My upbringing was rooted in a strict evangelical tradition (Missionary Baptist), one where the "old ways" were the only way. My father was a blue collar preacher, a minister who quietly served while following the prescribed path with unquestioning diligence. Most of my extended family—grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins—were also deeply involved in the same fundamentalist religious culture. My family had flaws, but overall they were loving, nurturing people. Their particular framework of belief, however, was all they knew, all they wanted to know, and to them anything outside of it was simply wrong. They were wholeheartedly convinced of this, including the end times prophecy you address here.
Naturally, that was the perspective I absorbed growing up. For a long time it was all I knew. Yet from an early age I carried an unarticulated, little understood discomfort with those core ideas, a discomfort that only grew stronger as my world gradually broadened. I spent my early adulthood struggling to reconcile those beliefs with what I felt deep inside. Although it did not happen overnight, by my late thirties—unable to embrace that worldview any longer—I walked away from nearly everything I had been taught. In its place, I found a way of understanding life that made complete sense to me. It was not something entirely new, but something I had sensed all along without being able to fully articulate, because it was fundamentally different from anything I had been given language for. Now at age 70 I look back with a measure of amusement and satisfaction at my experience. Your articles provide the studied evidence of the inconsistenties I had sensed early on.
Thank you for sharing this. It's the kind of comment that makes the work feel worth doing.
For a long time I was angry at my parents about how they raised me: what they did, what they didn't. But hearing stories like yours, I've come to appreciate the biggest gift they gave me. They never discussed religion with me. They never told me to believe or disbelieve in God. The one thing they made sure I understood was that they were fundamentally against people displaying religious belief in public to exploit others.
That's why I say I have no axe to grind with Christianity or any other religion. I can write about it without much personal emotion in the way, which I think makes for better history. I'm glad it resonates with you.
I appreciate the lack of any overt anger in your writing — which is one reason I continue to read it. I do, however, notice a certain hostility in the comments of some of your readers. I understand it, but at this stage of life I've come to see how fruitless it is.
With a somewhat clearer view of things, it becomes easier to recognize that religion — and its peculiar machinery of myth, institution, and carefully curated history — has a genuine role to play in the long arc of human development, and need not be cast as the enemy. It exploits, yes, and it has rewritten its own story more than once to consolidate that exploitation. But so do countless other institutions and industries. Insurance companies exploit the fear of loss at every turn. Pharmaceutical advertising floods its audience with unreasoned anxiety dressed as reassurance. Pest control sells dread of the ordinary. Automobile manufacturers exploit fears of inadequate masculinity, sophistication, or freedom — all while delivering their audience into a particular kind of bondage. Do we even need to list politics? Religion is not, in that company, especially remarkable. It is perhaps simply more practiced at it.
The difference, I suppose, is that religion at its best is reaching — however imperfectly, however self-servingly at times — toward something real. The others are mostly just reaching into your pocket.
Of course. If you think about it, one of capitalism's fundamentals is manipulating customers into buying things using every psychological trick in the book, which we also call marketing. They'll even sell us the same product at two different prices because one's packaging looks expensive to human nature and the other's doesn't.
As for the angry comments, they bother me less than they seem to bother other people. When someone attacks my personality and my writing without pointing to a single verifiable error in the piece, I can see straight through what's happening long before I can take things personally and get upset.
The Book of Enoch (dropped by the Catholic Church, maintained by the Ethiopian Church) is relevant because it has a timeline explaining the entire 7,000 years of the existence of this heaven and earth. It gets anchored in history with the Babylonian Captivity. According to the timeline, the Millennium started in 1187 CE, and thus Judgement Day is 2287 CE. Thus the Tribulation (which Enoch doesn't mention) already happened. And there was no Rapture.
Interestingly, after Enoch got dropped from the Canon that became the Bible, Revelation got added. And it's Revelation that talks about the Tribulation. Also, before being accepted by the Catholic Church, Revelation was maintained by heretics, and the Catholics carefully checked the text for heresy before adopting it.
