Truth be told, this topic is well outside my areas of expertise\u2013I agreed to develop the course with my colleague because I thought it would be fun to teach with him again. In addition, I do have some experience with apocalyptic thinking\u2013I was raised in it.<\/p>\n
A new HBO miniseries called \u201cThe Leftovers\u201d began a few years ago. T Where did people get such a ridiculous idea from? The textual evidence in the Bible, surprisingly, is relatively thin and mixed at best. There are a few cryptic comments in the Gospels, a few more hints in Paul\u2019s letters, but the bulk of the relevant material is in the Bible-closing Book of Revelation and the Book of Daniel from the Hebrew scriptures (as read through Christian filters), material containing predictions so cryptic and visions so strange as to suggest that the authors were on hallucinogenics. But that didn\u2019t stop my church community from being sure as hell (!) that we were in and just about everyone else (including Catholics, Universalists, and tons of other people who claimed to be Christians) was out. There was plenty of debate about the details. We believed that the Rapture would be the official kick-off of the Tribulation (we were \u201cPre-Trib\u201d people), but some Rapture believers thought it would happen half-way through the Tribulation (\u201cMid-Trib\u201d) and some even thought it would happen at the end, just before the Final Judgment (\u201cPost-Trib\u201d\u2014I never saw the point of a Post-Trib Rapture). Pastors preached on it, Bible scholars and experts gave week-long conferences piggy-backed on revivals (my Dad was one of these experts), Interestingly, some of the loudest voices making this argument belonged to Christians themselves, who couldn\u2019t help noticing that many of the people who\u2019d disappeared on October 14th<\/sup>\u2014Hindus and Buddhists and Muslims and Jews and atheists and animists and homosexuals and Eskimos and Mormons<\/a> and Zoroastrians, whatever the heck they were\u2014hadn\u2019t accepted Jesus Christ as their personal savior. My church would have been at the forefront of those who denied that this was the Rapture on theological grounds. It would be understandable if not everyone in our congregation was raptured\u2014not everyone was a good enough Christian. Those in the inner circle would have even been happy to predict who was not sufficiently up to snuff. But non-Christians? Atheists? Catholics, for God\u2019s sake? Underlying Rapture obsession and mania is the very familiar human attempt to put God in a box, to figure out ahead of time what God is up to, what God is like, and what God likes best\u2014then to act accordingly. A rapture such as fictionalized in The Leftovers<\/em> is such an affront to our best efforts at putting the divine in a straitjacket that it has to be rejected as something other than the real thing. ![\"Lindelof-The-Leftovers-HBO\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/766\/2014\/07\/Lindelof-The-Leftovers-HBO.jpg\")
<\/a>his is the sort of series that I usually have no interest in\u2014something weird has happened (like a huge invisible dome randomly dropping on top of a town) and the entertainment of the series is to see how people deal with the new situation. As my father would have said, it\u2019s fun to observe a cow\u2019s reaction to a new barn door. Shows with such premises are generally too Stephen King-ish for my taste. But the idea kernel behind \u201cThe Leftovers\u201d is different.![\"video-the-leftovers-trailer-shows-us-what-the-rapture-looks-like\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/766\/2014\/07\/video-the-leftovers-trailer-shows-us-what-the-rapture-looks-like.png\")
<\/a> On a seemingly unimportant day, October 14th<\/sup> to be exact, millions\u00a0of people worldwide inexplicably disappear into thin air. Here one moment, gone the next. The first episode of \u201cThe Leftovers\u201d drops us three years later into a small Pennsylvania community as they prepare for a third year anniversary celebration (wake? remembrance?) of the dozens of friends and family members who evaporated on October 14. So what makes this bizarre premise any more interesting than a giant dome falling out of the sky? This one hits close to home, because in the parlance of the people I grew up with, the October 14 event that is at the heart of this show is the Rapture.<\/p>\n<\/a>I don\u2019t know if \u201cRapture Obsession\u201d is an official medical diagnosis, but whether it is or not my family, my church, and just about everyone I knew growing up had it. In spades. The basic idea is simple\u2014Jesus is coming back. And when he does, he\u2019s going to take those who believe in him, who have \u201caccepted Christ as their personal savior,\u201d with him back to heaven (the Rapture) and leave the billions of unraptured losers here on earth for a seven-year period known as the Tribulation during which, literally, all hell will break loose. Armageddon. The Antichrist. The Apocalypse. All of these are triggered by the massive in-gathering of the faithful. At least in my youthful understanding, the primary reason to put up with all of the restrictions, limitations, and general annoyance of being a Christian was to guarantee that one is going and not staying when the Rapture occurs. Not that there was any solid guarantee that I was \u201cin\u201d rather than \u201cout.\u201d I spent many panicked moments as a youngster when my mother wasn\u2019t where I expected her to be thinking that the Rapture had occurred and I was screwed.<\/p>\n<\/a>There\u2019s enough there to draw one\u2019s attention if one is so inclined, but not enough for anyone to be sure about what the texts actually mean.<\/p>\n<\/a>and we all went into a tizzy when in 1970 evangelical minister Hal Lindsey\u2019s The Late Great Planet Earth<\/em>, called \u201cthe number one non-fiction bestseller of the decade\u201d by the New York Times, exploded on the scene. And this is not a dated phenomenon. Hal Lindsey\u20191972 bestselling sequel had the eye-catching title Satan is Alive and Well on Planet Earth<\/em>; a brief Internet search or a Sunday road trip to the closest megachurch will confirm that Rapture mania is also alive and well on planet Earth. \u201cThe Leftovers\u201d is likely to be a big hit.<\/p>\n<\/a>I first became aware of the series when Tom Perotta, whose novel the series is based on, made the rounds of my favorite NPR shows the week before its debut. In one of the interviews, Perotta said that part of his research for the book was living as an embedded person in a fundamentalist, evangelical Christian community and church for a certain amount of time, sort of like how the Soviet spies in \u201cThe Americans\u201d live embedded in Maryland as a typical middle-class 1980s American couple. Assuming that, as always, the book would be better than the television series (it is), I ordered The Leftovers<\/em>, published in 2011, from Amazon. It is clear from the outset that Perotta had done his homework well; on page 3 of the novel\u2019s Prologue, the narrator describes that, as one might expect, there is a great deal of confusion and debate about \u201cwhat just happened\u201d in the weeks following October 14th<\/sup>\u2014was it the Rapture or not? Many argued that it couldn\u2019t have been.<\/p>\n<\/a>As far as anyone could tell, it was a random harvest, and the one thing the Rapture couldn\u2019t be was random. The whole point was to separate the wheat from the chaff, to reward the true believers and put the rest of the world on notice. An indiscriminate Rapture was no Rapture at all.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/a>Maybe God threw this pseudo-rapture into the mix early just to test our faith, I can hear someone suggesting, sort of like God planted dinosaur fossils and made the earth appear to be several billion years old rather than the few thousand that the Bible says, just to fuck us up (for a good reason, of course).<\/p>\n