Discussion Group Report

"Nicolae Carpathia, the man who turned the United Nations into a one-world government with himself as dictator, has just decided on genocide. In his palace in New Babylon, capital of the world, Carpathia--alias the Antichrist--barks instructions to his top aide. 'I will sanction, condone, support, and reward the death of any Jew anywhere in the world,' he says. 'Imprison them. Torture them. Humiliate them. Shame them. Blaspheme their god. Plunder everything they own. Nothing is more important.' The aide rushes to obey, not knowing that he's fulfilling one more divine prophecy about the final days of history before the Second Coming."

This scene is from the latest novel by the Rev. Tim La Haye and Jerry Jenkins called The Remnant. It goes on to say that many Jews will survive the new Holocaust by becoming born-again Christians. Jews need to make up for the "national sin" of rejecting Jesus. Their choice in the last days is: convert or die. This book levitated to the top of The New York Times bestseller list immediately after publication in July, 2002, with an initial print run reported at 2.75 million copies. LaHaye and Jenkins' series of thrillers, Left Behind, which included this book, had already sold 33 million copies since they first appeared in 1995. The books sell because they base fiction on fundamentalist theology and they've succeeded in spreading that theology far beyond its original audience. Besides expressing contempt for Judaism, they demonize proponents of arms control, ecumenicalism, abortion rights and everyone else disliked by the Christian right; and they justify assassination as a political tool. Their anti-Jewishness is exceeded by their anti-Catholicism. Most basically, they reject the very idea of open, democratic debate. In the world of Left Behind, there exists a single truth, based on a purportedly literal reading of Scripture; anyone who disagrees with that truth is deceived or evil.

This series plus other publications advocating a similar religious intolerance are described in an article by Gersham Gorenberg entitled "Intolerance: The Best Seller" in The American Prospect, September 23, 2002.

LaHaye has served as a prominent comrade-in-arms of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. He was a board member at the time of the Moral Majority's 1979 founding, and he created the mid-1980s American Coalition for Traditional Values, which got out the vote for the religious right and played a key role in Ronald Reagan's re-election.

The series is intensely political. It provides a window on how theology can drive right-wing activism--sometimes in bizarre ways, as when vocal supporters of Israel look forward to the conversion or death of the Jews. Propaganda in the guise of fiction, they demand our attention.

The "Rapture of the Church," popularized by John Darby, a nineteenth British preacher, is a key element of a theology known as dispensational premillennialism, which pervades evangelical Christianity. Between one-fifth and one-fourth of all Americans are evangelicals, researchers report. Millennialism refers to the belief that history as we know it will end, to be followed by the establishment of a divine kingdom. The term is based on the Book of Revelation, which describes the godly era as lasting 1,000 years. It asserts that the world is flawed and must be utterly reconstructed. In its acute form, it says that the existing order must be razed by cataclysm before the new order can be built--and that the cataclysm is near. That radicalism is one reason religious establishments normally oppose millennialism. Another is that every millennial movement has brought bitter disappointment. History refuses to end. Millennialism is a form of public manic depression, so profoundly embarrassing to religion that established faiths try to repress the very memory of outbursts. Yet millennialism was the fevered spirit of 17th century British Puritanism, and has been an essential part of American religion since the Mayflower. "America," states historian Richard Landes, "was born in an apocalyptic stew."

Premillennialists insist that the Second Coming will take place so Jesus can rule during that period. Darby added that history should have ended in Jesus' time--if only the Jews had accepted him as messiah. Because they didn't, God began a new era, or dispensation; the Church Age, an immense parenthetical clause between the First Coming and the Second. The Church Age could end anytime with the "Rapture," so believers need to remain perpetually worthy of being transported heavenward. But before the end, God would fulfill his promises to the Jews, to return them to their land and rebuild their temple. Dispensationlism preserved the view of Jews as lost in error, while making them stars of the drama that brings about the end of an evil world. A nonfiction bestseller that popularized dispensationalism, The Late Great Planet Earth, by Hal Lindsey asserted current events were leading to the Antichrist's one-world government and nuclear weapons were essential to fulfilling prophecies of the end. Lindsey virtually made it an obligation for Christians to welcome nuclear conflagration. Doomsday themes of the Christian right suffused Reagan's rhetoric.

Although dispensationalism is not the only theology among fundamentalists or evangelicals and may not be the center of their lives, its books reveal something important of what is happening in that subculture. LaHaye's vision is being read by millions of evangelicals and other Americans. It is fiction that is intended to teach. Inspiration is part of the appeal. Here's how the global economy (which may have cost me my job or halved my retirement savings) works. Here's what lies behind debate over abortion or foreign policy. Some people serve God and some serve falsehood. Here's why a believing Christian can feel left out: Today's society is controlled by evil. And here's why cataclysmic war between the forces of good and the axis of evil is inevitable. The Left Behind series rejects the principle of truth arising from democratic debate.

Gorenberg says the proper response to the series' arguments is "to debate them--to make the ideas woven into the fiction explicit, to analyze and rebut them...The preachers of intolerance should not go unchallenged."

Some representative quotes from Left Behind author La Haye:

• "I'll tell you what is wrong with America. We don't have enough of God's ministers running the country."
       --From an address, Religious Roundtable breakfast, New York Times September 8, 1984.
• "Most of all, I believe God has chosen to bless this series. In doing so, he's giving the country and maybe the world, one last, big wake-up call before the events transpire."
       --From an article in the Southern California Christian Times, quoted from Guy Manchester, "Tim LaHaye: the man behind the bestsellers," Freedom Writer, Sept.-Oct. 2000
• "No humanist is fit to hold office."
       --From Mind Siege (co-authored with David Noebel, author of Communism, Hypnotism and the Beatles).