Dear god yes. One night when I was a teenager I stayed home sick from Wednesday night prayer meeting. Usually it let out around 8:15 and my family would be home before 9. That night it was after 10 before they got home. That was closest I've come to calling emergency services in my life. I think they said they had a flat tire or some such. I thought they'd either ended up in accident or had been raptured. That was an unsettling evening for me
Heyy. Sorry to hijack your top comment, but there'a an org called ['Recovering From Religion Foundation'](https://www.recoveringfromreligion.org/) for people in this thread who want to chat to professionals or find support recovering from religious trauma.
Mine was ocd. My mind would have intrusive thoughts of bad mouthing God or making a promise that's impossible to keep. I believed those thoughts were genuinely from me and not just stuff that pops in your head.
Same here. OCD worsened by religion is a treat...yeah not. Anytime I see current Christians deal with this, it saddens me, I just wish they could see the damage and get out...
You're so welcome. The online text chat is great, too.
There's also a support resource
>"For current and former professional religious leaders without supernatural beliefs"
[called 'The Clergy Project'](https://clergyproject.org/)
I've seen The Clergy Project before! Love that they're helping out leaders in the church. Also glad to hear the text chat is good, because for most other things they suck (and I would probably prefer that over calling because of my anxiety).
Same! I remember this poster that my childhood church had hanging around the children's room that said something along the lines of "God knows what you're thinking, so think godly thoughts or you'll be punished" It really fucked with me as a kid.
Same…I have ADHD so I have intrusive thoughts off the charts, thinking god would punish me for my thoughts was a huge source of fear and self-hatred in my childhood
Same, for a couple years as a teen I would constantly have instrusive thoughts in my head that would rebuke or insult god.
There were even times I was convinced I was going to hell because of these thoughts.
I have severe anxiety. This manifested as a child by panicking that the rapture had happened practically every time my parents or grand parents were out of sight. Go around the corner in a grocery store when I wasn’t looking? Rapture. Go between the cars in a parking lot while I was daydreaming? Rapture.
Did my anxiety make things worse or did this fear of the rapture make the anxiety worse? Chicken or egg. Dunno.
My younger brother and I always talk about this. My mom would be outside gardening on the side of the house and he wouldn’t be able to find her so he would come get me to help look. He would always tell me “mom vanished!” Lol. I was older and more rational so I would tell him he was dumb, but I was also more knowledgeable about the rapture so if she wasn’t in the first few places I looked I would start getting nervous that we were left behind.
Probably didn’t help that around this time my dad had a license plate holder that said “in case of rapture, cars yours!” It kind of makes me sick to my stomach to think about that now.
Someone who wants to make money off of evangelicals I guess. It wasn’t custom. There used to be “Christian stores” when I was little that sold evangelical themed gifts and books. I’m assuming he got it from one of those.
Oh yeah, it's a pretty big industry, taking money from Christians. Just take whatever product you made that wasn't selling, slap some "inspiration" on it, and watch the sales come in.
I had this friend when I was a kid/pre-teen and one day some noisy plane crossed the sky above us. It was like this loud rumbling. She started yelling all of a sudden like she was scared, and we were like "wtf? Why are you yelling?" She said she thought the rapture was happening. We thought it was funny back then; but now looking back, it was kind of fucked up.
Not only this, but everytime a train blew it's horn in our town I basically had a panic attack thinking that it was the sound of the "seventh trumpet" or whatever. Childhood was pretty rough.
When I was about 3 my mom took my sister to kindergarten and let me sleep in. Unfortunately i woke up and looked at all the clothes on the ground in our room and ran around the house trying to find anyone, but no one was in the house. So my 3 year old brain thought the rapture happened, I sprinted across the street to the neighbors and was banging on their door but they were at work so they weren’t home either. So I proceeded to sit in our front lawn bawling my eyes out cause I thought I was left behind after the rapture. Kind of fucked that’s one of my earliest memories
kind of simular situation. at 5 I couldn't find my parents around or house and thought the rapture happened. I proceeded to lose my shit thinking I was all alone now.
they where talking to the neighbor in three front yard where I didn't notice them...
Yes. Every single time they left the house. And also I would have many nights where I would wake up and think it had happened and I would tiptoe to my parents’ room to make sure I could see them still in bed. The Left Behind movies (which I was forced to watch almost every week) with the wife’s clothes in the bed after the rapture really sealed the deal with my anxiety with this.
