12.7.04
The Apocalypse Is Just Around the Corner
Tim LaHaye’s “Glorious Appearing”
By
Betsey Culp
When I was 11 or 12, a woman named Jean Henderson
joined the little Presbyterian church I attended. She volunteered to teach
Sunday school and ended up, by choice or by luck, with a class of junior
high school girls, including me.
Miss Henderson took her mission seriously. Or perhaps
she just liked the company of young people. In any case, she soon
instituted a Wednesday evening social hour in her tiny apartment, where we
— five or six of us — sat on the floor, eating cookies and talking.
As I recall, the conversation was pretty secular, and
pretty unmemorable. There couldn’t have been any overt sermonizing or we
wouldn’t have kept going back. Our hostess was a good listener, and much
of the time she sat smiling in her chair while we chattered away.
But she did have one requirement: at every session
she assigned us a Bible verse to memorize during the following week. One
week she offered us the simplicity of John 3:16 —
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his
only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but
have everlasting life.” Another week she presented us with the
intellectual pyrotechnics of Hebrews 11:1 — “Now faith is the substance of
things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”
There was never much
discussion of the verses. I think we learned them mainly because we liked
our teacher and she valued them. It wasn’t until years later that I
realized how important the little ritual must have been for her.
Jean Henderson was a tiny
dark-haired woman from somewhere down south. She told us that she had been
raised in a strict fundamentalist home, from which she was ejected when
she began to wear lipstick and go to the movies. That was when she moved
north and she found a clerical job. To my young eyes, she seemed
dreadfully middle-aged — a proper spinster — but she was probably in her
mid-20s. Her youthful rebellion hadn’t led her very far astray, and it was
hard to imagine her flirting or going out on a date. She spoke of her
ostracism with great sorrow, as though she had been cast out of the Garden
of Eden. But maybe the analogy is a false one: she never showed the
slightest desire to go back. Instead, she became a soft-spoken Miss Jean
Brodie, instilling in her “girls” a respect for the traditions she had
left behind.
After that year, I don’t
think I ever saw her again. The church started a social organization for
teenagers, and I threw myself into the titillation of boy-girl
relationships. But I assume — I hope — that Miss Jean Henderson took
another group of girls under her wing and showed them the quiet pleasures
of old-fashioned Christian fellowship.
It was thus in a nostalgic
frame of mind that I began to read
Tim LaHaye’s “Glorious Appearing.” If you haven’t come across
the book — the clerk at A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books hadn’t — it’s
the latest (number 12) in a Christian-fiction series called “Left Behind,”
set after the end of the world as we know it.
In the publishing world,
this series is big, says
Ira J. Hadnot of the Dallas Morning News: “The 12 Left Behind
books have sold 42 million copies, counting both paperback and hardcover
sales. When children's editions, graphic novels and the like are counted,
the figure is 62 million. In addition, there are spinoff products, from
calendars and music CDs to greeting cards and computer software.”
These are presumably the
books that George W. Bush’s faith-based supporters are reading. So I
decided to see what they were all about. I figured that, as the Christian
Right’s answer to Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings, these books
might not be well written but at least they’d spin an exciting yarn.
Wrong.
Imagine 400 pages that
alternate between scenes from a very gory video game and excerpts from
sermons.
Imagine dull.
Admittedly, I may have
chosen the wrong book. The series begins — forgive me if I’ve gotten some
of the finer points wrong — with the Rapture, the end-of-the-world moment
when all Christians are taken to heaven. Two weeks later Antichrist signs
a covenant with Israel, beginning the seven-year Tribulation, a time of
constant warfare for control of the world, when most of the series takes
place. At the end of this period, when Jesus returns to earth, everyone
who is still an unbeliever perishes. Everyone who became a Christian after
the Rapture is spared, and they join their deceased believing loved ones
to enter the millennial kingdom where Jesus reigns. (There are more
complications at the end of the Millennium, but that is apparently outside
the scope of the series.)
