Thursday, June 03, 2004
Religion: The Pop Prophets
"They're an odd couple, for sure: Tim LaHaye, the golden-ager in polyester, veteran culture warrior and cofounder of the Moral Majority; Jerry B. Jenkins, the bearded baby boomer in jeans, best known (until now) for channeling the autobiographies of such Christian athletes as Orel Hershiser. They're also, arguably, the most successful literary partnership of all time. And if you define success in worldly terms, you can drop the "arguably." Their Biblical techno-thrillers about the end of the world are currently outselling Stephen King, John Grisham and every other pop novelist in America. It's old-time religion with a sci-fi sensibility: the Tribulation timetable comes from LaHaye; the cell phones, Land Rovers--and characters struggling with belief and unbelief--come from Jenkins. And their contrasting sensibilities suggest the complexities of the entire evangelical movement, often seen as monolithic.
The first volume, "Left Behind" (1995), kicks off with the Rapture--the sudden snatching up of millions of the faithful into heaven--and subsequent volumes follow airline pilot Rayford Steele and journalist Buck Williams, left behind to tough it out down here on earth through the seven-year Tribulation and the rule of the Antichrist. The 12th and final installment (not counting a planned sequel and prequel), called "Glorious Appearing," has the return of Jesus, the battle of Armageddon and the Judgment. It sold almost 2 million copies even before its March publication; it's still tied for No. 2 on The New York Times's list--which doesn't count sales at Christian bookstores. In all, the "Left Behind" books have sold more than 62 million copies.
Who's buying? Jenkins recalls a puzzled Chris Matthews asking a "Hardball" guest the same question. "I'm sure I don't have the quote exact, but it was something like 'Certainly not the people in the cities and the suburbs.' And I'm thinking, 'What does that leave? Barefoot people in the hollers handling snakes?'" Jenkins takes issue with a previous NEWSWEEK piece that called "Left Behind" a "Red State" phenomenon, but statistics from the publisher, Tyndale, bear this out: 71 percent of the readers are from the South and Midwest, and just 6 percent from the Northeast. (Hence Tyndale's sponsorship of a NASCAR racer, with the unlucky logo LEFT BEHIND.) The "core buyer" is a 44-year-old born-again Christian woman, married with kids, living in the South. This isn't the "Sex and the City" crowd--which helps explain why it took so long for the media to notice that one in eight Americans was reading all these strange books about the end of the world.
And why are so many people eager to do that? Well, check the news tonight. As the world gets increasingly scary, with much of the trouble centered in the Mideast--just where you'd expect from reading the Book of Revelation--even secular Americans sometimes wonder (or at least wonder if they ought to start wondering) whether there might not be something to this End Times stuff. After September 11, 2001, there was such a run on the latest "Left Behind" volume, "Desecration," that it became the best-selling novel of the year. And it's no coincidence that the books are a favorite with American soldiers in Iraq.
LaHaye and Jenkins--the prophecy teacher and the pop novelist--combine the ultimate certainty the Bible offers with the entertainment-culture conventions of rock-jawed heroism and slam-bang special effects. "Left Behind" gives believers an equivalent of such secular sagas as the "Lord of the Rings" books: a self-contained, ordered world with a wealth of detail in which a reader can become blissfully immersed, and the assurance that good must win out--but not so quickly that the audience can't indulge the human fascination with evil. Scholars reconstructing the popular history of the first years of the 21st century--if there still are any--will have to grapple with the phenomenon of "Left Behind." In an age of terror and tumult, they may find, these books' Biblical literalism offered certitude to millions of Americans amid the chaos of their time.
The many critics of the series see a resonance between its apocalyptic scenario and the born-again President Bush's apocalyptic rhetoric and confrontational Mideast policies. And they see LaHaye's far-right political agenda behind having fetuses Raptured from pregnant women's wombs, and making the Antichrist the secretary-general of the United Nations. Roman Catholics aren't happy that the Antichrist's assistant is the pope, and while "Left Behind" shows the common evangelical sympathy for Jews, they exist to be converted and to fulfill Christian prophecy. (For Jenkins and LaHaye, of course, so does everyone else.) And minorities may find the books' attempts at multiculturalism condescending. "I ain't seen no Bible for years," says one character, a "heavyset Latina." "What got me was that it wasn't fancy, wasn't hard to understand... All them Scriptures sounded true to me, 'bout being a sinner."
The other principal critique comes from some of Jenkins's and LaHaye's fellow Christians, who find the books more interested in God's wrath than God's love--as well as scripturally questionable. "It's pulp fiction, based on a particular reading of the Bible," says Randall Balmer, chair of the religion department at Barnard College. "It diverts attention from the mandate of the New Testament to love God with all your heart and soul and mind and to love your neighbor as yourself." According to Tyndale's research, more Jews, agnostics and atheists read the series than mainline Protestants, and back in 2000 even the president of the Lutheran Church's conservative Missouri Synod denounced the "Left Behind" series as "an unbiblical flight of fancy." Most establishmentarian Christians agree with Tina Pippin, a professor of religious studies at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Ga., in saying "Left Behind" "encourages people to see the world in terms of black and white, good and evil, with us or against us."
