A number of Christians confidently predicted that the Rapture would occur by September 23, 2023.
Spoiler: No Rapture occurred. But this failure won’t deter potential prophets any more than it ever has. It works too well.
In yet another episode of the evangelical parade of Endtimes guesses, a Super Blood Wolf Moon comes our way soon. With it, we can also expect yet another Christian Rapture scare. This time, though, things are different.
Harold Camping’s legacy has been obliterated. It might sound laughable–and it is, really, for a number of reasons we’ll dive into below. But it’s also a sign of the times. Rapture fantasies might just be going out of fashion, a little.
I don’t know what fundagelicals would even do with themselves if they weren’t panicking about the end of the world. A new date has been set–April 18th–but it’s not getting a whole lot of attention. Today Lord Snow presides over an increasingly backfired fundagelical tradition: Rapture predictions!
A long time ago I wrote about fundagelical preppers and how the doom-preparation community had been taken over by fundagelical zealots fearing Rapture and Armageddon. There are some new developments in that story–but first, here are some new Rapture scares to look at!
Tim LaHaye, co-author of Left Behind and general Christian reality-denier, has just died at the age of 90. Thus ends a career marked by denial, grandiose ideas, wish-fulfillment, and Endtimes fantasizing–and one that led its owner into positions of great influence.
In the same way, it is simply bizarre to me that people who have built up this total conspiracy theory around all these “Bible codes” and arcane secret societies and government plots seem to be so incapable of coming up with what really should be one of the easiest parts of their predictions: what’s going to happen, exactly, and when. But that’s not even the worst part of these constant streams of Rapture scares.
This reboot of Left Behind is actually an imitation of a bog-standard disaster-on-a-plane movie.
But even in its attempt to slavishly imitate a specific genre of movies Americans got tired of in the 1980s, it couldn’t come anywhere near the quality and enjoyability of another take on the genre: 1980’s Airplane.
It’s a very ugly fantasy–the demonstration of a very broken psyche on display in the lewdest possible manner–and though the movie itself isn’t a critical masterpiece, seeing that fantasy marched across a screen for that runtime made me feel like I was reading some Nice Guy’s short story about his revenge on all those high school girls who rejected him long ago. It was that obvious and that disquieting to see this movie and think, “This is what they really think of us.”
To my astonishment, a quick search on Netflix revealed not only the new version of the movie but also the original Kirk Cameron version–and the two Kirk Cameron sequels. I feel like a five-year-old on Christmas morning suddenly. I’d say we’re set.