.jpeg)
When Kelly Chashchin was between the ages of 8 and 10, she lay awake nearly every single night in deep fear about the rapture.
“I wouldn't sleep for days at a time because I'd be so scared that I was going to miss the rapture,” she tells Teen Vogue, estimating that she got only two or three hours of sleep per night during that time. “I grew up in a church where I was told that I was inherently sinful from the moment that I was born, [so] there was always that idea like, 'I'm not going to make the cut and my family's going to get taken and I'm going to be left behind as a child and have to figure out … navigating the world without a care system.”
Now 28, Chashchin left her evangelical Southern Baptist church last year and has been deconstructing her faith ever since. She did it just in time for the latest rapture scare, one that's going viral on TikTok. But the rapture was supposed to happen on September 23 — a day that's now come and gone. For ex-Evangelicals and other deconstructing Christians like Chashchin, this doomsday rollercoaster is nothing new. They know what happens the day after the rapture that never comes.
#RaptureTok quickly picked up speed over the last few weeks, with many Christian TikTokers showing how they're preparing themselves and their families for the big event. Rapture is the belief that Jesus will return to earth to save devoted followers, ascending them into heaven. According to the Rev. Lizzie McManus-Dail, Vicar of Jubilee Episcopal Church and author of God Didn't Make Us to Hate Us, “rapture ideology is a fairly recent phenomenon,” one not specifically found in the Bible. It was a theory proliferated by John Nelson Darby, an English clergyman and Bible teacher, Rev. McManus-Dail says.
According to The Cut, the idea that it would happen on September 23 seems to have originated from a sermon by South African pastor Joshua Mhlakela, who says God delivered the date to him in a vision. His prediction is now widespread online, and believers are prepping themselves for the rapture, and trying to preemptively care for those left behind. According to this idea, only devote followers of God are eligible for rapture. Not everyone will make the cut, which is what fueled Chashchin's childhood fear.
“I was trying to do everything right,” Chashchin says. She was diagnosed with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, which she says factored into her anxiety. “I would lay awake, praying to God at night just like, 'I'm so sorry if I did anything wrong that I missed,' like 'please still take me. Please don't leave me without my family,' you know?”
TikTok content
She spent waking hours trying to prepare for rapture, too.
“There were silly things I was doing, like looking up a video on YouTube of how to drive a car in case as a child I had to get somewhere and I was left behind,” she remembers. "[It] was kind of like these doomsday preparations." Like many other Evangelical youth, Chashchin read the book series Left Behind, about the horror of being one of the people left on earth after the rapture. “That put fear into me, too, that I would have to stick behind and maybe become a martyr or I would get killed or there would be war [or] famine and I would just be this helpless child by myself because I was sinful. I wasn't good enough.”
Jubilee Dawn, 31, who hosts the podcasts “Healed-ish” and “Overshare Hour,” shared Chashchin's fear when she was a kid. Growing up as a non-denominational Christian, and later joining what she calls a religious cult, Dawn remembers a few rapture “scares," times when the rapture was predicted, but of course, never happened. There was one in 2012, and another when a pastor in her home state of Texas predicted the rapture and word spread.
TikTok content
“It was so scary,” she says. “Feeling that fear of not knowing if you will make the cut.” Dawn has talked to others who were raised with the idea of the rapture who say they would get scared if they lost their mom in the grocery store or if a parent didn't pick up the phone, assuming they'd been snatched up in the rapture. Like many of the people on TikTok today, Dawn says the adults around her always framed the rapture as a good thing — they were excited to go to heaven and be with God. But Dawn didn't want to die.
“The rapture never sounded like fun,” she says. “You're also in grief that you're never going to get married or have kids. I wasn't dying to go to heaven. I was like, ‘I'll go when I die, I don’t want to cut my life short.'"
“It can definitely mess with you as a kid because you feel like you can't dream for the future,” she continued.
Of course, it was a relief every time Dawn realized another rapture scare had come and gone. She was happy she wasn't left behind, but she was also happy that she could keep living her life, keep growing up. Chashchin also called the feeling of a rapture scare passing as a relief, but it also left a lot of questions, and too a lot of fear.
“The day would come and pass and I'd be kind of just anxiously watching waiting. When it wouldn't happen, it just kind of feels like it got swept under the rug and I'd be there like, ‘well, did it happen? or ’did we just not hear about it?'” Chashchin says. “Nothing was ever answered.”
The day after left Chashchin with more questions, but Rev. McManus-Dail sees rapture ideology as a way to try and grasp at control, to answer big questions, particularly in times of chaos.
“There is a real temptation to believe that we can hold the keys to what keeps us safe in a really volatile and changing world. It is not surprising to me that rapture thinking and emphasis is concurrent to the greatest technological innovations of the age,” she says. “We are faced more and more every day with how powerless we are in the face of the enormity of the world, the enormity of technology, and also the enormity of the world's grief — and that is so daunting. I have great empathy for the temptation to say, 'here's the ticket out.'”
There's perhaps another aspect of control in this belief, too. Dawn says rapture ideology is “a great way to keep people in line.”
TikTok content
“The stakes are so high. You are taught to not ask questions … and [taught that] you don't lean on your own understanding — which is a Bible verse," Dawn says. So, if you don't believe in the rapture and it turns out you're wrong, "it is the highest stakes ever. Eternal torment.”
So what happens when the rapture doesn't come? Nothing, really. Some creators on TikTok have said they plan to apologize publicly if they're still on earth next week. Others don't seem to have left room for that possibility. Sometimes the date gets pushed back, and sometimes it's just shrugged off. Rev. McManus-Dail hopes people see the rapture not coming as an invitation.
“We are hardwired to pay attention to the ways that we see hell on earth. What I hope the invitation that we experience in the rapture not happening this week is that we pay attention to the possibilities and the opportunities God is giving us to not escape from the world's pain, but to see how Jesus is present in the world's pain," she says. “And I also hope that it causes us to perhaps ask some questions of, what does God's justice look like when this world is hurting and what is our role in seeking that justice and mercy for all of God's people?”
It's hard to say how people will react this time around, but in Chashchin's rapture experience, “everything is still normal," until the next scare comes. "Life continues on.”
