Recently, our AV Club on the Discord watched The Moment After, a 1999 Rapture movie starring David A.R. White. And surprisingly, we didn’t completely hate it! For a Rapture movie, it was better than most. But it’s still a Rapture movie made by evangelicals after their fusion with fundamentalists, so it suffers from all the usual beloved tropes that their Rapture movies must employ.
Today, we’ll review the movie and explore its major tropes!
(This post and its audio ‘cast first went live on Patreon on 9/4/2026. They’re both available there now. Please support my work—see the end of this writeup for options, and thank you for whatever you decide to do! BTW, you’re welcome to join the Discord if you’re interested in watching movies with us. Invite code’s at the bottom of the writeup!)
SITUATION REPORT: A quick rundown of The Moment After
The Moment After follows two FBI agents, Adam Riley (David A.R. White) and Charles Baker (Kevin Downes). Adam is a godless, fun-loving, womanizing hedonist. Charles is a straitlaced married man whose wife is extremely pregnant with their first child.
Then, the Rapture blinks all TRUE CHRISTIANS™ and young children/babies/fetuses away. Afterward, the world plunges into chaos and panic. Adam and Charles interview the family members and friends of those who’ve disappeared. As they conduct these interviews, they wrestle with their own faith. And as they do, America shifts around them into a One World Government (OWG). This new OWG is weirdly hellbent on getting everyone to accept a strange new ID chip. It’s also hellbent on capturing and killing anyone who converts to TRUE CHRISTIANITY™ after the Rapture.
Eventually, the pair must decide where to direct their loyalties: The OWG or a god whose existence seems more credible now than it’s ever been.
Today, we’ll discuss the movie and where it sits in relation to others in the genre of Rapture movies.
Where to see these movies (also, all timestamps refer to these links; all are approximate):
The Moment After (1999)
A Thief in the Night (1972) and its sequels: A Distant Thunder (1978); Image of the Beast (1981)
Left Behind (2000)
Apocalypse: Caught in the Eye of the Storm (1998)
The Bible verse that opens The Moment After is the standard one, and so is the opening shot
Before anything else happens, the moviemakers first show us a Bible verse they think relates to the Rapture, 1 Corinthians 16:52.
Here’s the hilarious part: That passage is actually in 1 Corinthians 15:52, not 16:52. Chapter 16 only has 24 verses. Like we saw in Poltergeist, they moved the headstones but left the graves where they were!
And we get the usual setup for the Rapture: A normal suburban scene with people driving to work, kids playing outside, etc. Then, a super-bright light shines out from the TRUE CHRISTIANS™ and children, and the next moment they’re just gone—except for their clothes left behind on the ground. That’s been a trope for many years. The evangelicals responsible for these movies think they get white robes on the flight up to Heaven. So their physical clothes can’t come along, even though their physical bodies can make the journey just fine.
In this opening shot, a mother rushes out to a bicycle that’s fallen next to bright blue clothes and a little bicycle helmet. The child is gone, presumably Raptured.
We likely have Left Behind to thank for this trope. Before that franchise, Rapture movies didn’t feature clothes left behind. Here’s the immediate aftermath of the Rapture in A Thief in the Night (1972), where a lawnmowing guy vanishes—along with his Chuck Taylors and denim shorts:
But in 1995, the Left Behind novel described clothes left behind as if the body inhabiting them simply vanished. You can see the quotes in Fred Clark’s longform review of the book, and here is one of them:
Harold’s clothes were in a neat pile on his seat, his glasses and hearing aid on top. The pant legs still hung over the edge and led to his shoes and socks.
The book’s 2000 movie adaptation faithfully included that detail here:
In 1998, Apocalypse featured the clothes left behind too, but neatly folded in a stack (because they thought a Bible verse suggested that):
Very quickly, the idea became evangelical canon. The Berean Call pushed back against it a bit in 2005, but they were far too late to prevent it from taking root. So yes, The Moment After has to include it.
Also like other Rapture movies, The Moment After vanishes all children too, along with fetuses in the womb. But don’t worry! Women get through what should be a catastrophic emergency looking pretty perky! Here’s one of them, Charles’ wife, at 27 minutes in:
She doesn’t even have an IV in her hand. (See the score at the end for a possible answer to what should have happened.)
