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!
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.
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 traumatized millions and millions of Christians in the 1970s and 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.
“Sandkings” is a 1979 novelette by none other than George R.R. Martin of Game of Thrones fame. And it’s our off-topic topic for today!
It seems fitting, however, to return to this topic of power now as we look at the Christian glurge movie/book The Shack and observe its main teaching: that independence is to be distrusted and rejected.
The Shack, the latest popular Christian glurge to get made into a movie, pretends to be a serious answer for the age-old question plaguing Christians: why does their god, who is supposed to be omni-everything as well as loving and gracious, allow terrible things to happen in his created world?
The Shack, the latest in a long line of Christian glurge movies and books, lives in that weird middle ground where Christians think they’re being progressive and yet turn out to be as locked in systemic racism as any of their peers.
The Shack is one of a very long line of Christian glurge media that recreates reality for believers, giving them the thrill of “seeing” their beliefs mesh at last with the real world. But for everyone else, stories like this one simply make the religion sound worse.