Since the Puritan era, Americans have wondered if they are either phenomenally blessed or on the brink of a God-ordained disaster. ![]() The rapture and the apocalypse have had a powerful effect on the nation’s imagination and identity since the country’s inception, as well as playing an important part of American missionary strategy to other countries. Scholars label this view of the Bible “dispensational premillennialism.” “Dispensational” refers to the belief that God has divided human history into particular ages, or dispensations “premillennialism” refers to the understanding that such devastation will occur before Jesus’ ultimate victory, which leads to Christ’s 1000-year reign (or millennium) on earth. Everyone else will be left behind to face a catastrophic period under the rule of the Antichrist before the actual end of the world. The central premise of the movie is the “rapture,” a concept drawn from a particular strain of Christianity, which believes Jesus will return to earth at any moment to secretly rapture or take up the truly faithful to heaven. It was the first film of its kind: a Christian horror flick that applied the tropes of science fiction and horror to an end-times scenario. So I became obsessed with it, watching movies like … A Thief in the Night, which described very graphically people getting their heads cut off because they hadn’t received 666 tattoos on their forehead.” At the other end of the social spectrum, young Christian filmmakers Peter and Paul LaLonde likewise saw the film as children, and later founded Cloud Ten Pictures, which produced the Left Behind: The Movie, which was adapted from Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins’ massively popular book.Ī Thief in the Night draws its power from anxieties playing just below the surface of American life. Marilyn Manson, who like so many saw the film at church as a child, wrote in his autobiography The Long Road Out of Hell, “I was thoroughly terrified by the idea of the end of the world and the Antichrist. Religion scholar John Walliss, who has written extensively on the movie and its aftermath, says, “Just as Alfred North Whitehead said that all of philosophy is a footnote to Plato, so we might say that all of evangelical Christian film is a footnote to A Thief in the Night.” This film inspired people from across the political and social spectrum. The film had an enormous impact on evangelical culture and shaped its attempts to influence American popular culture more directly through music, film, and books. The showings were big cultural events for her, always capped by an emotional altar call. Political scientist Paula Booke of Hope College, who wrote her doctoral dissertation at the University of Chicago on the influence of premillennial eschatology on American politics, recalls seeing the film at her small church in Jamaica in the late 1980s as a part of the church’s youth outreach. (Because viewing and distribution has largely been through alternative mechanisms, an accurate accounting is impossible.) “Today, many teen evangelicals have not seen A Thief in the Night, but virtually every evangelical over thirty I’ve talked to is familiar with it, and most have seen it,” writes Heather Hendershot in her book Shaking the World for Jesus. To date, the movie has been seen by perhaps more than 50 million people worldwide others estimate as high as 300 million. It has influenced a generation of Christians reared in the 1970s and 80s. The film was released in 1972 and marks its 40 th anniversary this year. ![]() If you have seen it, the setting was likely a church basement, a church camp, or some other quasi-authoritative space where the film’s sermonizing might have been accompanied by an earnest youth pastor worried for your soul. The hypnotic rhythms lodged themselves in my brain and there I was, making a piece of toast, with the refrain repeating itself relentlessly.Ī Thief in the Night is a cult classic, where the word “cult” has more than one resonance. ![]() Then I turned it off, and I could not get the song out of my head. I watched the first five minutes on YouTube, through the church meeting where an early-era praise band sings “I Wish We’d All Been Ready.” The song, which was one of the first contemporary Christian pop hits, describes the terrible things that will take place during the end times, with a refrain that laments, “there’s no time to change your mind/the Son has come and you’ve been left behind.” As I watched, I could not help but laugh at the film’s campy quality and poor acting. ![]() I hadn’t heard the song that opens the 1972 Christian apocalyptic film A Thief in the Night in decades, and my impression of it was: slow, dull, bizarre, not catchy at all.
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