1 A Critical Analysis of the Left Behind Series By Nathan Dickey* “This is the end, beautiful friend. This is the end, my only friend the end. Of our elaborate plans the end. Of everything that stands the end. No safety or surprise, the end.” ~ The Doors, ‘The End’ (1967) I. THE PREMISE The belief that the biblical apocalypse is right around the corner in the present day is very central – and is in fact fairly close to the center itself – in the fundamentalist denominations of Christianity. This centrality was present in the early church as well two thousand years ago, so much so that the Second Coming of Christ (the Parousia in theology-speak) sometimes threatened to crowd out the first coming in popularity. There is some danger in this emphasis, whether one is a member of the religion or not. In the legend of the first coming of Christ, we are introduced to “Gentle Jesus, meek and mild” (on the surface at least) from whom one can learn all manner of wise teachings. But in the apocalyptic writings and artwork dealing with the Second Coming of Christ, we are presented with a very different personage: An ominous figure with a robe soaked in blood, finally ready to judge the world’s inhabitants and consign those who have accepted the Mark of the Beast into a lake of fire and sulphur. For the average moderate believer and the curious outsiders, the realization that they are numbered among those whom the strong believers think are going to have a part in this lake of fire is not long in coming. The Jesus of the Second Coming is the cosmic conquering warlord, very different from the Jesus we read about in the Gospels. The Jesus of Revelation is essentially a glorified incarnation of Frank Castle from Marvel Comics’ The Punisher who eschews all semblance of either mercy or nuanced evaluation in his violent vendetta against his enemies: I’m coming. All of you out there, I’m coming. Those who do evil to others – the killers, the rapists, psychos, sadists – take heed. You will come to know me well. . . . 2 Call me the Punisher.1 Just replace “the killers, the rapists, psychos, sadists” with “the liberals, the tolerant, intellectuals, freethinkers,” and you’ve pegged the Jesus imagined by Christian fundamentalists when they read of the Second Coming in Revelation. But how can Christian believers in the Second Coming and final judgment really expect Jesus to blame non-theist intellectuals like Bertrand Russell and Noam Chomsky for failing to be impressed by the likes of Jerry Falwell or Hal Lindsey? The deeper the devout believers immerse themselves in this apocalyptic fervor, the more the world they envision begins to look like something out of Planet of the Apes: an allaround nightmarish scenario of epic and frighteningly absurdist proportions. Welcome to the world of Left Behind. The Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins is a bestselling series of novels about the end-times as depicted in the New Testament’s Book of Revelation. The saga begins with the “Rapture of the Church,” an event in which all believing Christians vaporize in the twinkling of an eye and are translated into heaven. The ensuing story follows the lives of several people who find themselves left behind to face the “Tribulation,” a period of seven years during which all the remaining people on earth must endure great terrors and judgments dropped upon them by the Christian God. For all those not raptured away to heaven by Christ, there is still a second chance to live for Christ in the post-rapture world, an opportunity which is seized by the main characters in very short order. It is interesting to note that, according to the rules of this story, those who are left behind in the very beginning were not Christians, or at least not the right kind of Christians. Considering that these books are mostly read by Christians, this gives the term “lost audience” a whole new meaning. There are 12 books in the main series, with three prequel novels and an “epilogue” novel bringing the total to 16 books. The twelve main-sequence novels cover a period of seven years, the period of time over which the Tribulation is supposed to span. The series kicked off with the publication of the first book in 1995 and wrapped up twelve years later with the release of the final book (Kingdom Come) in 2007. I have read up to and including the seventh book (The Indwelling), as well as the prequels, and my critique here reflects that stage in my progression through the series. 1 D.A. Stern, The Punisher (New York: Del Rey, 2004), p. 309. 3 The sprawling epic of Left Behind is the adventure story of a lifetime and at the same time represents a carefully-calculated fundamentalist scare tactic. Readers will recognize the fire-andbrimstone motifs often used by fear-mongering preachers, but instead of hell, these novels try to instill the terror of being left behind in the wake of the Rapture. The message seems to be that avoiding hell is not the only reason a person should become a born-again Christian. According to the actual beliefs of our authors, there is also a Tribulation to avoid. Why get saved after the Rapture and thus have to worry about the judgments of God and the depredations of the Antichrist? LaHaye and Jenkins present this question by way of the unfortunate protagonists. These are characters that exist for the sole purpose of serving as examples of what kind of people the reader should hope to avoid becoming. In his critical review of the series, psychologist Edmund Cohen makes a fine comment on the foundation of fear and intimidation upon which the success of these books has been built: Left Behind’s purpose in the fundamentalist church scheme of things is devotional. It is a sugarcoated fear manipulation. To the fear of going to burn in eternal fire if one’s devotional life is not right is added the more easily imaginable fear of being left behind to suffer through the Tribulation—and perhaps not make the cut even then. With each installment, what the errant believer ought to be afraid of is made more lurid. The point is to keep the devotee too afraid to think outside that box. One has to feel sorry for people caught inside those morbid, fictitious preoccupations.2 For the apathetic non-believer who is either credulous or on the fence with regards to religious questions, reading about how horrible life on earth will be during the Tribulation will certainly have a subconscious effect at least, and the authors know this. Guilt is a major theme throughout; while there is a good deal of character development in the first book, much of this development is focused heavily on the guilt felt by the characters over their failure to turn to Christ before the Rapture, and the narrative dwells considerably on their regret over having to live in a world without their family and close friends and the commodities they so recently took for granted. To add to this guilt and regret, the authors burden their characters with fear. By becoming Christians in the post-rapture world, the characters know that severe prosecution will soon be in 2 Ed u d D. Cohe , Re ie of the Left Behind Tribulation Novels: Turner Diaries Lite, Free Inquiry 21, no. 2 (Spring 2001). Available online at http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/cohen_21_2.html (accessed October 6, 2014). 4 the works, and that they have taken upon themselves the possibility of just one more way to die, namely martyrdom. It is a world without children; all babies and small children disappear in the Rapture because they are below the so-called “age of accountability.” Strangely enough, however, not all “Christians” disappear. In these novels, denomination is a matter of life and death. But there are at least two ways in which the scare tactics built into the books’ narrative may fail to work. First, these books read much like dimestore pulp fiction. Often very humorous in a completely unintended way, the books’ corniness makes them mildly entertaining, and I am comfortable with recommending the series to my fellow atheists on the basis of its camp value. The second sense in which the novels’ scare tactics do not work so well has to do with the authors’ understandable mistake of “romanticizing” the travails of the Tribulation. It is, after all, a fantastical adventure story with which the reader can easily become entranced. In fact, some readers who actually believe in the theology upon which these books are based, or who are on the verge of believing, may decide they do not want to be a Christian in this boring Age of Grace. They may decide that they want to be left behind so they can experience the adventure of fighting the Antichrist. 