Unraptured Read online

  I think that’s why I fell so hard for the rapture. It eased my fears. It promised that I wouldn’t be left behind to be tortured on earth or sent down to hell to be tortured for eternity. All I had to do was believe.

  End-times theology wasn’t a radical turn in my spiritual journey. It was the natural evolution of my faith, the only place my faith was headed.

  Apocalyptic intoxication

  End-times theology is the American Christianity of my youth in a nutshell. It’s driven by fear, it’s focused on “me” and the goal of personal salvation, and it promises vengeance against our enemies at the end. It’s driven by the fear of being left behind at the rapture, fear of what is supposed to happen at the end of time, and ultimately the fear of hell. But it’s also about fear of the Other. Anyone who doesn’t believe the same way—anyone who isn’t a rapture-believing Christian, or doesn’t believe in biblical inerrancy, or thinks it took longer than six days to create the world—becomes the enemy, or at least an unwitting agent of the enemy. Salvation comes not just in the form of avoiding hell but also in the form of escape from the worries of this world. The salvation promised by end-times theology also promises the eternal satisfaction of seeing vengeance poured out on one’s enemies.

  Not all of American Christianity ascribes to the charts, theories, and timelines of end-times theology, but it’s shaped by the same impulses. American Christianity has come to be defined by who and what it’s against, by legalism and dogmatism that draws lines in the sand and turns unbelievers into enemies. There is a constant sense of persecution and judgment for standing up for “sincerely held beliefs.” And because the goal of American Christianity is getting to heaven, all sorts of responsibilities in the here and now can be ignored. After all, why worry about the world now when God is eventually going to start all over anyway?

  That was my faith for years: convinced I needed to be perfect, guilty of not being able to achieve perfection, fearful of hell, judgment, and anybody who was different from me. If someone didn’t look and think and believe exactly the way I did, that person was an enemy or at least Satan’s willing accomplice out to lead me astray; my allies would all look and think and believe the way I did.

  End-times theology actually offered a sense of hope and liberation from the fear. Despite being driven by fear itself, it promised me that even if I wasn’t perfect, I could follow signs that would keep me from being left behind or going to hell. When I was raptured, I’d be able to watch from heaven while everyone who ever did me wrong got their just due. For someone desperate to be perfect and desperate not to go to hell, the promise of end-times theology was too intoxicating to resist.

  3

  Late-Night Television

  I finally had it in my hands. I had waited and searched for what felt like my entire life. At long last, there it was. For the longest time it had seemed like just a rumor—a myth I desperately wanted to believe was real but wasn’t, like the Loch Ness monster or an In-N-Out Burger within easy driving distance of my house. But sweet old ladies wouldn’t lie to you, right? That’s how it began, after all, in my grandmother’s living room. It wasn’t my grandmother who sparked the dark recesses of my imagination. It was a friend of hers. Who knows what her name was? I sure don’t; I was too interested in what she had to say to keep track of the messenger. Let’s call her Nancy.

  There was, Nancy told me, an actual, real-life, honest-to-God recording of hell.

  It had been captured by miners in Siberia or somewhere else in remote, rural Russia. (Russia made perfect sense. I was a child of the Cold War, and I knew full well that everything evil came from Russia. Ronald Reagan had told me so. It made sense that the entrance to hell would be there too.)

  The obviously evil Russian miners had dug too greedily and too deep, and for some inexplicable reason, they had been recording their handiwork. Tucked in between the sounds of their massive drills were the screams of the damned. The screams were faint, she said, barely even discernable. But if you were smart and knew what to listen for, Nancy promised, the sound of tortured people could be heard as clear as day.

  I couldn’t believe it. If it was true, I finally had tangible, indisputable proof that my faith was real. I finally had something to shove in the face of those smug atheists who thought Christianity was just a myth for the ignorant and a crutch for the weak.

  In retrospect, I realize that “proof” of hell shouldn’t have been quite so exhilarating. I mean, it should have been mind-numbingly terrifying. I was worried enough about hell as an abstract concept; if that recording was what I would hear for all eternity if I wasn’t saved and sanctified, sheesh. I should have been scared out of my mind.

  But I wasn’t. I needed to hear the cries of the damned myself. However, those were the days before the Internet, and I couldn’t just google it on my iPhone and listen right away. If I was going to hear the cries of the damned for myself, I would have to hunt for them the old-fashioned way. You might think that wouldn’t be hard in a world obsessed with proving its beliefs are true, but you would be wrong. No matter how many stones I turned over, leads I tracked down, or pastors I pestered, the most I could ever uncover was a handful of people who had also heard rumors of the recording’s existence. No one had ever heard the actual recording itself.

  That recording became my white whale. My Bigfoot. My perfect cheeseburger. It was out there. I just had to find it. It took years and years of searching, but I finally did. I’m just ashamed it took me so long, because the key to finding it was hiding right in front of me in the place where all great things come from: television.

  The television in question was an old-school big black box that weighed more than me and was barely able to fit on my dresser. I had bought it myself and I loved it, especially once I got it hooked up to cable. But having a television in the privacy of my own bedroom was my spiritual undoing, as it has been for so many teenage boys. I was soon staying up late at night, turning the volume down so no one could hear, and wasting countless hours watching things I should have been ashamed to be watching.

