--- Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
> Incidentally -- the sociology of the subject line must be all
> wrong.
> Probably more believers in the Rapture fit the stereotype "yuppie"
> than
> the stereotype "white trash"?????
Yes.
I had the dubious experience of growing up with the whole gamut of evangelical Christianity as practiced from rural Florida and South Carolina all the way into Texas and over into Arizona. The old school evangelicals of the small, independant and rural churches - Pentecostal, Assembly of God, poor Southern Baptist and basic tent preaching revivalists - didn't dwell on "the Rapture" as much as just old fashioned "sin" and "gettin' right with God." The Rapture was a good tale to terrorize the masses with on a given night in a tent meeting or a church revival - usually brought in a big crowd and plenty of donations - but it wasn't the meat and potatoes of daily spiritual living.
Otoh, the suburban churches, the evangelical churches of the alleged middle (and mostly white) class ate it up, embellished it, commercialized it, and most importantly, politicized it. The "Rapture" became a fixation of a largely white, middle class that felt marginalized and needed to find yet another way to separate themselves from everyone else. These same people who would ridicule a Jehovah Witness and their 200,000 (or whatever the number allegedly is) inhabitants in heaven would be just as ferocious in judging who *they* believed would survive the Rapture, and very often it excluded Catholics and non-evangelical Christians.
Or, as someone else pointed out in a similar discussion here a while back, you don't hear a lot about "the Rapture" in black churches. I've had wide experience in both; it's a "white" fixation. Come down to Houston some day, and I'll take you on the bumper sticker tour: the "Rapture" stickers all have very white, middle class (and often male) drivers.
The televangelists of the late 70's and 80's, notably Falwell and Robertson, took this extreme myth and capitalized on the American love of being scared sh*tless. Horror sells in this country. If Stephen King could scare the bejesus out of the masses with his pop horror and make millions, just think how much could be taken in from spiritually desperate masses addicted to speculating on the horrors of the Rapture! Hence the popularity of the "Left Behind" series. And when those books have been made into film, it's that same white middle class, suburban dollar that's getting in to see a clean cut Kirk "Growing Pains" Cameron be their Christian hero, fulfilling a well-marketed fantasy.
So, yes, the juxtaposition of "The Rapture Index" and "white trash" is very misleading, and, unfortunately, more an uninformed and naive bias of liberal elitism that is failing to realize that the "white trash" population rarely has the luxury of dwelling so much on the Rapture as spending their waking hours trying to survive, feed their families and get adequate medical care.
I realize that the idea that anyone with an active brain cell capable of cognitive thinking could possibly believe in this stuff is incomprehensible to many here, self included. But to blindly dismiss all "believers" as stupid or irrational is grossly naive and doesn't take into account a wide array of sociological, economic, racial and cultural factors, many of which have been floated by Woj, Kelly and others.
- Deborah