TF: Bruce's sermon, part 1

Tribulation Force, pp. 60-63

So the second thing that needs to be said about this sermon by the Rev. Bruce Barnes is that it's not very good.

Well, to say that Bruce's sermon isn't very good would be like saying the Great Wall of China isn't very short. But it wouldn't have mattered much if this had been a good sermon, or even a great sermon, because the first thing that needs to be said about this sermon here is that it's simply the wrong sermon -- the wrong sermon at the wrong time, for the wrong audience, delivered in the wrong way.

That's not how Rayford Steele thinks of it. He sits in the pew anticipating another thrilling dose of his favorite sentiment: earnestness.

Few people who sat under the earnest and emotional teaching of Bruce Barnes could come away doubting that the vanishings had been the work of God. The church had been snatched away, and they had all been left behind. Bruce's message was that Jesus was coming again in what the Bible called "the glorious appearing" seven years after the beginning of the Tribulation. By then, he said, three-fourths of the world's remaining population would be wiped out, and probably a larger percentage of believers in Christ. Bruce's exhortation was not a call to the timid. It was a challenge to the convinced, to those who had been persuaded ...

Jesus is coming again again. It's a bit confusing to read this summary of "Bruce's message" before Bruce gets up and delivers that message, but it suggests part of the problem with what is to follow here. The paragraph quoted above comes immediately after the one that describes the congregation of New Hope Village Church as "grieving," "terror-stricken" and "looking for hope." So Bruce gets up to give a sermon that is, expressly, not for the timid, but for those already wholly convinced and persuaded and fearless.

To see how this plays out, let's skip ahead four pages to the introduction to Bruce's sermon itself:

My sermon title today is "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse," and I want to concentrate on the first, the rider of the white horse. If you've always thought the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse was a Notre Dame football backfield, God has a message for you today.

This will again strike evangelical readers as reassuringly familiar. They're accustomed to sermons that start off with nervously jokey pop-culture references from 1924.

But those readers aren't just the intended audience for this book, they're also the intended audience for this sermon within the book. Bruce's sermon is designed to be read by pre-Event American evangelical Christians -- by people sitting comfortably at home, convinced and persuaded of their own salvation, their undisintegrated children contentedly watching Bibleman videos in the next room. For that audience, Bruce's sermon might make a warped kind of sense. But for the audience there, in the book, in the pews of New Hope Village Church, this sermon would be intolerably, cruelly irrelevant.

There's only one sermon, one topic, that this traumatized, grief- and terror-stricken congregation needs to hear on this occasion: "What Happened to Our Children?"

This is the only thing that would matter. The only thing. That would be true even to those in attendance who had no children of their own -- even to those who didn't even know any children. Missing children require an explanation. They require a metaphysical accounting. That need, that demand, transcends any specific connection to any specific child. When children are taken, there are things we all demand and require to know.

I moved to Everybody's Hometown shortly after the accident and I had lunch that week with a friend who serves as a pastor there. Five teens from the local high school had been riding together in a car that was going too fast to negotiate a notorious curve. Some of the funerals were at my friend's church. He was exhausted, beaten down. During the course of that meal, he cycled through all of Kubler-Ross' stages of grief several times over.

Five children in a town of about 10,000 turned out to be an unbearably high percentage. The families were distraught. The high school was devastated. No one in town seemed untouched or unaffected or unscathed. People needed answers and many of them were turning to my friend. He is a wise man with a rock-solid faith, but when I met him for lunch that day he seemed to want to run away or hide or beat the rock like Moses and scream at the silent heavens.

In the preceding 60 pages of Bruce Barnes' moaning and whining about his "heavy burden," he hasn't once mentioned this burden. He hasn't once confronted or been confronted with the unanswerable questions about the missing children -- where? how? why? -- or with the hollow inadequacy of the pat answers he has to offer in response. God took them. They're with God. It's all for the best, so there's no need to conduct or consider or even mention the possibility of funerals for the disappeared. Let's just quickly move on already to the business at hand of digging a really big hole for Pastor to hide in.

By not confronting any of that in his sermon, Bruce creates a situation in which the best possible outcome would be people walking out en masse. More likely, there'd be a riot. ("His God did this? Let's get him! Burn the church!")

Then again this is the third Sunday since the Event. Perhaps Bruce dealt with all this last week. But that won't do either. This is not a one-lecture problem in need of a one-lecture fix. Even if he did preach about all those missing children last week, what of it? They're still missing. Their empty rooms and their tangible, ever-present absences are still the black holes at the center of every family -- the all-consuming devourer of light around which everything else slowly orbits.

