At the Round Earth's Imagines Corners, Blow

CHAPTER SIX

BEAM ME UP, LORD

At the round earth's imagines corners, blow Your trumpets, Angels, and arise, arise From death, your numberlese infinities Of soules, and to your scattered bodies go All whom the flood did, and fire shall o'erthrow, All whom warre, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies, Despaire, law, chance, hath slaine, and you whose eyes, Shall behold God, and never tast death's woe.

- - - John Donne1

Protestant fundamentalism is a powerful cultural and political force in the US, and more so since the end of the Cold War. Its political tide may have crested with the rise and decline of the Moral Majority and the Bush administration. Its cultural power continues to grow as witnessed by the phenomenal sale of the Left Behind series of books. The first eponymously named volume appeared in 1995 and by 2010 its publisher claimed that its sixteen volumes had sold over 65 million copies. Volume 7 was the first

Christian novel to make the New York Times bestseller list. The books sell at Christian bookstores and mass retail outlets like Costco and Sam's Club, but also at Barnes and

Noble. Christian popular culture is a $7 billion growth industry. Wal-Mart carries something in the range of 1,200 religious titles and over 500 inspirational albums, many of which reach the best-seller lists and pop charts.2 A 2009 Pew Foundation poll indicated that 79 percent of American Christians await the second coming and that 20 percent believe Jesus will return in their lifetime. Thirty-four percent of American

Christians are convinced that the world situation will worsen before the second coming and that it will unfold in accord with biblical prophecy.3 The belief of so many Americans that they are living in “the end of times” and the success of Left Behind books are undoubtedly related. These novels portray the rapture – the lifting to heaven of the most faithful – the subsequent rise of the Antichrist, a seven year period of “tribulation,” Christ’s return and creation of a millennial kingdom, the final judgment and the entry into heaven of the remaining faithful and resurrected dead.

The Left Behind books have received local support in church sermons and study groups and have generated a successful companion children’s series, a board game and computer game, all of which spread their message. Left Behind’s plot realizes the prophecies of

“dispensationalist premillenialism,” a religious movement that developed in the United

States in the late nineteenth century. The movement and Left Behind novels are apt subjects for my inquiry because they build on golden age and utopian narratives. They look back to the Garden of Eden as a model for their future utopias of the millennium and heaven. They foster a Christian identity with the goal of having it supersede other forms of self-identification.

For almost 150 years dispensationalists have repeatedly predicted rapture and

Christ’s return. RaptureReady.com maintains a frequently updated Rapture Index, not unlike the famous clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Since 2004, the Index has moved from "heavy prophetic activity" to "fasten your seatbelts."4 In August 2010, it stood at 174, close to its all-time high of 182 in September 2001. Dispensationalists speak of their movement as a short-term effort to prepare people for the rapture and ensuing time of tribulation. They are nevertheless building networks and institutions that are clearly based on the premise that the world as we know it will be here for some time to come. There is an obvious tension between their proclaimed goal and institutional

2 activities; one that can only become more acute when no rapture occurs. Early

Christianity found itself in this kind of crisis when Jesus did not return in the lifetime of his disciples or of their successors. Christianity successfully transformed itself into an institutionalized religion and postponed expectations of Christ’s return into the ever- distant future. It is too soon to know how Dispensationalism will respond to the failure of its latest predictions or the extent to which this will cause a problem for believers.

To date, Dispensationalism and Left Behind books have been remarkably successful in propagating a religious-based anti-modern identity – my strategy two -- and their achievement must be acknowledged. Tim LaHaye, who conceived of the Left

Behind series, attributes their success to a rapidly changing and frightening world in which “people are looking for answers.”5 The Book of Revelation makes it self-evident, he insists, that “Christ and Christians are the ultimate winners in the game of life.”6 Left

Behind “offers confident hope in a hopeless age.”7 At the outset of the Reformation in

England, William Tyndale (c. 1494 – 1536) intended his English translation of the bible to be absorbed by readers and shape their inner life, break the hold over them of the society in which they lived and enable them forge new identities.8 Rage against this society and its corruption was to be transformed into a redeeming certainty about deliverance through access to unquestioned truths. Left Behind is a modern instantiation of this project and its novels are intended to facilitate a different kind of interiority and identity formation.

Left Behind must be put into theological context. I accordingly begin with a discussion of American millennialism, of which Dispensationalism is now its dominant expression. This sets the stage for my examination of the Left Behind novels, which

3 dramatize dispensationalist prophecy. I read their utopia as a dystopia and find striking parallels between its millennium and the "Oceania" of George Orwell’s 1984. I conclude with a comparative analysis of Dispensationalism and the founding texts of Marxism, where I also find remarkable similarities. Both comparisons prompt some generalizations about the nature of anti-modern identities and discourses.

This chapter differs from its predecessors in important ways. The texts I analyzed in chapters 3-5 were great works of literature, music or philosophy. They were elaborate in structure and rich in ideas, allowing, if not demanding, creative and complex readings.

The Left Behind novels are simple in concept and writing. They combine adventure with

Christian eschatology, but make no original contributions to either genre. They are full of factual errors, some of them indicative of their authors’ naïveté about corporate life, technology, warfare and international affairs. Their turgid prose and poorly developed characters reflect the limited talent of Jerry Jenkins, the principal author. Errors and undistinguished prose make its commercial success that much more impressive and challenging to explain.

Left Behind is a mass market enterprise and must be analyzed less on its literary or artistic merits and more on its message and appeal. I suspect that one of the principal reasons for its success, and for that of dispensationalism more generally, is the way the movement and its novels encourage people to derive satisfaction from the very developments that depress and frighten them. Barrack Obama is a synecdoche for these developments.9 Many Left Behind readers are so opposed to the President and his policies that they consider him the Antichrist. LaHaye and Jenkins reject this characterization, but describe the President as a “committed socialist” whose goal is to

4 bring about a world socialist dictatorship. This outcome will “fulfill biblical prophecy” and hasten the rapture and second coming.10 Moral corruption, war and the breakdown of order are evidence that Christ will shortly return. The "good news," LaHaye and Jenkins proclaim, "is that the world will not end in chaos as the secularists predict."11 But life on earth will get much worse before redemption is possible.

AMERICAN MILLENNIALISM

The big divide in millennialism is between those who believe that Christ will return before the millennium and those who expect him only at its conclusion.

Postmillennialism, the older of the two traditions, stipulates that with God’s help,

Americans, and perhaps humanity more generally, will ultimately achieve a thousand year period of peace and prosperity that will end with the return of Christ and his saints.

Premillennialism puts the second coming before the millennium. This difference reflects its deeply pessimistic view of human affairs and concomitant belief that moral and political reform is meaningless. For Premillenialism, churches that make accommodations with modern science and society are ignorant, corrupt and part and parcel of the existing moral decay. The only hope for humanity is Christ’s immediate intervention in an increasingly wicked and violent world.12 Both doctrines draw their theological legitimacy from biblical prophecies and look to “signs of the times” for evidence that divine intervention of some kind is likely in the near-term.13

Postmillennialism dominated evangelical theology between the Revolution and the Civil War.14 During the so-called Great Awakening (1730-60) it was popularized by

Jonathan Edwards, who maintained that Revelation’s prophecies about the Antichrist were being fulfilled and would soon lead to the millennium. The pope was identified as

5 the Antichrist and Catholicism and other false faiths were expected to lose adherents as people around the world were converted to the true teachings of the gospel. William

Miller used numerical references in the book of Daniel to calculate that Christ would return in 1844.15 His followers founded their own denomination, Seventh-Day

Adventism, and subsequently updated Christ’s return to 1914.16

Premillennialism originated in Britain and became prominent in the US after the

Civil War, giving rise to the movement known as Dispensationalism. It found adherents within the Episcopal, Presbyterian and Baptist churches and was propagated at annual summer conferences.17 Its principal founder was John Nelson Darby, an itinerant British preacher who traveled widely in Canada and the US from 1862 to 1877. He followed other millenarians in developing chronological schemes, or “dispensations” that purport to show that their prophecies of the Books of Daniel and Revelation were in the course of being fulfilled. We are currently in the sixth such era, that of the church, also known as the “age of grace.” Darby's great innovation was the “rapture,” the moment when the faithful are lifted to heaven, leaving the rest of humanity behind to suffer the

“tribulation.” This is a seven year period during which the Antichrist achieves near-total control of the earth and compels the subjugated to wear the “mark of the beast.” The tribulation ends with the Battle of Armageddon, where Christ intervenes to destroy his foes. He then establishes the “millennium,” a thousand-year prelude to the final judgment and an eternity of bliss for those who have accepted Jesus as their savior.18

Darby justified the rapture with reference to the Latin vulgate translation of the

Greek text of 1Thessalonians 4:16-17. "For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trumpet of God; and the dead

6 in Christ shall rise first. Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and thus we shall always be with the

Lord." The English "caught up" is a translation of the Latin rapimur. Medieval Latin coined the noun raptura from the infinitive rapio, from which our word "rapture" derives.19 Darby's theological innovation was offered as a critique of existing churches.

The rapture would reveal the identity of true Christians; hypocrites, which included most self-professed Christians, would be "left behind." Dispensationalism attracted people who were alienated from their churches and for whom the concept of the rapture not only justified their discontent but held out the promise of their heavenly reward. It also offered the prospect of revenge in the form of suffering, but not necessarily damnation, of all those associated with the more liberal Christian establishment.20

Dispensationalism spread its message at yearly prophecy conferences and received wider publicity in W. J. Blackstone's Jesus is Coming, which predicted the end of the world sometime between 1916 and 1934.21 Cyrus. I. Scofield produced a

Reference Bible for the movement and defined a dispensation as a “a period of time during which man is tested in respect of obedience to some specific revelation of the will of God.”22 The Scofield-Gaebelein “pretribulationists” insisted that the rapture would lift true believers into heaven before the tribulation and won a majority for this doctrine at the Niagara Bible Conference of 1901.23 The Scofield Reference Bible introduced footnotes in lieu of separate commentary and used them to mark and interpret prophecies.

Distributed with funds provided by philanthropist Lyman Stewart, it became the core text of Dispensationalism.24

7 Dispensationalism differs from other variants of millennialism in a second important respect: it maintains that God has separate plans for Jews and Christians.

According to dispensationalists, God’s design for the Jews is spelled out in Genesis

(12:2-3), in which he promises to create a great nation from Abraham’s seed.

Dispensationalists maintain that God punishes the Jews periodically for not honoring the terms of their contract with him but never lost faith in his chosen people. He will honor his promise that David’s true son, the messiah, will return to rule over the earth on the basis of a new covenant that will replace Mosaic law. Until then, Jews must suffer

Christian domination in what Daniel (7-9) calls the “times of the gentiles.” This era or dispensation will consist of four successive empires. One of the leaders of the last empire will order the rebuilding of Jerusalem’s temple, which will trigger the return of the messiah and his restoration of David’s throne. Daniel measures these last events in weeks; Jerusalem will be rebuilt in seven weeks, sixty-two weeks later the messiah will appear and will meet a week of violent resistance during which the last emperor tries unsuccessfully to destroy the Jews.25

This chronology caused a major problem for dispensationalists because these prophecies should have been realized in the era of the historical Jesus. Finding wiggle room in the double meaning of the Hebrew word for week, which also means “seven,’ dispensationalists engaged in what can only be described as a wildly figurative reading of

Daniel’s text to argue that “seventy weeks” actually meant seventy “sevens” of years.

According to this scheme the messiah would appear 490 years after a decree to rebuild

Jerusalem. Dispensationalists turned to Nehemiah 2:1-8 and rather freely interpreted a reported decree of Artaxerxes to allow some Jews to return to Jerusalem to do repair

8 work on its crumbling walls as an order to rebuild the temple. Jesus was executed 483 years later. He should have returned seven years after that to establish his kingdom, but this did not happen so dispensationalists now invented “postponement theory” to explain his non-appearance. It held the Jews responsible for the failure of Daniel’s prophecy.

Because they rejected Jesus as their messiah, he directed his ministry to the gentiles, ushering in the “church age.”26 According to C. H. Mackintosh, a major popularizer of dispensationalist theology: “The Messiah, instead of being received, is cut off. In place of ascending the throne of David, He goes on the cross. . . God signified His sense of this act by suspending for a time His dispensational dealings with Israel. The course of time is interrupted.”27

Postponement theory created as many problems as it solved. All relevant prophecies were now Jewish, leaving Christians without any of their own and putting their church outside of God’s initial plans. The so-called church age is a kind of suspended existence, a gap filler between Israel’s rejection of Jesus and the ultimate conversion of the Jews. Dispensationalists argue that God was unable or unwilling to put his plans for Jews and gentiles into effect at the same time. It was necessary to remove the church from the scene before God could move forward with his plan for the Jews. To bring this about, dispensationalists moved the rapture forward to Daniel’s seventieth week and the reign of the Antichrist. All of God’s saints would disappear from the earth, in effect removing the church, thereby allowing God to initiate the tribulation and the rise of the Antichrist, setting in motion his plan for the Jews. God would return at the end of the tribulation with his saints in tow to establish the millennium.28

9 Dispensationalists become a laughing stock among more sophisticated Christians for their inventive theology, constant efforts to map current events on to biblical prophecies and repeated failed predictions of second comings. The first decades of the twentieth century were difficult years for millenarians and conservative Christians, more generally.29 They enjoyed some early successes in opposing the teaching of evolution, which culminated in their pyrrhic victory at 1925 Scopes Trial in Tennessee. Efforts by conservatives – now known as "fundamentalists" -- to enforce orthodoxy in churches and seminaries generated heated conflicts, especially in the Northern Baptist Convention and the Presbyterian Church. This catch-all term "fundamentalist," coined in 1920 by Baptist journalist Curtis Lee Laws, is almost invariably applied to churches and movements that do not question the historicity of the bible.30

Fundamentalists and premillenarians left to found their own churches, leaving them increasingly isolated from the religious mainstream and public life.31 On the defensive, they came to believe that American Christians were rejecting God, leaving them the “faithful remnant.” Local pastors built religious schools as well as churches and enterprising fundamentalists reached wider audiences through their use of radio. New bible schools, the Dallas Theological Seminary and Bob Jones University became centers of the movement, as did Wheaton College in Illinois. Bible conferences and youth movements also proved effective vehicles for building community and spreading millennial beliefs.32

Dispensationalists are more radical than conservative in their theology. They rely on what can only be called primitivist readings of the bible that are ahistorical and supernaturalist. They depart from traditional practice by deriving predictions from

10 prophecies.33 They insist that the bible is full of hidden meaning, but maintain, without acknowledging any contradiction, that these meanings are readily accessible to ordinary readers. In the words of one premillenarian, “the Scriptures were not [written] for the erudite, but for the simpleminded.”34 Believers are encouraged to read the bible and take what it says at face value.35 This approach appeals to the intellectually unsophisticated and those attracted to simplicity and certainty. Not surprisingly, Dispensationalism increasingly found its audience among rural and small town Protestants from northern

European backgrounds who had little education and grew up in families with Victorian values.36 Today, judging from public opinion polls and the sales of Left Behind, it reaches far beyond this demographic.

