"A lot of people are watching the Rapture Index very carefully right now," said Stephen O'Leary, an expert on apocalypticism at the University of Southern California, referring to a Web site that purports to offer a statistical gauge of the approach of the moment that Christians believe Jesus will remove the faithful from Earth.

The Web site, www.raptureready.com/rap2.html, registers 159. Anything higher than 145 means "fasten your seat belts," according to the legend.

Apocalyptic beliefs have long been an American staple. A June 2001 survey by the Barna Research Group, for instance, found that 40 percent of adults in the United States believe the physical world will end as a result of supernatural intervention. Fifty percent disagreed, and 10 percent didn't know.

Mitchell, like many Pentecostals and charismatics, believes the seven years of calamities leading to Armageddon -- the battle in which Jesus will defeat the Anti-Christ -- may already have begun. Now, he said, he gets almost daily questions from congregants about how current events may reflect those prophecies.

Social scientists say that such preoccupations reflect an increasingly apocalyptic mood in America, expressed not just in Christian fundamentalism, but also in secular doom-and-gloom scenarios.

Nonbelievers tend to express their anxieties in terms of man-made ecological disasters or, more simply, an indifferent and hostile nature. If the recent storms and quakes portend anything, it's climactic change, not biblical reckoning, said Oliver Haker, 28, a New York lawyer.