Bruce is eager to skip ahead to the next item in his End Times check list, to make some progress through the litany of judgments listed in the book of Revelation. That litany, we've noted before, is a variation on an older theme. John of Patmos assesses the Roman oppressor and suggests this Caesar is nothing more than the latest Pharaoh, so he invokes against him all the plagues of Egypt.

In LaHaye and Jenkins' reimagining of Revelation, they embellish that book's listing of the plagues, adding the one that's missing and reordering the list so that it comes first instead of last. And then they up the ante. It's not enough of a blow in their view for death to come to the first-born of every family, they have to take away every child.

They never grasp how this alters and undermines what Revelation presents as an escalating series of calamities. All the earthquakes and locusts and hail-and-fire-mixed-with-blood come across as wan and anticlimactic after every parent on earth has already been subjected to every parent's worst nightmare.

Go ahead and ask any parent, even the worst parent you've ever met, ask them which they would choose to have happen, if they had to choose: The inexplicable and instantaneous disintegration of their child? Or merely something like this:

... a great earthquake. The sun turned black like sackcloth made of goat hair, the whole moon turned blood red, and the stars in the sky fell to earth, as late figs drop from a fig tree when shaken by a strong wind. The sky receded like a scroll, rolling up, and every mountain and island was removed from its place.

That's the sixth seal of judgment from the sixth chapter of Revelation. It sounds bad, but not nearly as bad as the Event. Who really cares if "every mountain and island" is removed from its place after every infant and child has been removed from theirs?

The pages we skipped past a moment ago are filled with Bruce Barnes' long and rambling throat-clearing introduction to his sermon in which Bruce says, about six different ways, that he has something desperately urgent to tell everyone. You get the sense that if a large object were falling toward your skull, Bruce wouldn't just yell, "Duck!" but would, instead, say something like, "I want you to listen very carefully to what I'm about to say and not to dismiss it as the overwrought concerns of a religious zealot, but rather to appreciate my earnest sincerity and passion and to glean from that that attention ought to be paid to the desperately urgent warning I intend to deliver to you shortly ..."

Here's how Bruce begins:

I realize a word of explanation is in order. Usually we sing more, but we don't have time for that today. Usually my tie is straighter, my shirt fully tucked in, my suit coat buttoned. That seems a little less crucial this morning.

What Bruce ignores, probably because he's been re-reading Revelation instead of talking to any of his neighbors, is that the congregation is in even worse shape than he is. The Steeles may have "dressed for God" this Sunday morning, but the rest of these people haven't done laundry or shaved or slept since their kids disappeared.

Reaching for some kind of analogy for the unimaginable aftermath of the Event, I keep comparing it to something more familiar, like a mining disaster. We've discussed how communities faced with such tragedies do tend to congregate at churches. But they don't show up freshly scrubbed and dressed in their Sunday finest. They show up in whatever they happened to have on when they heard the news -- in jeans or sweats or even bathrobes hastily grabbed on the way out the door. This Sunday gathering isn't exactly like that, but it's far closer to that than either Bruce or the authors realize.

And that brings us to the strangest, cruelest aspect of this Sunday service and the sermon Bruce delivers: It's like a service after a mining disaster in which no one even mentions the miners. No one prays for them or for their families. No one discusses funeral arrangements or any other way for the community to acknowledge and begin to cope with the pain and loss. No one weeps with those who weep and no one mourns with those who mourn.

Once again we find ourselves up against a wall in reading these books. We can't move on without accepting the authors' framework, which requires them, and us, to work our way rat-a-tat through the discrete and unrelated events on the End Times check list. We cannot continue reading if we're going to dwell on the meaning or repercussions of events that have already been checked off. Nor will we be able to continue reading if we expect the characters in these pages to respond or react or change as a result of those over-and-done-with occurrences.

So, yeah, the kids are all gone. That's over with. It was in the previous book; this one's about the next thing. If Rayford, Buck, Bruce and everyone else in the world of this story can casually move on without giving those missing children a second thought then we, as readers, must be expected to do the same.

Other stories in other books persuade readers to go along through the willing suspension of disbelief. Tribulation Force insists on the willing suspension of the reader's humanity. It requires the reader not just to accept but to participate in the monstrous absence of empathy displayed by the characters and authors alike. The word empathy has recently become something of a partisan football, so it's worth reminding ourselves here of what the opposite of empathy is: sociopathy.

There's a monster at the end of this book. And if the authors succeed at what they've set out to do, that monster is you.

