Post-Rapture Pet Care

Post-Rapture Pet Care
by J. Michael Utzinger



In a famous quotation, often misattributed to Abraham Lincoln, the Rev. Henry Rowland once preached about the effectiveness of the Gospel on the Christian's conduct claiming that it makes "husbands better husbands, and wives better wives; parents better parents, children better children, masters better masters, and servants better servants; in a word, I would not give a farthing for a man's religion, whose cat and dog were not better for it!" Rowland might have been pleased with the sentiment behind the various post-rapture services offered to evangelicals, whose beloved pets might be "left behind." Kelly briefly mentioned these pet services in her last post, and I became intrigued.

Religious concerns about pets are hardly new for Protestants. Martin Luther, if the Table Talk can be believed, thought there would be dogs in heaven with silver fur and gold tails. Billy Graham's Swedenborgian vision of heaven included dogs and golf. Likewise, post-rapture services for pets existed long before Harold Camping's predictions became part of the recent media frenzy. Modern premillennialists love their pets too. In the words of one online company, After the Rapture Pet Care, the pets of raptured Christians are a real concern, and a legitimate concern. Our pets are given to us by God for us to care for. We are stewards of their lives. Should we simply forget them at the Rapture, allow them to starve or worse? Therefore, they promise immediately after the Rapture that all pets registered with them will receive the following:

1. Our non-Christian administrators will activate our rescue plan.
2. Volunteers will be alerted immediately by email and telephone that they have been activated.
3. Pets will be assigned to our Volunteer Pet Caretakers based upon location and other factors.
4. Our administrators and Volunteer Pet Caretakers will do whatever it takes to find and rescue your pets. If your pet has a location chip, they'll use that, or they'll go to every location you've registered with us, and, if your pets are not at one of those locations, they'll search for your cars as well as stay in contact with the local pet shelters. If they are unable to reach a Volunteer Caretaker in your area for whatever reason, our administrators will communicate with local animal organizations, like the Humane Society, to advocate for your pet's rescue and care.
5. Our administrators will stay in touch with our Volunteer Pet Caretakers regarding each and every pet to be sure everything is being done to rescue and care for them.

If all of the true Christians are raptured, one might well wonder how these services could be guaranteed. The typical answer is found in the FAQ of one company, Eternal Earth-Bound Pets, USA:

Q: How do you ensure your representatives won't be Raptured.
A: Actually, we don't ensure it, they do. Each of our representatives has stated to us in writing that they are atheists, do not believe in God / Jesus, and that they have blasphemed in accordance with Mark 3:29, negating any chance of salvation.



The cost of these services really vary. If premillennialists like anything besides charts it is calculations, so the savvy post-rapture shopper will find that it pays to do some prophetic math:
While there are many monthly subscription plans on the market, flat fee plans seem more reasonable. Eternal Earth-Bound Pets, USA, for example, charges a $135 fee for its services. (They raised the rate earlier this year by $20 because of the large volume of requests that Camping's predictions apparently caused). The pre-tribulationist dispensationist of the Scofield-Lindsey-LaHaye ilk understand that after the rapture there will be seven years before Armageddon. Using Eternal Earth-Bound Pets, USA's services, therefore, will add up to $19.28 per year of care. Of course, the fine print makes clear that the rapture must take place within ten years or your contract will expire. This means that buyers risk spending more if the Lord tarries more than a decade (and there is a precedent for this). However, there is a silver-lining that a portion of the proceeds are donated to area food-banks.

Those pet-lovers following Camping would have a greater annual cost for care. Because the end of the world will be in September, the monthly cost of $33.75. Further, since rapture will come by this Saturday there will be no fear of one's contract expiring. No hidden costs.

With a one-time $10 flat fee After the Rapture Pet Care is the best buy of these pet services. In the meantime you can also purchase gear from their online store, including t-shirts, coffee mugs, and wall clocks (the irony/humor of this last item is not lost on me, especially since it is not clear you can definitively tell what time it is with this clock. I think I may have to order one for myself). Ultimately, one will have to balance cost and risk: the key factor being credibility.

