Rhetoric Race and Religion
In 1988, I had a friend who worked in a religious bookstore. She explained that the owner gave her instructions regarding a book called “88 Reasons Why the Rapture Could be in 1988.”
“Sell as many copies as you can by the end of December,” the owner ordered. “In 1989, no one is going to buy this book.”
Often the first assignment I give to my students when I teach Revelation, except when I teach it for Ph.D. students, is to find the craziest interpretations of Revelation they can locate on the internet. Although meant to get preconceptions out of the way so that we can study Revelation itself, the exercise also provides comic relief at the beginning of our second week of class.
One website my students find promises that, for a fee paid in advance, the website’s company will care for pets during the great tribulation after the pet owners are raptured to heaven. Another site offers to send an explanation to friends and relatives after the payee vanishes in the rapture. (Both websites presuppose a now-popular teaching, first documented in 1830, that true believers will be caught up to heaven seven years before the end of the age.)
Sometimes such websites offer political opinion. A large number of students found arguments on the internet for why President Obama was the Antichrist. Although it’s hard to be sure, it’s possible that the authors of those websites are Republicans (perhaps the same ones who used to argue that Bill Clinton was the Antichrist). In the spirit of bipartisanship, however, I should point out that some prophecy experts, possibly Democrats, have pointed out that Ronald Wilson Reagan had six letters in his first, middle and last names. (The number of the beast in Revelation, 666, is often abbreviated 6-6-6.)
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