World Without End

Photo by Sarah Altendorf via Flickr. Licensed under CC.

On my first visit to my husband’s childhood home in Western Kentucky—after I got the tour of the house, the yard, and the garden—we paused on the deck overlooking the waves of tall, undulating grasses. Colin nudged his father: “Aren’t you going to show her the bunker?”

I’d been told about the bunker—a basement converted into a survivalist’s dream. We walked down a flight of stairs and into a room lined with shelves of canned food, five-gallon drums of water, flashlights and walkie-talkies, shotguns and hunting rifles and crossbows, and enough home-brewed beer to ride out the world’s end buzzed, surrounded by taxidermied turkeys preserved in mid-flight across the basement walls. 

In bed that night, I asked Colin, in a whisper, whether his dad had believed the world would end with Y2K. 

“No,” he said, “It’s more recent than that.” Above us, his childhood bedroom ceiling glowed with the light of a hundred stick-on stars. “It’s kind of an Obama re-election, they’re-gonna-take-our-guns, NRA-Fox News-apocalypse type thing.”

My husband grew up attending an evangelical church, listening to Christian rock, and ornamenting himself with hemp jewelry strung with tiny crosses. He has described to me a frequent occurrence from his youth: getting out of the shower and toweling off in the bathroom, he’d become aware of an eerie silence. Wandering through the empty rooms, he’d find his mother’s laundry folded on the bed, his father’s sandwich half-eaten on the kitchen counter, his sister vanished from the room where she had been playing, her toys scattered across her bedroom.

In those moments, he settled on the most obvious explanation for the empty house. “They’d all been raptured,” he told me, “and I’d been left behind.”

Until we moved to Memphis last year, my husband and I lived far away from our families and felt even farther from the faith traditions of our childhoods. But since moving closer to home, the religious beliefs we were raised with seem to be floating to the surface of our daily lives.

We compare notes constantly, and find that our experiences growing up in the church seem almost entirely unrelated. From my perspective as the daughter of a Methodist preacher, my husband’s evangelical upbringing seems an alien thing, distorted and strange. I’d never even heard of the rapture, growing up, and would never have assumed an empty house meant I’d been abandoned, left behind, for God to judge or damn. 

I’ve often wondered what effect it would have on a child—or