slacktivist

L.B.: Speakerphone

Left Behind, pp. 435-437

In this little section Bruce Barnes and Rayford are playing the Antichrist Game, trying to reconcile what they know about their prime suspect with the many arcane details they've compiled in their check list. Let me briefly try to explain where such details and such check lists come from.

The Bible is full of warnings not to be deceived by false prophets, false teachers or false leaders of any kind, religious or political. Read through the Bible and you will encounter, again and again, various versions of something like this:

Don't be fooled by false leaders. They deceive people with their lies, so watch out to make sure you're not taken in by them.

In many instances, the writer will use a definite generic instead of the plural, so you'll read something like this:

Don't be fooled by the false leader. He deceives people with his lies, so watch out to make sure you're not taken in by him.

Here's the fun part for prophecy enthusiasts: What if that second version doesn't simply replace the plural with the generic? What if, instead, it actually refers to a specific, actual, singular False Leader?

Let the game begin! Get a highlighter and go through the entire Bible, circling every passage that warns against this false leader. (Read carefully -- he goes by many names.) Next, go back through and write down all the descriptions those warnings provide of this false leader/teacher/prophet -- anything that might serve a clue as to this single person's singular identity. And there you have it, your very own Antichrist checklist.

Your final checklist will likely be a bit confusing. Some warnings seem to be describing the False Leader as an Israelite. Other warnings make it clear that he is a gentile. In the first part of Daniel the False Leader sounds like someone very much like Nebuchadnezzar, but in the later chapters of the book he sounds more like someone very much like Antiochus Epiphanes. Later still, John's Apocalypse makes him sound almost like some kind of Roman emperor. This is where the game gets tricky. We seem to be looking for a Jewish gentile who is part Babylonian, part Syrian, part Roman. Trying to reconcile all of those seemingly contradictory descriptions in one single person isn't easy, but that's how the game is played.

(Note: The descriptive details in your check list may seem so irreconcilably disparate or so closely bound to the various biblical authors' distinct contexts that you may even begin to suspect that these details weren't really all intend to prophesy a single, particular False Leader. But that's just crazy talk. Press on -- your speculation about the identity of the Antichrist might end up being wrong, but you won't be any wronger than everyone else who's ever played this game.)

Bruce and Rayford have an advantage over the rest of us when playing the Antichrist Game: They've got a prime suspect carefully tailored by the authors to match every detail of the check list. Yet despite that, they've still got questions, like why is the Antichrist Romanian? This is the question they seek to answer here in Chapter 24:

After the core-group meeting, Rayford Steele talked privately with Bruce Barnes and was updated on the meeting with Buck. "I can't discuss the private matters," Bruce said ...

Bruce and Buck didn't really talk about any "private matters," so I like to think that he's just saying this to give Rayford a hard time. "Hey you know that 30-something guy who's been seeing your freshman daughter? He and I talked yesterday. I can't discuss the private matters -- nudge, nudge, wink, wink -- but we talked for quite some time."

"I can't discuss the private matters," Bruce said, "but only one thing stands in the way of my being convinced that this Carpathia guy is the Antichrist. I can't make it compute geographically. Almost every end-times writer I respect believes the Antichrist will come out of Western Europe, maybe Greece or Italy or Turkey."

Turkey, traditionally, is not regarded as part of Western Europe, what with it's being in Asia, but if we're going to have any hope of reconciling all of the things in our Antichrist check list then we can't allow ourselves to be constrained by such tired geographic conventions.

Poor Rayford is just trying to keep up. If Bruce says the check list doesn't allow for an Antichristescu, then he'll play along.

Rayford didn't know what to make of that. "You notice Carpathia doesn't look Romanian. Aren't they mostly dark?"

"Yeah. Let me call Mr. Williams. He gave me a number. I wonder how much more he knows about Carpathia." Bruce dialed and put Buck on the speakerphone. "Ray Steele is with me."

"Hey, Captain," Buck said.

Upon reading the word "speakerphone" there I half expected confetti to drop from the ceiling as a Sousa march would begin to play and top-hatted officials would arrive to commemorate this apotheosis of LaHaye & Jenkins' weird fixation with telephony.

"We're just doing some studying here," Bruce said, "and we've hit a snag." He told Buck what they had found and asked for more information.

"Studying" makes it sound like they're translating obscure prophecies from ancient tomes rescued from the library of Alexandria. What they've actually been doing is watching CNN's replay of Nicolae's press conference and comparing his agenda to the Antichrist check list the late Rev. Billings left on his desk before he disapparated. One world government? Check. One world religion? Check. Peace treaty with Israel? Check. Babylonian/Syrian/Roman/Jewish heritage? Hmmm. ...