5 II. THE CHARACTERS The Protagonists The first book in the Left Behind series introduces the four primary characters who form the inner core group. Rayford Steele is a well-to-do, upper-class, all-American airline pilot. His nineteen-year-old daughter Chloe Steele is a college student and a natural-born skeptic of religion and supernatural phenomena. Cameron “Buck” Williams is an award-winning, globetrotting journalist. Bruce Barnes is an assistant pastor of a small church who thought he was a Christian prior to the Rapture but had a rude awakening when he was left behind, at which point he realized he was not the right kind of Christian for God. Rayford, Chloe and Buck are people who outwardly rejected the fundamentalist Christian faith of their family, friends and acquaintances. Rayford, Chloe and Bruce Barnes lived their lives surrounded by Christian influence, while Buck Williams is a wholly secular agnostic3 who has virtually no exposure to Christianity aside from a Christian colleague, and thus initially knows next to nothing about Christian theology. Other characters are introduced in the ensuing installments, joining the cast of primary protagonists. Among them is Tsion Ben-Judah, an Orthodox Jewish scholar-turned Christian fundamentalist. Tsion plays the role of spiritual guide and mentor to the other protagonists and is essentially a stand-in or “Author Avatar” for Tim LaHaye.4 He is rarely involved in the action, spending most of his time in hiding while researching biblical prophecy in order to consult with the other “tribulation saints” on what judgments are coming next and writing end-times sermons for his online cyberministry. An African-American physician named Floyd Charles joins the team of protagonists in the fourth book (Soul Harvest). A clear instance of tokenism, the character of Dr. Floyd Charles was probably the authors’ way of offsetting any potential accusations of racism. Of course, Floyd Charles is among the characters that die, in his case from 3 The beginning of the first book treats us to a backstory in which Buck experiences a close brush with death when he witnesses firsthand an attack on Israel by the entire Russian army, in fulfillment of an Old Testament prophecy. When the entire massive army is miraculously destroyed by divine intervention with not a single Israeli casualty, Buck decides he might be a deist instead of an agnostic (Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days [Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 1995], p. 79). This demonstrates that LaHaye and Jenkins have no idea what deism even is. 4 TV Tropes iki, Author A atar, http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AuthorAvatar (accessed October 6, 2014). 6 contracting “time-released cyanide” poison by osmosis after treating a woman who was poisoned by the Antichrist.5 All the other primary inner-circle characters are white. These characters are heavily stereotyped, for a simple reason that is to be expected given the nature of the case. The people to whom these books are geared are predominantly those who believe they will not be left behind when their awaited-for Rapture occurs. Thus, there is really no need to make any of the characters either believable or relatable. Indeed, the main characters are not the kind of people born-again Christian readers of the series are supposed to relate to. Again, Christian readers of these books are in a real sense a “lost audience.” Antichrist Superstar The Christian concept of the Antichrist has fascinated believers and nonbelievers alike for the last two thousand years, despite the fact that this enigmatic figure is mentioned only twice in the whole Bible, both references contained in a single verse (1 John 2:18). This solitary mention of “antichrist” has taken on a life and mythology of its own, likely due to Christians spuriously equating the epistle’s personage to the “Beast” in Revelation and the “Man of Perdition” in Daniel. As religious historian Bernard McGinn remarks, “What is most significant about Antichrist’s appearance in literature has been the attempts to probe the motivation (and at times even the psychology) behind ultimate human evil . . . It is probably no accident that novels and novellas, where motivation and character development are so important, display the most interesting Antichrists.”6 Nicolae Carpathia, President of Romania when we first meet him, is by far my favorite character in the Left Behind series, especially once he really breaks into his role as the Antichrist at the height of his power.7 He becomes the host body of Satan himself following his death and resurrection at the end of the seventh book (The Indwelling), and all the protagonists adamantly abhor him. And yet the world names schools after him! The whole reason Carpathia is pegged as the Antichrist by the protagonists at the end of the first book is because the world loves him, not 5 Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, Assassins: Assignment, Jerusalem, Target: Antichrist (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 1999), pp. 32, 54-55. 6 Bernard McGinn, Antichrist: Two Thousand Years of the Human Fascination with Evil (San Francisco: HarperCollins Publishers, 1994), p. 263. 7 Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, Nicolae: The Rise of Antichrist (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 1997). 7 because he rains down fire, controls the weather, and executes his critics (which he does not do until much later on in the series). Apparently, a great politician who starts out with a sincere desire to unify the world in the midst of a global crisis and whom everybody loves is perfect Antichrist material for our authors. Indeed, in Left Behind, the villains just happen to be the people most often demonized by LaHaye and the Christian Right in general, i.e. United Nations officials, the Europeans, the “liberal media,” freethinkers of all stripes, civil rights activists, women’s rights activists, etc. In a scathing profile done on Tim LaHaye in Rolling Stone magazine in 2004, Robert Dreyfuss gives us a revealing glimpse of just how far LaHaye’s paranoia extends: According to LaHaye, civilization is threatened by a worldwide conspiracy of secret societies and liberal groups intent on destroying “every vestige of Christianity.” Among the participants in this conspiracy are the Trilateral Commission, the Illuminati, the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the National Organization for Women, Planned Parenthood, “the major TV networks, high-profile newspapers and newsmagazines,” the U.S. State Department, major foundations (Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford), the United Nations, “the left wing of the Democratic Party,” Harvard, Yale “and 2,000 other colleges and universities.” All of this is assembled to “turn America into an amoral, humanist country, ripe for merger into a one-world socialist state.” 8 Dreyfuss also points out that Left Behind was first conceived as a self-righteous projection of LaHaye’s own extremely repressed moral strictures into the business of others: “As LaHaye tells the story, one day, about 1994, he was sitting on an airplane, watching a married pilot flirting with a flight attendant, and it hit him: What would befall the sinful pilot if the Rapture happened now?”9 According to the end-times doctrine of right-wing Christians, the Antichrist is both the most evil human being who will ever live and the first person to succeed in single-handedly bringing peace to the world. This belief opens the door for such Christians to label anyone who comes along and tries to make the world a better place as an evil person or group. This is something we hear over and over again from the Christian Right. Any time the news reports on the efforts of some influential figure who expresses the desire to see peace brought to the Middle East, for 8 9 Ro ert Dre fuss, Re ere d Doo sda , Rolling Stone, February 19, 2004, p. 49. Ibid. 8 example, such Christians immediately narrow their eyes and suspect he is the Antichrist. This outlook completely inverts the progressive values and of humanitarian compassion and understanding as bad, and presents ignorance, hatred and war as good. The Left Behind series strongly reflects this paranoia toward all things bearing even the semblance of secularism and progressivism. But I will be conciliatory here and state that Left Behind, in addition to employing end-times scare tactics under a thin marketing veneer of fiction, does misrepresent certain prominent portions of the Bible. In the words of Isaiah, “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter” (5:20). There are a number of obvious fallacies inherent in the storyline, and Carpathia, LaHaye’s “good evil,” is probably the most difficult to make sense of. To wit: When the Rapture occurs and millions of people all over the world vanish into thin air, the Antichrist explains the event away as the result of residual radiation left over from decades of nuclear bomb testing that vaporized random people: “When the time is appropriate, I will allow Dr. Rosenzweig to speak for himself, but for now I can tell you that the theory that makes the most sense to me is briefly as follows: The world has been stockpiling nuclear weapons for innumerable years. Since the United States dropped atomic bombs on Japan in 1945 and the Soviet Union first detonated its own devices September 23, 1949, the world has been at risk of nuclear holocaust. Dr. Rosenzweig and his team of renowned scholars is close to the discovery of an atmospheric phenomenon that may have caused the vanishing of so many people instantaneously.”10 Fred Clark, author of the excellent Slacktivist blog which offers detailed deconstructions of the Left Behind books and movie, has an interesting comment on this scene as it appears in Vic Sarin’s film adaptation,11 which was released direct-to-video in 2000 and starred evangelist Kirk Cameron: Back in NYC, Ivy and her friend are watching a Nicolae Carpathia press conference on Ivy’s computer — a nifty trick back in 2000. Nicolae offers the same nonsensical non-explanation for 10 Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 1995), pp. 253-54. 