Christians Are Supposed to Be Left Behind
This morning, I finally got around to reading 404Mediaʻs piece on Christians and AI slop, when I came across this curious line: “The fear among Christians is that if they don't immediately jump onto a technology they're going to be left behind.”
This is a true statement about (certain) Christians, but is curious when we theologize about the “left behind” part.
The phrase “left behind” is a loaded phrase in (certain) Christian circles. It largely entered the evangelical sphere in the 1970s as a result of a truly weird (and kinda great) evangelical horror film (you read that correctly) entitled A Thief In the Night. The film opens with a theme song entitled “I Wish Weʻd All Been Ready” by Larry Norman, an evangelical artist that Andrew Beaujon describes as “profoundly weird” in his book on Christian rock, Body Piercing Saved My Life. The song features a refrain well-known to my generation of evangelicals: “Thereʻs no time/ to change your mind/ the Son has come/ and youʻve been left behind.” This lyric, and its association with A Thief in the Night, eventually led to it inspiring the title of another series of books and films well-known to (certain) Christians: the infamous Left Behind series.
They even got Nic Cage in one of them!
The origin of the phrase “left behind” in this case originates from the Matthean Apocalypse, a small section of Matthewʻs gospel where Jesus reveals (what the term “apocalypse” actually means) a prophecy of the future:
At that time there will be two men in the field. One will be taken and the other left. Two women will be grinding at the mill. One will be taken and the other left. Therefore, stay alert! You don’t know what day the Lord is coming. (Matthew 24:40-42, Common English Bible)
This passage is first thing one sees in the film A Thief in the Night and summarizes the gist of contemporary evangelical theology regarding the end-of-all-things: one day, without warning, Christ will appear in the heavens and in an instant call all Christians (first the dead, then those still living) into the clouds and take them off to heaven (an event known as the Rapture), leaving behind those who did not accept Jesus as savior to suffer through something known as the Great Tribulation, in a world ruled by a figure called the Antichrist. So, for a couple of generations now, evangelicals have been utterly terrified of the concept of being “left behind.”
The 404Media article rightly notes that evangelical Christians have consistently been at the cutting edge of new media technologies. This is because, owing to the immediacy of Rapture theology, there is an impetus for ensuring that the “gospel” gets proclaimed to as many people as possible in order to ensure that as many people as possible can escape the Great Tribulation. However, this immediacy cuts in a different direction as well, experienced also by the evangelical obsession with “relevance.” If the goal of being on the bleeding edge of technology is to “win” as many souls as possible, then this becomes a numbers game. The result recasts the church in the image of modern capitalistic businesses focused on growth for growth's sake. As such, the fear of being “left behind” is both a fear for one's own soul, but also a fear of losing influence in a capitalistic marketplace—which is perhaps why there's so much fear over the “decline” of the Church in the Western (read capitalistic) world.
But here's the thing: the entire notion is the result of a profound misreading of Matthew's gospel, one that is so painfully obvious to border on oblivious. You see, Jesus wants us to be “left behind.”
Take a look at the relevant passage in a bit wider context:
As it was in the time of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Human One. In those days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark. They didn’t know what was happening until the flood came and swept them all away. The coming of the Human One will be like that. At that time there will be two men in the field. One will be taken and the other left. Two women will be grinding at the mill. One will be taken and the other left. Therefore, stay alert! You don’t know what day the Lord is coming. But you understand that if the head of the house knew at what time the thief would come, he would keep alert and wouldn’t allow the thief to break into his house. Therefore, you also should be prepared, because the Human One will come at a time you don’t know. (Matthew 24:37-44, Common English Bible—note also that the title of A Theif in the Night comes from this passage)
So Jesus uses Noah as His reference point here. And what happened with Noah? Well, according to Genesis, he built a boat called an ark because God forewarned him that a global flood was coming. He gathered animals from all over the world and put them on the boat so that they would be preserved and then he and his family entered the boat and awaited the rain. Eventually the flood waters came and did what flood waters do: they swept everyone else away. And so, who was left behind? Noah, the righteous man, and his family.
Somewhere along the way, the image of this story was inverted in order to fit with Rapture theology. In the Rapture re-telling, the righteous believers are swept away and the wicked are left behind.
In some ways, elements of the evangelical view remain (someone is on the wrong side of event and so, as with fortifying a house to prevent a thief from stealing, the evangelical impulse to prevent calamity from befalling others is still valid). However, the thrust of the view drastically changes. It's less about keeping ahead of the floodwaters and more about riding out the storm.
The problem with the fear of being left behind, in both terms of salvation and society, is that it fosters numerous problems for Christianity. The constant need to be relevant and keeping up with societal innovation winds up leading the Church to easily abandon crucial traditions, traditions that make Christianity intelligible, as well as leaving room for dangerous heresies and abuses to take root. As I wrote recently, the abandoning of tradition frequently leads to monstrous behaviors on behalf of people.
Saint Paul writes to the church in Ephesus:
God’s goal is for us to become mature adults—to be fully grown, measured by the standard of the fullness of Christ. As a result, we aren’t supposed to be infants any longer who can be tossed and blown around by every wind that comes from teaching with deceitful scheming and the tricks people play to deliberately mislead others. (Ephesians 4:13-14, Common English Bible)
I believe that the reason so many of us Christians wind up getting taken in by charlatans and swindlers is due to us allowing a fear of being left behind to define us. And so we wind up getting caught in the floodwaters of our contemporary chaos, being “tossed and blown around.” No, as the old hymn declares, “On Christ the solid rock I stand.” Our vocation as Christians is to be a steady presence that represents God through Christ to the world. We're not supposed to be chasing the latest trend, even if we dress it up in church-y language and saying that it is God's work.
I went through seminary and was ordained in the midst of social media's advent. I was taught, over and over, that I had a certain obligation to use sites like Facebook for the sake of saving the Church from decline because “that's where people are now.” Then it was Twitter, Snapchat, then Instagram, then TikTok... The irony is that I was being taught this by people who loathed the excesses of modern capitalism and declared the importance of environmental stewardship but who never once seemed bothered by the fact that telling every congregation and priest to have a Facebook account was doing little more than furthering the wealth addiction of people like Mark Zuckerberg—not to mention exhausting us with the constant need to keep up and guilting us with FOMO nonsense—while also leading to the obscene levels of resource consumption resulting from ever increasing data center construction.
For too long the Church has let itself be defined by fear. Fear of being left behind, and all the many ways that that idea can cut. But the scriptures remind us of a truth: “perfect love casts out fear.”
There is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear, because fear expects punishment. The person who is afraid has not been made perfect in love. (I John 4:18, Common English Bible)
If we truly love God and want His love to extend through us to others, for the sake of the gospel and making new Christians, then we cannot be fearful—of being left behind or anything else. A first step for remembering this is accepting that we know the end: we're supposed to be left behind. Once we accept that, we're free.
The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.