Ushering in the End Times

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I’ve been thinking about death a lot this week.

Like most people in the non-Orthodox Christian world, I’ve been observing (in my own way) Holy Week, which is the seven days leading up to Easter Sunday where we retell the story of the events culminating in the crucifixion and resurrection. (You can find my response to the Trump administration’s Holy Week Statement here.) For me it always involves a lot of reflection on what it means to die, and this week it feels especially heavy compared to previous years. That’s because this year, Good Friday isn’t just Good Friday, but the third anniversary of my mom’s sudden death from long COVID complications. This brings up a lot of complicated emotions, and trust me, my therapist has been getting the play by play. But it’s not just my personal issues at the top of mind.

Over the next few weeks, Christians across the world will be hearing a lot about the end of days in their services. It’s a traditional part of the Easter season to discuss Jesus’ future return and what it might mean for future humanity. But different denominations have different understandings of this concept, with some being more politically relevant in our current moment than others, and perhaps the most relevant being the concept of the rapture.

Now I should note that I didn’t grow up with rapture theology.

In so far as I can tell, that’s really not a Catholic thing outside of maybe some fringe groups that mostly appeal to former evangelicals. From what I can recall of my childhood churches and Catholic school education, the “end of days” was only ever vaguely referred to as some vague thing that would happen in the far distant future. We were waiting for Jesus to come back, sure, but we had no way of knowing when that would happen, so it shouldn’t impact how we live our day to day lives. We engaged with the Book of Revelations from time to time, but I remember learning pretty early about the historical and literary context it was written in, and being encouraged to not take it literally. If it’s something the Protestant side of my family believed in, they never mentioned it around me. I never read the “Left Behind” books, or watched the movies, and given how bad my anxiety disorder was as a child, I am beyond grateful that I was spared that bit of trauma.

I do remember the first time I heard the word “rapture” though. It was a couple of years after I had transferred over to the public school in my hometown, and I was sitting in my 8th grade art class and listening to a couple of kids freak out about it. 

I didn’t learn the whole background at the time, but a Christian radio host by the name of Harold Camping had claimed that he knew that the rapture would kick off on May 21, 2011, and the end of the world would happen in October of that same year. My evangelical classmates, many of whom were attending the growing non-denominational churches in the area, were understandably terrified by the prospect of the end of the world, and the majority of the adults in their lives weren’t doing anything to assuage their fears, believing in it themselves. A classmate told me that I needed to be seriously worried about being “left behind” and tried to get me to go to her church’s youth group, which I respectfully declined. I remember people’s concerns getting so disruptive to the educational environment that teachers started citing Matthew 24:36 (“But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” -NRSV) just to get kids to shut the hell up about it.

Now, as an attorney that has written letters to make sure public school teachers don’t proselytize to their students, I recognize that that was not exactly the most constitutional method of classroom management. But as someone who has close friends in education, I also recognize that it was extremely effective, and sometimes teachers just need to be able to get on with the day. Balancing act.

It seemed like after that first day there were warnings about the rapture everywhere. Billboards, road signs, bumper stickers, flyers, commercials, everywhere you looked there was a clear, hard deadline of when you needed to “repent” by, or you wouldn’t be a part of the 3% of the population beamed up into heaven. I’m not really sure how convincing more people to repent if you know only 3% are going to make it makes sense, I’d think you’d want to do the opposite to heighten your odds, but then again I’m not great at math. For all the issues my parish at the time had (of which there were many), our priest was adamant that we had nothing to worry about, so I mostly just carried on with my usual schedule and smiled and nodded when people brought it up to me.

Obviously, the rapture didn’t happen, because I’m writing to you 14 years later. Camping later said that the May date was simply a “spiritual” rapture, before later saying he was completely mistaken, and that trying to calculate the date of the end times was a sin. Also important to note that the 2011 prediction was his fifth attempt to predict the rapture.

That doesn’t mean the 21st century rapture fixation has gone away though. According to the Wikipedia page on end times predictions, there have been at least thirteen other predictions for the end of times since Camping’s 2011 date, most of which have already passed. Not all of them are directly Christian or rapture-esque, but have certainly been pointed to by rapture preachers as warnings. Generally though I think there is a movement now away from predicting a specific date for the end times, because let’s be real, there are only so many times you can embarrass yourself in that regard before it gets a little old. Instead, it seems like pastors and religious commentators who espouse rapture theology are now more focused on pointing towards specific conditions that are “signs” of the rapture. Political turmoil, natural disasters, economic collapse, gay marriage, trans people existing — all of these have been pointed to as signs of Christ’s impending return and the eternal punishment of sinners.

