When I got to college, it didn’t take long for me to feel myself drifting away from religion. A final battle is waged between good and evil, and finally, there is peace. The result was a dramatic reinterpretation of a passage in 1 Thessalonians, wherein the true believers are vanished from the Earth just before it descends into chaos and God rekindles his relationship with the Jews willing to accept Christ. Having ascribed a scriptural epoch to the Protestant Christians-dubbed the “Church Age”-Darby also had to give his age an ending. This is where the modern idea of the rapture is born.
What’s important about Darby’s work is that it is largely a way for gentiles to insert themselves into a story mostly by and about Jewish people, to reorient all scriptures as pertaining to white Protestants (non-Catholic Christians) beyond following the teachings of Christ and the literary richness of the Old Testament. The first lasted from Adam until the Great Flood, then another from Noah to Abraham, then Abraham to Moses, and so on, each tied to a scriptural turning point.
Darby believed human history could be broken into several eras, or dispensations, during each of which there is a fundamental shift in the relationship between humanity and its maker. Moody, founder of the Moody Bible Institute.ĭarby’s most lasting idea, and the root of the modern rapture, is known as dispensationalism-think of it as a sort of geologic timetable, but for God’s dealings with mankind. Over the next hundred or so years, what we know today as fundamentalist Christianity would begin to take shape: the hopes and fears of the Millerites reflected and reborn in various Christian sects across the United States.Īsk most people today about the rapture and you’ll largely be discussing premillennialism, a religious doctrine devised in part by English theologian John Nelson Darby in the 1820s and ’30s and popularized by American religious leaders like Dwight L. Millerites didn’t believe in the rapture, per se-Christ’s return and the rapture were not always interchangeable ideas for most of Christian history, although they are now-but their apocalypse yearning has come to signify a particularly American response to times of social upheaval and great change. And so I never stopped asking myself if I had any, and then I left home to go to college in upstate New York and I learned that I did not. This is where I was told that “trying” really doesn’t have anything to do with goodness faith does. This is where I tried-really tried, harder than for most things I’ve attempted-to make it work, to be a Christian, to be good. That Hispanic storefront church in New York is where my ideas about faith were formed and fostered. It’s no small thing, hearing the gospel in the language you were raised with. The Florida megachurch where I learned about the biological shock of crucifixion at age 8 had been run by white ministers propping up the ideals of middle-class whiteness, but when I was a teenager, my parents started attending a small New York City fundamentalist church with other Hispanic believers. It was real, and it is real,” my father tells me now, recalling the church in Queens my grandfather had brought his family to. “The rapture, at that age? It was painted very vivid.
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I learned how to see it coming, too: How the nation of Israel was “God’s timepiece” hitting marks on a prophetic timeline, how the machinations of the Catholic Church and the United Nations would soon come to a head and form a one-world government, how God would be driven out of America’s public square as people looked to other things for salvation. As a child, I was taught that I might live to see the end of the world. It’s hard to overstate how large the rapture loomed while I was growing up in the evangelical world.
In an instant, the cosmic outlook we’d been instilled with for our entire young lives would coalesce with shocking clarity: Was this it? Had the rapture happened? Were we going to face judgment alone? Or someone’s parents didn’t answer a phone call the way they normally would have. They were always triggered by mundane things: Somebody came back from school one day and no one was home. Other evangelical kids I knew growing up would tell me about their own first rapture scares.
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