"Well, he comes from a town, one of the larger university towns, called Cluj, and --"

"Oh, he does? I guess I thought he was from a mountainous region, you know, because of his name."

Following the logic of the dialogue in Left Behind isn't any easier than following the logic of the plot. One bumps into these Python-worthy non-sequiturs at every turn: "Is the town in the mountains?" "No, it's a college town." Huh?

"His name?" Buck repeated, doodling it on his legal pad.

"You know, being named after the Carpathian Mountains and all. Or does that name mean something else over there?"

Buck sat up straight and it hit him! Steve had been trying to tell him he worked for Stonagal and not Carpathia. And of course all the new U.N. delegates would feel beholden to Stonagal because he had introduced them to Carpathia. Maybe Stonagal was the Antichrist! Where had his lineage begun?

The ambiguity of Steve's remark -- "my boss moves mountains" -- sets up what might have been an intriguing mystery. But at this point, 436 pages into a 468-page book, it's a bit late to be introducing a new red herring. The possibility that Stonagal, rather than Carpathia, is our Big Bad is emphatically ruled out a mere 20 pages from now. Jenkins half-heartedly tries over those few pages to milk the question for suspense, but this falls flat since he's already spent so much time establishing that Nicolae is, without a doubt, the Antichrist. Readers thus aren't thinking, "Hey, Buck's right, it could be either one of them," but rather, "Pay attention Buck, you moron, it's Nicolae."

The larger problem with the section I just quoted is that we're in the middle of a Rayford-POV section. The whole point of having Bruce and Buck's conversation on speakerphone was so that Rayford, and the reader, could hear what was being said. Yet we're also somehow able to see what Buck is doodling and to hear his unspoken thoughts. Either Jenkins has completely lost track of which character's perspective he's supposed to be writing or else Rayford has some kind of supernatural mind-reading powers. ... Hey. Maybe that's it. Maybe it's not Carpathia or Stonagal, maybe Rayford is the Antichrist!

"Well," Buck said, trying to concentrate, "maybe he was named after the mountains, but he was born in Cluj and his ancestry, way back, is Roman. That accounts for the blonde hair and blue eyes."

Then again, if this strange-but-apropos Blonde Map of Europe is to be believed, Nicolae's being from Cluj, in northwestern Romania, might also "account" for his hair color.

Bruce thanked him and asked if he would see Buck in church the next day. Rayford thought Buck sounded distracted and noncommittal. "I haven't ruled it out," Buck said.

Following that paragraph is another one of these:

 

 

------------------------------

Indicating a shift back to Buck's perspective for the following section, which begins:

Yes, Buck thought, hanging up. I'll be there all right. He wanted every last bit of input before he went to New York to write a story that could cost him his career and maybe his life. ...

So immediately after reading Rayford's perception of what Buck is thinking we switch perspectives to read what Buck was really thinking and find out that Rayford had it backwards. Again. This was mildly interesting the first time Jenkins did this trick, less so the next four or five times. Here it doesn't work at all because, again, Jenkins got confused and presented Buck's perspective as Rayford's.

If you're a book editor, you should own a copy of Left Behind to take along to your annual performance reviews. Just open to a random page, have your boss read it, and then remind them that this is why you're worth every penny and then some.

L.B.: Geheimkode

Left Behind, pp. 431-435

Buck spent Saturday holed up in the otherwise empty Chicago bureau office, getting a head start on his article on the theory behind the disappearances. His mind continually swirled, forcing him to think about Carpathia and what he would say in that piece about how the man seemed to be a perfect parallel to biblical prophecy. Fortunately, he could wait on writing that until after the big day on Monday.

Reading Left Behind can be a bit like those picture-puzzles from Highlights magazine, the ones where you're supposed to circle everything that's wrong. Let's try that with the paragraph above.

We'll circle "otherwise empty," since Global Weekly's production schedule couldn't possibly allow for everyone to have a 9-to-5, M-F work schedule. (I suppose many of them could have Saturdays off if GW goes to print on Fridays, but that can't be the case since we know the executive editor just spent all of Friday hanging out with Bruce Barnes.) "Getting a head start" gets circled, since The Event is now 12 days past, and Buck's what-happened? follow-up is already hopelessly late. Ditto for "he could wait on writing that." Circling "continually" as unnecessary is probably nit-picking, though there's definitely something off about a sentence in which our hero's own mind forces him to think. I'd also circle "big day" as Buck's chosen term for his meeting the following Monday rather than for the much bigger big day of two Mondays ago that he's supposedly sitting there writing about.

I'm still probably missing something there, but I've covered the page with too much red crayon to find anything more.

It's been an astonishing 14 pages since the last phone call, so you can guess what comes next:

Around lunchtime, Buck reached Steve Plank at the Plaza Hotel in New York.

