The Rapture Disappoints Yet Again

The Rapture has always struck me as the quintessence of religious crankery, right up there with snake handling and speaking in tongues. How does anyone get to a mindset where they’re absolutely positive that Jesus will be coming around this week and whisking them off to heaven?

If you’re not familiar with the Rapture — or with Armageddon, the Second Coming, and the whole End Times theology — let’s bring you up to speed a bit.

An Australian writer named Dan Foster has an excellent article on the subject, written from his own experience. Raised in a “Rapture culture,” he says he suffered from “Rapture anxiety” as a child. He defines the Rapture as:

…a belief held by many evangelicals. It describes a sudden moment when all Christians, living and dead, will be taken up into heaven. According to this view, the faithful will escape the world before a long period of disaster and suffering begins for everyone left behind.

The theology is based, loosely, on the Book of Revelations, a whacky corner of the Bible that respectable theologians prefer not to discuss. But the setting of a date for the Rapture — and being disappointed when nothing happens — is a relatively new thing, going back only to the early 1800’s.

The scriptural underpinnings of the prophecies have always been dubious, but a long line of silver-tongued preachers has nonetheless succeeded in talking the gullible into giving away all their possessions and preparing for that “sudden moment” when they’ll be beamed up to heaven. The designated date is always extrapolated from some biblical passage, planetary alignment, or numerological fantasy, and it always leaves enough time for the preacher to draw more money from people who won’t be needing it anyway. And when the date comes and goes uneventfully, there’s always a gaggle of gullibles mortified to find themselves neither in heaven nor in the homes they no longer own.

So when the date was set, yet again, for September 23th or 24^th of this year, two weeks ago, the stories of true believers quitting their jobs and waiting for Jesus to sweep them away were hardly a surprise. Nor were the dope slaps on the morning after.

The only surprise was how quickly the whole phenomenon materialized on TikTok, and how the stories about it — both before and after — spread virally around the world. I especially liked the one about the student who blew off a big exam because Hey, what’s the point in studying if you’ve already made it to heaven? I’m sure his professor will understand.

Trouble is, that seems to be the attitude of right-wing evangelicals in general. They behave as if there’s no reason to care if the planet lives or dies.  Jesus has their back, after all. He’s going to forgive all their sins — even the really disgusting ones — and take them all to heaven. This is a done deal, so why should they give a shit about the world they leave behind?

The End Times movement is limited to a strain of right-wing evangelicalism that would normally be relegated to the fringes of society. The movement wouldn’t matter, if the people promoting it weren’t openly engaged in destroying our basic freedoms, and, due to a confluence of pernicious forces, getting away with it.

I came to the movement the same way many laymen of my generation did, through Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth, an ingenious piece of hokum which, since it was published in 1970, has become a classic of the Rapture genre. Don’t ask why I read it — I read Ayn Rand, too. I was in my early twenties, need I say more.

But Lindsey laid out a whole bunch of signs, things the faithful can watch out for, things proving that Armageddon — the final battle between good and evil — will be here soon, just as the Bible predicted.

But it wasn’t just the things to watch for that made his narrative so compelling. It was also the things that had already happened, that had gone just the way the Bible had supposedly predicted.

First and foremost was the return of the Jews to Israel. For some reason, Jesus couldn’t do the Second Coming until the Jews could get back to where they once belonged. Lindsey uses 1948, the year Israel became a state, as a marker of that return. All the End Times stuff — including the beaming up of the true believers — was supposed to happen within “a generation” of that year.

Lindsey defined ‘generation’ as the bible might: forty years. Which sounded fine when the book was written. But if all that crazy stuff had to happen within forty years, or by 1988, then the prophecy clearly failed.

Of course, if Lindsey were still alive, he might make the case that today a generation could be interpreted as twice the biblical forty years, and that both Trump and Netanyahu were born around the time of Israel’s founding. Think about that, okay?

If you’d been steeped in this stuff from childhood, you’d have no trouble seeing biblical prophecies coming true everywhere you look.

According to Lindsey’s reading of the prophecies, the ancient tribes from the far north and far east — Russia and China, in other words — were predicted to amass great economic power and military strength, which they would exert for their own nefarious ends. Who would argue that that’s not happening?

What we now call the Middle East was predicted to be the playing field for the End Times, with “disaster and suffering” looming in the forecast. In 1970, it was easy to look at the region and think Lindsey might be on to something. If you look today, at Gaza in 2025, it’s totally obvious he was right. What more proof would you need?

Also featured in the prophecies was a “revived Roman Empire,” which Lindsey took to mean the modern rise of the European Union, and of Europe as a unified power. Somehow, he included the U.S. in this presumed alliance.

So let’s review. China, Russia, and Europe/U.S. would all be players in the conflicts that would lead to Armageddon, and those conflicts would primarily be staged in the Middle East, especially Israel. The signs are all there for those looking for them.

But the biggest sign, the star of the whole End Times show, was always going to be the Antichrist. We’re all now waiting for the prophesied appearance of a super-charismatic leader, the kind of guy you could mistake for the Messiah, but who is, in fact, a con man. He’ll pretend to bring peace to the Middle East, but then he’ll throw Israel under the bus and trigger the final battle.

Keep in mind, the guy could be here already. And if you buy into this stuff, you couldn’t find a better candidate for Antichrist than Donald Trump. He’s a natural — a known antisemite who cozies up to Israel, promises peace in the region, then stabs Israel in the back. We’ve seen everything but the stabbing part, which could happen any day. And since he’s been running a con on his gullible followers for ten years as it is, they can’t be counted on to recognize an Antichrist when they see one.

As chaos agents invade our institutions, undermine our health, and expose us to environmental catastrophe, it’s easy to think that the end might be near. It’s also a cop-out, the perfect excuse for not taking any responsibility for the world around us.

But after careful consideration, I’ve decided I am, after all, in favor of the Rapture. Especially before the mid-terms. I eagerly await the glorious day when all the gullibles will be spirited up to heaven, where their votes won’t count.