God Loves You, and He's Going to Kill You

I think the episodes of The Simpsons dealing with religion are among the best social commentary on that program. I recently watched (for the third time) the episode where Homer predicts the date of the “Rapture”. He tries to warn everyone: “God loves you, and He’s going to kill you!”

I was taught the whole Rapture and Tribulation spiel when I was a teenager. It was all the rage in those days in the Bible Belt, and I recall a number of times sitting in on sermons that dealt with the End Times and interpreting Revelations as describing current events. Remember The Late Great Planet Earth? Those predictions all turned out wrong, but the author is still prophesying on the TV. There was a one- woman play by an evangelist entitled The Quick and the Dead that dramatized the Tribulation. One guy I heard argued that Nelson Rockefeller was the Antichrist, and he was dead serious. I’m pretty sure he was wrong. We used to sing a song I Wish We’d All Been Ready that was a lamentation of someone going through the Tribulation. “Children died, the days grew cold, a piece of bread would buy a bag of gold…”

I never bought into the whole Rapture and Tribulation thing because it just didn’t seem to me to fit with the teachings of Jesus. The Biblical predicates for the doctrine were really shaky as far as I was concerned. The same preachers who insisted that the “days” in Genesis were 24 hour days had no problem stating that the “weeks” in Daniel were figurative and represented a longer time period that placed the Rapture within the next few years. That doctrine and lots of other things about Arminian fundamentalist Christianity led me to spend the next two decades in apostasy. I experimented with (gasp!) Unitarianism. As a joke, I listed Wicca on my dog tags in the army. Fortunately, I ultimately discovered a kind of Christianity that acknowledges the grace of God.

I am sad to see that the Left Behind series of books (now minor motion pictures starring Kirk Cameron) are so popular. This is such a perversion of Christianity. So many self-described Christians are looking forward to leaving the wicked world and have given up on making it any better. In fact, some of the most hateful people I know are “Christians” looking forward to the Rapture. For them, God is all about the smiting, and they extend little or no love to those unbelievers that God is going to torture in the seven years of Tribulation. Life in the world is meaningless for them. Their emphasis on God’s supposed vengefulness and the utter irrelevance of this kind of faith to life in the world are huge stumbling blocks to the acceptance of Christianity by many people. Their gospel is not exactly “Good News”. As the preacher in Cold Comfort Farm said, “They’re all going to hell, and someone has to tell them.”

On the other hand, it appears that the whole vengeful God/sinners get what they deserve in the end/get your ticket out of this hellhole is hugely popular and generates a lot of revenue for a lot of preachers. It is a lot easier than actually trying to live like Jesus. All you have to do is recite a formulaic prayer and wait for the end of the world.