slacktivist

L.B.: Cursed are the peacemakers

Left Behind, pp. 68-71

Our first real glimpse of Nicolae Carpathia comes through the eyes of Chaim Rosenzweig, who is rather impressed with him:

"I found him most charming and humble. ... Impressive, that's all I can say. ... He knew my language as well as his own. And he speaks fluent English. Several others also, they tell me. Well educated but also widely self taught. And I just like him as a person. Very bright. Very honest. Very open. ... a man of high ideals."

All of this sounds laudable and is meant to be interpreted favorably. But Rosenzweig also says the Magic Words regarding Carpathia -- the words that indicate to every premillennial dispensationalist "prophecy" buff that this man is clearly the Antichrist:

"... a peacemaker and leading a movement toward disarmament. ... I believe his goal is global disarmament."

That word -- "peacemaker" -- practically screams Antichrist. For LaHaye and Jenkins' intended readers, it wouldn't be any clearer if Carpathia had the number "666" tattooed on his forehead and went by the nickname "Horny Beast."

For those not initiated into the cabalistic logic of PMD prophecy freaks, this seems counter-intuitive. Peace, after all, is generally regarded by Scripture as a Good Thing. Peace is one of the fruits of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22). The Messiah is described as the "Prince of Peace" (Isaiah 9:6-7). Peace is often spoken of by God's angels, including the heavenly host of the Christmas story in Luke 2 (cue Linus), who sing, "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men."

Since we're on the subject, a few more examples:

Psalm 34:14: "Turn from evil and do good; seek peace and pursue it."

Isaiah 32:17: "The fruit of righteousness will be peace."

Matthew 5:9: "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called the children of God."

Ephesians 2:17: "He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near."

James 3:18: "Peacemakers who sow in peace raise a harvest of righteousness."

We could go on, and on, and on. Peace is a pretty major theme in the Bible.

But none of this matters to the prophecy nuts who are convinced that the Antichrist will be a man of peace. And since they believe that the most important thing for Christians to do is to be on the lookout against the Antichrist, and vigilantly opposed to his evil ways, they believe that Christians must oppose anyone who speaks of, pursues, or tries to make, peace.

This is one of the most astonishing and dangerous aspects of the popularity of the End Times heresies promoted by people like LaHaye and Jenkins. It is one of this biggest reasons why this matters -- deeply, truly, seriously matters.

Tens of millions of copies of the Left Behind books have been sold. That doesn't just mean that tens of millions of our fellow citizens have horrible taste in literature. It also means they are being taught to oppose -- to condemn as immoral and ungodly -- any effort that goes under the name "peacemaking."

Since they believe the Antichrist will rule over a one world government, these readers are also being taught to fear, loathe and oppose the United Nations and anything that smacks of multilateral or international cooperation. (We'll see much more about the UN as we get further into L.B.)

Oddly, the PMD prophecy heretics often have a hard time explaining exactly why it is that they believe the Antichrist will be "a man of peace." They love to quote (and twist) the Bible, but if you press them on this point, they're far more likely to quote instead from the received wisdom of some other "prophecy scholar." LaHaye is just saying it because Hal Lindsay said it. And Lindsay was just repeating Scofield and Ironsides. And those guys were just repeating Darby, who concocted the whole convoluted scheme and is notoriously hard to follow.

Dig deep enough to find their alleged biblical basis for this belief that peace is Bad and you'll find them relying on one of two passages.

The first is from 1 Thessalonians 5:3, " While people are saying, 'Peace and safety,' destruction will come on them suddenly."

The second is even more obscure, Daniel 8:25 includes the phrase ""he will destroy many while they are at ease." In the King James Version, this reads, "and by peace shall destroy many." The subject of that passage is a Greek king (usually thought to be Antiochus Epiphanes who profaned the Temple in Jerusalem during his reign in 175-163 B.C.). But prophecy nuts don't worry much about the apparent subject of any given biblical passage. For them, the subject of every bit of Scripture about something bad is really, secretly, for readers who appreciate the arcane secrets of prophetic interpretation, the Antichrist.

And that is why many American Christians oppose any effort to bring peace to the Middle East. No, really, that's why. Because of Daniel 8:25.

L.B.: Unmotivated Close-up

Left Behind, pp. 68-71

Buck Williams' role as a journalist provides a useful device for long stretches of exposition without departing from the protagonist's point of view (one of many tropes borrowed from Sydney Watson's earlier rapture novels).

Jerry Jenkins' clumsy employment of this device often results in strange passages like this one, in which Buck reviews his notes from an interview with the Magical Jew, Chaim Rosenzweig, wherein the miracleworker discusses an obscure Romanian politician.

It's a bit odd for Buck to be reviewing this particular section of this particular interview just now. He just received an e-mail from his boss telling him he's in charge of investigating and reporting on the worldwide mass disappearances. You and I might consider that to be his most urgent priority. The disappearances, after all, are a top candidate for Biggest News Story of All Time.

But neither Buck nor his boss considers this the most important story. The editor is more worried about a pair of Jewish conferences gathering soon in New York City. (Jews in New York -- now that's news.) Steve Plank is convinced those wily Jews are Up To Something and no story is more vital than prying into the secrets of their international conspiracies.

(Inexplicably, the planning of these conferences isn't even slightly delayed by the mass disappearances and the resulting shutdown of air travel. Even as our hero goes to great lengths and great expense to charter a private plane to NYC, everyone else -- Jewish nationalists, Romanian diplomats, members of the Parliament of World Religions -- seems able to continue their travel plans to that city without interruption or delay.)

Buck's own obsession is with the Romanian, mentioned briefly at the end of his boss's long rant about the Jews. This was the literary equivalent of Roger Ebert's "Unmotivated Close-up" rule, so Buck astutely realizes that any person thus singled out must be more significant than he at first seems.

