The Rapture Profiteers

[Feuer Frei!]

For nearly a year, nonagenarian preacher and radio personality Harold Camping predicted the world would end on May 21. Locusts would blanket the earth and millions would die while Camping and his flock would rise up to the sky, rendezvous with Jesus, and ascend to the Kingdom of Heaven. Instead, May 22 happened, Camping postponed the end of the world by five months, and then suffered a debilitating stroke—leaving a huge vacuum in the Rapture market.


The meltdown came at a propitious moment for apocalypse followers. A proliferation of earthquakes, a plague that may or may not be sweeping Brazil, the Greeks, and Kim Kardashian, among other things, may be conspiring to create a Rapture bubble. In addition to Camping’s revised forecast—the world is definitely going to end on Oct. 21—many Rapture-seekers now believe the Aug. 2 debt-ceiling deadline signals that the end may be very, very near. “If the economy goes, that’ll be fertile soil for the antichrist to take power,” says Todd Strandberg of Little Rock, Ark. “Hitler came out of the Depression. A lot of us believe the antichrist will use the same stepping stone.”


This means there are only so many days left to get rich. Strandberg, the proprietor of RaptureReady.com—the most popular Rapture-preparedness website in the world—is part of a new generation of entrepreneurs trying to take advantage of Camping’s absence. Unlike Camping, the new apocalypse establishment is offering an unprecedented array of doomsday-themed literature, podcasts, survival kits, and other goods and services for navigating the end of times.

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