The conversation that follows is a reprise of the previous phone call between these two (see "Super Powers"). This time, however, they switch to speaking in code halfway through.

First, though, they have to deal with the Hattie Question, and I'm actually going to try to defend this exchange as an almost plausible bit of dialogue:

"I'll be there Monday morning," he said, "but I'm not inviting Hattie Durham."

"Why not? It's a small request, friend-to-friend."

"You to me?"

"Nick to you."

Buck is in an awkward spot here. He can't just tell Steve, "Look, I've changed my mind about helping those two get together because I just found out that he's the spawn of Satan, evil incarnate, the great ten-horned beast of the apocalypse." So instead he just gets snippy and starts acting like it offends his morals to allow two unmarried adults to spend time together with no one there to chaperone except the Security Council and the national press corps.

"So now it's Nick, is it? Well, he and I are not close enough for that familiarity, and I don't provide female companionship even to my friends."

"Not even for me?"

This is good strategy on Steve's part. If your friend becomes inexplicably indignant and starts using words like "familiarity" or "provide female companionship," you could try to point out that no one has suggested anything unseemly or improper, or you could just try to defuse the situation with a joke. Buck's response, however, is not encouraging:

"If I knew you would treat her with respect, Steve, I'd set you up with Hattie."

That "if" there is an unsubtle dig at Steve, who thus reasonably loses his patience with his friend, saying:

"I'll ask her myself, Buck, you prude."

This reading is probably a bit of a stretch. We're probably supposed to view Buck here as legitimately and righteously indignant rather than as flustered into semi-incoherence. The latter would make him more human and thus more appealing, but that's not how the authors tend to think about their heroes.

Either way we read this Buck has managed to tick off his friend, so it takes a bit of chutzpah for him to segue right into asking for a favor. Buck wants another "exclusive" interview with Nicolae:

"You know I'm going to do the complete piece on the guy. He needs this."

"If you watched TV yesterday, you know he doesn't need anything. We need him."

"Do we? Have you run into any schools of thought that link him to end-times events in the Bible?"

Steve Plank did not respond.

How could he respond? That question is almost a perfectly crafted conversation killer. It doesn't allow for a reasonable response.

You can try this yourself sometime. On a train or airplane and don't want to have to make conversation with a chatty seatmate? Just respond to whatever comment they make by asking, "Have you run into any schools of thought that link this to end-times events in the Bible?" Political campaigns are exempt from No-Call-List restrictions, but here is a useful tool for making sure they never phone again. I'd imagine this would also be effective for rebuffing unwanted attention at a bar. (The potential danger to this strategy being the remote but horrifying possibility that someone might respond, "Why, yes! Yes I have run into schools of thought that link this to end-times events in the Bible!" At which point you'd be doubly screwed.)

Steve's silence here, however, is not the shocked and perplexed silence such a question would prompt in real life -- not the semi-panicked pause of a sane person realizing they're dealing with someone in the opposite category. Steve's silence here instead is meant to be ominous and laden with meaning.

"Steve?"

"I'm here."

"Well, have you? Anybody that thinks he might fit the bill for one of the villains of the book of Revelation?"

Steve said nothing.

"Hello, Steve?"

"I'm still here."

"C'mon, old buddy. You're the press secretary. You know all. How's he going to respond if I hit him with that?"

Steve was still silent.

This ominous silence is meant to indicate that Steve knows exactly what Buck is talking about and that he's afraid to answer because Buck's questions are too close to what he knows to be the truth.

So OK then, let's consider how that could be possibly be true.

Buck has spent the better part of the last 72 hours getting a crash course in PMD prophecy theory from Rayford, Chloe and Bruce in turn. They've outlined this interpretation of the book of Revelation and explained to him what they believe it prophesies about a coming Antichrist. Steve hasn't heard any of that, yet here he seems to know everything that Buck does about the end times, the Antichrist and the entire PMD checklist. Where did Steve learn all that?

There seem to be only one place he could have learned it: from Nicolae himself. I'm trying to imagine how that conversation could have gone ...

NC: Welcome, Mr. Plank. Bienvenue. Bienvenido. Wilkomm ...

SP: Just the English is fine here in the office, Mr. Secretary-General.

NC: Please, call me "Nick." Now, your office is down the hall there on the left. Just ask Chaim if you need any supplies. Oh, and there is just one more thing you should know. I am the Antichrist.

SP: I'm sorry, the what?

NC: The Antichrist. The Beast? One of the villains of the book of Revelation? You have not heard of this?

SP: I ... I ... the book of ...?

NC: Ah, I see you will have some catching up to do. Chaim? Please fetch some copies of Tim LaHaye's non-fiction books for our new friend here.

Hmm. My imagined rendition of this conversation hardly seems plausible, but how else could it have gone?

