All the Different Christians I Have Been

It’s a fear that every Evangelical kid grows up with. It’s probably one of the main reasons we prayed the sinner’s prayer over and over again, hoping that at least one of those prayers would “stick.”

For some, teachings about a postmortem realm of unending pain and suffering weren’t quite enough to scare them into submission. So along comes the stories about the End Times™.

There are multiple versions of the story, and every pastor has his own timeline of events, but the version I was taught in my little Baptist church—and the one that became popularized in media like the 1970’s film series A Thief in the Night and the bestselling book and movie series Left Behind—goes something like this:

At some point in the not-too-distant future, all of the Bible-believing Christians are going to disappear from the earth in a seemingly catastrophic event called the Rapture. For non-Christians, the event will be a global apocalypse, but for Christians, this Rapture is a joyous event as we are all being taken away from earth to spend eternity in heaven with Jesus.

Now, that should be the end of the story at our churches, but Evangelicals love to speculate about what’s going to happen to the heathens who didn’t accept Christ into their lives (i.e., convert to Evangelical Christianity) before the Rapture took place. Also, you need to include as much detail as possible to convincingly frighten children into giving their lives over to the cult Jesus, so pastors decide to preach about the post-Rapture timeline.

After the Rapture, a world leader will come into power. He’s a charismatic figure, attracting the attention of countless millions of people around the world. In many Evangelical imaginings, this leader rises up as the Secretary General of the United Nations, probably because Evangelicals are so afraid of globalization, they have this pressing need to demonize any attempt at international cooperation.

This leader, according to Evangelical interpretations of the Bible, is known as the Antichrist, and his rise to power ushers in a period of global turmoil known as the Great Tribulation. This Great Tribulation lasts a total of seven years, during which God would be pouring out all his judgment and wrath on the world in the form of plagues and natural disasters that would continually kill thousands upon thousands of people over the course of this time period.

Simultaneously, the Antichrist would consolidate power and declare himself ruler of the entire planet, usurping the authority of all the world leaders, including the President of the United States (who, in the Left Behind novels, mounted a noble rebellion against the tyranny of the Antichrist’s United Nations). He would have abilities that captivates the world, like the ability to heal (like Jesus Christ is said to have been able to do), but over time he would become a fascist dictator who has a specific distaste for Christianity, making the religion a target for oppression and persecution.

His anger towards Christianity is fueled by Christians’ unwillingness to receive what Evangelicals think the Bible calls the “Mark of the Beast,” a type of privacy-invading stamp that serves simultaneously as a kind of societal identifier and a method of accessing currency (which, interestingly, is one of the fears behind the most recent wave of anti-vaccine activism).

But wait, weren’t all Christians raptured by this point? Well, according to some versions of this narrative (my pastor’s included), people could still become Christians after the Rapture, but because they didn’t accept Christ during the “Dispensation of Grace” (the time period we’re supposedly living in now), they would be required to endure the pain and suffering of the Great Tribulation.

At around the halfway point of the Antichrist’s reign, he would become possessed by an entity known as the Beast (some versions of the narrative consider this to be Satan incarnate), and he would become empowered to hunt down and execute millions of Christians outright. And for some reason, the guillotine seems to be the preferred form of execution in End Times media like A Thief in the Night and Left Behind, so every Christian in these stories is executed by one.

At the end of the seven-year Great Tribulation, Jesus Christ would return and lead his armies in a massive battle against Satan, the Antichrist, and their minions, known as the Battle of Armageddon. Jesus would be victorious, and he would install himself as the king of the world, ushering in a thousand-year-long period of peace known as the Millenium, after which the universe would be purified, and sin would be destroyed forever.

I think I was around 7 or 8 years old when I first heard about the Rapture. I found it in a big storybook Bible with pictures for kids.

I shit you not. This end-of-the-world, sci-fi/horror drama found its way into a picture Bible marketed for children as young as 7 years old.

In 1995, the novel Left Behind was published, and a whole genre of Christian fiction blew up overnight. Sure, Frank Peretti had been writing Christian thrillers for nearly a decade before Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins penned the first of their tiresome thirteen-book end-times novels, but it was the Left Behind series that put Christian thriller novels on the map.

No, these books weren’t particularly good, but my preteen Evangelical mind was the perfect place for stories like these to fester. I was LaHaye and Jenkins’ target audience, and target me they did.

Despite the way these books kept me up at night, particularly the first six or seven, I read them voraciously. Raymond Steele, his daughter Chloe, and her dumbass of a boyfriend Buck Williams were some of the flattest characters ever written, but I just couldn’t get enough of them.

These stories are strange because, while they are fiction, they are set during events that Evangelicals truly believe will happen. I firmly believed that a Rapture would take place. I was certain there would be a Great Tribulation, complete with the suffering that novels like The Mark, The Desecration, and The Remnant described.

Why did I believe such things?

For starters, my pastor was the guide through which I understood the Bible. I had no framework other than that which he approved. So the verses in Scripture that appeared to talk about the End Times™ were just that—verses about the End Times. It never dawned on me that the biblical book of Revelation might be a political treatise meant to critique the Roman Empire at the beginning of the first century. I wasn’t given that as an option. I was only ever taught that Revelation talked about the end of the world.

Additionally, my pastor gave us a timeline. From the Rapture to the Tribulation to the Seven Seals of God to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse to the Seven Bowls of God’s Wrath to the Antichrist to the Mark of the Beast—I was taught all of it in great detail.

By the time I started reading Left Behind I was in youth group at Parsippany Baptist, and we were having all-nighters at the church, which included a marathon of the A Thief in the Night films. I still vividly remember the blood-stained guillotine and the looks of horror on the characters’ faces as they watched their friends’ beheadings.

And I remember my youth pastor admonishing us to get saved now, before all of these events come to pass. We don’t know when Christ will return to rapture his Church; it could happen at any moment. Don’t delay in accepting him as your savior. You can escape these terrible circumstances if you simply believe in him and confess that he is Lord.

I first prayed to accept Jesus when I was around 4 or 5 years old. I began repeating that prayer over and over, nearly every week, just a few years later, afraid that I might end up left behind at the Rapture and forced to experience the Great Tribulation.

Anytime I was alone at home and didn’t know that my parents had stepped out, whenever my family was out later than they were supposed to be, I would turn on the TV to see if any breaking news was announcing that millions of people suddenly disappeared, afraid that I was not among them.

This fear wouldn’t subside until I learned other interpretive methods when I was around 24 or 25 years old. But by then, I had lived with Rapture anxiety for nearly 2 decades.

It’s one of the many complex traumas that religion can subject people to, and it can take many long years—and countless sessions with an understanding therapist—to heal.