That Hispanic storefront church in New York is where my ideas about faith were formed and fostered. It’s no small thing, hearing the gospel in the language you were raised with. The Florida megachurch where I learned about the biological shock of crucifixion at age 8 had been run by white ministers propping up the ideals of middle-class whiteness, but when I was a teenager, my parents started attending a small New York City fundamentalist church with other Hispanic believers. It was real, and it is real,” my father tells me now, recalling the church in Queens my grandfather had brought his family to. “The rapture, at that age? It was painted very vivid. I learned how to see it coming, too: How the nation of Israel was “God’s timepiece” hitting marks on a prophetic timeline, how the machinations of the Catholic Church and the United Nations would soon come to a head and form a one-world government, how God would be driven out of America’s public square as people looked to other things for salvation. As a child, I was taught that I might live to see the end of the world. It’s hard to overstate how large the rapture loomed while I was growing up in the evangelical world. In an instant, the cosmic outlook we’d been instilled with for our entire young lives would coalesce with shocking clarity: Was this it? Had the rapture happened? Were we going to face judgment alone? Or someone’s parents didn’t answer a phone call the way they normally would have. They were always triggered by mundane things: Somebody came back from school one day and no one was home. Other evangelical kids I knew growing up would tell me about their own first rapture scares.
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