WHAT LEFT BEHIND REALLY MEANS

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M

Thursday, January 12, 2006 3:51 PM

[FREEDOMSFORUM] WHAT " LEFT BEHIND " REALLY MEANS

 

This kind of Christianity is a black thing. It is a blood

religion that willingly gives up sons to America's campaigns in the

Holy Land, hoping they will bring on the much-anticipated war between

good and evil in the Middle East that will hasten the End Times. Bring

Jesus back to Earth. Whatever the case, tens of millions of American

fundamentalists, despite their claims otherwise, read and absorb the

all-time best selling Left Behind book series as prophesy and fact.

How could they possibly not after being conditioned all their lives to

accept the End Times as the ultimate reality? We are talking about a

group of Americans 20 percent of whose children graduate from high

school identifying H20 as a cable channel. Children who, like their

parents and grandparents, come from that roughly half of all Americans

who can approximately read, but are dysfunctional literates to the

extent they cannot grasp any textual abstraction or overall thematic

content.Most of my family and their church friends (mainly the women)

have read at least some of the Left Behind series and if pressed they

will claim they understand that it is fiction.

 

But anyone who has heard fundies around the kitchen table discussing

the books knows the claim is pure bullshit. " Well, they do get an

awful lot of stuff exactly right, " they admit. Beyond that, most

fundamentalists delight in seeing their beliefs as " persecuted

Christians " become best sellers " under the guise of fiction, " as the

Pentecostal assistant who used to work with me put it. " They show the

triumph of the righteous over those who persecute us for our faith in

God. "

 

Fer cryin' out loud, Christianity is scarcely a persecuted belief

system in this country, or in need of a guise to protect itself. Year

after year some 60 percent of Americans surveyed say they believe the

Book of Revelation will come true and about 40 percent believe it will

come true in their lifetimes. This from the 50 percent of Americans

who, according to statistics, seldom if ever buy a book. Fetishizing

of the End Times as a spectacular gore-fest visited upon the

unbelievers is nothing new. But the sheer number of people gleefully

enjoying the spectacle of their own blackest magical thinking made

manifest by mass media is new. Or at least the media aspect is new. It

reinforces the major appeal of these beliefs, the appeal being (to

restate the obvious) that they get to pass judgment on everyone who

disagrees with them, and then watch God kick the living snot out of

them. It doesn't get any better than that.

 

All my life I have seen these people and there are no more or

less of them proportionately than before. It is simply that, A) they

have built their own massive media, and B) educated middle class folks

are noticing them now because they vote and a major political party is

willing to violate the church-state boundary to get their votes. They

have always been out here and always in about the same percentages.

Think about that. It took me a while to accept it too. But George W.

Bush learned the significance of this while campaigning for his

daddy's friend back when he was supposed to be at his National Guard

meetings. Come George's turn to play poker for the presidency in that

quadrennial rich man's game we call elections, Sparky knew what cards

to play. The effete John Kerry had not a clue. Still doesn't. Neither

did you. Right? Don't feel bad. I even knew the great unwashed tribes

of the faithful were out here, wrote spooky and panicked articles

about it before the elections and still underestimated the capability

of the death-obsessed Christian right.

 

Lookie here. If you think I'm overcounting, think one more time about

those Left Behind books which have sold over 65 million copies at this

writing. Sold to people who do not even like or buy books. Gore Vidal

and Susan Sontag never wrote anything that sold 65 million. That

lead-footed prose and numbing predictability that Jerry Jenkins and

Tim LaHaye grind out in the Left Behind series might not even be

called writing. But whatever it is, at least 65 million folks that our

nation failed to educate find deep meaning and solace in it. LaHaye

has also sold 120 million non-fiction books, which makes him the most

successful Christian writer since the Bible.

 

Sales figures aside, it is entirely possible that the Left Behind

series is as important in our time and cultural context as was, say,

Harriet Beecher's Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin in its time, wherein

Lincoln called it " the little book that started the big war. " The

truth is that LaHaye is among the most influential religious writers

America ever produced and is the most powerful fundamentalist in

America today. He is the founder and first president of the eerily

secretive Council for National Policy, which brings together leading

evangelicals and other conservatives with right-wing billionaires

willing to pay for a conservative religious revolution. He is far more

influential than Billy Graham or Pat Robertson and was the man who

inspired Jerry Falwell to launch the Moral Majority. He gave millions

of dollars to Falwell's Liberty University.

