The "Left Behind" books: How the Christian Right Uses Jews and Israel.

The most popular novel in America right now is one in which the world is tyrannized by the former secretary general of the U.N., who operates from Iraq, and his global force of storm troopers, called "peacekeepers." Revered rabbis evangelize for Christ, repenting Israel's "specific national sin" of "[r]ejecting the messiahship of Jesus." Much of the world is deceived by a false prophet, part of the inner circle of the Antichrist, who seems a lot like the pope -- he's a Catholic cardinal, "all robed and hatted and vested in velvet and piping."

"The Remnant," which debuted at No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list, is the 10th entry in Jerry B. Jenkins and Tim LaHaye's phenomenally popular "Left Behind" series, a Tom Clancy-meets-Revelation saga of the Rapture, the Tribulation and, presumably, the eventual return of Jesus. Last year's "Desecration," the ninth volume of a projected 14, was 2001's bestselling hardcover novel. There is probably very little overlap between Salon's readership and the audience for apocalyptic Christian fiction, but these books and their massive success deserve attention if only for what they tell us about the core beliefs of a great many people in this country, people whose views shape the way America behaves in the world.

After all, Tim LaHaye isn't merely a fringe figure like Hal Lindsey, the former king of the genre, whose 1970 Christian end-times book "The Late Great Planet Earth" was the bestseller of that decade. The former co-chairman of Jack Kemp's presidential campaign, LaHaye was a member of the original board of directors of the Moral Majority and an organizer of the Council for National Policy, which ABCNews.com has called "the most powerful conservative organization in America you've never heard of" and whose membership has included John Ashcroft, Tommy Thompson and Oliver North. George W. Bush is still refusing to release a tape of a speech he gave to the group in 1999.

The point isn't that all these leaders are part of some kind of right-wing Illuminati. It's simply that the seemingly wacky ideology promulgated in the Left Behind books is one that important people in America are quite comfortable with. The Left Behind series provides a narrative and a theological rationale for a whole host of perplexing conservative policies, from the White House's craven decision to cut off aid to the United Nations Family Planning Fund to America's surreally casual mobilization for an invasion of Baghdad -- a city that is, in the Left Behind books, Satan's headquarters.

Political attitudes and actions that make no practical or moral sense to secularists become comprehensible when viewed through Christian pop culture's eschatological looking glass. At a time when America is flagrantly flouting international law, spurning the U.N. and tacitly supporting the land grabs of Israeli maximalists, surely it's significant that the most popular fiction in the country creates a gripping narrative that pits American Christians against a conspiracy of Satan-worshipping, abortion-promoting, gun-controlling globalists -- all of it revolving around the sovereignty of Israel.

Israel is the key to the theology that dominates Left Behind (as well as much of American evangelical Christianity). In the religion, as in the series, the rapture is kicked off by a military attack on the country, which survives almost unscathed (though the first Left Behind, written before the current intifada, had Russian aggressors rather than Arabs). Indeed, the chain of events that lead to the return of Christ depends on the existence of a Holy Land that is under catastrophic assault. No wonder the born-again lobby is obsessed with Israeli self-defense, but opposed to any peace plan.

Those Israeli settlements in the West Bank that add so much kindling to the conflagration in the Middle East are often "adopted" and funded by American evangelical churches whose members are devouring a novel that depicts Jews reclaiming Palestinian land, moving Al-Aqsa Mosque out of Jerusalem and rebuilding the second temple on the Dome of the Rock. The chosen people are suddenly the darlings of the religious right, while a bestseller promotes the idea that Jews will soon convert to Christianity -- and atone for their centuries of stubbornness -- en masse.

Of course, it's not that every reader of the more than 50 million Left Behind books sold so far is an end-times fundamentalist any more than every Eminem fan is a homophobe. Nor are the books guaranteed to change their audiences' views on American foreign policy -- the relationship between culture and politics is never that simple. But the stories people tell themselves about the world necessarily shape the way they act in it, and right now, this is the story that's captivating America.

