politics

Don't Get Left Behind

The concept of the Rapture has for generations served as cover for a hateful political movement

My buddy practically glided to his locker that day, a smile plastered on his baby face.

What’s up with you, I asked, trying to stuff books into my locker without tearing the grocery bag book covers my mom had carefully made. It wasn’t that this guy was usually morose; he was even-tempered, never up or down, perfectly pleasant but not too pleasant. His demeanor was different that morning though. He was buoyant.

“Haven’t you heard,” he said. I told him no, I don’t think I had heard about whatever made him so happy that morning. He looked at me sideways, unsure how I was oblivious to such a consequential situation. I was 16. My most consequential situation was asking the new girl to go to the movies with me that weekend.

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My buddy spent the next couple minutes telling me about some military conflict in the Middle East. Some country had bombed an Israeli facility or Israel bombed some other nation’s facility – I don’t recall exactly. This was the late 90s and not every world event dictated your mood. There were things that happened in the world that you didn't know about. Anyway, someone’s troops were marching somewhere mentioned in the Bible. Someone else’s troops were prepared to respond in kind. We were, according to my giddy little buddy, on the precipice of a massive regional conflict that would draw in all the world’s great powers and kickstart the End Times, the Rapture. Nukes would fly, entire countries would burn, it would be great.

Ah, that thing again, I said. Well, let me know if there are any updates. My buddy was no fan of such dismissiveness of the Rapture, a totally invented story with no biblical connection from the 1820s that has been a favorite of hard-right Christians for generations. Aren’t you going to prepare, my buddy asked me.

How does one prepare for getting sucked up to Heaven, I wondered. You could wear a suit, I suppose, but according to the lure, your clothes are left behind, so what’s the point in dressing nice for the Big Day. You’re just butt fucking naked in the sky for a while before entering Heaven and getting your own golf course community McMansion and SUV and whatever else Rapture believers conceive as heavenly.

Today – Tuesday, September 23 – is Rapture Day. You may have seen this on your varied social media timelines, folks gleefully posting about the day this life on earth would finally end and they could be vacuumed up by Jesus Christ. If you had properly invited Jesus into your heart, prepare to vanish to live in eternal happiness. If you didn’t, good fucking luck to you buddy.

I've been thinking about my apocalypse-loving buddy with yet another Rapture coming our way. I recalled his disappointment when the world did not end in the late 1990s, and how he started raving about the Rapture again in 2009, about thirty days after Barack Obama took office and – you guessed it – triggered the End Times. His Facebook posts became increasingly unhinged as another Rapture came and went with no one sucked into the clouds (the way you know it's the End Times is if a member of the Democratic Party occupies the White House).

I forget how many Raptures I’ve lived through. Maybe three? It’s hard to say. This one will be the same as the rest: A dark wish of a quasi-religious, mostly political movement that pretends (in bad faith) to care about Christ’s teachings, but really pines for the death of its opponents. Nothing will happen, the date of the Rapture will be bumped into the future, and those who believe in this totally unbiblical preoccupation will continue using the Rapture as an excuse for their hideous behavior. So it goes.

How Many Times Must A Soul Be Saved?

I knew about the contours of the Rapture because I attended a fire-and-brimstone Baptist high school (the one NBA superstar Kevin Durant attended years later) that was knocked down and paved over when God – speaking through real estate developers in Montgomery County, Maryland – offered millions in cash. It was called Montrose Christian School and it was a hotbed of far-right political and religious hysteria before it was cool and mainstream to be politically and religiously hysterical at all times. Montrose was an early case study in what would flourish into the openly fascist MAGA movement. I learned and played basketball and baseball and made lifelong friends there. It was there I met the girl who would one day be my wife.

Bill Clinton was the neoliberal antichrist, the Kennedy family were agents of the devil himself, and Jerry Falwell was presidential material. We were told every day to reject "worldly things," meaning the world itself, which was the enemy – a big enemy, if you ask me. Montrose in those days had been taken over by a grifting preacher who called himself Ray Hope. He stole a bunch of money from exchange students and eventually went to prison for it. Even a dough-faced teenager in 1998 could look at the guy and know he was impossibly corrupt. Too much hair dye, for one. That Ray Hope was skimming off the top of the school’s giant money bucket in between saving the souls of the student body’s young Republicans – how those kids adored George W. Bush as a messenger of Christ himself – was no real surprise.

A lot of us who lived through the low-simmering right-wing radicalization that defined the Clinton era came out of Montrose normal, if psychologically scarred. It would take us a while to adjust to the Real World, which didn’t seem as satanic as we were told as impressionable, highly pliable teenagers. A big part of that uncompromisingly dark, apocalyptic version of Christianity was the Rapture, the idea that the angels would play their horns from on high and Jesus would scoop up his Real Followers to come live with him forever and ever, amen. The liberals and apostates, meanwhile, would be left here on earth to live through seven years of hell: All-out war, famine, disease, everything the American fascist project desires.

It was in the middle and late 90s that a guy named Tim LaHaye wrote a book series called Left Behind, a fictional account of life after the Rapture. Though I never read the books, I knew plenty about them. You see, I once took Tim LaHaye’s granddaughter to a middle school dance. She was nice. Her dad was the school's principal. He kept some kind of spanking racket in his office in case a boy grew out his hair or a girl wore pants (I painted my fingernails black in eleventh grade and somehow escaped corporal punishment). Everyone I knew was devouring the Left Behind books and talking excitedly about all the pain and torment our various enemies would endure after the heavenly vacuum cleaner was turned on and all our clothes fell off and we ended up at Heaven’s Gates, where we’d have to admit to every dirty thought we had and every selfish desire and maybe – if God had been watching – that time you took a puff of your friend’s dad’s black and mild on the playground. Yes Lord, it tasted good. I take no pleasure in saying so.

