Recapture the Rapture: Rethinking God, Sex, and Death in a World That's Lost its Mind

by Jamie Wheal

At their heart, Rapture Ideologies share four key beliefs: the world as we know it is broken and unsavable. there is a point in the near future where everything is going to change. on the other side of that inflection point, everyone we value will be saved/redeemed. so let’s get there as fast as possible, without much concern for the world we’re leaving behind.

Mars isn’t where we’re from. It’s a long way off, and wildly hostile to human habitation. Solving for both of those problems—distance and survivability—is a monumental effort. Why, if we could marshal the technical expertise, capital, and drive to pull off this historic feat, wouldn’t we deploy those same resources to fix the place we already live? The place we’re actually from?

Call it the Techno-Utopian Rapture. And it follows that same four-stage framework exactly. The world as we know it is doomed (not because of sin this time, but because of overconsumption). There’s an inflection point coming soon (geopolitical/ecosystemic collapse, not the coming of the Four Horsemen). On the Other Side, our people will be looked after (the Singularity/Mars Colonies for the best and brightest—Atlas Shrugged in space). So let’s prepare for that eventuality as fast as possible and never mind the collateral damage (build space stations and luxury bunkers rather than solve for global crises like food, water, energy, or climate).

One thing is certain. There won’t be enough seats on the Good Ship Lollipop for all eight billion of us. And that highlights the most seductive and destructive part of all Rapture Ideologies. No matter how statistically unlikely, we secretly believe we’ll personally score a ticket to ride. Against all odds, we imagine that we are one of the saved, not one of those Left Behind. Imagine how high the bar will be to nab a ticket off the Late Great Planet Earth. It will make those helicopters leaving the U.S. embassy during the fall of Saigon look like a warm-up.

“What experience and history teach us is this,” the German philosopher Georg Hegel warned, “peoples and governments have never learned anything from history.”

“That’s when it hit me,” Rushkoff said. “At least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology. Taking their cue from Elon Musk colonizing Mars, Peter Thiel reversing the aging process, or Ray Kurzweil uploading [his] mind into a supercomputer, they were preparing for a digital future that had a whole lot less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether and insulating themselves from a very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic, and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is really about just one thing: escape.”

They are simply accepting the darkest of all scenarios and then bringing whatever money and technology they can employ to insulate themselves — especially if they can’t get a seat on the rocket to Mars . . . the result will be less a continuation of the human diaspora than a lifeboat for the elite.”

“A renewal of apocalyptic belief is underway that is unlikely to be confined to familiar sorts of fundamentalism,” John Gray, London School of Economics philosopher, writes in Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia. “Along with evangelical revivals there is likely to be a profusion of designer religions, mixing science and science fiction, racketeering, and psychobabble, which will spread like internet viruses. Most will be harmless, but doomsday cults . . . may proliferate as ecological crisis deepens.”

When buying into one of those stories, we tell ourselves two lies: The first is that there’s no hope for the world as we know it. The second is that, against all odds, we’re one of the lucky ones who get a Golden Ticket to the other side.

religious moderates and secular humanists around the world share a desire for stability and prosperity. Most people, across cultures, just want to live in peace and see their children get a chance for a better life.

Even if you are a devout jihadi, or Christian Zionist, or have prepaid for your first-class ticket to SpaceX Mars Edition, you amount to less than 1 percent of the Earth’s population. That means a fractional minority of humanity has seized the wheel of our collective future. And your “redemption” means everyone else’s likely annihilation.

To get a handle on what to do next, we’re going to rely on two emerging disciplines—neuroanthropology and culture architecture. Really, they’re the same approach. One looks backward into the past while the other looks forward into the future. Neuroanthropology borrows from neuroscience, psychology, and history to better understand how and why humans have behaved the way we have.

Culture architecture takes those insights and uses them as building blocks to design more effective solutions to social problems. If you found Richard Thaler’s Nudge or Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow interesting, you may be an armchair culture architect yourself.

as we untangle this tale, it’s going to get worse before it gets better.

