When Pastor Balmer comes proselytizing at their front door, the good reverend recalls how Jim was saved by a blood transfusion from a snake handler who’d built up an immunity to cobra venom.Īside from the more obvious biblical metaphors regarding snakes, the preacher likens Jim’s ordeal to that of Jesus, who likewise gave his blood for all humanity. Back while they were dating, Jim’s job as a zookeeper led to him being hospitalized after a cobra bite. Patty’s convictions continue to be challenged when her husband Jim accepts Christ into his heart. Patty, intended to be our more relatable in-character, is caught somewhere in the middle - a good person who does good deeds yet remains lacking in a personal relationship with Christ. Among them is the innocent Jenny, who recently accepted Jesus as her personal lord and savior, and the more worldly Diane, who routinely scoffs at religion and is more eager to flirt with boys than to pray for forgiveness (Diane and her mustachioed boyfriend Jerry will become mainstay antagonists throughout the franchise - yes, there were sequels). We see her and her friends attending a local carnival shortly after leaving a youth sermon. Patty despairingly flashes back to her life in the short time prior to her current predicament. The radio news commentator speculates whether this supernatural pandemic is UFO abduction or the biblical Rapture prominent in Protestant theology. Patty rushes into the restroom, dismayed to find her husband’s electric shaver running in the sink, he too among those taken. Thief begins where it ends, with Patty Myers (played perennially by Patty Dunning) awakening to news of a global phenomenon that’s caused thousands of people to vanish within the blink of an eye. Long before the Left Behind series (which the authors cited as a heavy influence) - either the young adult fiction books that gained traction in the late-‘90s/early aughts or the films featuring Kirk Cameron and Nicholas Cage - and before Damon Lindelof’s The Leftovers, it was up to 1972’s gospel exploitation (gosploitation?) Thief in the Night to scare young Sunday-schoolers into repentance and eventual (and in my case, begrudging) salvation. Fears regarding a one world government, technophobia surrounding emerging computer and credit advances, a rising threat from foreign Euro/Russian powers, and potential turmoil in Israeli were folded into talk of tribulation, hellfire, and God’s wrath upon an ungrateful earth.Īt the epicenter of all this discussion, the veritable ground zero of supernal cinema, was Russell Doughten and Donald W. Such sermons would often combine traditional fire and brimstone preaching with contemporary, conspiratorial paranoia. Replete with famine, war, conquest and death (the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse), not to mention an Antichrist who will persecute all who don’t receive his “mark of the beast,” talk of the end times is often utilized as a scare tactic intended to convert the youth towards Christian salvation. Meanwhile, the rest of us poor saps left here on the ground will experience a seven-year “tribulation” period that will usher in the beginnings of the end of the world as we know it. The good reverend would detail predictions from the books Daniel and Revelation, and typically cite worldwide current events perceived to be signs that these “end times” were just around the corner.įor the literal laymen among us, the Rapture (according to born again Christians) is when Jesus will return from the clouds to meet with all his true followers in the sky above, as he whisks them away to Heaven. For those raised within the evangelical Christian community (I’m a former Baptist myself), the more luridly sensational Sundays spent shifting about in one’s local church pew were those spent listening to lectures regarding Rapture theology.
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