That's part of why one should only read these books slowly, in small, weekly doses, while pausing to scream at or mock every page.

Comments

[Neohippie]

Oh come on, it's been, what, two weeks since all the children on Earth disappeared? That's old news now.

Um... am I first?

[Reverend-Colonel Tricksterson, Pastor to Muppets, Commander of Evil Clowns and Keeper of the Death Sheep]

Rats, you beat me. While reading Fred it occured to me that after the Denver bombing, or the Columbine shooting, even though I wasn't remotely related to anyone involved in those incidents I would still think about it occasionally for about a month. In the Columbine case it was because I was friends with a number of Goths and was afraid of a backlash of some kind but sdtill a very remote connection. But i get the feeling tha three weeks after the Event if you asked Rayford about how he felt about his missing wife and son he'd get a glazed, puzzled look in his eys and go "Who? Oh, yeah , them. Well they're with the Lord now so I have to worry about my own salvation." Or words to that effect
Btw, has anyone considered how Texas floating up into the sky fits into Revelations?

[Brenda]

"And that brings us to the strangest, cruelest aspect of this Sunday service and the sermon Bruce delivers: It's like a service after a mining disaster in which no one even mentions the miners. No one prays for them or for their families. No one discusses funeral arrangements or any other way for the community to acknowledge and begin to cope with the pain and loss. No one weeps with those who weep and no one mourns with those who mourn."
Just thinking about this has me beginning to tear up. Good job, Fred, as always!

Brenda

[lonespark]

This is masterful, Fred, and worth waiting for.

(Grover shout-out, too - well done!)

[Catherine]

This whole "Missing children as a non issue," in Left Behind makes me wonder, "How do L & J feel about their children?"

[lonespark]

It's like a service after a mining disaster in which no one even mentions the miners.

And that's either inhumanly cruel or unbelievably cowardly. The closest thing I've experienced to that might be the aftermath of Katrina. I have read about people having to deal with that type of thing in totalitarian regimes where their loved ones deaths were inconvenient to the leaders. Actually, the example of that kind of thing that immediately springs to mind is the killing of Malcolm X's father. In a situation like that, I feel like the rational response is to go mad.

[Hobbes]

It was in the previous book; this one's about the next thing.

Technically, the next one (Nicolae) is about the next thing. This one's about preparing for the next thing, which is why, as a teenager who actually thought these books were decent at the time, I didn't read most of this book. It was too boring.

[Ross]

Other stories in other books persuade readers to go along through the willing suspension of disbelief. Tribulation Force insists on the willing suspension of the reader's humanity. It requires the reader not just to accept but to participate in the monstrous absence of empathy displayed by the characters and authors alike.

I'm starting to realize that this may be part of a trope unrelated to RTCism or Ellenjayism, but more endemic to this broader class of apocalypse story. I've mentioned elsewhere, I think, that I've recently been listenign to a podcast of zombie stories. One thing that keeps striking me is the utter lack of empathy. One story in particular, had been going pretty well. THe protagonists were two young women, one who had just seen her wife devour a neighbor, and one who had seen her abusive husband bite the kids and turn them into zombies too. All was going well, I thought the author had a pretty good handle on making the characters convincingly shell-shocked. But then we come to a scene where they watch someone get killed by zombies and they *laugh at him*, because he was too stupid and deluded to appreciate the seriousness of the situation.

Or another story where the protagonists find a survivor who crosses their path before going off to find and rescue his girlfriend in an area which is almost certain death to enter. They know huis girlfriend is already dead -- they found her, turned, and killed her. But they don't tell him, and instead let him go off to his certain death, *because they feel guilty about having killed her*.

(People who like zombie stories tend to bash "cliches", but think that the only cliche about zombie stories is being set in a farmhouse. They overlook that pretty much every single one of them is a survivalist fantasy which idealizes the Bruce Barnsian "THe right thing to do is to dig a hole and hide in it, fuck the rest of society", stresses the pointlessness of trying to save the world, and treats anyone who doesn't hold to their beliefs as deserving if derision, ridicule, and a painful death. Oh, and also a hate or distrust of the government. The only real divergence from this is the stories where mankind has somehow tried to peacefully coeexist with zombies, in which that ultuimately proves to be a bad idea because zombies, deep down, want to eat your brains and can't change, which I suspect is a bit of unintentionally racist reactionary fantasy. Holy crap. Left Behind is a zombie novel. I totally get it now.)

[Catherine]

In a better version of this book, Bruce Barnes could have been written as a pastor who gets the promotion post Rapture, but is way out of his depth. He goes through the motions of being a pastor, which angers the new post Rapture congregation and he would still be more sympathetic than this version.

