(RNS) — The end is near, again.
Hysteria and mockery rained down in equal measure after a South African pastor proclaimed Tuesday (Sept. 23) as the day of the rapture, a reference to the doctrine that Jesus will suddenly cause millions of Christians to vanish, triggering the final countdown to Judgment Day.
On social media, “#RaptureTok” showed believers selling their cars before the great departure. Others made jokes about Jesus’ punctuality, as the projected date arrived in different time zones.
The rapture, however, is no laughing matter — not because it’s likely to ever come through for its prognosticators, but because even in its unreality it has serious real-world consequences. Rapture theology is racist theology. It upholds some of the worst injustices of human history. It’s time we left it behind.
Rapture theology became popular in the United States during a time of racial reckoning. Born decades before the Civil War, it didn’t take off in the states until the Reconstruction period, when the theology was championed by the ex-Confederate Cyrus Scofield, who continued to push the racist “Curse of Ham” doctrine long after it had outlived its popularity.
Some Christian leaders interpreted the post-Civil War racial revolution as the destabilization of society — in fact, just the white supremacist order to which they were accustomed — that is said to herald the rapture. The abolition of slavery, the establishment of birthright citizenship and the giving of the franchise to Blacks, along with the rising popularity of Darwinism and more liberal perspectives on the Bible, could all be read as signs of the end times.
The Civil War itself was horrific enough to convince Christians the world was beyond repair and to make the prospect of escape to heaven compelling. But end-times prophecy was also psychologically useful, in that it enabled white Christians to reframe the unpredictable and terrifying advancement of civil rights as something predictable: biblical prophecy. The white world as they knew it, built on the cornerstone of slavery, was ending, but no worries: The world is supposed to get worse before Jesus swoops in to save them, according to doctrine.
They applied the same principle to participating in the work of racial reckoning. In his 2008 book, “Race: A Theological Account,” J. Kameron Carter, a professor of religious studies at Indiana University, writes, “If Christian hope functions as an evacuation plan from history (rather than a call to repair its wounds), it risks colluding with the structures that wound in the first place.”
That seems to be what happened in U.S. history. Evangelical paragons such as Dwight L. Moody used rapture theology to discourage social action that would have further advanced racial reforms.
Moody’s revivals, theologian Nathaniel Grimes wrote, “prompted many to ‘forget earthy concerns.’ As Moody put it, ‘the moment a person becomes heavenly-minded and gets his heart and affection set on things above, then life becomes beautiful. … This shift toward heavenly-mindedness coincided with a drop in support for Reconstruction.”
Moody’s peers and predecessors used the same theological staff to jam the wheels of racial progress. “Only when Christ comes again will the little white children of Alabama walk hand in hand with little black children,” quipped Billy Graham after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 speech at the March on Washington.
The late John MacArthur parroted Moody almost verbatim in a 2017 interview about the Black Lives Matter movement, saying that when one becomes a Christian, “The object of life is no longer to fix past injustices, the object of life now is to proclaim Christ … once [people] come to Christ, all other issues fall away … and when the gospel changes your life, you go from social issues to spiritual issues.”
In short, rapture teaching is the bedrock of a theology of irresponsibility, popularized to pardon white Christians from the work of racial repentance and social repair. By this logic, Christian adherents had better stay out of the way of injustice and atrocity in order to hasten Jesus’ coming.
These theological ideas are at play in the genocide in Gaza today. Rapture theology is a pillar of Christian Zionism, which holds that a precondition of the end times is the Jews’ return to Israel, where they will accept Jesus as the true Messiah. Apart from the essential antisemitism of this scheme, rapture theology further perpetuates racism in justifying the ongoing dispossession and genocide of the Palestinian people as a necessary consequence of bringing about the Second Coming.
All of which prompts the question: Why do so many Christians cling so strongly to such a harmful idea?
Many will answer that the rapture is described in the Bible. Most of the passages cited in rapture doctrine, however, are misinterpretations, based on absurdly literal readings of biblical passages taken out of context. When Jesus says “one will be taken and the other left,” in the view of many Bible scholars, he’s talking about the imminent fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, not the end of the world. Similarly, the dreaded “mark of the beast” in the New Testament’s Book of Revelation was probably understood by its first-century audience as code for the Roman emperor Domitian, not Presidents Donald Trump or Barack Obama.
The famous Pauline passage that speaks of believers being “caught up” in the air to meet Jesus, even conservative scholars such as N.T. Wright have pointed out, comes as Paul is talking about people welcoming a dignitary and escorting them into town, and says nothing about believers going to heaven.
Those who use the Book of Revelation to prop up the rapture should read the book to the end, where God creates a new heaven and new earth and a new Jerusalem descends on it. Taken literally or figuratively, the text suggests that God’s apocalyptic vision, in the Christian tradition, is the restoration of our planet, not abandonment.
So, where does the rapture come from?
The rapture emerged in the 1830s in the visions of a Scottish girl named Margaret MacDonald, who dreamed that Jesus returned in two phases: first to take faithful Christians to heaven, then to return to Earth to deliver the full extent of divine wrath. Almost immediately, people began predicting when these visions would come true, leading most immediately to “the Great Disappointment” of 1844, when Baptist preacher William Miller led thousands of parishioners to sell their possessions.
Nothing good has come from this doctrine since, only disillusionment, trauma, abuse and more justification for systemic oppression. The cost in human suffering to hold on to this fiction is too high.
The earliest rapture teachings may not have intended to oppress anyone. As its history testifies, however, oppressors make quick use of the idea that the best God can do in a broken world is to offer an escape hatch. It excuses oppressors from repentance and those they oppress from struggle, the only real hope we have for social change.
We need theologies that bring us deeper into the society’s pain, that help us undo the lies that convince us that our destinies aren’t bound up together, and that give us a sense of agency to confront the systems of harm we live under together. The end we need isn’t the end of the world, but the end of indifference.