Dispensationalists have always been the voice of cultural pessimism, if not downright doom, in contrast to most other evangelicals. In the early decades of the twentieth century, their most prominent spokesman was Arno C. Gaebelein, a German immigrant, Methodist minister, editor of Our Hope and author of Revelation, among other books. He taught himself Hebrew and Yiddish so he could debate rabbis on the

Lower East side and proselytize its heavily Jewish population, Not meeting success, he turned to writing.37 Another leading figure, Isaac M. Haldeman, was pastor of the First

Baptist Church in Manhattan. His The Signs of Our Times was a steady best seller within the dispensationalist community. It described earthquakes, military buildups and unheralded displays of luxury as evidence of the coming end of the world. It develops a convoluted argument typical of premillenarian tracts. The world is literally going to hell, and attempts to reform it will inevitably fail because they are inspired by the devil.

Satan, Haldeman insists somewhat illogically, “would be glad to see prohibition

11 successful" even though his real objective is to lead Christians “into a drunken orgy of sin and shame and outbreaking vice.” He hoped that moral decay would have the unintended effect of producing a religious revival.38

Preachers expanded on the political-religious arguments of Moody, Gaebelein and

Haldeman. Sermons in dispensationalist churches condemned more liberal churches for their apostasy, which allegedly explained their declining influence and the corresponding rise of immorality and crime. LaHaye and Jenkins attribute the move away from "true" readings of the bible in the late nineteenth century to Satan. "The devil knew the best way to inject his apostate doctrine into the churches was to infiltrate the seminaries, indoctrinate young ministers, and send them into the churches to spread his false concepts across the land." The devil's allies were the "pro-Communist" Federal Council of

Churches and its successor, the National Council of Churches.39

Dispensationalists are fond of citing Jeremiah 30:7, which describes “the time of

Jacob’s trouble,” widely interpreted by them to mean intensified persecution of the Jews.

Beginning in the late nineteenth century dispensationalists began to predict that anti-

Semitism would prompt Jewish immigration to Palestine and the creation of the state of

Israel. Working with Satan, the Antichrist would unify the world’s religions, reestablish the Roman empire, dramatically extend its domain and make a friendship pact with Israel he would later disavow. The rapture would come, followed by the seven year tribulation, during which millions of people would die but many Jews would recognize Jesus as the messiah. Armageddon in Israel would become the site of history’s last great battle, where the Antichrist would face down his last earthly rivals. Christ would intervene, annihilate both armies, save the Jews and establish the Millennium. Allenby's entrance

12 into Jerusalem, Mussolini's rise to power, the Great Depression, World War II, Shoah, and the creation of Israel were each in turn offered as proof of these prophecies.40

From the beginning, dispensationalist anti-modernism was associated with reactionary social and political views. Premillenarians opposed Progressivism, which they condemned as the work of the devil.41 In the Depression, dispensationalists derided the blue eagle symbol of the National Recovery Act as “the mark of the beast,” and the

New Deal as paving the way for the Antichrist.42 During the Cold War, fundamentalist preachers Fred Schwartz, Carol McIntire and Billy James Hargis lead rabid anti- communist crusades. The Cold War and its aftermath spawned efforts to read the rapture and end of history in the tea leaves of current events. In 1982, Pat Robertson, not a strongly identified millenarian, predicted an apocalyptic war between the superpowers that would bring the world to an end.43 In 2006 he made repeated predictions of storms and tsunamis that God would send against America’s west coast.44 The most important voice of doom was the dispensationalist novel Late Great Planet Earth. Published in

1970, it offered a fictional account of the world’s destruction.

LEFT BEHIND

The first dispensationalist novel was published in 1905.45 Prophetic literature began to sell well in the 1970s. Hal Lindsey and Carole Carlson's The Late Great Planet

Earth, was distributed largely through Christian bookstores and churches and had sold over thirty million copies by the end of the century. In 1978, a documentary film about the book played in commercial theaters across the country. Drawing freely on Daniel,

Ezekiel and Revelation, The Late Great Planet predicted the return of Christ sometime in the 1980s. In line with the dispensationalist world view, it portrays humanity in a state of

13 moral decline that will lead to the collapse of law, order, the economy and military organizations. Churches coalesce to form “religious conglomerates” and the pope is increasingly active politically as a world church and world government merge. “Real

Christians” are openly persecuted by the Antichrist, head of the "European Economic

Community." The EEC [sic] dramatically expands its membership and power and comes to resemble a modern-day Roman empire. The only hope for America, Lindsey and

Carlson insist, is “a widespread spiritual awakening.”46 In 1980, Lindsey, a graduate of the Dallas Theological Seminary, authored a second book in which he argued that the

1980s could represent the last decade of history.47 Judging from the sales of his books, readers appear unperturbed by apparent contradiction between Lindsey’s deterministic belief in the end of the world and the hope it might be prevented by a spiritual reawakening.

The Left Behind series copies and expands on Lindsey’s scenario and has been an ever bigger success. To date, Left Behind consists of sixteen novels, several volumes of commentary a series for the military and a mini-series for children. The authors maintain an active website that solicits commentary and questions from readers. The project was conceived by Tim LaHaye, a self-described “prophecy scholar,” minister and educator.

He was active in the John Birch Society in the 1960s, was an original board member of the Moral Majority and a founder of or active in a score of right-wing social and political organizations. His wife Beverly is co-founder of Concerned Women for America, a prominent anti-feminist organization. LaHaye is convinced that the Chinese Communists bought the 1996 election for Bill Clinton.48 The series principal author, Jerry B. Jenkins, claims to have authored over a hundred books.

14 Following Lindsey and Carlson, Left Behind is based on prophecies elaborated by

Ezra, Daniel and Revelation. Their prophecies provide the plot for all the volumes, which opens with the Rapture, moves forward through the tribulation, Christ's return and establishment of the millennium and resurrection of the dead and the final ascent to heaven. Like all good dispensationalists, the authors believe that we are living in “the final days” because of humanity’s corruption and loss of faith in God. Traditionally, dispensationalists look for correspondence between contemporary events and biblical prophecies. Left Behind does the reverse; it writes a history of the near future to make it conform to its authors' readings of selected prophecies. Judging from web site posts, many readers find this approach appealing.49

The Plot: The Left Behind novels have an integrated if elaborate plot that realizes the prophecies of the Book of Revelation, as understood by LaHaye and Johnson..

Volume I opens with the rapture, which lifts some half-million believers to heaven at the same moment. Those aboard airplanes simply disappear, with God thoughtfully leaving their clothes neatly folded on their seats. The sudden disappearance of so many people comes as a shock to those “left behind” and only a few have the intelligence and faith to recognize what has happened. Among the first of these is Rayford Steele, a senior pilot at TransCom Airlines. He is contemplating an affair with a cabin attendant, an attractive woman who has signaled her availability. The rapture puts this plan on hold as Rayford’s wife and younger son have disappeared, drawing him closer to his daughter Chloe and soon to God. Father and daughter make the acquaintance of Buck Williams, a virile, socially adept, worldly-wise and phenomenally successful New York journalist who has somehow never had sex with a woman. He and Chloe, another virgin, fall in love, marry,

15 and become part of the “Tribulation Force” organized by Rayford’s Illinois pastor Bruce

Barnes. Its goal is to win people to Christ, oppose the Antichrist and simply survive the tribulation.50

Pastor Barnes is killed in the earthquake. Following the rapture he becomes an assiduous student of the Book of Revelation and leaves extensive notes for the faithful about what to expect. 51 He predicts the opening of the seven seals and bowls and their respective judgments and chaos to which this leads. One quarter of the earth’s population will die, as it soon does, from earthquakes, war, famine, pestilence and meteor impact.

Thanks to Bruce’s notes and his own belief in scripture, Rayford and other members of the Tribulation Force know just what to expect and this gives them a leg up in the survival game.52

From time to time the heroes reflect on the relationship between prophecy and the narrative they instantiate. They quote Revelation to illuminate the plot and presumably to demonstrate how the developments they confront should be taken as evidence of its prophecies. Bruce quotes Revelation 6:9-11 to the effect that the fifth of the seven seal judgments concerns martyrs who plead with God for vengeance but are required to wait because more martyrs will join them. He reasons that these martyrs are Christians who will die during the tribulation and its catastrophes.53

As the Jews and Israel are so central to dispensationalist theology, so they are to

Left Behind. Revelation describes “two witnesses” and the novels depict two Jewish messengers in Jerusalem who preach the return of the messiah and the conversion of

144,000 Jews (1000 times the twelve tribes of Israel squared). To make conversion possible, the authors create the character of Rabbi Tsion Ben-Judah. After lengthy study

16 of the old and new testaments he concludes that Jesus fulfilled all the requirements of the messiah. He was about “to receive” Jesus when the rapture occurred.54 He subsequently goes on television to make his pitch for Jesus, is forced to flee Israel and with Buck's help succeeds in converting many Jews. In one of the later volumes, he meets archangel

Michael and hears the voice of God.55

The principal “bad guy” is Antichrist Nicolae Carpathia. By means of deception, hypnosis, intrigue and murder he becomes head of Romania, Secretary General of the

United Nations and then dictator of the world. Carpathia is the product of genetic engineering and artificial insemination. He is alleged to have Roman antecedents, necessary to square the narrative with the prophecy that the Antichrist will take the form of a Roman emperor. The plot line also follows the contemporary millenarian belief that the Antichrist will be associated with the European Union – as he was in The Late, Great

Planet Earth, which characterizes what was then the European Community as the “New

Roman Empire” of the Book of Revelation. Carpathia’s handlers, agents of the devil, eliminate his mother and Nicolae removes his father, who blocks his rise to power. With the devil’s help, Carpathia makes millions in import-export and at age twenty-four enters the lower house of Romania’s parliament. Effectively blackmailed, Romania’s president stands aside in favor of Carpathia, who is elected with the unanimous support of both houses of parliament. Not long after, he is appointed Secretary General of the United

Nations. He effectively feigns humility and convinces others of his selflessness and sincere commitment to world peace. In a defining moment, he shoots two powerful figures in a meeting, but hypnotizes everyone in the room, Buck aside, into believing that one of them committed suicide and inadvertently killed the other in the process.

17 Nicolae uncaps and prepares to exploit Alaska’s vast reserve, which until now, we are told incorrectly, had been prevented by environmental legislation. As Carpathia already commands the Middle East's oil, he comes to control two-thirds of the world’s oil supply, allowing him to introduce steady price hikes to bring him revenue upwards of a trillion dollars a year.56 In the course of the 1990s, Carpathia restructures international politics and economics. He makes "Carpathianism" the only legal religion on Earth and compels everyone to bear a mark [the biblical Mark of the Beast] to attest their loyalty to him and the Global Community, the successor to the UN. Those who refuse face the guillotine.

A rebellion is launched by American militia forces under the command of former

American President Fitzhugh in alliance with England and Egypt and armed with a secret stash of conventional and nuclear weapons.57 Carpathia launches a preemptive strike, making his adversaries look responsible for the nuclear destruction it brings to many cities. World War III produces famine, the great “Wrath of the Lamb” Earthquake, meteor strikes, maritime disasters, contamination of waterways, global darkening and cooling, swarms of locusts and plagues of fire, smoke and sulphur. These calamities destroy a third of the population, but not Carpathia's regime.58 He is assassinated by

Chaim Rosenzweig, the Israeli botanist whose invention made it possible to farm the deserts. After three days, Carpathia is resurrected by Satan and his ability to rise from the dead proves an enormous political asset that allows him to further consolidate his power.59

The millennium is brought about by the return of Jesus. He casts Carpathia, his advisors and all their henchmen into the Lake of Fire, where they will suffer for all

18 eternity. Satan emerges from Carpathia’s body and is compelled to kneel before Christ and acknowledge him as Lord. He confesses that everything he ever did was for personal gain and that his entire life was a waste. A thousand years later we have a glimpse of

Carpathia still writhing in agony as he is tortured by fire and sulphur, repeating his new mantra that Jesus is Lord. All of these events, beginning with Carpathia’s improbable rise to world power, are necessary to make the world resemble dispensationalist readings of biblical prophecy.

Left Behind is more about adventure than character development. There is endless description of the mayhem caused by the Antichrist, the human and physical disruption and destruction to which this leads and the efforts of the tribulation force to survive and win converts to Christ. Little effort is made to demonstrate the spiritual rewards heroes derive from their commitment to Jesus. They occasionally speak of these benefits, but this is not a convincing method of demonstrating them. It is, of course, much easier to describe chaos and destruction than it is to portray spiritual evolution and its psychological and behavioral consequences.

Theology: Dispensationalists claim to read God’s word directly without introducing any interpretation of their own. Here too, Dispensationalism harks back to the early days of English Protestantism when Tyndale insisted that the bible should be understood in what he calls "its literal sense." Like Tyndale, dispensationalists assert that meaning lies directly in front of us and requires no special education or search for hidden meanings.60

Texts never speak for themselves and the bible least of all. Old and new testament are composites of multiple texts written by many people, in some cases over

19 many generations. Most of these books existed in different textual versions, making it impossible to reconstruct an “original.” Editors subsequently decided which texts, and which versions of them, to include in the scriptures.61 The old testament is written in

Hebrew and the new in Greek. Fundamentalists read the bible in English translation and there are over 500 translations available. The translation problem is exacerbated by the fact that many Hebrew and Greek words and phrases have lost their original meanings and taken on new ones. Words and phrases intended to evoke specific responses from contemporary readers are unlikely to do this with modern ones.62 This is particularly true of Revelation which makes free use of fanciful metaphors and symbols. Do swords really come out of mouths or millions of giant horsemen race across the face of the earth?

