Christians on TikTok were so convinced that the Rapture — an event anticipated by evangelical Christians in which the faithful will be beamed up to heaven by God while everybody else is doomed to ruin — was going to happen yesterday that some even ditched their jobs and cars in anticipation.
But the day came and went with nary a peep from the clouds above, forcing disappointed influencers to scramble and explain away why it didn’t happen — a quintessential fable of the modern age, in which a conspiracy theory goes haywire via social media.
“I am sorry to anyone who believed the Rapture was going to happen on the 23rd” said a Christian TikToker who goes by the handle tsunation in a video today. “My intention was not to deceive anyone. I truly believed with all my heart that today was going to be today.”
Others hedged their bets that the Rapture was actually going to happen today, or maybe later this month or year, which basically sums up the trouble with prophecies about the end times: so far it’s never happened, and there’s always tomorrow.
Other TikTokers went silent or stopped posting altogether, perhaps hiding in shame. And some tried to fight back against the jeering peanut gallery.
“I never said 100 percent that it would be September 23rd,” one Christian TikToker said.
Others were relieved that the Rapture fizzled out, because they were becoming anxious from all the viral videos.
“Please tell me I can’t be the only person who was filled with fear, worry and anxiety,” a woman said in one TikTok. “It caused a lot of anxiety with me.”
Rapture fever kicked into high gear when a South African preacher named Joshua Mhlakela said in a YouTube video this July that the dates of September 23 and 24 were when God was going to summon his chosen, according to The Guardian.
The Rapture is a popular belief among some Christians that Jesus Christ will come back and take believers, both alive and dead, into heaven. People on Christian TikTok became convinced it would happen on those dates because of a confluence of events happening this week: the start of the Jewish New Year known as Rosh Hashanah, the ongoing Gaza conflict, and also that the United Nation was meeting this month.
But the past is littered with failed Rapture predictions stretching into the mid 1840s, and now we can add this year’s viral Rapture moment to that list, which The Guardian called TikTok’s first “‘world is ending’ moment.”
TikTok was the perfect forum for the sputtered prophecy, because it’s already rife with wildly popular conspiracy theories, from Big Foot to Aliens and also credulous people who won’t do basic research. And that tells us we should expect more Rapture talk in the near future.
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