BUSH WATCH...The Rapture People

The Apocalypse Will Be Televised

Armageddon in an age of entertainment

By Gene Lyons.

excrpts from Harper's Magazine, November 2004.

After living in the Bible Belt for more than thirty years, I've learned several things about our fundamentalist Christian brethren: First, theirs is an embattled faith, which requires an ever evolving list of enemies to keep its focus. It includes Satan worshipers one year, "secular humanists" the next. Panic over backward masking on phonograph records yields to fears that supermarket bar codes harbor the Mark of the Beast. Some years back, Procter & Gamble was forced to deny widespread rumors that a moon-and-stars logo on boxes of soapsuds symbolized corporate diabolism. More recently, purging school libraries of Harry Potter's witchcraft has emerged as a cause. As if the real world weren't scary enough, chimerical threats must be found. It often appears that no form of occultism is too arcane or preposterous to provoke alarm.

I've also learned that fundamentalist Christianity's spiritual entrepreneurs are never more dogmatic than when they are ignoring, if not contradicting, the essence of Jesus Christ's teachings. The basic con is to insist upon the historical and scientific accuracy of every syllable in the Bible-then to analyze its symbolism, unveil hidden acrostics, and decode secret messages known only to initiates. The Book of Genesis is reduced to a biology text, and Daniel becomes a crystal ball. Thus are delivered the comforts of certitude and the enchantments of sorcery in a single beguiling package.

This is not to suggest insincerity. As Swift noted in A Tale of a Tub, his 1704 satire of religious extremists (by which he meant Catholics and Presbyterians), the successful propagandist is most often his own first victim. But it does begin to explain the huge commercial success of the Left Behind series of eschatological thrillers by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, a twelve-novel extravaganza combining a blandly paranoid worldview with crackpot theology to produce a form of biblical infotainment seemingly irresistible to a reported 42 million readers. (This is apparently a cumulative sales figure; the number of individuals slogging their way through the series is much smaller.)

* * *

Forget all that sentimental gibberish about blessed peacemakers, turning the other cheek, and loving your enemies. If there are references to the Sermon on the Mount among Left Behind's roughly 1 million words, I failed to find them. Depicting the "End Times" as an action/adventure melodrama similar to Arnold Schwarzenegger's Terminator films, the books portray midwestern suburbanites and born-again Israeli converts as Warrior Jesus' allies in an apocalyptic struggle against a U.N.-anointed "World Potentate," who looks "not unlike a younger Robert Redford" and speaks the language of science and liberal internationalism.

Yet the media's response to all of this nonsense has been remarkably polite. In America, of course, with commercial success comes a degree of cultural respectability. If millions of consumers succumb to a childish revenge fantasy that takes the Christ out of Christianity and treats the Bible as a cosmic Daily Racing Form, we dare not scoff at the merchandise. Indeed, the religious right is the biggest beneficiary of the "political correctness" it affects to deplore. Views H. L. Mencken once derided as the "idiotic hallucinations of the cow states" now command respect more or less proportionate to their market share.

So it is that the authors find themselves consulted regularly on matters ecclesiastical by publications ranging from the New York Times to Entertainment Weekly. A 2002 profile in Time magazine pronounced Dr. LaHaye an "influential theologian." (Academic titles are very big among graduates of Bob Jones University.) "Within a few hours after we met for the first time," its author enthused, "LaHaye gave me advice about my career, my love life and my salvation-and yet his questions didn't feel intrusive. He's that genuine."

Genuinely deluded is perhaps closer to the truth. Written as the sidebar to a classic newsmag cover story about the "trend" toward apocalyptic melodrama in post-9/11 America, the Time profile did mention LaHaye's attacks on Catholicism as a "false religion," but it soft-pedaled his zeal for the granddaddy of nutball conspiracy theories: the "Bavarian Illuminati." Adepts believe that this shadowy cabal of European-Jewish bankers and secret fraternities such as Skull & Bones has stage-managed world events since the late eighteenth century. (Some contend that America was betrayed into sin when George Washington was secretly assassinated and an impostor named Dr. Adam Weishaupt assumed the presidency.) In his 2002 book The Rapture, LaHaye indignantly defended himself against a John Birch Society critic who accused him of being in cahoots with the Illuminati. To the contrary-LaHaye pronounces himself an avowed enemy of what he calls the "satanically-inspired, centuries-old conspiracy to use government, education, and media to destroy every vestige of Christianity within our society and establish a new world order."