[Catherine]

"monstrous absence of empathy"

Well, to extreme right wingers, that quality would be a good addition for a Supreme Court member.

[Kyle]

hmmm...Left Behind as a zombie novel. I like it.

It would work best under the original telling of "I am Legend", where the "vampires" as they were called in the original book had set up their own society. All the newly "converted" become zombies, and everyone else is just trying to survive the RTZombie hordes. That would explain the beheadings from the later books. To kill a zombie you have to destroy the brain, right?

[Hobbes]

@lonespark:

In the Anglican church, where the topic of sermons is dictated by the week of the year, apparently priests and pastors were left with an awkward choice following the death of Princess Diana. The Princess had just died, on a Sunday, at 4 AM, only a few hours before the first normal Sunday services were to be held. Each priest/minister could either find some way to quickly squeeze a message about Diana into their already-planned, or they could preach on the other topic and ignore it completely.

N.T. Wright (a bishop) says that most people chose the first route. However, he relates a story about a woman whose priest chose the second route. The priest had preached about Mary (the mother of Jesus), and the lady, nearly in tears by the end of the sermon, timidly asked somebody to explain how the priest's message spoke to them about Diana. The poor lady was crying tears of confusion because she'd come to church for comfort, and instead heard a message that might have been delivered any other Sunday.

So Fred is absolutely correct here. This isn't what these people would want to hear.

[lonespark]

Thwarting the need to mourn is pretty evil. I seem to recall that being part of the crushing awfulness in some stories by Thomas Hardy or contemporaries; suicides couldn't be mourned in the socially approved ways.

[Ross]

It was in the previous book; this one's about the next thing.

Hey, that's another one for my "Left Behind is a Zombie Novel" pile. In every zombie novel, there is inevitably a scene where someone stops to lament over a dead loved one, and is treated to a monologue from the author stand-in noble survivalist to the tune of "It is wrong for you to give people who have died any thought. YOu must stop thinking about them and focus only on your own survival, otherwise you deserve death." Your typical zombie story "Strong Adult Character" will lose a spouse and or children in the backstory or opening scene, and will never give any sign afterward that they even remember them.

[lonespark]

As terrible as the recent movie version of I Am Legend was, at least it believed in mourning.

[Kit Whitfield]

Usually my tie is straighter, my shirt fully tucked in, my suit coat buttoned. That seems a little less crucial this morning.

Good grief. In the time it takes him to say that, he could have straightened his clothes up. Artfully dishevelled clothes to communicate urgency is one thing, but calling attention to them is just overplaying your hand.

Everyone in the congregation is now sitting there thinking, 'What a poser.' He's just lost several hundred souls. Way to go, Bruce.

[cjmr's husband]

I did assume that in the Floating Empire of Texas everyone was naked, but didn't mention it at the time.

In other clothing news, the pastor can't adjust his tie on the way to the lectern? Is he wearing vestments that get in the way? I have no idea, where I come from the priests don't wear ties.

[Roadstergal]

I recently, during research for something completely unrelated, came across a photo of UAL 175 hitting the South Tower. I had to stop what I was doing and catch my breath, as just an incredible deluge of emotion hit me - anger, and sadness, and a massive swell of maddedning frustration. That happened almost over seven years ago, across the country, and I don't personally know anyone who died in that tragedy. I just know that humans died - some willingly, in a twisted act of destructiveness, and most unwillingly, in an event that burst monstrously out of a clear blue sky.

Barnes is some kind of strange, un-human mutation who has slipped something truly mind-bending into the church Kool-Aid. There's no other explanation for what he's saying - and how everyone is reacting.

[lonespark]

The bit about his tie is like L&J are going beyond "tell, don't show" to something even stupider, like "put all descriptions in dialogue, just because." (Probably because that gives you more time talk about telephones?)

[Kit Whitfield]

"It is wrong for you to give people who have died any thought. YOu must stop thinking about them and focus only on your own survival, otherwise you deserve death."

I'm no zombie expert, but that could make for an interesting character study: with people living under terrible and constant threat of death, some of them might decide that ruthlessness is the only way to go, that they just can't afford to feel any grief because it'll slow them down and their fear is stronger than their sorrow. In which case, it's quite possible that 'They deserved to die for their stupidity' would become the consequence. It would be a case of succumbing to the Just World Fallacy under pressure, a way of struggling to retain a sense of control. If everyone who gets killed deserves it because they were stupid, and you're not stupid, you won't get killed. Right? Right?

