{"id":71000,"date":"2025-07-18T17:18:42","date_gmt":"2025-07-18T21:18:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/?p=71000"},"modified":"2025-07-18T17:18:42","modified_gmt":"2025-07-18T21:18:42","slug":"lbcf-still-not-creepy-enough","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2025\/07\/18\/lbcf-still-not-creepy-enough\/","title":{"rendered":"LBCF: Still not creepy enough"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

(A Left Behind re-run, originally posted in March, 2006.)<\/em><\/p>\n

Left Behind,<\/i> pp. 211-217 (take one)<\/b><\/p>\n

It was a lump in the throat. It was an itching in the feet. It was a stirring in the blood at the sound of rain. It was a sickening of the heart at the sight of misery. It was a clamoring of ghosts. It was a name which, when I wrote it out in a dream, I knew was a name worth dying for even if I was not brave enough to do the dying myself and could not even name the name for sure. Come unto me, all ye who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you a high and driving peace. I will condemn you to death.<\/p>\n

\u2014 Frederick Buechner, in The Alphabet of Grace<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Remember that American Cancer Society PSA with Yul Brynner? The King of Siam recorded the ad shortly before dying of lung cancer. He appeared gaunt and death-haunted, looking directly into the camera, \u201c\u201dNow that I\u2019m gone I tell you: Don\u2019t smoke.\u201d<\/p>\n

It may have been the creepiest public service announcement ever. And precisely because it was<\/i> so creepy, it was very effective.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Part of the problem with the Rev. Vernon Billings\u2019 In Case of Rapture video is that, again, it\u2019s not creepy enough. This video is, after all, a kind of message from the great beyond, a voice from the other side. Yet it doesn\u2019t seem to occur to LaHaye and Jenkins that such a message ought to be a little bit creepy, a little bit eerie, maybe even a little bit numinous.<\/p>\n

Instead, the ICR video is entirely didactic and expository. It\u2019s about as eerie and numinous as a PowerPoint slideshow or a corporate training video. Actually, for L&J, it is<\/i> a corporate training video. It\u2019s a how-to instruction guide that will result, in a few short pages, in Rayford\u2019s conversion.<\/p>\n

For L&J, this conversion does not seem to require or involve anything numinous. They\u2019ll use words like \u201cspirit\u201d and \u201csupernatural,\u201d but these terms seem detached, clinical, powerless. Rayford encounters the infinite and it merely seems definite. His experience plays out as something therapeutic, not something transcendent. It comes across like one of those psychological breakthrough scenes that Mel Brooks parodied in High Anxiety<\/i> \u2014 \u201cIt\u2019s not height I\u2019m afraid of \u2014 it\u2019s parents!\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n

Rayford\u2019s conversion scene fizzles, in other words, for the same reason that Billings\u2019 video falls flat \u2014 because it\u2019s not creepy enough.<\/p>\n

I probably shouldn\u2019t be using the words \u201ccreepy\u201d and \u201cnuminous\u201d interchangeably like this \u2014 the words have different meanings and different connotations. But at some point I\u2019m sure you\u2019ve sat alone in a room reading a better book than Left Behind<\/i> and you\u2019ve read something that made the hair on the back of your neck stand up, something that made you look up from the page and glance around the room because you were no longer quite so sure you were<\/i> alone. Whether you were reading Stephen King or Julian of Norwich, the physical sensation is the same.<\/p>\n

These pages of LB<\/i> should probably be about two-parts Julian and one-part King. They ought to make your skin crawl, yet they don\u2019t. You can sit alone in a room and read this account of Rayford as he sits alone in a room and never be troubled by the sense that anyone or anything else is lurking nearby either one of you.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Creepy” and “numinous” don’t mean the same thing. But they kinda FEEL the same way. And you won’t find either on in Left Behind.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":141,"featured_media":69785,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-71000","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nLBCF: Still not creepy enough<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\""Creepy" and "numinous" don't mean the same thing. But they kinda FEEL the same way. 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