and on the hilltop of meggido....

[Guest guest]

and i thought the rapturists in the reagan administration, and the turner

diaries were scary...sheesh....

 

 

Fundamentally Unsound

Michelle Goldberg, Salon

August 2, 2002

 

The most popular novel in America right now is one in which the world is

tyrannized by the former secretary general of the U.N., who operates from Iraq,

and his global force of storm troopers, called " peacekeepers. " Revered rabbis

evangelize for Christ, repenting Israel's " specific national sin " of

" [r]ejecting the messiahship of Jesus. " Much of the world is deceived by a false

prophet, part of the inner circle of the Antichrist, who seems a lot like the

pope -- he's a Catholic cardinal, " all robed and hatted and vested in velvet and

piping. "

 

 

" The Remnant, " which debuted at No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list, is

the 10th entry in Jerry B. Jenkins and Tim LaHaye's phenomenally popular " Left

Behind " series, a Tom Clancy-meets-Revelation saga of the Rapture, the

Tribulation and, presumably, the eventual return of Jesus. Last year's

" Desecration, " the ninth volume of a projected 14, was 2001's bestselling

hardcover novel. There is probably very little overlap between Salon's

readership and the audience for apocalyptic Christian fiction, but these books

and their massive success deserve attention if only for what they tell us about

the core beliefs of a great many people in this country, people whose views

shape the way America behaves in the world.

 

 

After all, Tim LaHaye isn't merely a fringe figure like Hal Lindsey, the former

king of the genre, whose 1970 Christian end-times book " The Late Great Planet

Earth " was the bestseller of that decade. The former co-chairman of Jack Kemp's

presidential campaign, LaHaye was a member of the original board of directors of

the Moral Majority and an organizer of the Council for National Policy, which

ABCNews.com has called " the most powerful conservative organization in America

you've never heard of " and whose membership has included John Ashcroft, Tommy

Thompson and Oliver North. George W. Bush is still refusing to release a tape of

a speech he gave to the group in 1999.

 

 

The point isn't that all these leaders are part of some kind of right-wing

Illuminati. It's simply that the seemingly wacky ideology promulgated in the

Left Behind books is one that important people in America are quite comfortable

with. The Left Behind series provides a narrative and a theological rationale

for a whole host of perplexing conservative policies, from the White House's

craven decision to cut off aid to the United Nations Family Planning Fund to

America's surreally casual mobilization for an invasion of Baghdad -- a city

that is, in the Left Behind books, Satan's headquarters.

 

 

Political attitudes and actions that make no practical or moral sense to

secularists become comprehensible when viewed through Christian pop culture's

eschatological looking glass. At a time when America is flagrantly flouting

international law, spurning the U.N. and tacitly supporting the land grabs of

Israeli maximalists, surely it's significant that the most popular fiction in

the country creates a gripping narrative that pits American Christians against a

conspiracy of Satan-worshipping, abortion-promoting, gun-controlling globalists

-- all of it revolving around the sovereignty of Israel.

 

 

Israel is the key to the theology that dominates Left Behind (as well as much of

American evangelical Christianity). In the religion, as in the series, the

rapture is kicked off by a military attack on the country, which survives almost

unscathed (though the first Left Behind, written before the current intifada,

had Russian aggressors rather than Arabs). Indeed, the chain of events that lead

to the return of Christ depends on the existence of a Holy Land that is under

catastrophic assault. No wonder the born-again lobby is obsessed with Israeli

self-defense, but opposed to any peace plan.

 

 

Those Israeli settlements in the West Bank that add so much kindling to the

conflagration in the Middle East are often " adopted " and funded by American

evangelical churches whose members are devouring a novel that depicts Jews

reclaiming Palestinian land, moving Al-Aqsa Mosque out of Jerusalem and

rebuilding the second temple on the Dome of the Rock. The chosen people are

suddenly the darlings of the religious right, while a bestseller promotes the

idea that Jews will soon convert to Christianity -- and atone for their

centuries of stubbornness -- en masse.

