We still have people with a millenarian mindset, notably believers in The Rapture, who think that the End Times may be close at hand. In their belief system, true believers will be bodily teleported to heaven immediately before a seven-year period of strife and suffering called The Tribulation afflicts the sinful remainder of humanity. This time of troubles will end when Christ returns and establishes a thousand-year godly kingdom.
This is where the plot twist I wasn't expecting comes in. I would have expected a belief system like this to have originated with the marginalised and excluded, with people with no investment in the established order.
But then I happened across a radio programme** about John Nelson Darby who, I found out, was the guy who first came up with the idea of The Rapture.
Darby was very much not poor, marginalised or oppressed. He was born, in 1800, to a wealthy Anglo-Irish land owning (and
castle-owning) family and educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Dublin. An accomplished scholar and linguist, Darby won a gold medal on graduating in Classics in 1819. Influenced in his choice of career by an evangelical tutor at Trinity, Darby was ordained as a curate and, shortly thereafter, as a priest in the established Church of Ireland. And in case you think Darby wasn't already well-connected enough, he got his middle name from
the Lord Nelson who was a family friend and Darby's godfather because of course he was.
As an evangelical and Bible scholar, Darby became unhappy with the established church, but not because it was too exclusive, or oppressive. For Darby, it wasn't unbending or exclusive enough. In particular he seems to have become disenchanted with an established church linked to a state which had already taken the first tiny baby steps towards Catholic emancipication,*** something which he saw as acts of state apostasy towards his Protestant faith.
Coming from the Anglo-Irish Protestant Ascendency, people like Darby, his family and peers saw any extension of the rights of the Catholic majority as a personal threat to their own status in a zero sum power game. And legislative emancipation wasn't the only threat they saw - shortly before Darby was born, the certainties and confidence of the Ascendency were violently shaken by major uprising against British rule in Ireland, the Irish Rebellion of 1798.
It was an echo, on home soil, of the turmoil that people of Darby's class saw all around the world. The Irish rebels of 1798 had some support from the French, whose own revolution in 1789 had terrified the established elites of Europe. Going back to the American Revolution and forward to the Napoleonic Wars which had been raging in Darby's youth (when some had explicitly
identified Napoleon with the Antichrist), it seemed to people who valued order, hierarchy and their personal stake in that hierarchy that the natural order of things was being violently upended.
If state apostasy, violent revolution and globe-spanning wars weren't enough to put Darby into the frame of mind to contemplate the End Times, in 1819 a pro-reform rally was held in Birmingham, protesting about the fact that the city had no representative in Parliament, at a time when pocket boroughs with tiny populations and controlled by landowning interests returned members to Parliament. The same year authorities in Manchester put down a similar rally in the Peterloo Massacre. These sort of demands stuck people of Darby's class as an affront to the natural order.
Darby broke from the Church of Ireland and went on to devise the idea of a pre-tribulation rapture in which Christ will suddenly take up the true believers (but not members of what Darby regarded as an apostate established chuch and believers in false religions) into heaven, leaving the less godly down below to endure sufferings of The Tribulation. Darby first popularised these ideas in annual meetings of Bible students organised by his influential evangelical friend,
Theodosia Wingfield, Viscountess Powerscourt.
Darby was also a co-founder of the evangelical Plymouth Brethren, where his eschatological ideas gained some traction. When the movement later split into "Open" and "Exclusive" Brethren, Darby became the de facto leader of the Exclusive Brethren, who were also known as "Darbyites." In his later years Darby undertook missionary tours of America, where the idea of pre-tribulation rapture was took hold among members of various Protestant denominations including Presbyterians, Baptists, and Congregationalists.
It's a bit of a counter-intuitive origin story, but it is one that resonates in the current climate, where the recent big, noisy attempts to overturn the status quo, have been elite-led and profoundly reactionary in nature. The status anxiety of Darby and his class and their wish-fulfilment dream of seeing the decadent, apostate modern order smashed feels very familiar. As they say, "When you're privileged, equality feels like oppression."
Bonus piece of trivia: in 1875, a few years before Darby died, a wealthy couple from Leamington Spa, who had become converts to Darby's Exclusive Brethren, gave birth to a son. The father was particularly devout and became an itinerant preacher, reading a chapter of the Bible to his wife and son every day after breakfast. It's a remarkable testament to the power of reverse psychology that the son was none other than Aleister Crowley, later to become the notorious black magician, occultist, self-styled "Great Beast" and "the wickedest man in the world."
*My italics.
**BBC Radio 4's
In Our Time (link to BBC Sounds
here also on YouTube
here, also available on
Stitcher).
