Left Behind What?
We were talking (somewhere) about the Left Behind series, and the Rapture, and that nice Tim LaHaye fella. And then coincidentally I was browsing around, tidying up attics and things (figuratively speaking), and found an old Comment on the subject. Very old. So old that I’m just giving you the whole month instead of the Permalink – because the whole month is only four brief items. Isn’t that sweet? That was when B&W was brand spanking new, fresh out of the bandbox. I wasn’t as talkative then, either because I was too busy hammering joists and looking for the blueprints, or because we were still deciding on format, content, timing, etc. I don’t remember.
Anyway. I found him and what he said just as repulsive as I thought I had.
When Jesus shouts in the sky and all the believers are instantly taken up into heaven, to leave the rest of us down here to be tortured for all eternity (after a great deal of to-ing and fro-ing with End Times and tribulations and killing all the Jews and the Anti-christ and never being able to find a parking space)…I was repelled but not at all surprised by the obvious relish plus loathing in LaHaye’s voice when he talked about all the people who refused to ‘call on God’ (and thus were doomed doomed doomed), about the way they ree-bell, and their attitude. And the air of faintly surprised generosity with which he said he hoped that as many as a billion people might be saved. And the naive fatuity with which he said that because Jesus said ‘Whosoever believes…’ that means he meant everyone, without stopping to reflect that Jesus didn’t actually speak English or that the translation might possibly not bear out his interpretation. But I was (I shouldn’t have been, but I was) a little surprised to learn that the rapture crowd believe that the Bible predicts that ‘one world government’ and world peace are part of the plan of the Anti-christ. Not figuratively but literally. Now there’s a reassuring thought. And there are 50 million of them sold.
There’s an interesting item here that provides a lengthy synopsis-critique of the first Left Behind novel. It’s quite funny in an enraged sort of way.
You know, Ronald Reagan believed in all this crap, and it wouldn’t surprise me if Bush does. It’s one thing to get incensed — and rightfully so — at True Believers who insist that our elementary school loyalty oath have the words “under God” in it or lobby for the inclusion of magic in science curricula. But that stuff isn’t really so outrageous when you consider that there are people who control nuclear weapons who at least lend an ear to people who have a literal belief in Biblical prophecy, and perhaps even believe in it themselves.
Even if you were a Christian, how could you vote for somebody like that?
I know, I know. Reagan scared the hell out of me for just that reason. Bush does for that and a lot of reasons.
I will say, though, that for schlock, the Left Behind novels (or at least the first one, which I’ve skimmed) are pretty well written — I’d say better than the bit of Crichton I’ve read, and certainly better than _The Da Vinci Code_ (If you gave 1000 monkeys at 1000 typewriters 3 hours to summarize _Foucault’s Pendulum_, I don’t know what you’d get, but I’m pretty sure an editor could make more of it than _The Da Vinci Code_) So it’s possible that some of the Left Behind popularity is because pot-boilers are popular, and these are pretty good pot-boilers.
Or at least I’d like to comfort myself with that thought, rather than just assume they’re popular because 1/4 of Americans want to rebuild the Temple of Jerusalem so that the eschaton can be immanentized.
Mmmyeah but hard to believe though. I like a good potboiler now and then – Crichton for example – but I can’t imagine that all the rapture stuff wouldn’t put me off. So even with the potboiler aspect it seems plausible that most people don’t mind the rapture stuff – which I find creeeeeepy.
How ever repulsive we find “that nice Tim LaHaye fella”, we have to recognize that his attitude is not peculiar to fundamentalist protestantism. I commend to your attention an article by Antony Flew, “Human Freewill and Divine Predestination”, Issue 40 (March/April 2003) of _Philosophy Now_.
At one point Flew describes Thomas Aquinas (alleged saint) as a “devotedly complacent apparatchik”,
and adds:
“He sees no problem about the justice of either the inflicting of infinite and everlasting penalties for finite and temporal offences or of their being inflicted upon creatures for offences which their Creator makes them such that they freely choose to commit. He justifies this opinion with a quote from _Summa Theologiae_:
“In order that the happiness of the saints may be more delightful to them
and that they may render more copious thanks to God . . . they are allowed to see perfectly the sufferings of the damned . . . the Divine justice and their own deliverance will be the direct cause of the joy of the blessed, while the pains of the damned will cause it indirectly . . . The blessed in glory will have no pity for the damned.”
So, however odious we may find LaHaye’s opinion, it may well be the most orthodox aspect of his belief.
Oh I know. One reason I loathe Christianity. Dante’s delight in all that eternal punishment, for example.
And there are all those 19th and 20th century novels and memoirs about children of religious parents who are terrorized with hell-talk – Alton Locke for example, and Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist. Samuel Johnson was terrified of death, and when Boswell asked him why, he snapped, ‘Because of the judgment, of course!’ (Or words to that effect.) We’re told that religion is consoling but the fact is that it has always also been extremely terrifying. People seriously literally believed they would be physically tortured for eternity – it’s disgusting. (It certainly made Lucretius indignant.)