 

 

Of course, it's not that every reader of the more than 50 million Left Behind

books sold so far is an end-times fundamentalist any more than every Eminem fan

is a homophobe. Nor are the books guaranteed to change their audiences' views on

American foreign policy -- the relationship between culture and politics is

never that simple. But the stories people tell themselves about the world

necessarily shape the way they act in it, and right now, this is the story

that's captivating America.

 

 

On one level, the attraction of the Left Behind books isn't that much different

from that of, say, Tom Clancy or Stephen King. The plotting is brisk and the

characterizations Manichean. People disappear and things blow up. Revelation is,

after all, supremely creepy, which is why it gets so much play in horror flicks

from " Rosemary's Baby " to " End of Days. "

 

 

The opening sequence of the first Left Behind book is gripping and cinematic.

Rayford Steele, an unhappily married commercial pilot, is flying to London and

contemplating an affair with a stewardess, when, handing the controls over to

his co-pilot and walking into the cabin, he finds her hysterical. People

throughout the plane have disappeared, their clothes left in neat piles on their

seats.

 

 

" This was no joke, no trick, no dream, " Jenkins and LaHaye write. " Something was

terribly wrong, and there was no place to run. "

 

 

Returning to America, Steele finds a world in chaos. All real Christians -- as

opposed to mere churchgoers -- as well as children and fetuses out of wombs have

vanished. Planes flown by believers have crashed, along with cars driven by the

faithful. The media struggles to make sense of it, but Rayford, whose marital

troubles were caused by his wife's newfound religious passion, knows what

happened. His wife had told him that Christians would be raptured up to heaven

in preparation for the rise of the Antichrist, his nefarious seven-year reign

and the Second Coming of Jesus.

 

 

The Left Behind books chronicle those seven years -- known to Christians as the

Tribulation -- as a ragtag group of new believers form the " Tribulation Force "

to thwart the murderous plans of Nicolae Carpathia, the

U.N.-leader-cum-prince-of-darkness (often just called " the evil one, " Osama bin

Laden-style). Carpathia's rise is engineered by a cabal of bankers. He's

supported by Israeli liberals enthralled by his devious promises of peace, and a

Democratic American president sells out the country to Carpathia's one-world

government. Meanwhile, the Tribulation Force finds a spiritual leader in Tsion

Ben-Judah, a rabbi and former Israeli statesman who realizes the error of his

Jewish ways and becomes a guerrilla media evangelist.

 

 

It's bizarre that more attention hasn't been paid to the series' open hostility

to the Jewish religion, if not the Jewish people. Imagine if, say, James

Carville wrote a novel in which a band of heroic gay socialists defeated a

voracious army of slack-jawed Bible-quoting Republicans to turn the world into a

gigantic French-speaking free-love commune. He'd be crucified on the talk shows,

and all kinds of sinister motives would be impugned to the Democratic Party.

 

 

That a Republican player can create a blockbuster media empire out of analogous

extremism suggests two seemingly contradictory things. First, Christian paranoia

has become so mainstream that few see fit to remark on it anymore. Second, while

the novels' popularity has received lots of media attention, their actual

content is utterly off the radar of the kind of people who write about books.

Nobody, it seems -- except, of course, for the series' millions of fans -- is

reading Left Behind.

 

 

The Left Behind books actually play on that sense of being unfairly ignored,

reveling in the moment when smug agnostics, insufficiently zealous Christians

and, most of all, Jews realize how terribly wrong they were. As Gersholm

Gorenberg wrote of the books in his " The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the

Struggle for the Temple Mount, " " Christianity's ancient, anxious amazement that

the people who know the Old Testament best don't accept that it leads to Jesus

(don't, in fact, accept that it is Old Testament) is at last disarmed. "

 

 

Cannily, the authors make their protagonists disbelievers who are disdainful of

fundamentalism. That means that doubters can relate to them and are thus drawn

into their dawning religious consciousness, while believers get the satisfaction

of seeing the heroes come around to their point of view. By having even minor

characters recount their conversions, Jenkins and LaHaye make sure that each

volume has moments when readers can enjoy a bit of high-minded revenge against

mocking urbanites.

