

Millerites didn’t believe in the rapture, per se-Christ’s return and the rapture were not always interchangeable ideas for most of Christian history, although they are now-but their apocalypse yearning has come to signify a particularly American response to times of social upheaval and great change. And so I never stopped asking myself if I had any, and then I left home to go to college in upstate New York and I learned that I did not. This is where I was told that “trying” really doesn’t have anything to do with goodness faith does. This is where I tried-really tried, harder than for most things I’ve attempted-to make it work, to be a Christian, to be good. That Hispanic storefront church in New York is where my ideas about faith were formed and fostered. It’s no small thing, hearing the gospel in the language you were raised with. The Florida megachurch where I learned about the biological shock of crucifixion at age 8 had been run by white ministers propping up the ideals of middle-class whiteness, but when I was a teenager, my parents started attending a small New York City fundamentalist church with other Hispanic believers.

It was real, and it is real,” my father tells me now, recalling the church in Queens my grandfather had brought his family to. “The rapture, at that age? It was painted very vivid.
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I learned how to see it coming, too: How the nation of Israel was “God’s timepiece” hitting marks on a prophetic timeline, how the machinations of the Catholic Church and the United Nations would soon come to a head and form a one-world government, how God would be driven out of America’s public square as people looked to other things for salvation. As a child, I was taught that I might live to see the end of the world. It’s hard to overstate how large the rapture loomed while I was growing up in the evangelical world. In an instant, the cosmic outlook we’d been instilled with for our entire young lives would coalesce with shocking clarity: Was this it? Had the rapture happened? Were we going to face judgment alone? Or someone’s parents didn’t answer a phone call the way they normally would have. They were always triggered by mundane things: Somebody came back from school one day and no one was home. Christian worldview (including evangelistic discussion), but with extremely brutal gang members committing heinous violent acts and communicating mixed messages throughout, along with a humanistic view for majority of characters several shootings (including sweeping with automatic weapons, and shooting up a small business and a private residence with a minor involved), holding a minor at gunpoint, pointing a gun in person’s face, close-range killing, an unusual and heavy instrument strongly implied to be a murder weapon and wielded threateningly, shooter praised for attempting to kill innocent victims, deranged man laughs while shooting toward people, man realistically suffocated in front of a group, knives used in fights, blood comes from mouth of dying gunshot victim, violent martial arts/tactical defense used in fight scenes, audio of a woman being beaten, man knocks woman down and is verbally/emotionally controlling man implicates another of fornication (but he was innocent) a few women briefly seen in tight clothing liquor store sign visible cigarette packages briefly visible while their availability is implied via the Christian hero character dysfunction and mysterious relationships between gang members and women (including telling a daughter that she was "a mistake"), brutal man barks orders to burn their friend’s dead body, an enemy states that he will "go after" an innocent man’s wife and daughter, someone leads others to take "blood for blood," in revenge, man says he has no regrets for killing others (but he is trying to understand why).Other evangelical kids I knew growing up would tell me about their own first rapture scares.
