Rapture triggers haunt the Left Behind generation

When a pandemic caused shutdowns across the globe in March 2020, Stacie Grahn thought it was the literal end of the world.

Stacie Grahn

“I thought: ‘This is it. We’re all in our homes. Is this when we’re all going to disappear?’” Grahn said in a phone call from British Columbia. “With the vaccine, I thought: ‘Is this how they’re going to separate us? Is this going to be the mark of the beast we have to take?’”

For those like Grahn who are taught the rapture can happen at any second, the End Times are more than fodder for apocalyptic fiction. Fear-saturated stories about the saved being transported to heaven while the world faces havoc and hellfire can generate lifelong panic, paranoia and anxiety, reorienting people’s lives around what’s to come instead of what is.

These religious beliefs have societal implications, too. Why care about the refugee crisis or climate change if the world is doomed?

Rapture a relatively recent concept

Belief in the Second Coming of Christ is as old as the church, but the concept of the rapture is a relatively recent early 19th-century phenomenon, most often embraced in evangelical or fundamentalist circles.

In the late 20th century, it was reinforced through popular media, including Hal Lindsay’s 1970 bestseller The Late Great Planet Earth, which interpreted world events as signs of the end times, as well as the 1972 thriller A Thief in the Night and, in the 1990s, Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins’ wildly popular Left Behind series.

But, as Grahn could tell you, these ideas aren’t relics of the past. Grahn’s grandmother first introduced her to the rapture at a young age via videos of End Times ministries and preachers like JD Farag. Anything her grandmother planned was with an asterisk.

“We can plan that, but the Lord could be coming back,” Grahn recalled her grandmother saying.

Prepping for disaster

Unlike Grahn, Nikki G, 46, came to view the rapture as gospel later in life. In 2010, she uprooted her life to join the International House of Prayer in Kansas City, Mo. As a survivor of several high-control religious groups. she asked to go by her first name due to safety concerns.

Nikki was attracted by the fervency of the group, which has been hosting 24/7 worship and prayer since 1999 and has a distinct End Times flavor.

“We believe that the church will go through the Great Tribulation with great power and victory and will only be raptured at the end of the Great Tribulation. No one can know with certainty the timing of the Lord’s return,” the organization’s website says.

As a result of the apocalyptic messaging she heard in these groups, Nikki said she rejected materialism, began canning food and strategized survival tactics. But prepping to survive until the rapture took a toll on Nikki.

“It’s very dehumanizing,” Nikki said. “You’re not present. You’re always in the future. You are disassociated from your body, your nervous system and yourself, and ultimately you become the theology. … I was no longer Nikki, when I was in all of that.”

She experienced nightmares, flashbacks and insomnia years after leaving.

Anecdotal evidence of anxiety and fear

Therapist Mark Gregory Karris said, while there’s little research on rapture-related trauma, anecdotal evidence suggests people can experience anxiety, fear and disrupted life plans because of such teachings. He said it especially is true among those who emphasize the immediacy of the rapture, the torment of those left behind and the need to be good enough to win God’s approval. Some who ingest these beliefs see future plans as futile, even faithless.

That was the case for Diana Frazier, 39, who grew up in an Assemblies of God church in Poulsbo, Wash.

“I remember sobbing multiple times as a little kid, thinking I will never get to get married, I will never get to have children. There’s no point in having any kind of dream for my future because I’ll be in heaven,” she said. “And then I would have guilt and shame, even as a little kid, because I’d know I was supposed to be happy about that.”

As a teen, Frazier participated in a youth group-sponsored hell house, a riff on haunted houses that portrayed sinful scenarios—like drunken car crashes and an abortion clinic—that led to hell.

Afterward, participants were invited to say the “sinner’s prayer.” Inundated with images of the terror she’d face if she wasn’t chosen by God, Frazier constantly was vigilant, ready to respond to disaster. But there was a cost.

“Humans aren’t meant to survive like that. Walking around with a fire extinguisher going all the time when there’s no fire is exhausting.”

Frazier paused her education after receiving her associate degree, in part because she thought Jesus would arrive at any time. Even when she had doubts, the risk of leaving her church community felt too high. She’d be forsaking her friends, her family and, later, as a parent, potentially jeopardizing her kids’ salvation.

“I’d be literally losing everything, for what? To go to college? Get a career?” she asked.

Fear of being ‘Left Behind’

“Left Behind” movie poster, photo courtesy of Stoney Lake Entertainment.

April Sochia, 41, grew up in a Baptist community in the Adirondack Mountains of New York state and began to fear the rapture after reading the Left Behind series in college.

“I felt great pressure to force my kids to say the sinner’s prayer, because it was their ticket to heaven,” she said. “If the rapture happened, they had to say the sinner’s prayer, but it had to be genuine enough so they wouldn’t get left behind.”

According to Nikki, who now works as a certified trauma recovery coach, it’s common for people who believe in the rapture to evaluate and judge themselves constantly, seeking to be right with God so they won’t be judged harshly in the end times.

Andrew Pledger, 23, was part of the Independent Fundamental Baptist movement as a child in Walkertown, N.C., when his 4-H Club took a field trip to a local farm. Before the farm tour started, Pledger went to the bathroom. When he came out, no one was there.

“I remember just dread and fear going throughout all of me,” he said. “I couldn’t hear anyone’s voices, they were just gone. I remember running around the yard screaming and yelling for my mother … those five minutes of that fear and rapture anxiety, it was a lot.”

Though Pledger no longer believes in the rapture, his body remembers. Just over a month ago, a plane flew low over his current home in Greenville, S.C., and the sound—so familiar in the rapture genre—shocked him into fight or flight mode.

“It’s so frustrating, the cognitive dissonance of, I don’t believe in the rapture anymore, but I experienced that,” he told RNS.

Concept ‘read back’ into the New Testament

Therapist Karris said much like people experience phantom limbs, people can experience “phantom ideas” even after rejecting the idea of the rapture.

“That’s why it lasts so long, because we’re talking about it being in the tracks of the nervous system,” he said.

Of course, belief in the rapture doesn’t always translate into trauma. For some, the promise of being chosen by God and escaping the world’s troubles is profoundly reassuring.

Still, the fact that some experience severe consequences shouldn’t be downplayed, Karris asserted.

Tina Pippin, a professor of religion at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Ga., said the rapture isn’t strictly biblical. It’s a concept that’s “read back” into New Testament passages, which get “sort of appropriated or misappropriated,” Pippin said, in Scriptures like 1 Thessalonians 4, which says that those who are “alive and are left” will “meet the Lord in the air.”

With 39 percent of American adults believing humanity is living in the end times, Pippin said, it’s important to assess the far-reaching implications of apocalyptic beliefs.

“The rapture is not just a theological position, it’s also a political one, and I think a really dangerous one,” said Pippin, who criticized those who ignore or even welcome global tragedies as precursors to Jesus’ return.

As awareness around rapture anxiety grows, many who’ve been impacted by rapture teachings are reassessing their beliefs and finding physical, emotional and spiritual healing.

During the height of the pandemic, Frazier stepped away from her church community. She still believes humans are “all divinely connected” and hopes to return to school to become a therapist.

For Grahn, the rapture panic she felt during the pandemic was the beginning of her faith unravelling. She no longer believes in the rapture and holds space for religious trauma survivors on social media through her @apostacie accounts.

Her grandmother is still awaiting a heavenly ascent.

“I wouldn’t bring it up with my grandma. … They believe, as much as we know Christmas is on Dec. 25 every year, they believe it will happen at any moment,” said Grahn. “To them, it’s heaven or hell. They’re not going to give that up or take that chance.”

And the rest of your post is also wrong.

A few points to note:

The people we refer to as "Jews" should more accurately be referred to as "Rabbinical Jews" and their religion as Rabbinical Judaism

Why?
- Because after the 2nd temple was destroyed, Judaism was in a crisis (refer: First century Judaism in crisis by Rabbi Neusner
- Rabbi Yohannan bin Zakkai, a great Pharisee scholar and teacher who had escaped from Jerusalem in 69 AD, chaired the Council of Jamnia which looked at how to save the religion with the destruction of the core of the worship - the temple (similar to the crisis Islam would face if Mecca was obliterated)
- They created a new religion centered around synagogues, with todah instead of temple sacrifices, and rabbis instead of priests
- Since they were deried from the Pharisees, they started the process of codifying the Oral Torah - which the Sadducees had rejected, into the Talmud -- the Talmud was finally compiled by the 9th century.
The first "Christians" called themselves "Followers of the Way of Jesus" and were properly speaking a 2nd century Jewish sect
- That is why Paul writes of "beaten in the synagogues"
- And why they worshipped both on Saturday and Sunday
After the destruction of the temple, the Jesus-movement Jews were "winning" more converts from other sects of 2nd temple Judaism and they needed to be stopped
The Jesus-movement Jews had been derided before 64 AD as "your God said he was coming in 40 years, so what happened?" but with visions of angelic hosts etc. seen by the Jewish warriors in Jerusalem (cf. Josephus "The Jewish war"), their statements were now shown as true
The Jesus-movement Jews were also coming off their great tribulation from 64 AD to 67 AD when the Sadducees, teh Pharisees AND the Roman secular authorities all persecuted them
From 70 AD to 114 AD the Rabbinical and Jesus-movement Jews were in competition.
But from 114 AD onwards - with the Kitos war - the Jesus-movement Jews took on the exonym "Christian". Why? - because the Rabbinical Jews had committed odious slaughter in the Kitos war in Cyrene and Cyprus
Orosius records that the violence so depopulated the province of Cyrenaica that new colonies had to be established by Hadrian:
The Jews... waged war on the inhabitants throughout Libya in the most savage fashion, and to such an extent was the country wasted that, its cultivators having been slain, its land would have remained utterly depopulated, had not the Emperor Hadrian gathered settlers from other places and sent them thither, for the inhabitants had been wiped out

The original 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia stated on the Cyrene massacres:
By this outbreak Libya was depopulated to such an extent that a few years later new colonies had to be established there (Eusebius, "Chronicle" from the Armenian, fourteenth year of Hadrian). Bishop Synesius, a native of Cyrene in the early 5th century, said of the devastations wrought by the Jews ("Do Regno," p. 2)

t'o conclude - the Christians are a 2nd temple Jewish sect and many ethnic Judaeans became Jesus-movement Jews i.e. Christians - this was a threat to the Pharisees and especially after the destruction of the temple, so they created Rabbinical Judaism

==============

Please look at my cross-references and I'm open to pointing out more for you to read yourself

///////////////////////

After Jesus rose to heaven, there were multiple jewish 2nd temple sects
1. Sadduccees, took only the 5 books of moses and the prophets and rejected the oral Torah (the basis of the Talmud)
2. Pharisees who took the Oral Torah with its detailed Sabbath rules (the written basically just says keep the Sabbath holy)
3. Samaritans who rejected the prophets and kept their own version of the written pentateuch
4. Essenes
5. Jesus movement Jews
6.. zealots

Afte3 the destruction of the temple, only the Jesus movement Jews had a “way out”.

Namely they pointed out that Jesus had prophesied the destruction of the temple in his Olivet discourse, that it was the fulfillment of Daniel’s vision and the 70 weeks had come to an end with Jesus triumphant. And that it was exactly as John’s vision in the book of Revelation spoke of. That book was written in 64 AD.

The Pharisees reinvented themselves without the temple or priests, replacing them with synagogues and rabbis. This was done at the council of Jamnia in 70 AD by Rabbi Yohannan bin Zakkai. This was the start of rabbinical Judaism, or what we simply call Judaism now.

So strangely enough, Judaism of today is actually about 40 years younger than christianity.

The Talmud was finished only in the 8th century and had influenced on and was influenced by Islamic writers creating the Quran, Hadiths and Sirah in the 8th and 9th centuries

The reference in Mark to synagogues of Satan was a reference to the period prior to about 132 AD when the Jesus movement was another sect of 2nd temple Judaism - along with the Pharisee sect (that was reconstituted in 70 AD as Rabbinical Judaism - what we call “Judaism” today)

Matthew 10:17
But beware of men: for they will deliver you up to the councils, and they will scourge you in their synagogues;

Matt 23:34
Wherefore, behold, I send unto you prophets, and wise men, and scribes: and some of them ye shall kill and crucify; and some of them shall ye scourge in your synagogues, and persecute them from city to city:

John 16:2
They shall put you out of the synagogues: yea, the time cometh, that whosoever killeth you will think that he doeth God service.

acts 9:20
And straightway he preached Christ in the synagogues,

rev
2:9
I know thy works, and tribulation, and poverty, (but thou art rich) and I know the blasphemy of them which say they are Jews, and are not, but are the synagogue of Satan.

3:9
Behold, I will make them of the synagogue of Satan, which say they are Jews, and are not, but do lie; behold, I will make them to come and worship before thy feet, and to know that I have loved thee.

Note that the Jesus-movement still met on Sabbath in the synagogues along with the other sects of 2nd temple judaism - the pharisees, the sadducees, the essenes, etc.

But after 70 AD and the destruction of the temple, there were only 2 sects of 2nd temple Judaism left

1. The Jesus movement who said Jesus was the new temple

2. The Pharisees were destroyed, but under Rabbi Yohanannan Ben Zakkai at teh COuncil of Jamnia created a new religion, RAbbinical Judaism that tossed aside animal sacrifices in favor of TODAH and other changes to survive

We are not talking about today’s Jews in those acts in Revelation - which was written in 64 AD

The people we refer to as "Jews" should more accurately be referred to as "Rabbinical Jews" and their religion as Rabbinical Judaism.

Since they were deried from the Pharisees, they started the process of codifying the Oral Torah - which the Sadducees had rejected, into the Talmud -- the Talmud was finally compiled by the 9th century.

It is interesting to find here the origins of "Protestantism" in chrstianity itself. Just as all chrstians claim that Rabbinic Judaism is about forty years younger than chrstianity, Protestants believe that Catholicism/Orthodoxy is 313 years younger than "true chrstianity." And note the origins of sola scriptura in the attacks on the Oral Torah and the Talmud. Apparently while chrstianity has an authentic authoritative oral interpretive tradition, this is denied for Judaism (whose written Bible, the Bible per excellence, doesn't even contain vowels or punctuation!).

Protestantism is merely the repetition of chrstian calumnies against Rabbinic Judaism thrown back in the face of its hypocritical creators. Apparently they can dish it out but they can't take it!

Likewise, note the Jewish arguments the sacramental chrstians make against antinomian faith-only Protestantism. This shows that historical chrstianity is a camel (a horse put together by committee). It makes Protestant arguments against Rabbinic Judaism but Rabbinic Jewish arguments against Protestantism. How in the world can anyone take such an inconsistent, hypocritical position seriously? Especially considering that sacramentals have to scold Protestants for believing that human nature is messed up! (Eastern chrstians don't even believe in original sin, much less total depravity!)

It is also interesting that James, the "new testament" epistle invoked by the sacramentalists so often to refute "faith alone," was (allegedly) written by the head of the original Jewish church which kept the Law of Moses! Of course such a person would reject "faith only." But the sacramentalists would insist that any such church was heretical--even though it was the first and original one!

I don't understand why chrstians think that the absence of the Temple and its qorbanot for such a long time is such a problem! There were certainly several periods in Biblical times when the sacrifices could not be offered (the Babylonian Exile being only one of them). Even in the days of Moses, whenever the tabernacle was in transit from one place to another the sacrifices were suspended.

There's a whole section of the Torah (beginning at Deuteronomy 28:15) where Israel is told of a terrible exile that they will endure in the future, scattered to the four winds. Certainly at that time there would be no temple and no sacrifices! It also tells exactly why this will happen . . . deviation from the Torah. There is not one word about "rejecting the Messiah." Israel is warned over and over and over not to turn from the Law of Moses to the left or to the right, yet chrstianity claims that G-d punished Israel for refusing to turn from the Torah and "rejecting the messiah!" Only someone with the thickest of blinders and the a priori assumption that chrstianity is true could believe such nonsense.

In fact we see the "new testament" quoted numerous times to prove chrstianity when the validity of the "new testament" is the very point of dispute! The so-called "Old Testament" had been the recognized Word of G-d for a thousand years, completely independent of the endorsement of chrstianity. The Torah judges all subsequent claims of Divine revelation and is judged by none of them. "Proving" chrstianity by quoting the "new testament" is no different than "proving" mormonism by quoting the book of mormon!

I note with satisfaction your preterism, which means that you reject the very concept of an actual messiah (aside from the "great Catholic monarch, anyway). One wonders why you make such posts. Are you trying to entice some Fundamentalists and Evangelicals to sacramental chrstianity? The ancient churches despise Fundamentalists and regard them as an embarrassment (unlike their good buddies the liberal Protestants from whom they took historical criticism, not being smart enough to think of it themselves). Every convert to the ancient churches must eventually subscribe to liberal Protestant de-mythologization or be forced to leave. You can't put enough daylight between those "horrible" Fundamentalists and yourself. You don't want converts; you want conquests groveling at your feet and admitting that Wellhausen and Darwin were right! It is a metaphysical impossibility for someone to whom total inerrancy is important to convert to the ancient churches even though they admit that their ancient fathers were total inerrantists and that their "unchanging" doctrines have indeed changed! I don't even see how you folks can look at yourselves in the mirror.

If the Law of Moses is no longer valid, then neither are any of its self-proclaimed successors/imitators. If the former is a denial of salvation by J*sus, then so is the latter (as the Protestants claim).

Don't you have something profound and intellectual, like a totem pole or a Mayan ritual or a "pachamama" to "baptize?"

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.