‘Apocalyptic expectations’
A far-right movement claims the eclipse is a sign of the end of days. Seemingly fringe beliefs are more ominous than you think
One sign — and if you find the right corner of the internet, there are many, many signs — is that Monday’s total eclipse passes over a city with a portentous name: Rapture, Indiana.
It’s also “shocking,” according to a TikTokker with 2.4 million followers, that the eclipse crosses eight towns named “Nineveh,” the city of sin and vice in the Bible that the prophet Jonah was sent to warn of God’s wrath.
A pastor who streams live on YouTube points to a map with the eclipse’s path overlaid with the path of the last total eclipse to cross the U.S. — a big “X.” Or is it Tav, the final letter of the Hebrew alphabet?
For millions of people who plan on observing the total solar eclipse crossing North America on Monday, those two or three minutes will be purely astronomical: a chance to witness a lucky planetary alignment.
For some who belong to a ballooning movement within Christianity, the eclipse marks much more: a sign of the coming apocalypse, the end-times described in the Bible.
Such doomsaying is easy to dismiss as the fixation of a religious fringe, and this is not the first time, nor will it be the last, that a significant astrological event draws out dark prophecies. The total eclipse in 2017 generated the same apocalyptic chatter.
The difference now, experts who monitor these groups say, is that this Christian movement has become enmeshed with an ascendant wing of far-right Conservative politics, rocket-boosted by a conspiracy culture, and herded by social media algorithms. Together, these forces have cultivated a cauldron of beliefs that represents a real threat to democracy, and will persist after the eclipse passes.
Online, the discussion ping-pongs from Biblical references to the Israel-Hamas war and to former U.S. president Donald Trump. The pastor with the maps also guides followers on obtaining religious exemptions for vaccines. The alt-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has glommed on, posting an eclipse video on X that claims “the Biblical implications are massive” and pointing to the deployment of the National Guard on Monday — called in by some states for crowd control — as a ruse to enact martial law.
Laughter “is tempting,” and even sometimes useful, said Ruth Marshall, a professor at the University of Toronto in political science and the study of religion.
“But behind the laughter, we should be aware that the stakes of this, politically, are very serious. We cannot have a democracy if we do not share a common world of facts.”
The believers are certainly taking it seriously: amid the calls for spiritual awareness are others grounded in real-world actions.
“Protect yourself, arm yourself, guard yourself that day,” recommends one TikTok with 3.4 million views and counting, warning ominously of threats to those who work in jewelry and electronic stores, as well as of “demonic creatures.”
Some elements of this moment are peculiarly modern; others are not.
Popular histories of eclipses often note that ancient civilizations viewed these events as the punishment of angry gods, but that’s not the full story, said Kyle Gervais, a professor of Classics at Western University.
Even in seventh-century BC Mesopotamia and sixth-century BC Ancient Greece, people understood the scientific basis of eclipses — that the moon was blocking the sun — and correctly predicted future eclipses. That understanding, however, did not preclude worries that these astronomical events were also bad omens.
The Book of Revelation, the last book of the Bible that some interpret as describing the period around the end-times, references the sun turning black, among other visions. It’s full of astronomical and animal imagery, numbers as ciphers for names, and potent but confusing descriptions. These are hallmarks of apocalyptic texts from many religions, said Tony Burke, a professor of Early Christianity at York University.
“Because of the esoteric and somewhat obscure imagery in them, they tend to get reinterpreted again and again and again,” said Burke.
“The beauty of the material is that it can almost never be wrong.“
Burke said the current upwelling of apocalyptic interest “shows that a certain group feels a certain amount of anxiety about their present situation that the people outside of that situation don’t understand” — including, even, other Christians.
In response to online eclipse prophesying, other Christian content creators and commenters have tried to dampen speculation, citing parts of the Bible that say no human knows when Jesus will return. One TikTokker urged those pointing to the eclipse as a sign to “stop freaking out.”