 

He's the man without whom Ronald Reagan would never have become

governor of California and the man who grilled George W. Bush, then

wiped the cocaine off George's nose and gave him the official

Christian fundie stamp of approval. He created the American Coalition

for Traditional Values that has mobilized evangelical voters, putting

neoconservative wackjobs into political offices across the nation. In

short, he is the Godfather of Soul, fundie style. When the man lays it

down, his peeps doo dey duty.

 

Scratch LaHaye and you'll find an honest-to-god surviving John

Bircher. In the 1960s when LaHaye was a young up-and-coming Baptist

preacher fresh out of Bob Jones University, he lectured on behalf of

Republican Robert Welch's John Birch Society. We are talking about a

man who believed Dwight Eisenhower was an agent of the Communist Party

taking orders from his brother, Milt Eisenhower. Along the way LaHaye

extended his paranoid list of villains to include secular humanists

who " are Satan's agents hiding behind the Constitution. " And the only

way to destroy them is to destroy their cover. I have asked preachers

about the Left Behind books. They all claim to have reservations about

them. Fundie preachers are snarky about any beliefs that do not

precisely mirror their own, and no two ever agree completely. They

publicly find fault with the apocalyptic Left Behind books even as

they privately enjoy the books' popularity.

 

Most say the series overestimates the number of people going to

heaven. Which figures, given that their stock and trade is the divine

exclusivity of a club called " The Saved. " No sense in ruining the

brand by franchising it too cheaply. Same goes for television as for

the Christian pop-lit. Fundamentalists delighted in the NBC series

Revelations. Admittedly it was a bullshit job from network people who

had not the slightest understanding of the subject, but could smell

more money the closer they got to it.

 

They were right. Xian fundies sucked it up. Coolly as if butter

wouldn't melt in their mouths, the fundies I know denied they enjoyed

Revelations at all because the producers " got some things wrong, " (as

if it were possible to be wrong regarding dire predictions made

centuries ago by superstitious mystic fanatics about something that

never came to pass.) They say the main thing wrong was having Christ

return as a little child. Most hardcore fundies preferred their vision

of a Rambo Jesus arriving to beat the fuck out of everybody who ever

disagreed with Him or them -- sinners' eyeballs turning to putrid

jelly, blood flowing everywhere, etc. (In Revelations Jesus arrives on

horseback wearing a blood soaked robe.) These media products are more

than harmless American Christian kitsch culture or just more American

religious swill.

 

Swill it may be, but it is also dangerous propaganda and the writers

know damned well that propaganda value. Just as the propaganda value

of associating Jewish people with rats in Nazi Germany helped the

German populace accept persecution of the Jews, the Left Behind books

foster a morality that excuses horrors done to " non-believers. "

 

Forget about sanity and reason. Christian fundamentalist media

promotes a hermetic worldview cut off from reason. From the standpoint

of those who consume such media messages, it is not so much propaganda

as it is an abundant offering so complete as to be a parallel bizarro

world of its own. It gives answers to questions not even asked. It is

a world in which the Secretary General of the United Nations is the

anti-Christ (Left Behind) and the " Clinton Crime Family " deals in

cocaine and is linked to the Gambino family (Joshua Project, and other

sources.) It is one in which abortion doctors are microwaving and

eating fetuses, according to testimony given by anti-abortionists

before a Kansas House subcommittee (WorldNetDaily, of course) and

where crowds of good folks get teary-eyed as Rev. Pat Evans of the

NASCAR " Racing for Jesus Ministries " rumbles onto the track.

Evangelical NASCAR? Yup. What ABC called America's " unapologetically

evangelical sport. "

 

I can see you, dear reader, running and holding your head and

screaming at the thought. Yet it's true. At Bristol and Talladega the

earth is shaking for Jaaaayzus! Now that we have Evangelical NASCAR,

what, I ask you, can ever go wrong?