Anyway, back in the novel itself Buck still can't get an answer out of Steve so he tries a slightly different approach:

"Don't do this to me, Steve. I'm not saying that's where I am or that anybody who knows anything or who matters thinks that way. I'm doing the piece on what was behind the disappearances, and you know that takes me into all kinds of religious realms. Nobody anywhere has drawn any parallels here?"

Yes, that's much more tactful. "I'm not saying" your boss is the Great Beast from the Abyss, I'm merely asking how he'd respond if somebody else were to suggest that he is.

This time when Steve said nothing, Buck merely looked at his watch, determined to wait him out. About 20 seconds after a loud silence, Steve spoke softly. "Buck, I have a two-word answer for you. Are you ready?"

"I'm ready."

"Staten Island."

"Are you tellin' me that --?"

"Don't say the name, Buck! You never know who's listening."

"So you're threatening me with --"

"I'm not threatening. I'm warning. Let me say I'm cautioning you."

This is followed by Buck reminding his friend of his reputation as a tough "bird dog" reporter who never backs down from threats or warnings. Steve doesn't contradict him. Nor does he point out that the very example they're discussing -- reporter Eric Miller's suspicious "suicide" leap off the Staten Island Ferry -- is itself one of several stories Buck has helped to bury in just the past week due to his fearful response to threats and warnings.

Here again what is said about a character trumps that character's actual behavior. Thus, for LaHaye & Jenkins, this song --

Brave Sir Robin ran away.
Bravely ran away away.
When danger reared it's ugly head,
He bravely turned his tail and fled.
Yes, brave Sir Robin turned about
And gallantly he chickened out.
Bravely taking to his feet,
He beat a very brave retreat.
Bravest of the braaaave, Sir Robin!

-- should be taken as proof that Brave Sir Robin was, in fact, quite courageous and gallant. This is primarily Very Bad Writing, but I have a theory that it's somehow also related to Very Bad Theology -- specifically to the author's understanding of "faith" as wholly separate from, and irrelevant to, "works."

The dialogue that follows is a delicious font of unintentional humor. Buck attempts to continue questioning Steve by eaking-spay in ode-cay.

Buck began scribbling furiously on a yellow pad. "Fair enough," he said, writing, Carpathia or Stonagal resp. for Eric Miller? "What I want to know is this: If you think I should stay off the ferry, is it because of the guy behind the wheel, or because of the guy who supplies his fuel?"

"The latter," Steve said without hesitation.

Buck circled Stonagal. "Then you don't think the guy behind the wheel is even aware of what the fuel distributor does on his behalf."

"Correct."

"But if he found out about it?"

"He'd deal with it."

"That's what I expect to see soon."

"I can't comment on that."

It's impossible for me to read that without picturing Buck making Dr. Evil air quotes with his fingers when he says things like "fuel distributor." The best part, of course, is that they're worried that Carpathia, Stonagal or Todd-Cothran might be listening in, so they adopt this convoluted way of talking that would only make sense to each other and to Carpathia, Stonagal and Todd-Cothran. Nothing they're saying would be the least bit confusing to any of the people they're trying to conceal their meaning from. This makes as much sense as it would have if the U.S. had replaced our Navajo code-talkers in World War II with people who spoke German.

But while nothing they're saying would confuse the possibly eavesdropping conspirators, it does succeed in confusing Buck.

"Can you tell me who you really work for?"

"I work for who it appears to you I work for."

What in the world did that mean? Carpathia or Stonagal? How could he get Steve to say on a phone from within the Plaza that might be bugged?

"You work for the Romanian businessman?"

"Of course."

Buck nearly kicked himself. That could be either Carpathia or Stonagal. "You do?" he said, hoping for more.

So I pick up the ball, I throw it to first, and who catches it?

"My boss moves mountain, doesn't he?" Steve said.

"He sure does," Buck said, circling Carpathia this time. "You must be pleased with everything going on these days."

"I am."

Buck scribbled, Carpathia. End times. Antichrist? "And you're telling me straight up that the other issue I raised is dangerous but also hogwash."

"Total roll in the muck."

"And I shouldn't even broach the subject with him, in spite of the fact that I'm a writer who covers all the bases and asks the tough questions?"

"If I thought you would consider mentioning it, I could not encourage the interview or the story."

There's the deal: access in exchange for Buck's agreement not to ask certain questions. Buck agrees. He always does. But he's still "a writer who covers all the bases and asks the tough questions." It says so right there in the book, so it must be true.

L.B.: Still unsaved

Left Behind, pp. 426-430

From here on the rest of Left Behind is all building up to the big final scene in which the Antichrist, like Chekhov's gun, finally goes off. The end of Chapter 23 here is part of this build-up, an attempt to create and sustain suspense leading up to Buck's next encounter with Nicolae Carpathia.