When Kurt Vonnegut, author of modern classics like Slaughterhouse Five and Cat’s Cradle, studied anthropology at the University of Chicago, he found that all stories share only a handful of basic shapes. According to Vonnegut, you can trace any narrative by the rise and fall of the main characters’ fortunes. He identified certain standbys, like the well-worn “Rags to Riches” story (Down then Up), and the “Boy meets Girl” tale where a couple meets each other, then loses each other, then gets each other back (Up then Down then Up again). But of all the possible shapes Vonnegut discovered, he noticed that the Cinderella Story (Down then Up, then Really Down then Really Up) was the most compelling.

But if we can focus, there’s a solid shot at redemption on the other side of that descent—a chance for the biggest Happily Ever After ever. Buckminster Fuller might have said it best when he described a future that works “for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.” That sounds like a pretty good Up to shoot for.

As Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson once put it, “We have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.”

Steven Pinker was right! you think to yourself. The great Enlightenment Experiment of the last three centuries is going swimmingly, despite the Cassandras and the naysayers. Literacy and nutrition are up. War and disease are down. All signs point to an underreported but undeniable upward arc to human progress.

E. B. White, the author of the children’s classic Charlotte’s Web, once reflected, “I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”

Two curves in particular are intersecting right now—we can call them the Coming Alive arc and the Staying Alive arc.

Coming Alive is timeless, optimistic, and focused on maximizing choices—savoring the world. Staying Alive is time-bound, pessimistic, and focused on dwindling choices—saving the world. Right now, we seem to be caught smack-dab at their intersection. And that can make it hard to plan our days.

This broader idea of how our buildings enshrine our beliefs is helpful as we consider our current crisis in meaning. We all suffer from some version of the “Edifice Complex,” where the institutions that are most prominent in a given time and place also reflect our values. They tell us at a glance exactly who’s in charge and what we care about the most.

“The firm’s willingness to work with despotic governments and corrupt business empires is the logical conclusion of seeking profit at all costs,” an anonymous McKinsey staffer wrote in a widely circulated internal post. “[If you believe that capitalism’s] continued practice poses an existential threat to governments, the biosphere, and poor people the world over, then the firm’s role is that of a coconspirator to a crime in which we are all victims.”

Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize–winning economist and former chief economist at the World Bank, knows how our global system works better than most. His conclusions are stark. “The simultaneous waning of confidence in neoliberalism and in democracy is no coincidence or mere correlation. Neoliberalism has undermined democracy for 40 years. . . . The numbers are in: growth has slowed and the fruits of that growth went overwhelmingly to a very few at the top.” * * *

Today, 80 percent of heroin addicts started out with a prescription for OxyContin. Add to that an equally destructive but less reported epidemic of benzodiazepines (a class of sedatives that includes Valium, Xanax, and Klonopin), and the routine over-prescription of amphetamines like Ritalin and Adderall, and it’s hard not to second-guess our patient-doctor relationships.

Systematic analysis by The Lancet reported over twenty million incidents of “iatrogenic illness” worldwide—a mouthful of a term that basically means “your doctor really screwed up and made things worse.”

Political scientists Roberto Foa and Yascha Mounk have found that nearly half of American citizens lack faith in democracy and more than one-third of young high-income earners actually favor army rule. “Young people today,” Derek Thompson writes in The Atlantic, “commit crimes at historically low rates and have attended college at historically high rates.

Although each thinker differed in emphasis, they could all agree on one thing: Religion, at its very roots, was a superstitious throwback, doomed to promote suffering and perpetuate ignorance.

By 2015, the Pew Center posted a momentous survey—for the first time in history, the spiritual-but-not-religious, a.k.a. the “Nones,” had surpassed all other organized denominations to become not only the largest but the fastest-growing category of belief in the United States.

While mainline Protestantism and Catholicism were seeing significant drops in attendance, Evangelical megachurches have been booming. They offer a uniquely American mash-up of positive thinking and the Gospel of Wealth. These transdenominational churches encourage congregants to abandon traditional values of poverty, humility, and service in favor of dreaming their #BestLife. Stage lights, amplified “praise music,” Jumbotrons, and Jesus Rock. The old Catholic standbys of penance, “smells and bells,” never stood a chance.

