The idea of the “End Times”, that era of human history either directly before or directly after the Second Coming of Christ (depending on whose books you like), has been around for a good long while. But it is, nonetheless, a relatively recent addition to Protestant dogma, and is in fact only embraced by a minority of Protestant denominations.
The idea is simple: certain New Testament scriptures have been stacked up in the minds of some (mostly) Evangelicals as a kind of Da Vinci Code formulation strongly implying that Christ will, at some preordained moment, return to earth and retrieve the faithful, consigning the rest to eternal damnation. The retrieved then live forever in heaven.
This idea is so powerful among Evangelicals that it has inspired an entire side industry within Christian media. Back in the Seventies, Christian author Hal Lindsey made a big splash with his book The Late Great Planet Earth, an eschatological wish list of cinematic melodramas cinching New Testament prophecy to late-20th century geopolitical tensions. In subsequent books and alongside several other like-minded authors – Salem Kirban springs to mind – Lindsey crafted a narrative that took hold in Evangelical culture with more force than jazzercise in Eighties suburbia: Evangelicals became better-versed in the Rapture, the Tribulation, and the subsequent Judgment Day than they were in the life of Christ itself.
And that was just the start: low-budget Christian films fictionally depicting the Rapture like A Thief in the Night, The Mark of the Beast: 666, and Blink of an Eye appeared, elevating the narrative to high melodrama. David Wilkerson of The Cross and the Switchblade fame produced perhaps the most inventive of these ventures, simply entitled The Rapture, which took the form of a newscast reporting on the sudden disappearance of millions and the resulting chaos.1
Jack Chick, publisher of disturbing Christian cartoon tracts, did all he could to promote the narrative, with titles like Here He Comes!, Let’s Fly Away! and Where Did They Go?
But the true kingpin of End Times Media has got to be Tim LaHaye, the West Coast Evangelical power broker who co-wrote no less than 16 novels about the Rapture and the Tribulation in his Left Behind series, which were also served up as five films, with appearances by Gen X Evangelical irritant Kirk Cameron and the ever-aimless Nicholas Cage. And LaHaye didn’t stop there; he also authored or co-authored a dozen non-fiction books on the subject, as well as a prophecy-based Bible study guide.
Let’s be clear: all of this Rapture talk among Evangelicals is in the Lindsey mold, a very specific flavor – and End Times theology comes in more flavors than Baskin Robbins: there’s Premillennialism, where the dead rise and then Jesus rules the earth for 1,000 years, after which follows eternity in heaven; Pre-Tribulational Premillennialism, all of the above plus a seven-year period between the Rapture and the 1,000 years called the Great Tribulation, wherein there will be lots of world-wide suffering and chaos; there’s Mid-Tribulational Premillennialism, which scoots the Rapture to the middle of the Tribulation; then comes Partial Pre-Tribulational Premillennialism (I swear I’m not making this up), with the super-obedient faithful being harvested pre-Tribulation and the not-so-obedient called up mid-Tribulation.
There’s the Prewrath Rapture, where all the Christians are still here when the Tribulation begins, and many are slaughtered by the Antichrist (aka the Beast) before being called home; and Post-Tribulational Premillennialism, where Christians head into the sky to meet Jesus on the way down.
And then there’s Postmillennialism. This is the idea that the world is Christianized for an indefinite period with Christ returning at the very end, making the Rapture and the Second Coming one and the same. Finally, there’s Amillennialism, which holds that the millennial rule of Christ is the period between his life on earth and his return, including the now, and that Christ is already reigning, through the church.
This all sounds pretty loopy, and, of course, it is – but Evangelicals get so worked up about it all that it often utterly overrides the mundane day-to-day of actually following Christ. In particular, Evangelicals embrace Pre-Tribulational Premillennialism, where there’s a Rapture, followed by a Tribulation, featuring the worldwide rule of the Beast, followed by the Second Coming, the Millennium, Judgment Day, and Eternity.
Whew!
