Left Behind: Futurist Fetishists, Prepping and the Abandonment of Earth (2019)

12/29/2025 at 10:56:12 PM

There is no rapture coming. The idea of the rapture didn't even exist until Morgan Edwards came up with it in 1788. It didn't become popular until John Nelson Darby developed and popularized it starting around 1827-33 by conflating verses from different books of the Bible.

In Matthew 24:40-41 (also Matthew 13) it speaks of one being taken and one being left, but the people being taken are being destroyed by an invading army, like happened in Jerusalem in 70AD when the temple was destroyed. You want to be the one left behind. You also see this in Genesis when the people were taken away by the flood and they perished.

In 1st Thessalonians 4:17, it talks about being caught up but it isn't speaking about what we understand as the rapture today. It is referring to a convention where a Roman ruler would triumphantly return to a city and the people would go out to greet him and return with him to the city.

The beast was Nero (his name in Gematria adds up to 666). All of the end times events either happened 1900 years ago or aren't ever going to happen.

by timbit42

12/29/2025 at 11:33:47 PM

Definitely is a relatively newer innovation/reading. In the earlier days of the religion (thus Byzantine), Amphilochius of Iconium mentioned that the book of Revelation was widely held to be dubious, and Eusebius of Caesarea himself doubted its authenticity.

by PeterHolzwarth

12/29/2025 at 11:02:58 PM

Did anything happen between Darby and Hal Lindsay? Seems like about ~80 year gap before it become de rigeur again?

by why-o-why

12/30/2025 at 8:22:37 AM

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scofield_Reference_Bible is probably the most important thing in that interim.

by Avshalom

12/30/2025 at 12:17:40 AM

I don't believe in the rapture (or really anything in Christianity), but why would the idea of the rapture being a recent idea change anything? Why would it being suggested 2000 years ago suddenly make it more likely to be true?

by tombert

12/30/2025 at 12:31:46 AM

If the idea goes back to the first century, then it is more likely Jesus or his disciples or Paul knew the idea or believed or taught it, regardless of what was recorded in the New Testament. Since, it doesn't, it is much less likely to be a valid teaching of Jesus.

Often the issue is that Christians tend to treat the books of the Bible as being univocal, that is, that the authors all had the same ideas and believed the same things. Upon close scrutiny, it becomes obvious that they didn't all believe the same things. This means taking verses out of context from different books and trying to make them agree is a poor way to understand each authors unique message.

by timbit42

12/30/2025 at 2:46:40 AM

There are millions of people who believe that God's chosen profit was Joseph Smith, about two-hundred years ago. Certainly they don't think that having close proximity to Jesus is an important factor.

I think it's all very silly, honestly.

by tombert

12/30/2025 at 5:04:43 PM

Ultimately the more ridiculous and unbelievable the beliefs are the stronger your faith must be to keep them. It is a paradox of religion. I believe this is the underlying force that pushes people out to the fringes of their religion: the need to prove themselves the better man/woman by showing how strong their faith is.

by jandrese

12/29/2025 at 10:27:11 PM

I found the article interesting until they brought up the Apple headquarters. It’s just an office building. Steve Jobs was obsessed with people walking around and bumping to each other. That’s why it’s a circle. The landscaping mimics the area around the Stanford dish where he liked to go on walks with people a talk through things. That’s it. Jony Ive brought the minimalist architecture. No greater meaning. These types of articles tend to lose their way when that try to attribute meaning to things that have no specific meaning.

by doug_durham

12/29/2025 at 11:58:00 PM

It's a tale as old as schlock journalism: an article seems interesting... until it talks about something you actually know about personally, at which point it suddenly starts saying obvious nonsense.

by pjscott

12/30/2025 at 12:11:29 AM

My experience is that very few people understand what I am saying if I really explain things. It is usually better to say obvious nonsense that gets people work in the same direction. I most masscommunication is meaningless until you find the meaning yourself, there are some rather wonderful educators that prove I am wrong. I can only think of one that I have met, and he spent 50% of his time talking about "unrelated" topics. He died, teaching to the end.

by pastage

12/29/2025 at 10:33:45 PM

It's sort of like how all those pseudo-intellectual literature professors and critics who are incapable of creating anything original waste their lives away trying to find deeper meaning in certain books. Often they end up fooling themselves by perceiving patterns in noise. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

by nradov

12/29/2025 at 9:32:07 PM

In the event of the Rapture America is doomed. How is a country that loses 60% of its population supposed to compete with the Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, Shinto, etc... countries that were almost untouched? Does the Left Behind series even talk about this? I've never read the novels, but what little I know of it made the scope seem focused on the USA. Does the rest of the world just carry on as normal and it's just America that goes all Mad Max?

