"The Apprentice" and a Secular Rapture

For those outside evangelical culture, it is easy to dismiss the Rapture as magical thinking. But we can also best understand it, I believe, as metaphorical thinking, about some very real events on earth. Just around the point when Rapture culture became popular, real wages for the American working class began a still-continuing decline. Tens of millions of believers in the Rapture are white, blue collar, or service workers who see good jobs being peeled away by automation and global offshoring. Their industrial world â?? of union-protected, plentiful, well-paid, secure jobs for them and their children â?? has come to an end. And the end can appear suddenly. A factory closes. A company downsizes. A house is foreclosed. A Supreme Court suddenly permits gay marriage.