The Rapture animated everything we learned in those days. It was supposed to be the big payoff for dedicating your life to Christ. And there were plenty of decent young people at Montrose who meant well and treated others with respect and even had some compassion for the marginalized subgroups we were taught to despise. Most of them were deeply cynical though. They used the Rapture as cover for being shitty people. After all, they could not get sucked into the afterlife with Jesus if they accepted LGBTQ folks as part of society, as equal members of the body politic who deserved the freedoms guaranteed by the nation’s founding documents. Same goes for Muslims and Buddhists and atheists and Democratic Party voters and Jewish people who didn’t subscribe to their brand of far-right politics (Jews for Jesus was a big thing back then; I never quite understood how that worked). If they wanted to stay pure for that glorious day, they had to hate. They had been left with no choice but to hate, for hating was the only way to guarantee they wouldn’t be left behind. It was good to be sure.

Every Wednesday in chapel, Ray Hope would end the service – usually something about video games doing Satan’s work – with a call to action: It was our weekly opportunity to save our eternal souls. This offer expired before fourth period. Act now. So Ray Hope would tell Montrose students to come to the front of the church and accept Christ into their hearts, as to avoid being left behind to suffer for years and years. It was mostly the same kids every Wednesday who would emerge from the pews and walk to the front and save their souls, sometimes tearfully, sometimes with a knowing smirk. I don’t doubt that many of them believed they were buying insurance for their eternal souls; the horrors that awaited the unsaved sounded fucking terrible.

Probably we wouldn't even have TV in the aftermath of the Rapture. No football either. Shit.

As a teen, I was unclear about how many times one had to accept the Lord into one’s heart before one got their ticket to heaven – a ticket that can’t be revoked, if I understand the small sprint correctly. Some Wednesdays I would watch these kids trickle up toward Ray Hope and ask for their ticket to heaven and I would think, yeah, she needs it, I heard that rumor about her and those boys. Oh yeah, he needs it, he got caught last week cheating in chemistry class. I’m judgmental by nature. Watching this ridiculous soul-saving process supercharged my cynicism. It was the same assholes getting saved every week.

I never went up to the front of the church and asked Dr. Hope – he liked to pretend he was a doctor – for my ticket. I hadn’t felt like I had done anything too terribly wrong that would forbid me from entering the heavenly gates. I would show up and say hey God, you know me, good kid, clean kid, always listened to mom and dad, hardly ever watched porn, got good sleep, abided by all gender norms, never kissed with too much tongue. There was the black and mild, but that was just once. Whatever. I was pretty sure the disciples used to smoke some shit. Maybe Jesus did too. Who knows.

It's not that I was immune to this Rapture shit. I wasn't. Sometimes when I'd come home in the afternoon and my parents were gone and my brother was at practice or a friend's house, I would wonder – in a moment as fleeting as it was horrifying – if I had been left behind. The terror of being abandoned by those I loved had crept through my skepticism and cynicism and found its way into a crevice of my mind. I prayed that I wouldn't find my family's clothes strewn about the kitchen.

The idea that God would pull the ripcord at any moment and plunge the sinful into years of pain and terror and fire and all that bad stuff was drilled into us at Montrose. You could say this created a sense of urgency among a cohort – easily distracted, extremely hormonal and horny teenagers – that never felt much in the way of urgency. That the call to heaven could come today, or tomorrow morning, or next Friday at 5:33 p.m. eastern standard time, meant one had to be prepared at all times. Being prepared, of course, meant abiding by the small-minded worldview encapsulated in far-right Christianity. No one outside of the Republican-voting evangelical movement would get the call on Rapture day; stray outside the suffocating, discriminatory norms of this worldview and you risked remaining on earth, this horrible place that Jesus Christ wanted to make better.

That was too hard though. Love is hard work and hate is easy business. The Rapture-obsessed among us base their entire politics on this dichotomy. As a witness to this right-wing evangelical movement, I can attest these people hated those who were not like them – I mean, real, visceral, pulsating hate. Pure hate, undiluted by uncertainty. If you believed the fate of your everlasting soul depended on hating, maybe you would too.

That wasn't for me. I always had a hard time believing God was so small as to care about the nitty gritty details of a person’s sex life or their fertility choices or their favorite political party or whether they used drugs or boozed, but the folks who surrounded me in those days seemed certain that God was indeed that small and that he was on their side. Sometimes they sounded convincing.

If love was the key to getting raptured as the horns blew from on high on that glorious day, these folks were thoroughly fucked. They knew that. So it couldn’t hinge on love, that was off the table. It had to be hate that served as the key to those pearly gates, which would one day swing wide open for the deserving and reveal a gorgeous upper middle class American community with good schools and low taxes and a lot of folks who voted in the GOP Iowa caucuses and never forgave Ross Perot for fucking things up in 1992.

Their unshakable belief in the Rapture was nothing but bad-faith cover for a belief system that offered full permission to spread hate in the name of Jesus, a man who hated no one, who loved everyone. And so it is today, Rapture Day once again.

Follow Denny Carter on Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.