Fred Clark has, for I think the past year or so if not longer, been doing a running, chapter by chapter review of the first book in the apocalyptic fundamentalist hit book series, Left Behind.  If you haven’t checked in on it yet you should, because while it may seem that taking a serious, critical look at Left Behind is like shooting fish in a barrel, Fred not only brings to it his editorial knowledge (he works for a local newspaper where he lives), he also brings to bear his own sincere and deeply held Baptist faith (he’s a Baptist in the sense that I once, in a world long ago and far, far away, thought of the word…), and with it a humanity utterly absent from the scribblings of LaHaye and Jenkins.  It must be a painful chore, but after so long his readers can tell Fred’s committed to it, because it’s important to him that people see what the likes of LaHaye and Jenkins have done to his faith, and are doing, still, to their followers.

I bring it up, because this week’s episode finds Fred, once again, pounding on the one, overreaching flaw in the series, the thing that taints every word of it from the get-go.  And you see that flaw in how strangely indifferent the characters of the novels are, to the sudden disappearance of millions of people…

Buck Williams and Steve Plank have been watching the Two Witnesses of Revelation 11 on CNN. They don’t wear sackcloth and they don’t shoot fire out of their mouths, but two guys who tried to kill them tripped, fell over and died, then one of them claimed to be the Messiah before they both settled back into chanting that Jesus was the Messiah. CNN’s Dan Bennett, bored already with the chanting, signs off, promising to record anything else that happens and to report on it after the fact.

Marge and a few others on the staff had drifted into Steve’s office during the telecast. "If that doesn’t beat all," one said. "What a couple of kooks."

If you ever met someone, in real life, who talked like the characters in Left Behind, it would become a story you told for the rest of your life. "No, for real," you would say to your friends, who had heard this story a dozen times, but still enjoyed it while half-doubting that it really could have happened. "It was six years ago, at the airport, and the guy actually said, ‘If that doesn’t beat all, what a couple of kooks,’ just like that. And then he said something about ‘coming on like gangbusters.’ …"

But it’s not that they don’t talk like real people talk…it’s that they’re missing something that real people, mostly, have…

Buck decides to stick up for the kooks:

"… What a couple of kooks."

"Which two?" Buck said. "You can’t say the preachers, whoever they are, didn’t warn ’em."

Actually, you can say they didn’t "warn ’em" because they didn’t warn ’em. Instead, they started out with a lethal little object lesson — kill the first two and the others will get the idea. It was only after killing those two that they informed the rest of the crowd that this is what would happen to anyone who tried to harm them. That’s a rather vivid warning, but it came a little late for those first two dead guys.

The authors have gotten confused here. They have read Revelation 11:5, which says of the witnesses that "anyone who wants to harm them must die." That warning seems to be what they have in mind when they have Buck weirdly assert that the preachers "warned" their attackers that they would be devoured by flame and/or trip and die. But the authors seem to forget that Buck and Dan Bennett and, most importantly, the two trip-and-die guys, have not read Revelation 11:5 and thus were not privy to this warning.

The central conceit of the Left Behind books, is that it’s a future history according to the Dispensational Millenialism theology of it’s authors.  Events in the book of Revelations, taken at literal face value by crackpot fundamentalists, begin happening throughout the world, and are witnessed by the central characters in the book…a group of sinners who were "left behind" after the rapture.

There’s a problem here…and it runs throughout the book.

"What’s going on over there," someone else asked.

"All I know," Buck said, "is that things happen there that no one can explain."

Two weeks ago, Buck’s co-workers would have been impressed by that comment. A year before, you’ll recall, Buck had been "over there," in Israel, when the Ruso-Ethiopian Air Force launched a full-scale, doomsday nuclear assault, concentrating its entire arsenal on that tiny country. And no one was killed. No one was even hurt. And Buck was right in the middle of it, watching this According to Hoyle miracle unfold before his eyes. Buck had seen something happen "that no one can explain." Two weeks ago, that made him special.

But that was two weeks ago. He’s not special anymore.

Last Monday, a third of the planet vanished faster than you can blink, without a trace, without an explanation. The entire world has seen something "that no one can explain." There are no more children anymore and no one knows how or why or what happened. Compared to The Event, even Buck’s bona fide nuclear miracle seems a little less impressive. Compared to the confounding, incomprehensible, world-altering Event, a couple of guys tripping and dying scarcely registers on anyone’s personal list of unexplainable happenings.

Look at this.  Really look at it.  LaHaye and Jenkins are writing about events that have happened after what must be the greatest calamity that the human race has ever faced.  Not only have millions of adults suddenly vanished from the face of the earth, but so has every single child.  There are no children anymore!  To everyone left alive after such a cataclysmic event, it would have to seem as if the world had suddenly ended.  There is no future left for humanity.  This is it.  Finito.  Done.  End of story.

And yet the characters drawn by LaHaye and Jenkins seem utterly indifferent to that.  They just go on about their lives.

There’s a reason for that…

"If that doesn’t beat all …" No, you moron, it doesn’t. Every child on the face of the earth simultaneously vanishing and no one knowing why beats all. With prejudice. All has been beaten, decisively, and all won’t be coming back for Round 2.

The next thing Buck says is, "I’ve got to get to JFK." In the context, I at first took this to mean that he had decided to fly to Israel to check out these preachers for himself. (Buck likes to fly all over the world investigating stories. Someday weeks from now, if he finds time, he may even write something about one of them.) But what he meant was that he had to get to JFK to meet a flight attendant he spoke with once, briefly, for a few minutes, so that he can take her to meet the president of Romania in his hotel.