* * *

"How fading and insipid," Swift wrote, "do all Objects accost us that are not convey'd in the Vehicle of Delusion?" And indeed, such preposterous views haven't prevented LaHaye from advancing in the world. As an ecclesiastical go-getter, he has few peers. A co-founder, along with the Rev. Jerry Falwell, of the Moral Majority, LaHaye now heads something called the Tim LaHaye School of Prophecy, at Liberty University in Virginia. Another of LaHaye's visionary projects is the secretive Council on National Policy, which functions as a sort of theological popular front of evangelical preachers and politicians on the far right. And his alliance with Jerry B. Jenkins (writer of the Gil Thorp comic strip, former editor of the Moody Bible Institute magazine, and author of more than one hundred quickie books, including celebrity "autobiographies" of Billy Graham and Orel Hershiser) has turned LaHaye into a best-selling novelist.

As the careers of such disparate authors as Ayn Rand and D. H. Lawrence demonstrate, eccentric ideas are no impediment to writing novels. Almost any worldview compatible with sanity, in the medical sense, can serve as the scaffolding of readable fiction. Orwell wrote about what he called "good bad books," arguing that "intellectual refinement can be a disadvantage to a story-teller, as it would be to a music-hall comedian"; what is necessary are strong convictions, an interest in individual human beings, and a powerful instinct for narrative. We're all capable of suspending disbelief for the sake of a good story. So how seriously should we take the dust-jacket blurbs from reviewers who compare the Left Behind series to the work of pop-fiction luminaries like Tom Clancy and John Grisham? Or, to put it another way, can anybody not infatuated with LaHaye and Jenkins's theological views read the novels for pleasure?

The answer, I fear, is no. On a purely mimetic level, the novels scarcely exist as realistic or even as allegorical fiction. These are novels for people who don't read novels. Far too much of it is sheer didacticism: the characters don't converse so much as they preach....

***

...Scholars of the End Times genre may see the "Russian Pearl Harbor" business as an oblique tribute to Hal Lindsey's 1970 bestseller, The Late Great Planet Earth. Ironically, given American fundamentalism's historic ambivalence about Jews, it was the 1948 founding of Israel, coming as it did near the end of the millennium, that gave the End Times prophecy industry a boost. Hence Israeli Jews play a strange role in the Left Behind series, existing to be converted or slaughtered. As God's chosen, they are to be protected from harm until the battle of Armageddon, at which point they must either accept Jesus as their Messiah or die.

Suddenly, high over the Atlantic a miracle takes place: "Only thing I can compare it to," another pilot tells Rayford, "is the old Star Trek shows where people got dematerialized and rematerialized, beamed all over the place." Indeed, all over the world, millions of born-again Christians have vanished into the mystical ether-leaving behind their clothing, their eyeglasses, even their dentures-along with every child under the age of twelve. Airplanes are crashing, automobiles are veering driverless and out of control, and fetuses are disappearing from their mothers' wombs, as the born-again and the unborn alike are abruptly "raptured" to heaven.

More about this curious doctrine, concocted in the nineteenth century by a Glasgow evangelist named John Darby, in due time....

***

...How seriously the rest of us need to take a primitive revenge fantasy like the Left Behind novels is hard to say. While daydreaming about Armageddon, most readers, I'm guessing, are also signing off on thirty-year mortgage notes and keeping their life insurance up to date. Intellectually, the "rapture racket," as Barbara R. Rossing calls it in her lucid and passionate book The Rapture Exposed, owes its origins to nineteenth-century turmoil over Darwinism. A professor of the New Testament at the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago, Rossing argues persuasively that certain people are attracted to Darby's "dispensationalist system with its Rapture theology because it is so comprehensive and rational-almost science-like-a feature that made it especially appealing during battles over evolution during the 1920s and 1930s."

