I’ve always admired humans’ creative ability and range. Whether it’s their God or an alien invasion, we love to write elaborate stories about the end of the world. Who doesn’t love a good apocalypse? We’ve built entire belief systems on one original sin and on UFOs. If we ever do experience another enlightenment, I suspect someone will be there with pen and pad, ready to turn it into a bestselling book or movie series. This essay is my small contribution to the tradition of imagining, questioning, and reimagining it all.

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A question I often think about is whether we’ll experience another enlightenment. Of course, one question leads to another: If it does happen, what powerful movement or crisis would spark it? And then another question: When?

I’m not exactly a doomsdayer, but I do believe that only something apocalyptic could force us to slow down, redirect our attention, and truly wake up. I doubt it will happen in my lifetime, and I’m not entirely sure I’d want to endure the hardships that such an awakening would bring.

If I could, I might skip the fires that lead to it and jump straight into enlightenment. But everything in my life suggests I’d probably dive headfirst into the frying pan. No pain, no gain, right?

About 23 or 24 years ago, in LaPlace, Louisiana, I was in my Uncle Bruce’s garage. My uncle had every toy a man could want. You can imagine my surprise when I noticed a book on a corner shelf. I picked it up, Left Behind, and asked my aunt if I could read it. She said yes, but to please return it. “Someone left it here.” I think she missed the humor in that.

I had no idea what the book was about, but I started reading it immediately and I was hooked. Eventually, I read all sixteen books in the series. It’s based on the religious concept of the Rapture, where believers are taken to heaven, and the rest of us... well, I won’t spoil the ending.

From a young age, I was sent to church with my siblings. When my mother had the urge, she’d join us. When the urge got stronger, she’d join other churches. We were Baptist, Seventh-day Adventist, Jehovah’s Witnesses. Recently, she became a Jew. Yep, she decided she is Jewish.

I no longer attend church of any kind, but I do often think about how religious traditions imagine the end of the world. The religious content in Left Behind didn’t surprise me. What I keep returning to is the question that keeps surfacing: Is the “end of the world” just the end of the world as we know it and the beginning of an enlightenment?

We live in a world built on acceleration, but not the kind that provokes deep thought or inner growth. No, we’re fueled by attention, consumption, profit, and rage. And slowing down, looking within? That doesn’t generate profit. So what, then, would force us to stop and reassess? Maybe nothing short of something catastrophic. Something that strips away our attention-seeking, excessive consumption, and rage toward one another.

Could the destruction of corporations, technology, and religion be the only path to our next enlightenment? Or will the spark come in some other form, one I haven’t yet imagined? Well, I have imagined it, and it is in the form of an alien invasion. There, I said it. “You’ve read too many sci-fi novels,” you might say. Perhaps. But I believe in my sci-fi novels about as much as I believe in religious books, all written by men, each containing some truth but also a generous helping of fantasy.

If those of us who crave meaning, truth, and depth are present during the Rapture, could we be the believers, the ones ushered into a new world, the next enlightenment? And what about those of us chained to rage, consumerism, and the hunger for attention? Do we get cast into the pit of fire, never to be seen again?

Perhaps the next enlightenment won’t come from some catastrophic event, but simply from realizing we’ve been asking the wrong questions all along. A seemingly simple act, yet quite a mountain of a task.

In closing, writing this essay has only raised more questions and rekindled my urge to revisit the Left Behind series, though my Asimov books have been quietly taunting me too. I suppose my questions will never be fully answered, and I’ll never stop searching for meaning or imagining possibilities, whether in religious texts, sci-fi novels, or in the questioning faces of those who continue to ask, even if their answers are centuries away.