Those not drawn to the promise of the all-in-one Megachurch don’t always end up where Harris and Hitchens would have imagined—in the realm of reason and rationality. They often drift to the other extreme and fall into nihilism instead.

Diseases of despair—anxiety, depression, suicide—are rampant. One in six Americans takes psychiatric medications just to cope with the banality of modern life. To put this in harsh relief, the World Health Organization reports that more people today kill themselves than die from all wars and natural disasters combined.

“We’re the middle children of history, man,” the ultimate nihilist character, Tyler Durden, explains in Fight Club. “No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War is a spiritual war, our Great Depression is our lives.”

But Meaning 2.0—modernism—hasn’t exactly panned out either. “We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars,” Durden continues. “But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.” For the frustrated middle children of history, nihilism—the view that none of this matters—is their refuge of last resort.

Nietzsche was arguing that the reason and logic of the French Enlightenment and scientific revolution had replaced blind faith. But, he said, there are profound social consequences to lobbing the Baby Jesus out with all that backward-ass bathwater.

“When one gives up the Christian faith,” Nietzsche cautioned, “one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet. This morality is by no means self-evident. . . . Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole” [emphasis added].

And for those stuck in the moderate middle, identifying as “spiritual but not religious”? The Nones have no particular place to go.

eschatothesia /.e-skə-tä-ˈthē-zhə / Noun: a feeling of some huge event in the near future we are approaching: the end of an aeon, a marker in time after which nothing will be the same.

First, the Apocalypse. In the ancient Greek, apocalypsis means “the unveiling or revealing.” As we’re experiencing the collapse in both Benign and Divine Authority, and questioning the dictates of both traditional religion and modern liberalism, there are all sorts of hidden truths that are being revealed. Not all are comforting, but they’re necessary if we hope to develop an informed capacity to act.

Armageddon. That’s a contraction of the Hebrew Har Megiddo and refers to the mountain outside the Israeli town of Haifa. There, believers wait for the ultimate showdown between Good and Evil. Once this battle starts we’re on the road to the final days of Judgment. There’s no going back for the quick or the dead.

Rapture. In its lowercase version, it means intense bliss or fulfillment. In its uppercase version, Rapture is a story of impending cataclysm for the many and the joyful redemption of the few. While it began as a religious belief about the End of Time, it ...

Our cognitive biases hamper our ability to predict with any degree of certainty what’s going to happen next.

“Plans,” said Winston Churchill, “are worthless. But planning is priceless.”

there are three key drivers that affect our ability to make sense of the future: our cognitive complexity, our sacred cows, and our ability to grieve. If we are not up for tackling all three head-on, we’ll get stuck.

First we need to make sure we have the mental complexity to map and plan for an unpredictable future. Since the recent collapse in Benign Authority, we have fewer trustable public leaders and institutions to lean on.

So we have to do the heavy lifting and sort through competing and conflicting sources ourselves. That requires graduating from simple, binary, either/or thinking toward both/and/neither thinking. Not only does this require an unusually high tolerance for ambiguity, it requires cultivating what Roger Martin, the dean of the Rotman School of Management, calls an “opposable mind” that can stay above the fray. That requires practice. And time. Neither of which we feel like we’ve got enough of.

what sacred cows might we have to throw on the barbecue if one of those thousand-year fires comes to town?

Democracy and capitalism, once assumed to be a package deal, had been neatly separated. “We’ll take your vertically integrated supply chains, predatory lending, and profit margins,” said the Chinese Communist Party. “You can keep your uppity citizenry, human rights, and elections.”

Student debt on one end and evaporating pension plans on the other have weighed down upward mobility. Job security is fading fast. Baby boomers who grew up on that promise have had to abandon it altogether as retirement at sixty-five has morphed into working hourly jobs just for the extra spending money and health insurance.

When twenty-six people, who could all comfortably fit on a bus together (not that they’d ever ride one), own as much wealth as the poorer half of the world (nearly four billion people), you know we’re in a strange place. That sort of asymmetric resource accumulation has never existed in all of human history, or anywhere in nature, for that matter.