Horrifyingly, though, there is a growing group of Christians, many of whom are deeply entrenched in the Trump administration, who are not only pointing to these types of events as signs of the end times, but seem to be actively trying to create the conditions that will trigger them.

Now in many ways this isn’t new. You only need to look at American support for Israel to find a large, mainstream political movement focused on ushering in the end times. Throughout this section I’ll be heavily referencing this well-researched post by Jewitches, whose work in anti-semitism education has been invaluable.

In the United States, the vast majority of support for the modern nation-state of Israel and its occupation of Palestine comes from Christians, not Jewish people. There are Christian Zionists in every Christian denomination, but the ideology is most prevalent amongst Evangelicals and Fundamentalists, and it is no coincidence that these are the theologies that most commonly believe in the rapture.

Jewitches’ definition of “Christian Zionism”:

“Christian Zionism is both a religious and political ideology which has no formal structure but generally demands total support for the modern political state of Israel in order to gather all Jews in Israel which will trigger the Rapture & the second coming of Christ.”

The largest Zionist organization in the United States is a Christian one, with more members than there are living American Jews, claiming more than ten million members. 

Zionism has always been a major political force in the United States, and the tension surrounding the Isreali occupation of Palestine has been reaching a fever pitch in recent months as demonstrators have increasingly protested the ongoing genocide on the Gaza strip. Universities across the country have made a mockery of free speech law, unjustly characterizing anti-genocide protests as “anti-semetism” and utilizing police violence to suppress dissenting opinions.

Columbia University, an Ivy League University in New York City of all places has been one of the worst offenders in this regard. Campus speech has been massively chilled, and international students have had their rights stripped at a level very few could have anticipated. Most famous of these cases has been that of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist, permanent resident, and Columbia graduate who has been an active voice against the genocide in his home country. Khalil’s protest and organizing work, in the eyes of a government looking to eliminate dissent, amounted to support for terrorism, and a Louisiana judge recently ruled that he can be deported for that activity. This case is far from over, however, and will likely be in appeals for quite some time as Khalil’s attorneys attempt to vindicate his rights. 

Khalil isn’t the only immigrant who has been targetted for anti-genocide speech in recent months. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service announced earlier this month that they would begin to monitor the social media of immigrants applying for permanent resident status and/or affiliated with educational institutions for “evidence of antisemitic activity.” What does the Department of Homeland Security consider to be “antisemitic activity?” They say that they’re looking to “protect the homeland from extremists and terrorist aliens, including those who support antisemitic terrorism, violent antisemitic ideologies and antisemitic terrorist organizations such as Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, or [the Houthis]."

Now I’ll go on the record saying that terrorism is a bad thing. Kidnapping civilians is also a bad thing. I know, this is yet another one of my absolutely scorching takes. But I have serious concerns, given the way that anyone opposing the mass war crimes happening in Gaza has been characterized by power players in the government and universities as being anti-semitic, including many Jewish people who consider themselves to be anti-Zionists themselves, who oppose modern political Zionism and the Israeli government’s human rights abuses in Palestine.

Now I’m going to pause just briefly, because I can hear the comments a thousand miles away: “But Kat, you’re queer, how can you support Palestine despite the harm queer people face there?” First, please remember that queer Palestinians exist, and are amongst the innocent people facing bombings, mass starvation, and decimation of their homes, medical systems, and education system. Their queerness is not protecting them from genocide. Second, and far more importantly there is no moral prerequisite for me to defend people from a mass extermination campaign. 

I’ll repeat that in case it isn’t clear. 

There is no moral prerequisite to defend people from a mass extermination campaign. 

No human being deserves to go through what the people of Palestine are experiencing right now, no matter their beliefs on queer people. This is why we have international law, and why “war crimes” are even a thing. If you think I need people to accept my gender and sexuality for them to be worthy of safety, food, housing, clean water, medical care, education, or any other basic human right, you have grossly misunderstood my politics.

This type of rhetoric is a distraction from the actual conflict at hand. This is not a war being fought over “liberal democratic values.” This is a colonialist, imperial project, that the United States supports because it provides a strong strategic stronghold for our interests in the Middle East, as well as the aforementioned rapture politics (though you really cannot separate one from the other.) Believe it or not there are plenty of ways to defend human rights in the region that don’t involve war crimes.