According to an LA Times article, "Entrepreneurs Offer Post-'Rapture' Services," (19 May 2011) there have a been a proliferation of businesses, well beyond pet care, that cater to the needs of premillennialists who are concerned about maintaining their affairs after the rapture. In a very cursory surfing of the web I found post-rapture wills, videos for non-raptured family members, and encrypted document storage and "rapture"-triggered email messaging systems.

Opponents of dispensationalism have often argued that its otherworldly preoccupations lead to quietism. Charles Erdman, long-time professor of practical theology at Princeton Seminary, felt compelled to challenge this view in 1916. A premillennialist himself (though not a dispensationist) he noted that belief in Christ's premillennial second coming compelled people to act concretely in this world because of this belief not in spite of it. Put another way, for believers, the imminent rapture creates one of the parameters that dictate moral behavior in and for this world. Indeed, buying services to warn, alert or care for non-believing family members (whether human or animal) after the rapture is not so much lunacy as reasonable behavior for a true believer. Kelly Baker has reminded us that the rapture is not just "rhetorical and absent but material and present."

The consumption of post-rapture services is a means to concretely express faith and act morally, which in turn reinforces the belief in the rapture and makes it satisfying. Donning a t-shirt that expresses one's belief in the end witnesses to one's faith, while the risking of stigma from non-believers confirms and proves the seriousness of that faith. And Saturday, one might see these beliefs embodied in a variety of interesting ways, maybe even "On the Dance Floor" with Britney Spears or Jennifer Lopez right up "Till the World Ends."

The Lost Soul of Higher Education

by Michael Utzinger

There is a really nice interview with Ellen Schrecker, author of The Lost Soul of Higher Education: Corporatization, the Assault on Academic Freedom, and the End of the American University (The New Press, 2010) by Serena Golden at Inside Higher Ed.

Schrecker highlights, it seems to me, some of the key issues facing higher education today. The questions remain: how can faculty articulate their vocational goals and how do these goals dovetail with their institution’s mission in the current climate? I wonder if Schrecker’s final hopes (quoted below) are possible in a world in which “re-branding” has become the tool of survival, especially at small tuition-driven schools, to reach our potential students, who act and are treated like consumers. The pressures to mold one’s institutional mission in new directions may be especially acute if you are at a small church-related institution, especially if being, say, Methodist does not appear to be a brand that potential students initially find appealing. As colleges and universities increasingly retool their identities and missions in a tough economy, we may need to speak now or forever hold our peace.

Here is a short excerpt from the interview:

For the past 40 years, professors have been abandoning their collective responsibility for maintaining the quality of higher education. Some have been careerist or lazy, but most, I think, are just overwhelmed …

This situation must be reversed; faculty members must return to their traditional role at the heart of the university. They must explain to the public – and to their students and their administrators as well – why their input is essential if American higher education is to meet its current challenges. This reversal will not be accomplished easily; the nation’s faculties face a legacy of more than forty years of demonization by the media and marginalization on their campuses. Collective action – through unions, faculty senates, and organizations like the American Association of University Professors – is crucial. Fortunately, the situation is not yet hopeless. As many administrators admit, faculty members still have considerable clout within their institutions, even if they do not always exercise it. At the same time, as the failure of David Horowitz’s recent campaign against academic freedom revealed, once politicians and the general public understand the real issues involved, they do support the intellectual openness and faculty autonomy that American higher education requires. And, who knows, they might even pay for it.

Psalm 109:8: Trivia or Conspiracy

By Michael Utzinger

With all of the discussion of the midterm elections, I would like to rewind the clock to a bizarre little incident from the ghost of news cycles past. Last November there was a short-lived furor about a bumper sticker that read:

Pray for Obama
Psalm 109:8

When I first saw this bumper sticker, while driving, I naturally went home and looked up the passage in the Bible: “May his days be few, let another assume his office.”

Because I found it moderately clever, I was surprised when the news broke that the websites selling Psalm 109:8 bumper stickers and T-shirts had stopped peddling these wares because the message may have been against the law, a law that bans threatening the President of the United States

The guilty speech in this case was not the verse printed on the bumper sticker (Psalm 109:8) but the verse that follows it in the Bible which reads: “May his children become fatherless, and his wife a widow” (v. 9).