Is the lamb simply an animal or a symbol for Jesus? Most readings, including those of dispensationalists, opt for the latter understanding of the lamb, which, of course, represents a figurative, not literal reading.

Fundamentalists try to get around the first of these problems by insisting that the bible was written and edited under the direct guidance of God so perfectly reflects his intentions. They do not address the problems of how we can fathom God’s meaning from words that conjure up diverse meanings. Left Behind defends literalism, quite a challenge for a movement whose bible readings are remarkably imaginative and labored. The journalist Verna Zee, one of the minor characters, plays devil’s advocate by suggesting that Revelation resembles Nostradamus: “Can’t these prophecies be read into?,” she asks.

“Can’t they mean anything you want them to mean?” Chloe responds by telling her about pastor Bruce’s predictions based on his reading of Revelation. “If the treaty between the United Nations and Israel was the covenant referred to in the bible, it would

20 usher in the sever-year tribulation period. First there would be the seven Seal Judgments.

The four Horsemen of the Apocalypse would be the horse of peace -- for eighteen months

-- the horse of war, the horse of plague and famine, and the horse of death.” 63 Verna Zee a disbeliever, who has been further discredited by being outed as lesbian, says that nothing that has happened so far has convinced her of Chloe’s interpretation. For some unexplained reason she volunteers that the predicted earthquake would do this.64 As the plot of the novels are based on Revelation, the earthquake, like the other prophecies of this book of the bible comes to pass. Proof is provided tautologically.

Another defense of literalism is offered by Rabbi Tsion Ben-Judah. “For centuries,” he tells us, “scholars believed prophetic literature was figurative, open to endless interpretation. That could not have been what God intended. Why would he make it so difficult? I believe when the Scriptures say the writer saw something in a vision, it is symbolic of something else. But when the writer simply says that certain things happen, I take those literally. So far I have been proven right.”65 He later explains that John, Revelation’s author, saw 200 million horsemen in a vision so they will not be literal, but that something will happen with an equivalent impact.66 To his surprise, the horsemen appear, but are only visible to their faithful. They are giant horses with flames shooting out of their nostrils and mouths and kicking up thick yellow smoke. Their giant riders are ten feet tall and are said to weigh 500 pounds. Horses and riders destroy non- believers, conveniently allowing Rayford and his party to escape being shot by irate guards.67

Tsion confesses he was wrong in assuming the horsemen would be spiritual, not physical creatures.68 Reconfirmed in the value of prophecy, he now looks to Revelation

21 for numbers that allow him to calculate how many people will survive tribulation.69 Such an approach violates long-standing rabbinical approaches to the bible. They reflect the concept of Peshat, which literally means “to strip away” to reveal the underlying meaning, which cannot always be equated with the literal meaning. The Talmud makes it evident that this process is based on the recognition that the “The words of the Torah are expressed in human language.”70 Interpretation accordingly requires historical and philological awareness because meanings are almost always culture and time-specific.71

Like Chloe, Rabbi Tsion Ben-Judah relies on fiction -- the novel’s plot -- to confirm prophecy. His arguments and Chloe’s require correspondence between some prophecy and real world events or developments. Chloe reveals that Bruce’s predictions that the treaty between Israel and the UN will trigger the tribulation, and it therefore must be the covenant described in Revelation. LaHaye and Jenkins defend this parallel in a separate coauthored defense of prophecy, in which they read these and other developments as evidence that we are living in "the end times." These other developments include the hatred of Israel by Russia and its Arab allies, the emergence of

China and the increasingly frenetic nature of modern society. The importance of Russia for prophecy is deduced from Ezekiel who says:

Son of man, set your face against Gog, of the land of Magog, the prince of

Rosh, Meschech, and Tubal, and prophesy against him, and say, 'Thus

says the Lord God: "Behold, I am against you, O Gog. . . . I will turn you

around, put hooks into your jaws, and lead you out, with all your army,

horses, and horsemen, all splendidly clothed, a great company with

bucklers and shields, all of the handling swords. Persia, Ethiopia, and

22 Libya are with them, all of them with shield and helmet; Gomer and all its

troops; and house of Togarmah from the far north and all its troops – many

people are with you.72

LaHaye and Jenkins insist that "etymologically," Gog and Magog "can only mean modern-day Russia. Magog was the second son of Japeth who, the Roman [sic Jewish] historian Josephus reports, settled along the northern coast of the Black Sea. The tribes from this area were known to Greek historians as Scythians. As for an army from the north, "Any map will show that Russia is indeed north of Israel." What is more remarkable, LaHaye and Jenkins insist is Ezekiel's identification of Gog's allies – Persia,

Libya, Gomer [which they infer is Turkey], Ethiopia and Togarmar [?] "are all Arab countries."73 This reading of Ezekiel is anything but literal, as it nowhere mentions the then non-existent Russia. The connection between Japeth and the Scythians is tenuous and that between the Scythians and Russians historically absurd as they are two different peoples. Russia is indeed north of Israel, but so are Lebanon, ,Syria and Turkey. LaHaye and Jenkins err in describing Ethiopia as a Muslim country, as its population is largely

Christian. Their equation of Gomer with Turkey is without support, and another indication of the authors' ignorance as Muslim Turkey, until very recently, had been quietly pro-Israel.

There is no way around the fact that any parallels between prophecy and the real world are based on a figurative readings as the bible makes no mention of international treaties, let alone of Russia and the United Nations. Reading biblical tea leaves is no different from interpreting Nostradamus. And no more successful, as every prediction of

Jesus’ return, from the first century onwards, has failed to materialize. Dispensationalist

23 predictions of doomsday and the second coming, which began in the nineteenth century, extend this zero batting average. LaHaye and Jenkins offer the lame defense that people who made these failed predictions were at least attentive to scripture. They acknowledge that "reading the times" is difficult and will not succeed, according to Daniel, until "many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased."74 They then leap to the conclusion that the increase in secular knowledge in the twentieth century has fulfilled this condition and that "The ability to rightly evaluate the signs in our times is increasing almost daily." They acknowledge that they "cannot guarantee that Christ will come in our generation," but we have more reason than ever before to believe that he will.75

Fundamentalists and dispensationalists, LaHaye and Jenkins among them, are guilty of eisegesis: the reading of one's own ideas into a text.76

Continuity: Regardless of genre, most fiction authors make an effort to get their facts right. James Michener was the first of many best-selling novelists to have an army of researchers to dig out and check facts for him. Given the financial success of Left

Behind, this option is readily available but has not been exploited. Left Behind novels are full of factual errors and unrealistic situations, most of them avoidable without undercutting the plot line or authors’ commitment to biblical prophecy. Actual errors aside, the authors offer wildly unrealistic portrayals of warfare and the workings of the media, corporations, governments and the United Nations.

Much of the narrative is about the conversion and subsequent adventures of leading pilot Rayford Steele. The novel begins aloft, and air travel features prominently in almost every volume. The authors are ill-informed about its commercial and technical aspects. Buck, an accomplished world traveler, asks his assistant to book him a flight --

24 which she does -- to London from LaGuardia, an airport that only handles short and medium range flights. Buck makes sure he has his passport and United Kingdom visa – the latter unnecessary for US tourists.77 Rayford flies his Learjet 60 west to Easton, Pa. to take on fuel for a non-stop flight to Tel Aviv.78 The Learjet 60 has less than half that range. In one of Buck’s many escapes, he flees Israel, taking Rabbi Ben-Judah with him to Egypt. Pursued by Egyptian police in a James Bond-like chase they shake off their pursuers by setting fire to their vehicle and hop onto the same Lear Jet, waiting to taxi down the runaway. It now flies non-stop flight to Illinois, which would qualify as another miracle.79

Other howlers include references to the “Common Market.” The Common

Market was founded in 1958 and generally referred to as the European Community after its enlargement in 1967. The European Community became the European Union in 1993.

,Left Behind, published in 1995, is left behind in its terminology as it still refers to the

European Common Market and implies, incorrectly, that it embraces all of the continent save Russia.80 In Left Behind, Israeli teenagers go to Hebrew school.81 They have no need to learn Hebrew, as it is their native language, immigrants aside. Most Israelis are in any case secular and those who are religious, especially boys, would begin their studies well before their teenage years in preparation for bar mitzvah at age thirteen.

Less forgivable is the incipient racism and stereotypes that pervade the text. Anti-

Christ Nicolae Carpathia of Romania has blond hair and blue eyes because, were are told,

Romanians are descendants of the Romans, who were “Aryans,” as were the Romanians

“before the Mongols affected their race.”82 This is utter nonsense. So too is the claim that before the conversion of the 144,000 Jewish witnesses from around the world, and

25 the millions of additional converts they bring to Christianity, “most [people] assumed they could identify a Christian. Now, of course, only true believers know each other on sight, due to the mark visible only to them.”83 Could the authors really be so parochial not to know that members of their faith are drawn from every race and ethnic group?

Their observation also assumes that Jews are identifiably different in appearance from

Christians of European origin.

Early in the first volume we learn that Israel scientist Chaim Rosenzweig has developed a synthetic fertilizer that enables deserts to bloom like a greenhouse without any need of irrigation. With its newly acquired wealth Israel makes peace with its neighbors and becomes the world’s richest state when it licenses the formula for export.84

With this fertilizer Russia grows grain in Siberia and destitute African nations become net exporters of food.85 It has not occurred to the authors that if every nation can grow its own food, none will require imports. In a subsequent volume, it rains in Jerusalem, bringing joyous Israelis outside to scream in delight and stick out their tongues to taste the falling water. They are so happy because of “what this miracle will mean for their crops.”86 Rain and snow are hardly novel to Jerusalem, which is in an arid climate but not a desert. More importantly, as Israeli’s economic success is attributed to its ability to raise crops without irrigation, why would a rain shower be significant?

The rebellion against the anti-Christ is led by the most unlikely coalition of

American patriotic militias, England and Egypt.87 England presumably means at least

Britain, if not the United Kingdom. Egypt, otherwise an unlikely ally, is included because in dispensationalist readings of prophecy it joins with a northern confederacy during the tribulation to attack Israel. With an eye to practical politics, North Korea, Iran

26 or other states unlikely to buckle under to UN diktats would have made more realistic rebels. So-called patriotic militias despise the UN as some claim it is trying to take over the United States with the covert assistance of government officials. The Left Behind series builds on this belief, although it never suggests complicity on the part of office holders. The President is portrayed as a decent enough if not terribly clever fellow who is deftly outmaneuvered and marginalized by Nicolae Carpathia. The UN establishes its authority over the US once it and all the other countries of the world agree, quickly and inconceivably, to turn over most of their weapons to the world body.

The patriotic militias nevertheless get their hands on sophisticated assault weapons, nuclear warheads, their delivery systems and the tightly-held codes necessary to arm their warheads. More unrealistic still, they possess the transporters, radars, computers, communications and trained personnel necessary to transport and fire missiles with nuclear and conventional warheads against Carpathia and his forces. They are overwhelmed, although it is just as unrealistic to imagine that in the short time the UN has acquired its vast and diverse arsenal it has been able to recruit and train forces capable of using its weapons effectively. Carpathia, whose intelligence system also materializes from nowhere, is forewarned and able to escape the missile meant to vaporize him and his aircraft. He retaliates massively and many American and other cities are hit by conventional and nuclear weapons. Incredibly, America continues to function normally outside these circles of destruction.

The authors have little understanding of the destructiveness of nuclear weapons.

London Heathrow airport is destroyed by a 100 megaton hydrogen bomb, but the rest of

London is relatively unscathed. The largest nuclear explosion on record is a 50 megaton

27 device the Soviet Union detonated on the Arctic island of Novaya Zemlya in October

1961. In later decades the superpowers built large arsenals of relatively low-yield weapons in the kiloton range because of the greater accuracy of their delivery systems. If a 100 megaton bomb had somehow been built and exploded over Heathrow it would have destroyed greater London and have done considerable damage well beyond the metropolitan area. The smaller weapons dropped on New York and Chicago would also have been devastating. In the Big Apple, we are told, nobody knows if the bomb dropped on Manhattan was conventional or nuclear. This is also unrealistic given the nature of the nuclear and conventional weapons of the 1990s.

Historical detail lends verisimilitude to fiction but is not necessary for all genres.

For readers of Christian fiction, as for readers of romance, it may be the rhetorical value of detail that counts; the very fact that it is there, accurate or not, makes the narrative credible. Counterfactual narratives illustrate the validity of this rhetorical truth; the more vivid they are the more credible they become to readers.88 This is in sharp contrast to science fiction, whose writers must invest time and effort to get their detail right to satisfy a more knowledgeable audience.89 Star Trek can be distinguished by Star Wars in this respect. The latter is more fantasy than science fiction even though it is set in space and the future. It can get away with such gross anomalies as Luke Skywalker and his enemies aiming their ships’ weapons by hand rather than by computer.