  I’m talking, of course, about late-night televangelists.

  Enraptured by the rapture

  It was just a bad habit at first. Out of curiosity, I would flip over to the broadcast home of televangelism, TBN, during commercial breaks while I was watching another show, just to see what crazy thing they were trying to get people to send money in for. But the bad habit soon became an addiction as I found myself compelled to argue with the television, correcting the bad theology of televangelists who couldn’t hear me and who, even if they could, wouldn’t care what I thought. But not every televangelist suffered the wrath of my adolescent theological expertise. In fact, it was that late-night addiction that led to the great love affair of my teenage years. For it was there that I first laid eyes on Jack Van Impe Presents.

  If you’ve never heard of Jack or his faux news show, then you’re missing out on some truly incredible television. I was enraptured by it (pun very much intended). By their own reckoning, the show was broadcast to 247 countries around the world, a truly impressive number considering that the United Nations recognizes the existence of only 195 countries on Earth.1 But that wasn’t the only impressive thing about the show. Jack Van Impe also claims to have saved at least eight million people—a figure that would dwarf the two million or so estimated to have responded to Billy Graham’s preaching.2

  Each episode of Jack Van Impe Presents was essentially the same as the one before it. Jack’s wife, the ageless wonder Rexella, would read off various news headlines that were either intentionally provocative or hand-selected as proof of biblical prophecy come to life. In either case, the headlines were always wholly absent of context so that they remained as shocking as possible. Then, as if trying to cosplay the 1950s cliché of a doting housewife who had to get all her information from her husband, Rexella would turn to Jack and breathlessly await his words of wisdom. With his massive grey pompadour, well-tailored suit, and soothing but pas
sionate voice, Jack would break down the prophetic implications of the day’s events by quoting enough Scripture to put any Bible quizzer to shame.

  Jack laid out, in what seemed like irrefutable logic, how the week’s news events clearly portended the imminent rapture and the rise of the Antichrist. Each week he explained in detail how a new prophecy was being fulfilled or how an old prophecy was being fulfilled in a new way. Sometimes the same prophecy would be fulfilled multiple times by different events over the course of several weeks. But no bother. What mattered was that the Bible was coming to life, and Jack was there to explain it to me.

  The show would go on like this for half an hour or so, back and forth between Rexella and Jack, until the end, when they would toss things over to the announcer, Chuck, whose deep, booming voice would rouse your spirit and compel you to open your wallet to send them money for whatever “love gift” they were hawking—usually some video that would give you even more insight into the terrifying but prophetically important headlines of the day. All you had to do was dial the 800 number on your screen, pledge a few bucks, and within seven to ten business days the secrets of biblical prophecy would arrive in your mailbox.

  You may have wondered if anybody ever calls those 800 numbers on the bottom of the screen. The answer is yes. I sure did. My first call to Jack Van Impe Presents was placed in hopes of procuring a free booklet that promised to unlock the mysteries of biblical prophecy. This may come as a shock, but it didn’t. It was basically just a generic trifold-brochure rehashing of the main points Jack made every week on his show. But as disappointing as the not-so-prophetic pamphlet was, the next offer more than made up for it. It was the very thing I had waited a lifetime to find: the mythical recording of Russian miners discovering hell in Siberia or wherever. I still didn’t care about the details. I just wanted to finally hear it.

  Jack was a man ahead of his time. The elusive recording wasn’t relegated to the indignity of an outdated cassette tape. No, my friend; everything with Jack was first class, cutting edge. You can do that sort of thing when you have a multimillion-dollar budget courtesy of people on fixed incomes desperate to know if they’re going to live long enough to see the second coming.

  Not long after I called the show to request my white whale, it arrived in my mailbox. Well, not directly. What arrived was yet another brochure that told me all about the dangers of hell and how not to go there, and inside that brochure was a link to a website. The Internet had finally made it into mainstream American life by that point, and some brilliant soul had uploaded my holy grail. I raced to the one computer in my house and turned it on as fast as I could.

  And then waited.

  And waited.

  And waited some more.

  It was the late ’90s. PCs took forever just to turn on. Some 187 hours later, the computer was finally booted up, and I couldn’t open up America Online fast enough. I signed on, and then . . . more waiting, this time accompanied by those strange noises you had to endure from a clunky dial-up modem trying to connect to the Internet. As I waited impatiently for my modem to connect, I said the prayer of every Internet user in the late ’90s: “Dear Jesus, I know I let you down by listening to secular music this week, but I promise it’s nothing but DC Talk and Carman from here on out if you will just please, please, please make sure that nobody in the house picks up the phone while I’m online and kicks me off the Internet.” Seventeen hours later I was finally online. I typed in the web address as fast as my fingers would type.

  And then waited some more.

  My Internet connection was slow. It took even the smallest of files an eternity to download. I can still remember the agony of the webpage slowly opening, one line of pixels at a time, like some kind of digital water torture. But there it was at last: a bold, shiny icon that read “Click here to listen to hell.”

  Subtle.

