Thread by @dogemperor

Ah, and RIGHT on cue, it seems a fair chunk of the NAR types had a good old fashioned Rosh Hashanah Rapture Panic (yes, this is...a Thing, as I'll note, part of a LOT of apocalypticism re the High Holidays in the NAR and related movements).

A brief thread:

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https://twitter.com/ItsDeanBlundell/status/1574362902399549440

So I've written before on High Holidays Apocalyptic Thought in the NAR, including how (of all things) the January 6th Insurrection was actually intimately connected (yes, seriously) with this sort of thought:

https://twitter.com/dogemperor/status/1546663923843211265

Another facet of that is Rapture Panics.

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Now, the NAR is probably at best quasi-premillenarian with some being post-millenarian and some even holding the belief that the Second Coming is in the form of a "corporate Christ" consisting of the Elect) but proto-NAR movements (like MSoG and Latter Rain)...

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themselves evolved from segments of Pentecostalism that, at least arguably, are premillenial and have always promoted a kind of Rapture Theology that has had them being taken up first, lolzing over everyone else's suffering for 7 years, and then coming back...

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to kill everyone else. (Tim LaHaye actually pretty much fictionalized the whole concept in the Left Behind books; it's actually a pretty good summary on what Latter Rain endtime theology was like circa the mid-90s, to be honest.)

And, well, since the late 70s,

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in addition to the whole "Israel must exist before the Rapture can happen" (which was honestly prebaked into the particular form of premillenial dispensationalism that functionally birthed most Pentecostalism: dailykos.com/stories/2007/8…)

6/c

...well, in addition to that, you started having (again late 70s/early 80s) a fair number of proto-NAR promoters actually starting to embrace a lot of the cultural appropriation themselves (versus just using it as a tool for conversion), which started with...

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things like "Bible tours" and the Widow's Mite Grift (common in Prosperity Gospel circles, get lots of out-of-circulation 1-agora pieces not even worth melting down for the aluminum, hand 'em out as "gen-u-wine Widow's Mites from the Holy Land", make "love offerings" fast)

8/x

and by the mid-80s had definitely evolved to actually incorporating this into the *remarkably* scripted "outpourings" that even then were happening in what became the NAR.

Which led, eventually, to the first Rosh Hashanah Rapture Panic in 1988...

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when Ed Whisenant (taking full advantage of ALL the trends going on in the NAR and Prosperity Gospel communities, of fixations on Israel, on fascinations with the High Holidays and religious calendar, and the happy coincidence that Israel was coming up on...

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a particular anniversary of its statehood that just happened to coincide with Important Numbers in NAR Numerology...so he promptly released a book "88 Reasons the Rapture Will Happen in 1988" (one being Israel had been around 40 years, and 40 is a Very Important Number)

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And this took off like *wildfire*.

People started selling off their homes, possessions, pulling their kids out of school (they'd not need any of that, The Rapture Was Nigh!). Arranging for pets to be cared for.

It was *very* popular in the group I grew up in,

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and it was one of those rare instances (as I recall) that you even had the rare moments of sanity of the occasional preacher trying to encourage people to NOT sell all their worldly possessions and give away their life's savings because "no man knows the hour or date",

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all the while still giving the old wink-wink nod-nod when said life's savings went in the offering plate as a final "love offering".

Needless to say, the Rapture did not ensue in 1988, a lot of people ended up penniless (and at least some ended up homeless, because

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people had quit their jobs and sold their homes expecting the eschaton to be immanentized that month.

(Hence why I'm a little hesitant to laugh on the "Rapture did not Ensue" today, because I've seen what happens with failed religious panics.)

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Despite Whisenant trying several more times to prognosticate why the Rapture was going to happen around the High Holidays (and becoming more obscure) he and Jim Bakker in particular managed to contribute a lasting meme that has come up repeatedly since:

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That in general, "outpourings", and quite probably the Rapture (probably) would occur sometime around the High Holidays and that these were always things of Great Portent.

One of the next big Rosh Hashanah Rapture Panics was from ol' Pat Robertson,

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who--along with John Hagee, a notorious NAR promoter--started pushing the idea in the early 2010s regarding a rather interesting coincidence that occasionally happens with lunar calendars (lunar eclipses)...and particularly in 2016,

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there was a particular coincidence of four lunar eclipses in a year, one of which happened to fall on Rosh Hashanah.

The NAR types went positively guanopsychotic; the combo of numerology and Rosh Hashanah led to the idea that The End Was Nigh,

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so much undercurrent was done over the "Four Blood Moons" and it being an obvious sign the Tribulation was about to ensue, or some outpouring, or the Rapture, but all in all it was obviously a sign The End Was Nigh (Send in your love offerings!)

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And while The Former Guy did get elected, and while this has been a Very Bad Move for the US in particular and world politics in general, I'm not sure he's exactly the disaster they were picturing.

At any rate, the Rapture did not ensue in September 2016.

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And as the NAR and similar Nasty Types have all but been given license to run amok and take the masks completely off, by September 2019 or so you had the Pr*ud B*ys talking insurrection, and by September 2020 the fires of insurrection were well and truly lit in the NAR

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So on one hand maybe I should be glad this is a mere Rapture Panic, but there's still a lot of pushing to bring the Millenium by violence, particularly in the NAR.

(And now you all know why I want to piss on Jim Bakker's grave when he dies.)

23/end