Escapist theology

This resolute focus on the church’s imminent exit to heaven has the effect of inclining believers in the rapture to treat the future (and thus the present) of the earth as unimportant. This lack of concern for our earthly future in the early part of the twentieth century was clearly tied to an otherworldly heavenly—mindedness, but as the century progressed, it has resulted in the free reign of consumerism and greed among North American evangelicals, since there is little theological ground in a rapture—oriented eschatology for ecological or social responsibility.—J. Richard Middleton, A New Heaven and a New Earth, 303