r/TrueReddit • u/nationalpost Official Publication • 20d ago
Science, History, Health + Philosophy The apocalypse that never was still haunts generation X
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/colby-cosh-the-apocalypse-that-never-was-still-haunts-generation-x?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=NP_social168
u/TomfromLondon 20d ago
Gen X here, no idea what you're on about
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u/the_real_dairy_queen 20d ago
I am extremely Gen X (lol) and I was never ever worried about or “haunted” by the idea of a rapture. I also don’t believe in rapture. I thought this was going to be about the Cold War, which would have made sense.
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u/libra00 20d ago
There were a LOT of books and cultural wailing and gnashing of teeth about it among evangelicals though, that shit was on Oprah even, so it makes sense to feel like it left a cultural impact even if you personally, as I do, couldn't care less.
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u/MrTubzy 19d ago
Yeah there were a lot of end of the world dates thrown out there. I never took them serious though. And those days have been passed and the world hasn’t ended.
Some of those people felt like grifters. Send us money because the world is ending in six months type of thing.
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u/Norwegian__Blue 19d ago
My friends from the Tx panhandle say they were taught not to worry about recycling or the environment be they’re going to get raptured soon anyways.
So it might just be more noticeable for Bible Belt regions
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u/MrTubzy 19d ago
This was in Utah though. Mormons are huge on the rapture.
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u/Norwegian__Blue 19d ago
Might just be you got family lucky in that one aspect.
My family who's strongly catholic just kinda...skims over revelations. I went to a Catholic school and they cut out revelations after parents got upset at their 5th graders not sleeping, haha.
My mom now watches prosperity gospel, no matter how much I tell her it's not catholic teachings. She likes it.
Whatevs. Not Catholic now. It's all a grift. The first thing to turn me off was "it is right to give him thanks and praise". Bleh.
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u/libra00 19d ago
But I mean there were also books and movies about it, TV shows, the History Channel did whole series on eschatology, etc, so the idea has cultural purchase in our minds even if we're only dimly aware of it.
But yeah, I think a fair number of those people were either pushing it because they had an agenda or hopping on the bandwagon as a way to cash in.
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u/Puzzled-Delivery-242 20d ago
I was going to say. Ive survived many apocalypses so far. But I don't remember this guys name or any of those dates.
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u/GramercyPlace 20d ago
Same
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u/turbo_dude 20d ago
Who is Hal Lindsey?
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u/markth_wi 20d ago edited 20d ago
He was one of the first guys to write about the end of the world as if it was next Tuesday. I really prefer that if you pretend to be rationalist about things, then we talk about the things that can wipe us out in terms of problems that we think we can either solve, not solve , or need to prepare to survive.
Mr. Lindsey does none of that , it's this "we're all gonna die!!!!!" and that's pretty much it, throwing the Apolocalypse of John into a modern context which terrified millions of devout evangelicals.
For my money I almost prefer when some foaming at the mouth Evangelical degenerate like Jim Baker or Jimmy Falwell Jr, who divides his time between begging for my money, working over his harem of pool-boys and then going on television and telling a congregation of 10,000 zealous faithful that everyone else is going to hell unless they give more money, because God told him personally that the Apocalypse is next Tuesday at 3pm....or maybe Next Tuesday, God wasn't entirely specific on the matter.
It didn't help that at the same time, the Evangelicals had become dominant in the Republican Party , for a while there were those in the party that pitched the idea we should fight and try to win a nuclear war against the evildoers in Russia and China - this put a fucking terrifying icing on the already pretty terrifying nuclear arms race that some degenerate Evangelical would premptively attack whomever he wanted.
I can't say as anyone should miss the "good old days". But we still see that sort of garbage float to the top in the GOP soup today - with Glenn Beck or some of the clowns on AM radio talking about purification of evildoers and all that.
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u/bananaboat1milplus 20d ago
Pete Hegseth literally has a jerusalem cross tattoo and wants to retake the middle east in a holy war.
In islam that's called jihad.
Pete hegseth is a christian jihadist.
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u/markth_wi 20d ago
He also evident bowed out and went for rehab because just the fucking preamble to Trump 2.0 was too much, and frankly , I can't say as I disagree.
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u/markth_wi 20d ago
Which can be read as anyone not totally into whatever dogshit Richard Spencer is wishing everyone would eat today.
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u/trash-juice 20d ago
Ooo, Ooo, Ooo, I got this Mr,Koter, he’s the guy who wrote ‘The Late, Great, Planet Earth’, the ads used to show up on UHF - the tv band not Weird Al’s movie …
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u/myloveisajoke 19d ago
I don't know about a religious rapture but....
...8 year old me would be disappointed in late 40s me working a corporate job instead of running around a post nuclear war wasteland in a hockey mask and asschaps.