 

" To be saved is to fall into the ludicrous and satanic flippancy of

false piety, kitsch. " -- Trappist monk Thomas Merton Forty years later

Merton is still right. Like most American liberals, not to mention all

of Europe and the rest of the world, I learned through education to

write the U.S. born-again literature off as kitsch religion, merely

bad theology in an unholy marriage to bad writing. Another product of

the American Jesus industry. If we liberals can name it, assign it to

some appropriately vulgar and sentimental corner of our degraded

culture, and then remain tolerant of it, then we feel have dealt with

the damned thing.

 

After all, it is the comparative worldview of the teeming red

state masses. But there is certain arrogance in such pop cultural

erudition and thin worldliness, isn't there? In itself, our attitude

is too flip. It took coming home to a born again red state to realize

how cultural documents such as Left Behind or the movies Revelations

and Passion of the Christ do great harm, and at a critical time when

we are facing economic upheaval, fighting illegal wars and suffering

deep religious antipathies across the planet. " Aw " , my liberal New

York and West Coast friends tell me, " That is overstating the case.

The Democrats will eventually be back in power. " We cannot afford to

wait a few more years and see. No matter if the Dems actually can be

elected back into powerlessness, they will have needed at least some

of these people's votes to get there. Next election we will find out

if it is possible to be elected without the fundamentalist Christians.

 

So far the Democratic political elite, who only take their thumb out

of their ass to change thumbs, has not been able to stop the religious

right's relentless push. And I think it is because, at least from

where I sit right now, the Democratic establishment has not offered,

much less delivered, and is incapable of delivering what my people

really need -- decent educations so they will not be prey to three

thousand year old superstitions. The Left has yet to demand for all

Americans a genuine absolutely free education, an opportunity to enjoy

a life of the mind, or to even know such a thing exists. Hell, you got

yours and I got mine, right? So screw 'em.

 

We progressives have failed. We were always and still are our

brother's keeper and now the throwaway Americans, the ugly little

dickhead at the car wash and the truck driver and the guy who delivers

the bottled water to our offices, are coming to get our asses, even

though they aren't quite sure why. My Random House editor told me not

to get on a soapbox about this, but I cannot help it. (Sorry, Rachel)

I am not trying to be smart-assed, but to indicate the fear of what is

unfolding around me as a person living in the belly of the beast. The

reality gap between fundamentalist and urban liberals is unfathomable.

Liberal observers watching from a safe distance in New York or San

Francisco conclude it is pure stupidity that caused millions of

Americans to continue support of the Bush junta in the face of

overwhelming evidence of lies, deceit and contempt for the

Constitution, even as the fat cats raided their retirements and picked

their pockets at every turn. Others think it is just plain meanness

that attracted them to Bush.

 

And so do I sometimes, because stupidity (the Jesus stockcar

entries should be proof enough) and meanness are surely part of the

attraction to a certain type of conservative, that poisonous toad Karl

Rove being their chief deity of meanness for meanness sake. There

remains one nagging problem. Despite their masochistic voting

patterns, fundamentalists are very ordinary and normal Americans.

People who often as not go out of their way to help others and endorse

most American values. So how do we reconcile the warmth and good

nature of these hardworking citizens with the repressive politics,

intolerance, nationalism and war-making they support? Why do such

ordinary people do such awful things? The Germans have been wrestling

with that one for 60 years, and 60 more years from now they still will

have not solved the riddle in any meaningful way for the rest of the

world. Barring ecological and cultural collapse, historians will say

America suffered under the same sort of extraordinary delusion, a

national hallucination of God and empire and exceptionalism.

 

The thing about a hallucination -- and take it from a person who has

enjoyed many fine ones on various chemicals and herbs -- is that it is

a convincing reality in its time. Try talking to a fundamentalist

about politics and God for an hour. You will see the spell that holds

sway. Let us be thankful for pro sports or we would have nothing

whatsoever to talk about on those rare occasions when a fundamentalist

and a liberal ever bother to speak to one another. Allow me to get

down to the nub of this and say what urban liberals cannot allow

themselves to say out loud: " Christian majority or not, the readers of

such apocalyptic books as the Left Behind series are some pretty

damned dumb motherfuckers caught up in their own black, vindictive

fantasy. " There. I said it for you. Let us proceed. Beyond that, there

is a more mundane aspect of the success of the Left Behind books. It

is fair to say that Left Behind readers are happy to discover a

pop-lit phenomenon that they

 

can participate in at all -- popular literature that doesn't conflict

with their insulated and armor plated world view. At last they have

something else to read besides Guideposts and Reader's Digest, both of

which pass as highbrow lit in most fundamentalist households. Aw, come

on. You know it is the truth the same as I do. If you go into the

homes of most fundamentalists, you will not find many books at all,

much less books that contain real ideas. Now they have the Left Behind

series, the huge sales of which, as they see it, validate their

beliefs. I know I am painting with a mighty wide brush, but so what?

