Wake up, sheeple! It's the end of the world. Everyone's saying it. And by everyone I mean a gazillion conservative content creators who made TikToks this past weekend warning everyone to be awake and aware because the Rapture will be happening either Sept. 23 or Sept. 24!
I, Defector's resident ex-evangelical, am reluctantly here to answer all of your most pressing Rapture questions.
OK wait, I'm sorry. What the hell is the Rapture?
The Rapture is part of an end-times belief system held by many American Evangelicals. It is, in theory, a moment in which all of the Christians on earth (alive and dead) will be, well, raptured away from the earth to be with Christ in Heaven.
They'll just be like ... lifted into the air?
Correct. This is the belief. People on TikTok presently are giving advice to "look up" when you are levitated into the air and "pray that you aren't on the toilet." Evangelicals on TikTok are warning each other to make sure to leave their phones unlocked and to leave their nonbeliever spouses and partners the passwords they will need to survive the Rapture's aftermath. They, the Christians, will be flying up to meet God in the next couple of days.
Theoretically, this idea of the Rapture is based on prophecy.
So this is like a thing that happens in the Bible?
Sort of? Most of Rapture theology is based on a section of verses in 1 Thessalonians 4. Here are verses 15–17 in the New International Version:
"According to the Lord’s word, we tell you that we who are still alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever."
And those are the words of Christ?
Good question! Most Christians believe that the Bible is written by God through men and therefore all the words are the words of God. However, some words are quoted directly from Christ. Things like "blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy" and "If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me" are words directly said by Christ.
Thessalonians does not contain any direct quotes from Christ. It was written by a man named Paul, who became an Apostle after Christ died. The verses used to create the belief that people will literally raise into the air to meet Christ come from a letter Paul wrote to the people of the early Christian community in Thessalonica (today called Thessaloniki), a city in Greece.
OK got it. Why do people think the Rapture will happen tomorrow, Sept. 23, 2025?
The same reason people always think the Rapture is about to happen: A single pastor was very loud about his theory and people heard him who want to believe. In this case, the pastor is Joshua Mhlakela, an evangelical pastor from South Africa. He posted a YouTube video three months ago in which he claimed that Jesus had appeared to him in a vision and told him that the Rapture will begin on the first day of the Jewish holiday Rosh Hashanah, which this year falls on either Sept. 23 or 24 (depending on the moon).
Rosh Hashanah is the Feast of Trumpets, so this timing has some Biblical connection. The Thessalonians verse above refers to "the trumpet call of God," and 1 Corinthians 15:51–52 (also written by Paul) reads, "Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed—in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed."
See? Trumpets!
Do you mind if I share a little anecdote about this?
No. Go Ahead.
I was raised very evangelical, and one thing evangelicals do a lot of is Bible Study. I am reminded of this whenever I interact with someone who was raised in basically any other Christian denomination. Evangelicals approach the Bible like literature scholars. They nitpick over translations of words. They read single chapters for months. One book of the Bible can take a whole year to teach from the pulpit. If it's Romans, it could take five years.
I was in an iconic Bible Study for high school girls led by a woman who had this same Rapture theory—that it would happen on Rosh Hashanah—but for a different reason. Christ hadn't appeared to her, but she was saying as far back as 2006 that Christ would come back over Rosh Hashanah because it was the only Jewish holiday on which the Bible didn't record him performing a miracle.
Which is all to say that the Bible is absolutely right about one thing and that is that there is absolutely nothing new under the sun.
And this is a thing that all Christians believe?
No, definitely not. Many sects and denominations of Christianity are not that focused on the end times. Evangelicals, however, are very focused on the end times, and amongst evangelicals there are many different eschatological (end-times) theologies that try to explain what will happen at the end of humanity. Several of these theologies believe in the Rapture and most of them base those theologies off the final book of the Bible, Revelation, which is kind of an apocalyptic fever dream signed by a guy named John (unclear if he is one of the other Johns in the Bible or a different one).