So yes, looking at how normal takes on morality might disintegrate under pressure, and the additional frictions such an attitude might create within groups, could be interesting. But author-stand-in lectures are boring.

[Ross]

It would work best under the original telling of "I am Legend", where the "vampires" as they were called in the original book had set up their own society. All the newly "converted" become zombies, and everyone else is just trying to survive the RTZombie hordes. That would explain the beheadings from the later books. To kill a zombie you have to destroy the brain, right?

One of the zombie shorts I read was about an assassin for a militant fundamentalist order, who is in the middle of executing some harlot for her harlotry when the zombie apocalypse strikes. He reasons that this is in fact the rapture, and that the zombies are demons who have assumed the discarded corporeal bodies of the raptured. Consequentially, he doesn't try to save his wife when she calls him in a panic, because he knows that the survivors are all, de facto, unsaved sinners, deserving of their fate. He is, however, a bit puzzled as to why *he* wasn't taken, though at the very end, he discovers that the zombies have no interest in eating him.

[Kyle]

Ross, you know what's REALLY sad? L&J would probably agree with you about the zombie plot relating to this book. The Rapture == The initial wave of plague, the un-saved masses become the zombies, and Rayford/Buck/Bruce etc get to be come the "We're the only ones who can save you!" people.

And given that zombie tales DO require a lack of empathy if you're going to be able to kill thousands of zombies in order to survive. Because, well, obviously the point of the 7 years of God given torture coming up are really just a game (like The Running Man), where the idea is "Survive until the end, kill anyone who gets in the way".

[lonespark]

?

[Neohippie]

Cool! I really WAS first! *basks*

Ok, now I get to ramble.

Not only was I friends with a number of Goths when Columbine happened, but I was also a senior in high school, same age as the assassins and many of their victims. And then, thanks to some copy-catters calling in bomb threats every day for a while, they ended up closing the school a month early. Which made my last year in high school really surreal.

Aaaanyway, back on topic. Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins must have had really happy, easy lives. They seem to have no idea what it feels like to have either a personal tragedy (like losing a child) or to be affected by a large-scale tragedy (like a mining disaster). Also, didn't they imply that Bruce Barnes's job was easy before The Event? My pastor freely admits he goes to therapy regularly so he can handle the pressure of being a de facto counselor to all these other people.

I've noticed that having Very Bad Things happen to you tends to remind you of What's Really Important in life. I was bullied a lot in school, but one bully I had abruptly stopped when we were in 9th grade. Why? Her older brother got a brain tumor. She suddenly had more important things to worry about than how misearable she can make me.

And Tim LaHaye is a bully too, but instead of being hung up on who's cool and who's not, he's hung up on who's getting raptured and who's not. So I assume he's never had anything happen to him that makes those things seem kind of silly in comparison.

Just an idea.

Also, am I safe to assume that fundie megachurches are not the sort of place you can go for comfort when something Very Bad happens? Again, don't come from a religious background, so I may not know what I'm talking about here, but I did know that some people use their religious groups for this purpose, yet megachurches seem far too impersonal, and even if it's a small one, tragedies tend to make people question God (if not his existence, then at least his motives), and that's a big no-no with fundies. So instead of these churches being the extended family that I know some churches can be good for, they seem more like pep rallies people can go to feel good about themselves and how awesome they are being Real True Christians.

I'm totally biased though, since I'm an agnostic pagan who started going to church recently just for the social benefits. It's a very liberal Methodist church that some of my other pagan friends got me going to. Various benefits include potlucks, a convenient place to drop off charitable donations, already knowing someone who can legally perform weddings for when the time comes, and being able to tell fundies who harrass/evangelize me that I'm already churched, and not only that, but "Methodist" is still considered a real church, unlike Unitarians who totally don't count. I don't have to mention the part about how my church recognises same-sex unions and incorporate Creation-based spirituality into their services (as in "nature is good" not "Darwin is bad").

[/rambling]

[Fraser]

Getting nitpicky, Ross, but the kind of zombie apocalypse you're talking about didn't become the standard until Night of the Living Dead. Prior to that we have I Walked With a Zombie, White Zombie, and that John Carradine movie where he's creating a zombie army for the Nazis (it was not a good film).
Reading Fred's post I couldn't help thinking of The Sweet Hereafter, in which Ian Holm is trying to convince a town to sue over a fatal school-bus accident (and turns out to have a grief of his own). Much better than LB.
Completely OT: I'm doing research for a book--paranoia and infiltration in movies--and I'm curious if Christian films have anything equivalent to Bodysnatcher or Manchurian Candidate films (also Ritual Satanic Abuse Conspiracy stories would count). Also, is there anything equivalent to that in the anime world?
Not trying to threadjack, but knowing this group, y'all seem like a great resource.