  I clicked on it immediately, and slowly but surely, the humble, unadorned media player began to crackle to life. All I could hear at first was the crackle of electronic noise. Eventually the sound changed, and I began to hear the dull rumbling of what I supposed were the miners’ drills at work deep beneath the surface of the earth. And then there it was. Faint at first, just as Nancy told me it would be. But it was so faint I wasn’t sure I actually heard anything. So I leaned in closer for a better listen, and then . . . it was over.

  I immediately hit “play” again, turned the volume all the way up, and put my ear as close to the speaker as the laws of physics would allow. I could definitely hear something that sounded vaguely like voices, and the vaguely sounding voices sounded vaguely like they were groaning in pain. But it might have also been the grinding of industrial gears or the groaning of workers after a long day of work. Looking back, I think it was probably the sound of people groaning in pain—which had been edited together with a bunch of white noise to create a hellish effect that would be embraced without question by suckers like me desperate for proof to shove in the face of evil atheists.

  Color-coded guide to the apocalypse

  That was the last call I placed to Jack Van Impe, but it wasn’t the last call placed on my behalf. My grandmother called the show sometime later, although I wouldn’t find out about it until that Christmas, when I opened up her present to me. It was a spectacular gift my mortal teenage eyes were far too unworthy to behold. And yet it was too mesmerizing to look away from even if I couldn’t believe it was really mine.

  It was the Jack Van Impe Prophecy Bible that I had been lusting after for months, ever since Chuck the announcer revealed its majesty at the end of a show earlier that year. I never thought I would be so lucky as to own something so magnificent. Bound in crimson leather, with pages gilded in 24-karat gold and words translated into the language of our Lord, King James English, the Jack Van Impe Prophecy Bible was my color-coded guide to the apocalypse. Literally. The verses were color coded to highlight and explain the various biblical prophecies hidden within the text. I was in love.

  But it was just the beginning of my love affair with all things apocalyptic. I quickly began snatching up the Left Behind novels too, reading them as fast as Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye could write them. For me and many, many others, the Left Behind books were like works of historical fiction, in that they were nothing more than a slightly fictionalized version of the dramatic and often terrifying events foretold in the book of Revelation. The events in the Left Behind series were real life—or would be soon enough; it was only the characters that were made up. I couldn’t get enough of them. Every trip to the mall meant a rush to the Christian bookstore to see if the next Left Behind book had come out yet. Any sales clerk who had the audacity to try to tell me they had no idea when the next book was coming out was obviously part of the Antichrist’s conspiracy to keep the faithful from knowing the truth.

  Then the unthinkable happened. Well, unthinkable to me, because it seemed too good to be true, and as I knew all too well, evil Hollywood was determined to keep the truth of Christianity out of the movie theaters and would never allow something as indisputably truthful as the Left Behind series to be made into a movie and thus proclaim the truth of the rapture to the world. But it happened! Not only did it happen, but the filmmakers got my childhood hero, Growing Pains star Kirk Cameron, to play the lead. I got my tickets the moment they went on sale and dragged my friends with me to the theater on opening night. It was everything I ever hoped it would be. Unquestionably on par with The Godfather—even though I had never seen The Godfather. Still, it was clear to me from the moment I stepped out of the theater that Left Behind would become an instant cinematic classic, destined for Oscar glory.

  But it wasn’t just end-times entertainment I was interested in. The end times were serious business. And not just at the box office. The fate of my soul was at stake. I had a mission: to figure out when Jesus was coming back and let as many people as possible know about it so they wouldn’t be left behind and I wouldn’t get raptured only to be sent down to hell when Jesus r
ealized I hadn’t tried to convert everyone I ever came into contact with.

  But first things first. Converts were important, but I had to get myself ready first. I had to make sure I wouldn’t be left behind either, and to do that I needed to turn my holiness up to 11.

  I was pretty good about saying my bedtime prayers, but I needed to buckle down if I was going to impress the big guy upstairs. I couldn’t afford to miss praying a single night, and I sure wasn’t going to be one of those lazy Christians who prayed while lying in bed instead of kneeling on the floor the way the Lord intended. But praying just at night wasn’t enough. Someone at church had once told me that prayer should be a way of life. With the rapture approaching, I needed to start taking that brilliant insight seriously. And by seriously I mean literally. If I was in the shower, I was praying. Shooting basketball in the backyard? Praying. Riding the bench during a game? Great chance to squeeze in some time with the man upstairs. Walking down the hallway at school? Praying for the salvation of my clearly sinful classmates.

  I was a weird kid.

  But I’m not finished.

  I wanted to make sure to get all the impurities out of my life. Remember: we’re talking about sinless perfection here. If I was going to be holy as God is holy, I couldn’t allow anything in my life to go unsanctified. My Bible? Started carrying it everywhere. When it began to fall apart, I duct-taped it back together—both as a practical measure and to show everyone around me how often I read it. Music? Again, only Christian music. That’s not an exaggeration. My first concert? Clay Crosse. Don’t know who that is? Of course you don’t. You had better taste in music than I did. Your first concert probably wasn’t in a church either. Mine was. What about my first non-church concert? DC Talk’s 1996 Jesus Freak tour.