Jesus is Not Coming Back
There is no rescue for evangelical angst
When I was 15 I hoped I would be allowed to live at least to see my 20th birthday. It was the mid-1970s and Jesus was well on his way down from heaven to destroy the world and massacre everyone who had offended god. That included me.
My family was not devout. I doubt any of us were even believers. We attended a liberal main-line church only because church was mandatory in the South. Our church never mentioned “end times,” a “rapture” or Jesus’ imminent return. But still I knew it was true. All of us in my high school just assumed it was about to happen. Because it was in the air. Hal Lindsey said so. Our teachers said so. Everybody else’s pastors said so. Bumper stickers everywhere proclaimed that “Jesus is coming back and boy is he pissed!”
What was he so pissed about? — Women. Roe vs Wade. Women’s liberation. Women marching in protests without bras. Women going to parties with men, rock music, and beer. Rock stars dressing up like women. Women living with men “without benefit of marriage.” And girls like us wearing skirts above the knee and riding around in cars with boys.
Yet despite this dire prediction about the fate of our planet, the world just kept marching on. My high school offered its first home economics class for boys, and a shop class for girls. We kept wearing short skirts and kissing boys in the halls.
When it came to prophecies of doom, the world seemed to be following a different script.
The Hot Breath of Apocalypse
This is a dark time for evangelicals, and especially so for the white evangelical Right. It’s easy to see why they feel the hot breath of the apocalypse on the back of their necks. For while the rest of the world is advancing and expanding, sometimes at the pace of the universe itself, theirs is crumbling and contracting.
Their own kids are abandoning them in droves. Many more churches close than open. Their own gospel luminaries have started to follow suit, one after another announcing their abandonment of the faith. Deconversion has become an entire non-fiction genre. Sex abuse and pedophile scandals have rocked them across the spectrum. Many of their own women are in open revolt, with Beth Moore and others leading the charge. The Covid-19 pandemic shuttered many churches and the issue of in-person meeting split many others. Schism has shattered them into warring camps as the new evangelical Left, home churches, and prosperity gospel mega-stars rob the faithful from its orthodox core.
A Desperate Mission
It’s no mystery why the white evangelical Right is so desperate for Jesus to come back and save them. Apocalypse is already consuming them. They need Jesus and they need him soon.
But according to one widely held eschatology, the world is not quite ready for the savior’s return. Several final steps are incomplete. And instead of waiting for the world to comply with prophecy, many churches and believers have undertaken to finish these steps themselves. It’s a tall order.
First they must fully reconstitute Israel— which apparently means removing the Palestinians from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. They must also rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem. Only then will the stage be set for the grand drama to play out, complete with an Antichrist, a mark of the beast, a rapture, a final battle of the nations in the valley of Armageddon, and Jesus’ triumphant return. But will America be ready?
Not as it is. For we have abandoned the white Christian patriarchy upon which we were founded. The list of the ways we have turned away from god and fallen into Satan’s clutches are too many to name. Our sins are so great our nation may even end up fighting on the side of the Antichrist.
So they must overthrow our diverse, multi-cultural democracy to re-establish the rule of white Christian men. If America is to be worthy to greet Jesus and receive his blessing instead of his curse, They must return us to our white Christian roots.
By any means necessary.
It all seemed impossible until god sent them a leader in the cause — Donald Trump. This was god answering their prayers. This was proof that all the calamity around the world, and theirs especially, was truly the birth pangs of the apocalypse. Donald Trump was anointed by god to prepare Israel and save America for Jesus’ glorious return.
And it was working. Until it wasn’t. We all know how that turned out.
Ready or Not
I remember the last time the “birth pangs” started. It was the late 1970s and I was a new born-again evangelical in my first year of college. The world was turning upside down, which was evidence of these pangs. Our task back then had nothing to do, however, with Israel or overthrowing our democracy. It was instead to evangelize every soul in the U.S. by 1980, and every soul in the world by 2000. Because Jesus would not return until every ear on Earth to hear the gospel message before his return (Matthew 24:14)
We were trying to clear the way for his return too.
We were soldiers on a holy mission, entrusted with special knowledge about the future and the fate of all humanity. I felt like a secret agent dispatched from heaven to bring about the promise of creation itself.
But there was a dark side. Jesus was impatient to get here. And he was still pissed — this time at us. Because we were slacking off on the job. Our faith was so weak that we were not sharing the living waters of the gospel message to the thirsty world. We were failing both Jesus and the world. All those people who might have been saved, would instead be sent to hell because we had not told them about Jesus' love.
Our struggle was to not let Jesus find us tarrying about upon his return, but to find us toiling dutifully in his soul fields, still planting seeds. He was coming to judge us more than to save us.
Soon the world would be ready, but would we?
Apocalypse All the time
With a lot more years under my belt, it’s clear to me that Jesus was not planning to revisit us then, and he’s not planning it now. A mere glance at history reveals the absurdity of this notion. For chaos and signs of doom are nothing more than business as usual for planet Earth. Jesus did not return when the Black Plague decimated the West. He did not return when war spread over the whole world and the Nazis executed six million Jews. The birth pangs were likewise hollow in the Civil War. None of these, it turns out, were birth pangs of Jesus’ return.
Any study of history reveals that apocalypses happen all the time. Nations, cultures, empires, gods, and religions rise, wax, wane, evolve, and crash or fade away. It’s only our own narcissistic myopia that fancies our country, our culture, and our gods as the center of all history and creation. We can prophesy the end of this world all we want, but the world follows a different script.
It just keeps moving on.
The Real Revelation
We can, however, understand a bit more about the true meaning of apocalypse. The original Greek defines the word as a form of the verb meaning to disclose, reveal, or uncover something previously hidden. In this sense, apocalypse may indeed be the word to describe what is happening.
Something is being revealed, and it’s the true heart of the evangelical Right.
For when examined without the religious lens, a community is revealed that is trying to bring its god down to slaughter billions of men, women, children, and babies — born and unborn, who happen to not be one of them. Then their god will imprison us all in eternal torment for the same sin.
These are the devotees to the Left Behind series. They find the vision of divine vengeance against us inspiring. Jesus will indeed come back, and boy will he be pissed. They will be proven right, we will all be proven wrong, and boy will we be sorry.
This is the dark side of the shining ‘New Heaven and New Earth” — a slaughter on a scale that would make Hitler and Stalin look like amateurs.
While those of us on the outside can plainly see the shape of this beast, those inside its bubble are blinded by their god-glasses. It’s a good thing because god. It’s cosmic justice because god. We all deserve it because god. When their god does it, slaughter, genocide and torture are a universal good.
But what if Jesus’ much longed-for return turned out not to involve us at all? What if instead it was nothing more than a mirror — a clear-eyed, unwavering reflection directly into the soul of the faithful?
We can dream.
Counted Out
I am no longer special. I am no longer chosen. I have no cosmic role in the fate of the world. I have no special knowledge about the future of mankind. I am not a soldier in any god’s army, and expect no god to rescue me from an apocalyptic catastrophe in my corner of the Earth. I am no longer responsible for the fate of anyone else’s eternal soul.
Count me out.
All I can do is try to survive and bring as much good into the world as I am able. And I am so much happier this way.
I would recommend it to anyone.
