TikTok Rapture

“RaptureTok” has been trending over the past week, buzzing with talk of a Tim LaHaye-style Rapture coming this week on or around Rosh Hashanah.

It’s hard to tell how widespread this belief in an imminent imminent Rapture actually is, given that for every apparently sincere TikTok video posted by believers there seemed to be many more joking about it or spoofing the idea.

TikTok skews younger than other social media platforms/silos, but even people too young to remember Hal Lindsey have been through this before. This ain’t their first date-setting Rapture prediction and they realize it won’t be their last. They may remember John Hagee’s “blood moons,” and the Nick Cage Left Behind movie, and they’ve probably at least heard about poor Harold Camping and all the would-be “prophets” who piggy-backed on the Y2K bug. So it was both encouraging and amusing to see this claim of Rapture 2025 met mainly with skepticism.

But at least some of the videos trumpeting this belief seemed to be in earnest, with posters sincerely convinced and sincerely trying to convince others that The End Is Nigh with all the heartfelt concern of a young Larry Norman singing “I Wish We’d All Been Ready.”

I suppose the idea seems plausible to them because, like Larry back in the day, they’re looking around and seeing that life is filled with guns and wars, and everyone’s getting trampled on the floor, etc. Given America’s heel turn and everything else that’s going on in the world, a resurgence of premillennial pessimism isn’t surprising.

Some of those TikToks earned my begrudging respect for their approach to Rapture “prep.” One young woman was printing out sheets outlining the full Great Tribulation timeline of PMD “Bible prophecy” based on the Trumpets, Bowls, and Seals in the book of Revelation. She hoped this would help the unredeemed left behind to prepare to survive the coming seven years of judgment. All of this is based on an anti-literate, anti-biblical hodge-podge of nonsense, but it’s the same exact hodge-podge preached for decades by Tim LaHaye, and yet the characters in his own novels — the “Tribulation Force” of Bruce, Rayford, Buck, et. al. — never approached their own Tribulation “prep” with such clarity and responsibility.

This latest Rapture ¡Alarma! seems to have originated with a South African pastor named Joshua Mhlakela who claims to have received a vision from God in which he was whisked up to a heavenly throne room and informed about the coming Rapture by Jesus himself. OK, then. Mhlakela made this claim three months ago on the “Centtwinz” YouTube channel run by South African identical-twin influencers Innocent Sadiki and Millicent Mashile.

“Joshua Mhlakela’s predictions have sparked a flurry of conversation on social media platforms, particularly TikTok, with some users concerned and others opening mocking the prophecy,” Lori Comstock wrote in her report on all this for the Bergen Record.

The headline for that report reflects some of the struggle to convey what part of this is newsworthy news: “Is the ‘Rapture’ happening tomorrow? Pastor claims rapture, ‘end of world’ Sept 23.”

“Fringe preacher predicts end of world” is the epitome of a dog-bites-man situation — too mundane and common to be regarded as newsworthy. But it’s also a human-interest story that people will want to read just because some guy, doesn’t matter who or why, is saying the world is gonna end tomorrow and that’s just exactly the kind of story that people like to talk about whether or not it really counts as “news.” (“It sells papers,” people used to say, back when anybody used to buy papers.)

But a lot of people “believe” in Rapture folklore, and so despite this being mostly a quirky human-interest story, Comstock’s article also needs to respect that and to try to sort through, summarize, and contextualize those beliefs in a way that will both satisfy those believers and make this all understandable to people whose churches do not have annual “prophecy conferences” — all while maintaining the light-hearted tone of a human-interest story. I can’t say Comstock succeeds at all of that, but I can’t blame her for it either since this is basically an impossible task.

Kelsey McKinney “Defector’s resident ex-evangelical” has a bit more success in her irreverent explainer, “Why Is Everyone Talking About the Damn Rapture Again?” in which she even manages to explain what all “premillennial dispensationalism” means for a secular audience.

I’d supplement McKinney’s summary by just noting again that all of the biblical references cited by Rapture believers are really passages about death. The most famous/infamous of these being the Bible verse that gave the “Left Behind” series its title. That’s from Matthew 24:

As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark; and they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away. That is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. Two men will be in the field; one will be taken and the other left. Two women will be grinding with a hand mill; one will be taken and the other left.

Being “taken” there isn’t getting “raptured,” it’s getting swept away in the flood.

There are rather a lot of Bible verses that notice that death comes for everybody eventually, often quite suddenly. Part of the appeal of Rapture Christianity is that it turns that frown upside-down, taking all of those verses and inverting their meaning to reassure believers that everyone else dies — but not you! You are special! You are going to be snatched straight up into Heaven in the twinkling of an eye! (How that differs from anyone else who dies suddenly and never heard or felt the bullet still isn’t clear to me, but I suppose part of the appeal is that it allows every thought of death to be dismissed with a “There, there, there — don’t you worry about that, you’re going to be raptured instead!”)