Trope: Panic and chaos rules as all the TRUE CHRISTIANS™ vanish
Interestingly, relatively few FBI agents have vanished. One of them is George, a good friend of our two heroes. George converted to TRUE CHRISTIANITY™ not too long ago, and he’s got the zeal of the new convert. Now, he and his young children are gone, leaving only his wife behind.
Otherwise, though, the outer world in America is in complete shambles. As Charles tells Adam, “everything’s in chaos.” Power lines are down, phone lines are out of service, car wrecks, plane crashes, millions are missing in America alone. “The President has enacted martial law,” intones the pair’s boss.
We can hear nonstop police sirens outside while the boss hands out assignments, so I guess the cops sure didn’t vanish. In these movies, a surprising number of essential workers seem to be damned souls, and they still work to try to maintain health and law and order. For most others, life becomes post-apocalyptic.
In reality, every one of us can think immediately of a situation that happened very recently that cut down large numbers of their fellow countrymen, wherever they are: COVID-19. In America, the NIH estimates that it killed 697,000 people between March 2020 and October 2021. Between March 2020 and November 2020 alone, the NIH estimates elsewhere that more than 900k people were hospitalized. The quarantines and lockdowns had huge impacts on supply chains and everyday life.
Life definitely got difficult for many of us, but the absolute chaos described in these movies just didn’t happen. It looked more like the Marvel movies after the Snappening: People vanishing, and the rest adjusting more or less to the new normal.
I think evangelicals just think they’re way more important to the functioning of society than they actually are. Without their stabilizing parental influence on the rest of us heathens, without them being our Designated Adults, they think we’ll just go haywire.
Trope: The Magic Jews that convert and lead heathens to Christianity
This part was hilarious. It’s been in most evangelical Rapture movies as well. See, evangelicals think the Book of Revelation describes “two witnesses” in Revelation 11 who breathe fire while they make prophecies. In chapters 7 and 14 they think the book further reveals 144,000 male Jews who’ll convert and evangelize whoever’s left. So Rapture movies frequently portray this trope.
We don’t get direct references to the Magic Jews in the Thief in the Night movies, but we do get an indirect reference during the Wall of Crazy scene in its third movie, titled Image of the Beast, around 27 minutes in:
And at 49 minutes, the news mentions that two Jews were converting Jews in droves to Christianity.
In Left Behind, we see an early example of one of the witnesses, who preaches at Kirk Cameron before shuffling away around 9 minutes in:
At 18 minutes, we learn he was actually speaking Hebrew. Just the character listening, Buck, heard it as English! ZOMG A MIRACLE! And in the sequel to that movie, Tribulation Force, a pastor describes the Two Witnesses around 12:30 in. He does it by pointing to an unusual visual:
In this movie, The Moment After, we get a very early shot of a Jewish guy praying before he apparently converts instantly and without any apparent reason. Afterward, he gets a gift Bible out of its box, looks up Acts 9:15-18 (about Paul’s conversion), and immediately gets out a shofar to blow about 6:30 in:
He’ll end up as a major character who leads many people to Christianity. Eventually, he even converts one of our main characters (guess who? first guess doesn’t count). Somehow in his short time as a Christian, he’s figured out the complete Sinner’s Prayer and all the other evangelical embellishments of conversion.
Of course, the notion of Jews converting to Christianity en masse is ridiculous. They know perfectly well that Jesus isn’t the Messiah. They’ve known this for the entire history of Christianity. As we find on the Jewish site Aish.com, Jesus fit none of the rules their prophets had set up for him. That’s why they overwhelmingly rejected him as Messiah in the 1st century, and why they continue to reject him today. And that’s why early evangelists pivoted to gentiles, in turn!
This movie apparently never knows that Jews have specific rules about when to blow the shofar too. It’s not just a general celebration like evangelicals obviously think it is, like when they blew shofar in Jim Bakker’s audience on Election Night 2016 (it’s gone from Jim Bakker’s official video of that night, but Vic Berger caught it and immortalized it—it sounds like a truck horn, too):
But Rapture conspiracy theorists persist. Any good Rapture yarn must contain Magic Jews. It’s the ultimate victory over Jews. Evangelicals love to imagine they’re Jews 2.0 anyway, and this idea represents their biggest competition suddenly admitting they were right all along.