Bruce Barnes has just finished providing Buck with a short checklist of things the Antichrist will do during his rise to power: Form one world government based in Babylon, one world currency, one world religion -- pretty much all the things that Nicolae had announced he was instituting earlier that same day.

"Did you see the news today?" Buck asked.

"Not today," Bruce said. "I've been in meetings ..."

This could have been played for laughs (intentional laughs, I mean), or it could have been written as an eerie reveal -- "Everything you just predicted has already happened!" -- but this being Left Behind, we instead get a half-page explanation of the workings of Bruce Barnes' answering machine.

No, really:

Buck told him what had happened at the U.N. Bruce paled. "That's why we've been hearing all those clicking sounds on my answering machine," Bruce said. "I turned the ringer off on the phone, so the only way you can tell when a call comes in is by the clicking on the answering machine. People are calling to let me know. ..."

Sometimes I almost feel sorry for the authors. Here they finally arrive, albeit belatedly, at this Big Reveal, a moment they've been building up to for hundreds of pages. Two major characters finally come to accept the terrifying reality they've both feared for some time but didn't quite dare to believe and then ...

And then the authors just can't help themselves. They immediately steer off into a discussion of the clicking sounds an answering machine makes when the ringer is turned off. Even when they're not actually on the telephone, they wind up talking about the telephone. (I'm starting to wonder if maybe all this telephony has to mean something, that maybe it's some kind of deeper theme the meaning of which, like the recurring bears in John Irving,* simply eludes me.)

This brings us to the "bullets won't stop him" portion of the monster movie. Here Bruce plays the role of the Spooky Old Man in the village who knows all the legends about the local monster, its strengths, weaknesses and super powers.

"The Antichrist is a deceiver. And he has the power to control men's minds. He can make people see lies as truth."

Buck told Bruce of his invitation to the pre-press conference meeting.

"You must not go," Bruce said.

"I can't not go," Buck said. "This is the opportunity of a lifetime."

"I'm sorry," Bruce said. "I have no authority over you, but let me plead with you, warn you, about what happens next. ..."

I can't help but wonder if Bruce were talking to a member of his congregation, would he begin by saying, "I do have authority over you?" I don't think I've ever heard someone use the word "authority" in this context. Usually when taking this line of argument, a person will say something like "I can't tell you what to do," or "I can't make up your mind for you." I can't imagine someone instead saying what Bruce says here unless that person were a military officer or an overbearing CEO or someone else who is accustomed to exercising authority over others.

For some reason, when someone says, "I can't tell you what to do," it never strikes me this way. It never seems as though they're suggesting, "I can tell some people what to do, but you don't happen to be one of those people." Yet that is what Bruce's phrasing seems to imply. It seems as though he's saying, "As a senior pastor, I have authority over my congregation, but since you're not yet part of that congregation, I can't yet give you orders." It's the sort of comment that would make me extremely reluctant to join this man's church.

Bruce is convinced that the Antichrist is Up To Something, yet, despite all his prophecy study, he isn't sure exactly what.

"He undoubtedly has ulterior motives for wanting you there."

"I'm no good to him."

"You would be if he controlled you."

"But he doesn't."

"If he is the evil one the Bible speaks of, there is little he does not have the power to do."

If I'm following this correctly -- and at this point I'm fairly sure I'm not -- it seems that in the LB-verse we humans have free will when it comes to our dealings with God, but not when it comes to our dealings with Satan.

"I warn you not to go there without protection."

(I'll refrain here, but I'll be disappointed if this isn't pounced on in the comment section.)

"I warn you not to go there without protection."

"A bodyguard?"

"At least. But if Carpathia is the Antichrist, do you want to face him without God?"

... "I don't think I'm going to get hypnotized or anything."

"Mr. Williams, you have to do what you have to do, but I'm pleading with you. If you go into that meeting without God in your life, you will be in mortal and spiritual danger."

Ah. Only God can protect you from the Antichrist's mind-control mojo. Here then, neatly laid out, are The Rules for the big final scene unfolding over the next two chapters. Buck will be going to meet the Antichrist who is sure to turn him into the devil's pawn by using his mind-control powers. Unless, that is, Buck instead invokes the counter-spell of divine providence.

I say "counter-spell" because here again LaHaye & Jenkins' notion of spiritual warfare is difficult to distinguish from sorcery. The Antichrist can cast a spell that we are powerless to resist. That would mean we're all doomed except that we can invoke the magic words spell, which God is powerless to resist, and thereby compel God to cast his counter-spell against the Antichrist.

It's kind of like a cosmic game of rock-paper-scissors. Antichrist beats human beats God beats Antichrist.

This is strange theology, to say the least, but if one agrees to go along for the ride without trying to reconcile any of this with conventional or biblical Christianity then these Rules work well enough as a premise for the coming showdown with Nicolae.

