The latest sequel to a long series of books and movies just hit the cinema!?

Yes, you read it correctly … yet another sequel in the Left Behind / Thief in the Night franchise of books and movies has come out. As if the previous ones which began coming out as far back as the 70s and 80s weren’t embarrassing and destructive enough.

We talked to Dr. Aaron Ricker, whose current major research interest is Apocalypticism … in the Bible … in comic books … in modern action hero movies … and in the zeitgeist of our day. And together with him, we first looked at some of the statistics gathered by polling agencies re. the various beliefs pertaining to “the End Times,” the Antichrist, and “the Rapture” in society today (well, mostly in Americans). [Links for these data can be found below]

We also looked at the fact that every Left Behind movie or book has the same four ingredients: the “Rapture”, an Antichrist who violently takes over the world, the “Mark of the Beast”, and global destruction. These are the hallmark features of this genre. This isn’t just a nerdy fun-fact: the reason it’s so noteworthy is that the “End Times” scenario that Jesus described doesn’t have any of these four ingredients!? At least not in any way that modern day Evangelicals understand these things. Disagree? Check out how we justify that claim.

Finally, we looked at some of the dangers and costs — to individuals as well as to society — of this “End Times” thinking:

• the anxiety and fear that it creates in people, especially kids and adolescents, of having been “left behind” and now having to face a world-dominating Antichrist, global destruction, and ultimately …. eternal damnation.
• opportunity costs: some who get sucked into this way of thinking question whether to go to university, or to pursue important careers, or even whether to get married (or they decide to get married too early) … all because they think “Jesus is definitely coming back in the next year or two, so why bother? Instead, we should just get ready for his return.”
• making the situation on Earth even worse: the mentality that “maybe we can get Jesus to come back sooner if we just stir things up in Israel, or push international relations to the brink, or ruin the planet such that we humans NEED to be rescued (believe it or not, some people actually think this way)”.
• inaction on important issues: “if Jesus is coming back in the next year or two, then why bother trying to save the planet (pollution; global warming; environmental collapse and species extinction), or fix the inner cities, because it’s all gonna just burn anyway, right?”
• a distorted attitude re. foreign affairs, especially when it relates to Israel, because “this is all part of the plan”.
• unnecessary suspicion about any enterprise that involves a variety of governments, because they all start looking too much like “part of the one-world government that paves the way for the Antichrist”.

Next week, we’re going to look at the history behind this way of thinking: how it has evolved over the past two millennia. And the week after that we’ll hear from two clinical experts who specialize in this kind of trauma.

As always, tell us what you think …

If you enjoyed this episode, you might also like the other one we did a year ago on “the End of the World” …. episode #33.

Our guest, Dr. Aaron Ricker, can be contacted at aaron.ricker@mail.mcgill.ca

Statistical polls discussed in this episode are available at Pew Research and at Lifeway Research.

Episode image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay (and modified). Movie promotional image from Amcomri Entertainment and Stonagal Pictures.

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