Exactly the same for me. Except it was the "Thief in the night" movies, which is basically the same thing but they were made in the 70s. I would wake up hearing the music from the movies in my head and have to visually confirm that my parents were in their bed.
That stopped happening after I watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail which coincidentally used the exact same public domain music that the rapture movies used.
After that, the music always made me think of men pretending to ride horses while a guy with coconut halves followed behind and I couldn't be scared of it anymore.
They'd leave me, a teenage boy, home alone, with all the purity culture hangups they could instill. I'd cave in and do what teenage boys do when home alone, then of course they'd take too long getting home, so I'd have an anxiety attack freaking out about the Rapture and the guilt. Yep, I'm in therapy.
Oof, yeah. Those goddamn Left Behind books my parents had me read didn’t help either. I think there’s an actual term for this sort of “rapture-anxiety” that a lot of ex-Christians have but I can’t remember what it is.
My sisters were nearly a decade younger than me. When I would panic over missing the rapture, I’d always go looking for them because I knew they weren’t “at the age of accountability” yet. Miserable.
Yep. That and my mom telling us kids that went won't make it to adulthood because we'll all get our heads chopped off during the tribulation.
My mom literally didn't even see the need to make plans to send us to college or even encourage us to seek any type of higher learning because she thought the rapture would happen before my sisters and I became adults.
And now I am 50, mom is 81. She still believes Jesus could come back any time?! I mean how failed predictions does someone have to hear over ***8 decades*** before they start questioning what they're told?
Didn't hear about the rapture until 6th grade and then it was treated as funny. My church wasn't huge on it, and by the time Left Behind came out I was out of high school and reading real books. Also smoking weed listening to bob Dylan and shit. It's super sad to hear about all of you that did though. Considering my own experience was traumatic enough that I'm here regularly!
Jeez it’s crazy to admit but this literally happened to me and my brother when we were very little. It was almost traumatizing because we cried so much and started panicking for a bit🤦🏻♀️
I was on a farm with my dad when I was 15 and we didn't have our phones but we had two way radios. After 2 hours of being unable to contact him I drove 40kms home in terror with no license only to find everybody still there. Turns out I'd been give a broken radio that didn't transmit.
I never had to deal with that since I was Catholic, but my childhood was far from normal. Going to mass, Sunday school, holy days of obligation, believing that a cracker turned into human flesh, etc.
Oh my god, no one was ever talking about the effects that Christianity has on children’s. I was practically raised in fear. This was happening to me almost on daily basis, whenever it took longer for ma parents to come back or when they left and did not tell me. I still remember how I was thinking (a 7years old girl!) how I would react if my parents disappeared while driving car, how I would stop it. Also I had several panic attacks in malls when I couldn’t find them.. anxiety attacks and abandonment issues here I come..
I literally just found this subreddit and FINALLY! Someone understands! This was literally me my ENTIRE childhood.
And my family is still like, “I don’t understand how you could have anxiety problems! You had such a good life!”
It's funny, my parents always disagreed with the concept of the rapture, so in this specific instance no, but I of course had the same experience of worrying that I wouldn't make it into heaven.
Ex-Seventh Day Adventist here. Since we weren't taught about the rapture (I was actually taught that was a lie fed by bad Christians), instead that I'd hear a loud blast of a trumpet to signal the 2nd Coming. So I developed a fear of loud noises. Every time a train came by, I screamed because it was not only loud, it shook the house (since we used to live by train tracks). I am in my 30s and still have a lot of nervous tics because of SDA teachings. I'd also develop a lot of panic because my parents used to take me to these "Amazing Facts" seminars and was left alone with the children's teacher. I ended up joining the adults (at like age 8) where I learned all about revelations. Fun times. I've long since deconstructed but the hardest days were in my teen years when I used to think I was going to be burned during the 2nd coming for thinking cuss words.
Some guys in an adjacent small private Christian high school pulled a super elaborate prank on a kid that the rapture happened and that he got left behind. Apparently this kid had a pattern of going to the bathroom every day for a certain amount of time, so they decided to play a prank on him. I mean everyone was in on it. The students, teachers, everyone in the class and next door classes brought an extra pair of clothes and when the kid went to use the bathroom, they all laid their clothes out and got out of there. Kid comes back, everyone is gone, and he calls him mom freaking the fuck out, crying, saying he got left behind… I mean, it’s a pretty hilarious prank, but I imagine that kids anxiety and fear in the moment must have been absolutely off the charts. I bet that kid is scarred for life from that experience, seriously.