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u/clozepin 20d ago
Same. No idea who this is or what he was on about. New to me. And I loved a good conspiracy back on the day.
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u/Turkatron2020 17d ago
This should be aimed at Boomers- gen x notoriously gives zero fucks about anything lol
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u/mittenthemagnificent 20d ago
This is actually quite interesting. I wasn’t aware of this man or his book growing up, but the doomsday mentality of evangelical Christians was evident then and is even more evident now. Thank you for pointing me to one source of their bullshit ideology.
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u/SomeCountryFriedBS 19d ago edited 19d ago
I read a lot of his and John Hagee's books as a youth group kid.
Then I was a 9/11 conspiracist.
Then I was into Ron Paul.
Then I grew a brain.
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u/BathingInSoup 20d ago
The author seems to mistakenly believe that all gen X grew up in the Bible Belt or that those kinds of backward evangelical Christian views were pervasive everywhere, rather than only of the provincial zealots of a particular region.
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u/kittenpantzen 20d ago
Until I clicked the link, I thought this article was going to be about the way that growing up in the cold war fucked with us long term...
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u/slfnflctd 19d ago
provincial zealots of a particular region
They may not have existed in all regions, and were likely in the minority in the regions where they did, but this was definitely a nationwide US phenomenon and still is. The Left Behind book series has sold 80 million plus copies.
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u/BillionTonsHyperbole 19d ago
The Left Behind book series has sold 80 million plus copies.
Apparently that was the last time these folks bothered to read a book.
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u/BathingInSoup 19d ago
I’m highly skeptical of that number. I wonder if it’s similar to the surprisingly high sales numbers of L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics book.
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u/linuxgeekmama 20d ago
This was NOT what I expected when I clicked on this link. I thought it was going to be about fear of nuclear war, not crazy rapture predictions.
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u/FunnyItWorkedLastTim 20d ago
GenX here. I do remember this guy and the name of the book, but don't remember taking it very seriously. Was more worried about the possibility of Ronald Reagan just deciding to launch and see what happens.
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u/GloriousDawn 20d ago
Expectation: given the title and picture, some thoughtful essay about how growing up in the early '80s and the Cold War revival left a mark on our psyche, finding echoes in the current escalation of regional wars and the specter of nuclear war coming back 40 years later to haunt Gen X.
Reality: some pseudo-religious garbage from an author i never heard of.
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u/PmMeYourUnclesAnkles 20d ago
Don't know about the US, but we euro gen X have no clue about this stuff. There was some fear about a nuclear war with Russia (then USSR) that evaporated in the late 80's but it seemed less likely then than now. But that evangelical stuff... No clue about it.
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u/mars_titties 20d ago
As a European you’re probably aware of various strains of American brain rot, and this column describes one of them. This type of thinking is influential in America and has coloured its foreign policy in ways that affect the Middle East and Europe
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u/the_real_dairy_queen 20d ago
And yet the Americans here have never heard of it… not disputing that many types of brain rot exist in the US and everywhere but, considering nobody has heard of this one, it’s not a good example.
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u/Logan7Identify 19d ago
I think Gen Xers were more concerned about the outcome of a full nuclear exchange, which we came close to accidentally on a few occasions. The outcomes portrayed in Threads and The Day After weren't too far from a possibility.
No sky fairy antics required.
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u/No-Day-5964 20d ago
This is funny. I’m always chastised by the youth who freak out when Putin says “nukes”. Everyone in our generation is so numb to this by now that we are all like “meh, go ahead”
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u/linuxgeekmama 20d ago
I freaked out the first few times Pootin said nukes. By the thousandth time, I started to think that maybe, just maybe, this was a little like the boy who cried wolf.
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u/accountforfurrystuf 20d ago
even if he did it's not like we can do anything besides wait for an alert on our phone telling us we have T minus 3 minutes to get as far away as possible. I don't even have a basement I'm cooked lol.
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u/NewPresWhoDis 20d ago
I mean the prospect of never having to hear or see some Ivy League masked brain dead Gen Zoid drone on from some TikTok manifesto makes me go "Apocalypse? Now! (Please!)"
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u/egypturnash 20d ago edited 20d ago
I was born right in the middle of the span of time that gets labeled "Generation X" and I have never heard of this person or his books and theories. Maybe if I'd been raised in some form of Christianity I would have encountered it? Hell if I know.
I feel like I'm pretty done with giving a fuck about the nuclear apocalypse I was expecting this to be about, too. I don't think a single one of the houses Ive lived in was outside of the expected "instant cinder" zone of anyone's map of likely nuclear targets. I'll know there's a war on when I'm suddenly standing in a charred pit, wondering why I feel like I should be freaking out, but am not, until I look down and realize I'm dead. There is not a single fucking thing I can do about this possibility.
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u/Sad_Yam_1330 19d ago
I miss polar bears.