11 Vic Sarin, Left Behind: The Movie (Cloud Ten Pictures, 2000). 9 the disappearances that he offers in the book: “We have confirmed that the disappearances have been caused by accumulated radiation from decades of nuclear weapons testing.” That doesn’t even try to make sense, yet here, as in the book, everybody happily swallows this. Not only do they universally accept this explanation for why random people simultaneously disintegrated (and only people, no animals or plants), but they universally greet as reassuring the news that the atmosphere is filled with undetectable radiation that might, at any moment, cause them to spontaneously disintegrate too: “Where are they? Where are my mother and my brother? Where are my children?” “Don’t worry, they disappeared due to accumulated radiation from decades of nuclear weapons testing.” “Oh. Well, OK then. Anybody know what’s playing at the multiplex?”12 This really is representative of the level of intellectual discourse found in the series. This is what happens when evangelical authors attempt to drag a very old apocalyptic text into a modern setting, and then try to portray how they think fictional skeptics would rationalize what happens. Spoiler alert: They end up creating a strawman portrayal of skeptics. Has everybody in this story forgotten about the centuries of Christian proselytizing? Prior to the Rapture, Christians had made it their mission to save as many people as possible so that they can get zapped away to heaven before the seven years of Tribulation got to them first. But we know that the world depicted in the novels is not placed under some magic spell of amnesia after the Rapture, because the post-Rapture believers soon take up the mantle of their recently-departed brothers and sisters and set out to save souls, all the while trying to survive the depredations of divine judgment and the Antichrist’s persecutions. In the second book (Tribulation Force), our four heroes begin to settle back into semi-normal lives after the few months of worldwide chaos covered in the first book. They decide to carry on with their various jobs as best they can, and Buck and Chloe even start a serious relationship, even though they have been made to fully understand they only have seven years at most left to live. They know the settling of the world into the makeshift peace routine established by Carpathia (who has become Secretary-General of the United Nations) is only a temporary façade. Carpathia is the 12 Fred Clark, LBTM: A u ulated Radiatio , Slacktivist, January 9, 2009, http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2009/01/09/lbtm-accumulated-radiation/ (accessed October 6, 2014). 10 Antichrist, after all, and it is a matter of course that anybody who tries to bring the world together in peace must be evil. But they play along in order to bring the lost to Christ more effectively. Rayford even becomes Carpathia’s personal pilot, and Buck becomes Carpathia’s favorite journalist. Another oddity of the Left Behind novels that strains plausibility to its breaking point is that Carpathia, the charismatic peacemaker who brings the entire world under a single government and then betrays that peace three and a half years into his reign, is an obscure politician from Romania at the beginning of the series. Fred Clark again hits the nail on the head as to why this is implausible: [The writers’] aim here is to have it make some kind of sense that Nicolae would be the go-to guy for network reporters seeking comment immediately after the Event [the worldwide vanishing of millions]. That’s a tall order. Even if the president of Romania were as charismatic as a young Robert Redford he would still be the president of Romania, which is to say a foreigner, and Americans — and particularly American network reporters – aren’t interested in what foreigners have to say. It’s impossible to imagine any plausible scenario in which the president of Romania is who they’d want to hear from in the immediate aftermath of the abduction/disintegration of all their children. It’s unlikely the president of Romania would even be sought out for comment by the American media if the Event had been confined to Romanian children. Even apart from any America-centric parochial tendencies here, it makes sense that in times of national tragedy, people would want to hear from their own leaders. The filmmakers hope to skip that step by killing off America’s leader, but that doesn’t work. If the loss of the president were added to the trauma of the Event, Americans would have an even more urgent need to learn that someone — someone here — was in charge, and they would need to hear from that person, not from some thickly accented man with no standing here who comes from a place most of us couldn’t find on a map. 13 Why Romania? Implicit in the Book of Revelation and according to long-standing tradition in Christian eschatology, the Antichrist is supposed to hail from Rome.14 This is why we end up 13 Fred Clark, LBTM: In Case of Rapture, Slacktivist, December 14, 2008, http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2008/12/14/lbtm-in-case-of-rapture/ (accessed October 6, 2014). 14 This being the case, I am not sure why many fundamentalists have claimed that Barack Obama is the Antichrist, or how in their minds he is possibly supposed to fit in with Rome. In any case, the claim that Obama meets qualifications characteristic of Revelation’s Beast has ee de u ked. “ee Bar ara Mikkelso a d Da id P. 11 with a Romanian man in these novels. Does the first book depict Romania as a country that has become a world superpower? No, Carpathia is simply really good at talking (and based on the Bush Jr. presidency, we all know how much importance we place on that). This must be why Carpathia, the president of Romania, reports the development of the ludicrous radiation theory to the press, not the “renowned” scientists themselves. Fans of the series may try to defend this particular aspect of the character’s development by arguing that the authors are using this sudden transformation from obscurity to fame as a device to portray Carpathia as a “dark horse” figure. But this defense falls short, because the sudden transformation is not even documented. It is simply asserted as something that happens. Even “dark horse” narratives need an appreciable level of verisimilitude to work, and Left Behind conspicuously lacks this ingredient. Mikkelso , O a a as A ti-Christ, Snopes.com, August 3, 2009, http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/antichrist.asp (accessed October 6, 2014). 12 III. TRIBULATION FARCE “You must be certain of the Devil ‘cause he knows your name / You must be certain of the Devil ‘cause he’s counting on your shame / You must be certain of the Devil ‘cause he’s master of the game / You must be certain of the Devil right now.” ~ Diamanda Galás, ‘You Must Be Certain of the Devil’ (1988) In the Left Behind series, several attempts are made by the small army of Christian believers known as the “Tribulation Force” to fight the Antichrist and thwart his plans. But there is a fairly obvious catch-22 inherent in the notion of a task-force of Christian believers fighting against the Antichrist’s agenda. If their efforts were successful, they would by definition stop the Antichrist’s plan and thereby prevent prophecy from being fulfilled. Are they not trying to change a fixed future and thwart what is already predicted by the very Holy Scriptures they fight for? The authors have something of an explanation for this. The reason the Tribulation Force protagonists keep on trying to either kill the Antichrist or disrupt his plans is not to actually prevent the prophesied calamities that God is dishing out to a supposedly deserving world via the Antichrist, but rather to convey the point to unbelieving people that this man, who is not being affected by their attacks, really is the Antichrist and not to be trusted. The protagonists know full well, for example, that “if Carpathia was indeed the Antichrist – and most people except his followers thought he was – he wouldn’t stay dead anyway. . . . Nicolae would come out of it more heroic than ever.”15 They are aware that when Carpathia is scheduled by ancient prophecy to die