Jason Kirk provided a bit of context to this latest Rapture panic by reminding us of his 2024 post, “The entire history of the Rapture.” Kirk’s main point there is that Rapture folklore is an extremely recent and parochial invention, and he does a good job explaining how this folklore spread and was popularized within white evangelicalism. Kirk’s background as someone raised in that subculture informs his “history,” but also limits it. He knows his Larry Norman and Hal Lindsey, but he leaves out things like The Omen, and perhaps misses a bit of how mainstream culture has — ever since William Miller was Greatly Disappointed — seized on Rapture folklore to tell popular stories that have, in turn, influenced and reshaped the “doctrines” taught by Rapture Christians. The screenplay for The Omen was based partly on Lindsey’s books, with storytelling enhancements and embellishments that were incorporated by later “Bible prophecy scholars” as part of what “everyone knows” about the Rapture and the Antichrist, etc. This is why Nicolae Carpathia has more in common with Damien Thorn than he does with Antiochus Epiphanes.

The fact that this week’s mini-mania for the Rapture comes from an otherwise unknown and obscure South African pastor is interesting. It underscores what we were discussing here last week via Yanan Rahim Navarez Melo, about how “global evangelicalism” is often just a colonial reflection of American white evangelicalism. Joshua Mhlakela is a Black South African pastor, but his religion is white evangelicalism.

More specifically, it is a form of charismatic/Pentecostal white evangelicalism. Which is why it’s especially interesting that this story is being covered by the Defector and the Bergen Record, but not by Charismanews. Pastor Mhlakela isn’t part of their network of prophets and apostles, so his prophecies and visions are not something they can monetize recognize.

The front page of Charismanews today is mostly about yesterday’s memorial service and fireworks show for a beloved apostle of the Great Replacement Theory, but it also finds room for three separate stories about the prophetic significance of Rosh Hashanah 2025, all of which are about Jonathan Cahn — CharisMAGA’s favorite “Messianic Rabbi.”

Cahn is warning Charismanews’s readers not to be deceived by talk of a Rosh Hashanah 2025 Rapture. He doesn’t seem to have heard about RaptureTok or Joshua Mhlakela’s visions (unless this stuff comes from deep into the hour-long video Mhlakela did with those uncanny influencers — I didn’t watch the whole thing). Instead, Cahn is responding to some other prophecy based on astronomy and astrology:

The speculation originates from people believing that Jesus revealed the date of the Rapture, and a celestial alignment tied to Revelation 12. This biblical passage describes “a woman clothed with the sun, the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of 12 stars,” giving birth to the Messiah while a dragon, representing Satan, attempts to devour her child.

Proponents of the Sept. 23 Rapture theory focus on a supposed astronomical event: the constellation Virgo near Leo, with the sun, moon and Jupiter aligning to signify the birth of the Messiah. This alignment previously occurred in 2017. Because the Feast of Trumpets falls on the same date in 2025, some suggest it signals the Rapture.

Cahn issued his own prophecy to condemn this prophecy, warning that seeking signs in the heavens from constellations is “Pagan” thinking, as contrasted with his own seeking signs in the heavens from lunar eclipses.

He also warns that Christians mustn’t allow such false prophecies to distract them from the true, biblical meaning of September 23, which is that God has told him we must all fully support Bibi Netanyahu no matter what.

I was going to read the other two Jonathan Cahn pieces on Rosh Hashanah, but I got distracted there on the front page of Charismanews by this other story from prophet, apostle, and longtime UFO researcher LA Marzulli about “Mars, Underwater UFOs, and Giants.”

Marzulli chastises Rep. Tim Burchett, Republican of Tennessee, for his amazement at the alien underwater craft Burchett claims are being sighted all over the world. Well, duh, Marzulli says, that’s just “gravity wave propulsion,” which the undersea aliens use to bend space and time as we know it. In Marzulli’s eyes, it’s just embarrassing that a sitting member of Congress wouldn’t know something as basic as that.

Marzulli tied the phenomenon to his own research into historical anomalies, including his work on Catalina Island. “We found the Ralph Glidden photo. It shows a giant, at least nine feet tall, that was unearthed on Catalina in the 1920s,” he recalled. For him, discoveries like this connect modern sightings to ancient entities.

Just so you have some context here for the thoughtfulness and biblical fidelity of our friends at Charisma. (And don’t Google Ralph Glidden unless you have a lot of time to waste.)

The genius of Marzulli’s Catalina Giants scam is the Catalina part. Sure, you can fleece the rubes by telling them that you’ve found evidence of “the real Noah’s ark,” but then at some point you’re going to have to travel to Mount Ararat in Erdogan’s Turkey. Ugh.

So much better to tell them you’ve found evidence of Nephilim in the Channel Islands and get them to fund another six weeks of “research” in Catalina, where the weather is always spectacular and you don’t even need a passport.

Anyway, the point here is that “the Rapture” will not be happening tomorrow because “the Rapture” is not actually a thing and thus will not ever be happening.

And but also, to those who celebrate the occasion, Happy New Year.