Welcome back to Season 11, The Spirit of Fear.

I'm Tara Jean Stevens, a lifelong scaredy cat.

And on this season, I'm trying to unpack some of the ideologies that I believed as a teenage fundamentalist that still

haunt me today, even though I'm not a believer anymore, and even though I haven't been

a believer for most of my adult life.

Episode 4.

Rapture Anxiety On this episode, my guest is Dr. Amy Frickome.

She's an award-winning writer, scholar, and journalist, and she has a special focus on religion

and culture.

I've invited her on for this episode

after I came across her 2004 book, Rapture Culture,

left behind in Evangelical America.

It documents her efforts to make sense

of why the apocalyptic narrative of Jesus' second

coming is so compelling.

So before we go any further, can you help all of us understand just rapture ideology through the filter of your own work?

Like when we're saying the rapture or when believers say the rapture, what are we actually talking about?

That's a great question. I think the basic foundation is that there is a belief that Jesus will come back to earth,

not just one time in some great, like, blaze of glory, but twice.

Once kind of secretly, and this is the event called the rapture, where Jesus will take

all the true believers to heaven in one fell swoop.

And then everyone else will be left behind.

...