Climate Change or the Rapture
If the world is ending, how are we responding?
Today’s post is about something I’m often processing but it’s also kinda heavy (this is your content warning). I do end with some measure of hope though. Would love to hear from your thoughts about climate change [anxiety] and how this hit you!
As I write this paragraph1, a thick haze has settled over my small town in Ohio. We’re typically quite sheltered from the effects of climate-change fueled forest fires, but the Canadian wildfire smoke has finally blown our way. I notice that it’s hard to take a deep breath these last couple days. My kids seem crankier than usual and I wonder if the poor air quality topping out near 200 has affected them in ways we don’t even know about.
The scene reminds me of the Apple series I have been watching called Extrapolations, which envisions life later in this century, constantly plagued by the effects of climate change: smoke hanging in the air, Canada always on fire, coastal areas flooded, countless species going extinct.
I never really thought about Canada being on fire until I watched the show, and here we are weeks later…Canada on fire. Expected to be on fire until the snows of October. Poor air quality around the continent. It all feels too eerie.
Climate change anxiety is something I regularly experience: the terror of being on a swiftly heating planet, thinking about global food insecurity and climate refugees and floods and hurricanes and drought2. Wondering if it was the wrong choice to bring two innocent little people into a world like this. Praying it somehow wasn’t.
Yesterday I noticed feeling heightened regular anxiety too, so much so I wondered multiple times if I’d somehow skipped the Zoloft dose that I’ve written has helped me so much. Once I realized how poor the air quality was, though, I wondered if my body was just having an instinctive reaction to adverse circumstances. It knows it’s unsafe out there and begins to send out the alerts to my brain and nervous system.
Growing up evangelical in the era of the Left Behind books and Y2K seems to have created an expectation in me that the world is imminently going to end. I hear similar reports from my Boomer friends about nuclear holocaust. I don’t think I fully expected I’d live until old age. It’s still hard for me to fathom. So is the idea of having grandchildren or other things people typically seem to dream about.
Now I still feel like the world is imminently going to end, but this time from a climate-based extinction event rather than the Christians getting raptured followed by seven brutal apocalypse years. (Because Left Behind was gospel truth, of course). Unfortunately, one of these is much more scientifically-based than the other.
In the Left Behind fantasy, all “true” Christians would vanish in an instant, rescued by God to hang out in heaven while awful things happened on earth (some of them sound reminiscent of climate change impacts, actually…drought and plague and fire…). Many of us exvangelicals are still traumatized by Rapture anxiety and the fear either we weren’t “real” enough Christians to be raptured, or that our loved ones would be left behind while we escaped the awfulness they would endure.
But for those who had the confidence — or hubris?? — to trust that they were among the select few God had chosen to be with him while Satan wreaked havoc on earth, there was a weird security in knowing that even though awful things were going to happen, they weren’t going to happen to you.
The United States and other Western nations (but…especially us in the US) have contributed way more than our fair share to climate change, yet we remain more sheltered from its impacts. Meanwhile, those who have contributed the least to climate change—specifically, those in developing nations—are the most impacted and the least able to protect themselves from it.
The privileged of the planet can hide from what we’ve done. We can turn the air conditioning down another degree. We can work from home. We can hit the gym for our exercise instead of go outside. We can pay the extra couple dollars for bread whose price has been raised because of drought and crop issues. We can turn the news off and forget about India, Pakistan, Bangladesh. For now.
It’s tempting to forget.
Until the Canadian wildfire smoke blows even to rural Ohio, and the sky grows flat and gray, and it’s hard to breathe.
We need to remember.
I certainly don’t believe in the Rapture anymore, but I am beginning to wonder about the timeless metaphorical, allegorical truths contained in literature like the Bible. The book of Revelation, as I now know biblical criticism would say, was not referring to a global cataclysmic event that would occur around the year 2000, but instead the impact of imperial Greco-Roman society on early Jewish / Christian communities of the first century. John delivers his message with coded language to evade the understanding of the empire.
But Revelation also speaks of a world in which terrible and frightening things happen. Terrible and frightening things happen throughout all of history, and many of us imagine ourselves to be in different kinds of epic battles between good and evil. The world can be inhospitable, and we can be even more inhospitable towards each other.
If you remove the literal reading, aren’t some of the stories told in Revelation “true”? In times like this, for those who are paying attention, don’t they feel true?
Especially on the days when my climate change anxiety threatens to take over, when I envision 10, 20, 30 years into the future, I long for some kind of hope. Some non-evangelical version of Jesus returning and winning the epic apocalyptic battle.
I have been listening to the audio books Many Lives, Many Masters and Same Soul, Many Bodies, by Dr. Brian Weiss. This might be a little “out there” for many of you, but Dr. Weiss is a psychiatrist who stumbled upon past life regressions in his work with one of his patients, and went on to explore the topic in depth. Even before this, I’ve been curious about the idea and been open to reincarnation as the best way to explain our spiritual lives.
In some of his work with patients, they do future life progressions, where people envision their future lives that might occur based on the choices they’ve made in this life. Regardless of the specific lives, a common pattern has emerged about life on earth.
Many people envision an earth in the future, perhaps a couple centuries or maybe millennia into the future, that emerges after some kind of cataclysmic event has greatly reduced the planet’s population. There is greenery, peace, telepathic communication. People are living in harmony — people clearly more evolved than we are.
When I heard this description of the world, a tightness I hadn’t even recognized was released in my chest. Even if it’s pure fantasy, I want so badly to believe that someday, there is some kind of redemption. That things will one day be okay. If we stopped treating our planet as a throwaway planet, as evangelicals are prone to do (Rapture!); if we stopped treating it as something to suck resources out of (Capitalism!)… what could change about the way we live?
How do you grapple with the realities of climate change and our swiftly heating planet? How do you relate to it in light of Rapture theology or other end-times thinking that once told us it didn’t matter what we did to the planet? Or share whatever came up for you, in the comments! Thank you for reading — I’m so glad you’re here.
In late June, 2023. The air has cleared here as I finish the article in early July, and it’s amazing what an impact the air quality has on both mental and physical health.
I highly recommend climate activist and journalist
and his Substack as an excellent resource for keeping up with the latest climate change news. It’s not the stuff that’s being reported often in mainstream news but it’s so important to know about. Also, multiple times while I was watching Extrapolations, I had just learned about a particular concept in Bill McKibben’s newsletter! Pretty wild, and unnerving.
I really love your last paragraph, Christine. Evangelicals do such a shitty job of managing resources, and I see this play out in my own life to this day having grown up with beliefs that resources are disposable and there will always be more. It's so validating to read your writings about these feelings that I felt so strongly back when I was at church at least 3 times a week, but couldn't articulate due to young age, lack of context and preference (ability? escape? lots of things going on?) to bury myself in music while there as a way to cope. I can only hope that more of us than not will try to do the hard work of preserving the only planet we currently have, but like you, the concept of "grandkids and things people typically seem to dream about" is elusive for me. Future, what future? Rapture or hell on earth? So difficult sometimes to move beyond that binary/black and white thinking. And yet we can acknowledge the feelings, breathe through them, and do the work. Thanks, as always, for your post!
"Growing up evangelical in the era of the Left Behind books and Y2K seems to have created an expectation in me that the world is imminently going to end." Yes! These days, with climate anxiety rather than Rapture terror, I get the most hope from watching climate scientists on social media and learning from them about the work that is being done. I also take hope by working on my own mental health and surrounding myself with a community that is safe so that, when things are bad, we can work together in some kind of resilience that allows us to work for the good of the world community.