It’s that time of year, when we all try to guess what we’re supposed to get each other for Christmas, and we all pretend to be thrilled with whatever it is that our loved(ish) one(s) picked out for/made for/regifted us as we sit around lit by the Netflix Yule log, with Spotify blaring your uncle’s playlist, the one who’s “down with the kids” and way too comfortable singing all the lyrics to “M.A.A.D. City”.

Spotify also looms large this time of year in some of our lives when it shames us for our listening habits, and because I’m usually only listening to Spotify when I’m working out (not a flex, although stay tuned for my TikTok explaining how my excess belly fat can help with the speed of kettlebell swings) and looking for something both familiar and angry, and haven’t evolved as much as Henry Rollins who worked out to ballads, or at least he did in his seminal 2009 essay “Iron and the Soul”.

Which means my Spotify Wrapped every year is a mix of the occasional podcast I’ve streamed (this year more than usual since for a minute there I was in sales and on the road a lot and listening to other people talk made sense) and a lot of filler rock.

Occasionally new music will make an appearance, and there’s those times when a familiar lyric will bounce around and resonate. Today that’s this from Shinedown’s “Sound of Madness”:

I’m so sick of this tombstone mentality If there’s an afterlife, then it’ll set you free But I’m not gonna part the seas You’re a self-fulfilling prophecy

There’s very little poetry, but there is a truth that shaped an impressionable me during those formative years when I was subjected to the message of The Gospel on a weekly basis, that evangelicals are just hoping to get this over with, the “this” being the life we know, because on the other side of the veil waits their reward, and they’re ready for that to happen sooner rather than later.

It’s what drives their indifference to reports of climate change, because acknowledging that feels like science, and anyone who believes man and dinosaurs co-existed isn’t terribly concerned with facts.

And even if you get the occasional Bible thumper to buy into what’s happening to the globe as a problem, their response is that it’s just another sign of the End Times and the promise of what’s to come.

So they sigh as they pass cemeteries, pining for the day when their earthly vessel will be interred, and their spirit will be transported to Heaven, where God will meet them with a harp and a keys to a mansion, or whatever. Details are still fuzzy.

And because a certain kind of evangelical church preaches this kind of future think, there exists little need to reach a hand out to those who need it here on earth, unless that hand is holding a tract explaining how they’re nothing with Jesus and sure, they’re hungry for food, but wouldn’t you rather feed your soul?

There’s a reason religion’s been termed an opiate: the point is to make you feel better about yourself just because you showed up, and to keep you feeling better despite your circumstances or the circumstances of those around you, because when it all ends one day, either in death or in the end of times, it’s all going to be better on the other side.