"The evaporation of 4 million who believe this crap would leave the world an instantly better place."

• Poet Andrei Condrescu's 1996 comment on NPR regarding a pamphlet he was handed by a street preacher in New Orleans, which described how believers in the "rapture", supposedly more than 4 million people, will depart from Earth in less than a fifth of a second when that event occurs.

Pete (not his real name), was a classmate of mine in my senior year of high school. He was a friendly, bright and ebullient kind of guy. We used to hang out in the schoolyard, the school library or wherever, and talk about everything from then-president Nixon to the kind of meat they were using in sandwiches in the school cafeteria (he was convinced that it was roadkill, I had no reason to disagree with him). Then one fateful day, unbeknown to me, Pete was approached (or should that be “accosted”?) by a gaggle of what were then called “Jesus freaks”. Now, back in the 1970's that term could have applied to anyone from the garden-variety long-haired freaks of that day who simply used the New Testament as a spiritual tool the way others back then might have used Hindu or Buddhist philosophy, to hate-filled, unquestioningly-obedient, know-nothings who had more in common with today's “religious” right. This was after all the golden age of cults and the charismatic, cynical opportunists who ran them.

Less than a week after I'd last seen Pete, he had changed. Gone was the likeable and smart kid I used to casually hobnob with. In his place was a mean, willfully ignorant zombie. The sparkle in his eyes was missing. His speaking voice was now a virtual monotone bordering on an angry growl. And the only thing he ever cared to talk about was saving my soul, or that of anyone else who wouldn't shut him up.

It was from Pete that I first learned of the Rapture. He told me that during the Rapture, which he assured me was going to happen any day now, he and others like himself would be instantaneously whisked off the planet to meet their Main Man in midair while poor sinners like myself and the rest of my classmates would be left down here on Earth to endure an icky chain of events called the Tribulation.

Fast-forward to many, many years after Pete and I parted ways, to 30 years after Reverend Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority engineered the Republican Party's post-Watergate comeback and started the chain of events which would turn that party from America's conservative wing into an ungodly fusion of crypto-(or not-so-crypto-) fascism and medieval theocracy, It almost seems like my country has had an encounter with the same kinds of people who spiritually mugged Pete and left him a mere shadow of the person he was. An alarming number of Americans are subscribing to well-financed and organized religious (or quasi-religious) movements which are evidently quite serious about turning the clock back not to the 1950's, the golden age which conservatives of the recent past got all misty-eyed about whenever the longhairs got a little unruly, but all the way back to the Middle Ages, when it was sheer blasphemy to question a king who after all had been appointed by God and sacrilege to practice science which conflicted with church dogma, when holy wars and witch hunts were the order of the day.

Did the Jesus Freaks of the 1970's become the religious-rightists of today? Who knows? Actually, the more important question is, what can we do about the religio-political threats which we now face and more importantly, what will we do, before it's too late?