Howlers also abound in the non-fictional writings of LaHaye and Jenkins. Are

We Living in the End Times? repeats the canard that the Balfour Declaration of

November 1917, in which Britain recognized Palestine as the homeland of the Jews, was a payment to Chaim Weizmann for his scientific contributions to the war effort. One of

28 the authors reports knowing from first-hand experience that at the end of World War II the US had its fighter aircraft in Germany destroyed lest they fall into Russian hands following an invasion of the western zones of occupation. These fictions are offered as evidence of Ezekiel's prophecy of "noise and shaking" as the TNT allegedly used to destroy these aircraft was loud and shook the earth.90

Are We Living in the End Times? compounds factual errors with paranoia. The rather conservative New York-based Council on Foreign Relations is alleged to promote

"one-world government." The US is said to be disarming, when in fact its military spending has increased in the post-Cold War era. "At the rate America is disarming and the UN is increasing its stature and power," LaHaye and Jenkins allege," it is only a matter of time until the UN is capable of controlling the world."91 China is controlled by

"some of the most dedicated communists in the world." They are "a ruthless group of elite gangsters who have never wavered in their plan to use China as a military platform from which to conquer the world." These political judgments are wedded to demonstrably bad geography. Speaking of the "Red Chinese" demand for the Spratly islands, LaHaye and Jenkins assert that "Whoever controls the Spratlys controls not only the oil checkpoints to the oil-dependent countries of the Far East. . . but also Australia,

Indonesia and Singapore." A simple look at the map reveals the Spratlys to be 750 small, largely uninhabitable reefs, atolls and islets in the South China Sea that have economic but no military value. They are nowhere near the trade routes between the oil producing countries of the Middle East and the US, Australia, Indonesia and Singapore.92 Finally,

Are We Living in the End Times? reveals remarkable intolerance. To cite only one

29 example, its authors assert that "so long as a Muslim mosque occupies the Temple

Mount, we believe our holy place is being defiled."93

The Millennium: The last volume, Kingdom Come, opens with the Millennium and closes with the ascent of the faithful to Heaven. It showcases the rewards of the committed Christian life, but also foregrounds the horrible fate meted out to the wicked.

As is true with many extremist sects, the wicked include not only those who commit crimes but non-believers, even those who have lead virtuous lives. LaHaye and Jenkins go so far as to include Christians who do not internalize their belief to the point where they have fully committed themselves to Jesus. The authors offer their millennium as a close approximation of paradise; their Jesus will recreate the Garden of Eden.94 This millennium is obviously expected to appeal to readers and provide another incentive for them to commit themselves to Jesus. LaHaye and Jenkin's vision of the millennium is, however, disturbingly reminiscent of George Orwell's 1984.

One of the most striking features of Orwell’s dystopia is the extent to which Big

Brother demands loyalty beyond outward conformity to state directives. People must believe in Big Brother and his cause, and the state uses propaganda and more nefarious methods of mind control to achieve this goal. Oceania is the quintessential totalitarian regime. In Kingdom Come, Jesus is a Christian Big Brother. His presence, actual or depicted, is everywhere and completely dominates social and personal life. He demands total loyalty from citizens and, like Big Brother, attempts to achieve it through mind control. Children attend nursery schools where they are indoctrinated by true believing teachers who function as a mind police. Buck’s son Kenny, who runs such a school, helps a little girl of ten find Jesus and pledge herself to him. Nursery teachers are

30 summarily dispatched to hell if they do not perform their proselytizing mission conscientiously and successfully. Young men --in the millennium, this can mean 80 or

90 years of age -- who refuse to participate in activities designed to indoctrinate the young are eliminated by lightning strikes in front of their friends.95 In 1984, the Party constantly reminds citizens that “Thought crime does not entail death. Thought crime is death." This is also true of Jesus World.

In 1984, there is opposition to Big Brother and some citizens believe there is an underground. Winston Smith gradually becomes disillusioned with Big Brother and falls in love with Julia, who gives the appearance of being a fanatical member of the Junior

Anti-Sex League and is adorned with its red sash. They have an affair, are caught in flagrante delicto by the Love Police and Winston is hauled off to prison where he is systematically beaten and brainwashed and ultimately betrays Julia. In Kingdom Come, sex is equally verboten and there is a Love Police of sorts, authorities who snoop on young people and arrest them for various crimes that include going to underground night clubs, rumored to exist in France and Turkey. There are alleged to be black markets and brothels.96 As in 1984, it is unclear if such things actually exist or are inventions of the regime intended to entrap the Winston Smiths of this world.

Emmanuel Goldstein, Big Brother's wily enemy, has his counterpart in Left

Behind’s Satan. Goldstein fled Oceania and may be dead, and Satan is tightly bound and locked up in the nether world. But his evil, like Goldstein's, still suffuses the society and takes the form of sin; people are tempted by sex and material goods.97 There are rumors of an underground anti-Jesus movement known as the ‘Other Light,” whose proponents allegedly claim that study of the scriptures has made them “fans of Lucifer and not

31 Jesus.”98 The plot of the novel, to the extent there is one, revolves around the efforts of

Kenny and his friends to form a "millennium force," modeled on his father's earlier

"tribulation force." Its goal is to win over the faithless before they cause more trouble and are zapped by Jesus' lightning bolts. All crimes, which includes blasphemy, are punishable by death.99

"Other Light" supposedly produces a manifesto in which they do not deny Jesus, but object to his theocracy and mind control. “He has left men and women no choice but to believe in Him and serve Him, denying our free will." They favor pluralism, insisting that they "have no quarrel with those who believe and follow Him and consider themselves devout. We simply insist on the right to decide for ourselves.” They lament that Jesus "will not countenance an alternate point of view.”100 Left Behind portrays

Other Light as a pack of thugs with a few deliciously evil leaders and a coterie of easily misled followers. Rumors spread that they tried to rape a “glorified” [see below] woman to impregnate her in the hope of producing a mongrel race of converts who would survive beyond the age of one hundred. The rapist, we learn, was destroyed by lightning, while the woman, who resisted him, was unharmed.101

Other Light dissenters are seemingly undeterred by knowledge that they will with certainty die at age one hundred, if not before. They hope, or so we are told, to find enough recruits to pass the opposition along to subsequent generations and have large forces at the end of the Millennium to join up with Satan against Jesus.102 The rebels

Rayford encounters in Egypt consider themselves freedom fighters against Jesus, who they describe as heading an “occupying army." Although outnumbered they will not give up hope. Egypt is once more the rotten apple in the bunch. On this occasion it makes the

32 mistake of electing some young people as judges and they vote against sending representatives to honor God at the feast of the tabernacles. King David reports that the lord is mighty miffed and intent on destroying all the wicked of the land.103 His revenge, which includes a drought, seems to punish everyone, not just a few perpetrators, but this overkill conveniently helps Rayford to proselytize.104

The millennium gives a new twist to the meaning of opposition. The population is divided into two groups: the "glorified,” who were raptured and spent time in heaven before the millennium, and "naturals," who were left behind but have since seen the light.

The glorified have been genetically altered and do not age.105 For some reason, the authors feel the need to come up with a physical account for this phenomenon. They devise the fanciful notion that just like the long-lived biblical patriarchs, the millennium’s population lead long, healthy lives because “The world actually exists now, as it did back then, under a canopy of water that blocks the most harmful effects of the sun.”106

True believers, whether glorified or natural, are allowed to remain alive through the millennium and afterwards gain eternity in heaven. Those who do not follow the rules, or fail to make an inward commitment to Jesus, not only die at age one hundred, they spend eternity in the Lake of Fire.107 Cendrillon Jospin, a young woman of French origin, is the first person to die following the purge of millions of non-believers at the outset of the millennium. She gave every appearance of being a believer but must have inwardly rejected Jesus. 108 Left Behind's Big Brother is truly omniscient.

The millennium resembles totalitarian regimes in other ways, not the least of which are its leader's architectural plans. Jesus goes in for large, kitschy temples and squares of the kind found on Cecil B. De Mille bible movie sets, presumably to impress

33 people with his power. He rebuilds Jerusalem on a monumental scale with lengthy causeways, large esplanades and off-scale buildings reminiscent of Hitler’s plans for postwar Berlin. The quarter reserved for priests and Levites encompasses an area of forty by fifty miles, “more than six time the size of greater London and ten times the circumference of the original ancient, walled city.”109 According to the authors, this megalopolis is more than ten times the circumference of the original walled city of

Jerusalem.110 Such a city would in fact have a circumference thousands of time larger.

Heaven is tackier still. Following Revelation 21.12-14, 21, it has a great high wall with twelve gates and with an angel positioned in front of each. Every gate is inscribed with the name of a tribe of Israel. The wall of the city has twelve

“foundations,” each with the name of an apostle. The city is laid out as a perfect square with jasper walls adorned with precious stones. Each of the twelve gates is fashioned from a giant pearl. The streets, we are told in a description that makes no visual sense, were "also pure gold, like transparent glass”111 Jesus rivals Hitler, Stalin and Saddam

Hussein in his architectural pretension.

More frightening still is Jesus’ callous disregard for life. Here too, comparisons to Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot spring to mind. Collectively, these dictators killed something in the range of 100 million people. Chaim Rosenzweig tells us that half a billion people were raptured, and that half the remaining population was killed during the

Seal and Trumpet Judgments, more were lost during the Vial Judgments and millions were subsequently martyred. Only one-quarter survived the seven years of tribulation.

This would put the death toll, directly or indirectly attributable to God and Jesus, in the billions.

34 Millions of non-believers die at the outset of the millennium.112 The martyrs cry out: “When will You avenge our blood against those living on the earth?”113 Jesus hears their plea and turns angrily to non-believers and other wicked-doers: “Depart from Me, you cursed, into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels.”114 The condemned plead for mercy but Jesus is unyielding. He raises one of his hands a few inches and “a yawning chasm opened in the earth, stretching far and wide enough to swallow all of them. They tumbled in, howling and screeching, but their wailing was soon quashed and all was silent when the earth closed itself again.”115 Rayford Steele, the principal hero of the series, is by now so brainwashed that he refuses to hold Jesus in any way responsible for mass murder. Jesus did not send anyone to hell, he explains: “They chose their own paths.”116

Jesus World is bizarre in other ways. Rayford is united with both his wives, his raptured son Raymie and many former friends. Having two wives is no problem as romance and sex are allegedly non-existent and triangles of this kind live happily ever after. Conveniently, we are told nothing about the sleeping arrangements of the Rayford threesome, or those of anyone else.117 Perhaps, like Hollywood movies of the production code era, married couples sleep in separate beds? Everyone soon speaks fluent Hebrew, even if they did not know a word upon arrival.118 This linguistic transformation is based on the authors' reading of Zephaniah 3:9: “For them I will restore to the peoples a pure language, that they all may call on the name of the Lord, to serve Him with one accord.”

For dispensationalists, who insist they read the bible literally, this is another wild inference based on an a typically ambiguous text.

35 Everyone becomes vegetarian as humans lose any desire to eat meat. Animals also give up eating one another, which makes it possible for the lion lie down with the lamb. On feast days, however, the yen for flesh returns and people eat meat.119 Sex is definitely out of the question. Chloe confides to Buck: “It’s bizarre. I still love and admire and respect you and want to be near you, but it’s as if I’ve been prescribed some medicine that has cured me of any other distracting feelings.”120 Raymie too is pleased to be freed of sex and parenthood so he can devote himself fully to the service of Christ.121

It is revealing that these characters describes romance and sex as distractions, as indeed they are in a society where Jesus demands total attention, affection and loyalty. Chloe’s son Kenny is nevertheless smitten by a demure young woman named Kat, who has come to work in his nursery.122 He does his best to control his surging hormones – and it is unclear why he still has them when his parents do not. Abstinence is another sacrifice

Jesus imposes on his subjects to test their loyalty to him. It is a practice entirely at odds with Jewish tradition, which Left Behind’s millennium in other ways tries to instantiate.

It appears to reflect the hostility to sex of Pauline Christianity and American Puritanism.

The ban on sex also contradicts the novel's narrative as children continue to be born throughout the millennium, and there is no hint that they are the result of virgin births.

Stalin’s Soviet Union, Hitler’s Germany and Orwell's 1984 were also markedly puritanical.

Other forms of recreation are proscribed. When not working with children, Buck spends his time praising Jesus with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs.123 There is no hint of sports, children’s games aside. Teenagers rightly complain they cannot have any fun. As one of them puts it, we want to go “Somewhere where people like this nursery

36 guy won’t condemn you to hell if you [don’t] do anything but worship.”124 The authors cannot allow such complaints to go unanswered so try to depict the youths who voice these complaints as irrational. They allegedly want to become martyrs because “They find that glamorous.”125 Stalin and Hitler were far more astute than LaHaye and Jenkins; their regimes made major efforts to organize highly regimented outdoor and sporting activities for youth to keep them off the streets, indoctrinate them ideologically and distract them from sex.

When the millennium ends Satan is unbound and gathers his armed supporters around him. This is a dumb strategy in light of what happened to the massed armies at

Armageddon. David and Jesus observe Satan from an undisclosed location. At a critical moment, Jesus steps out from his hiding place raises his hand and opens his palm. “A seam in the cosmos opened before Satan. Flames and black smoke poured from where the Beast and False Prophet writhed on their knees screaming.” Satan belatedly acknowledges that ‘Jesus is Lord.’” Jesus is understandably unmoved, closes his fingers and Satan and his host disappear into the abyss which swallows them up and muffles their screams. Surviving Christians are instantly clothed in gleaming white robes and fly up to heaven. They are joined by all the dead faithful, who are resurrected.126

The Jews: Throughout the nineteenth century millenarians predicted the return of the Jews to Palestine, although not their conversion. They were fascinated by Zionism and General Allenby’s conquest of Jerusalem during the First World War.127

Millenarians expected Jews are to play a major, if not decisive, role in the events leading up to the rapture, tribulation and second coming. In the 1920s, Charles Trumbull, a bible teacher and contributor to the Fundamentals, declared that "God's greatest sign through

37 the ages has been, and will continue to be the Jews."128 Fellow millenarian Arthur Brown proclaimed that "the Jew enables us to tell time on God's clock."129 Some dispensationalists were decidedly less friendly to Jews. Arno Gaebelein, influenced by the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” associated communism with Jews in his widely circulated books. This was after his failure to convert them.130 In the millennium

Christians are at the bottom of the pecking order.131 Tsion Ben-Judah, the leading Jew for

Jesus, finds this situation amusing, but not surprising. He explains that the new testament says that the government starts with Christ and extends through his prince, King David, to the apostles, now judges over the twelve tribes, to counselors and finally, to

“foreigners.” Gentile Christians count as foreigners as they are the adopted children of

God.132

Dispensationalists are especially interested in Jews because they read the old and new Testament as parts of a unified scripture and expect God to fulfill his promises to his chosen people. God's relationship with the Jews they believe to have been put on hold once Christianity emerged. The so-called church age, from Jesus to the present, represents a “parenthesis,” a dispensation in which the gospels are offered to Jew and gentile alike. Following the rapture, God’s continued love for the Jewish nation will be evident and many Jews will accept Jesus as their messiah. All of Israel’s enemies will be defeated and Jesus will sit on the throne of David.133

Left Behind's authors have been excoriated for their fictional exploitation of Jews.

