No One Gets to Rapture Their Way Out of This

Not even the evangelicals

Welcome to Healing is my Special Interest, the newsletter at the intersection of late-diagnosed neurodivergence and healing from high control religions. Like most people these days, I have too much to say and also nothing much to say at all. Most of my energies have been directed towards my magnum opus on how serial child predators operate (please read and share if you are so inclined). But here’s my tiny imperfect attempt at making sense of the past few weeks. Thanks for being here, and for being a part of working towards a better world.

Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash

When I was a young child, age six or seven, I wanted to be a comedian when I grew up. I liked making my dad laugh. I liked people having a pleasant reaction to me when they remembered I existed. My family perhaps didn’t think I was funny as much as they thought I was odd. They were laughing at me, not with me, but I couldn’t tell the difference.

By the time I was 8, I had no dreams for my future. My mother had entered her stage of religious psychosis where she was convinced God was telling her that the second coming of Christ was just around the corner. She found others who believed the same way in small towns across the western United States. She found people willing to sell her books and conferences eager to sell her tickets, all proclaiming the end was nigh. As a homeschooled pastor’s kid with no other adults in my life, I hung on her every word. She told me she was a prophet, and that I must listen to her carefully. She was full of woe and sadness, but also strangely giddy. Soon, all her troubles would be over. The rapture was coming, and she would be whisked away to heaven where no more tears would ever be shed. She could feel the end coming, feel it in her bones. It had to be soon. Because how much more of this life could she bear?

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Last week I had two anxiety attacks. I tried all my tricks: ice pack on the chest, deleted all my social media apps, read Anne of Green Gables, took long walks in the September wind. But still the anxiety thrummed in my veins, made me sick to my stomach, made my mind lose hours and hours on pointless ruminations. Of course some of them centered on how the world was ending, how suffering would always be my companion, on how to keep my children and everyone I love safe in a world that was increasingly targeting them.

Nothing helped, until one day I woke up feeling a little bit better. No miracle cure, no magic prayer, no pill to take or belief to cling to. I just kept surviving, and one day it got slightly easier. Instead of just feeling afraid, I started to feel other emotions: anger, joy, bemusement, scorn. I started to feel like a human. A silly little bag of bones clattering around a world I know way too much about. A survivor of countless apocalypses, most of them only living in my brain. Every night my world ends, and every morning it begins again anew.

And I am grateful, despite everything, to wake up and see that we are all still here.

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Evangelical Christians as a whole are a bunch of depressed and anxious and angry people who have no real skills for living through tumultuous times. It is no surprise to me that rapture theology is back on the menu for them, since they hitched their wagons to the white supremacist patriarchal god which becomes ever more unpopular. They know deep down, just like we all do, that there is no going back to normal. There is no forgetting what people have said and the boots they have kissed and licked in order to get cookies from the fascists. Their hatred of queer people, trans people, immigrants, Black people and more will never be erased. They have their anger and they have their guns and they have their martyrs and they have their president and they have their Supreme Court but you know what they don’t have?

Us.

They have lost us, the people who actually care about the future of the planet and the future of humanity. And since their religion doesn’t allow for them to self-reflect, apologize, or take accountability, they have no clue how to fix the mess that they themselves created. The ways they parented their children, the politicians and the policies they voted into office, the houses they can no longer sell, the empty seats at the Christmas dinner. They are lost, so they turn to what they know: the desire to be swept up into the heavens, to escape the life that they themselves created. Their ridiculous beliefs about being raptured into glory bely a terrifying lack of ability to live here, in 2025, and all the very real problems we as a society and globe face. They want all the power and all the glory and none of the responsibility for living together in a world that makes room for everyone.

They are the apocalypse, the locusts, the plagues I grew up hearing about. They are not the antichrist, but they are his minions. Their Bibles and their worship songs the mark of the beast, the signs of the times that we and all the rest of the world can see. They have been branded, they have been claimed. Their world is ending, that much is true. But for the rest of us, it is only beginning.

Here, in the rubble, we rebuild all that they have tried to destroy. While they sit on the outside and gnash their teeth or pray to be delivered, we are the ones who feed and care for each other. Who cherish our children and nurture their strong wills. Who believe in the goodness of humanity instead of our sins. Who believe the earth is precious and must be treated as such. Who are committed to living as if we will wake up tomorrow instead of wishing we would cease to exist.

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What is rapture theology except a cry for help? What are evangelicals if not a group of people so totally lost that they would destroy the whole world if it saved their perception of themselves as good and holy?

Today, like every day, is a good time to remember how hollow the words those locked into a death cult truly are. Look at the people the valorize. Look at the funerals they hold. Look at the their relationships with anyone who dares to think differently from them. These are not serious people, nor do they operate in any kind of good faith. There is no point debating them, no point trying to appease them. Whatever empathy you give to them will not be returned to you and yours — it will be hoarded, greedily, and used to silence you further.

They are losing the war they have been waging for so long, and making us all pay. Of course some days it feels like the end of the world, because that is what they want us to feel. But in reality, we are all in the cycle of the seasons shifting again. Something new is coming, something better is already here. So many of us are learning how to love ourselves and love our planet despite billions being poured into indoctrinating us otherwise. So many of us want a better world for ourselves and our children right this very second. And they can’t silence us all, or fire us all, or censor every single social media app, or make us disappear with a snap of their fingers or the sound of the shofar.

We are here, and we aren’t going anywhere. A new world is coming. If the apocalypse is happening then it is the ending of the gods of men. And despite what they might desire, evangelicals will have to live just like everyone else as a new world is birthed right in front of them.

So why not find moments of laughter, of joy, of pleasure while we can? The anxiety attacks might keep coming, but so too will moments of connection and care. We are in this together, and we will make it through as we always have. I have fought too hard to give up now, I have discovered how much I truly enjoy being alive — despite all the pain and fear and suffering. I have so much to live for, and so do you.

Evangelical theology tried to squash my sense of the future, of joy and safety and belonging outside of the narrow confines of their patriarchal white supremacist religion. But I clawed my way out, and here I am with all of you: happy to be alive. Happy to be here. Happy to find things to laugh about, even in the most chaotic of times.

And today, on yet another failed rapture day, is something for me to celebrate.