On one level, the attraction of the Left Behind books isn't that much different from that of, say, Tom Clancy or Stephen King. The plotting is brisk and the characterizations Manichean. People disappear and things blow up. Revelation is, after all, supremely creepy, which is why it gets so much play in horror flicks from "Rosemary's Baby" to "End of Days."

The opening sequence of the first Left Behind book is gripping and cinematic. Rayford Steele, an unhappily married commercial pilot, is flying to London and contemplating an affair with a stewardess, when, handing the controls over to his co-pilot and walking into the cabin, he finds her hysterical. People throughout the plane have disappeared, their clothes left in neat piles on their seats.

"This was no joke, no trick, no dream," Jenkins and LaHaye write. "Something was terribly wrong, and there was no place to run."

Returning to America, Steele finds a world in chaos. All real Christians -- as opposed to mere churchgoers -- as well as children and fetuses out of wombs have vanished. Planes flown by believers have crashed, along with cars driven by the faithful. The media struggles to make sense of it, but Rayford, whose marital troubles were caused by his wife's newfound religious passion, knows what happened. His wife had told him that Christians would be raptured up to heaven in preparation for the rise of the Antichrist, his nefarious seven-year reign and the Second Coming of Jesus.

The Left Behind books chronicle those seven years -- known to Christians as the Tribulation -- as a ragtag group of new believers form the "Tribulation Force" to thwart the murderous plans of Nicolae Carpathia, the U.N.-leader-cum-prince-of-darkness (often just called "the evil one," Osama bin Laden-style). Carpathia's rise is engineered by a cabal of bankers. He's supported by Israeli liberals enthralled by his devious promises of peace, and a Democratic American president sells out the country to Carpathia's one-world government. Meanwhile, the Tribulation Force finds a spiritual leader in Tsion Ben-Judah, a rabbi and former Israeli statesman who realizes the error of his Jewish ways and becomes a guerrilla media evangelist.

It's bizarre that more attention hasn't been paid to the series' open hostility to the Jewish religion, if not the Jewish people. Imagine if, say, James Carville wrote a novel in which a band of heroic gay socialists defeated a voracious army of slack-jawed Bible-quoting Republicans to turn the world into a gigantic French-speaking free-love commune. He'd be crucified on the talk shows, and all kinds of sinister motives would be impugned to the Democratic Party.

That a Republican player can create a blockbuster media empire out of analogous extremism suggests two seemingly contradictory things. First, Christian paranoia has become so mainstream that few see fit to remark on it anymore. Second, while the novels' popularity has received lots of media attention, their actual content is utterly off the radar of the kind of people who write about books. Nobody, it seems -- except, of course, for the series' millions of fans -- is reading Left Behind.

The Left Behind books actually play on that sense of being unfairly ignored, reveling in the moment when smug agnostics, insufficiently zealous Christians and, most of all, Jews realize how terribly wrong they were. As Gersholm Gorenberg wrote of the books in his "The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount," "Christianity's ancient, anxious amazement that the people who know the Old Testament best don't accept that it leads to Jesus (don't, in fact, accept that it is Old Testament) is at last disarmed."

Cannily, the authors make their protagonists disbelievers who are disdainful of fundamentalism. That means that doubters can relate to them and are thus drawn into their dawning religious consciousness, while believers get the satisfaction of seeing the heroes come around to their point of view. By having even minor characters recount their conversions, Jenkins and LaHaye make sure that each volume has moments when readers can enjoy a bit of high-minded revenge against mocking urbanites.

The writers take a special pleasure in the self-abnegation of supposedly sophisticated media types. In "The Remnant," a British reporter makes an appearance solely to explain her salvation. "All I can say is that the enemy has a stronghold over the mind until one surrenders to God," she says. "I was a pragmatist, proud, a journalist. I wanted control over my own destiny. Things had to be proved to me." Now born-again, she tells Steele that she's mystified by her former "lunacy."

Seeing the self-defeating delusions of erstwhile elites exposed may be the greatest pleasure the Left Behind books offer their readers.