Tim LaHaye responded in a special preface to Kingdom Come in which he asserts that “it should be plain from our treatment of this great future period that we are the opposite of anti-Semites. Indeed, we hold that the entire Bible contains God’s love letter to and plan

38 for His Chosen people. If Israel had no place within the future Kingdom of God, we could no longer trust the bible.”134 LaHaye and Jenkins are not anti-Semites in the traditional sense, but the Left Behind series is offensive to Jews. Its fictional Jews willingly convert in large numbers, something they have never done in the historical past, and often in the face of extreme pressures to do so. An imaginary Israeli biblical scholar validates biblical prophecy and Christ as the Messiah. Abraham, Sarah, Moses and

David are made to kneel humbly before Jesus and acknowledge his divinity.135 Noah,

Abraham and David become part of Jesus’ entourage and David sends Noah out to lecture, on the Sabbath no less.136 Despite the high positions and respect accorded historical Jews and modern converts, the bottom line is terrifying: Jews who do not convert are sent directly to hell. Left Behind's self-proclaimed philo-Semitism is utterly hollow; as has happened so often in the past, Jews are confronted with the choice of conversion or death. And those who die, moreover, do not merely cease to exist, they burn in hell for all eternity.

Anti-Semitism is compounded by other forms of racism. Earlier I noted the description of Nicolae Carpathia as an "Aryan." Throughout the Left Behind series, we do not encounter virtuous representatives of minority groups or non-Christians, the odd

Jew aside. White Anglo-Saxon Protestants lead the Tribulation Force while African-

Americans, Arabs and Asians convert or go to hell. Some conversions can only be read as humiliating portrayals of capitulation.137

Gender: Amy Johnson Frykholm notes that women are the first to be taken into heaven in traditional rapture narratives. They are women who have proved their faith, steadfastness and loyalty to alcoholic and abusive husbands. They are stereotypic, long-

39 suffering and forgiving women. They sustain the church, are theologically privileged but socially powerless. Once they are raptured, their disbelieving spouses commit suicide or descend further into sin. Every so often, rapture is the catalyst for a sinful husband to repent and embrace Jesus.138 Left Behind adheres to this tradition in important ways but is more modern in others. Rayford's first wife, Irene, whom we do not meet until the millennium, is devout, domestic and loyal. She and her youngest son Raymie are raptured. Rayford found her intense faith annoying when they lived together but her rapture opens his eyes to Christianity, which is the first step toward his rebirth.

Throughout the series men make decisions and act courageously while women maintain the faith, perform domestic chores and sustain their men emotionally.

Much of Left Behind takes place in the largely masculine world of aviation.

Planes are portrayed as phallic objects. In the opening scene of Left Behind, Rayford, piloting a "fully loaded 747" fantasizes about the sexual flight he intends to have in

London with a cabin attendant. Unlike most husbands of raptured wives, Rayford rises to the challenge emotionally and part of his journey involves bridging traditional gender roles. He shops, cooks and performs other routine domestic chores and increasingly identifies with his former wife and his daughter. He becomes gentler, kinder and more expressive, traits encouraged by the Christian men's movement. Rayford nevertheless remains engaged in the world of business and power, which violates traditional portrayals of Christian heroes and martyrs. His daughter Chloe also undergoes a transformation in the course of the novels. When we first meet her she is a feisty Stanford graduate with a quick wit and able to hold here own in conversation with men. She softens in the course of her relationship with Buck and becomes increasingly domestic and deferential. She

40 submits to here husband but asserts herself behind the scenes in ways acceptable to conservative Christianity. She finds the perfect compromise as director of the Christian

Cooperative, which she runs from the underground bunker built by the Tribulation Force in Illinois. Later on, however, she undertakes a mission in Greece while Buck stays home with their child.139

Who Reads Left Behind? Amy Johnson Frykholm conducted thirty-five in-dept interviews, primarily in the American South. Roughly the same number were conducted in and around Columbus, Ohio by Alexander L. Stephan. The most typical readers are self-identified "evangelicals" who sought out, and generally found, churches in which they felt "at home." They are relatively unconcerned with the denomination or theological orientation of these churches Most are uncomfortable with the label

"fundamentalist," and do not feel the need, as did many earlier dispensationalists, to separate themselves from the broader society. They read non-Christian fiction and watch a wide range of television programs, but feel strong about what they consider the moral decline of America. They identify homosexuality and crime as leading indicators of this decline. Frykholm reports men and women equally attracted to Left Behind, and the novels tend to appeal across racial and class divides.140 Frykholm and Stephan both find their church-going readers to be embedded in dense social-religious networks where common reading and worship are important ways of building and sustaining community.

Left Behind is read aloud in churches and frequently on Christian radio stations. Church members pass copies around and buy additional ones to give to family members, friends and other people they identify as possible recruits.141

41 A May 2005 study of 1008 randomly selected American adults by the Barna

Group found that nearly half of all Americans had read a religious book other than the bible during the last two years. Women, college graduates and church members were overrepresented among these readers. Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code topped the list, followed by Rick Warren's The Purpose Driven Life. Volumes of the Left Behind series come third. Left Behind attracts a surprisingly broad base of Protestant readers from churches of all sizes. More women than men are drawn to the series and most readers of both genders described themselves as politically conservative and born again

Christians.142 A May 2001 study of 1008 adults conducted by pollster George Barna found that Left Behind has its greatest following among adults in the 35 to 55 age group, born again Christians and residents of the South and West. The people least likely to read these books were Catholics, non-Christians and adults in the Northeast.143 Left

Behind may have something of a cross-over effect as one study, published in Christian

Century, indicates that almost half its readers are non-evangelicals.144

We have no survey data on the political views of Left Behind readers, but it is reasonable to assume that they are similar to those of self-identified "evangelicals." A

2006 Barna survey indicated that 66 percent of evangelicals favored a constitutional amendment to make Christianity the official religion of the US and that 67 percent described themselves as politically conservative.145 This figure is substantially higher when adjusted for race. This is because two-thirds of African-Americans identify themselves as evangelical or born again, and most are Democrats. White American evangelicals are significantly more conservative than indicated by the Barna survey.

42 One way we make sense of narratives is to classify them by genre. Each genre has its own set of conventions governing content, characters and narrative style that help us understand and evaluate individual texts. Genre represents an implicit contract between author and readers that the former will adhere to a set of conventions when writing and the latter when reading.146 Tragedies are expected to end with all their principal characters dead. In comedies, they must marry, as they do in Cosi fan Tutte.147

Readers and viewers generally develop an intuitive understanding of these conventions, and if not, find guidance in the labeling of sections (e.g., crime, travel, adventure) in libraries, bookstores and CD rental shops. Creative authors mix or bridge genres, as

Homer does in the Odyssey, Mozart and Da Ponte in Don Giovanni and Philip Roth in A

Plot Against America.148 Left Behind also bridges genres and the first challenge is identifying those it represents. This in turn depends on the assumptions we bring to these texts.

Left Behind is undeniably Christian literature. Like other books of its kind it encourages people to make a commitment to Jesus and to live a Christian life.

Contemporary Christian texts generally approach this goal in a positive way by telling inspirational stories that encourage readers to embrace Jesus because of the spiritual and other benefits they will receive. Early Christians pioneered this strategy; they offered membership in a community and the promise of eternal after-life in heaven. Throughout the middle ages, and until quite recently, the Roman Catholic Church and many

Protestant denominations relied more on deterrence than reassurance; they aimed to frighten people to obey their dictates -- or at least conform outwardly to them -- or suffer the fire and brimstone of eternal damnation. Left Behind deploys carrots and sticks in the

43 hope of making converts and strengthening the commitments of believers. Like many contemporary Christian books, its characters find meaning in their lives through their religious commitments. The novels offer graphic portrayals of the dreadful fate in store for those who spurn Jesus.

Left Behind can be described as an adventure series. Tales of this kind are populated by three distinct kinds of characters: admirable heroes, hateful villains and ordinary folk. Hero and heroine must display pluck and skill to surmount life-threatening challenges and generally come to aid of the downtrodden. Adventure tales have an ancient provenance; the Iliad, Odyssey and Aeneid are early examples. Christianity adapted the genre to its own ends, as in its elaboration of the myth of St. George and later stories about chivalry.149 Such tales come in varying degrees of sophistication. Nancy

Drew novels, Superhero comics, The Seven Samurai and early James Bond movies are straight-forward exemplars aimed at mass audiences. The Magic Flute, today considered high culture, nevertheless includes a stereotypical hero and heroine and life-threatening challenges for them to overcome. More sophisticated adventure tales, like John Le Carré spy novels, blur distinctions between good and evil characters and highlight conflicts within the camps of good and bad guys, not only between them. They meet the criteria for page turners but make us wonder if their contests have any broader meaning or moral significance.

Left Behind follows the format of classic, unsophisticated adventure novels. Its novels string together episodes, many of which involve narrow escapes from death. At the outset, the “believers” confront the rapture, which takes away family members without explanation. During the tribulation that unfolds in the first nine novels, they face

44 an escalating series of life-threatening challenges from the forces of "evil," represented by corrupt capitalists and the Antichrist and his followers. Star journalist Cameron

"Buck" Williams and senior pilot Rayford Steele have enough close escapes -- from cops, border guards, assassins, thugs, bombs, missiles, radiation and the Antichrist himself -- to make Bruce Willis jealous. Unlike Buck and Rayford, not all the heroes survive, but those who do prove their mettle and move closer to one another and Jesus. In some adventure tales heroes receive help from supernatural figures (e.g., the Lady of the Lake in Arthurian legend) or humans with extraordinary powers (e.g., Merlin in the same saga). In Left Behind, God himself lurks in the background waiting to provide assistance.

Like Billy Batson shouting “Shazzam” so Zeus will transform him into Captain Marvel, its characters mouth quick prayers for God to make them capable of otherwise incredible feats and escapes.

Left Behind qualifies as counterfactual history. When its first novel appeared in

1995, the rapture was set in the near future, as was the tribulation and second coming.

They are depicted in the follow-on novels that appeared in the course of the next decade.

Like all previous predictions of rapture or Jesus' return these failed to materialize.

Although not conceived as counterfactual history, with the passage of time these novels have become counterfactual history. There has been no rapture or second coming, no amalgamation of religions and states and no World War III. Our corrupt world staggers on affected by nothing so dramatic as the events described in these novels.

Left Behind violates key conventions of counterfactual history. Novels in this genre most often employ “minimal rewrites “of history: small, credible changes

(antecedents) that bring about major changes (consequents) in the world. The antecedent

45 is connected to the consequent by a chain of logic that shows how the former ineluctably leads to the latter. Credible counterfactuals involve believable rewrites of history and provide compelling chains of logic consistent with the evidence and our expectations about how people behave.150 A quintessential example is the prevention of World War I by forestalling the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo. The

Archduke should never have come to Sarajevo in light of warnings of trouble and should certainly have been whisked out of town when the first assassination attempt against him on the Appel Quay failed. As he was the major spokesman within Austria-Hungary for peace with Russia, and the Emperor Franz Josef only became bellicose because of his assassination, the Archduke’s survival would have prevented war in the short-term and quite possibly in the longer term as well.151

A variant of counterfactual history uses so-called miracle counterfactuals, which make inherently implausible changes in reality.152 Some novels use miracle counterfactuals to telling effect. In Philip K. Dick’s Fatherland, the United States is governed by President Joseph P. Kennedy and an isolationist administration happy to do business with the Nazis. The Nazis see the Holocaust through to its completion in

Europe. In its aftermath they destroy the death camps and succeed in keeping their extermination of the Jews a secret. Germany’s victory rests on their development of an atomic bomb and a missile capable of carrying a large warhead to New York City. Given what we know about Germany's difficulty in developing a nuclear program and the limits of rocket technology of the time, both bomb and delivery system are miracle counterfactuals.153 Such unrealism does not undermine the novel but rather makes it

46 possible by setting up the premise -- a German victory in World War II – the consequences of which the author explores with chilling realism.154

Part of the challenge of counterfactual fiction is to use as few interventions in history as possible to create the world in which their narratives take place. Clever authors can bring radically different worlds into being through one or a few small changes in reality that have radically amplifying consequences. To lend verisimilitude to their counterfactual worlds, most authors try to make them adhere to reality in other ways, and especially to our expectations about how people and their institutions behave. Surgical counterfactuals are no more possible than surgical air strikes, so even minimal rewrite counterfactuals can introduce changes in addition the desired ones. These “second order” counterfactuals can confound scenarios authors are trying to construct and sophisticated counterfactual fiction takes at least some of them into account.155

Counterfactual fiction is often used to change the outcome of wars and other major political events and to problematize national or ethnic identities. Philip Roth does this effectively in The Plot Against America as does Michael Chabon in The Yiddish

Policeman’s Union. Counterfactuals are not new to Christian literature. D. James

Kennedy's What if Jesus Had Never Been Born describes a miserable and unhappy world with the aim of demonstrating how Christ and Christianity are responsibility for economic development, cultural advancement, science and even civil liberties.156 The

Left Behind series makes use of literal miracle counterfactual: God raptures the faithful and leaves behind everyone else to face seven years of tribulation. This conceit is perfectly legitimate for counterfactual fiction, but the authors introduce numerous additional miracle counterfactuals rather than limiting themselves to exploring the

47 consequences of the whopper that sets off their tale. The rapture is preceded by Israel’s incredible survival without casualties of an all-out Russian nuclear attack. It is followed by, among other miracle counterfactuals, the rise to world dictatorship in a matter of months of an unknown Romanian politician, universal near-disarmament, unification of the world’s religions, the creation of a world-wide dictatorship and the appearance at the

Wailing Wall of two Jewish Christians with supernatural powers who destroy adversaries by breathing fire on them. LaHaye and Jenkins resort to these and additional counterfactuals to tell a story that follows the plot line of biblical prophecy. As miracle counterfactuals are by definition unrealistic, Left Behind’s use of multiple miracle counterfactuals makes its narrative redundantly unrealistic.

