I grew up evangelical. Terrifying rapture films scarred me for ever
After millions of people vanish from existence, the world is thrown into violent anarchy, the streets a playground of theft, murder, rape, looting and suicide. Those “left behind” are about to endure seven years of a Cormac McCarthy nightmare: world wars, plagues and mass starvation, the streets littered with the decaying corpses of half the Earth’s population.
It’s a familiar story to anyone raised as an evangelical Christian in the last century, particularly if you grew up in the 90s with a shelf full of Left Behind rapture novels – which have sold 80m copies – or watched the Kirk Cameron film adaptation in 2000, or the Nicolas Cage version in 2014. Or if, like me, you just attended a screening of the most recent installment, Left Behind: Rise of the Antichrist, starring and directed by Kevin Sorbo (best known for his starring role in Hercules: The Legendary Journeys).
Intended to be taken as a literal prophecy of events right around the corner, these stories terrorized me as a child – and haunt my dreams to this day.
I’m working on a memoir about these experiences and have interviewed dozens of people who grew up under this toxic theology. They all have the same story of being unable to reach their parents or siblings (a much more common scenario back in the pre-smartphone age) and suffering panic attacks at the thought of being left behind. It’s a sensation that strikes to the core of your being, the overwhelming sense of abandonment reducing you to a crying infant unable to conjure its mother.
Unlike Hollywood Bible epics, these films are almost always independently financed, star B-list celebrities like Louis Gossett Jr or Margot Kidder, and are chiefly driven by proselytization over entertainment.
Rise of the Antichrist expertly weaves contemporary Christian right boogeymen (big pharma, Silicon Valley, mainstream media, Davos, the Covid vaccine, mental health experts) into an otherwise typical tale. It’s the same narrative every time with rapture films, books and plays: the antichrist uses world war to manipulate the UN into installing him as leader of a global socialist government centered on the Mark of the Beast, a tattooed credit card – often a barcode bracketed by the numbers 666 – on everyone’s right hand or forehead.
Sorbo’s film also skewers the “globalist mainstream media”, which has supposedly conspired to use Covid, and now the rapture, to keep people indoors, distracted and afraid, all in the name of power and profit. It’s a boldly ironic stance for this movie to take, considering it rests in a tradition of using questionable theology to terrify