From gilded age oil men to the rapture on TikTok

Hello and welcome to the very first edition of Revelations!

My name is Lyndal. I’m a journalist and writer and I’ve been thinking a lot about climate change, and the way it makes us feel.

I first started reporting on climate change as a UN correspondent back in 2014, but more recently, as you can maybe guess from the name of this newsletter, I’ve also become interested in researching and writing about religion. That journey has taken me in a lot of directions, including back to the 1800s when Gilded age oil men worked with doomsday preachers to change how we think about the future, aka what is now our present. I’m very excited that I’ll get to share more of that research with you soon.

For now, this newsletter is going to be a place where I gather together my recent reporting, especially on climate change, as well as a selection of interesting things written by other lovely people. I’ve named this newsletter Revelations because I want to create a place to talk about what it means to be explicitly anti-apocalyptic, in an era where the word apocalypse seems to be used to explain away things that scare us, both by people who are religious and people who aren’t. In fact, in its original Greek, the word Apokalypsi simply means to reveal, disclose, or unveil the truth. And as a journalist, this seems very much like a good description of what I hope to do!

To begin this first newsletter, I have some news to share. I’m very happy to have recently signed with Trinity McFadden, a Senior Literary Agent at The Bindery in the United States. Trinity has worked with authors on important books including Tia Levings’ A Well Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy. I read Tia’s book recently and it really resonated with me, in part because I could see my younger self in some of the experiences she described. It’s not an easy read (I listened to the audio book which Tia recorded in her own lovely, very reassuring voice), but I think it offers a revealing counter-point to the seemingly enchanted lives that trad wife influencers present to the world.

Trinity and I are now working together to submit the proposal for my book Brimstone: On Climate Change, the Rapture and Escaping the End Times to publishers. I’m very grateful to everyone who has helped me with the book so far, especially people who so graciously shared their stories of rapture anxiety with me. It’s been a long process to get to here, in part because I’ve also been digging through archival records to piece together how Gilded Age oil men like John D Rockefeller Sr and Lyman Stewart are both connected to pastor Dwight L Moody, a doomsday preacher who built one of America’s first megachurch empires.

Outside of working on my book proposal, I’ve also been able to do more reporting on climate change in my work as a journalist recently. This has included writing about intense and unusual storms and floods in countries including Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Jamaica over the past few months. One of my articles on this topic was selected by Covering Climate Now (a journalism initiative created by the Columbia Journalism Review and The Guardian) as one of their Noteworthy Stories for the first week of December.

In October, during the UN General Assembly I also got to interview Tuvalu’s minister of climate change Maina Talia about what his country has been doing to fight climate change, including working on the world’s first treaty to ban fossil fuels. You can read that article here. Minister Talia also told me about how evangelical Christians have been incorporating end times prophecies into their understanding of rising sea levels, which I wasn’t able to fit into this article, since there was so much more to include, but I will definitely be writing about more soon.

Another story I’ve been following at the United Nations has been the International Court of Justice (ICJ)’s ruling in July last year that governments have a legal responsibility to act on climate change. This is a really big story, and testament to the important work island countries, like Vanuatu which brought the case to The Hague, continue to do on all our behalves. But, just last week the United States decided it wants to intervene, which I wrote about here. It’s part of a much wider pattern I’ve been reporting on where the Trump administration is still trying to influence what happens at the UN, even though it is quitting most UN bodies. One of the ways they’ve done this is by threatening to impose sanctions on diplomats who were about to vote on regulating pollution from ships at the International Maritime Organization (IMO), back in October. With the Trump administration also imposing sanctions on UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese, this is also another example of how climate change and Palestine are connected (and yes, there’s definitely a religious reason why too).

On that note, I also recently got to write about the rapture, something that is an important theme in the book I’m working on. If you grew up in an evangelical church it’s quite likely that you know what the rapture is and that you even maybe experienced something called rapture anxiety. But if you didn’t, you might want to read my explainer article for Al Jazeera English ‘Why are TikTok conservatives predicting the rapture?’ from last September to find out a bit more. While it’s rare to see so many people talking about the rapture on TikTok it is something that has been very deeply troubling to generations of children, so I do hope I can help demystify it through my writing. You can read my article here.

What I’ve been reading, watching and listening to:

A Well Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy by Tia Levings. As evangelical Christians exert more influence over the political realm, including how we respond to problems like climate change, it can be helpful to understand how views on power often begin at home, as Tia illustrates so openly in her beautiful first book.

Trade Winds: A Voyage to a Sustainable Future for Shipping by Christiaan De Beukelaer. As I’ve been writing about what’s been happening at the UN on climate change, including at the International Maritime Organization (IMO), Christiaan’s book helped me to better understand how we’re all quite connected to the mostly hidden world of shipping through our strange modern world of “instant” shopping.

How I Learned to Love Supernatural Horror by Chrissy Stroop. This article for FlyTrap media by Chrissy explores what it’s like to reclaim what scares us, from the perspective of someone who grew up in an evangelical church.

The Voice of Hind Rajab by Kaouther Ben Hania. This documentary mixes re-enactments and real voice recordings to tell the story of Hind and the ambulance drivers who tried to reach her. It won the the Grand Jury Prize at the 2025 Venice Film Festival and while it wasn’t easy to watch, I’m glad that I did and grateful to everyone who worked on it.

In between reading and writing, I have been listening to Marlon Williams’ beautiful album Te Whare Tīwekaweka which is entirely in te reo Māori. I also love his dancing so recommend watching the music videos too.

I also really enjoyed Arundhati Roy’s memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me as an intimate look at what it was like to grow up inside the Christian school her Mum ran in Kerala.

Thanks so much for reading and for all your support.

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Until next time!

Lyndal