[lonespark]

Well, Bruce's job was easy before because he didn't do it. He could be written as out of his depth, unable to truly minister to anyone, yet still doing God's work by researching the Tribulation. Not by L&J, obviously.

[Kyle]

OH! The other thing that got me about Bruce's clothing. When you're so frazzled that your clothes are becoming disheveled (shirt untucked, tie crooked and loose, etc), you're also so frazzled that you aren't going to notice you're clothing. For Bruce to have noticed how unkempt he looked, he must have been staring into the floor lenght mirror on the back on his study door, admiring his image before he walked out to the pulpit.

"Wow...I can really rock this new sloppy look, can't I? I wonder how many single women will be in the congregation today?"

For a man that is supposed to be "feasting on the word" pretty much 24/7, people should be commenting on how bad he smells, because he's forgotten to shower for three days and has been drinking coffee straight from the pot while chain-smoking to take the edge off the caffeine. He shouldn't even remember that he's wearing a tie at this point.

[Anton Mates]

Go ahead and ask any parent, even the worst parent you've ever met, ask them which they would choose to have happen, if they had to choose: The inexplicable and instantaneous disintegration of their child? Or merely something like this:

In fairness, I've known some parents who would view the disintegration of their child as a net plus. Some people really aren't cut out to be parents.

Ross,

The only real divergence from this is the stories where mankind has somehow tried to peacefully coeexist with zombies, in which that ultuimately proves to be a bad idea because zombies, deep down, want to eat your brains and can't change, which I suspect is a bit of unintentionally racist reactionary fantasy.

Yes, that's definitely at the heart of lots of zombie stories.

I've always thought there should be a virus whose only effect is to convince its victims that everyone uninfected is a zombie, and therefore turns its victims into an implacable murderous horde driven by noble intentions. I suppose it would be too close to nonfiction, though.

[Ross]

I've noticed that having Very Bad Things happen to you tends to remind you of What's Really Important in life. I was bullied a lot in school, but one bully I had abruptly stopped when we were in 9th grade. Why? Her older brother got a brain tumor. She suddenly had more important things to worry about than how misearable she can make me.

Some people. But then, don't a lot of bullies come from abusive or neglectful parents?

Hm, though, I wonder if there's a slight modification we can make: Having very bad things happen to someone close to you tends to remind you...

You mentioned a bully whose brother got cancer, while my counterpoint is a bully who was himself abused.

I could totally believe that having bad things happen to you "desensitizes" you, either out of a desire to make others feel as bad as you do, or because your understanding of what counts as "bad" gets corrupted -- or, what with the just world fallacy, if you are able to blame yourself for bad things that happen to you, then those on whom you inflict badness must also "deserve it". On the other hand, havign something bad happen to those around you, particularly somethign which you're powerless to help with, could engender empathy.

[lonespark]

I've always thought there should be a virus whose only effect is to convince its victims that everyone uninfected is a zombie, and therefore turns its victims into an implacable murderous horde driven by noble intentions.

That reminds me of Frailty. I like that movie.

[Noah Brand]

There's another interesting point about Bruce's "Usually my shirt's tucked in and I don't look like a hobo" line... who's he saying it to? Practically the entire congregation of this particular church went up in The Great Snatch (as Al Hartley called it), right? So everyone here has, at most, seen Bruce the previous Sunday or two.

So either everyone's sitting there going "Usually my ass, he's looked like this every time I've seen him" or Bruce WAS in fact all smartened up the last couple Sundays, in which case we need to wonder what new information he JUST GOT that took longer to process than it would have taken to tuck in his shirt. Of course, the punchline to that theory is that it's the same information he was repeating last week.

I am not inspired by his sincerity.

[Neohippie]

I could totally believe that having bad things happen to you "desensitizes" you, either out of a desire to make others feel as bad as you do, or because your understanding of what counts as "bad" gets corrupted -- or, what with the just world fallacy, if you are able to blame yourself for bad things that happen to you, then those on whom you inflict badness must also "deserve it". On the other hand, havign something bad happen to those around you, particularly somethign which you're powerless to help with, could engender empathy.

Maybe. I know I haven't thought this all the way through. I just know of a few specific examples where a tragedy has been a wake up call for someone.