But this “ushering in of the end times” isn’t limited to the genocide in Palestine, or even American involvement abroad generally. While I think American Zionism is the most tangible example of this theopolitical mindset, I would also argue that for many of the True Believers amongst the power players of the Christian nationalist movement, part of their motivation in the dismantling of our government structures is to sew the kind of political turmoil that would trigger the end times, in conjunction with their belief that they need to build an earthly kingdom of fellow believers to “save” the country from God’s eternal wrath when it finally does come. You only need to look at the large numbers of Christian nationalist preachers and politicians who speak frenzied tones about how we are at the end of time and we need to “repent” as a country before the Lord strikes us all down to see what I’m talking about in this regard.

Social safety nets in particular, like social security, food assistance, housing assistance, and other welfare programs, are critical for maintaining civil peace and order. I once had a professor posit while teaching about the politics of the Great Depression that one of the reasons the United States did not undergo a socialist revolution at the time was because the government had created social programs to meet people’s needs during economic turmoil, a statement that has stuck with me for years since then. Most revolutions are borne of desperation. People who have sufficient access to food, shelter, water, healthcare, bodily security, and education don’t typically find reason to overthrow their government, though there are always exceptions. Beyond the old maxim of “bread and circuses,” a functional social safety net is, at least in my opinion, an indicator of a government fulfilling its most basic purposes.

If political unrest is a signifier of the end times, there is likely no faster way to make that happen than by taking food out of people’s mouths.

Attacks on free expression are also key to creating the kind of social environment that they believe might get God to start beaming the worthy up to heaven. While I fully believe that the attacks on gender affirming care and transgender rights are more deeply related to an insistence on strict gender roles and hierarchies, as well as forced adherence to their specific theologies, I do think that they may find some added benefit in the discord and turmoil that it is causing in communities across the country for its additional rapture fuel.

Now do I think that Elon Musk is some kind of True Believer, attempting to trigger the rapture with his DOGE attacks on the treasury, our public health systems, and cultural institutions? No. I think Musk and his ilk are grifters of the highest order attempting to line their pockets with the remnants of a dying empire. But I do think they, at least at some subconscious level, know that they can weaponize this religious psychology to their own benefit, the same way that many other cult leaders and rapture predictors have profited from it for centuries.

I will say that much like the other ironies of Christian nationalist power players consistently having the point of the Bible fly so far above their head it’s spent more time in space than Katy Perry, I am finding an extra level of irony as I consider this during Holy Week in particular. For centuries now people have been trying to figure out why exactly Judas chose to betray Jesus in the story of the crucifixion. There’s no truly clear motive given in the text, and theories have been gleaned from common sense to examinations of Jewish thought at the time and beyond. Some people point to simple greed, evidenced by the thirty pieces of silver. Other people point to fear from being associated with a dissenting religious and political movement. But one of the most interesting ones that has long captured my imagination is that Judas did it to attempt to push Jesus into action, wanting him to be a military leader to violently overthrow the government oppressing the Jewish people. If that is indeed the mistake that Judas made, it is precisely the same mistake that the Christian nationalists attempting to trigger the rapture through political means are making today.

I promise that you don’t need to think that this is a Biblical mistake to oppose this theological destruction of our government. It’s objectively bad and a horrifying subversion of secular democracy that Christian extremists are hijacking our government bodies, killing people en masse, and harming millions more who will survive to tell their descendents stories of how we made it through these massive historical and political missteps. But I do think it is a helpful framework for understanding the world we are currently inhabiting, and you do need to identify and understand all of the motives of all the players in a fascist movement in order to effectively fight it. 

When I’ve thought about my own death this week, I’ve come to the conclusion that I can only hope that I’ve left behind a world that is better than I found it, and if I didn’t that the legacy I leave behind will inspire others to create that world. I don’t really care if there’s an afterlife so long as my current life has some kind of real impact. And hopefully pointing out these patterns, pointing out the way that this psychology is creating our current political conditions is a part of it.

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Kat (they/them) is a queer lawyer, activist, and theorist focusing on the intersections of law, queerness, religion, and politics, with the occasional bit of theology, political theory, and legal theory thrown in for good measure. Originally from rural southern Indiana, Kat earned their B.A. in Political Science in 2019 before continuing on to earn their J.D. in 2022, both from Indiana University- Bloomington. A former Equal Justice Works Fellow for the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Kat has spent their professional career fighting for the separation of church and state and LGBTQIA+ rights. Outside of work you can find them at a ballet or contemporary dance class, sipping on dirty shirleys at their local gay bar, or playing video games with their cat, Merlin.