Speaking with some colleagues about this, I admitted that I thought it odd that “Pray for Obama: Psalm 109:8” would be construed as a threat against the President. One colleague disagreed. “You have the read the next verse,” he insisted. “This is clearly a threat.” The implicit argument of my colleague was based upon the claim that the bumper sticker must be interpreted contextually. In other words, Psalm 109:8 can only be understood if it is read with Psalm 109:9. My colleague pressed that these people know their Bible, so they know what they meant.

I have no doubt that they knew what they meant. The problem is: how do “we” know what they meant? For example, what about verse 6? “Appoint an evil man to oppose him; let an accuser stand at his right hand.” (So much for the newest Republican revolution or the Tea Party.) Better yet, in the full context of the Psalm, it appears that verses 6-19 represent the voice of those that oppose the anointed of God, the king, the messiah. Perhaps, the bumper stickers implies those that paste it to their cars are the “accusers” (Satans) mentioned in verse 6? Perhaps, Obama was God’s anointed?

And this, of course, is the rub. Bible verses can be de-contextualized and re-contextualized on a bumper sticker or a shirt or a sign. On what grounds does one verse printed on a bumper sticker carry some or all of the rest of the meaning of the literature from which it was decontextualized?

For example, it is cliché to use John 3:16 in a decontextualized manner: For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever believes in him shall perish but have everlasting life. My experience, however, has been that those that use the verse are completely unaware of verses that follow that speak of the condemnation of those that do not believe. How do I know if the fan in the rainbow wig is inviting me to accept Jesus as my personal savior, warning me that I am potentially hell bound, just an eccentric, or all of the above?

“Pray for Obama: Psalm 109:8” on a bumper sticker, it seems to me, was clearly a bible-believing version of “throw the bum out.” Further, our current president was not the first to be targeted by this Bible verse as Arlen Specter, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton would certainly attest. So, why did this verse attached to Obama make the idea that it constituted a threat seems credible? Perhaps it seemed plausible because the media bombarded us the previous summer with images of the raw anger manifested by individuals within the emerging Tea Party movement and assumed that tea partiers were really populist remnants of the religious right. However, we now know (if little else) that the tea party movements are not primarily a cloaked religious movement of potentially violent evangelicals.

Claims about what the verse meant and why a certain interpretation seems credible at a particular historical moment requires argument and evidence if it is to have validity. This, of course, usually takes more time than a new cycle. However, well after the event is news, it becomes our job as students of American religion to determine if this was simply a trivial misunderstanding or a religious conspiracy to threaten the president.

Religion and the Prince Edward County School Closings

A warm welcome to our newest contributing editor, J. Michael Utzinger!

Michael is Associate Professor of Religion at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia. He is the author of Yet Saints Their Watch Are Keeping: Fundamentalists, Modernists, and the Development of Evangelical Ecclesiology, 1887-1937 (Mercer University Press, 2006). Recently he is writing a biography of the Rev. Dr. Charles R. Erdman (1866-1960), a Presbyterian minister and professor of practical theology at Princeton Seminary and a key figure in the Presbyterian fundamentalist-modernist controversies in the 1920s. He is also recently compelled by the importance of local religious history and the pedagogical problem of assuming the essential connection between religion and violence. Utzinger serves as moderator of the Southeastern Colloquium of American Religious Studies and on the board of the Episcopal Historical Society. He also participates in the College Theology Society’s evangelical-catholic theology consultation.

Michael's first post concerns the 50th anniversary of the closing of schools in Prince Edward County, Virginia, beginning in 1959 and going for five years (an undergraduate student of mine just completed a splendid senior thesis on this subject, which I hope eventually will be published: "Virginia's "Massive Folly": Harry Byrd, Prince Edward County and the Front Line." It is available here). Utzinger reflects on the role of religion in the Prince Edward County saga.

