The Man Who Quit Money Read Online Free PDF

house empty. The year was 1972 and the family was living in the suburbs of Denver, where Daniel’s father worked at a car dealership. Daniel called for his parents and siblings. No reply. His three older brothers were not in their room. His older sister was nowhere to be found. He called their names, his voice trembling. He rushed to his parents’ bedroom. His mother’s clothes lay atop her shoes. She would never leave clothing on the floor. It was as if she had vaporized while standing in them. “Mom!” he cried. “Dad!” An electric fan whirred.
    Daniel’s mind raced for some benign explanation. Maybe they’d taken a walk with the dogs. Or driven somewhere. But the car was in the driveway. Try as he might to interpret these clues in some other way, he fixated on what struck him as the only plausible scenario: Rapture. The Lord had returned and sat in final judgment. The righteous, including Daniel’s family, hadascended to heaven. As for the sinners, they were doomed to suffer the tribulations prophesied in the Book of Revelation. Fires would rain down from the skies and wicked Babylon would plunge into the sea. As poor Daniel stared trembling at his mother’s shoes, he could only conclude that while she and the rest of his family had soared up to heaven, he, in punishment for some unspeakable sins, had been
left behind
!
    When the family clomped up the front steps—they’d been over at the neighbors’ house—they found Daniel crying. They comforted him and had a gentle laugh. He was the youngest, and so worried about everything. He shouldn’t fret so much. When the end-times did arrive, he would be going home to Jesus.
    In a family of biblical literalists, Daniel was the most literal of them all. One summer when he was very young, he stockpiled his dollars and quarters and bought Christmas presents for Mom and Dad, for Pennie and Rick and Ron and Doug. He wrapped them with Santa Claus paper and presented them in the August heat. He wanted them to enjoy their gifts here on earth, before the Great Tribulation.
    Daniel felt like he was the only kid in Sunday school who took it seriously. But that didn’t make faith easier. The kids who goofed off and passed notes didn’t lie awake fretting about Mathew 19:24, wondering how a full-grown camel could squeeze through the eye of a needle, and if so, why such an event was more likely than a rich man entering the Kingdom of Heaven.
    For those not raised fundamentalist, the Rapture seems a cartoonish fairy tale. But in the past half century the notion has become mainstream. As the percentage of Americans belonging to mainline Protestant denominations has steadily dropped since the mid-1960s from a quarter to a tenth, those belonging toevangelical or fundamentalist churches have held fast at about 25 percent. Factoring in population growth, that firm percentage reflects an increase in numbers. In the popular imagination, the child’s nightmare of burning in hell with the devil and his pitchfork has been replaced by the Apocalypse of the Book of Revelation, with its four horsemen and pits of boiling sulfur. Those raised in the faith accept as fact that this world’s days are numbered. Clocks will stop, and time as we know it will cease.
    Suelo’s family typifies the nation’s drift toward fundamentalism. They are part of the counterweight to the great secular shift that was also occurring over the past half century, making Americans—my family, for instance—less religious and more educated, urban, and prosperous. I had assumed that a conservative Christian family would be less accepting of a son who chose to be homeless. I was wrong. For fundamentalists, living in a cave and eating locusts and wild honey is a less far-fetched way of life than it seems to secular people concerned with getting a good internship and scoring high on the SAT. The guiding mythology of the Shellabarger family is not the American Dream, in which wealth waits as the reward for a lifetime