The predictions this week are based on a very specific theology called pre-millennial dispensationalism.
I'm sorry. What?
Yeah. That's fair. A good way to think about pre-millennial dispensationalism is to think about it as Eras.
Like Taylor Swift's The Eras Tour?
Yes, but it's Eras Of God Dealing With Us. So according to pre-millennial dispensationalism there was the Pre-Christ time, when God's covenants were only with the Jewish people (from the beginning of Earth to somewhere between 6 and 4 BC). Then there was the time of Christ Being Alive (ending in either AD 30 or AD 33). The Church Age we are in is the post-Christ pre-Revelation era. (AD 33–now??).
What makes pre-millennial dispensationalism special and different from other apocalyptic theology timelines is that it posits that after the Church Age comes the Rapture, and then the prophesied seven years of tribulation, and then the second coming of Christ and his thousand-year (millennium) reign on Earth before the Last Judgment and the end of time.
Wait. Seven years of ... tribulation?
In pre-millennial dispensationalism, the the Seven Years of Tribulation are a period of time in which all the Christians are gone (raptured into the sky, remember?) and a bunch of bad shit happens. The two key verses forming this belief are Matthew 24: 21 and Revelations 7:14. Christians who believe in this theology believe that the book of Revelations is a prophetic depiction of the Seven Years of Tribulation, which luckily they will not be here for.
This has been a key component of evangelical conversion arguments since at least my childhood. Lifespans have generally been increasing for generations. Postwar Americans are less afraid of dying at any moment than they used to be and so the threat of hell is kind of distant. Death is imminent but not unexpected. The Rapture is unexpected—it could happen at any moment. Do you want to be left here, without your loved ones, amongst heathens all by yourself for seven years of starvation and violence?
It really feels like maybe this is connected to Charlie Kirk? Is this connected to Charlie Kirk?
Pastor Joshua Mhlakela predicted this date three months ago, but his theory's rise in popularity is absolutely connected to Charlie Kirk's assassination. Kirk was a prominent evangelical man who was assassinated. It is not a coincidence that lots of videos about how the Rapture is coming on Tuesday began to go viral on TikTok the same weekend as his funeral.
A key component of American Evangelicalism is the belief that the world is evil and bad and getting more evil and bad every day. The world, evangelical Christianity preaches, is rushing headlong toward disaster, and it will only get worse. Charlie Kirk's assassination can be taken as evidence of this. On Sunday, at his funeral, his death was described as part of a "spiritual war." Vice President J.D. Vance described Kirk as a "martyr for the Christian faith."
In his book With God On Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America, William Martin writes about the second coming of Christ that,
[...] the relevant "signs of the times" are bad news—political anarchy, religious apostasy, increased wickedness, earthquakes, plagues, and the like. As a consequence, pre-millennialism has usually fared better in bad times than in good, because it offers believers a shining ray of hope in an otherwise dismal situation. It has also acted as a break on reform efforts, since it regards such efforts as little better than fruitless attempts to thwart God's plan for human history.
The times, then, are bad. And people want to believe that the Rapture will save them because the prospect of being plucked out of the world by God and taken to a comfy cozy Heaven is much more pleasant—a form of passive gratification, like all of Americans' favorite things—than actually following the teachings of Christ, which command you to care for the poor and be kind to others and help more than you hurt.
So wait. Is the Rapture actually happening tomorrow?
That seems very unlikely. Just in my lifetime, this is the fourth major prediction of the Rapture's arrival. The first two were radio evangelist Harold Camping, who predicted Sept. 6, 1994, then admitted he got the date wrong and revised it to May 21, 2011, which was also wrong. The pseudonymous end-times conspiracy theorist and author David Meade swore the Rapture would come on Sept. 23, 2017, basing his prediction on astrological alignments of planets, but was also wrong.
In one of Christ's parables, he says "Therefore keep watch, because you do not know the day or the hour." So I guess we just have to wait.