In order to maintain the suspense surrounding that showdown, the reader has to be kept in doubt about the state of Buck's soul. This requires something of a departure from the standard tropes of didactic evangelical fiction. This scene cannot end with Buck's conversion, since that would spoil the is-he-or-isn't-he? drama of his encounter with Carpathia.

It's interesting that the authors thought it necessary to up the ante here. They've insisted all along that salvation -- saying "the prayer" and invoking "the transaction" -- is the most important thing in the world. Up until now I'd have thought that, for them, "Without God in your life, you will be in mortal and spiritual danger" could have stood alone as a statement for anyone. Yet here that statement is qualified, "If you go into that meeting without God in your life ..."

This is an odd inversion of the old evangelist's cliche. At some point you've probably heard an evangelist ask some variation of this question: "If you were to stand before God and He were to ask you why He should let you into His heaven, what would you say?" Here, instead, Bruce is in effect asking Buck, "If you were to stand before Satan and he were to ask you why he shouldn't take you to Hell ..."

"If you go into that meeting without God in your life, you will be in mortal and spiritual danger."

He told Buck about his conversation with the Steeles and how they had collectively come up with the idea of a Tribulation Force. "It's a band of serious-minded people who will boldly oppose the Antichrist."

There's no ellipsis there, nothing omitted between those two paragraphs.

So let's recap, according to Bruce: 1. The Antichrist can control the minds of anyone who isn't born again; 2. Buck isn't born again; 3. Buck is about to meet with the Antichrist.

Given all that, Bruce decides the best course of action is to tell Buck all about his super-secret anti-Antichrist guerrilla squad and to provide him a list of the founding members. Genius.

I suspect the idea here has to do with what Bruce and the authors regard as a more compelling sales pitch. A personal relationship with a loving God just doesn't seem as exciting as the idea of being recruited into an army, into God's commando squad.

The Tribulation Force stirred something deep within Buck. It took him back to his earliest days as a writer, when he believed he had the power to change the world. He would stay up all hours of the night, plotting with his colleagues how they would have the courage and the audacity to stand up to oppression, to big government, to bigotry. He had lost that fire and verve over the years ...

If you've ever seen the disturbing documentary Jesus Camp, then you have an idea of how effective this kind of recruiting-proselytization can be. That sort of stirring, heart-pounding call to be a part of some greater cause is what the authors seem to be shooting for here. Note though that Jenkins' clumsy prose again accidentally reveals more than it intends. Staying up late, "plotting ... how they would have the courage and the audacity" is the end point here. Such late-night plotting offers all the thrills and none of the discomfort that comes from actually doing anything that might require courage or audacity.**

But while Bruce has no qualms about telling a reporter all about his top-secret resistance squad and its top-secret plans to undermine the new OWG, he draws the line at letting Buck sit in on their meeting:

"I'm afraid not," Bruce said. "I think you'd find it interesting and I personally believe it would help convince you, but it is limited to our leadership team. Truth is, I'll be going over with them tomorrow what you and I are talking about tonight, so it would be a rerun for you anyway."

So Buck can't come to the meeting because they'll be discussing things that only the leadership team can discuss and which he's already heard anyway. Huh?

Bruce offers a lukewarm invitation to their Sunday church service:

"You're very welcome, but I must say, it's going to be the same theme I use every Sunday. You've heard it from Ray Steele and you've heard it from me. If hearing it one more time would help, then come on out. ..."

Worth noting here that this is, I believe, the only time in the entire book that anyone other than his dead wife calls Captain Steele "Ray."

Buck stood and stretched. He had kept Bruce long past midnight, and he apologized.

"No need," Bruce said. "This is what I do."

"Do you know where I can get a Bible?"

"I've got one you can have," Bruce said.

So Buck departs, still unsaved and thus still uncloaked in godly protection from Nicolae's evil powers. Will he be saved in time? The suspense is killing me. (No, wait, that's the writing. I knew something was killing me.)

The chapter closes with a final two-paragraph vignette inside the exclusive leadership team meeting.

Bruce told the story of Buck Williams, without using his name or mentioning his connection with Rayford and Chloe. Chloe cried silently as the group prayed for his safety and for his soul.

The point of view for this scene is a bit confusing. Thus far the pattern has been for every scene to be from either Buck's or Rayford's perspective. Yet Buck isn't present for this scene, so it can't be from his POV. And the narrator mentions that Chloe is crying, so it can't be from Rayford's POV either since, as a rule, he never notices when his daughter is crying.

