The horror of Mike Flanagan’s newest series isn’t a serial killer or a haunted house—it’s a diagnosis.
The main characters of The Midnight Club are eight terminally ill young adults. At midnight, the adolescents gather in the library of their hospice facility to tell scary stories. In many ways, their gathering is the opposite of a church service. The kids meet at night instead of Sunday morning. They wear pajamas instead of their Sunday best. But in a very real sense, their gatherings are a liturgy—repetitive movements and phrases that affirm and ingrain beliefs.
Before the storytelling commences, the sick kids recite, “To those before and those after. To us now and to those beyond. Seen or unseen. Here but not here.” Just as a Christian liturgy might include repeated phrases like “Thanks be to God” or “Peace be with you,” alongside ancient creeds or the Lord’s Prayer, the Midnight Club employs liturgical language to articulate its own creedal truths.
Whereas Flanagan’s 2021 Netflix series, Midnight Mass, raged against institutional Christianity as a parasitic source of evil, The Midnight Club ostensibly bypasses organized religion altogether, yet it cannot escape its own form of church-like liturgy.
Those Before and After
“To those before.” This phrase roots its reciters in the past. These teens’ lives are hopelessly ephemeral. Calling out “those before” reminds them that, while their lives are brief, they’re connected to a community that predates them. The phrase also pays respect to the previous members who passed away. Though the teens’ situation is awful, it’s not unprecedented. They find comfort that others have experienced what they’re experiencing. Most members of the Midnight Club want nothing to do with church, yet they want the historical rootedness that liturgy and tradition bring. But they need more than that. They need hope.
“And those after.” The members of the Midnight Club also invoke liturgy as an anchor to the future. The repetition of the phrase acknowledges new members who will populate the club after the current members pass away. The reciters of the liturgy take comfort that though their deaths are imminent, the group will live on. The phrase reinforces the assumption that the sick kids will keep on living, and it acknowledges that if they don’t, it’ll be OK because someone else will. Faced with the terror of the cessation of their own existence, the group finds hope in the thought that their legacy and community will live on after they’re gone.
Is It Enough?
Through liturgy, the members of the Midnight Club root themselves in the past. They also console themselves by looking to the future. These comforts are substantial. But they’re not enough.
The Midnight Club has only existed for a few decades, after all; it’s a shallow place to drop an anchor. And while their liturgy creates a comfort that sustains them at least until their next meeting, it’s powerless in the face of their imminent deaths. The hope of a pseudo-life after death through the continuation of the group is also flawed; there’s no guarantee the group will continue.
We instinctively know there is more than just our own fleeting wisp of life. There has to be. And so we search for a liturgy that helps resolve this tension.
Don’t we long for a liturgy that gives meaning to our lives, beyond whatever we accomplish in the brief time we’re alive? Don’t we need hope beyond next week and the next generation? God has set eternity in our hearts (Eccles. 3:11), yet fragility and ephemerality mark our bodies. This tension is what makes humans liturgical creatures. We instinctively know there is more than just our own fleeting wisp of life. There has to be. And so we search for a liturgy that helps resolve this tension.
The Midnight Club’s liturgy fails to provide true hope for bodies doomed to decay, but Christian liturgy does.
Saints Before and After
Though most of us don’t face the horror of a terminal diagnosis, we still feel our fleeting nature. Even if we live into old age, the psalmist compares us to grass that’s here one day and gone the next (Ps. 103:15–16). Yet our Christian liturgy reminds us we belong to a community that has existed for over 2,000 years and will exist forever.
Don’t you relish the antiquity of our faith when you sing the doxology? When you respond to a call to worship and receive a benediction, do you consider how incredible it is that generations of Christians have kept this weekly rhythm for so many unbroken centuries? When you hear “I baptize you in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,” followed by a wonderful, soaking splash, do you marvel at how many gallons of water Christians have used for baptisms since receiving our commission? This is the ancient rootedness the members of the Midnight Club looked for. Our historical inheritance through liturgy is a beautiful thing—and exactly the sort of temporal connectedness so many in today’s fast-paced world are seeking.
Catechisms teach us new (to us) truths. Liturgy reminds us of what we already believe. Christian liturgy reminds us we’ll go to an eternal place Jesus prepares for us even now (John 14:2–3). It also reminds us that in that place we’ll see our brothers and sisters again (1 Thess 4:13–14).
The liturgy of the Midnight Club could never make such promises. The Christian hope is not like the “hope” of The Midnight Club—that others will carry on our faith tradition after us, but we won’t be with them tangibly. No, the Christian hope is that we’ll one day be in real, tangible, eternal community with all the saints before and after us, together with Christ (1 Thess. 4:16–17).
Liturgy That Leads to Life Eternal
We are all liturgical creatures. The difference between Christians reciting creeds on Sunday morning in church and terminally ill kids reciting liturgy in the Midnight Club is that the former offers a sturdy hope that will sustain us in life and death, while the latter provides only a flimsy reassurance to get through a day. Yet in both cases, humans are intuitively seeking meaning and purpose in the face of finitude.
Christian liturgy reminds us that we belong to a community that has existed for over 2,000 years and will exist forever.
This represents a natural “bridge” for Christians to engage their secular neighbors. How is your non-Christian friend channeling her liturgical ache? What rhythms is she using to fill the meaning void? How might you draw her into the bigger, more satisfying story of Christian liturgy?
As The Midnight Club demonstrates, people all around us are looking for a hope beyond their lives. Christians should invite these people into a liturgy that truly lasts. After all, one day we’ll be reciting liturgy with angels. For ages upon ages we will say, “Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come” (Rev. 4:8). And it’ll never get old.
The Gospel Coalition