The determination of what constitutes a realistic versus a miracle counterfactual is a matter of interpretation. We can all probably agree that supraliminal travel is a miracle counterfactual because the laws of physics, as currently understood, prohibit velocities beyond the speed of light. Most of us would also concur that providing laser-guided, stand-off weapons to Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo is a miracle counterfactual because it violates many times over the scientific and engineering capabilities of the era.

The rapture, a multi-lived antichrist, unification of the world’s religions and political units are equally problematic for anyone like me -- a secular international relations scholar. For a true believer, the rapture would be a miracle but not a miracle counterfactual. Such people believe that miracles (e.g., the parting of the Dead Sea, the virgin birth, resurrection) have occurred in the past and will happen again. True believers readily acknowledge the unrealism of religious and political unification but attribute these developments to divine intervention. For dispensationalists, the only incredible

48 miracle counterfactuals are those that untrack the historicity of the bible or what they believe are God’s plans for the future. Left Behind considered in counterfactual terms is a religious Rorschach Test.

Left Behind might also be characterized as science fiction or fantasy. Rod

Serling, creator of the TV series Twilight Zone, is alleged to have said that “Science fiction consists of improbable possibilities, fantasy of plausible impossibilities.”157 A laudable bon mot, it does not provide the basis for a good working definition because science fiction routinely employs impossibilities like supraliminal velocities, hyper- space, time travel and immortality. Guy Kay may be closer to the mark with his characterization of fantasy as “the literature of longing; instead of writing about the world as it might someday become, it writes about the world as we wish it could be or have been.”158 Michael Swanwich identifies another important feature of fantasy; more often than not it is a morality tale in which good conquers evil, order is restored and wise and benign rulers returned to power.159 Unlike science fiction, fantasy, affectionately known as "sword and sorcery," routinely features characters with special powers or heroes who gain such powers through their mastery of arcane lore or texts that are safeguarded, interpreted and shared by their guardians. From this lore or texts heroes often learn the true names of people and things, which can be invoked for their protection. In Tolkien’s

Lord of the Rings, men and dwarves are aided by wizards in their cosmic struggle against evil.160 Science fiction characters, by contrast, gain power or authority by means of their pluck, but almost always combined with an impressive use of reason and understanding of natural laws.161

49 Left Behind nicely meets the conditions of fantasy. It is an adventure tale that takes place in four fictional worlds, which for the scientifically minded, could never exist.

First, there is our world, but made counterfactual by God's visible intervention in wars, rapturing of some half-million people and unification of the world’s religions and government through the machinations and near-magical powers of the Antichrist. The second world is the millennial kingdom, inhabited by the faithful, who live forever, and others who make it only to one hundred. Serious evil doers (including drinkers, dancers, adulterers) are eliminated by lightning strikes. The third world is heaven, to which the faithful ascend at the end of the millennium. Hell, the fourth world, has the standard lakes of fire and other unpleasant venues where people suffer for an eternity without dying or losing consciousness from the pain and hopelessness of it all.

The starting point of all fantasy is serious departure from reality, and here there are undoubtedly differences of opinion about what is unrealistic and qualifies as a miracle counterfactual. For people awaiting the rapture, Left Behind is not fantasy, and they may constitute the majority of its readers. For the secular among us, believers and novels alike inhabit a fantasy world.

Left Behind is unquestionably a morality tale. At the individual level, the good are rewarded handsomely, the evil suffer terribly and the faithful who die in wars, plagues and earthquakes are reincarnated and ascend to heaven. Following the rapture, corrupt religions and godless regimes give way to the more horrendous dictatorship of the

Antichrist. At the onset of the millennium, the Antichrist and his empire are swept away and replaced by the kingship of Jesus. At the cosmic level, God triumphs over Satan.

Left Behind also qualifies as fantasy because of its invocation of special powers. God,

50 Satan, the Antichrist and Jesus all have such powers and use them to protect their followers and advance their goals. These powers range in scope from mass hypnosis, mind reading, telepathy and teleportation to the ability to knock bombers and missiles out of the sky to the even more impressive capability to trigger earthquakes and meteor strikes, terraform the earth, reconfigure human physiology and confer immortality.

Ordinary humans do not possess these powers, but Nicolae Carpathia, the Antichrist, can manipulate human minds and memories through hypnosis and has more than one life. In a prequel, we learn that he is the genetically engineered offspring of two gay men. The truly awesome superpowers are reserved for the three divines: Jesus, God and Satan.

Fantasy has incredible plots in a double sense: they involve supernatural feats and preordained story lines. We never doubt that Prince Valiant or Superman will triumph in the end and this is true of Jesus in Left Behind. For thoughtful readers, these novels raise the question of why we must reach happy endings by circuitous routes that entail so much suffering. There is an obvious commercial answer: suspense and adventure sell books.

There is also a psychological answer: people enjoy suspense and adventure all the more when they know the good guys ultimately emerge triumphant. For many Christians, there is a theological answer. Our beliefs and behavior determine our fate; temptation and suffering confront us with moral choices and provide the opportunity to accept or reject Jesus in a meaningful way.

Fantasy’s good and evil characters are readily identifiable. There are no shades of gray, although characters of uncertain allegiance are allowed, as are those who switch sides as the plot unfolds. Left Behind is true to form. Some of its volumes include a glossary up front that identifies characters under headings of “believers,” “enemies” and

51 “undecided.”162 Left Behind is stereotypic in that its good characters are very good and its bad characters very bad. The Antichrist and Satan are evil incarnate just as God and

Jesus are portrayed as entirely benign. So are our panoply of mortal heroes, who are chaste, generous, self-effacing and put their families at risk to serve Jesus. Their morality is all the more impressive given the “wickedness” of society. Non-believers, who make up the lion’s share of society, “worship idols and demons, commit murder, sexual immorality and theft.” Rabbi Tsion Ben-Judah, one of the heroes, explains that “demon worship, sorcery, and illicit sex” are applauded in the new tolerant society of the

West.”163

MAKING SENSE OF DISPENSATIONALISM

American millenarians have little in common with their Roman, medieval and early modern European precursors beyond their confidence that Christ will soon reappear. Many Medieval and early modern premillenarian sects were proto-socialist; they believed that property and other forms of wealth, including women for some, should be held in common. Many movements engaged in direct political action that took the form of violence against local authorities. Contemporary premillenarians are conservative in their social values, decidedly non-violent and many are apolitical. This is not true of Tim LaHaye, coauthor of the Left Behind series, who is a cofounder of the

Moral Majority and vocal opponent of the "socialist" President Obama who believes that

“government can control everything” and “take from those who have to give to have nots.”164

52 A more extreme expression of these views is propounded by the Christian

Deconstructionist Movement, also known as Theonomy or Dominion Theology.

Founded by Rousas J. Rushdoony, an ultra-conservative Presbyterian, Reconstructionism advocates a theocracy based on old testament civil law and a laissez-faire economic order. It would stone to death people found guilty of homosexuality, adultery, blasphemy, spreading of false doctrine -- and here going well beyond scripture -- children who consistently misbehave.165 Pat Robertson, who made a bid for the presidency in

1988, advocates a version of this theology. His several books have premillennial premises, government that withdraws from all international organizations and is guided by fundamentalist Christian teachings.166 Reconstructionism’s depiction of its ideal theocratic state is remarkably similar to the Millennium as imagined by LaHaye and

Jenkins.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century fundamentalists distanced themselves intellectually and institutionally from other Christians. Many heeded Reuben

Torrey's call to lead a “separated life," a defining move of strategy two.167 They imposed a moral code on themselves and their families that was considerably stricter than the usual evangelical requirements of modesty, chastity, temperance and avoidance of theater, dancing, makeup, card playing, smoking and other objectionable practices.

Separation was enforced by separate schools, daily prayer, bible reading, patriarchal rule and a social life restricted to fellow believers.168 Even today, premillenarians are more likely to withdraw from political life than to participate in it. Many do not vote.

Psychological studies indicate that religious people tend to be conservative, but unlike most conservatives have greater than average trust in governmental authority.169

53 Dispensationalists differ from other conservative Christians in this respect, as they have no trust whatsoever in government.

American premillenarians also differ from their medieval and early modern predecessors in their adherents. For the most part they do not come from the least well- off groups in society. Like other American fundamentalists, they are from Anglo-

American and Northern European backgrounds and often middle class, although generally from its less prosperous and less well-educated sections. These movements nevertheless attract proportionately more followers from the working class and less from the professional classes than do mainstream Protestant churches.170

Timothy Weber contends that turn of the century premillenarians had much in common with the Progressives. Both sought versions of the millennium, although millenarians believed this would occur through the personal intervention of Christ and accordingly regarded reform movements as distractions.171 I find this a forced comparison as the Progressive movement encompassed a wide range of groups with quite diverse goals. Its left wing had the most far-reaching ambitions, but they were still relatively cautious in the expectations, hoping at best to ameliorate conditions for the poor and introduce other positive changes in society. They believed in progress but had few illusions about any figurative millennium lurking around the corner.172

A more appropriate comparison is to Marxism. This is not all that surprising as both movements have roots in Christianity. Marxism has often been described as a secularized version of Christianity as it seeks to regain paradise, in secular form and by political means.173 Jesus’ teachings and early Christianity had a strong anti-wealth ideology and medieval millennial movements frequently had proto-socialist ideologies.

54 Some nineteenth and twentieth century Christian political movements and parties built on this tradition and offered a blend of Christianity and socialism. This is certainly not true of Dispensationalism, which is strongly conservative. If we look beyond these obvious political differences, we encounter striking similarities in outlook and style of argument between Dispensationalism and the brand of socialism espoused by Karl Marx and

Friedrich Engels. Both ideologies describe the world as impossible to reform, expect and espouse violent upheavals, advance arguments with the same kinds of contradictions and confront the problem of failed predictions. There is some evidence to suggest that they attract similar personality types: people who feel threatened by ambiguity and are drawn to movements that offer a comprehensive, black-and-white view of the world and demand submission to authority from on high.

Christianity and Marxism have a parallel view of history. The world was good at the outset, quickly became corrupt, but has the potential to become good again. For

Christians, Eden was a paradise without sin, until the devil, through his agent Eve, encouraged Adam to eat from the tree of knowledge. This led to the expulsion of the couple from Eden and all the misery that followed. Through commitment to Jesus, Eden can be regained in the form of an eternal afterlife in heaven. In the Marxist narrative people once enjoyed a happy life, living under a primitive form of communism. Society was corrupted by the introduction of property, the equivalent of original sin, which brought increasing misery to humankind. The situation became worse under capitalism.

The young Marx declared that "it is only [Germany's] desperate situation that fills me with hope."174 Redemption is possible through socialist revolution as it will lead us away

55 from private property and to a form of communism in which human fulfillment and happiness are again possible.

Marxism was never a monolithic ideology or movement, and by the late nineteenth century had many variants. A principal cleavage was between those who believed that socialism could be achieved through the ballot box – so-called revisionists

-- and those who insisted that only revolution could attain this end. The latter were convinced that the condition of the working class in industrial countries was deteriorating, not improving, and that compromise with capitalism was a dead end.

American evangelicals experienced a similar split. Postmillenarians assumed the role of revisionists; they supported reforms and many believed that the millennium could be realized in America through continued reform of the country’s moral and economic life.

Premillenarians, of whom dispensationalists became the dominant faction, believed the world was becoming ever more corrupt and impossible to reform. Just as Lenin condemned the revisionism of Eduard Bernstein as a sell-out to capitalism, dispensationalists like Gaebelein and Haldeman condemned evangelical involvement in reform as the devil’s work.

For Marx, and for his Bolshevik successors, socialist revolution was necessary to overthrow capitalism, transfer power to the proletariat and institute the transformation of people and society that would pave the way to communism. Marx and Engels never fully elaborated their understanding of the post-revolutionary era or their plans for this transitional period, but expected it to be a violent and turbulent as capitalist resistance would survive the revolution.175 Dispensationalists also look forward to a turbulent era, the seven-year-long tribulation, during which the devil and his supporters will extend

56 their control over the earth and persecute true believers. Even the millennium would not put an end their opposition because the devil will return at its conclusion to make a final and unsuccessful bid at world domination.

Marxism and Dispensationalism foreground clever villains with no saving graces.

Satan and capitalists are fiendishly clever but myopically shortsighted. They can imagine and execute complex plans and conspiracies but cannot see how counterproductive they are in the long run. For capitalists, this contradiction is made more difficult to fathom by virtue of Marx's writings and the rise of a socialist movement. If socialists can see the end of history in sight as well as the means by which this will assuredly come about, clever capitalists ought to be able to do the same. At the very least they could profit from insights of their socialist adversaries and figure out ways to preserving the economic order just as they came up with advertising and planned obsolescence as a means of sustaining production of often unnecessary goods. Indeed, such learning may have occurred and provide a partial explanation for why socialist revolutions did not occur in most developed countries. Satan is even smarter and more scheming than capitalist plutocrats and for millennia has successfully leading much of the human race astray. He is nevertheless blind to the inevitable outcome of his resistance to god, and this despite dispensationalist efforts to decode biblical prophecy and publicize just what will happen during the tribulation and millennium. The poor devil must be defeated at Armageddon and then again at the end of the Millennium, and on both occasions as the result of the same unsuccessful military strategy.

Marxists and dispensationalists differ somewhat in their assignment of agency.

Marx and Engels believed that socialist revolution was the inevitable outcome of

57 capitalism and in a deeper sense the product of historical developments that began with the introduction of property. The revolution has to be man-made, so agency is important, but it can only succeed when conditions were ripe. Capitalism has to reach its most mature stage of development. Dispensationalists see the millennium as inevitable and in a deeper sense the outcome of a moral decline that began with the introduction of sin in the Garden of Eden. The millennium will not be manmade, but come about through the direct intervention of Jesus. Emphasis on inevitability creates the same conundrum for both movements. If socialist revolution is inevitable, why is it necessary to organize the vanguard of the proletariat and an international socialist movement? If the millennium was inevitable, why invest huge resources in revival meetings and conversion?

Bolsheviks believed that organization and agitation could make socialist revolution happen sooner rather than later. Billy Graham, who accepted the premillennial eschatology, justified his crusades for Christ by suggesting that good Christians might hasten the millennium along a bit.