Chloe is crying because she knows Bruce is talking about her boyfriend. But I also like to think she's crying because she's smarter than Bruce and she realizes that Pastor Moron has put all their lives in jeopardy by telling her unsaved boyfriend all their secrets before he goes to hang out with Mr. Mind Control. ("The minds behind every military, diplomatic and covert operation in the galaxy, and you put them in a room with a psychic.")

- - - - - - - - - - - -

* Seriously, what's with the bears already? I finished A Prayer for Owen Meany and I thought, "That was beautiful and, for once, no bears." But then I started wondering what the absence of bears might mean ...

** This is why I find the manipulation of children in Jesus Camp horrifying, but I'm not terribly worried about their "revolution" succeeding. As with most of the theocratic strands of American Christianity, I'm more concerned with what the leaders of such groups are doing to their own followers than I am about what they might actually do to the rest of us. This is true of those leaders as well -- they're far more concerned with manipulating their followers than with changing the rest of the world. That doesn't mean, of course, that we can afford to be completely unconcerned with their external agenda and its effects on their external victims, but in opposing that agenda we have always to keep in mind that such groups internal victims are no less real, and no less victims. That's why, for example, I've tried here to focus my criticism on LaHaye & Jenkins as the peddlers of this dangerous nonsense and to avoid, for the most part, mocking their millions of followers.

L.B.: Transactions

Left Behind, pp. 424-426

As Bruce and Buck go around in circles, spiraling closer to Buck's eventual conversion, I find myself reimagining this scene set in "The Box" from Homicide: Life on the Street, with Andre Braugher in the role of the Rev. Det. Bruce Barnes Pembleton. The authors' notion of evangelism isn't that different from the manipulative mind games employed by Braugher's jesuitical policeman when interrogating suspects. It wouldn't seem out of place if, instead of asking Buck to pray, Bruce slid a yellow legal pad across the table and told him that it was time to make a formal statement.

Alas, the scene as actually written has none of the propulsive urgency of that excellent police drama:

"Nobody can force you or badger you into this, Mr. Williams, but I must also say again that we live in perilous times. We don't know how much pondering time we have."

"You sound like Chloe Steele."

"And she sounds like her father," Bruce said, smiling.

"And he, I guess, sounds like you."

I'm not sure if that's supposed to a be little meta-joke there, a winking acknowledgment to the reader that the past 400 pages are filled with repetitious dialogue from often indistinguishable characters.

Bruce's assertion there about "perilous times" in which we can't know "how much ... time we have" is another reminder of how premillennial dispensationalism is shaped by the denial of death. His remark is an accurate statement about the fragile human condition in every place and time. The Bible is filled with such reminders of our mortality. To the PMDs, however, those reminders do not apply to every place and time, they are relegated to this future time period, this other "dispensation." Here in our dispensation, what PMDs call the "Church Age," we can ignore such thoughts of our own finite time by clinging to the hope of, as Irene Steele put it way back on Page 4, "Jesus coming back to get us before we die."

I suppose that's reassuring, provided one doesn't stop to consider that the mortality rate for all humans, RTCs included, is a constant in every time and "dispensation." What mortals these fools be.

"Let me take a different tack," Bruce says:

"I know you're a bright guy, so you might as well have all the information you need before you leave here."

Buck breathed easier. He had feared Bruce was about to pop the question, pushing him to pray the prayer both Rayford Steele and Chloe had talked about. He accepted that that would be part of it, that it would signal the transaction and start his relationship with God -- someone he had never before really spoken to.

"Pop the question" is a strange phrase there, though less theologically troubling than the rest of that paragraph. The motif of God as the patient, wooing lover of humanity is a frequent and, to me, favorite biblical image. Betrothal isn't a bad metaphor for the kind of commitment and relationship Buck is considering here. Or, rather, for the kind of commitment and relationship Buck might have been considering were it not for the metaphor that supercedes that one here and throughout Left Behind -- the idea of a "transaction" initiated by "the prayer." Not just prayer, but the prayer -- the right prayer, the Magic Words.

I can't begin to unpack all the many ways that "transaction" is the disturbingly wrong word in the paragraph quoted above, but let's note that this notion of a transaction would seem to imply that Buck would be the one doing the redeeming here. That's not how we Christians usually think of this.

The authors' magic-words notion of prayer also explains what they mean here when Buck says that God is "someone he had never before really spoken to." Prayers not properly formulated and precisely addressed (with the correct ZIP+4) simply don't count. Foxhole-prayers and desperate cries addressed to "if there's anyone out there" don't count. God doesn't listen to things like Renan's agnostic's prayer ("Oh God, if there is a God, save my soul, if I have a soul"). Nor does God listen to any supplicant who doesn't pronounce his name precisely right.