You're right that it doesn't always work. It just seems to me like LaHaye can't possibly have ever met anyone who's lost a child, or even had a close call. It's weird though, because as someone further up mentioned, doesn't he have kids?

Maybe I'm giving him too much credit. I haven't had any kids, and I still know that people who have lost them would still be traumatized weeks (months? years?) later. Hell, it's taken me longer than a couple of weeks to get over losing cats!

[lonespark]

Not necessarily in the case school bullying, but in the case of many people who are assholes or abusive, bad stuff was done to them and that was their model for behavior. To the point where they can know it's wrong and still fall back on it for lack of any other habits of human relation.

[Ross]

I've always thought there should be a virus whose only effect is to convince its victims that everyone uninfected is a zombie, and therefore turns its victims into an implacable murderous horde driven by noble intentions. I suppose it would be too close to nonfiction, though.

The one zombie story about which I can say nothing negative was one where an meteor hits or a bomb goes off or something, and in the aftermath, the hero notices the dead getting up and walking around and attacking him, and when one of them kills a small child, he realizes that the only thing he can do is smash their brains, so he grabs something large and starts smashing skulls. It bothers him that it keeps seeming like some of the zombies were begging him for mercy or telling others to run away, but he writes that off to the fact that what with the zombie holocaust, he hasn't had time to get home and take his anti-psychotic medications.

[inge]

And given that zombie tales DO require a lack of empathy if you're going to be able to kill thousands of zombies in order to survive.

I had more the impression that zombie novels use the zombie to work around the usual empathy issues by presenting an opponent who is a force of nature with hit points. Orcs have language and culture, even if both are unpleasant for not-orcs, they bleed when they are hurt, they can be talked to, they know fear. They may be irredemably evil (or not) but they are still very nearly human. Zombies? Not so. In most zombie stories I know (I'm far from an expert, though), zombies are dead bodies animated by something that is only marginally alive. They only differ from an avalance or a hurricane in that they can be destroyed.

Strange thing, it used to be vampires that were metaphors of pestilence before thay became cool and pretty (but evil), then anti heroes, then just normal guys trying to cope with some issues, then ideal boyfriends. Now it's zombies instead...

[Katz]

Again, don't come from a religious background, so I may not know what I'm talking about here, but I did know that some people use their religious groups for this purpose, yet megachurches seem far too impersonal, and even if it's a small one, tragedies tend to make people question God (if not his existence, then at least his motives), and that's a big no-no with fundies.

Not speaking about fundies, but megachurches can vary. Lots of churches have small groups of maybe a dozen or so that meet on a weeknight, sometimes with more of an intellectual focus (Bible studies) and sometimes with more of a personal focus. These groups become the "extended family" that an individual can get to know well, since the church is too large. Also, good megachurches have a well-developed leadership structure, so if you want to talk to a pastor or an elder, you can find someone without having a 2000-person competition.

On the pep rally note, it's a common complaint with churches that you need to be happy to go there. This isn't entirely the church's fault. When people interact, they feel the need to look socially acceptable, and usually that means not, for instance, crying in public. The standard "How are you?" can feel like a loaded question to a person who isn't doing very well. Still, it's hard to know how to set up the whole environment so that it's inviting to the sorrowful (other than making it specifically for the sorrowful, which may be appropriate surrounding events like we've been talking about, but isn't as a general modus operandi).

[lonespark]

Zombies-like things go way back, though. Draugr = scary.

[cjmr's husband]

Now trembling in fear of the day fifteen years from now when my daughter announces she's in love with a zombie...

[inge]

Ross: But then, don't a lot of bullies come from abusive or neglectful parents?

Abusive parents teach you that it's OK to abuse those who cannot defend themselves. This is not in the "have bigger problems, re-consider bullying" category.

[Katz]

I am not inspired by his sincerity.

But...but he's so passionate!

[cjmr's husband]

Really, they're only leprous and gory at night, in the sunlight they're sparkly!

[Andrew Wyatt]

That reminds me of Frailty. I like that movie.

Great, underrated horror film. Interesting, isn't it, that actor Bill Paxton, who was once a Catholic kid from Fort Worth, can direct a film that in two hours has more interesting things to say about family, loyalty, faith, certainty, violence, and eschatology than the entire Left Behind series?

[Headless Unicorn Guy]

So the second thing that needs to be said about this sermon by the Rev. Bruce Barnes is that it's not very good.

It's CHRISTIAN (TM) Fiction, Slack. What did you expect?

Jesus is coming again again.