“Glorious Appearing”
describes Jesus’s Second Coming. The characters quite naturally tend to
turn their attention heavenward, which may partially account for its lack
of excitement. I’ve heard that an earlier volume includes the simultaneous
destruction of major cities all over the world. But nevertheless, it’s
hard to believe that anything could top the final battle between Christ
and Antichrist.
It turns out, though, that
the poor forces of evil haven’t a chance. At the battle of Armageddon,
Jesus says, “What has been determined shall be done.” And that’s it:
The great army was in
pandemonium, tens of thousands at a time screaming in terror and pain and
dying in the open air. Their blood poured from them in great waves,
combining to make a river that quickly became a swamp.
In spite of the almost-constant violence, there is a
strangely static quality to the book, perhaps because the outcome of the
battles is pre-ordained. There is much rejoicing when non-believers
convert — the numbers are recorded on a website — but even the hope of
salvation loses its dramatic appeal in a world where God hardens some
people’s hearts so they will never believe.
In a world where belief in the divinity of Jesus is
the only salvation, good and evil fade in importance. Human actions lose
their value. In the end, the main characteristic in “Glorious Appearing”
that distinguishes Antichrist from his opponents is his deplorable
manners. Human relationships, usually the fonts of fictional tension, also
lose their power to compel: “In the back of [one character’s] mind was the
prospect — soon, he hoped — of reunions with loved ones. But having Jesus
in their midst made everyone think only of Him.”
In a place like San Francisco, it’s hard to take
sentiments like this seriously. But millions and millions of Americans
obviously do. While I was reading “Glorious Appearing” over the weekend, I
flipped on Channel 2 just in time to catch an address by
Billy Graham. Yes, he said, he was very aware of the prophecies
concerning the end of the world. And from what he could see of the world
today, most of them have come true.
I recalled a DVD that I watched before the election
called
“George W. Bush: Faith in the White House,” which was not shown on our
local stations but reached millions elsewhere through Christian networks.
Even in the White House, faith trumps action: if we are to believe the
message of the movie, Bush is a great president not because of his record
as a war president or because of his economic programs; he is great
because (1) he is a believer, and because (2) he takes time out of his
busy schedule to sympathize with people who mourn.
Talk about the resurgence of the Christian Right is nothing new. Although
the mainstream press tends to overlook it, other religious groups have
been watching.
Tom Sine, a contributor to the progressive evangelical magazine
Sojourner, writes, “LaHaye's writings tend to foster both an eschatology
of disengagement and the politics of fear…. Implicit in this kind of
literature is a fatalistic view of the future and a degenerative view of
history. As a consequence many Christians who ardently embrace this view
insist that ‘the Bible teaches that everything is destined to get worse
and worse, so it makes absolutely no sense to work for social change. The
best we can do is to get a few more people in that salvation life boat
before Jesus comes back.’”
The Rev. Davidson Loehr, of the First Unitarian Universalist Church of
Austin, Texas, makes even more ominous connections: “Governments in
fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a
tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is
common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion
are diametrically opposed to the government's policies or actions.”
LaHaye himself has forged another kind of political link. On November 10
the
Rev. Jerry Falwell announced the formation of a new coalition, a "21st
century resurrection of the Moral Majority” designed to “maintain
an evangelical revolution of
voters.” The Moral
Majority Coalition includes a four-point platform:
(1) TMMC will conduct
an intensive four-year "Voter Registration Campaign" through America's
conservative churches, para-church ministries, pro-life and pro-family
organizations.
(2) TMMC will conduct
well organized "Get-Out-The-Vote Campaigns" in 2006 and 2008.
(3) TMMC will engage
in the massive recruitment and mobilization of social conservatives
through television, radio, direct mail (U.S.P.S. and Internet) and public
rallies.
(4) TMMC will
encourage the promotion of continuous private and corporate prayer for
America's moral renaissance based on 2 Chronicles 7:14. [“If
my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray,
and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from
heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.”]
Falwell will serve as national chairman;
the chairman of the board is Tim LaHaye.
I bet they won’t be sitting on the floor, eating
cookies and talking.