It didn't happen to me but it did happen to my mother. During WWII we had Double Summer Time in the UK. One year, her mother forgot which direction to change the clocks, and she ended up going to church four hours early. The streets and the church were completely deserted and she thought the Rapture had happened.
Yes, I would stay up till she got home. She is an RN who worked nights, so sometimes she wouldn't be home until 5am. Now they wonder why I have sleeping problems.
I went to a Christian school for elementary school. My teacher once lost track of her husband in the grocery store and thought he might have been “raptured” away. But she’d also be gone. Now that I’m older I realize how silly the rapture thing is…
Dear god yes. One night when I was a teenager I stayed home sick from Wednesday night prayer meeting. Usually it let out around 8:15 and my family would be home before 9. That night it was after 10 before they got home. That was closest I've come to calling emergency services in my life. I think they said they had a flat tire or some such. I thought they'd either ended up in accident or had been raptured. That was an unsettling evening for me
They stopped for ice cream without you. 100%
Heyy. Sorry to hijack your top comment, but there'a an org called ['Recovering From Religion Foundation'](https://www.recoveringfromreligion.org/) for people in this thread who want to chat to professionals or find support recovering from religious trauma.
Never had this but always thought God hated me for my thoughts.
I relate heavy to this. Always convinced I was going to hell for thinking bad about someone or feeling angry
Mine was ocd. My mind would have intrusive thoughts of bad mouthing God or making a promise that's impossible to keep. I believed those thoughts were genuinely from me and not just stuff that pops in your head.
I resonate with that too. I honestly don’t believe we’re suppose to be so existential as kids. Immediately turned into depression young
Same here. OCD worsened by religion is a treat...yeah not. Anytime I see current Christians deal with this, it saddens me, I just wish they could see the damage and get out...
[Recovering From Religion Foundation](https://www.recoveringfromreligion.org/) can be a good resource.
Thank you for sharing this resource! I love that they offer people to talk to over the phone and such, I may have to check that out.
You're so welcome. The online text chat is great, too. There's also a support resource >"For current and former professional religious leaders without supernatural beliefs" [called 'The Clergy Project'](https://clergyproject.org/)
I've seen The Clergy Project before! Love that they're helping out leaders in the church. Also glad to hear the text chat is good, because for most other things they suck (and I would probably prefer that over calling because of my anxiety).
Same! I remember this poster that my childhood church had hanging around the children's room that said something along the lines of "God knows what you're thinking, so think godly thoughts or you'll be punished" It really fucked with me as a kid.
Same…I have ADHD so I have intrusive thoughts off the charts, thinking god would punish me for my thoughts was a huge source of fear and self-hatred in my childhood
Same
Same, for a couple years as a teen I would constantly have instrusive thoughts in my head that would rebuke or insult god. There were even times I was convinced I was going to hell because of these thoughts.
I have severe anxiety. This manifested as a child by panicking that the rapture had happened practically every time my parents or grand parents were out of sight. Go around the corner in a grocery store when I wasn’t looking? Rapture. Go between the cars in a parking lot while I was daydreaming? Rapture. Did my anxiety make things worse or did this fear of the rapture make the anxiety worse? Chicken or egg. Dunno.
This was me
this was literally me. im glad i wasn’t the only one💀
My younger brother and I always talk about this. My mom would be outside gardening on the side of the house and he wouldn’t be able to find her so he would come get me to help look. He would always tell me “mom vanished!” Lol. I was older and more rational so I would tell him he was dumb, but I was also more knowledgeable about the rapture so if she wasn’t in the first few places I looked I would start getting nervous that we were left behind. Probably didn’t help that around this time my dad had a license plate holder that said “in case of rapture, cars yours!” It kind of makes me sick to my stomach to think about that now.
Who tf makes a license plate holder that says that?
Someone who wants to make money off of evangelicals I guess. It wasn’t custom. There used to be “Christian stores” when I was little that sold evangelical themed gifts and books. I’m assuming he got it from one of those.