Dispensationalists and Marxists make parallel arguments about history. For both, the world is full of seeming contradictions, but contradictions that can be reconciled at a deeper level of understanding. For Marxists, the dialectic provides the analytical tool to make sense of contradictions and to show how the tensions they generate move history forward. Contradiction are welcome for this reason. Although dispensationalists do not employ the dialectic, but they resort to a kind of dialectical reasoning. They revel in contradictions and see them as signs of change. Like Marxists, they believe that world must get much worse and seemingly more inexplicable because of its contradictions before any transformation is likely. Again like Marxists, they see few, if any,

58 developments as purely accidental. Everything, no matter how disturbing or perplexing, serves a general and higher purpose.176

Dispensationalists and Marxists make predictions based on their study of prophecy. They infer the unfolding and end of history from current events and their respective texts. Both sets of predictions have been confounded by events and both movements have responded to failure in somewhat similar ways. Early Christians expected Christ to return in their lifetime and were forced to revise their expectations.

Later Christians came to accept the idea that Christ’s return was in the more distant future. Millennial sects periodically arose in troubled times, their participants convinced that the current events were fulfilling biblical prophecies. For many thoughtful

Christians the millennium has come to represent a vision that should not be taken literally but rather used as a source of guidance for confronting everyday life. Like their millennial predecessors, dispensationalists reject figurative readings of the second coming and expect Christ to return in the near term, and are undeterred by repeated failures of their past predictions. There is no hint in their writings that these failures should prompt a rethinking of their position. Imminent rapture, followed by the tribulation and millennium remains the message propagated in their churches and the Left

Behind series.

Marxism has a shorter history than Christianity, but its predictions of world revolution in 1914 and 1945 were unsuccessful, as were later expectations by Chinese,

North Korean and Vietnamese communists of at least an East that was Red. These failures, and more importantly, the collapse of the Soviet Union and China's embrace of capitalism, encouraged remaining socialists to rethink their understanding of the

59 millennium. Many became disillusioned while others came around to an understanding, not unlike their sophisticated Christian counterparts, that reframes a socialist paradise as a long-term goal and benchmark for present-day political behavior and judgment. In sharp contrast to Dispensationalism, relatively few Marxists, to my knowledge, predict imminent revolution. It may be that after repeated setbacks, there will be fewer dispensationalists or a move among them to defer the rapture to a more distant future.

Marxists and dispensationalists are very different kinds of people ideologically and demographically. Historically, in Europe and North America at least, Marxists have been more educated, secular, urban and intellectual than the general population. Minority groups were overrepresented among their followers. This was particularly true of Jews, who also tended to be better educated, more secular, urban and intellectual than their fellow citizens. Jewish participation was greatest in countries where they were rejected or marginalized by the national culture. Dispensationalists are less well-educated that the population as whole, more religious and rural, and decidedly non-intellectual. In contrast to dispensationalists, who shun modern culture, Marxists found many recruits among the culture producing and consuming classes and the intellectual elite. Very few professors are attracted to Dispensationalism, and those who are almost invariably teach in church- run institutions that are millenarian in their orientation.

In personality type there may be more similarity. There is some research indicating that people attracted to extremist movements of all kinds have a need for psychological closure. They need, or want, to believe, that the world is ordered and predictable, and are receptive to ideologies based on totalizing and determinist visions of society.177 Other research indicates that left and right-wing authoritarians differ from

60 other people in their cognitive styles and motivational needs. Else Frenkel-Brunswick, who did pioneering work on this subject in conjunction with the development of the authoritarian personality concept, found that authoritarians display low tolerance for ambiguity and have a preference for simplistic clichés and stereotypes.178 Summarizing subsequent research on intolerance of ambiguity, Furnham and Rochester report that it is associated with a portfolio of related tendencies, including refusal to believe that individuals can have both good and bad traits, rigid dichotomization of people and practices, need for certainty and premature closure in information search and decisionmaking.179

Other researchers maintain that cognitive closure is a means of reducing fear, anxiety, dissonance, uncertainty and instability.180 Webster and Kruglanski developed a

42-item "Need for Closure Scale" that purports to capture five elements of closure: preference for order and structure, emotional discomfort arising from ambiguity, impatience and impulsivity with regard to decision making, desire for security and predictability and closed-mindedness.181 I have no data on dispensationalists as a whole, but the Christians in Left Behind display all five elements of closure. The society Jesus creates in its envisaged millennium encourages and caters to all these traits. It is fair to assume that LaHaye and Jenkins have an astute understanding of their readership and have tried to create characters that they will find appealing because they can readily identify with them.

Similarities in cognitive style and motivated belief may account in part for why many disillusioned communists became Catholics or joined conservative movements.

Premillennialism has had the same appeal for some former political activists. The poster

61 child may be Christabel Pankhurst, the principal strategist and leader of the British suffragist movement in the early twentieth century. She initially believed the problems of the world would be solved once women were enfranchised. World War I and its aftermath disabused her of these expectations and the hope that a secular paradise was around the corner. She found, as she put it, a "refuge" in the promised return of Jesus. In the early 1920s, she became a speaker for the premillenial movement.182

Marx and Engel's version of socialism and Dispensationalism are hostile to modernity. In this respect, they differ sharply from most socialists and many other

Christians. Socialists and Christians criticized what they saw as the negative economic and social consequences of industrialization, the self-centered and materialistic values of the bourgeoisie and the anomie of industrial society. Non-revolutionary socialists have tended to be optimistic about the future and committed to political action intended to improve the conditions of the working class. Some Christian movements shared this outlook, including American evangelicals up to 1914. They espoused reformist agendas and sponsored a panoply of educational and charitable initiatives. Revolutionary

Marxists and Dispensationalism spurn reform programs because they consider society utterly corrupt and incapable of reform. Both aspire to destroy it and replace it with something that is fundamentally pre-modern in its values and practices.

I say pre-modern because, while Marxist images of communism vary, the future envisaged by Marx and Engels rolls back history by doing away with the industrial revolution and most of its consequences. Factories are replaced by workshops and artisanal production restores the intimate relationship between workers and their products that capitalism destroyed. Bureaucracy is never mentioned and can be assumed to have

62 disappeared. Social relations are face-to-face and a high value is put on leisure and recreational activities.183 In chapter two, I described how William Morris, a reform- oriented socialist, picked up and fleshed out this vision in his utopian writing. Like the pre-Raphaelites, he imagined a socialist London that is medieval in its economy, customs and costumes.184 From its inception, Dispensationalism envisaged a millennium that also does away with industrialization and its consequences. The political order of Left

Behind's millennium is a hierarchy with a leader surrounded by a coterie of faithful followers. Christ is at its apex but, in contrast to the Soviet Union, and more like Morris' utopia, there is no bureaucracy or any form of government beyond councils. Laws, religion and social values are based strictly on the old testament and civil society in all its manifestations is eliminated. All forms of modern entertainment are expressly forbidden.

There is no hint of an educational system beyond nurseries whose primary job is not so much to teach as to indoctrinate children. We are told nothing about the economic underpinnings of the society and must assume it rests on the produce of small, independent farmers. Differences about religion aside, Marx and the dispensationalists have a surprisingly similar vision of paradise.

Marxism and Dispensationalism make silk purses out of sows’ ears. The very features of modernity they abhor – capitalism and moral decline respectively – are offered as evidence that revolutionary change is around the corner. For both movements, conditions need to get worse before they can get better. Workers must become poorer and more desperate, but also brought together in larger productive units for the socialist revolution to break out. People must become corrupt and greedy enough for the

Antichrist to establish his dominion over them if biblical prophecies are to be fulfilled.

63 This is a psychologically sophisticated strategy because it encourages followers to take pleasure in the very developments that would otherwise frighten and depress them.

ESCAPING MODERNITY

It is no coincidence that Marxism and Dispensationalism arose in the second half of the nineteenth century. This was the time when the industrial revolution had revealed its worst features but not yet its positive promise. It is significant too that

Dispensationalism experienced a remarkable surge in its appeal in the aftermath of the

Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union and its informal empire. The communist enemy, that Americans held responsible for so much evil and suffering disappeared but evil and suffering did not. By many they are seen be on the rise as a result of society’s tolerance of practices abhorrent to religious social conservatives, including sexual freedom, homosexuality and abortion.

Marxism and Dispensationalism represent different routes for escaping modernity in the hope of finding human fulfillment. They nevertheless share important psychological similarities. Dispensationalism is a quintessential representation of strategy one in that it seeks to reduce interiority and reflexivity through an all-embracing religious order in which individual differences are minimized and a collective identity substituted for individual ones. Like Tyndale, Dispensationalists envisage this as a two stage process. The initial step is creation of a Christian community that lives within but outside of the larger social order. It is to be followed by a take over of the larger society, in this instance facilitated by the Tribulation, which all but destroys existing societies, and the return of Jesus and his establishment of the millennium. In the Introduction, I

64 alluded briefly to Dispensationalism and Marxism as combining elements of both strategies. Like Dispensationalism, it aspires to reduce interiority and reflexivity through a collective class-based identity whose adherents, the vanguard of the proletariat and committed workers form a community within a community, but through revolution ultimately take over the larger society and remake it in their image. Early Marx especially, appears consistent with strategy one in that he expected communism to liberate human potential, a goal that acknowledges individual distinctions and requires retaining some degree of interiority and reflexivity.185 Stalin's Soviet Union and other self-proclaimed communist states – most notably North Korea – appear closer to strategy two in their goals and practices.

Marxists and Dispensationalists share a second important psychological dimension. Throughout the twentieth century, communist movements structured themselves as similarly rewarding counter-cultures. In addition to political activities, they sponsored reading rooms and other educational institutions, self-help activities and even summer camps. These associations provided entry into a circle of like-minded comrades who reinforced one's world view and self-esteem. Marx was deeply impressed the solidarity of socialist workers in Paris:

When communist artisans form associations, education and propaganda

are their first aims. But they very act of associating creates a new need –

the need for a society – and what appeared to be a means has become an

end. The most striking results of this practical development are to be seen

when French socialist workers meet together. Smoking, eating and

drinking are no linger simply means of bringing people together.

65 Company, association, entertainment which also has society as its aim, are

sufficient for them; the brotherhood of man is no empty phrase but a

reality, and the nobility of man shines forth upon us from their toil-worn

bodies."186

Dispensationalists are convinced that the world is coming to an end in the near future but until then, like their socialist predecessors, encourage believers to find solace in their Christian community. Such a strategy is emotionally rewarding but can only be sustained by maintaining a faith strong enough to deny threatening, if not disconfirming, external realities. In 1960, psychologist Milton

Rokeach warned of the dilemma of dogmatism.

All belief-disbelief systems serve two powerful and conflicting sets of

motives at the same time: the need for a cognitive framework to know and

to understand and the need to ward off threatening aspects of reality. To

the extent that the cognitive need to know is predominant and the need to

ward off threat is absent, open system should result, . . . . But as the need

to ward off threat becomes stronger, the cognitive need to know should

become weaker, resulting in more closed belief systems.187

Dispensationalism provides assurances against threat and offers immediate emotional rewards and promises of even greater ones following the return of Jesus.

Repeated failures of the rapture or second coming -- most recently those predicted by

Left Behind – do not seem to have shaken the conviction of many believers. Judging from the history of Marxism, repeated failure inevitably brings disillusionment in its wake. Those most likely to remain true believers are people for whom belief has become

66 a way of life. Renouncing their faith would necessitate extracting themselves from a community with which they strongly identify and from which they derive positive emotional and other rewards. Dispensationalists have tried hard to build and sustain such communities. It remains to be seen how long and by what means the pull of identity will succeed in the face of repeated predictive failures.

67 1REFERENCES

Donne, "Divine Poems," § 7.

2 Radosh, Rapture Ready!, p. 3.

3 Pew Research Center Publications, When Will Jesus Return?

4 RaptureReady.com Rapture Index, http://www.raptureready.com/rap2.html

5 Rachel Madow Show, “Left Behind Authors Meet Madow,” MSNBC, 27 February 2010, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29496421

6 LaHaye, Revelation Unveiled, p. 10.

7 La Haye, Understanding Bible Prophecy, p. 20.

8 Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, pp. 84-85.

9 Boyer, When Times Shall Be No More, pp. 178, 275-76, notes that a slew of other figures have periodically been identified as the Antichrist, among them Juan Carlos of Spain, Moshe Dayan,

Mikhail Gorbachev, John F. Kennedy, Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan, Sun Myung Moon and

Saddam Hussein.

10 “Left Behind Authors Meet Madow."

11 LaHaye and Jenkins, Are We Living in the End Times?, p. 26.

12 Clouse, Meaning of the Millennium; Blackstone, Jesus is Coming; Sandeen, Roots of

Fundamentalism, pp. xv-xviii, 162; Weber, Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming, pp. 15-17.

13 Weber, Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming, pp. 9-11 for the varieties of millennialism.

14 Hatch, “Millennialism and Popular Religion in the Early Republic.”

15 Newport, Apocalypse and Millennium, pp. 163-64; Weber, Living in the Shadow of the Second

Coming, pp. 13-16.

16 Newport, Apocalypse and Millennium, p. 166; Weber, Living in the Shadow of the Second

Coming, pp. 43-44.

17 Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, pp. 50-51. 18 Sandeen, Roots of Fundamentalism, pp. 62-70; Scofield, notes to the Scofield Reference Bible, for the classic exposition of this belief.

19 Hoekma, "Bible and the Future."

20 Sandeen, Roots of Fundamentalism, p. 73; Frykholm,. Rapture Culture, p. 17.

21 Blackstone, Jesus is Coming, pp. 231-33.

22 Scofield, Scofield Reference Bible, and Rightly Dividing the Word of Truth, p. 18.

23 Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, p. 93.

24 Sandeen, Roots of Fundamentalism, pp. 191, 222.; Marsden, Fundamentalism and American

Culture, pp. 55-62

25 McCain, Daniel’s Prophecy, pp. 12-15; Scofield Reference Bible, 915; Weber, Living in the

Shadow of the Second Coming, pp. 17-24; Clouse, Meaning of the Millennium; Glass,

“Fundamentalism’s Prophetic Vision of the Jews”; Ross, So It Was True; Carpenter, Revive Us

Again, pp. 97-100; Cooper, Prophetic Fulfillments in Palestine.

