One of the things I miss about the internet prior to 2016 is the half-second pause of reflection before popping off. The temptation to post quickly and be among the first to react was strong. But my intersectional identities as an ex-evangelical, nuanced leftist, therapist, and mother gave me pause.
“Left Behind” was a best-selling series of 16 fictional novels written between the years 1995-2007. There were also over 40 novellas written for a teenage audience, with teenage protagonists called “Left Behind: The Kids.” And yes, I read all of them before I graduated high school.
To say these books have shaped the way many evangelical Christians understand the complex (and not at all meant to be a future historical prediction) book of Revelation in the New Testament would be an understatement. It was a geopolitical series that provided evangelicals with “signs” to look for to anticipate the second coming of Jesus.
Without getting too deep into the theological weeds, evangelicals believe that an attack on Israel indicates how close we are to the end of the world. As a teenager, I was fascinated with the concept of “end times” and the rapture. The rapture is the concept derived from TWO verses in 1 Thessalonians, which purports that those who believe in Christ will be “caught up in the clouds” with him. Essentially, taken up to heaven and avoid death. It’s paining me to paint this concept with broad strokes because the details are truly engraved on my brain. As a teenager, I was mostly worried I’d be raptured before I had a chance to have sex.
As an adult, it is wild to think about how this eschatological view shaped most of my formative years. The day I heard about Hamas’ attack on the Israeli people, my had to work my way down from panic. My system flooded with adrenaline and cortisol, as my body remembered the implication of this announcement. I spent a lot of the day trying to regulate my system back to baseline, and reminding myself that I don’t believe in that concept anymore. That I’m safe, that my family is safe, and I don’t have to live in fear. This is an especially difficult position to hold in the social justice spaces I inhabit.
As a recovering evangelical, I have found doing the opposite of what I was taught growing up is helpful: holding space for the grieving and keeping my mouth shut. There is a benefit to waiting, to carefully understand before forming an opinion. In my deconstruction and then reconstruction, my friend who happens to also be my pastor, Jon Macdonald, has really helped me understand this nuanced space. My neurodivergent brain feels more regulated in a sure and certain space (it’s called black-and-white thinking, but I like to call it sure and certain to sound better). Jon is really good at pushing back on this, and way back, somewhere between 2017 and 2021 pointed out to me that reactionary politics didn’t do anything but drive people further from each other. The political left appeared to be taking a page from the political right, drawing lines in the sand and stating that if you didn’t believe these things, you don’t belong. I’ve observed this wave of feminism draw similar lines. The trouble with this discourse is that it can’t be managed online. The conversation is too nuanced and MUST be held in the community to have a back-and-forth. We also have to sit in front of a physical human person to confront their humanity and wrestle with it. We can’t use the anonymity of the internet to partition off the parts of them we don’t agree with or like. We must fight to humanize each other.
I am learning. I am open. I am trying to acknowledge where my privilege and power and influence show up, and listen.
If you’re ex-evangelical, struggling evangelical, or just interested in understanding the context of how other people raised evangelical are understanding world events, Jon’s sermons are a great place to turn. You can find them here. This one, on the Third Way is an excellent starting point.
Oh I had that SAME feeling about thinking I would get raptured before having sex. Remember thinking it would be really unfair for my parents to have had sex and not me! We saw Left Behind movie as a youth group outing and I looked at my leader and said the PASTOR is left behind? Revelation freaked me out a lot as a teenage Christian and I didn’t read beyond the first book but end times is definitely huge with evangelicals!