As he leaves for the airport, Buck doesn’t give a second thought to any of the things that no one can explain. He’s not thinking about the witnesses and the trip-and-die guys. He’s not thinking about The Event, or about the international criminal conspiracy whose secrets he has promised not to reveal, or about his betrayal of his slain friend Dirk, or his likely complicity in the suspicious death of rival reporter Eric Miller, or about how he’s well on his way to missing his second consecutive weekly deadline. He is thinking, instead, of the promotion he has just been offered:

Buck knew Steve was right. He was going to have to accept the promotion just to protect himself from other pretenders. He didn’t want to be obsessed with it all day. Buck was glad for the diversion of seeing Hattie Durham. His only question now was whether he would recognize her. They had met under most traumatic circumstances. 

In his article for Vanity Fair, American Rapture, Craig Unger tells of walking with a group of the faithful, led by their prophet LaHaye, to the very place where the longed for battle of Armageddon will occur… 

On a scorching afternoon in May, Tim LaHaye, the 79-year-old co-author of the "Left Behind" series of apocalyptic thrillers, leads several dozen of his acolytes up a long, winding path to a hilltop in the ancient fortress city of Megiddo, Israel. LaHaye is not a household name in the secular world, but in the parallel universe of evangelical Christians he is the ultimate cultural icon. The author or co-author of more than 75 books, LaHaye in 2001 was named the most influential American evangelical leader of the past 25 years by the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals. With more than 63 million copies of his "Left Behind" novels sold, he is one of the best-selling authors in all of American history. Here, a group of about 90 evangelical Christians who embrace the astonishing theology he espouses have joined him in the Holy Land for the "Walking Where Jesus Walked" tour.

Megiddo, the site of about 20 different civilizations over the last 10,000 years, is among the first stops on our pilgrimage, and, given that LaHaye’s specialty is the apocalypse, it is also one of the most important. Alexander the Great, Saladin, Napoleon, and other renowned warriors all fought great battles here. But if Megiddo is to go down in history as the greatest battlefield on earth, its real test is yet to come. According to the book of Revelation, the hill of Megiddo – better known as Armageddon – will be the site of a cataclysmic battle between the forces of Christ and the Antichrist.

To get a good look at the battlefields of the apocalypse, we take shelter under a makeshift lean-to at the top of the hill. Wearing a floppy hat to protect him from the blazing Israeli sun, LaHaye yields to his colleague Gary Frazier, the tour organizer and founder of the Texas-based Discovery Ministries, Inc., to explain what will happen during the Final Days.

Like they’ve seen it in their dreams, a thousand times… 

Once Christ joins the battle, both the Antichrist and the False Prophet are quickly captured and cast alive into a lake of fire burning with brimstone. Huge numbers of the Antichrist’s supporters are slain.

Meanwhile, an angel exhorts Christ, "Thrust in thy sickle, and reap." And so, Christ, sickle in hand, gathers "the vine of the earth."

Then, according to Revelation, "the earth was reaped." These four simple words signify the end of the world as we know it.

Grapes that are "fully ripe"- billions of people who have reached maturity but still reject the grace of God – are now cast "into the great winepress of the wrath of God." Here we have the origin of the phrase "the grapes of wrath." In an extraordinarily merciless and brutal act of justice, Christ crushes the so-called grapes of wrath, killing them. Then, Revelation says, blood flows out "of the winepress, even unto the horse bridles, by the space of a thousand and six hundred furlongs."

With its highly figurative language, Revelation is subject to profoundly differing interpretations. Nevertheless, LaHaye’s followers insist on its literal truth and accuracy, and they have gone to great lengths to calculate exactly what this passage of Revelation means.

As we walk down from the top of the hill of Megiddo, one of them looks out over the Jezreel Valley. "Can you imagine this entire valley filled with blood?" he asks. "That would be a 200-mile-long river of blood, four and a half feet deep. We’ve done the math. That’s the blood of as many as two and a half billion people."

We’ve done the math…   Read that again.  "We’ve done the math."  What kind of person goes to the trouble to calculate to the corpse, exactly how many human beings have to be crushed like grapes at the hand of the man who once said that to love God, and your neighbor as yourself, was the greatest commandment.  I recall reading after the last book in the series was published, that someone asked LaHaye how hard it would be for God’s Chosen to go on living after having witnessed almost four fifths or more of the human race cast into hell for eternity…many of whom must have been family and dear friends…

Jesus merely raised one hand a few inches and a yawning chasm opened in the earth, stretching far and wide enough to swallow all of them. They tumbled in, howling and screeching, but their wailing was soon quashed and all was silent when the earth closed itself again
-Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, Glorious Appearing

…and LaHaye averred that God would probably, in kindness, erase the memory of it from everyone’s mind.  But why would God have to, if the faithful are all as empty inside as LaHaye.  Without a doubt LaHaye could go on living just fine after having watched all the heathens, all the intellectuals, all his betters, everyone he’s despised all his life for being more gloriously human then he could ever hope to become, cast into fire for eternity by a loving God.  He’s the kind who, if he was a good Party Member in the Germany of the 1930s and 40s, he’d have shoveled Jews into the ovens and gone home to kiss his wife, tuck his children into bed, and listen to a little Bach before turning in for the night.  All of them could.  That’s why they’re fundamentalists.  They have no inner compass for managing human relationships.  No instinctive sense of sympathy and decency.  They need rules.  But even more, they need someone to blame for that inner void that keeps nagging at them, keeps reminding them of everything fine and noble and decent a human being can be, that they are not.  They need scapegoats.  They need someone to hate, so they don’t have to hate themselves.

This is why the characters in LaHaye and Jenkins novel can walk around in a world where all the children have suddenly vanished and worry about their job promotions.  They act like they’re oblivious, because their creators are oblivious.  But they know down to the corpse how many bodies it takes to fill the valley of Armageddon with blood up to a horse’s bridle.

[Edited a tad…]