The “Rapture” is racist
An Evangelical idea is a hit of pure white supremacy
The world is ending—soon! Jesus will appear in the sky to take his favorites to Heaven! Evangelical America says: You better convert, so you’ll be “Raptured.”
As a kid in church I heard it all the time: the Rapture will be happening…soon. You’ll be lifted up into the sky in an instant. Later, I learned that the Rapture isn’t taught in any other Christianity.
I wondered: where did it come from?
I went looking up facts about the Rapture’s origins.
There wasn’t much. The Rapture was introduced to the public in Hal Lindsey’s 1970 book The Late Great Planet Earth. He had nothing.
I checked Things to Come by J. Dwight Pentecost, the ‘classic’ 1958 study of biblical prophesy. Nothing there either.
Isn’t the Rapture just in the Bible? That’s what Evangelicals might say — and point to the single verse thought to express it: 1 Thessalonians 4:17. The apostle Paul seems to be speaking of a future event:
“…we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air.”
But is it really so clear?
The Bible often uses terms like “the clouds” or “the air,” but these wouldn’t seem to be references to the earth’s atmosphere. In Ephesians 2:2, Paul says that Satan is “the ruler of the kingdom of the air.”
One might have to ask: Are we breathing in Satan?
Even Evangelical scholars lecture on the problems with finding the Rapture in 1 Thessalonians 4:17. “There’s so much ambiguity here, and so much that is presupposition-driven,” sighs Michael Heiser.
The history of the Rapture seems to trace to Scotland in 1830.
As I follow sources and clues, I’m back in Port Glasgow with a 15-year-old girl named Margaret MacDonald. She was getting famous for ‘prophetic trances’, spoken as if divinely inspired. A transcript reads today as biblical gibberish, and 1 Thessalonians 4:17 was in there:
“’Tis Christ in us that will lift us up — he is the light — ’tis only those that are alive in him that will be caught up to meet him in the air.”
This wasn’t ‘the Rapture’, but it was on its way. One of Margaret MacDonald’s performances had a horrified viewer in a young John Nelson Darby, a dissident Anglican cleric.
At first, Darby dismissed as “absurd” any concept of a Rapture. But he kept thinking about it, and after a few years was sure that Jesus would be returning — very soon! — to take to Heaven the very few true Christians left on earth. He never credited his source.
Darby was founding his own Christianity, called Plymouth Brethren.
The Rapture became their key idea. Human history was winding down, they taught, and Jesus would be coming for the last faithful few.
Darby was a strange man. Never marrying, he was, as the historian Donald Akenson describes him, a “driven, ice-coldly charismatic personality,” always “deeply secretive about his own personal life…”
As I examined the sources, I didn’t see that Darby viewed masses of American Evangelicals as ‘saved’ and ready to be ‘Raptured’. He saw all reuglar Christianities as a total failure. I wrote to Donald Akenson, who kindly replied, saying he thinks I’m on the right track, and he’d just released a book that goes over the vague sources.
As he notes in The Americanization of the Apocalypse, it doesn’t seem Darby had in mind that masses of Americans would adopt the Rapture, and include themselves in it.
The “Rapture” as an Evangelical concept was devised by an ex-Confederate soldier.
After he’d fought for Tennessee in the Civil War, Cyrus Scofield went along to St. Louis. A man with reportedly great sex appeal and personal charm, he’d become a notorious con artist, divorcee and alcoholic.
A biographer of Scofield suspects that he met Darby, perhaps in 1877, when Darby was in America. Scofield was fascinated. After a stint in jail, he’d decided his next mark was Christianity. He took to calling himself a Bible scholar. He was Dr. Scofield, though he’d never spent a day in college.
He began to put together references to address the burning Christian issue of the day: How could the South have possibly lost the Civil War?
They saw themselves as Jesus’ favorites.
They’d read the Bible to say that everything about them was privileged, elect.
God said—in their view—that Africans were “cursed” to be slaves. In the “Chrisian” narrative they’d created, they were living the divine life.
But now, many were saying that the South had acted wrongly in regard to their slaves—and they were all forced to live among each other.
A Christian analysis wouldn’t see this as the grounds of the Rapture. I found the idea in a 2016 scholarly paper, “The Racial Ideology of Rapture,” by Nathaniel P. Grimes. As he notes:
“The rise of rapture theology in America occurred after the Civil War and can be understood as resulting from major cultural crises related to the war itself.”
Scofield went to work on theology of reclusion.
His working assumptions seem to have been deeply racist. Canfield’s biography has notes for a speech Scofield gave in 1904 to Confederate veterans. It included the line:
“right superior race to bear white man’s burden of an inferior race in its own way.”
Scofield re-affirmed the “Curse of Ham” and offered the South a way forward. They could not control the government, and they were defeated—but he explained why. The world, he said, will soon be over.
Scofield adapted Darby’s ideas of “dispensations,” or phases of history, to explain that the story of humanity on earth is reaching its final scenes. God is tiring of this evil world, and will be moving against it.
But before it gets too bad, But the Rapture will happen and the true Christians, implicitly all white, will be lifted into the skies—as the rest of the world burns.
The true Christians will then live, as Nathaniel P. Grimes notes, in “a heaven untouched by Reconstruction.”
Scofield published his famous “Reference Bible.”
Selling many millions of copies, this footnoted Bible became, essentially, the founding sacred text of modern Evangelical Christianity. One book became everything one needed to “understand” the Bible.
It had his racism in it. In a note for Genesis 9:25, Scofield included the old “curse of Ham” idea that Africans were destined by God to be slaves. It was coded, as Scofield had Noah’s son Ham giving birth to “an inferior and servile posterity”—without saying who that was. His readers knew.
In his note for 1 Thessalonians 4:17, Scofield emphasizes the Rapture as the “blessed hope” toward which the whole story of history moves.
They are perched on the edge of history! The apocalypse is nigh.
So no need not participate in all this “Reconstruction” stuff—or make any efforts to work toward a world of racial equality.
All they had to do was be ‘saved’ — and wait!
The religious brand became ‘fundamentalists’, as they now reassured themselves they alone kept to the accurate, ‘fundamental’ beliefs. They kept to their own churches, kept rigorously segregated by race.
Fundamentalists were famously averse to politics. As Edward J. Blum writes in the 2015 study, Reforging the White Republic:
“…this general abandonment of politics had a specific meaning. It invariably meant a rejection of radical Reconstruction and its emphasis on black civil rights and civic nationalism.”
The Rapture was taught in all Evangelical channels.
It was the key teaching of Dallas Theological Seminary, the training ground of Evangelical pastors, founded by Scofield’s disciple, Lewis Sperry Chafer. He was as much of a fake scholar and even more of a racist.
Year after year, the Rapture became the Evangelical calling card. You better get converted! It’s about to happen. In 1950, the evangelist Billy Graham was thundering: “Two years and it’s all going to be over.”
In 1995, he updated: “When will the end be? We don’t know.… But every indication is that it will be sooner than we think.”
Hal Lindsey, likewise, gave shifting dates for the Rapture he kept saying would happen—while he dropped the profits from his books into long-term real-estate investments.
But all the religion cared about was the good news: The world is evil. You’re the special ones. Jesus will be coming for you! All you have to do is wait. 🔶
