Not long ago, the Discord’s AV club watched A Distant Thunder (1978), the sequel to A Thief in the Night. This movie hit a vast number of tropes in evangelical Rapture/Endtimes movies, centering on one of my very favorites: Taking the Mark of the Beast may occur under duress, but Read more
Recently, we watched A Thief in the Night. This 1972 movie is one of the original grandmasters of the evangelical Rapture genre. Millions of people have seen it, and many of them were just children. Today, let’s check out its overview and see how hard it pushes fear-based marketing to Read more
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 Read more
Recently, a gospel singer named Solomon Ray saw his songs climb to the top of the Christian music heap—but there’s a catch! He’s an AI created by right-wing rapper named Topher. More than that, the AI’s music is created in an AI program called Suno. This isn’t even the first Read more
Evangelicals can’t defeat actual atheism, so they vastly prefer strawman atheism—their own unique and deliberate mangling of atheism. The real thing is impenetrable to them, and they very clearly realize it. But this strawman form of atheism is much easier to tackle. Today, let me show you how what was Read more
Last time we met up, we talked about the recent death of Hal Lindsey, who wrote The Late Great Planet Earth. The book made Lindsey a mint and guaranteed him a lucrative career in evangelical prophecy. In 1978, eight years after the publishing of that book, its movie version came Read more
Some years back, Christian bookstores made a mint with heavenly tourism books. These books claimed to offer not only PROOF YES PROOF of life after death, but also evidence for Christianity itself. For years, they made money. And then, the entire genre collapsed. Today, let’s talk about the rise and Read more
For decades now, Christians have been arguing among themselves about worship music. And I can see why. Music speaks to the heart and mind in ways that words simply can’t. Two editorials from Christianity Today reveal that this argument is nowhere near an end. In fact, it might only be Read more
It’s been very interesting to see how dysfunctional authoritarians approach deconstruction in other Christians, especially with regard to how they’ve dealt with doubt over the past 10 or 12 years.
By the time I joined evangelicalism (in the mid-1980s), I learned to feel downright guilty for not injecting enough Jesus-ification into my life. I couldn’t just read a fantasy novel for the sake of it, go to a movie, or enjoy music that didn’t mention Jesus even once.