from a severe head wound three and a half years into the Tribulation, he will rise again. At his resurrection he will be indwelt by Satan and become more powerful than ever. But a number of Christians in the story still want the honor of being the assassin anyway (since “it had to be done anyway”16), if only to make a symbolic point to Carpathia’s lost followers: “Tell me, Captain Steele. Do you still believe that a man who has been known to raise the dead could actually be the Antichrist?” Rayford hesitated, wishing Tsion was in the room. “The enemy has been known to imitate miracles,” he said. “Imagine the audience in Israel if you were to do something like that. Here are 15 16 LaHaye and Jenkins, Assassins, p. 5. Ibid. 13 people of faith coming together for inspiration. If you are God, if you could be the Messiah, wouldn’t they be thrilled to meet you?” Carpathia stared at Rayford, seeming to study his eyes. Rayford believed God. He had faith that regardless of his power, regardless of his intentions, Nicolae would be impotent in the face of any of the 144,000 witnesses who carried the seal of almighty God on their foreheads.17 But this reasoning does not work. The problem with wanting to shoot bullets at Carpathia just to prove to the world that he is the Antichrist is made apparent in the story itself. At the end of the seventh book, Carpathia declares himself to be God in the flesh after returning to life from a death he ended up suffering at the hands of a nonbeliever.18 Thus, it turns out that even if it had been our pious butt-kickers who had carried out the assassination in an attempt to force Carpathia to display his demonic powers, this would only have further supported his claim to divinity. But LaHaye and Jenkins can be credited with providing us a thought-provoking idea, although unintentionally on their part. If evil people can perform wonders and miracles, how does one know that what he or she thinks is God’s wonders and miracles does not actually come from an evil source? If one believes that the performing of signs and wonders are an indication of an evil being, or even that they can potentially be the sign of an evil being (which is something almost all fundamentalists affirm), upon what grounds can that person say that Jesus must be the good Son of God simply because he validated himself through signs and wonders? In his own critical analysis of the Left Behind series, atheist Bible scholar Robert M. Price makes the following salient observation: It is striking that the books (especially The Indwelling) set up the resurrection of Antichrist Carpathia in the very terms evangelical apologists wish they had and claim to have for Jesus: his resurrection was seen by many witnesses, including hostile ones, and is even recorded on tape! And yet there is the realization that there will always be “skeptics” holding out. The attested resurrection is offered as confirmation by the Risen One of his own deity. Should not Rayford . . . and the others, if they were raised on evangelical apologetics, convert to belief in Carpathianism? 17 Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, Soul Harvest: The World Takes Sides (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 1998), p. 424. 18 Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, The Indwelling: The Beast Takes Possession (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 2000), pp. 363-368. 14 And if they shouldn’t, why should skeptics not reject belief in Jesus, for whom the same sort of claims, though much weaker, are made?19 Jesus is reputed to have said to his disciples, “For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect” (Matthew 24:24; cf. Mark 13:22). But just how can one distinguish between good miracle-working entities from evil miracle-working entities, especially when the miracle-worker under scrutiny is of the kind that comes as a standard-bearer of peace to the world like Carpathia? Is it not true that the Pax Romana in the first and second centuries of the Common Era accomplished exactly what Carpathia did in these novels? Some Christians will respond by saying that God has warned us in the Book of Revelation not only that the Antichrist is coming, but also what actions he would take and how his attributes will be conducive to conquering through peace. But what if the Book of Revelation was actually written by an evil antichrist as a way of thwarting the good divinity and turning us against it when the end came? That would be highly problematic, but I doubt most (if any) Christians have considered that possibility. And it’s a possibility which is no more or less plausible than the alternative given a supernaturally-oriented worldview. 19 Robert M. Price, The Paperback Apocalypse: How the Christian Church Was Left Behind (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2007), p. 292. 15 IV. LEFT BEHIND 2000 YEARS AGO “People look to me and say, ‘Is the end near, when is the final day?’ What’s the future of mankind? How do I know, I got left behind. How am I supposed to know hidden meanings that will never show? Fools and prophets from the past, life’s a stage and we’re all in the cast.” ~ Ozzy Osbourne, ‘I Don’t Know’ (1980) In exploring and critiquing the underlying theology upon which Left Behind is based, it is important to make clear my realization that many Christians do not believe in the notions of Rapture and Tribulation. Many educated Christians take the side of the vast majority of reputable Bible scholars who say that the Book of Revelation was intended to be an allegorical and devotional account of what early Christians at the close of the first century CE believed would befall the Roman Empire.20 But whether it makes more or less sense for a professing Christian to take this position is, I think, debatable. What are the theological implications of saying that Jesus could see the future only in a limited sense, and that his foresight did not extend very far into the future? For secular and critical Bible scholars, this does not pose a dilemma, because they know the New Testament was not written by either Jesus or his closest followers. But for the majority of lay believers, the New Testament is supposed to be divinely inspired. Whenever Jesus delivers a dissertation on the end-times in the Gospels, the speech is always directly linked to the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. His end-times missives are always intended to refer to events predicted to take place within the next few decades. In Jesus’ time, there was a great deal of incendiary doomsday preaching in the midst of Jewish persecution at the hands of Rome, which was having a difficult time deciding what to do with this section of their growing empire. The inference that the Temple was in danger was not an outlandish one to make; it did not take a divine prophet or seer to perceive that a bad situation was brewing and getting worse as time went on. And in the New Testament scriptures, the Temple’s destruction is clearly predicted to take place within Jesus’ own generation. In the Olivet Discourse, featured in every Gospel except that of John, Jesus talks with his disciples about the signs which will immediately precede the apocalypse. When Jesus states, 20 Bart D. Ehrman, The New Testament (Chantilly, VA: The Teaching Company, 2000), lecture 23; Elaine Pagels, Revelations: Visions, Prophecy & Politics in the Book of Revelation (New York: Penguin Books, 2012), chap. 1. 16 “Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled” (Matthew 24:34; cf. Mark 13:30; Luke 21:32), he is speaking specifically about the coming of the Messiah and the concurrent destruction of the Temple, events which the early church believed would cue the end of the world and the final judgment. On the basis of the above-mentioned verses and others (for example, Matthew 16:28 and John 21:21-22), some biblical inerrantists have actually gone so far as to posit that John the Apostle, Jesus’ closest follower, is still alive today and waits for the Second Coming in hiding somewhere, his physical body miraculously conserved by God for the last two thousand years.21 Even the most hidebound of fundamentalists must have some dim understanding in the back of their minds that the validity of their faith is seriously threatened if in fact Jesus predicted that his return would come during his disciples’ generation, a promise he obviously failed to deliver on. This is why Christian apologists must resort to mental gymnastics when their backs are against the wall on this topic. They will argue, for example, that the words “this generation” (genea) in Matthew 24:34 and its parallel passages should actually be understood to mean “this nation” or “this race,” as in “this nation shall not pass till all these things be done.” My response to this apologetic maneuver is threefold: 1. Greek language experts do not agree with this translation. In the particular context of these verses, genea is translated as “generation” by scholarly consensus. This is supported by the context of other passages that use the word. For example, when Jesus calls the Pharisees a “generation of vipers” (Matthew 12:34; 23:33) he is not referring to either a nation or a race. The term “you generation” or “this generation” must refer to “you people who are living right now.” Also, how would it make sense to say, “This race [or nation] will not pass till all these things be fulfilled” if “these things” are part and parcel of the trying-by-fire to be endured by the nation being addressed? 