Add to this that the man's name is Nicolae Carpathia. It's almost impossible to read that without hearing a swell of ominous organ music on the soundtrack. (Frau ... Blucher!)

Nicolae Carpathia is, in fact, the Antichrist. This has been made explicitly obvious to the reader, but it's something that Buck could not yet have any way of knowing. Perhaps this shows his vaunted journalistic instincts at work. Others might see the vanishing of billions of people as the bigger story, but the rise of the Antichrist to worldwide dominion is just as newsworthy -- and Buck is onto that story long before anyone else.

By fortuitous coincidence, Buck had already learned a great deal about Carpathia. It turns out that in his interview with Rosenzweig, the doctor had gone off on a tangent about one of his hobbies. When he's not busy inventing miracle formulas that make the deserts bloom, Rosenzweig apparently likes to study "the lower house of Romanian government." Who doesn't?

"Don't feel bad that you don't know" such things, Rosenzweig tells Buck:

"... even though you are an international journalist. This is something only Romanians and amateur political scientists like me know. That is something I like to study."

We'll get back to Carpathia and what Rosenzweig had to say about him soon, but I need to post this now so I can get back to one of my favorite hobbies. I like to read up on Estonian appellate courts.

Blessed Solstice

Blessed Solstice! In commemoration of this ancient holiday, now under siege from cultural elitists, we provide the following guest editorial from Charles Krauthammer of The Washington Post.

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It is Winter Solstice, and what would Solstice be without the usual platoon of annoying pettifoggers rising annually to infuse Solstice with Christian content? With some success:

School districts in New Jersey and Florida ban Solstice carols, even going so far as to replace the traditional Solstice lyrics of the "Scheydryk," with inane, Christianized lyrics about bells, bells, bells. The mayor of Somerville, Mass., apologizes for "mistakenly" referring to the traditional 12-day revelry in praise of Marduk as "the Twelve Days of Christmas." Shopping malls across South Florida have erected "Christmas trees" with no mention of the custom's Druidic origins. The manager of one of the malls explains: the tree represents Christmas, and that's a Christian holiday, though he hastens to add, "I really don't know a lot about it." He does not. The tree represents the midwinter hope for the rebirth of the sun, and there is nothing more pre-Christian than that.

The attempts to Christianize, or Christmas-ize Solstice are as absurd as they are relentless. The examples I have provided -- a handful of school districts, a small-city mayor and a few shopping malls -- demonstrate just how very relentless and pervasive this crisis is.

Some Americans get angry at parents who want to celebrate Saturnalia because they tremble that their kids might feel "different" and "uncomfortable" should they hear anything other than majority Christian music sung at their school. I feel pity. What kind of fragile religious identity have they bequeathed their children that it should be threatened by exposure to the ancient celebrations of the Unconquered Sun?

I'm struck by the fact that you almost never find genuine Christians clamoring for a Christmas creche in the public square. That is because their children, steeped in the richness of their own religious tradition, know who they are and do not need to impose their religion on the rest of the public.

It is the thewless members of religious majorities -- brought up largely ignorant of their own traditions except for in their hegemonic, assimilated, civil-religious forms -- whose religious identity is so tenuous that they think that the solution to their predicament is to insist on the extravagant and public display of official support for their religion.

It is time that members of religious (and civil-religious) majorities, as full citizens of this miraculous republic, transcend petty defensiveness.

Blessed Solstice. To all.

L.B.: Get in line

Left Behind, pg. 68

It was nearly Buck Williams's turn at the head of the line at the Pan-Con Club counter ...

Buck has clawed his way back to the terminal at O'Hare and worked his way into a line at the counter.

This doesn't really make sense -- the airport is clearly closed, it's runways cluttered with burning wrecks and a still-unknown quantity of its staff vanished or dead. All the airports are obviously closed. Faced with an unprecedented local disaster as well as a mysterious and unprecedented global disaster it hardly seems likely that a Pan-Continental Airlines customer service agent will be able to offer much assistance, so why wait in line to get to the counter?

Yet this irrational behavior on the part of Buck and the others in line is one of the first things in the book to ring somewhat true. This might actually happen. Faced with an overwhelming, incomprehensible situation and carnage on a massive scale he sees a line of people and a person in uniform with an official-looking badge of some sort at the head of the line. What are they in line for? Who knows? But surely all these people wouldn't be in line if it weren't for something important. And if he doesn't hurry up and grab a spot in line then others will just get there ahead of him.

Buck thinks of himself as a man of action, and confronted with the situation before him he acts. He gets in line. Others, frantic, may still be wandering in a panicky daze -- We have to do something! Buck is doing something. He's waiting in line.

It never occurs to the authors, or to Buck, that he might be in any way obliged, as an able-bodied young man, to participate in the desperate rescue efforts going on all around him. On the other hand, back on pages 10-14, Buck Williams personally witnessed an all-out nuclear assault in which the entire Russian arsenal was spent but no one was killed or even injured. After seeing something like that, he may no longer be able to appreciate the significance of a mere few dozen jumbo jetliner crashes.

During that nuclear assault, Buck had kept his wits about him enough to remember that he was a reporter. He observed and reported. But now his only journalistic instinct is to hurry back to the office, ignoring everything that's happening around him.

Our hero journalist does not behave like either a hero or a journalist. Instead, a bit absurdly, he sets out to charter a private plane by getting into the very long line at the counter of an airline that does not provide such a service.

The further I get in this book, the more Buck reminds me of Arthur Dent from Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker series. The main difference being that Arthur, at least, realized that he was a confused and selfish man overwhelmed by the absurd events unfolding around him. And Buck, unlike Arthur, really is a jerk, a total kneebiter.