The Rapture (1991)

Disclaimer: The Rapture is extremely disturbing in places and on multiple levels. I don't describe any part of the movie in any detail here. Instead, this is an essay on Evangelical Christianity.


I always arrive late due to time constraints. Even in the dark, I could see more than the usual number of people were attending The Rapture, and then after, when the credits rolled and the lights came up it seemed to me an older-than-typical demographic.

While exiting, I overheard Ben (the director of Cinematheque, a local cinema arts group) discussing the movie briefly with an older, white gentleman. Ben said, "The movie is theologically accurate." The man said, "Oh, I don't think so." (More or less this was the exchange.)

All of this is to say, I left with the impression that maybe some people with sincerely held beliefs about Jesus' alleged second coming attended. And good for that, in lots of ways.


I haven't written down this thought but I have expressed it a lot of times to people I am close to. Christianity is harmful in degrees depending on your personality.

Many people are able to moderate its more severe ideas and beliefs. I call this the first group. But not everyone is wired up this way. Many people adhere to Christianity sincerely, deeply, personally. This is the second group.

Members of the first group are more typical. It might be that they are likely to harm others with their beliefs, their comforts, actions, inactions, and so on; all of which they marry successfully (in their minds) to Christianity. But they themselves are unlikely to be seriously hurt by it. Their psyche is robust and healthy enough, let's say, to defend their personhood. First groupers might come to a realization, later on in life, that what they believed, implied, professed, or did was harmful to others. On that they might leave the Faith. But they do not really ever internalize, for instance, that they are actually worthless, full of evil, and even for their stray thoughts, deserving of eternal punishment, aloneness, separation from their perfect and loving Creator-Father.

This experience is only for the second group.

The first group doesn't think Christianity really teaches any of these things.

But the second group is capable of a truer Christanity. To believe— truly believe— a person needs to hold extremely destructive yet opposing thoughts, and all at once. The belief that God's love is universal, but that He would allow you to be tortured (however you envision this) in Hell, if you will not accept him. The belief that God is all-powerful, created the world, and can do anything at any time, but that human suffering, misery, hate, prejudice, abuse, murder, war, and all other very real horrors are also somehow not under His control. (God can leap any paradox— you must believe this, and you must believe that your questioning of this, is, itself, a sign of your wrongness.) The list of these contradictions is really endless. And for the second group, it is a ceaseless attack on their personhood.

But always they must remember: God loves them perfectly. Any problems with any part of this arrangement is all on them.

Here I'll clarify I'm talking about Evangelical Christianity that I am familiar with.

If you were raised in the Church, maybe you see yourself in one of these two groups. But likely not. If you don't really think this dichotomy is fair, can you think of anyone in your Church who might show signs of being in the second group? Anyone, for instance, who seems to live in poverty, and is not able to seek out or create security for themselves?

Anyone who cries while praying? Anyone who overshares? Don't you think these people are really living the Message more truly, giving up small, impermanent things like a comfortable life or their personal social status, for things that are eternal?

If you were in the first group, then those in the second group are doing things to themselves that your psyche protects you from doing to yourself. You know you would be worse off, in this life at least, if you lived like them. So you don't. Part of you knows they are truer Christians, part of you thinks they are crazy.

By the way, your Pastor is probably in the second group.

Here I'll add that I fear that the second group really is very large, and I'll be open that others' experiences put them in a third, fourth, fifth, or five-hundredth group that feels the harms of Christianity in still other ways.


The movie is nothing more and nothing less than a portrayal of Evangelical Christian beliefs, and it uses the immediacy and literal nature of cinema to create realism and detail around them.

It could be a dark comedy, but it knows there is nothing funny about what it is showing. It is very disturbing.

It's a real portrait of beliefs truly held, professed, and taught in Churches when I was growing up in the 80's and 90's, at least. Ideas that are painted into peoples' minds, often as children, or, equally damaging, as vulnerable adults. Destructive, self-reinforcing ideas that overpower many peoples' entire sense of self.

Yet these beliefs are rarely reasoned about in any kind of realistic detail, except in stupid, excited tones by those confident that they are on the inside, in the know, chosen.

The Rapture is not an allegory, it's a fantasy. And it is, by my lived experience at least, theologically watertight.


I hope that one day, sitting on the other end of this brief essay, are those who see themselves for the first time as members of the second group, and can start to grasp the complexity and magnitude of the harms done to them, or those that, in reacting defensively by raising objections to what I have written (to an audience of themselves) even before they have finished reading, can see that maybe I have a point, and that maybe as members of the first group, they should start to see what has been happening all along to those of us in the second.

May 24, 2024
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