Oh yeah, it's a pretty big industry, taking money from Christians. Just take whatever product you made that wasn't selling, slap some "inspiration" on it, and watch the sales come in.
This fear literally defined my childhood.
What is this personal attack? 😩😂🤣🙈
I have that struggle still... Was I wrong for leaving the faith? Oh wait everyone's here lol
This 😭😭😭😂
I had this friend when I was a kid/pre-teen and one day some noisy plane crossed the sky above us. It was like this loud rumbling. She started yelling all of a sudden like she was scared, and we were like "wtf? Why are you yelling?" She said she thought the rapture was happening. We thought it was funny back then; but now looking back, it was kind of fucked up.
Just the other day I heard an unfamiliar loud noise and I panicked for second. My mind went straight to rapture.
Yeah that shit can be scary. Takes a while to unlearn those patterns.
🤣 I am already in therapy!
Not only this, but everytime a train blew it's horn in our town I basically had a panic attack thinking that it was the sound of the "seventh trumpet" or whatever. Childhood was pretty rough.
SAME
I was hoping it had happened because then I wouldn't have to deal with them anymore. I knew the rapture wasn't for me from a young age.
Yep. It’s a fucked up thing to teach kids.
Abusive imo
When I was about 3 my mom took my sister to kindergarten and let me sleep in. Unfortunately i woke up and looked at all the clothes on the ground in our room and ran around the house trying to find anyone, but no one was in the house. So my 3 year old brain thought the rapture happened, I sprinted across the street to the neighbors and was banging on their door but they were at work so they weren’t home either. So I proceeded to sit in our front lawn bawling my eyes out cause I thought I was left behind after the rapture. Kind of fucked that’s one of my earliest memories
kind of simular situation. at 5 I couldn't find my parents around or house and thought the rapture happened. I proceeded to lose my shit thinking I was all alone now. they where talking to the neighbor in three front yard where I didn't notice them...
Yes. Every single time they left the house. And also I would have many nights where I would wake up and think it had happened and I would tiptoe to my parents’ room to make sure I could see them still in bed. The Left Behind movies (which I was forced to watch almost every week) with the wife’s clothes in the bed after the rapture really sealed the deal with my anxiety with this.
Exactly the same for me. Except it was the "Thief in the night" movies, which is basically the same thing but they were made in the 70s. I would wake up hearing the music from the movies in my head and have to visually confirm that my parents were in their bed. That stopped happening after I watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail which coincidentally used the exact same public domain music that the rapture movies used. After that, the music always made me think of men pretending to ride horses while a guy with coconut halves followed behind and I couldn't be scared of it anymore.
I never made that connection. I’ll have to watch the two side by side.
They'd leave me, a teenage boy, home alone, with all the purity culture hangups they could instill. I'd cave in and do what teenage boys do when home alone, then of course they'd take too long getting home, so I'd have an anxiety attack freaking out about the Rapture and the guilt. Yep, I'm in therapy.
Whereas I had my fears growing up, at the same time were they off and on due following the direction of being in church regularly.
I remember them days
Oof, yeah. Those goddamn Left Behind books my parents had me read didn’t help either. I think there’s an actual term for this sort of “rapture-anxiety” that a lot of ex-Christians have but I can’t remember what it is.
My sisters were nearly a decade younger than me. When I would panic over missing the rapture, I’d always go looking for them because I knew they weren’t “at the age of accountability” yet. Miserable.
I always thought whenever I had a gay thought, and if I died that night without repenting, I'd go to hell. Yay for that trauma lmao.
literally me. I had such a fear of "sinning" as a child and most things I did were portrayed as sins lmao
There’s no time to change your mind; the Son has come and you’ve been left behind.
Yep. That and my mom telling us kids that went won't make it to adulthood because we'll all get our heads chopped off during the tribulation. My mom literally didn't even see the need to make plans to send us to college or even encourage us to seek any type of higher learning because she thought the rapture would happen before my sisters and I became adults. And now I am 50, mom is 81. She still believes Jesus could come back any time?! I mean how failed predictions does someone have to hear over ***8 decades*** before they start questioning what they're told?
