In this post, I’ll set the stage briefly and then we can get to the viewing. Feel free to watch along with me and comment here with any observations or snark you have–consider this an off-topic post as well, so anything else is fair game too! Welcome to the party!
Sometimes I catch myself thinking that fundagelicals are, at heart, perfectly normal people who have simply been socialized in really awful ways, so they really aren’t aware of the threats they constantly use and the fearmongering behavior they exhibit. I start thinking that they are so immersed in fear tactics that they notice it all about as often as we notice the air in a room or how often we blink. And then A Thief in the Night rolled past my eyes, and I had to come face-to-face with my own boundless misplaced optimism.
It’s been so eye-opening for me to see just how deeply and painfully these movies have affected so many people with their terrifying, traumatizing message. I’ve heard from a great many people over this past week who wanted to share how frightened they’d been by these movies. So we’re going to be looking at why these movies had the effects they did. I’ll start with a retrospective–come join me!
Often we feel like others will agree with us once they know what we know. Further, we’ll assume that others share our way of looking at the world. And then we have to learn the hard way that neither of those assumptions are true when it comes to terrible people.
If you wanted to know what 70s Christians thought about the Rapture, these are your movies! Bear in mind that the Christians leading all these churches and Congressional committees and “think tanks” today are the ones who grew up on these movies. These idiotic movies are what informed their opinions about the world. To me, the value they have is that they show me a little of what went into the adult fundagelicals I see grandstanding today.
As horrible as the first A Thief in the Night was, as little happened in it narratively, and as awful as it was according to every single of filmmaking that exists, what blows my mind is that the creators of it found funding for not one–not two–but THREE other sequels.
The type of Christians who go in for the Rapture also tend to suffer from what the modern age has begun to call the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO). I’ll show you what that fear is and how it relates to Christianity–and maybe we’ll find some ways to escape that fear.
This is the mega-review of A Thief in the Night, which is one of the big granddaddies of Christian Rapture porn. It’s a movie where nothing happens and none of the characters are distinguishable except by hairstyle, and yet somehow it Read more
It sure looks like it follows all the usual tropes of these sorts of movies. Blah blah, Christians get Raptured and the world falls apart. Blah blah, one world government. Blah blah, everyone forgets about human rights–which fundagelicals are not super-good with anyway, remember–and the ebil gubmint starts executing people for holding beliefs they don’t like–which Christian leaders have traditionally done for centuries and only stopped doing because of human rights advances.
It was one of the funniest blowups I’ve seen on that site lately: a professional Christian named Matt Smethurst monumentally misread the limits of Twitter glurge-evangelism and one of his tweets blew up in his face. Today, Lord Snow Presides over some unexpectedly-illuminating tweets.