10/21/2023 0 Comments Download the rapture gameIt sought to make its gospel message popular by mainstream cultural standards. Emerging in the 1940s out of and in some ways against the fundamentalist movement, which had become increasingly countercultural and sectarian in the wake of the Scopes trial, “neo-evangelicalism,” as it was then called, made American youth culture its mission field. The late 1960s and early ’70s were transformative years for American evangelicalism generally and evangelical youth culture specifically. Between the rise of the Christian youth movement and a growing fascination with the darker traditions of Christianity rooted in the Book of Revelation, we were witnessing the dawn of a new era of evangelical apocalyptic horror culture, one that makes you wonder what might come next. Then again, like most youth group kids in America, I was largely oblivious to everything going on in the larger world of evangelical Christianity. I assumed the original version was the one performed by the Fishmarket Combo during the opening credits of the 1972 evangelical rapture horror movie A Thief in the Night, which we watched every year or so. I had no idea that Larry Norman was the song’s original writer and performer. The song invited us to imagine a time when it was already too late, when our ambivalence, our lack of faith, had left us each alone, without God and, perhaps more terrifying at that age, without friends. We all looked at the floor, feeling the weight of the words, as if we were the ones Christ had left behind when he returned to rapture his followers up to heaven. Our youth group must have sung it more than a hundred times.
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