Trope: National Sovereignty? Who dat? Never met her!
One of the very goofiest tropes of Rapture movies involves the One World Government (OWG). Evangelicals wholeheartedly buy into this belief that in the Endtimes, all nations will consolidate into one. They get the idea from Revelation 13 and Rev 17, as well as Daniel 2 and Dan 7.
So in A Thief in the Night, we had the Antichrist giving orders from a gigantic throne (with his cute wee sockies visible):
And at 18 minutes into Left Behind, we see characters reacting to the takeover of Nikolai Carpathia, the Antichrist who unites the world. Countries just start melting into each other, it seems, starting with “Europe standard[izing] their currency with Asia.” (The FOREX bros will be so mad!)
In The Moment After, we don’t see the actual takeover or handover or whatever happens. We just get soldiers with hastily-applied new patches, who become a real presence around 57 minutes in. Nobody really explains what’s happened. Here’s the patch on a character I called LIEUTENANT RAGE. (He’s a captain, probably, but damned if he isn’t enraged in every single shot he’s in.)
Basically, this fantasy insists that every country’s leader is happy to hand their country over to the Antichrist’s control. But evangelicals don’t have much of a grasp of international politics. All they really have as a reference for a country-uniting government is the United Nations. Seriously. Not even the EU, formed in 1993 and which actually comes closest to their fantasies.
However, they’ve pinned the OWG on the UN since at least my time as a Christian. They can’t walk that back now. So they think the UN will become the OWG, which of course the Antichrist leads unilaterally. Years ago, Fred Clark did a great job of dismantling that idea.
The idea of America handing all control over to an outside force that is extra-ridiculous. I’d be hard-pressed to imagine any country more actively defending its sovereignty than this one. We refuse even to allow our citizens to be tried in international courts like the Hague.
Either way, nobody ever describes exactly how these handovers even happen, because there’s just no mechanism or process that would adequately do the job. But the nice part about this trope is that it’s pure magic. Nobody has to explain how it works.
Trope: The more or less voluntary Mark of the Beast
This is really my favorite part of the entire Endtimes package of beliefs: The notion that the Mark of the Beast is this instant dealbreaker with Jesus, sure, yes, that’s obvious! But it’s also more or less voluntary to get. It’s from Revelation 13, and it’s an integral part of the fearmongering around the Endtimes. Stories regularly circulate about this or that modern convenience being totally the Mark of the Beast.
Back in the 1980s, fundamentalists whispered that bar codes contained secret tech-y sigils for 666 (the number of the Beast). They did, and still do, point those fingers at almost anything from universal ID systems to kids’ school badges.
In this belief system, the Mark insta-dooms the wearer to Hell forever—with absolutely no way out, no forgiveness, no reconciliation ever. But everyone who gets it also must choose to get it. The OWG imposes penalties for disobedience, yes, but the OWG treats the Mark as slightly more voluntary than a COVID vaccine. When mumps infested British Columbia in the 90s, one college treated vaccination more stringently than the average Rapture movie.
In The Moment After, Adam gets a couple of notices that he really super-needs to “report to his Census station.” One (1:06:00) even involves a bright red notice slip!
The Thief in the Night series extensively covered one character’s agonizing over whether or not she’d take the Mark. She spent quite a long time agonizing over it before rejecting the idea and getting executed.
Trope: Summary execution for refusing to get the Mark
And if the TRUE CHRISTIAN™ flat refuses to get the Mark, then the OWG executes them.
Wait, what??
Yes.
Seriously. They guillotine disobedient Christians in this universe, and they do it with a quickness. America can’t even execute convicted murderers in anything less than 20 years, but the OWG has considerably expedited the process for recalcitrant Christians!
Obviously, this is just about fearmongering. It’s a way to show how silly and foolish those agonizing over the Mark are, with the stakes that high. More than that, it’s a way to show what happens to the disobedient in a fantasy world where this conspiracy theory actually works.
The Antichrist positions his Mark as just a Census count. See? That’s how the Antichrist gets ya. I see why, though. Evangelicals need characters to accept the Mark. If OWG physically forces on someone, then Yahweh’s condemning them to Hell just doesn’t seem fair, does it?
