Rapture and the American Psyche  (copyright 2005)

Millions of Americans, believers in the Rapture, are wishing fervently for the world to end. They would end the world to escape it, such is the pain of their psychological misery.

Their vision is deeply negative and basically neurotic. It stems from experiencing ourselves through our passive side, whereby we doubt our essential value or worth, feel overwhelmed by life’s complexity and uncertainty, and are entangled in negative beliefs and impressions about ourselves.

People tend to take this negative inner state for granted, and are not aware that it is a measure of emotional illness and that it can be overcome.

Prophecy itself, when we are emotionally invested in it, takes power from us. That’s because it leaves us feeling that a future is approaching which we are helpless to influence.

It is tempting to feel this helplessness because doing so is easy and effortless. Like children, we can remain in a state of passive trust and hope. This is why some of us are so literal in reading, say, the Book of Revelations. When we carry the emotional baggage of childhood, especially unresolved negative attachments, we are prone to relate emotionally, in an infantile manner, to what we read and study or to the facts of life.

Our inner refusal to grow emotionally carries a price in fearfulness, self-doubt, depression, and passivity—the pain of psychological misery and the neglect of our democracy.

When we believe in ourselves and have cleared away enough inner negativity, we realize we are the creators of an evolving, improving life. We understand that we can each be a hero in the drama of our own life and the star of our own important destiny.

I remember back in the 1970s, reading Hal Lindsay’s The Late Great Planet Earth, and being emotionally captivated by its powerful prophetic vision. I wondered intensely, Can this all be true? I easily could have plunged deeper into the subject, but some instinct or intelligence helped me to reject the significance of the material. So I know from experience its emotional appeal.

The emotional seduction of the Rapture is unconscious and it goes like this:

Since Jesus will descend to save me, I don’t have to be concerned that I am not amounting to much and that I have forfeited a belief in myself. The inner voice that criticizes me can no longer assail me for my lack of direction and motivation. Now I can say, “What does it matter anyway? All my efforts are puny through no fault of mine.” True, I can’t believe in my self, but I can believe in Jesus. He loves me, and that is how I know my value. And, hey, I’m not interested in indulging the feeling that I am a worthless non-entity. I want Jesus here, on my doorstep, right now, with my personal pass to His Kingdom. And I am not wishing ill toward all those liberals, secularists, and whatnot who scorn me and my belief. It is Jesus who knows who and what is good or bad, and He is the one who will destroy those who have rejected Him.

The apocalyptic conviction that the world is filled with evil creates the impression that political negotiation or diplomacy is futile. The more “evil” we “see” in the world, the deeper the state of passivity we can induce. The black-and-white feeling is:

Even Jesus can’t talk to those lost souls. Better to withdraw and shun or reject the world, or else we’ll have to destroy that evil through force, meaning we must build up our military and keep open the nuclear option.

This is a projection on to others of one’s own intransigence, meaning one’s own unwillingness to see and clear away inner negativity: They’re the ones who refuse to change, not me.

George W. Bush must be under the spell of the Rapture because he has concocted a foreign policy that mimics it. He believes in combative intervention (in the Middle East), a model based on Jesus coming to save some of us and allowing the rest of us to be destroyed (as in the Great Tribulation). Believing in salvation, Bush “saves” the people of Iraq, delivering them from evil, while allowing many to be destroyed.

The secular option is less passive than the fundamentalist one. The secular choice is an expression of our belief in ourself. It says, “We can be stewards in our own domain. This earth is our domain, and we are grateful for the opportunity to discover and to express our very best. Let’s see what we’re made of!”

We secularists are inwardly braver than those escapists, so we want the chance, as in Star Trek’s non-intervention philosophy, to do our thing without interference from on high. Otherwise, it’s like a parent always telling us how to do something, when the greater satisfaction is often in learning or discovering for ourselves.

The Rapture ought to be called the Rupture. It is like taking a butcher knife to our destiny and hacking at it like a fiend. Who would do that other than someone too afraid to face himself?