2. The context of Jesus’ Olivet sermon on the end-times shows that the speech is clearly prompted by the disciples’ question concerning the fate of the Temple. The discourse comes right after the scene in which Jesus and his disciples come out of the Temple, which the disciples are openly admiring. Jesus tells them, “See ye not all these things? Verily I say unto you, there shall not be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down” (Matthew 24:2; cf. 21 The idea of a 2,000 year-old Apostle John living to witness modern times has been used by Christian end-times novelists David Dolan (The End of Days, Springfield, MO: 21st Century Press, 2003) and James BeauSeigneur (The Christ Clone Trilogy, New York: Warner Books, 2003-2004). 17 Mark 13:2; Luke 21:6). This comment, referring directly to the Temple, prefaces Jesus’ sermon on the end-times that follows. The Olivet Discourse is a long answer to the disciples’ question: “Tell us, when shall these things be? And what shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world?” (Matthew 24:3; cf. Mark 13:4; Luke 21:7). Jesus then proceeds in verse after verse to describe the various signs that will signal the coming of the Messiah, as well as what the end-times will entail (war, persecution, earthquakes, famines, celestial disturbances, etc.) All of this great tribulation centers on Rome’s destruction of the Temple in the first century CE. 3. When Jesus tells his disciples, “this generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled,” he makes no attempt to clarify that he is not referring to them. Obviously, if the disciples did not think that Jesus was talking about them, they would not have asked what signs they should look for in the first place. Suppose you encounter a modern doomsday prophet who believes the world will be destroyed 3000 years in the future. If you ask this prophet what signs you should be looking out for, he would say that you need not bother looking for anything. Our generation will not live to see the signs of the end foretold by this prophet. On the other hand, if a doomsday prophet does outline specific signs for which you should be on the lookout, he is tacitly saying that the end will come at some point during your lifetime. This is exactly what Jesus is purported to have done in the Olivet Discourse. He laid out a description of the signs he wanted his disciples to look for. Even the evangelical authors of Left Behind subtly admit that Bible passages such as the Olivet Discourse and others similar to it pose a potential difficulty. This admission is voiced by the internal monologue of Rayford Steele, one of the main characters, who feels who feels some understandable confusion about apocalyptic theology while reflecting on the vanishing of millions of people all over the world: So Jesus said he was coming quickly. Had he come? And if the Bible was as old as it seemed, what did “quickly” mean? It must not have meant soon, unless it was from the perspective of someone with a long view of history. Maybe Jesus meant that when he came, he would do it quickly. Was that what this was all about? Rayford glanced at the last chapter as a whole. Three other verses had red letters, and two of those repeated the business about coming quickly.22 22 LaHaye and Jenkins, Left Behind, p. 122 18 Biblical prophecy buffs fail to understand that their arsenal of tortured rationalizations for why Jesus failed to live up to his apocalyptic promises have effectively eliminated their own claimed ability to discern anything of significance in advance. By refusing to come to terms with what the biblical texts actually say about which generation will be the last, evangelical prophecy “experts” can make the texts apply to any stretched-out interpretation of current events. Bible prophecy is for this reason a completely useless exercise. Christian prophecy experts have nothing to offer but highly-subjective applications of vague symbols to current events that can just as easily be associated with the equally-vague predictions of Nostradamus. In order for a prediction to be worthy of the name, it must make an unambiguous claim. The self-proclaimed prophet should, as a prerequisite to be taken seriously by anyone, explain what his or her prophecy means in exact terms, including what exactly is going to happen. Any prophecy that follows this criterion becomes empirically testable and falsifiable. Hence the reason we rarely if ever see such standards met by self-described prophets. Simply spouting a string of vague statements about some future state of affairs, into which any number of subsequent events can be shoehorned, does not pass as meaningful prediction. On this basis we can safely conclude that the majority of “prophecy” found in the Bible is content that no intelligent person should take seriously. But in the Olivet Discourse, Jesus does what very few biblical prophecy passages do: He offers a testable and falsifiable claim. If someone claims that there is an invisible heavenly realm that guides all worldly events toward a preconceived denouement, how can anyone possibly go about testing that claim? The believer may dress up the claim with highly sophisticated word usage that employ advanced theoretical physics, the way physicist and Christian theist Frank Tipler does in his book The Physics of Immortality, for example.23 Such a realm may or may not exist, but there is no known test or data available to us by which we may arrive at a definite conclusion either way. On the other hand, if someone tells us – as Jesus reportedly did 2000 years ago – that the present generation will experience the end of the world and describes all the signs that accompany it to boot, we have before us an eminently testable and falsifiable claim. This is precisely why the promises attributed to Jesus are damning to the credibility of the Christian 23 Frank J. Tipler, The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God, and the Resurrection of the Dead (New York: Doubleday, 1994). 19 faith. And yet mainstream “orthodox” Christians ironically criticize preachers like Harold Camping (who predicted that the Second Coming of Christ would occur on May 21, 2011) and fringe denominations like the Jehovah’s Witnesses for doing exactly what Jesus himself did, namely setting dates for end-times that never happen at the promised time. Why is it that Jesus’ own words debunk Christianity in the same way and for the same reason? Robert M. Price offers these thoughts: [H]ow can fundamentalists not see that the New Testament writers made the same mistake [as the Jehovah’s Witnesses]? They cannot afford to see it. They have altogether too much invested in their beliefs. It is a prime case of cognitive dissonance. They refuse to face a devastating truth because, no matter how guilty a conscience one may have, it is better than having to admit how wrong one was and to have to start over again.24 The Olivet Discourse is not the only Gospel passage in which Jesus predicts the Messiah’s return and the end of the world within his own contemporaries’ lifetimes. A striking example is found in Matthew 10:23: “But when they persecute you in this city, flee ye into another: for verily I say unto you, ye shall not have gone over the cities of Israel, till the Son of man be come.” In other words, Jesus’ disciples will not even be finished preaching in the cities of Israel when the end comes. Elsewhere, Jesus makes this extraordinary declaration: “Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his Kingdom” (Matthew 16:28; cf. Mark 9:1; Luke 9:27). These verses are the reason for the existence of a Christian end-times school of thought known as Preterism and its close cousin Transmillennialism. According to Preterist doctrine, the end-times scenarios described by Jesus have already happened. The Second Coming is a matter of past history as far as the Preterist is concerned, having come to pass as promised in the first century CE.25 Their interpretation of scripture is heavily symbolic and allegorical, but the verses quoted above form the foundation of their very salient point that anyone who is looking forward 24 Price, The Paperback Apocalypse, p. 162. In response to the success of Left Behind, Christian authors Hank Hanegraaff and Sigmund Brouwer have together written a trilogy of interesting apocalyptic novels, The Last Disciple (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 2005), The Last Sacrifice (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 2006), and The Last Temple (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 2012). These novels are based on the Preterist viewpoint and set in the time of Nero in the first century. 