...and the spotted owl.
...or having an ozone.
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u/kitterkatty 19d ago
I miss snow. Going on two years without a proper winter up here northern US close to Canada and some kid in shorts was being obnoxious at the grocery store. Winter is supposed to get rid of bugs. Instead it’s only dark sooner so the worst come out early.
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u/SimilarElderberry956 19d ago
The internet has changed how we feel about bible prophecy. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unfulfilled_Christian_religious_predictions
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u/archbid 20d ago
Not a thing. GenX here.
I vaguely remember the name, but the apocalypse was not something we worried about. Not sure where this came from.
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u/bliprock 20d ago
Maybe you didn’t but I did. Grew up reading where the wind blows and movies like the day after the tv show threads. The fear was real
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u/nationalpost Official Publication 20d ago edited 20d ago
In this column, Colby Cosh reflects on the legacy of the influential evangelizing author Hal Lindsey, whose end-of-the-world version of Christianity were inescapable for a generation that grew up in the shadow of the Cold War. Lindsey's ideas, he argues, still linger today.
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u/BinkertonQBinks 20d ago
Kinda reaching there to include a whole generation when you call the guy an evangelical. That’s disingenuous of you. This didn’t haunt gen X it haunts evangelicals
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u/OutlandishnessOk7997 20d ago
More like the war where there was no weapons of mass destruction. How can anyone forget.
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u/Resident-Cattle9427 20d ago
The world’s press took relatively little note of this, even though Planet Earth is sometimes said to have been the single best-selling non-fiction book of the 1970s.
Um yeah, I’m gonna need a source on that, please.
According to Ranker, that’s a hard NO IT FUCKING ISN’T.
Not casually on Good Reads, either..
I don’t even see it onTHIS random list site..
So who the hell even is Colby Cosh?
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u/theredhype 20d ago edited 20d ago
It's worth noting that books and music sold through christian bookstores during this era were often not tracked alongside mainstream media, and may have been significantly underreported (if at all). The large religious publishers, distributors, and bookstores simply were not integrated.
And yet, here's the NYTimes saying "“The Late Great Planet Earth” became the best-selling nonfiction book of the 1970s. By some estimates, it sold about 35 million copies by 1999, and was translated into about 50 languages."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/30/books/hal-lindsey-dead.html
Wikipedia records the same numbers, and cites the National Endowment for the Arts as its source, though it's unclear where the data is from.
Anecdotally, having grown up in California around several prominent traditions of protestant / evangelical churches, I can report that Hal Lindsey was very popular and it did seem like everyone had this book.
Also, you realize Goodreads didn't exist back then, right?
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u/OldschoolGreenDragon 20d ago
Millenials experienced two financial apocalypse and are working on a third.
They world may not blow up, but their world already has.
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u/the_real_dairy_queen 20d ago
Other generations were alive through those and other economic recessions. Gen X, being older, have lived through more recessions than Millennials. There was a recession when I graduated college and another as I was finishing grad school. Extra convenient when you are looking for a job!
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u/Nannyphone7 20d ago
If nuclear Armageddon had occurred, we wouldn't be here talking about it.
What percent of humanity histories end with nuclear Armageddon? 1% ? 10 %? 99.9%? It is not possible to say.
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u/NewPresWhoDis 20d ago
It doesn't haunt us as much as make us snicker at Gen Z's propensity to tag any little global skirmish as prelude to WW3
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u/GreenGlassDrgn 19d ago
cold war? y2k? mayan apocalypse? ...oh, the age of Aquarius?
if the US was a single person I think they'd need to get treatment for all that suicidal ideation
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u/louiselyn 19d ago
Besides religion, I think Gen X also got the apocalypse vibe from all the Cold War fears and environmental disaster predictions of the time
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u/Affectionate-Pain74 14d ago
If you are from the south and raised in church, we got threatened with burning in a lake of fire for all eternity for cussing. Jesus has been coming up the drive for over 2000 years.
Well we also lived through the Satanic Panic in the 80’s. The horrors of acid rain (I thought it I would get acid burns if I played in the rain) I was scared, but I played in ditches with water running off the fields they just sprayed defoliant or herbicide on.
We also had the Great New Madrid fault catastrophic Earthquake scare. They predicted the day and closed schools. We had water, flash lights, food and survival supplies stored up. It as on Dec 4. I can’t remember the year. December 5th we went back to school and nobody said anything about it.
I’m really hoping for aliens on my 2025 bingo card. Everything else going on just seems like a rerun of previous events.
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u/BigDamBeavers 19d ago
Dude, I was raised Catholic and Gen X. I've never heard this guy nor ever known a Gen Xer who lost sleep worrying about The End Times. We did Nuclear Attack drills under our school desks. We didn't have energy to worry about your imaginary friend rapturing idiots.
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