When I was a born-again Christian, there was a movie which was dragged around the Youth Camps I attended, which was based on the concept that the rapture was a real thing.
The film A Thief in the Night had a song by Larry Norman, I Wish We Had All Been Ready, which every young Christian lad with a guitar had to learn to play if they ever hoped to attract the interest of young Christian girls who would never sleep with you. The flick was a rapture-based, B-grade horror film, and after it had been shown, frightened kids were invited to accept Jesus into their hearts.
If I sound snarky and cynical about this, it is because one of the reasons I packed in Christianity was because of the discovery that the whole rapture thing was a lie. I am not saying the return of Christ was a lie (it was an article of faith), but the specific idea of Jesus showing up and disappearing all his followers before the world went to hell in a handcart, as is apparently described in Revelation.
Cue the devout vanishing into the clouds while the rest of us dodge Antichrist, fireballs and probably a Nicolas Cage remake. It’s all very dramatic and a good way of getting out of the tricky question about whether Jesus is so loving, why would he put his followers through all that?
But this rapture nonsense is a theological latecomer, stitched together in the 19th century like a bad fanfic. The man behind the curtain was John Nelson Darby, an Anglo-Irish preacher who took one look at church history and thought, You know what this needs? Filing cabinets. He split history into “dispensations” and declared Christ would pop by twice. First, for a sneaky extraction of the godly. Then later for the loud bit with trumpets and judgement.
Darby may have pinched the idea from a Scottish teenager, Margaret MacDonald, who had a dramatic vision in 1830 about believers being hoovered up before divine wrath hit. Whether he borrowed her dream or just caught a whiff of the revivalist fumes, the fact remains. He turned a bit of ecstatic teenage mumbo jumbo into a theological house of cards.
Typically, people would have ignored this spin on Jesus’s story; after all, Christians had been expecting him to come back in their lifetime since Paul, and even if, like Godot, he never showed, it was forgivable, as he probably had a lot on his mind.
Enter the Scofield Reference Bible in 1909, which placed Darby’s fantasy in the margins and presented it as scripture. American Protestants, bless them, saw the footnotes and thought that settled it. Once Scofield had canonised Darby’s fever dream, it became “biblical” by default. Never mind the first 18 centuries of Christianity, which apparently missed the memo.
Fast forward and you’ve got pulp fiction bestsellers, preachy TV specials and apocalyptic cash grabs all singing from the same hymn sheet. A billion-dollar pop-theology industry founded on a lawyer-turned-preacher’s obsession with charts and a teenager’s sleepover vision.
The reason that it is so popular as a concept is that it means that not only do Christians have the prospect of a heavenly afterlife, but they can also escape the fearful prospect of death. Early Christians were bracing for one world-shattering event, not a cosmic Uber for people who consider themselves righteous.
What also makes the rapture concept useful is that more extreme Christian pastors can use it as another way to get their congregations to part with some cash. After a pastor declared that God came to him and gave him yesterday’s date, we had Christians across the US flog off their cars and hand the cash to the church (which would have had a very short time to spend it). This ignored one of the few references to the return of Jesus that “no one knows the time of the return of the Son of Man” and “he will come like a thief in the night.” It is therefore logical that if someone tells you Jesus is coming back at a particular time, that is precisely when He will not show up.
However, the central reason I find rapture ideas so problematic is that they are designed to instil fear. There is enough shit in the world to be worried about; fear of being left behind in the rapture should not be one of them. One of the things that the Jesus story is supposed to be about is that you should not fear anything.
Then there is the awful truth that apparently is going to come back and collect those who reject his key teachings about love and forgiveness. Just because when Karens and other haters were ten, they said a little prayer asking him to forgive them for their sins, they feel they can create a system where their hate is enshrined. I somehow doubt that Jesus is going to sweep up a bunch of people to save them from the consequences that their hateful actions have brought the world such as voting for the anti-christ.
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