What #RaptureTok reveals about nationwide mental health

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ALEXANDROS GEORGUSSIS: It is easy to assume that in politically tumultuous times those whose ideals do not align with the ruling party may suffer adverse mental health effects; however, the rise of #RaptureTok may show that this decrease in mental health could, in actuality, be nationwide, rather than based on partisan lines. 

Broadly, #RaptureTok refers to the viral online trend–primarily on TikTok–in which a myriad of evangelical influencers declared that the event known as The Rapture would occur sometime on the dates Sept. 23, 2025 or Sept. 24, 2025, based on South African Christian Joshua Mhlakela’s prediction made in June of 2024. The Rapture, generally, represents the last moments of Earthy humanity before the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, according to the most practiced forms of Christianity in the United States. As this outlandish belief took the internet by storm, the aforementioned evangelical influencers presented their followers methods to prepare for the event, including leaving their jobs, selling their possessions and even placing their pets in specialized care facilities.

In response to this phenomenon, multiple researchers and experts in the field of religion stepped forward to use their lens of expertise to understand why such an unbelievable event could gain momentum so quickly. For example, Dr. Kim Haines-Eitzen, a professor of religion at Cornell University, suggested that phenomena regarding apocalyptic events often appear during times of high social and political unrest.

Both inspired by the words of nationwide experts on religion, and driven by my own curiosity as to why mass belief in apocalyptic events occur, I reached out to a number of Georgetown University faculty with expertise in religion across disciplines. Eventually, I was able to interview Dr. Becky Yang Hsu, our resident professor on the sociology of religion at the undergraduate level, in the Sociology Department. We spoke on Oct. 2, 2025, and below, I expand on the themes as a way to understand #RaptureTok.

Over the course of the interview, we discussed three main conditions or reasons for why the #RaptureTok phenomena occurred, and what it may mean. 

First, “The Rapture” itself could act as a sort of ritual representing a societal desire to depart from the status quo. This notion is based on a framework rooted in Robert Orsi’s study on The Madonna of 115th Street. To summarize, Orsi examines a parade, a ritual, in which a statue of the Madonna is carried around East Harlem on the feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. He suggests that this parade may occur as a reflection of cultural heritage and of everyday life–the movement of the Madonna represents the movement of Italian immigrants to East Harlem, and the uplifting of the Madonna represents the uplifting of the Italian Matriarch. In my discussion with Hsu, this concept was extrapolated that the ritual event known as “The Rapture” could, in a similar vein, represent the desire for change, manifesting in a way that is rooted in American-Christian heritage.

Second, focusing on mental health, we discussed how this phenomena may relate to Emil Durkheim’s speculation on suicide–what I would consider to be the complete collapse of mental health. Generally, I took away from our conversation two aspects: isolation and anomie, or the lack of regulation. In relation to #RaptureTok, isolation may represent how members of the evangelical sub-culture may be isolated from each other and broader society; thus, “The Rapture” would be an event directly causing the holistic reintegration of society. Additionally, this idea could be connected to the ongoing fracturing of the Republican party under the Second Trump Administration. Therefore, this event may also have roots in the increasing distance between evangelicals and other parts of the MAGA-base. Alternatively, anomie would refer to how there is a lack of regulation and structure in evangelical spaces–society can no longer regulate the behaviors of evangelicals, especially influencers, due to the distance caused by social media. This dysregulation may also be exacerbated by upheaval of economic, social, or political sources.

Finally, we discussed how evangelicals, as a sub-culture, may be primed for negative mental health effects due to their association with fundamentalist beliefs. These beliefs may have a correlation with anxiety and negative mental health according to a study conducted by Fanhao Nie and Daniel Olson.

Applying these arguments at the national level, our discussion on #RaptureTok may suggest that the method in which negative mental health affect appeared in evangelical digital circles occurred because of cultural beliefs and values, and that the root cause for the negative affect can be generalized to the entire nation. In other words, because of evangelical beliefs, heritage and the isolation and anomie in evangelical circles, negative mental health could be seen overall in the phenomena that was #RaptureTok, but the underlying cause of negative mental health–isolation, dysregulation and general upheaval–remains, meaning that this negative mental health may manifest in different  ways nationwide.

The fact that the negative mental health of people in evangelical circles, a sub-culture deeply tied to the current ruling party, manifested itself in such a visible way suggests that the same negative affect is present in undercurrents across the nation, pointing towards the possibility of a nationwide mental health crisis.

Alexandros Georgussis is a Junior in the College of Arts and Sciences with interest in the fields of Sociology, Psychology, Theater and their intersections, and is a columnist for On the Record.