The plotting alone certainly isn't enough to sustain attention in "The Remnant." That wasn't true of the first book -- theology aside, the setup of the original Left Behind makes for a strangely compelling thriller. The stage is the whole world gone mad, and the story roils with international intrigue. Jenkins and LaHaye are very good at turning esoteric biblical augury into real-world scenarios, and they get the action going before they start inserting too many sermons into the mix.

So simple fascination with a good story might have accounted for the book's initial success -- after all, audiences don't necessarily endorse the politics behind every action adventure they devour.

But by the time "The Remnant" starts, the suspense has pretty much died, because the story has the ultimate deus ex machina. Whenever things look grim for our heroes, when the enemy is closing in and there's nowhere to run, they're saved at the last minute by ... God. At the beginning of "The Remnant," Ben-Judah is encamped, Moses-like, with a million followers in the Jordanian desert. Carpathia's forces unleash a devastating bombing raid, but thanks to God, the resulting "massive sea of raging flames" leaves the so-called Judah-ites untouched. God can also be relied upon to speed up computer searches and drop plenty of nourishing manna on his blockaded flock. In the wittiest scene in "The Remnant," God is literally a co-pilot, sending an angel to help fly a plane during a tense getaway.

There's not much drama in the repeated victories of an omnipotent being, but that's not the only thing that makes "The Remnant" sluggish. In order to stretch out the series for so long, Jenkins and LaHaye have larded it with tedious subplots and countless techno-geek scenes in which a crafty Christian hacker named Chang sabotages Carpathia's plans or creates false identities for his comrades. About a third of "The Remnant" concerns the rescue of a Tribulation Force pilot named George Sebastian from Greece. The action mostly involves the characters driving around, splitting up, reconnoitering and then trying to find each other.

The Remnant has very little in the way of climactic good vs. evil showdowns. While there is a bit of supernatural deviltry (masses of vipers attack believers lured from Ben-Judah's protection by agents of the False Prophet) and some martyrdom (though not of any main characters), most of the story follows members of the Tribulation Force jetting around the globe running various errands. The nuclear annihilation of Chicago rates just a few lines, while the cellphone codes the Force uses to communicate gets several pages.

Left Behind cloaks itself in the conventions of ordinary airport thrillers, but it does far more than just provide a Christian alternative to decadent mainstream entertainment. It creates a Christian theory of everything, one that slates current events into a master narrative in which the world is destroyed and then remade to evangelical specifications. It's an alternate universe in which conservative Middle Americans are vindicated against everyone who doesn't share their beliefs -- especially liberals and Jews.

There's nothing wrong with that. Everyone is entitled to their fantasies. But LaHaye and Jenkins are at pains to show that the Left Behind books are meant as more than fiction. They write on the Left Behind Web site, "While it is true that in the broad spectrum of Protestant Christianity there are multiple views of the end-times scenario, the pre-millennialist theology found in the Left Behind Series is the prominent view among evangelical Christians, including their leading seminaries such as Talbot Seminary, Trinity Seminary and Dallas Theological Seminary."

So the rest of us can ignore Left Behind, or chuckle at its over-the-top Christian kitsch. We should keep in mind, though, that for some of the most powerful people in the world, this stuff isn't melodrama. It's prophecy.

Maybe modern day Druids have their own form of holocaust denial. It's hard to say since so little evidence exisits concerning the Druids and their beliefs. I can't help but notice that this little fact has not kept them from making an "ancient" religion out of whole cloth. I would hazard to guess that Roman historians were closer to the truth than todays Druids would like to believe. That whole time in history was brutal across the board so it seems the idea that Druids practiced some very nasty repression isn't really that far fetched.

I know a lot of New Agers and I find them just as intolerant as every other religion can tend to be. Their dislike of Chrisitans by the New Age movement is visceral. Of course if I had Christians telling me I was going to hell all the time it would tend to get my back up too. They go on and on about how Christians wiped out the "old religion". That is true they did but they overlook the the good things that Judeo-Christian thought brought to the modern world. Things like hospitals,public education, the end of slavery in the west, the sufferage of women etc. All these ideas had their start within the church. The Christian belief that everyone is equal in the eyes of God is something the New Age borrows from freely but rarely gives credit to the original source for. Although I do not agree with those who say the US is a Chrisitan country I will say that without it we would not have our wonderful constitution The contributions of Judeao-Christianity are mind boggling in their scope. If one weighs the contributions of the New Age to it there is no contest about who has been of greater benefit to humanity.Chrisitan ideals are the underpinning of so much of our modern day beliefs we take it for granted and just assume the world was always that way.

