I wasn’t raised to believe in the future, but I always secretly hoped it would come to pass. My family were Southern Baptists, though; the Rapture hung over our heads. Once, when I was 7, I heard a big boom on a Saturday morning that shook the pictures on our walls. Me and my brothers yelled. Mom told us this was the end. The Lord was coming back to get us, and I had just just gotten a Game Boy for Christmas. The timing was terrible, almost cruel, really. I started to cry. A few minutes later, Mom turned on the TV and declared a false alarm. What we’d heard was the sound of the space shuttle Columbia exploding upon reentry over East Texas and the debris falling everywhere.
The end was still near, of course. I knew that because of what people said in church and on the evangelical radio stations my mom listened to. It was 2003, and we were at war in places the Bible talked about. Earthquakes, floods, and famines plagued the Earth. The news said “no survivors” over footage of a big fireball in the sky—a sad story, but there was nothing in Revelation about crashing spaceships, which meant I wasn’t going to heaven today, and for that, I was very happy.
Suffice it to say, I was not surprised to learn last week that a lot of evangelicals were saying the world was about to end; it would be more surprising if they weren’t saying that. What’s new is that secular Americans—and the media, from The New York Times to Fox News—briefly paid attention. There’s one reason for that: The Rapture was trending on TikTok.
