It’s a unique experience to grow up as a fundamentalist child who is constantly under the threat of either being suddenly yanked out of the world in the twinkling of a eye or being left behind as an orphan for seven years of tribulation. This is stuff that will keep an eight-year-old up at night. If I’m in heaven, who’s going to feed my dog? (In case you’re wondering you can prepare ahead with a letter to an unsaved animal lover via raptureletters.com)

But to their credit, fundamentalist children are nothing if not creative when faced with the possibility of suddenly being disembodied. For example, there’s a helpful clause in Scripture which says that “no man knows the day or the hour” of the Lord’s return. If you’ve ever made it a bedtime ritual to proclaim “I know the Lord will return tomorrow” in hopes of using reverse psychology on the Almighty to stave off the End Times, you might have been a fundamentalist child.

But for those without a clever Rapture-prevention strategy, the fear of being left behind in the midst of Tribulation chaos is a real one for fundamentalists of all ages. The ubiquitous tale of pilots sucked out of the cockpits of their airliners to the doom of the passengers calls for giving some careful scrutiny to the flight crew when boarding an aircraft to see if there are visible clues to their salvation status. “Everybody relax, the pilot has a mustache.” It looks like any unsaved passengers will get to live for another day.

If you’ve ever been awakened from a dead sleep by a car horn and your first thought was “I’ve been left behind!” — you probably have been a fundamentalist.

If you’ve ever heard a train whistle as you’re lying in bed late at night and the first thought through your mind was “The Rapture!”, you may have been a fundamentalist.

To be sure, a fascination with the Rapture is hardly unique to fundamentalists. If nothing else, the wildly popular Left Behind series written by two very non-fundamentalist types attests to that fact. But the fundies have especially honed the skill of using something as glorious and anticipated as Christ’s return to terrorize the living bejeebers out of people.

“When Christ comes back, what will he find you doing?” is the ever-present question. One is forced to wonder whether fundamentalists think that Christ can’t see what everyone is doing right now and will have to actually show up in the flesh to set things straight. The fact that those sinners then be made perfect and get to avoid judgment is sort of forgotten in all this.

The worst of this is the notion that when the Rapture happens there may be people who will be unsaved and die in Tribulation fire because a fundamentalists shirked his duty and didn’t witness. Our sovereign God is evidently quite hampered by such human shortcomings. And to make things worse, fundamentalists teach that once the Rapture happens there will be no more chance for repentance for anyone who has heard the gospel. This is all found in Scripture somewhere or another but it’s hard to pin down just where.

As for all the Rapture-deniers out there, it’s likely you aren’t even saved and won’t know what hit you when that great trumpet blows and your airplane crashes because your pilot has been whisked away. Enjoy!