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Recovering Millenarian
Once in elementary school I couldn’t find my parents. I looked in room after room. My terror mounted; by the time I realized my dad was just in the shed, I’d been fully panicked for about ten minutes. What if this was it, I thought? What if this was the Rapture, and I hadn’t believed in Jesus hard enough to fly up to Heaven with my family?
I suspect most people with a conservative Christian background can relate. I remember feeling so guilty when I realized that, although I certainly didn’t question whether Jesus really would come back, I contemplated his return with dread, not excitement. The Last Judgment made perfect sense — but the thought that when the wheat was separated from the chaff, I wouldn’t be too heavy with sin to escape the fire? That tested my credulity. Jesus knew just how rotten I was.
I dropped those specific beliefs when I left Christianity. But Christian theology isn’t the only example of the deeper structure of millenarianism — the idea that history will soon reach its climax, a final cathartic explosion that will sweep away the corrupt world and usher in paradise. I no longer accepted a church-approved, Jesus-initiated end of days. But what about a different telling of the millenarian story?
Like playing mad-libs, I swapped out the nouns but kept the underlying plot intact. Instead of the Rapture, I looked forward to a socialist…