Stacie Grahn Posted on 04/19/2023 5:59:00 AM PDT by Cronos
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?
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.”
Funny how Man seems to think his opinions matter to God..
Bookmark
LOL. ummmkay
At the same time it will be completely unlike anything that we have imagined.
Jesus's first coming aligned precisely with the Old Testament prophecies. And yet to most He was the furthest thing from the messiah they were expecting.
It will be no different with His second coming either.
Just my .02
All one has to do is see the signs of the Times, Mankind has become so blind to events overtaking Man...These naysayers will say anything to be noticed but that was predicted as well.
“When the end comes, it will be exactly as it was predicted in scripture.
At the same time it will be completely unlike anything that we have imagined.
Jesus’s first coming aligned precisely with the Old Testament prophecies. And yet to most He was the furthest thing from the messiah they were expecting.
It will be no different with His second coming either.
Just my .02”
Excellent.
And I thought this might be a serious article, instead it’s a bunch of fluff psychology masked as “journalism” to mock a serious subject.
The pre-tribulation rapture is not supported by scripture.
There is simply no evidence in the Bible that Jesus is going to secretly return before his second coming to snatch His church away. I know it is a comforting thought for many Christians, the thought of “getting out of this deal” of unspeakable last days persecution, but Jesus does not tell us we will be spared being here for those days—those of us who are alive then, whenever “then” is.
No one will miss Jesus’ return. The “rapture” won’t happen in secret.
Believers will be removed before the floodgates of Evil are opened wide.
I personally believe that our opinions mean a whole lot to God, and in fact why he created us. He gave us a free will, and fills us with choices every single day, believing that with His guidance we will eventually make good choices. And if we don’t, His everlasting patience waits for us to come back to Him (Tikkun and Tchuvah in the Jewish realm, or Forgiveness of sin in the Christian realm). He allows his creation ha Satan to tempt us with our animal natures (as is his job), and allows us a way to make good choices. Many times Salvation is taught as an insurance policy against burning in hell for eternity, but what is hell if it is not the absence from God? To be threatened by physical torment is less frightening to be removed from God’s presence. So, I respectfully disagree with the premise of your argument. I believe that each indvidual’s opinion matters more to God than anything in this universe. I believe that he created this system so that we will knowingly desire to be with Him forever (like marriage), and not to secure a “fire insurance policy”. Yet, I see your point that God is unchangeable. He cannot change and is the same as always, even before time began. It is only US that have the free choice to change.
I think we should live like Jesus is coming tomorrow, but be open to the possibility that it won't be for another thousand years.
A song from back with pop/rock bands used to practice their back-up singing. LOL Maybe Today - White Heart
Note the parables in Matthew 24 and 25
Notice how the parable expands our understanding of the earlier phrase “one is taken, and one is left” (Matt. 24:40–41).
This parable shows that Jesus meant “left out of the eternal Kingdom.” He never meant “left behind at the secret rapture,” as rapturists claim.
Jesus is talking about the taking of Christians into eternal bliss. Two men will be working together. One will be taken, and the other left out of the marriage feast (Matt. 24:40). Two women will be together. One will be taken into the marriage feast of the Lamb, and the other left out (Matt. 24:41).
In the parable before this, tye parable of the two servants,Jesus does not mention any hint of a seven-year tribulation or a Millennium after this coming. All that remains is either eternal bliss or eternal damnation.
Christ’s second coming will be sudden. It will be public and unmistakable. Christians will be irresistibly attracted to their Lord immediately. We cannot determine its precise timing, so we should live each day in anticipation, yet prepare for the long haul. Christians will be living and working alongside non-Christians when it occurs. Every person will receive his just reward in the end based on the charity he has shown.
Nothing even remotely suggests the private rapture that rapturists try to deduce from these verses. Nowhere is anyone “left behind.” There is no secret rapture preceding a seven-year Great Tribulation; indeed, the Great Tribulation Jesus predicts here has already come to pass. There is no mention of a separate millennial reign of Jesus as Messiah after the judgment.
The ord Paul uses for meeting the Lord "in the air" is aer, the Greek word for atmosphere (ref Eph 2:2). In the latter, Satan is called the prince of the power of the "aer" - so do rapturists think only airplane passengers are influenced by Satan??
No, that's another nonsensical rapturist posing
When Christ returns to the earth's atmosphere, he has returned to earth -- we will meet Christ at His second coming. No rapture away
The "like a thief in the night" is to be taken in the context of Matthew 24 -- the "cry of comman", "the archangel's call", "the trumpt of God"
There is no secret rapture
All the passages speak of one and only one more advent of Christ - no secret rapture
I respectfully disagree. One could make an eisegesical case for a pre-trib rapture, post-trib rapture, or even a mid-trib rapture (what I believe). But IMHO would be hard pressed to make an exegesical case for either. Thus, IMHO, the timing of the rapture in respect to tribulation is something neither of us should draw a line in the sand over.
What we should unashamedly push on the subject is that all of us should trust Jesus completely and stick to Jesus like glue with a no-matter-what, no-matter-who kind of attitude cuz in the end Jesus wins and Satan loses.
“Fear-saturated stories about the saved being transported to heaven while the world faces havoc and hellfire can generate lifelong panic, paranoia and anxiety...”
Just the opposite of “fear-saturated stories” and “lifelong panic, paranoia and anxiety”. It’s hope and comfort. For true Christians, anyhow.
Can you elaborate what you see as the “signs of the times” and how they differ from similar “inflection points” in the past?
Like the conquest of Jerusalem by the Muslims.
Like the conquest of Constantinople by the Muslim Turks
Like the great evils of Hitler and Stalin
Like the scourge of God - Genghis Khan
etc.?
Yet Jesus told us to expect trials and tribulations in His name.
He didn’t promise us an escape - He told us to endure THROUGH it
Correct.
We are to stick true to the teachings of the Christ and endure through to the end as Jesus told us
The state of Israel was established in 1948, in one day, as predicted in the scriptures. This will be the last generation before the Second coming.
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