Althugh there are some common ideas betweeen Judism, Christianity and Islam, Islam has taken a different turn in the road totally. They have failed to "grow up" like the Jews and Chistians have. They still practice slavery, treat women like dirt and kill heretics. They have a world view that is totally incompatable with most everything we hold dear. If they stayed home and practiced that crap nooe would have a problem with it. It's when export it in that oh so special way they have that we a forced to do something. Given time they will probably get over it since there is a small active element within their faith that can see these ideas are wrong. The problem for us is we may have to kill a lot of them before they settle down.

I wish I heard that Art Bell interview. I usually tape his show ever night on my Versa-Corder but I must have missed that one Like you sometimes I wonder if I just have a problem with humanity in general. Let's face it they can sure be pretty darn grating at times :) Please forgive all the typos, spelling errors and oversights in grammer. I'm mostly a lurker and hardly ever post.

Just what is Judeao-Christianity? If it means both Old and New Testament, then Judeao-Christianity is another name for Christianity. So why not call it that?

But ironically, in practice, it seems to mean only Judaism (i.e., only the parts that both agree on).

An online dictionary (Websters, as I remember) says that "Judeao-Christianity" was only coined in 1899. So I assume it was coined in response to Jewish immgrantion. The newly arrived immigrants no doubt felt unnerved by the term "Christian America," because Jews have long associated Christianity with anti-Semitism.

If you think about it, "Judeao-Christian" is really an early PC term meaning "Christianity without anti-Semitism."

You're right about New Agers hating Christians, but it's especially true of neo-pagans (since there are people who consider themselves "New Age Christians" or "New Age Jews").

I think it is America and Israel against the world right now. The day we turn our backs on Israel is the day we will face the tribulation.

I hate it when people drag theology into politics. Makes me wish for more "separation of church and state."

I don't know, CB, I didn't take it that way at all. It's just a personal expression of support for Israel. I think it does seem like American and Israel against the world right now, religion completely aside. Don't you? Of course we have other allies, but their support can be shaky at times.

As far as the facing "the tribulation if we turn our backs on Israel"...that's just a personal belief, don't let it bug you.

The so-called "seperation of church and state" is about making sure American's are free to make the above statement without fear of government retribution. In other words, it is about protecting the Church FROM the State. The government should not endorse religion, but that's not the same as individuals in government having and expressing their own religion.

I guess I am saying I fear the oppression and persecution of religion far more than I fear an adoption of any state religion.

I don't concur with your interpretation of 2nd Thesselonians (chapter 2) but I do not wish to engage in a debate over scripture on the internet. I have done so before and it is frustrating, very time-consuming and ultimately, fruitless and divisive. Sooner or later, these discusssions always turn personal and nasty, as life and death issues are at stake. I don't need the stress and little is gained when two or more anonymous people post long messages debating scriptural meanings and playing 'dueling scriptures' back and forth on the internet. I will not do that.

I gather from your previous posts that you are eager to play the teacher and can be dismissive of others who do not share your theological views so I will simply state that while we have some disagreements over scriptural meanings, the Left Behind books, while not destructive, are somewhat misleading - but as you say, if they get the unsaved to at least consider the future and eventually go to scripture and even come to the Lord, that's fine. I don't really endorse them but I wouldn't stop someone from reading them, either, however I would certainly urge an unsaved 'fan' of the books to then go to scripture for the true story.

The problem is that the new Christian is totally unprepared to deal with Revelation and other deep scriptures. They need milk before they are ready for meat. When you take the unsaved or the simply curious into scriptural areas that even lifelong Christians with years of study still contend over the result is often confusion and eventually, a rejection of the whole Bible as 'a story'. I've seen this happen.

The 'Left Behind' series has merit and I'm glad it's well received but I still highly recommend the Bible, God's Word to his creation, first, before trusting secular ficton using the Bible as a vehicle to bring the unsaved to Christ.

