Left behind – the fear of death and apocalypse

Apocalypse is the last topic in the course, it seems like an ending, but also a start, it leads me my way to further explore the interaction between Christianity and popular culture in contemporary society. 

I never watched the movie “left behind” before, or read the novel only until after the lecture this week, it is an interesting movie, and perfectly matches the topic for this week. This film received a lot of negative feedback, when I researched it in Google, I found some comments like “The more this movie tries, the worse it gets.” The interpretation of apocalypse in this film upsets some people, but in my opinion, it quite resonates. The anti-Christian causes the doomsday and people with pure soul were raptured, the rest are left behind to face the Ends Day. What makes me interested is not the idea “it will ultimately ends” but “anxiety”, the “anxiety” of characters in the movie and also my anxious feeling when I watch it. The idea of doomsday has been existed in our culture since ancient time, but before twentieth century, the fear of it only appears during certain period such as during the Black Death, but after twentieth century, people began to lose hope even during the normal life, the more we know about the world and ourselves, the less we look back into our religion, and this is where the anxiety comes from. Popular culture such as film spread the anxiety, creates the fear, and drive us to think about ourselves and our believes.

“It is not reading, it’s believing”. The movie conveys the idea: “don’t be the ones left behind”, it is really a strong way to communicate the Christian idea through film, and it did make both positive and negative impacts on Christians. “Left behind” resonates people while the resonation is due to the fear of death.