This is chapter 1 from our upcoming book, Functional Fatality: Reinterpreting the Death of God in American Society INTRODUCTION CHAPTER   The Apocalyptic Frame Francis Fukuyama wrote in The End of History and the Last Man  that "What we may be witnessing is… the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government." [1]  Yet what if this supposed final age is not a triumphant culmination as pr