Thank you for sharing this fascinating historical and theological breakdown! The unique preservation of Enoch within the Ethiopian Orthodox Tradition and its articulation of apocalyptic timelines alongside the adoption history of Revelation are endlessly intriguing topics. Appreciate you bringing this perspective to the conversation!
It was all a fraud. You’re a little charitable with Schofield, I think. He was a first degree charlatan. It’s likely that his second wife and daughter cobbled together many of the notes. It’s all been a power and money scam since then.
Thanks for adding this! The Scofield family definitely deserves its own piece. There's just way too much to unpack there. Appreciate you sharing this angle!
Glossolalia is a good candidate for a future piece. The interesting part is that modern Pentecostal tongues is even younger than the rapture: Charles Parham's students in Topeka in 1901, then Azusa Street in 1906. So the two doctrines that feel most ancient to American evangelicals are both younger than the Civil War. Thanks for reading.
Glossolalia is speaking in tongues, while echolalia is repeating someone else’s speech, gibberish or not. I could’ve just said speaking in tongues. My apologies for that.
I'm happy to see more and more people speak out against the Pre-Tribulation rapture. My husband's stance is that the rapture will happen right before the wrath of God. Here's the first part of a 5 part presentation he's posting on YouTube if you'd like to check it out: https://youtu.be/_qTOM4bm_-k?is=s7Q-0PfDA4y-gF6T
Even when I was a devout Anglican, for the life of me, I couldn't bring myself to read Revelations. Whenever I listened to sermons & heard conversations about the end-times, that part of the doctrine scared me as a kid but afterwards, it just never sank deep in my mind
And now that I think about it, my only knowledge of the rapture came from an episode of American Dad, watching a Christian film & maybe a brief memory of watching a Left Behind film. I also vaguely remember seeing a chart showing the dispensations which makes me cringe just thinking about it now
My upbringing was rooted in a strict evangelical tradition (Missionary Baptist), one where the "old ways" were the only way. My father was a blue collar preacher, a minister who quietly served while following the prescribed path with unquestioning diligence. Most of my extended family—grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins—were also deeply involved in the same fundamentalist religious culture. My family had flaws, but overall they were loving, nurturing people. Their particular framework of belief, however, was all they knew, all they wanted to know, and to them anything outside of it was simply wrong. They were wholeheartedly convinced of this, including the end times prophecy you address here.
Naturally, that was the perspective I absorbed growing up. For a long time it was all I knew. Yet from an early age I carried an unarticulated, little understood discomfort with those core ideas, a discomfort that only grew stronger as my world gradually broadened. I spent my early adulthood struggling to reconcile those beliefs with what I felt deep inside. Although it did not happen overnight, by my late thirties—unable to embrace that worldview any longer—I walked away from nearly everything I had been taught. In its place, I found a way of understanding life that made complete sense to me. It was not something entirely new, but something I had sensed all along without being able to fully articulate, because it was fundamentally different from anything I had been given language for. Now at age 70 I look back with a measure of amusement and satisfaction at my experience. Your articles provide the studied evidence of the inconsistenties I had sensed early on.
Thank you for sharing this. It's the kind of comment that makes the work feel worth doing.
For a long time I was angry at my parents about how they raised me: what they did, what they didn't. But hearing stories like yours, I've come to appreciate the biggest gift they gave me. They never discussed religion with me. They never told me to believe or disbelieve in God. The one thing they made sure I understood was that they were fundamentally against people displaying religious belief in public to exploit others.
That's why I say I have no axe to grind with Christianity or any other religion. I can write about it without much personal emotion in the way, which I think makes for better history. I'm glad it resonates with you.
I appreciate the lack of any overt anger in your writing — which is one reason I continue to read it. I do, however, notice a certain hostility in the comments of some of your readers. I understand it, but at this stage of life I've come to see how fruitless it is.
