Evangelical Christians have been sharing warnings and advice in videos on social media in preparation for the potential imminent rapture, an end times prophecy some people believe could happen on September 23 or 24 this year.
Although the current wave of videos have seemingly been inspired by a South African pastor’s prediction shared on YouTube, rapture predictions have also long been linked to real world events, including Israel’s war on Palestinians in Gaza.
So what is the rapture, and why are some Evangelical Christians predicting the end of the world could happen this week?
Here’s what you need to know:
What is the rapture?
Not all Christians share a belief in the rapture.
This perhaps shouldn’t be surprising, since the word “rapture” does not appear in the Bible, according to Bible scholar Bart Ehrman, author of Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says about the End.
For those who do, it is considered a prophecy about what will happen during the end times, and before Jesus returns to earth.
Followers of rapture theology believe that when the rapture begins, true Christians will rise up into the clouds “to meet the Lord in the air”.
At the same time, non-believers will be left behind here on Earth, where they will endure a series of trials and tribulations, including plagues and fires.
What are people saying about the rapture on TikTok?
In one video shared by an account with 848,100 followers, called christwillreturn, a woman shares advice with her best friend, tearfully saying: “You need to repent. Now. I don’t want you to be left behind.”
She recalls having a dream where she tries to warn people that “Jesus is coming,” but even though she screamed, she said “nobody was listening to me.
“Some were making fun of me. I’m like, everyone needs to repent now. He’s coming,” she added.
In another video shared by an account called Christianquotes89, two men share advice on what non-believers should do when the rapture occurs.
“You’re probably wondering, where did the missing people go? What’s going on? I imagine you’re pretty afraid and looking for answers,” one of the men explains.
“All of us who placed our faith in Jesus, Christ as our Lord and Savior, have been taken off of the earth to heaven, to the Father’s house in heaven. With Jesus. We will be there with him, and we will be coming back with him in about seven years or so,” he added.
In the meantime, he warned, those that are left behind will experience a “troublesome period that’s worse than any period since mankind was created”.
How many people believe in the rapture?
The trending videos include a mix of people who seem genuinely concerned that the rapture could happen soon, as well as people responding with surprise and even some disdain.
However, in the United States, where many of the videos originate, end-times beliefs are not particularly rare.
According to research by the Pew Research Center from 2022, nearly half of all Christians in the US, some 47 percent, say “yes” when asked whether they believe “we are living in the end times.”
Although overall, Pew found that most Americans, 58 percent, “reject the idea that humanity is in its last days”.
Pew also found that end-times beliefs may influence how people feel about the state of the world, including problems like climate change.
People who believe we are living in the end times were somewhat less likely, at 51 percent, than others, at 62 percent, to say that climate change is “an extremely or very serious problem”.
Will the rapture happen soon?
In a video shared on YouTube three months ago, South African pastor Joshua Mhlakela predicted that the rapture could occur on September 23 or 24, this year.
The video had more than 560,000 views as of September 22.
But people have been predicting the rapture could happen at any moment since at least the 1800s, and other kinds of end-times prophecies go back even further than that.
In that time, there have been a number of popular books and movies about the rapture that have sold millions of copies.
They include The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey, which was the bestselling non-fiction book of the 1970s, according to The New York Times.
Lindsey, who died last year, aged 95, helped popularise the belief that biblical prophecies would be fulfilled by events in modern-day Israel and Palestine.
In the The Late Great Planet Earth, Lindsey wrote that Jesus’s return would not occur until after the final great war called “Armageddon” was triggered by an invasion of the “new state of Israel”.
He also claimed this would only take place when “mankind will be on the brink of annihilation.”
More recently, the popular Left Behind series of books helped bring out one of the major themes of the rapture, that non-believers will be left behind on earth.
At least three of the 16 books in the series reached number one of The New York Times bestseller list, and one of the books was also made into a film starring Nicolas Cage.
Clinical social worker and author Josie McSkimming says beliefs about the end times can become deeply ingrained, especially for people who grew up learning about them in church, with real-life events like Israel’s war on Palestinians in Gaza potentially bringing those emotions to the surface.
“I have clients who have exited those churches, who have found themselves very dysregulated, very distressed, hypervigilant, fearing that this is the end times,” said McSkimming, who is from Sydney, Australia, and is the author of Leaving Christian Fundamentalism and the Reconstruction of Identity.
“Even though they don’t believe in hell, and they don’t believe in the Apocalypse, and they don’t believe in Armageddon, they’re very distressed because their family members are saying it to them. Their friends are saying it to them,” McSkimming told Al Jazeera.
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