Glacial Errata, No. 46

One

Every so often for the past twenty-five years or so, I’ve checked in on the website raptureready.com. Run by a guy named Todd Strandberg, it’s a decades-old clearing house for apocalyptic news and predictions. It’s perhaps most famous for its “Rapture Index,” in which Strandberg assigns numerical values to various global developments that he’s deemed signs and portents of the coming End, everything from “Interest Rates” to “Civil Rights” to “Gog (Russia).” this is all boiled down into a single number, that one can then use to gauge how close Christ’s return is.

A sort of Moneyball for the Apocalypse, if you will.

Two

“The Rapture Index is by no means meant to predict the rapture, however, the index is designed to measure the type of activity that could act as a precursor to the rapture,” Strandberg’s website explains. “You could say the Rapture index is a Dow Jones Industrial Average of end time activity, but I think it would be better if you viewed it as prophetic speedometer. The higher the number, the faster we're moving towards the occurrence of pre-tribulation rapture.”

Using the Wayback Machine to crawl back through it is laborious, kinda depressing, and not really anyone’s idea of fun, but it is a weird historical record of America’s anxieties and traumas, charted out through one man’s obsession. What to make of the fact, for example, that “All Time High” eras have come and gone—not just 9/11, but the first Gulf War (which is preserved for posterity on the site), an incident barely remembered now even by those of us who were alive during it, to say nothing of people born afterwards? What to make of the detritus of almost-Apocalypses, trailing behind us like so much wreckage in the rearview mirror?

Three

The website hasn’t changed much in decades, and so it still has that nostalgic flavor of an earlier Internet—though the slow evolution of its logo through the decades nicely captures the aesthetic of Biblical and anti-government conspiracy sites.

Looking more closely, though, one notices that there have been strange, subtle changes. In the Rapture Index’s original scale, any reading above “145” meant “fasten your seat belts.”

Now, however, the scale is different: “fasten your seat belts” now applies to any reading above “160.”

Somehow, we’ve experienced what can only be called “rapture inflation,” as the Index spent so long above 145 in the wake of September 11 and the wars of Iraq and Afghanistan, unbudging and yet not producing the expected return of Christ, that Strandberg appears to have had to reset his expectations.

Four

When did this change happen? Using the Wayback Machine, I was able to narrow it down to sometime between February 18, 2007, and February 25, 2007. Strandberg makes no mention of the change on his website, but it is perhaps noteworthy that Barack Obama announced his candidacy for president on February 10, 2007.

A year later, one week after Obama’s historic win, Newsweek ran a piece headlined “Is Obama the Antichrist?” a truly shitty piece of journalism bylined by Lisa Miller that featured Strandberg.

“Strandberg says Obama probably isn’t the Antichrist,” Miller writes, “but he’s watching the president-elect carefully. On his Web site, he has something called the Rapture Index, a calculation based on signs and prophecy of the proximity of the end. According to Strandberg, any number over 160 means ‘fasten your seat belts.’ Obama’s win pushed the index to 161.”

Five

While looking through old articles about the Rapture Index, I came across a piece by Brenda Peterson from the Tulsa World, published May 1, 2005. Speaking to her neighbor who’s nigh-giddy about impending calamities, Peterson asked, “Why are you so, well, cheerful, about the end of the Earth?

He responded, “I’m afraid you’ll have a rough time of it here during the Tribulations—plagues of locusts, frogs, viruses, the Earth attacked by tsunamis, volcanoes, dark legions of the unsaved.”

“Don’t you love any of us you believe will suffer?”

After a pause, he told her, “You can’t blame us born-agains for at last getting our heavenly rewards. We’ve waited thousands of years for End Times.”

It’s a telling line for me—this middle-aged man claiming he’s been waiting millennia for something and is thus justly due it, even at the cost of pain and misery of his neighbors. This sense of entitlement, Peterson’s article reveals, has destroyed this man’s sense of humanity, and made him blind and disinterested to even the remotest prospect of any kind of suffering of others, so long as he gets his.

The problem for many of us remains that we’re not living in the End Times, but rather in the wake of the previous generation’s failed End Times. Jesus continually refuses to appear, and no matter how bad things get, the Apocalypse never happens. Instead we just plunge on further into the almost-End, and all that longing, all that terror and expectation, all that resentment, gloating, and xenophobia builds and builds, accreting like a cancer among the disappointed.

Directed to the Rapture Index by her neighbor, Peterson meets up with him a week later and asks him bluntly, “Doesn’t the Scripture say ‘For God so loved the world?’ Well, I’m going to start a Real Rapture Index with signs and wonders of how beautiful and sacred this Earth. Another mantra is: ‘For we so love the world.’” She trails off, and then adds, “Listen. I want to be left behind.”

As she concludes her column: “Left behind to figure out a way to fit more humbly into this abiding Earth, this living and breathing planet we happily call home, we call holy.”