With a somewhat clearer view of things, it becomes easier to recognize that religion — and its peculiar machinery of myth, institution, and carefully curated history — has a genuine role to play in the long arc of human development, and need not be cast as the enemy. It exploits, yes, and it has rewritten its own story more than once to consolidate that exploitation. But so do countless other institutions and industries. Insurance companies exploit the fear of loss at every turn. Pharmaceutical advertising floods its audience with unreasoned anxiety dressed as reassurance. Pest control sells dread of the ordinary. Automobile manufacturers exploit fears of inadequate masculinity, sophistication, or freedom — all while delivering their audience into a particular kind of bondage. Do we even need to list politics? Religion is not, in that company, especially remarkable. It is perhaps simply more practiced at it.
The difference, I suppose, is that religion at its best is reaching — however imperfectly, however self-servingly at times — toward something real. The others are mostly just reaching into your pocket.
Of course. If you think about it, one of capitalism's fundamentals is manipulating customers into buying things using every psychological trick in the book, which we also call marketing. They'll even sell us the same product at two different prices because one's packaging looks expensive to human nature and the other's doesn't.
As for the angry comments, they bother me less than they seem to bother other people. When someone attacks my personality and my writing without pointing to a single verifiable error in the piece, I can see straight through what's happening long before I can take things personally and get upset.
The Book of Enoch (dropped by the Catholic Church, maintained by the Ethiopian Church) is relevant because it has a timeline explaining the entire 7,000 years of the existence of this heaven and earth. It gets anchored in history with the Babylonian Captivity. According to the timeline, the Millennium started in 1187 CE, and thus Judgement Day is 2287 CE. Thus the Tribulation (which Enoch doesn't mention) already happened. And there was no Rapture.
Interestingly, after Enoch got dropped from the Canon that became the Bible, Revelation got added. And it's Revelation that talks about the Tribulation. Also, before being accepted by the Catholic Church, Revelation was maintained by heretics, and the Catholics carefully checked the text for heresy before adopting it.
Thank you for sharing this fascinating historical and theological breakdown! The unique preservation of Enoch within the Ethiopian Orthodox Tradition and its articulation of apocalyptic timelines alongside the adoption history of Revelation are endlessly intriguing topics. Appreciate you bringing this perspective to the conversation!
It was all a fraud. You’re a little charitable with Schofield, I think. He was a first degree charlatan. It’s likely that his second wife and daughter cobbled together many of the notes. It’s all been a power and money scam since then.
Thanks for adding this! The Scofield family definitely deserves its own piece. There's just way too much to unpack there. Appreciate you sharing this angle!
Yup, all BS.
Ever see video of the charlatan tv preachers “speaking in tongues”? More nonsense!
Glossolalia is a good candidate for a future piece. The interesting part is that modern Pentecostal tongues is even younger than the rapture: Charles Parham's students in Topeka in 1901, then Azusa Street in 1906. So the two doctrines that feel most ancient to American evangelicals are both younger than the Civil War. Thanks for reading.
I had never heard the term Glossolalia, but I am familiar with Echolalia.
Glossolalia is speaking in tongues, while echolalia is repeating someone else’s speech, gibberish or not. I could’ve just said speaking in tongues. My apologies for that.
No apologies needed. The meaning was obvious.
I'm happy to see more and more people speak out against the Pre-Tribulation rapture. My husband's stance is that the rapture will happen right before the wrath of God. Here's the first part of a 5 part presentation he's posting on YouTube if you'd like to check it out: https://youtu.be/_qTOM4bm_-k?is=s7Q-0PfDA4y-gF6T
Even when I was a devout Anglican, for the life of me, I couldn't bring myself to read Revelations. Whenever I listened to sermons & heard conversations about the end-times, that part of the doctrine scared me as a kid but afterwards, it just never sank deep in my mind
And now that I think about it, my only knowledge of the rapture came from an episode of American Dad, watching a Christian film & maybe a brief memory of watching a Left Behind film. I also vaguely remember seeing a chart showing the dispensations which makes me cringe just thinking about it now
Anyway, great article