It's by and large true. Considering that by no means do all

fundamentalists believe in The Rapture, and that the whole Rapture

thing is a cult within a larger cult, the popularity of the Left

Behind series says something about the sheer scale of apocalyptic

Christianity in the American heartland today. Do the readers believe

the books? Again, I would say most do. Here are a couple of typical

reader testimonials for the books:

 

" This series of books is the best I have ever read. I have

looked long and hard to find a resource that put scripture into easy

to read, and understand format. Many people I know get frustrated when

they try to read scripture because they have trouble understanding the

language. Now after reading these books I have a better understanding

of where I stand at this moment. " " I started reading the Left Behind

series in 2000 with the first book in paperback. . . . I read it and

was impressed with how well written it was and have read or own every

book. In impact, it has gotten me closer to God than where I was

before. . . . I grew up in church, but was always afraid of what was

supposed to happen at the end times. I was afraid of the Book of

Revelation, because the thought of all of the evil that had to be

fought terrified me. While reading the Left Behind series, I followed

along with my Bible, and I am so excited that I am understanding and

learning more than I ever have. I am no longer afraid of the fight

against evil, because I know that I am on the side of the greatest and

most powerful force. Thank you for getting me started on this path of

learning. "

 

These people may not be your neighbors or friends, but they are

ordinary and typical Americans. If you the reader are a

college-educated middle class person, then folks like those above

outnumber you roughly three to one in this country. If that is not

reason enough to drink, then I don't know what is. No matter what

happens in the next election, we are going to be dealing for a long

time to come with millions of voters who think Left Behind is great

literature, spiritual guidance and a political primer all in one.Do we

really think that cartload of bloated hacks called the Democratic

Party knows what to do about this? Do you really think Howard Dean has

a clue about how to deal with this entire class of Americans? Hardly.

 

And besides, even if the Dems can get elected again and

restored to the impotency they have come to represent, they will have

needed these people's votes to get there. Or they simply will not get

there. So let's not expect the Democratic political elite to save us

from watching the fundie takeover attempts escalate in the future (In

which case, assuming my book makes some real dough, I will be watching

from abroad, thank you.) Essentially it comes down to the fact that a

very large portion of Americans are crazier than shithouse rats and

are being led by a gang of pathological misfits, most of whom are

preachers and politicians. We are not talking about simple religious

faith here. There is a world of difference between having religious

faith and being a born-again zealot who believes in his heart that he

is thumping Darwinian demons out of classrooms and that Ted Kennedy is

the anti-Christ. Trading down to the Democratic party of the pussies

really will not save us. It will just buy a little time.

 

But we have whipped the hell out of this dead horse before, haven't

we? Forgive me. Meanwhile, we are left to contemplate communication

with these folks, people whose leaders deliver unfathomable

pronouncements such as the following one regarding family finances and

the national economy from a Christian radio broadcast.

 

The mystery of the harlot of Jerusalem is solved, people! Praise the

Lord! Deuteronomy 15:6 says plain as the nose on your face that " For

the LORD thy God blesseth thee, as he promised thee: and thou shalt

lend unto many nations, but thou shalt not borrow; and thou shalt

reign over many nations, but they shall not reign over thee. "

Therefore, the harlot is NOT the gentile nations! " The harlot controls

and rules over the gentile nations, sitting on them. " Rev 17:1. " And

there came one of the seven angels which had the seven vials, and

talked with me, saying unto me, Come hither; I will shew unto thee the

judgment of the great whore that sitteth upon many waters " : Rev 17:15.

" And he saith unto me, The waters which thou sawest, where the whore

sitteth, are peoples, and multitudes, and nations, and tongues. " NOW

IS THAT NOT PROOF ENOUGH?

 

Get that? Me neither.

 

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_346.shtml