 

 

The writers take a special pleasure in the self-abnegation of supposedly

sophisticated media types. In " The Remnant, " a British reporter makes an

appearance solely to explain her salvation. " All I can say is that the enemy has

a stronghold over the mind until one surrenders to God, " she says. " I was a

pragmatist, proud, a journalist. I wanted control over my own destiny. Things

had to be proved to me. " Now born-again, she tells Steele that she's mystified

by her former " lunacy. "

 

 

Seeing the self-defeating delusions of erstwhile elites exposed may be the

greatest pleasure the Left Behind books offer their readers.

 

 

The plotting alone certainly isn't enough to sustain attention in " The Remnant. "

That wasn't true of the first book -- theology aside, the setup of the original

Left Behind makes for a strangely compelling thriller. The stage is the whole

world gone mad, and the story roils with international intrigue. Jenkins and

LaHaye are very good at turning esoteric biblical augury into real-world

scenarios, and they get the action going before they start inserting too many

sermons into the mix.

 

 

So simple fascination with a good story might have accounted for the book's

initial success -- after all, audiences don't necessarily endorse the politics

behind every action adventure they devour.

 

 

But by the time " The Remnant " starts, the suspense has pretty much died, because

the story has the ultimate deus ex machina. Whenever things look grim for our

heroes, when the enemy is closing in and there's nowhere to run, they're saved

at the last minute by ... God. At the beginning of " The Remnant, " Ben-Judah is

encamped, Moses-like, with a million followers in the Jordanian desert.

Carpathia's forces unleash a devastating bombing raid, but thanks to God, the

resulting " massive sea of raging flames " leaves the so-called Judah-ites

untouched. God can also be relied upon to speed up computer searches and drop

plenty of nourishing manna on his blockaded flock. In the wittiest scene in " The

Remnant, " God is literally a co-pilot, sending an angel to help fly a plane

during a tense getaway.

 

 

There's not much drama in the repeated victories of an omnipotent being, but

that's not the only thing that makes " The Remnant " sluggish. In order to stretch

out the series for so long, Jenkins and LaHaye have larded it with tedious

subplots and countless techno-geek scenes in which a crafty Christian hacker

named Chang sabotages Carpathia's plans or creates false identities for his

comrades. About a third of " The Remnant " concerns the rescue of a Tribulation

Force pilot named George Sebastian from Greece. The action mostly involves the

characters driving around, splitting up, reconnoitering and then trying to find

each other.

 

 

The Remnant has very little in the way of climactic good vs. evil showdowns.

While there is a bit of supernatural deviltry (masses of vipers attack believers

lured from Ben-Judah's protection by agents of the False Prophet) and some

martyrdom (though not of any main characters), most of the story follows members

of the Tribulation Force jetting around the globe running various errands. The

nuclear annihilation of Chicago rates just a few lines, while the cellphone

codes the Force uses to communicate gets several pages.

 

 

Left Behind cloaks itself in the conventions of ordinary airport thrillers, but

it does far more than just provide a Christian alternative to decadent

mainstream entertainment. It creates a Christian theory of everything, one that

slates current events into a master narrative in which the world is destroyed

and then remade to evangelical specifications. It's an alternate universe in

which conservative Middle Americans are vindicated against everyone who doesn't

share their beliefs -- especially liberals and Jews.

 

 

There's nothing wrong with that. Everyone is entitled to their fantasies. But

LaHaye and Jenkins are at pains to show that the Left Behind books are meant as

more than fiction. They write on the Left Behind Web site, " While it is true

that in the broad spectrum of Protestant Christianity there are multiple views

of the end-times scenario, the pre-millennialist theology found in the Left

Behind Series is the prominent view among evangelical Christians, including

their leading seminaries such as Talbot Seminary, Trinity Seminary and Dallas

Theological Seminary. "

 

 

So the rest of us can ignore Left Behind, or chuckle at its over-the-top

Christian kitsch. We should keep in mind, though, that for some of the most

powerful people in the world, this stuff isn't melodrama. It's prophecy.

 

 

Michelle Goldberg is a staff writer for Salon based in New York