LaHaye won't be along next month when the genial Jenkins appears at the secular BookExpo America's first-ever Religion Day. They may not be quite ready for LaHaye. With Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, he was one of the most divisive figures of the 1980s religious right, and he's still a loose cannon. He can't resist an opportunity to get in a dig about school prayer, the United Nations, homosexuals or "libertine living"--or to question a NEWSWEEK reporter about his personal relationship with Jesus Christ.
LaHaye's common-sense reading of the Bible is also tied up with a still-aggrieved sense of social class. "Those millions that I'm trying to reach take the Bible literally. It's the theologians that get all fouled up on some of these smug ideas that you've got to find some theological reason behind it. It bugs me that intellectuals look down their noses at we ordinary people." His family had been hard-pressed when his father lost his job at a Ford plant in Michigan during the Depression; his widowed mother worked in factories while going to night school to become a Bible teacher, and gave a tenth of her income to the church. ("Can you imagine? She made 60 cents an hour.") LaHaye worked himself through Bob Jones University; his first pastorate, in Pumpkintown, S.C., paid him $15 a week. "I wake up every morning," he says, "and I see this beautiful place, and that drop-dead gorgeous view of the mountains, and I think, 'This is fantastic.' Because God is faithful." How does he reconcile that with Jesus' injunction to sell all you have and give to the poor? "I can accomplish far more from my present lifestyle and the giving that I do to Christian work," he says. "If I just sold everything and gave it to the poor, I can't see where that would advance the Gospel as much as I'm doing." But wouldn't it advance the poor? "Well," he says, "you know how much I pay in taxes?"
To LaHaye, spreading the Good News is far more compassionate than redistributing the wealth. This is the motivation behind his conservative politics--for him, traditional moral values are a matter of spiritual life or death--and the "Left Behind" books, which he and Jenkins credit with bringing some 3,000 people to Christ. As Jenkins puts it, "Whatever people say about Dr. LaHaye--he's polemical, he's not politically correct--he really cares about souls." It's why he never gives up, even with that unsaved NEWSWEEK reporter, to whom he gives a copy of "Glorious Appearing" to pass along to his mother. There's that smile.
At first Jenkins had purely professional doubts about LaHaye's project. And what was the intended audience--the evangelical market or a mass readership? Both, LaHaye told him. Bearing in mind the Epistle of James' warning not to be a "double-minded man," Jenkins tried to talk him out of it with a witticism. "A double-minded book," he told LaHaye, "is unstable in all its ways."
Readers identify with the "Left Behind" characters in part because they seldom speak in Christian cliches: as Jenkins says, starting out with the Rapture means "anybody who would use evangelical lingo is gone after the first chapter of the first book." More important, Jenkins uses such characters as Rayford Steele's daughter Chloe to voice his own wrestlings with his faith. "To me there's a value in questioning, and even doubting sometimes. Chloe's big deal is, how does this sound like a loving God? People disappear, planes crash, people die--even people who might have believed, but it's too late. There is indication in the prophecies that God will harden some people's hearts. I don't get it myself; I don't understand how that fits in with God's plan. Yeah, those are hard things." Jenkins is nearly as troubled as his critics by the apparently vengeful elements in the books, such as that episode in "Glorious Appearing" in which too-late penitents are sent to hell vainly bleating, "Jesus is Lord." "One of the toughest things I deal with is that there are some evangelicals, with familiar faces, who seem to like that part of it. You know, 'We're right, you're wrong, that's what the Bible says, someday you're going to kneel and admit it.' That should break our hearts."
Still, Jenkins knows that is what the Bible says, at least as he and LaHaye read it, and "we sort of have a responsibility to tell what it seems to say to us." For them--just as for Christians who think LaHaye and Jenkins have it all wrong--this is ultimately about love, for God and for their fellow humans. As they see it, they're on a rescue mission, with time running out. "We don't know when the Lord's going to come," LaHaye admits, and he likes to quote Matt. 24:35: "Of that day and hour no one knows, no, not even the angels of heaven, but My Father only." But don't the signs seem to be coming thick and fast? Even for evangelical Christians, of course, LaHaye and Jenkins's uncompromising reading of Scripture and of current events isn't the only choice. But if you assume, with them, that it's all true, the end won't be pretty for those left behind. While for those who listen up in time, it'll be a whole other story.
(This story has been edited from the original)
Newsweek
Title: Religion: The Pop Prophets
Date: May 24, 2004
Copyright (c) 2004 Newsweek, Inc.
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