Glenn W. Shuck is Assistant Professor of Religion at Williams College.John M. Stroup is Harry and Hazel Chavanne Professor of Religious Studies at Rice University.

From X-Files and Left Behind to Fight Club and New Age writing, Stroup and Shuck map out a trajectory of growing cultural cynicism embedded within escape fantasies. Such cultural-political pessimism might still be a minority viewpoint in America, but as a variety of real-world correlatives hint, it could also be "near-term cultural prophecy." Here is provocative and engaged reading at its best. --Robert K. Johnston, Professor of Theology and Culture at Fuller Theological Seminary

• 1. Secret Agents: Visions of Escape, Glimpses of Hope2. Do We Still Want to Believe?: The X-Files and the American Struggle with Progressive Action3. Perhaps Today: The Dialectic of Despair and Activism in Popular Evangelical Literature4. God's Unwanted: Fight Club and the Myth of ""Total Revolution""5. Relocating the American Dream: The Challenges and Ambiguities of Contemporary Cultural Pessimism6. The Quest for a Real-World Correlate Sightings of Cultural Pessimism in the Domains of Scholarship and Journalism7. The Question of Real-World Correlates to Fantasy Processes of Decline: The Deep Structure of Decay, or, Descent into the Engine Room of the RMS TitanicEpilogue-Into the Great Wide Open