It’s hard to believe that grown men and women could fall for something so damn dumb, but upon reflection we can surely see that the cinematic features of the whole progression push all our limbic buttons: the Rapture narrative is a war story, a horror story, a political thriller, high melodrama and slash film, all rolled into one. On top of that, it’s calculated to stim up both fear and self-righteousness in its audience – two of the pillars of Authoritarian thought.
Why is he telling us this?
I’m telling you this because the Rapture narrative played heavy in my youth. I was not quite coming of age when Lindsey’s book and Wilkerson’s film first emerged, and brother, my buttons got pushed.
The Rapture, you see, represented for me a lifetime-first foray into the bowels of existential terror. As a vanilla suburban boy in the post-war American Midwest, reading Encyclopedia Brown and watching Batman and wrapped in the protections and comforts of Mayberry-style neighborhood banality, I was awash in a kind of subconscious, naïve invincibility. Unaware of my Paleolithic heritage, that my parents’ parents’ parents 100 times removed had never made it to 30, that we wound up as cat food for often than not and that kids my age back then had required more survival skills than Seal Team 6 to last long enough to reproduce – well, let’s just say a 13-year-old boy’s sense of his own vulnerability in 1970s Indiana was not exactly finely-honed.
The Rapture changed all that.
I was already halfway out the church door in my head, mind you; as a young teen, it had become clear to me that the walk of the church was nowhere near the talk of the church, and that most of the people around me didn’t really believe the things they said they believed, and weren’t experiencing what they said they were experiencing; they were simply enjoying benign community and offering one another validation and comfort. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but geezus, did they really have to fire up a creep show like the Rapture to keep the doors open?
It’s fair to say that it worked on me, at least for a while. Here I am, a kid who isn’t yet old enough to drive, who has felt isolated and out-of-place all his life, clinging to the one community he’s ever known, with no idea how to actually live in the world – and here’s this proposition of the trumpet blast that ends it all, and I’m left with... what becomes of me?
On the one hand, the Rapture could happen and I’d be whisked away with my tribe. Did I really want that? The truth was, the most interesting people I knew of almost certainly wouldn’t be whisked away - my favorite authors, Isaac Asimov and Harlan Ellison and Ray Bradbury and Ursula LeGuin and Kurt Vonnegut, for starters; Gene Roddenberry, an overt humanist; philosopher Elie Wiesel, by definition; and the Beatles, who were more popular than the Rapturer, and Elton John, who was one of those.
And on the other, I knew in my heart that I’d already not only harbored but embraced my doubts – my faith had shifted to the stars. So if a Rapture really happened, I’d be left behind – and I didn’t know anything about living in the world to begin with, let alone how to survive a Tribulation without even a family.
The Rapture narrative, then, did what it was designed to do: it stoked uncertainties, then slipped into them.
I did what I always do when faced with uncertainty: I learned everything there was to know about it all. I studied everything Lindsey wrote, including Satan Is Alive and Well on Planet Earth and The 1980s: Countdown to Armageddon; I read Kirban’s 666 and 1000; I learned all the different flavors of Millennialism, becoming a more authoritative dispensationalist than any pastor my family knew.
I became a big hit in youth group discussions and in my first two years of college, able to call up picturesque, academic-sounding summaries of everything Revelation on demand; I impressed my elders, charmed my friends, and looked all the more pious for my knowledge. But in my heart, I felt more and more like I was in the wrong theater.
And that’s when Tony Campolo, bless him, pulled me out. At a Christian Student Fellowship conference in Gatlinburg in 1981, I heard him describing the authoritarian crackdown he’d experienced as a young man, wherein going to the movies was as frowned upon as dancing – both gateway pastimes to Satanic ruin.
“’What if you’re at the movies when the Lord returns?’, people would say to me,” Campolo said in his keynote talk, “’The trumpet sounds, the Lord returns – and you’re there!!!’”
“The next movie I went to, I was scared stiff,” Campolo went on. “I was terrified that the trumpet would sound, the Lord would return – and I wouldn’t get to see the end of the movie!”
...and that quickly, my Rapture terror ended.
Who’s Tony Campolo? Glad you asked...
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