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A Few Reflections on Prince Edward County, Virginia

J. Michael Utzinger

In 1951 R. R. Moton High School students led by Barbara Johns (niece of Rev. Vernon Johns) and John Stokes led a strike for better school facilities for African Americans in Prince Edward County, Virginia. The NAACP represented the students on the condition they would sue for the end of separate but equal education. The Supreme Court ultimately folded the Prince Edward case into Brown v. the Board of Education (1954). On 3 June 1959, when the government mandated the implementation of Brown, the Prince Edward County supervisors chose to stop funding public education for five years. Fifty years to the date, William “Bucky” Fore, stated that closing the schools was “wrong” and apologized on behalf of county “for the pain that was caused, for how those locked doors shattered opportunities and barricaded the dreams our children had for their lifetimes; and for all wounds known and unknown.” Soon after Fore’s speech, school Board President Russell Dove noted that the four educational institutions in the county (Prince Edward County schools, Fuqua School, Longwood University, and Hampden-Sydney College), all once segregated, now provided integrated education. Fuqua School, once the all-white Prince Edward Academy, now provided scholarships for African American students. This year Hampden-Sydney elected its first African American president, Dr. Christopher Howard, a notable development in its 233-year history. Sitting in the shadow of the courthouse, I knew things had changed significantly even since I came here ten years ago.

On the courthouse lawn, the supervisors unveiled a memorial which, on one side, permanently immortalized the apology that Supervisor Fore had just read to the public. On the other side, the large plaque commemorated the illuminating of the “Light of Reconciliation” in the tower of the courthouse the previous summer. The language was unmistakably religious: “When we raise our eyes to see this light, may we incline our hearts and minds to shine our light of reconciliation toward all people.” The supervisors presented the flag that draped over the monument to the representatives of the R. R. Moton Museum, a grass-roots museum organization that has worked tirelessly to gain broad community involvement to tell the story of education and civil rights in Prince Edward County. After a benediction by the Rev. Jim Ashton, pastor of First Baptist Church (a traditionally black church), all the students who had been of school age between 1959-1964 were invited to walk before the Memorial plaque. Photographs mixed with tears and smiles as the procession slowly moved its way around the courthouse lawn.

Over the course of the last year, I have served on two projects surrounding the anniversary of the school closings in Prince Edward County, both as an organizer for a symposium on the Prince Edward story at Hampden-Sydney College and as a board member for the R. R. Moton Museum. In these capacities I am struck by the pervasive role of religion in this otherwise apparently “non-religious” story. More important, as I reflect back over the past year, three ideas have struck me as a scholar of American religion. First, I believe that I have learned that religion is rarely a simple reflection of a community’s values nor does it simply act to comfort and mollify its adherents. Next, I think my involvement has suggested that the study of institutions is still important for the study of America religion. And finally, I have learned that historical work can affect people’s lives.

It takes very little effort to see that religion weaves through the Prince Edward story. The student strikers found an immediate ally in the Rev. L. Francis Griffin, the pastor of First Baptist Church. On one panel at the Hampden-Sydney symposium, Griffin’s sons, Skip and Eric, shared that they grew up in a house where their father discussed the ideas of Walter Rauschenbusch and Reinhold Niebuhr. During the closings the American Friends Service Committee volunteered to help children denied a public education. Many African American churches opened their doors to try to provide some rudimentary academic skills to those students denied public education. The role of white church communities was equally important. In the same way that black churches provided a space for self-determination for African Americans, Southern white churches during the 1950s often provided a haven from government interference. When the courts denied public funding for the local white academy, many white churches in Farmville provided spaces, spaces protected by the separation of church and state, to house this institution. James Kennedy, minister of Farmville Presbyterian Church, opposed the closing of the schools, a view not shared by the majority of his congregation. The apparent incongruity of his role as a public figure of a white church and his views on public education cost him his pulpit. These are the stories one would expect to hear.

However, close examination suggests that the threads of religion in this story are much more complex. While people can marshal their religion to challenge injustice or to maintain social hierarchies, religious systems themselves often make such attempts more or less credible. When student activists came to Farmville, they did not try to eat at segregated lunch counters; rather, they tried to attend white churches.

Some churches posted “guards” to prevent this; others simply called the police and had would-be worshippers arrested. The symbolic effect of denying black student worshippers access to a church made many white members uneasy. One “guard” at the local Episcopal church simply could not allow himself to turn away the African American worshippers—it just wasn’t right. Gordon Moss, a professor at the State Teachers’ College (now Longwood University) and vestryman of Johns Memorial Episcopal Church, counted on just such a reaction when he conspired with his bishop and the student protesters. With backing of the bishop, Moss planned to meet the students at the door of the church and lead them to his pew. This he did in the presence of a shocked parish. Moss remained a thorn in the side of his church because many parish members found themselves in the awkward position of standing against their highest religious authority if they acted against him. A final example: as the school closings dragged on for years, L. Francis Griffin’s authority in his own church became more tenuous. Further, he became plagued with self-doubt. Griffin’s son Eric noted that late in his life his father confided that he still wondered if his decision to support a lengthy court battle was the best pastoral choice considering the individual lives that were directly affected by an absence of five years of public education. The Prince Edward story reminds that while religion can be a powerful tool to divide or unify, sometimes commitment to religion doesn’t simply comfort us or project a community’s wishes and dreams. Religion can also destabilize a community’s assumptions about their circumstances and leave an individual uneasy and uncomfortable over her beliefs and actions.

The Prince Edward story also suggests to me that institutions are still worth studying and understanding, even if they do not constitute the whole cloth of religion in America. Religious institutions have importance, not only because members identify themselves with them, but because religious institutions have symbolic (perhaps vicarious) importance within the communities in which they reside. At the final session of the symposium at Hampden-Sydney, I arranged a panel of ministers to discuss religious resources for racial reconciliation in Prince Edward. During his talk the Rev. Michael Cheuk publicly acknowledged practices of discrimination and segregation practiced at Farmville Baptist Church. He then (in an unscripted moment) dramatically apologized to the Rev. Samuel Williams (sitting in the front row) because he was arrested for attempting to attend church there in 1963. The utter silence and rapt attention of the audience (including students, faculty, and townsfolk) underscored the gravity of the moment. Cheuk’s comments, of course, did not happen in a vacuum. Jim Ashton, the pastor of First Baptist Church (another panelist that evening) and he had already begun discussions of reconciliation. Cheuk and Williams had developed a friendship over the past year. When Cheuk spoke at the symposium, however, many folks remarked that he had courage. Why? Such an interpretation only makes sense if we recognize that he (and everyone else) knew that he spoke for more than himself. His apology had to be received, not only by those for which it was addressed, but also by his own community. Acceptance could not be guaranteed in either case. If Cheuk did not get fired by the deacon board (and he didn’t), his apology signaled a change at Farmville Baptist. And it mattered more to members of the community what he said as the pastor of the church rather than as an individual.

Finally, by serving on the symposium team and the museum board, I have learned that that telling stories of the past can affect people’s lives. With a functional definition of religion I might argue that the R. R. Moton Museum has acted as a civil religious institution. Moton promotes as its mission that it “attempts to promote positive discussion of integration and to advance positions that ensure racial harmony.” The museum has a large board of directors that represents broad community constituencies. Under the capable leadership of its director, Lacy Ward. Jr., this museum has become a symbol of reconciliation by promoting community healing through shared storytelling, both tragedies of the past and hope about the future. I have also learned that we historians too often ignore the ethical dimensions of our craft. I have never been so aware of this dimension as I have while working on the museum board. The dilemmas surrounding how we tell history are much more obvious when they are scrutinized in the relatively democratized space of the public sphere. Whose story do you tell or emphasize? What’s the “real” story? On what grounds was that decision made? Who has the effective power to withhold knowledge, money, or social imprimatur? All historical work has the potential to affect people’s lives; although it is easy to forget this if we write cloistered from communities about whom we write. We should become aware that our claims to tell the real story might really be a code for telling only the parts of the stories that interest us. The Prince Edward story has shown me that there is not a single story. There is neither a “white” side nor a “black” side of the story. Rather than the single voice of the historian disguised as virtuoso, history exists as a multitude of voices that act more like instruments in an orchestra that need to express themselves together.