Honestly, one would expect New York City to be one of the less impacted locales on account of the cultural diversity and general high level of sin according to Evangelicals. Same with California. It's the Midwest that gets wiped out.

by jandrese

12/29/2025 at 10:56:52 PM

Left Behind is a very poorly written series so it doesn't address any of this well but: most christians don't get raptured but also any child under 12? does regardless of religion. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25011483-the-anti-christ... (which uses the left behind books as a jumping off point) is worth reading as an explanation of the political world we live in.

The book sort of constantly forgets that every child under 12 in the world means that every one on the planet should be deeply traumatized.

by Avshalom

12/30/2025 at 2:19:46 AM

That's one hell of a lost generation. Interesting that being baptized is not a requirement since that's often mandatory to even be considered for entry into heaven. Getting infants baptized is a big deal in some denominations.

by jandrese

12/30/2025 at 11:34:31 PM

I think belief in the rapture is pretty rare among denominations that practice infant baptism.

by dabbledash

12/30/2025 at 12:00:44 AM

I like Arthur C. Clarke’s take on a similar subject in Childhood’s End.

by stevenwoo

12/29/2025 at 10:00:32 PM

"America" to these people, is the set of collected souls. They would deny what's left behind is America, its just the landmass north of Mexico.

by ggm

12/29/2025 at 10:17:01 PM

Perhaps we should rename it as the Peninsular of North Mexico?

by blipvert

12/30/2025 at 4:45:31 AM

Depending of your flavor of how the rapture is supposed to work, there is supposed to be a 7 year period of tribulations between the rapture (when X population get pulled up to heaven), and the actual second coming of Jesus. That 7 year period is generally expected to be very challenging to Christians.

Within the Left Behind book series... by the end of the first book (of like 10+), they've already revealed who the Anti-Christ is going to be, and foreshadowed the broad outline of his plans (use the UN and the forces of neoliberalism to do his bidding), and he has already basically mind controlled all the world leaders in attendance, and by the end of the second book, the Anti-Christ has managed to trigger WW3.

by icegreentea2

12/29/2025 at 9:12:39 PM

There is a conspicuous lack of ceiling mounted escape hatches. A realistic belief in rapture necessitates avoiding being trapped in vaulted ceilings.

by kelseyfrog

12/29/2025 at 9:38:17 PM

I think the visions of people floating up into the sky are somewhat fanciful and are the result of people reading too literally into a translation. The actual Rapture is just whichever people qualify suddenly dropping dead on the spot as their souls are whisked away. Some probably get put on life support machines but never wake up again.

by jandrese

12/29/2025 at 10:12:09 PM

This is the biblically accurate version. In heaven the body has no more purpose than the clothes people wear, so the bodies should just drop dead empty of souls.

However, a more terrifying interpretation could be that the bodies have no reason to just drop dead just because the soul is gone, instead, they would continue functioning as P-Zombies. This could mean the rapture already happened and we're just not aware of it. If you are not a P-Zombie, you weren't raptured. This could be a premise for a pretty cool story.

by deadbabe

12/29/2025 at 10:59:35 PM

>In heaven the body has no more purpose

This is not the biblical teaching about the body. The hope emphasized in the Bible is for the resurrection of the body. This is why Jesus is resurrected bodily, and not as some kind of ghost. If the body was some kind of superfluous thing like clothes, this would make no sense. This is also why the Nicene Creed says “I look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the World to Come.” The World to Come likewise is a renewed version of this world, where Heaven and Earth are united, in the same way that the body and soul are. This idea of the soul shedding the body is Platonic, not Christian.