25 20 to a futuristic Second Coming yet to take place has no way of intelligently making sense of these passages without damaging the credibility of Christ’s words. How else, asks the Preterist, can one make sense of Jesus’ bold statement that people who are standing in front of him as he speaks are going to be alive when the apocalypse arrives? The upshot of all this is that the worldview presented in the novels of LaHaye and Jenkins is not even validated by the Bible itself, which is supposed to be the primary text which inspired the series. The characters in Left Behind would be completely justified in rejecting Jesus on the grounds that he was a failed prophet, because although he does return in the story, he does so more than 2000 years after the time he explicitly stated he would in the Bible. Christians who subscribe to Preterism and Transmillennialism would agree. Obviously, LaHaye and Jenkins reject Preterism. They hold to the opposing theological interpretation known as Dispensationalism, which is rife with its own internal difficulties.26 But an astounding number of people take the Left Behind series and its Dispensationalism quite seriously, as evidenced by the fact that total sales of the books have surpassed $70 million. The popularity of the series is potentially alarming, because dispensational Christians, LaHaye and Jenkins included, teach and believe that these are much more than fiction novels based on their religion. They believe these books portray future events that are actually going to happen. Left Behind purports to be a primer on true prophecy dressed up as fiction. But the window-dressing of fictional storytelling through which the authors convey their judgmental doomsday beliefs turns out to be a thin disguise, stripped away by the novels’ die-hard biblical literalism. It is to this aspect of the series that we turn next. 26 Price, The Paperback Apocalypse, chap. 5. 21 V. BIBLICAL PORNOGRAPHY “My eyes with your vision My choice but always your decision My play with your direction Well it’s my lead but always your connection.” ~ The Alan Parsons Project, ‘You Don’t Believe’ (1984) The wild popularity of the Left Behind series demonstrates the extent to which evangelical culture has become proficient and competent in adopting secular standards to dramatize the Christian message. This is made all the more fascinating when one considers the extremely literalist standpoint with regard to theological doctrine that the authors of the series assert and from which the storyline and concept is derived. Slacktivist blogger Fred Clark aptly refers to the Left Behind series as “Pretrib Porno” owing to “its fetishistic appeal for followers of that kinky eschatology”: A good artist knows when to fade to black (or, as in Dante’s “Paradiso,” to fade to white), when to suggest rather than to show, when implicit metaphor will be more truthful than explicit detail. Pornographers — be they sexual or spiritual — don’t care about such things. They neither acknowledge nor seek to convey anything transcendent in their subject, replacing transcendence with titillation. Their audience is never caught up in the mystery and ecstasy of rapture, only teased with the cheap thrills of a great snatch.27 And there are cheap thrills aplenty in Left Behind. As Rolling Stone’s Robert Dreyfuss notes, “[LaHaye’s] books depict a fantastical, fictional version of what he and his followers think is in store for the human race . . . If the Bible (Revelation 9:1-11) says that billions of six-inch long scorpionlike monsters with the heads of men, ‘flowing hair like that of women’ and the teeth of lions, wearing crowns and helmets, will swarm across the globe gnawing on unbelievers – well, that’s exactly what LaHaye says will happen.”28 These creatures, literally rendered, make their appearance in the series’ fifth book. Our authors imagine them as a “grossly-overgrown combination insect, arthropod, and mammal” 27 Fred Clark, L.B.: E pli it Co te t, Slacktivist, June 6, 2005, http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2005/06/06/lb-explicit-content/ (accessed October 12, 2014). 28 Dre fuss, Re ere d Doo sda , p. . 22 having “a horse-shaped body consisting of a two-part abdomen,” with a multi-segment preabdomen covered in metallic armor and posterior segments ending in a stinger tail. “The face looked like that of man, but as it writhed and grimaced and scowled at Buck, it displayed a set of teeth way out of proportion. They were the teeth of a lion with long canines, the upper pair extending over the lower lip.” True to the biblical description, the demonic insects in this novel also have “long, flowing hair like a woman’s, spilling out from under what appeared to be a combination helmet and crown, gold in color.”29 The same chapter in Revelation that features these bizarre scorpionlike creatures also treats us to a description of an army of 200 million demonic horsemen who embark on a global killing spree that leaves one third of the earth’s inhabitants dead. These are fire-breathing horses with heads “as the heads of lions” and tails “like unto serpents” (Revelation 9:13-19). Like the armorwearing scorpions with the human heads and lion teeth, these symbol-laden horse/lion/snake monsters are given an absurd literalistic treatment by LaHaye and Jenkins in their story: Flames came from their nostrils and mouths, and thick yellow smoke billowed. The fire illuminated their majestic wide heads, the heads of lions with enormous canines and flowing manes. Rayford slowly, painfully rose, no longer surprised that Leah had been rendered helpless when first she had seen them. . . . He trembled, trying to take in the scene. . . . The riders were proportioned every bit as large as the animals. They appeared human but each had to be ten feet tall and weigh five hundred pounds. . . . The horse in front of him, hardly three paces away, stutter-stepped and turned in a circle. Rayford gaped at a tail consisting not of hair but rather a writhing, sinewy serpent with a head twice the size of Rayford’s fist. It writhed and bared its fangs. The riders seemed to gaze miles into the distance, high over Rayford’s head. Each horseman wore a breastplate that, illumined by the flames, shone iridescent yellow, deep navy, and fiery red. Massive biceps and forearms knotted and rippling, the riders seemed to work to keep the animals from stampeding.30 As we can see, the authors approach the apocalyptic texts upon which they base their story with a dogged and wooden literalism which makes for highly entertaining reading but also ultimately represents another major shortcoming of the series. For one, there is no real element of suspense 29 Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, Apollyon: The Destroyer is Unleashed (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 1999), p. 317. 30 LaHaye and Jenkins, Assassins, pp. 127-28. 23 or originality at work in the series. The authors simply map out the biblical apocalypse literally, superimpose the Book of Revelation onto modern times, and invite their readers to grab the proverbial popcorn and watch it come to life. Being Bible-worshipping fundamentalists, LaHaye and Jenkins were probably intimidated by the following dire warning found at the end of the Book of Revelation while writing the series: For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book: And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book (Revelation 22:18-19, KJV). To appropriate the words of the song by the Alan Parsons Project, quoted in the epigraph above, it’s LaHaye’s play with the Bible’s direction, and it’s the former’s terms on the latter’s conditions. “They’re my tunes but they’re your compositions.” Other novelists in mainstream secular markets have demonstrated that it is possible to produce a genuinely gripping and original yarn while taking artistic thematic inspiration from apocalyptic texts. For example, horror novelist Stephen King’s epic novel The Stand is an endtimes story that delivers real and genuine suspense to its readers. Unlike in LaHaye’s series, in which nearly every jot and tittle of the Book of Revelation is novelized, the characters in The Stand do not immediately understand what is happening to the world. Some only suspect that what is described in Revelation might be playing out, but it is not played out blow-by-blow, which only heightens the mystery: The Antichrist, that’s what I think. We’re living out the Book of Revelation right in our own time . . . how can you doubt it? “And the seven vials were opened . . .” Sure sounds like the superflu to me. Ah, balls, people said Hitler was the Antichrist.31 Being a secular writer with no history of fundamentalist belief, King was not trying to save the souls of his readers or prepare them for the Second Coming with this book. But the story – in which a devastating killer plague destroys countrysides and great cities and paves the way for an even greater evil to come along and threaten the few survivors – does incorporate a selective 31 Stephen King, The Stand: The Complete & Uncut Edition (New York: Signet, 1990), p. 888. 