I think it does seem like American and Israel against the world right now, religion completely aside.

Do most people in Latin America or Africa, or even the Pacific rim, know or care about the mideast. Maybe some, but not most, I think.

There's a great short story by Ray Bradbury. An American couple travel to Mexico, when they hear a radio report of nuclear war between the US and USSR. The husband screams about "the end of the world" and the need to return to the US. After he leaves, a Mexican peasant glances around, everything looks fine, and he wonders who was this crazy gringo screaming about the "end of the world."

The story is a parable about American tendency to imagine that anything that happens to them happens to "the world," or that most of the world is even aware of them.

I'm not a traveler, have not left the US since 1977 (I'm one of the many non-rich Republicans), but I think Bradbury likely hit on something.

Israel is so over-played in the US media. True, many are dying, but I'm sure many more (even per capita) are dying daily in hot spots across the globe. But we never hear of it. We think the US and Israel are the center of the world, and imagine that the world thinks likewise. I don't think they do. So I don't think that the "world is against the US and Israel."

And since I'm a libertarian, foreign non-interventionist, I don't think the US should be so closely "allied" to any nation. I wish we returned to out pre-1898 foreign policy (yes, it can be done!).

don't concur with your interpretation of 2nd Thesselonians (chapter 2) but I do not wish to engage in a debate over scripture on the internet.

Hey there, Jim Scott. I think you must have me confused with someone. I never offered an interpretation of 2 Thessalonians on this thread (or anywhere else)! I'm not sure what you mean when you say I'm dismissive of others' interpretations. Please, when making such accusations, show what you consider to be offensive, and we'll discuss it. I was just agreeing with Berned (on this thread) that the Left Behind books have done an overall service (in my opinion), in that they have caused Christians to think about the end times, and have caused others to think about Christianity. That's far different from arguing over Biblical interpretations (which I have NOT done here). And on the most important point, I absolutely agree with you. 'Tis far better to go to the source, the Bible, than to rely on Tim LaHaye's interpretations! Peace, brother.

Posted by Lonesome in Massachussets to Theresa On News/Activism Aug 5 7:34 AM #198 of 213 "I had already resolved the animal soul debate down to ants, snakes, etc by the time I was ten. "

Smarty! It took me much longer! "I do not think there were any antisemites among the sisters I knew. We were taught that it was our obligation to convert the Jews, by example and by encouraging them to find Christ. They we never presented as enemies, all non-believers were children of God who had not yet found "

This was exactly my experience too!

"That's how people felt about Jews in those days, I remember the then-young couple who ran the delicatessen had numbers tatooed on their arms and as a seven-year old could hardly believe and little comprehend my Mother's explanation. "

Okay I am FREAKING out. That is exactly my experience too. There was a couple named Alla and Rubin who ran a nearby delicatessen and they had blue numbers tattooed on their arms and I ASKED MY MOM ABOUT IT. How about that??!!!

"There weren't many Jews in our corner of Queens. "

I grew up in Dallas Texas, grade school in the 50's - 60's. Not a lot of Jews there. But I can't say I ever ran into anti-Semitism in school. Or in my family. Or my friend families. I was trained that the Jews were special to God. that's

"In H.S. I had some theologically semi-serious brothers, who did not presume to speak for God, (and of course some who did) and were intellectually stimulating. One thing I am certain of is that it was definely not Roman Catholic doctrine that non-Christians were going to Hell regardless of what O'Reilly says."

In HS I went to Ursuline Academy and we had GOOD religion classes that got into grown up type theology. I enjoyed those classes. I always made A's and B's in religion all through grade school and high school. It was my favorite subject. And my first real qestion about God was to my Dad when I was about seven years old. I was worried about the pygmies in Africa... would they go to hell? After all it was not their fault they had not heard about Jesus. It was an important question, me and God were going to have some serious problems if pygmies went to hell for something that was not their fault. Then my dad, and later the nuns, gave the Catholic teaching. Oh boy I was happy! Good is good. And Catholic teaching is wise and true.

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