As for the rapture itself, it is considered to be nonsense by virtually all biblical scholars, both secular and religious, but how it became such a widespread belief among Americans is probably for another website.

by jact

12/30/2025 at 2:23:20 AM

The Rapture is more of a pop culture thing than a widespread belief among Americans, but there is one notable exception: Evangelicals. For some reason Evangelicals latch on to some of the weirder parts of Christianity.

by jandrese

12/29/2025 at 9:59:33 PM

Reminded of the spoof "subscribe to have certified athiests look after your pet post rapture" thing.

by ggm

12/29/2025 at 9:47:17 PM

ah, light black on dark white, my favourite reading setup

by croisillon

12/30/2025 at 4:15:08 PM

Bonus points for the thin font on a textured background. Phenomenal mobile reading experience.

by nickthegreek

12/30/2025 at 12:51:35 AM

Firefox reader mode as always saves the day.

by brohee

12/31/2025 at 6:04:57 AM

Came here to say this too!

by hn_acc1

12/30/2025 at 4:13:32 AM

Thank you for distilling my first comment on this piece.

by bronco21016

12/29/2025 at 10:06:14 PM

"Linked theoretically, conceptually, and politically, both to each other and to their unacknowledged or obfuscated ideological origins in accelerationism and nihilism, these endeavors, and their proponents in government and technology sectors, represent the ultimate preppers, ready to start anew somehow and somewhere else: in a self-contained unit like Biosphere 2 or HI-SEAS, on the newly discovered “habitable” planets, or on Mars."

Hmm... I think it's a lot of convoluted, wordy sentences just to paint a scary picture of an invented strawman the author disagrees with.

It's ironic because the usual accusation levied against "preppers" is that they're weirdos who are afraid of fellow man, but the author is playing the same game. It's all nebulous yet clearly connected: the Apple campus in Cupertino, 1960s civil defense posters, the NSA, Sim City 2000, Biosphere 2, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, rural gun nuts, Christian doomsday cults... and what are they working toward? Unclear, but it's obviously something bad.

by nospice

12/30/2025 at 1:26:33 AM

And in this case, the author never gets around to actually disagreeing with the straw man. They are lots of arched eyebrows and knowing pokes in the ribs, but nothing ever happens.

by ted_dunning

12/29/2025 at 10:54:27 PM

This is a thoughtful piece, and I'm surprised that most of the comments here are focusing on the evangelicals who are thirsty for the Rapture. While misguided, those people aren't much of a problem, as they are mostly waiting for the end times, grandiosely sure that they are among the chosen.

All that discussion of evangelicals is really a setup for the real focus of the article: people like Yarvin, Musk, and Theil, who have the power to actually have the influence and money to cause significant damage to society. And they are acting on it. Although there are cranks on the left who think the solution to the problems of capitalism is its demise, they are not in a position of power. It is ironic it is the so called conservatives who are actually trying to destroy society as we know it.

by tasty_freeze

12/31/2025 at 6:07:32 AM

This is definitely the problem - it has spread from being just "hope for hopeless" (aka opiate for the masses, a way to pacify those over-affected by inequality) to it now being acceptable for the rich/powerful to actively steer the ship TOWARDS Ragnarok with the expectation that they will survive / come out more powerful.

by hn_acc1

12/29/2025 at 8:24:25 PM

There is plenty on earth, and a very high quality of life if it weren't for the insane concentration of wealth and overconsumption (think mega data centers to spare us from thinking, among others) resulting in environmental ruin.

And if we got along instead of divisiveness, nationalism, and religious wars, incredible unlocking of value tied up in militaries and relieving consequent mass suffering.

It's a choice.

People have chosen poorly.

by k310

12/29/2025 at 11:02:15 PM

After reading this very well-written essay, what jumped out at me was "this is rich person psychosis". It seems like the easiest answer. Rich people know they are destroying the world, and rather than dial it back, they have mentally cracked and are fantasizing (and probably literally fetishizing -- in that it becomes sexual) about end-of-days. They've completely internalized what was a niche Evangelical position since Hal Lindsay (who I am surprised did not pop up in the essay). I know the trope that these folk must be sociopaths, which is why I opt to believe they aren't, and have just damaged themselves with the contradiction they represent. (As for the peasants who believe this? Collateral damage from hero worship.)

I enjoyed the essay from a recent-history perspective, but damn does it scare me.

by why-o-why

12/31/2025 at 6:05:48 AM

Interesting ideas..

by hn_acc1