I also realize this Evangelical Christian End Times stuff is old news to that segment of the HOTDOG readership that remembers keeping a porn stash in the woods. I’m not saying this is the reason I didn’t have a lot of friends in school, but I do think it was part of the reason, in addition to me constantly saying things like, “You’re punishing me for being five minutes late to class, but I thought you counted from the time my dick came through the door, not my balls!” and “Excuse me, I know you guys are busy playing kickball right now but I wanted to let you know that I’m not trying to smuggle a kielbasa and two ostrich eggs in these lycra shorts, that’s my dick and balls!” and “Mike Tyson is accusing me of embezzling money from him because he heard I was Dong King!.” The takeaway for me and my fellow Sunday School pupils was that all of the people we saw on the street - including some members of our own church - were ready to murder us the very second it was made legal. These movies begin and end with Bible quotes stating this anti-Christian genocide absolutely will happen, and that it will happen soon and without warning. Now you close your eyes and tell them you love Jesus no matter what.” Don’t worry, we don’t actually see the child get his head chopped off, we merely see his blood splattered on the guillotine when the man is led out to his own execution a moment later: “Billy, you’re free … ” he says, “they’re going to take you outside and lay you down. The man responds by telling the boy to go out and accept his death. It’s in the third movie where the anti-Christian forces tell a captive Iowan they will execute a toddler unless the man gives up the location of the boy’s mother, a Christian who is still at large. Some version of the above scene occurs over and over in these stories and if you’re thinking that it’s weird that the church was exposing children to this kind of thing, don’t worry - the films themselves actually explain why it’s necessary. It also spawned a book series (the Left Behind novels, named after a line from the first movie) that has sold over 65 million copies - enough copies that if you were to stack them vertically, you would have a pile of books 65 million copies tall. The first movie, from 1972, has reportedly been seen by 300 million people (so more than the number who saw Avengers: Endgame in theaters worldwide). That is from the A Thief in the Night series, one of the most popular film franchises ever made. It takes place in Des Moines, Iowa and includes this depiction of a woman being led to a blood-splattered guillotine by her fellow Iowans in the futuristic year of 1975, because she refused to renounce her faith in Christ: I 100% believed that as a child, mostly because of a “technically-fiction-but-it’s-totally going-to-happen” movie series I was made to watch in church. Some of you didn’t grow up thinking your neighbors were secret anti-Christians planning to chop off your head in the town square, and it shows.
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