Most likely nobody you know has read one, but more than 50 million books in the Left Behind series have sold in the past decade. Six of the 12 apocalyptic thrillers by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins have entered the New York Times best-seller list at number one. LaHaye is influential in more direct ways too: in the run-up to the 2000 election he co-led the Committee to Restore American Values, a group of evangelicals who subjected Republican candidates to a questionnaire to test their allegiance to the right-wing agenda. A former Baptist minister, he cofounded the Council for National Policy, the Concerned Women of America (headed by his wife, Beverly), and the California branch of the Moral Majority, all political Christian organizations, after leaving the pulpit in the early 80s. He advocates what amounts to theocratic government for the U.S. in his 2001 work of nonfiction, Mind Siege: The Battle for Truth. The Left Behind series and assorted spin-offs (graphic novels, Bible covers, a children’s series) are estimated to bring in at least $100 million a year, which LaHaye channels back into the Christian right.
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The first book in the series, Left Behind, was published in 1995, one year after Barbara Rossing joined the faculty of the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago in Hyde Park, where she’s now tenured. When she spoke in churches or in the classroom about Revelation, inevitably people would ask her what she thought of the novel. She didn’t read it until ’98 or ’99, and she didn’t think much of it. “[It’s] like a disaster movie with Bible verses thrown around in it,” she says. But by 2002, having read the whole series and studied the political activities of its authors, Rossing was writing a book of her own: The Rapture Exposed: The Message of Hope in the Book of Revelation, a work of theology and pop-culture criticism published in March 2004 by Westview Press. It’s due out in paperback, with a new preface, on July 5.
She wrote the book because she came to believe that the Left Behind interpretation was not only false but dangerous. “The mentality . . . that somehow God has laid out in advance a script for the end of the world, that things have to get worse and worse and this is somehow God’s will before the world can end and Jesus can return, taking everyone away–I think it’s terrible theology,” Rossing says. “Because then as the environment or anything gets worse, people will somehow think this is what the Bible says.”
During her time at Carleton, Rossing was grounded in her home church, St. John’s Lutheran. There was a Christian community on campus, she says, but they were “Crusaders for Christ types” who proselytized a Christianity influenced by Hal Lindsey’s then-popular doomsday polemic, The Late Great Planet Earth. Lindsey’s book interpreted the cold war through the lens of Darby-influenced Bible prophecy and predicted that the Rapture would happen any day now, to be followed shortly by World War III. “Lindsey’s got ‘Red China’ and the ‘yellow peril’ in there,” Rossing says. “He didn’t yet have the Muslim world as the enemy, but he kept ‘updating’ it over the years. . . . I call it the ‘Antichrist du jour’ mentality.”
In academia, Rossing says, her worldview is the common one. “I think pretty much every scholar on Revelation thinks what I’ve said. The only difference is that I’ve written a trade book that is more accessible, and I’ve made some connections to popular culture.” The reason no one else has written a book like hers, she says, is that “we thought the Left Behind books were so ridiculous that they didn’t need to be answered. They’re just pulp fiction. You don’t usually need to have scholars critiquing that level of novel. But then I discovered that everyone was reading them!