24 adaptation of prophetic scripture, just selective and understated enough that the reader is made to feel uncertain as to whether the characters are experiencing the privations of a Christian universe or not. It is not by any stretch an arduously-faithful reconstruction of the Book of Revelation as in Left Behind, and King has the good sense to allow his protagonists to be confused about what is happening. The Stand represents everything Left Behind could have been and is not. The smooth-talking politician from Romania does not hold a candle to the “Dark Man” Randall Flagg. By contrast, LaHaye and Jenkins are much too obtrusive in their storytelling, constantly preaching to the reader as they construct a timeline of events as accurately as they imagine the Bible instructs them. The protagonists routinely refer to the Bible in order to prepare for what is coming next and very little takes them by surprise. Arbitrary Literalism Apart from the fact that the element of suspense and surprise is greatly diminished by this highly-unimaginative literalist approach, the authors never acknowledge the fact that there is actually more than one straightforward interpretation of the major prophetic books in the Bible (Ezekiel, Daniel, Revelation, etc.). The problem with literal interpretation is that there is no single, monolithic “literal interpretation” (a peculiar contradiction in terms, if you ask me). Instead, there are many different “literal interpretations,” and more often than not the faithful take the convenient and non-reflective route of simply pretending they are all saying the same thing. Old Testament scholar James Barr explains why this is the case in his 1977 book Fundamentalism: [F]undamentalist interpretation does not take the Bible literally, but varies between taking it literally and taking it non-literally. This variation is made necessary by the real guiding principle of fundamentalist interpretation, namely that one must ensure that the Bible is inerrant, without error. Inerrancy is maintained only by constantly altering the mode of interpretation, and in particular by abandoning the literal sense as soon as it would be an embarrassment to the view of inerrancy held.32 32 James Barr, Fundamentalism (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1977), p. 46. 25 This arbitrary literalism is on full display in the consequently-inconsistent Left Behind series. For example, we find the character of Bruce Barnes scoffing at non-literalist Bible followers who were proven wrong by the Rapture event: “But those who had relegated this kind of teaching to the literalists, the fundamentalists, the closed-minded evangelicals, had been left behind. All of a sudden it was all right to take scripture at its word!”33 And yet, no more than three pages later, we find Bruce Barnes explaining that the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” described in Revelation 6 should be understood as allegorical imagery, rather than descriptions of actual personages: “’Let me clarify,’ Bruce was saying, ‘that I don’t believe it is God’s intent to convey individual personality through the imagery of these horsemen, but rather world conditions.’”34 Perhaps the most striking instance of the series’ awkward handling of literalism is the authors’ treatment of the passage in Revelation 12, in which John describes a vision of a pregnant woman in space “clothed with the sun,” her feet resting on the moon and her head crowned with twelve stars. She is about to give birth to a male child, “who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron.” Before the woman stands a great red dragon with seven heads and a massive tail that sweeps away a third of the stars and causes them to fall on the earth. The dragon is waiting to devour the sun-clothed woman’s infant the moment it comes from the womb. But the child is snatched away to safety in heaven and the woman escapes to a “place prepared of God” in a wilderness (Revelation 12:1-6). LaHaye, a die-hard purist and completist, apparently felt that he must somehow include this highly symbolic and esoteric scene in his novels. He and Jenkins do this by making their character Tsion Ben-Judah experience the exact same vision as John the Revelator.35 But BenJudah’s experience is much more than just a dream sent from God. He becomes a modern-day Enoch, his spiritual self being treated to a tour of the heavens where he actually meets the archangels Michael and Gabriel who serve as tour guides. Ben-Judah becomes convinced “that when he had seen the dragon sweep a third of the stars from the skies and they fell to earth, he was witness to eternity past.”36 Never mind the obvious scientific absurdity of one-third of the stars in the observable universe (over 23 billion trillion) falling on a tiny, insignificant pebble of 33 Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, Tribulation Force: The Continuing Drama of Those Left Behind (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 1996), p. 67. 34 Ibid., p. 70. 35 LaHaye and Jenkins, The Indwelling, pp. 247-48. 36 Ibid., p. 300. 26 a planet called earth. If Tsion was witness to “eternity past,” why was there an Earth? LaHaye is obviously no Carl Sagan. However, our storytellers do not want us to think that the other bits of strangeness witnessed by their character were actual historical happenings. Even they understand that the description of the sun-clothed woman in Revelation 12 is laden with allegory: Tsion pored over his Bible texts and commentaries, trying to make sense of the vivid dream. He pleaded with God for another of the same, but short of that, he wanted to understand the one he’d had. Scholars were divided on who the sun-clothed woman was, the one who wore a garland of stars and used the moon as her footstool. Clearly she was symbolic, as no woman was that large or had a child in space.37 When Tsion finally receives his desired second vision, he becomes a spectator of the war in heaven described in Revelation 12:7-10, in which the archangel Michael and the angel soldiers under his command fight successfully against the great red dragon and his angels and cast them out of heaven. Here is how our pornographers novelize this biblical passage: Tsion turned to see a great battle raging. Michael and his angels wielded great double-edged swords against fiery darts from the dragon and his evil angels. The ugly hordes advanced again and again against Michael’s might forces, but they could not prevail. As his comrades retreated behind him, the dragon fled to the throne. But it was as if a colossal invisible door had been slammed in his face. He fell back and tried to advance again to the place he had enjoyed before the throne. But from the throne came an insistent, “No. There is no longer a place here for you. Be gone!” The dragon turned, his anger nearly consuming him. With his seven heads grimacing and gnashing their teeth, he gathered his own around him, and they all tumbled toward the earth.38 LaHaye and Jenkins treat this episode as an historical event that actually happened and which Tsion, supernaturally transported to the heavenly realm, witnesses firsthand. So why should the authors not treat the giant, cosmically-proportioned woman being menaced by the same sevenheaded dragon as a literal entity, rather than symbolic imagery? Why is Nicolae Carpathia a human being rather than a sea-dwelling monster with seven heads and ten crowned horns 37 38 Ibid. Ibid., pp. 302-303. 27 (Revelation 13:1-3)? Why don’t we get to read about literal Horsemen of the Apocalypse terrorizing the world (Revelation 6:2-8)? And where is the infamous whore of Babylon who lounges on a multi-headed and scarlet-colored monster, drinking the blood of saints from a golden cup (Revelation 17:1-6)? The literal rendering of all these images would be no more absurd and ridiculous than the novels’ historical warfare between angels and dragons, demon locusts with human heads and armor, and horses with lion-heads and snake-tails. Other ostensibly “straightforward literalists” who have written Christian end-times novels see matters differently than LaHaye and Jenkins. For example, in his 1950 novel Raptured, television evangelist Ernest Angley relates what Left Behind’s Bruce Barnes was unable to hermeneutically stomach: Two of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse (the red horse of War and the black horse of Famine) are actual riders on horses who waltz through the streets of the tiny town of Alabesta where all the story’s actions take place.39 An even more bizarre example of literalism is found in Carrie Gruhn’s 1951 novel A Trumpet in Zion, which depicts Revelation’s Beast as just that – a grotesque creature played straight out of the description in the thirteenth chapter of Revelation.40 But, like LaHaye & Jenkins, neither Angley nor Gruhn are consistent literalists. That is, they do not apply their painstaking literalism to everything. This further illustrates the subjective nature of so-called “literal interpretation.” This leads us to consider an interesting question. Given the fact that, as we have seen, LaHaye’s interpretation of prophetic scripture vacillates arbitrarily between the figurative and literal, why shouldn’t there be an element of surprise in the Left Behind novels? The absence of any such element indicates that LaHaye and Jenkins betray their own voice, carelessly letting it leak into their story. Their characters just happen to subscribe to the exact same eschatological/hermeneutical system embraced by the authors with no shadow of turning, not even for the sake of narrative suspense. 