The TRUE CHRISTIANS™ left behind in The Moment After
And here’s one of the most manipulative tropes in Rapture movies: The Christian who somehow misses the Rapture. Maybe they entertained doubts. Maybe they hid secret hypocrisy from the others. Or maybe they rejected fundamentalist conspiracy theories, only to discover those theories were all true. Whatever happened, the magic whisking-away somehow overlooked them.
In A Thief in the Night, that trope appears in spades. At 50 minutes in, the heroine, Patty, wanders into a church. We’ve seen this church before at 20 minutes in. It’s an Evil Ecumenical Church whose boring, long-winded pastor called Creationism a “myth” he didn’t accept. But now that pastor mourns alone in his empty church:
In Left Behind, at 53 minutes, we meet another pastor who openly calls himself a “fraud” for not teaching what he knew was the truth, which doomed him to miss the Rapture.
And in The Moment After, one scene at 12 minutes involves a pastor discussing the Rapture on a talk show—along with a pagan-sounding feminist and an atheist scientist. The pastor clearly believes what he’s saying, but he missed the Rapture!
Later, Adam visits the church of that pastor (Edward Wilkins, played by Paul R. Jones). There, Wilkins explains the Rapture and the Endtimes to Adam. He also explains that he missed the Rapture because he didn’t really believe what he preached.
I find this entire line of thinking to be predatory. Not one Christian alive truly knows what exactly Christians should believe or reject. Tens of thousands of flavors keep warring over those points. Nobody ever wins. Nobody can. And all Christians break their own rules constantly. They keep rationalizing away their constant hypocrisy with their certainty of escaping Hell. But it’s all the same motivated reasoning.
In my Pentecostal days, everyone feared missing the Rapture because of this exact trope. If Jesus decided this was the moment, and we weren’t “prayed up” or completely up to date with our psychic apologies, then he’d pass us by. A god who can overlook constant rulebreaking at any point except the most important one? That isn’t much of a god. But fear keeps believers racing on their hamster wheels—going too quickly to stop and think too hard about anything.
The tropes evangelicals love, all in one convenient place in The Moment After
Certainly, more tropes besides these frolic playfully within The Moment After. But these are the main ones we noticed.
The funny thing is, though, that this movie didn’t actually completely suck. Its production values (minus the OWG soldiers’ patches) were consistently good. The acting was fine—even David A.R. White’s, since he wasn’t being asked to go near the edge of his comfort zone. The plot suffered from the usual problems of Rapture movies without being too egregious about any of them: Characters moving like chess pieces, the OWG making zero sense, etc. However, the writing/screenplay mostly elevated those requirements.
The pacing was incredibly good, too. It raced by surprisingly quickly. I gave half-hour breaks for this 90-minute movie, and I almost forgot to do both the midmovie breaks.
For what must have been a low budget, this movie also really outdid itself in many ways. As I said, we didn’t hate it. Overall, we liked it. That makes it head and shoulders above every other Rapture movie I’ve ever seen.
SCORING THE MOMENT AFTER
David A.R. White’s Adam Riley as the Second Glance alternate-universe sequel: My headcanon now
Charles Baker: The FBI must be recruiting junior high kids these days
The Case of the Disappearing Fetus: If “Loss.jpg” were a fundie Rapture movie scene
The Mark of the Beast as a vaccination: About that pressing
“Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!”: We saw it a mile away
“Left behind” tropes: Still completely predatory
Melting server farms: I asked Grok what happens if a viable fetus just vanishes from a uterus
I believe the children are our future: Nothing in the Bible discusses children auto-Rapturing, but having kids go through the Endtimes is just ickie—even to evangelicals
Pre-Tribulation Rapture: Only for weenie cowards (see this post)
Pacing: 10/10, no sarcasm, extremely watchable
Surprisingly high production values: 8/10
Surprisingly decent story for the genre: 7/10
Acting: 7/10 except for LIEUTENANT/CAPTAIN RAGE
LIEUTENANT/CAPTAIN RAGE: 11/10, no notes
Realistic portrayal of society post-Rapture: 0/10
Summary:
If you need to see a Rapture movie, this is probably your current best bet of the lot of them. If you’re new to the genre, The Moment After presents a decent introduction to it.
NEXT UP: Some guy thinks he’s figured out how to convert Nones! See you soon! <3
Please support my work!
Thanks for reading, and thanks for being part of our community! Here are some ways you can support my work:
