More than 40 percent of Americans believe that the Second Coming will take place by the year 2050, with that number rising to 58 percent among white evangelicals.
“Among lay people it’s just a given that the Rapture’s going to happen,” says Matthew Avery Sutton, history professor at Washington State University and author of American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism, in an interview with VICE. “Most evangelical churches would be shocked to find out that this is a 150-year-old concept and not a 2,000-year-old Biblical concept.”