39 Ernest W. Angley, Raptured: A Novel on the Second Coming of the Lord (Old Tappan, NJ: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1950), pp. 159-165. 40 Carrie E. Gruhn, A Trumpet in Zion (Chicago: Moody Press, 1951), p. 146. 28 VI. CONCLUDING THOUGHTS “Sure it would be better if I had you here to hold me Be better baby, but believe me it’s the next best thing I’m sure there’s many times you’ve wanted me to hear your secrets Don’t be afraid to say the words that move me anytime you want to tell them to me.” ~ Billy Joel, ‘Sometimes a Fantasy’ (1980) The more enigmatic and mysterious a particular portion of Scripture comes across, the more likely it is to receive fan fiction treatment in the interests of fleshing out tantalizing details not disclosed in canonical scripture. This explains the great popularity and success of Christian novels that deal with the “end-times” as described by the major prophetic books of the Bible, such as Daniel and Revelation. The Left Behind series is the brainchild of two religious believers seeking to present a judgmental and small-minded doctrine which they view as theologically accurate in compelling and contemporary terms which will not only titillate believing readers, but also draw in potential converts who would not normally pick up a Bible or a Bible commentary. “The secularization of the sacred apocalyptic myths,” writes religious studies professor Conrad Ostwalt “has been completed in Left Behind.”41 The function of these novels about the Christian end of the world is to psychologically fill in glaring and troubling gaps in the minds of believers. According to the beliefs which are hammered home to fundamentalists in church every week, the Second Coming ought to be happening at any time now. In fact, as we saw in Section 4, it should have happened long before now. Needless to say, it has not happened. So what is the next step? With the help of the Left Behind books (and a host of other Christian novels dealing with the biblical end-times), Christian believers are able to visualize in their mind’s eye the fruition of their longed-for apocalypse. The imagination serves to soften and soothe the wound of disappointed expectation. In the words of the Billy Joel song, “It’s just a fantasy. It’s not the real thing. But sometimes a fantasy is all you need.” The Left Behind series is a testament to the fact that there can be a fine line between literature and propaganda, especially when the medium of fiction is being used by an author as a means-to41 Conrad Ostwalt, Secular Steeples: Popular Culture and the Religious Imagination (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2003), p. 96. 29 an-end, that is, as a vehicle for preaching his or her set of beliefs and ideals.42 As Edmund Cohen remarks, “The Left Behind books are consumed by grownups who receive them as deadly serious instruction about soon-to-come cataclysmic events. The mainstream media miss that essential difference, and treat the Left Behind books as cheerful Sunday school curiosities. They are a lot darker than that.”43 But the fact that the authors of Left Behind have presented what they believe to be absolute truth in fictional terms can mean nothing but trouble for their own evangelistic goals. Any reader who begins to take Christianity seriously as a result of reading Left Behind must sooner or later find herself in a highly tenuous position. Assuming such a reader is capable of recognizing that these books are obvious fiction and even billed as such, how long can her newfound faith last on such a shoddy foundation? How long will it be before she wonders whether there is any reason to think any part of Christianity is not equally fictional? There are a great many Christian laypeople whose ears will perk up only when somebody tells them that the Antichrist is coming soon and that they are going to get their innards toasted if they do not repent in the here and now. Conversion stemming from such a self-serving motivation is doomed to have a very short shelf life. If that which can frighten but momentarily is all that impels a person to conversion, their belief is shallow and weak. In order to last, there must be something more to the pitch, and in the case of the highly superstitious and paranoid strain of Christianity pushed by LaHaye and Jenkins, there is nothing more to it. For this reason, the existence of the Left Behind series may ultimately be unintentionally fortuitous to the cause of freethought and turn more people into atheists. This potential “faith antidote” aspect would then represent the sole redeeming element of the series. 42 There is a similar important distinction to be drawn between teaching the Bible and teaching about the Bible in public schools and colleges. Christian conservatives often repeat the tired and overly-refuted claim that the Bible has been banned from public schools. No, the Bible has not been banned from these venues of learning. The Bible is often legitimately utilized in the Humanities courses of secular colleges and universities across the country and in public high school literature classes. The key difference is that secular schools are not teaching either that the Bible is historically true in every detail or that the Bible is a bunch of nonsense. Rather, they are taking a neutral position in teaching the Bible simply as religious literature. 43 Cohe , Review of the Left Behind Tri ulatio No els. 30 Bibliography Angley, Ernest. Raptured: A Novel on the Second Coming of the Lord. Old Tappan, NJ: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1950. Barr, James. Fundamentalism. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1977. BeauSeigneur, James. Acts of God: The Christ Clone Trilogy, Book Three. New York: Warner Books, 2004. ______. Birth of an Age: The Christ Clone Trilogy, Book Two. New York: Warner Books, 2003. ______. In His Image: Book One of the Christ Clone Trilogy. New York: Warner Books, 2003. 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Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 2004. ______. The Last Sacrifice. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 2005. ______. The Last Temple. Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 2012. King, Stephen. The Stand: The Complete & Uncut Edition. New York: Signet, 1990. LaHaye, Tim, and Jerry B. Jenkins. Apollyon: The Destroyer is Unleashed. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 1999. ______. Assassins: Assignment: Jerusalem, Target: Antichrist. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House 31 Publishers, 1999. ______. The Indwelling: The Beast Takes Possession. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 2000. ______. Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 1995. ______. Nicolae: The Rise of Antichrist. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 1997. ______. Soul Harvest: The World Takes Sides. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 1998. ______. Tribulation Force: The Continuing Drama of Those Left Behind. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 1996. McGinn, Bernard. Antichrist: Two Thousand Years of the Human Fascination with Evil. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1994. Mikkelson, Barbara, and David P. Mikkelson. “Obama as Anti-Christ.” Snopes.com (August 3, 2009). http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/antichrist.asp (accessed October 13, 2014). Ostwalt, Conrad. Secular Steeples: Popular Culture and the Religious Imagination. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2003. Pagels, Elaine. Revelations: Visions, Prophecy & Politics in the Book of Revelation. New York: Penguin Books, 2012. Price, Robert M. The Paperback Apocalypse: How the Christian Church Was Left Behind. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2007. Sarin, Vic. Left Behind: The Movie. Cloud Ten Pictures, 2000. Stern, D.A. The Punisher. New York: Del Rey, 2004. Tipler, Frank J. The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God, and the Resurrection of the Dead. New York: Doubleday, 1994. * Published to Academia.edu on October 19, 2014. This paper is available on my blog Skeptical Inquests in six parts (http://nathandickey.wordpress.com/). Feedback is welcome: dickey@sou.edu.