26 Weber, Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming, pp. 19-20.

27 Mackintosh, Papers on the Lord’s Coming, pp. 101-02.

28 Haldeman, Coming of Christ, pp. 297-325; Munhall, Lord’s Return, pp. 179-80; Mackintosh,

“Double Phase of the Second Advent”; Weber, Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming, pp. 19-

29 Ibid., pp. 16-17.

30 Laws, “Convention Side Lights.” Carpenter, Revive Us Again, pp. 4-5; Marsden,

Fundamentalism and American Culture, p. 4, and “Fundamentalism”; Sandeen, Roots of

Fundamentalism, pp. xiii-xvi.

31 Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, pp. 164-84.

32 Ibid.,, pp. 193-94; Carpenter, Revive Us Again, pp. 33-88, 206.

33 Noll, Princeton Defense of Plenary Verbal Inspiration; Marsden, Fundamentalism and American

Culture, pp. 63-65; Carpenter, Revive Us Again, pp. 70-71. 34 Mauro, Seventy Weeks and the Great Tribulation, pp. 9-12; Weber, Living in the Shadow of the

Second Coming, pp. 9-24, 36-42; Sandeen, Roots of Fundamentalism, pp. 48-66; Marsden,

Fundamentalism and American Culture, p. 108.

36 Carpenter, Revive Us Again, pp. 9-10.

37 Sandeen, Roots of Fundamentalism, pp. 214-15; Weber, Living in the Shadow of the Second

Coming, pp. 143-44.

38 Haldeman, Signs of the Times, p. 128; Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, pp.

125-27.

39 LaHaye and Jenkins, Are We Living in the End Times?, p. 74

40 Clouse, Meaning of the Millennium ; Weber, Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming, pp. 9-

24, 128-29; Glass, “Fundamentalism’s Prophetic Vision of the Jews”; Ross, So It Was True;

Carpenter, Revive Us Again, pp. 97-100; LaHaye and Jenkins, Are We Living in the End Times?, pp.

95-120.

42 Carpenter, Revive Us Again, pp. 93-94, citing Louis Bauman, “The Blue Eagle and Our Duty as

Christians,” Sunday School Times, 16 September 1933, pp. 583-84; Walter P. Knight, “The Mark of the Beast, or is the AntiChrist at Hand?, Moody Monthly 34 (July 1934), p. 493, and “The Blue

Eagle,” Revelation 3 (September 1933), p. 329.

43 “A Brief History of the Apocalypse,” http://www.abhota.info/end3.htm

44 “God is Warning of Big Storms, Robertson Says,” Seattle Times, 19 May 2006, http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2003004452_pat19.html

45 Burroughs, Titan, Son of Saturn.

46 Lindsey, Late Great Planet Earth, and The 1908s; Boyer, When Times Shall Be No More, p. 5;

“The Great Cosmic Countdown: Hal Lindsey and the Future,” Eternity, January 1977, p. 21.

47 Lindsey, 1980s. 48 Radosh, Rapture Ready!, p. 81.

49 http://www.leftbehind.com/

50 Ibid., p. 13.

51 LaHaye and Jenkins, Rise of the Antichrist Nicolae, pp. 319-20.

52 Ibid., p. 108.

53 Ibid, p. 324.

54 Ibid, p. 144.

55 LaHaye and Jenkins, Indwelling, pp. 242-45.

56 LaHaye and Jenkins, Rise of the Antichrist Nicolae, p. 127.

57 Ibid, p. 73.

58 LaHaye and Jenkins, Assassins, p. 378.

59 LaHaye and Jenkins, Indwelling, pp. 364-68.

60 Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, p. 100.

61 Morgan, “New Testament”; Davies, “Qumran Studies.”; Elwolde, “Language and Translation of the Old Testament."

62 Elwolde, "Language and Translation of the Old Testament"; Gibson, Language and Imagery in the Old Testament"; Knibb, "Language, Translation, Versions, and Text of the Apocrypha"; Porter,

"Language and Translation of the New Testament"; Norton, "Ancient Versions and Textual

Transmission of the Old Testament"; Birdsall, "Textual Transmission and Versions of the New

Testament"; Van der Kooij, "Textual Criticism."

63 LaHaye and Jenkins, Rise of the Antichrist Nicolae, pp. 347-48.

64 Ibid., p. 348.

65 LaHaye and Jenkins, Assassins, p. xv.

66 Ibid, p. 90.

67 Ibid, p. 127-31.

68 Ibid, p. 173. 69 Ibid, pp. 173-74.

70 Berakhot 31b; Sanhedrin 85a; Nedarim 3a.

71 Kasher, “Interpretation of Scripture in Rabbinic Literature”; Magonet, “Jewish Interpretation of the Bible"; Gibson, Language and Imagery in the Old Testament.

72 Ezekiel 38:8.

73 LaHaye and Jenkins, Are We Living the End of Times?, pp. 83-87.

74 Ibid pp. ix-x; Daniel 12:4.

75 Ibid., pp. x-xi, 23-24.

76 Bauckham, Theology of the Book of Revelation, p. 152; Currie, Rapture; Rossing, Rapture

Exposed.

77 LaHaye and Jenkins, Left Behind, pp. 159, 171.

79 Ibid, p. 273.

80 LaHaye and Jenkins, Left Behind, p. 274.

82 LaHaye and Jenkins, Left Behind, pp. 70, 436.

83 LaHaye and Jenkins, Assassins, p. 103.

84 LaHaye and Jenkins, Left Behind, pp. 7-8, Rise of the Antichrist Nicolae, p. 140.

86 LaHaye and Jenkins, Soul Harvest, pp. 419-20.

88 Kahneman, Slovic and Tversky, Judgment Under Uncertainty, p. 226, and “Extensional versus

Intuitive Reason; Koehler, “Explanation, Imagination, and Confidence in Judgment”; Lebow,

Forbidden Fruit, ch. 6.

89 Jones, Deconstructing the Starships, p. 16.

90 LaHaye and Jenkins, Are We Living the End of Times?, pp. 50-52. 91 Ibid., pp. 168-69.

92 Ibid., pp. 210-11.

93 Ibid., p. 121.

94 Ibid., p. 119.

95 Ibid., pp. 79, 111-112..

96 Ibid., pp. 52-54.

97 Ibid., pp. 50-53.

98 Ibid., p. 53.

99 LaHaye and Jenkins, Kingdom Come, p. xlii.

100 Ibid., p. 120.

101 Ibid., pp. 122-23, 232.

102 Ibid., pp. 71-72.

103 Ibid., pp. 89-90.

104 Ibid., p. 144.

105 Ibid., p. 61.

106 Ibid., p. 156.

107 Ibid., p. 59.

108 Ibid., pp. 46-47.

109 Ibid., pp. xlii-xliv.

110 Ibid, p. xliv.

111 Ibid., p. 353.

112 Ibid, p. xxii.

113 Ibid., p. xxiii; Revelation, 6.10.

114 LaHaye and Jenkins, Kingdom Come, p. xiv; Matthew, 25.41.

115 Ibid, pp. xxiv-xxvii.

116 Ibid., p. 352. 117 Ibid., pp. xxxvi-vii.

118 Ibid., p. xli.

119 Ibid., pp. 1, 38- 39.

120 Ibid., p. 3.

121 Ibid., p. 50.

122 Ibid., p. 129.

123 Ibid., p. 4.

124 Ibid., p. 65.

125 Ibid, p. 95.

126 Ibid, p. 319.

127 Sandeen, Roots of Fundamentalism, p. 234.

128 Trumbull, Prophecy's Light, p. 67

129 Brown, Light on the Hills, p. 21.

130 Gaebelein, Conflict of the Ages, pp. 72-99.

131 Ibid, pp. 35-36.

132 Ibid, pp. 35-36, 68.

133 Isaiah 9:6-7, 11, 65:17-25, 66:22-24, Zechariah 14:9, Acts 1:6-7, Matthew 25:31-34, Revelation

5:10, 20:4-6; LaHaye and Jenkins, Are We Living in the End Times?, pp. 45-63.

134 LaHaye, “Note” to LaHaye and Jenkins, Kingdom Come, p. xv.

135 LaHaye and Jenkins, Kingdom Come, p. xxix.

136 Ibid., p. 141.

137 LaHaye and Jenkins, Appollyon, pp. 110-13; Mark, pp. 24-28, Indwelling, p. 70.

138 Frykholm, Rapture Culture, pp. 30-31.

139 Ibid., pp. 32-33, for a good discussion of gender roles in Left Behind.

140 Frykholm, Rapture Culture, pp. 24-26; Alexander L. Stephan, conversations with the author,

March 2007. 141 Ibid., pp. 39-40, 77-78; Alexander L. Stephan, conversations with the author, April 2007.

142 Barna Group Research Report, 28 June 2005, "Religious Books Attract a Diverse Audience

Dominated by Women and Boomers," http://www.barna.org/barna-update/article/5-barna- update/176-religious-books-attract-a-diverse-audience-dominated-by-women-and-boomers? q=left+behind

143 Barna Group Research Report, "Different Groups Follow Harry Potte, Left Behind and Jabez,"

22 October 2001 http://www.barna.org/barna-update/article/5-barna-update/61-different-groups- follow-harry-potter-left-behind-and-jabez?q=left+behind

144 Dart, "'Beam Me Up' Theology."

145 Cited in Radosh, Rapture Ready!, p. 7

146 On this point, Burridge, "Gospels."

147 This is one reason why some productions of the opera marry off Don Alfonso and Despina in addition to the two couples.

148 On Roth, see Lebow, Forbidden Fruit, ch. 8.

149 Hanning, Individual in Twelfth-Century Romance, pp. 11-15.

150 Lebow, Forbidden Fruit, for elaboration.

151 Ibid. ch. 3 for this case.

152 Tetlock and Belkin, “Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics.”

153 Dick, Fatherland.

154 Sanchez, Pope Gabriel, for another interesting example.

155 Lebow, Forbidden Fruit, ch. 2 for elaboration.

156 Kennedy, What if Jesus Had Never Been Born?

157 Wikipedia, “Science Fiction,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_fantasy

158 Guy Gavriel Kay, “Fiction versus Fantasy,” http://www.treitel.org/Richard/sf/fantasy.html

159 Nick Gevers, “The Literary Alchemist: An Interview with Michael Swanwick,” http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/nonfiction/intms.htm 160 Tolkien, Lord of the Rings.

161 Kay, “Fiction versus Fantasy,”

162 LaHaye and Jenkins, Indwelling, for example.

163 LaHaye and Jenkins, Assassins, pp. 174-75.

164 Rachel Madow Show, “Left Behind Authors Meet Madow,” MSNBC, 27 February 2010, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29496421

165 Lienesch, Redeeming America, p. 177; Martin, With God on Our Side, pp. 354-55.

166 Robertson, Secret Kingdom, New Millennium and New World Order.

167 Torrey, Return of the Lord Jesus, p. 126.

168 Carpenter, Revive Us Again, pp. 57-75; Ammerman, Bible Believers; Peshkin, God’s Choices;

Bereton, Formation of the Bible Schools; Barkun, "Divided Apocalypse." Rice, Home, for a guidebook of fundamentalist practices.

169 Wisneski, Lytle and Skitka, “Gut Reactions.”

170 Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, pp. 202-04.

171 Weber, Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming, pp. 102-104, for this parallel.

172 Lippmann, Drift and Mastery; Croly, Promise of American Life; Hofstadter, Age of Reform;

Eisenach, Lost Promise of Progressivism.

173 Löwith, Meaning in History; Popitz, entfremdete Mensch, p. 99; Wackenheim, Faillite de la religion d'après Karl Marx, p. 200, contends that via Hegel, Marx links up with the soteriological schema underlying the Judeo-Christian tradition;McLellan, Marx, pp. 96-97, rejects these comparisons to Christianity,

174 Karl Marx to A. Ruge, in P. Nerrlich, ed., Briefwechsel (Berlin, 1886), p. 295, cited in McLellan,

Karl Marx, p. 63.

175 Marx, “After the Revolution”; Engels, “On Morality.”

176 Harding, Book of Jerry Falwell, p. xi. 177 Sorrentino and Roney, Uncertain Mind; Schaller, Boyd, Yohannes and O’Brien, Prejudiced

Personality Revisited; Webster and Kruglanski, “Individual Differences in Need for Cognitive

Closure; Jost et al, "Are Needs to Manage Uncertainty and Threat Associated With Political

Conservatism or Ideological Extremity?; Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski and Sulloway, “Political

Conservatism as a Motivated Social Cognition,” for a review of the literature on the the cognitive styles and motivated needs of conservatives.

178 Frenkel-Brunswick, “Tolerance Toward Ambiguity as a Personality Variable,”

“Intolerance of Ambiguity as an Emotional Perceptual Personality Variable,” and “Personality

Theory and Perception.”

179 Furnham and Ribchester, “Tolerance of Ambiguity”; Budner, “Intolerance of Ambiguity as a

Personality Variable”; Wilson, Dynamic Theory of Conservatism; Sorrentino and Roney, Uncertain

Mind; Hofstede, Culture’s Consequences. For critiques, see Turner, Prejudiced Personality and

Social Change; Verkuyten and Hagendoorn, “Prejudice and Self-Categorization"; Reynolds,

Turner, Haslam and Ryan, “Role of Personality and Group Factors in Explaining Prejudice."

180 Land, “Fear of Equality”; Nias, “Attitudes to the Common Market.”

181 Sorrentino and Rooney, Uncertain Mind; Webster and Kruglanski, “Individual Differences in

Need for Cognitive Closure.”

182 Weber, Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming, pp. 103-04; Pankhurst, Lord Cometh!, p. 9

183 Marx, "After the Revolution." 184 Morris, News from Nowhere.

185 Beginning with Engels, a sharp distinction has been made between the eaerly and late Marx, beginning with his 1845 Theses on Feuerbach. In recent years, this has effectively been challenged by McClellan, Karl Marx; Geras, Marx and Human Nature ; Colleti, Karl Marx.

186 Marx, "Critique of Hegel's Doctrine of the State."

187 Rokeach, Open and Closed Mind, p. 67.