Anyone remember an old hymn (usually broadcast on Christian radio in the Seventies) whose chorus repeats the line "Coming Again... Coming Again..." in a tone of semiconscious bliss? How about filking it to "Coming Again Again... Coming Again Again..."?

This will again strike evangelical readers as reassuringly familiar. They're accustomed to sermons that start off with nervously jokey pop-culture references from 1924.

I think that just indicates what era LaHaye and his target audience are time-stopped in. Was "The Four Horsemen"/Notre Dame Football connection of 1924 still common knowledge circa 1950?

And that brings us to the strangest, cruelest aspect of this Sunday service and the sermon Bruce delivers: It's like a service after a mining disaster in which no one even mentions the miners. No one prays for them or for their families. No one discusses funeral arrangements or any other way for the community to acknowledge and begin to cope with the pain and loss. No one weeps with those who weep and no one mourns with those who mourn.

Because Everybody KNOWS they're in Fluffy Cloud Heaven, watching the world end from their catered box seats. They are already doubleplusunpersons.

And anyway, weeping and mourning are unbecombing to Always-Victorious Shiny Happy Clappy Christians.
Everybody SMIIIIIIILE!

So, yeah, the kids are all gone. That's over with. It was in the previous book; this one's about the next thing. If Rayford, Buck, Bruce and everyone else in the world of this story can casually move on without giving those missing children a second thought then we, as readers, must be expected to do the same.

And so we go to the next EXCITING thing on the End Time Prophecy Checklist!
Same Bat-Time, Same Bat-Channel!
("Scripture! Scripture! Scripture! Scripture!...")

[JessicaR]

Bruce is worse than not telling you to duck. Bruce is not pulling you out of the way, not telling you to duck, but watching with a smirk as the rock hits you. And then looking down at you and lecturing you that if you had paid attention to his five part lecture series on looking out for signs of boulders falling out of the sky you wouldn't be in this position.

[Neohippie]

Not necessarily in the case school bullying, but in the case of many people who are assholes or abusive, bad stuff was done to them and that was their model for behavior. To the point where they can know it's wrong and still fall back on it for lack of any other habits of human relation.

Yeah, in the case of the girl I knew, I think what happened was that being in the in-crowd suddenly didn't seem as important to her anymore. She quit bullying me and also quit hanging out with the rest of the clique that bullied me as one of their favorite pastimes. Mileages may vary. Maybe it's not even an empathy thing at all but more of a priority-shift. It's not like we became friends after that or anything, she just left me alone from then on.

Anyway, that's just what I was reminded of with this post about how silly it seems to be concerned about having the proper end-times checklist when ALL THE CHILDREN IN THE WORLD ARE GONE. Giving LaHaye the benefit of the doubt, maybe he's just totally unfamiliar with suffering. I can't imagine him having actually lost a family member and still writing crap like this.

[hapax]

All the earthquakes and locusts and hail-and-fire-mixed-with-blood come across as wan and anticlimactic after every parent on earth has already been subjected to every parent's worst nightmare.

Wan and anticlimactic? Are you kidding? They come across to me as a positive RELIEF.

My kids have suddenly disintegrated, no explanation, no body, no closure? Dear blessed Lord, point me at the exploding volcano so I can throw myself in. Anything to make me stop feeling.

[hapax]

Now trembling in fear of the day fifteen years from now when my daughter announces she's in love with a zombie...

Sarah Rees Brennan, on her blog, has been joking about writing the Next Big Thing in paranormal romance, about a Mary Sue caught in a love triangle between a zombie and a unicorn.

(Forget vampires, what has pop culture done to the unicorns? Originally near bestial incarnations of phallic ferocity tamed only by the purity of repressed female sexuality, they've become emasculated and infantilized into cuddly pony-cherubs farting rainbows. Pfui)

[Lady Jessica of the OStP with Buttercream Rosettes, Matron of Her Imperial Majesty's Royal Kitchens, and Makener of Cookiez 4 Grate Kitteh]

And if the authors succeed at what they've set out to do, that monster is you.

Ooooo, that gave me chills.

Hooo-ray for LB Friday.

Aaaaaaaaaaand here's some boobies.

[lonespark]

point me at the exploding volcano

I kind of thought of that, too. The children are gone, but at least the world isn't going on as normal.

[Abelardus]

So the second thing that needs to be said about this sermon by the Rev. Bruce Barnes is that it's not very good.

Second thing? This confuses me. What does Fred have in store for us?

Or have the delightful Folk Who Post Rather Than Lurk already pointed out the first thing? For that possibility wouldn't surprise me.

(And now I shall return to reading the Comments in full.)