Indeed, only a minority of Christians worldwide believe in the Rapture — the theory that the day of God’s judgment is coming, when Christian believers will be lifted into Heaven to join the Lord. Among those who do believe it, not all accept that the eclipse is a sign of this impending Judgment Day (some question whether this interpretation is too U.S.-focused; Monday’s eclipse is only crossing Mexico, the U.S. and Canada).
But the Christian movement that does make the Rapture a central component of their spirituality — one that goes by a few names, including Pentecostalism and Charismatic Christianity — is the fastest growing in the world, with scholars estimating their numbers at 600 million worldwide, or a quarter of all Christians.
In the U.S., the idea of the Rapture is “pretty widely distributed,” said Marshall, who has spent decades studying the political import of this religious movement: 41 per cent of Americans, according to a 2010 Pew Research poll, believe Jesus will return by 2050. “Apocalyptic expectations” are a huge part of this movement, she adds.
None of this is new — “reading the signs” is standard practice, Marshall said.
“What I’d argue happened since 2016 ... (is) the really dramatic rise of paranoid conspiratorial thinking” — a culture of paranoia that has long been present in American politics but was kicked into overdrive by movements like QAnon, the cult-like far-right conspiracy theory, and the pandemic, which frayed trust in many important public institutions.
“What happens often unfortunately with these types of groups that see Bible prophecy as pointing towards the end-times in which we live in, is that it’s easy to blend in with conspiratorial thinking,” said André Gagné, a professor of theology at Concordia University and the author of the book “American Evangelicals for Trump: Dominion, Spiritual Warfare, and the End Times.”
Believers already parse numbers, names and places for signs of the coming Judgment Day; QAnon followers parse numbers, names and places as evidence of a hidden cabal controlling the U.S. government.
Since 2016 and the election of Trump as president, people associated with this Christian movement have moved “to the vanguard” of Republican politics, Marshall said. (They have influence in Canada, too, she adds, but less than in the U.S.)
Marshall points to Mike Johnson, the Republican Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. American media outlets have reported extensively on his ties to a movement rooted in Pentecostal and Charismatic beliefs called the called New Apostolic Reformation, which advocates for Christian
dominance over all facets of American life, including politics. Rolling Stone reported that a flag hanging outside his office, featuring an evergreen tree and the phrase “An Appeal to Heaven,” is one popularized by the New Apostolic Reformation and by Christian Nationalists, who seek to “return” America to God. Johnson’s spokesperson told Rolling Stone the flag was a gift and pointed to its “rich history.”
Trump, of course, plays a central role in all of this, and is the subject of many prophecies himself. Marshall has tracked his associates, like Steve Bannon, using “spiritual warfare” language. Gagne points out he was dutiful in his first term as president, making good on his promises to his Evangelical base.
Marshall said the final ingredient is the effects of social media algorithms, which encourage increasingly more shocking content. “These things are kind of a perfect storm, I would say, for the construc- tion of these kinds of conspiratorial narratives,” said Marshall.
Though only some Pentecostal or Charismatic beliefs movements be- lieve the eclipse is a sign of the endtimes, particularly concerning to her are those claiming all previous U.S. eclipses happened during wars, and that this one is heralding a new civil war. She says she can’t rule out the possibility of violence, because the risk is already high.
On Tuesday, after the eclipse has passed and the Rapture hasn’t happened, these groups are unlikely to be disappointed for long, if at all. (Many of those online keep their promises vague, anyhow: is it the Rapture, or the period of tribulation preceding the Rapture?). The signs are still there, waiting to be re-interpreted — and there are more events waiting on the horizon, including major elections.
“There are people in our societies that embrace these things and conduct their lives according to these things and actually make political decisions on who to vote and not to vote for according to these types of values and this kind of world view.”
“We can’t simply discard them as being nutcases,” Gagné added. “We need to be conscious of what it is ... we need to be at least minimally informed to understand what is going on.”