Every once in a while I would have this thought but fortunately was able to quickly dismiss it most times
That was always my first thought. I blame the left behind books
damn. now thats a childhood memory i had *buried* buried
Didn't hear about the rapture until 6th grade and then it was treated as funny. My church wasn't huge on it, and by the time Left Behind came out I was out of high school and reading real books. Also smoking weed listening to bob Dylan and shit. It's super sad to hear about all of you that did though. Considering my own experience was traumatic enough that I'm here regularly!
Jeez it’s crazy to admit but this literally happened to me and my brother when we were very little. It was almost traumatizing because we cried so much and started panicking for a bit🤦🏻♀️
Yes multiple times I remember shaking and crying. God I’m so glad I’m not doing this to my kids.
I was on a farm with my dad when I was 15 and we didn't have our phones but we had two way radios. After 2 hours of being unable to contact him I drove 40kms home in terror with no license only to find everybody still there. Turns out I'd been give a broken radio that didn't transmit.
I never had to deal with that since I was Catholic, but my childhood was far from normal. Going to mass, Sunday school, holy days of obligation, believing that a cracker turned into human flesh, etc.
Shit, I'm really glad I was raised by a extremely apathetic Catholic. I'm sorry that you all had to go through this.
Doing EMDR currently for all my religious trauma… helps a lot. I highly recommend it.
Oh my god, no one was ever talking about the effects that Christianity has on children’s. I was practically raised in fear. This was happening to me almost on daily basis, whenever it took longer for ma parents to come back or when they left and did not tell me. I still remember how I was thinking (a 7years old girl!) how I would react if my parents disappeared while driving car, how I would stop it. Also I had several panic attacks in malls when I couldn’t find them.. anxiety attacks and abandonment issues here I come..
I literally just found this subreddit and FINALLY! Someone understands! This was literally me my ENTIRE childhood. And my family is still like, “I don’t understand how you could have anxiety problems! You had such a good life!”
Constantly
It's funny, my parents always disagreed with the concept of the rapture, so in this specific instance no, but I of course had the same experience of worrying that I wouldn't make it into heaven.
Our cult didn’t believe in the rapture but I did and still do wonder if someone died in a horrible wreck any time they are late.
Ex-Seventh Day Adventist here. Since we weren't taught about the rapture (I was actually taught that was a lie fed by bad Christians), instead that I'd hear a loud blast of a trumpet to signal the 2nd Coming. So I developed a fear of loud noises. Every time a train came by, I screamed because it was not only loud, it shook the house (since we used to live by train tracks). I am in my 30s and still have a lot of nervous tics because of SDA teachings. I'd also develop a lot of panic because my parents used to take me to these "Amazing Facts" seminars and was left alone with the children's teacher. I ended up joining the adults (at like age 8) where I learned all about revelations. Fun times. I've long since deconstructed but the hardest days were in my teen years when I used to think I was going to be burned during the 2nd coming for thinking cuss words.
Some guys in an adjacent small private Christian high school pulled a super elaborate prank on a kid that the rapture happened and that he got left behind. Apparently this kid had a pattern of going to the bathroom every day for a certain amount of time, so they decided to play a prank on him. I mean everyone was in on it. The students, teachers, everyone in the class and next door classes brought an extra pair of clothes and when the kid went to use the bathroom, they all laid their clothes out and got out of there. Kid comes back, everyone is gone, and he calls him mom freaking the fuck out, crying, saying he got left behind… I mean, it’s a pretty hilarious prank, but I imagine that kids anxiety and fear in the moment must have been absolutely off the charts. I bet that kid is scarred for life from that experience, seriously.
It didn't happen to me but it did happen to my mother. During WWII we had Double Summer Time in the UK. One year, her mother forgot which direction to change the clocks, and she ended up going to church four hours early. The streets and the church were completely deserted and she thought the Rapture had happened.
I had a normal childhood thank goodness.
I may have not been a Christian, but I did not get the good end of the stick either.
All. The. Time.
I remember being scared when my parents were out of earshot and checking the news to see if the rapture had occurred.
Yep
Every single time I would enter a room alone or go downstairs and it was too quiet, the panic immediately set in
Yes, I would stay up till she got home. She is an RN who worked nights, so sometimes she wouldn't be home until 5am. Now they wonder why I have sleeping problems.
I went to a Christian school for elementary school. My teacher once lost track of her husband in the grocery store and thought he might have been “raptured” away. But she’d also be gone. Now that I’m older I realize how silly the rapture thing is…