Caught up in hoopla: Back to the Rapture

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After a long absence, the Rapture has made something of a comeback.

It was not exactly what it used to be, and faded quickly. But journalist, former PBS host and minister Bill Moyers brought it up as evidence to prove, as so many have all but injured themselves with the strain of the effort, that the United States has been hijacked by fundamentalist rightist loonies.

He quoted Grist, a magazine of no known depth in matters of American faith and religion, but somewhat greater in environmental matters. According to the magazine, he said, the drooling masses who re-elected George W. Bush this past November are, in the main, believers in the Rapture who feel no pangs of responsibility toward the environment because, hey, they'll all be leaving someday and the Earth will shortly thereafter be remade, right?

To make sure the spin on this notion made us good and dizzy, Moyers pointed us to the Rapture Index, a Web site that keeps track of a jaw-dropping list of global conditions and items that, when added up, somehow give its owners a number that tells us how close we are to the day when, as Paul told the Thessalonians, we "shall meet the Lord in the air; and so shall we ever be with the Lord."

A recent check showed the Rapture Index at 151, well into the range labeled simply, "fasten your seat belts." Why the faithful might need seat belts to arise unaided is not explained.

Nor is it explained why anyone might think someone who looks forward to the time when he or she is gathered into the presence of the Lord should not consider being called to account on how well he or she handled issues of environmental stewardship, but that isn't our point here.

Moyers, speaking late last year as an honoree of the Center for Health and the Global Environment, made sure his audience held these simple souls at arm's length and regarded them as fixated on the idea of being snatched away - raptured.

If they are, we would wonder how, these days. Many years ago, when I attended a church that believed its members were the few and the proud among fundamentalists, I heard a good deal of teaching about the Rapture.

To that church, the Rapture was important, but not always for the reasons imagined by Grist and Moyers. Yes, it was considered imminent, but the church tended to be pragmatic. Be ready for it, but don't count on it - especially if you're in trouble.

Another main reason its members underwent such intensive instruction was the presence of competing ideas about the Rapture, like differing notions about when it would occur and, of course, whether it would, at all. For the record, the church hung its reasoning on the fourth chapter of Revelation to conclude the believers - the saved, we call them - would leave before the seven-year period set out in the same book as the period of catastrophic global tribulation.

Still, there was a menu of different ideas and no shortage of churches and evangelists - some traveling from town to city - to give presentations complete with time lines, flow charts and frightening illustrations to explain why they believed in the Rapture and when they thought it would happen. I remember large ads for them in newspapers.

But that was then and this is now. To be honest, it has been so long since the last time I heard anything like an end-times sermon or lesson, I can't remember when it was. Some have suggested these kinds of messages died out, in favor of subjects like life and relationship management, after Russia collapsed in 1989. It makes sense, after all. The Soviet Union of the past played a big role in the most popular interpretations of end-times prophecy: Gog and Magog and all that.

After the Cold War ended, we went from discussions of Hal Lindsey's "Rapture" to "The Prayer of Jabez" and "The Purpose-Driven Life." Sure, there have since been Tim LaHaye's novels about the end times, but they have come across more as diversion than mainstream message. They carry a story line, but not the same personalized heft of, say, John Hagee's volcanic sermons or Perry Stone's deeply analytical and sometimes controversial expository lessons.

And, in a way, it is ironic. The Rapture went underground for more than a decade and came out the other end as a political identifier and not at all what it once was: an article of faith. The attention in the meantime has turned from what it might mean in the broad sense to what it might mean in a narrow, temporary, political sense.

And with that attention so drawn away, the voice of Jesus talking to his disciples about how it would all fall out, as Matthew and Luke recorded it, comes to the inner ear of the wary, saying, "in such an hour as ye think not . . .”

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