Today it reads like very bad literary criticism, although it's admittedly tempting to admire the sheer ingenuity of a biblical "system" that turns Beelzebub into a "peacenik" and Jesus Christ into a bloody-handed avenger. The Rapture, one of LaHaye's fifty non-fiction books, is densely packed with charts, tables, graphs, and lists of biblical citations that, if rearranged in the proper order, constitute thunderous proof that Christ's Second Coming will be a two-stage event-first the "rapture," then the killer Lamb of Revelation on the rampage. There's even a diverting passage in which, making a great show of scholarly objectivity, LaHaye comes close to revealing his own hocus pocus. He concedes, "No one passage of Scripture teaches the two phases of Christ's second coming separated by the Tribulation." But, he adds, "no one passage teaches against the pre-Trib view," either. Of course, the Bible is likewise silent on the Treaty of Versailles and the designated-hitter rule.

By no means are all, or even most, evangelical Christians comfortable seeing their faith turned into fortune-telling. Rossing quotes an array of contemporary theologians who reject what one disapprovingly describes as "this perverse parody of John 3:16: 'God so loved the world that he sent it World War III.'" As noisy zeal overwhelms more reasonable voices, however, the Left Behind hubbub strikes me as symptomatic of the degraded state into which American Puritanism has fallen. In Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, the runaway religious bestseller of the seventeenth century, Christian's allegorical journey to the Celestial City involved an essentially inward quest. His encounters with the Giant Despair and Mr. Worldly-Wiseman forced him continually to search and re-search his mind and spirit for evidence of Satan's wiles. LaHaye and Jenkins convert what was once the spiritual and psychological drama of salvation into escapist melodrama, Puritan self-examination into messianic narcissism. Satan is the Other, basically anything you fear and don't understand. The books are pagan tribalism writ large, complete with soothsayers and magic spells. All of history has conspired to turn suburban Americans into apocalyptic superheroes. The end is near, and dude-you're, like, the star! --posted 03.15.05

Letters: The Rapture People, II

Re: Letters: The Rapture People... I can't help but put my two cents in on this one....The point I made to my boys...the other night...is this; If we are not related to everything on this planet we in fact become the "Aliens" or if I'm not from here why should I care about the Earth and the environment or who should die because none of it really matters, right? Which leaves it as people in wait for the Mothership to come and pick them up and take them to their real home. Now that made them laugh and it is funny but not, all at the same time because there really are people who do believe that. I think you call them the rapture people. Really, I think you misuse the term.

It is a sad testament to how far we as a People have fallen and though there are those who say they have no need for something real to hold onto; Science vs. Religion is no better than Reublican vs. Democrat when it comes to rising above the BS. of this world we live in. They are both and all parts of the BS. we so desperately need to escape, none of them capable of being known as Man's saviour.

Science in its pure form (without interjection of personal opinion) is as simple as "the study of things in an objective manner so arguement will cease concerning the things we don't know."...Religion is and always has been the worship of the Unknown God.... Of course you could always say, that's [just an opinion] and that everybody has one of those but then I'd have to say; The ego self is the maker of opinions but the selfless self is and always has been, what not only the Bible is about but what is stated in all the Holy books and religion is to be found in none of them....

Heaven and Hell are states of being and the Bible reveals the truth and hides it, all at the same time. It just depends where you are standing when you look at it.

So could you read between the lines? The thought of rapture is one is taken and one is left. When the selfless self remains, all will be revealed.....Joe

No wonder Karl Rove goes around the White House whistling that militant hymn, "Onward Christian Soldiers." He turned out millions of the foot soldiers on Nov. 2, including many who have made the apocalypse a powerful driving force in modern American politics.... --posted 02.21.05

To The New York Times