A New Take on Life after the Rapture

For Premillennialists, the rapture (a term which is never actually mentioned in the Bible) has become a favorite topic – an event that will usher in the Biblical end-times. It was popularized a decade ago by the Left Behind Series (Lehaye/Jenkins), which contained all the imaginative drama a youth group kid could ever want. Now, author Tom Perrotta (an agnostic and religious skeptic) offers a new look at what life might be like for the “leftovers.” Rather than hyped up action, Perrotta is drawn to the social and psychological impact that a rapture-like or cataclysmic event might facilitate. (Although a large part of the population disappears into thin air in his novel, Perrotta does not actually say it was in fact the rapture.) How will the “leftovers” mourn for those who are now gone? Will the memory of this event be embedded in society’s memory or eventually become simply a part of history? In an interview on NPR’s Fresh Air, Perrotta recently spoke about the book and how society’s response to events like September 11th, 2001 might be analogous to the way people will process an event such as the Rapture. Here’s a snippet of the interview:

Perrotta says he wanted to play with the idea that being alive — or left behind — was somehow more of a punishment instead of a gift.


"No one in the Garvey family has disappeared, and yet a number of them are all haunted by losses," he says. "Laurie's best friend's daughter is gone. And somehow that disappearance has shocked her out of her own life, and she spends a lot of time helping her friend grieve. And that grief, she says, feels sort of right — and it's the place where she needs to live. She can't find her way back to any kind of normal life."