Years ago I was arguing with a fundamentalist friend over the meaning of Acts 4:12, "Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved." This meant, he said, that salvation was impossible unless one spoke that precise name, the name of "Jesus Christ of Nazareth." Teasing him a bit, I reminded him that the book of Acts was written in Greek, and that Peter was most likely speaking in Aramaic, so if salvation required the pronunciation of that precise set of syllables, then saying it in English wouldn't seem to count. This clearly troubled him. I'm fairly sure he went home to look up those magic words in Greek and Aramaic, reciting them again just to be safe.

"I don't mean to be morbid, Mr. Williams, but I have no family responsibilities anymore. I have a core group meeting tomorrow and church Sunday. You're welcome to attend. But I have enough energy to go to midnight if you do."

[Insert gratuitous Ted Haggard joke here.]

Core group meetings (and super-ultra-inner-core group meetings) and church services make up Bruce Barnes' agenda these days now that he has slid into the "senior pastor" role left vacant by the disintegration/rapture of his boss. That raises the question of who now is serving as New Hope Village Church's visitation pastor. That ministry is more important than ever here in the traumatized post-Event world. Every family in the new congregation, every family everywhere, is now struggling to cope with the loss of their children. Others would still be in painful limbo -- their traveling spouses missing for more than a week now, whether raptured or dead in a plane crash no one yet knows. Those people are all going to need the attention of a minister in some form other than prophecy classes and Sunday services. The need and the pain of such people would be the dominant fact facing any church in the days, weeks and months after such an epic tragedy, yet this dynamic is completely absent from the authors' portrayal of the life, schedule and agenda of New Hope church.

We've noted before that the United Nations scenes in LB are completely unrealistic, bungling every aspect and detail of how that institution works and what actually goes on there. The authors' laziness, lack of research and failure of imagination is inexcusable, but their ignorance in that case is at least understandable, since neither of them has any actual experience or familiarity with that institution.

Yet the scenes in this book set in the offices of Global Weekly or New Hope Village Church are also wholly unreal. Such scenes also botch and bungle the details, the rhythm, the culture and the daily life of those institutions. This is confounding. Jerry Jenkins was, for years, the chief editor of a monthly magazine. Tim LaHaye has been, for decades, the pastor of a church. Despite their own histories with such institutions, their portrayal of them still seems as alien, lazy and ignorant as their portrayal of the U.N.

This is baffling. It's like listening to someone describe himself inaccurately while looking into a mirror. (Perhaps that explains it, actually.)

Anyway, I nominate poor, shattered Loretta to fill the now-vacant position of visitation pastor. She's visibly broken and short on answers. That should make her much better at the job than Bruce ever was.

Bruce spent the next several hours giving Buck a crash course in prophecy and the end times. ...

What this means for readers is a summary of the authors' description of the Antichrist, accompanied by a fevered description of Buck's increasing anxiety:

Buck's blood ran cold. He fell silent, no longer peppering Bruce with questions or comments. He scribbled notes as fast as he could. ... His fingers began to shake. ... Buck was overcome. He felt a terrible fear deep in his gut.

I'm starting to worry about his health. Buck's anxiety here stems from the similarities between the Antichrist that Bruce describes and Nicolae Carpathia:

At one point he thought of accusing Bruce of having based everything he was saying on the CNN report he had heard and seen, but even if he had, here it was in black and white in the Bible.

The CNN report is, of course, fictional. So too is this version of the Bible and its purported description of "the Antichrist."

Antichrist stories are, in a sense, a bit like vampire stories. Just as every new storyteller must reinterpret the vampire legends, deciding which parts to keep and which to revise (crosses, garlic, sunlight, mirrors, wood, running water, invitations, etc.), so too every new Antichrist storyteller must do the same -- whether, as here, in fiction or in purportedly non-fiction "prophecy" studies. Both kinds of stories are based on various, sometimes contradictory legends and neither (despite LaHaye's claims) can rely on any actual or canonical account that establishes the "real" characteristics of such monsters.

Because of this, as this series of books progresses, it's interesting to watch the dynamic in this passage reverse itself. Here Bruce and Buck begin to realize that Carpathia's actions closely parallel those supposedly prophesied in the Bible. Such similarities exist, at this point, because the character of Carpathia and his actions are based on those prophecies.

Yet because those prophecies of the Antichrist's actions are also largely a creation of the authors' imagination, the influence and the similarity begins to reverse itself as the Left Behind saga develops. The Antichrist they find "literally" prophesied in the pages of the Bible comes to resemble Nicolae rather than the other way around. They start projecting their own fictional character back into their convoluted prophecy scheme. More on this much later, when we get to some of the sequels (if the Lord tarries and/or we live that long).

I've commented before on the strange way that the authors (and many of their fans) seem to regard these books as evidence that these biblical prophecies are true. That wouldn't be the case even if these books were, as the authors claim, a fictional narrative devised to illustrate the fulfillment of those prophecies.

But that's not really what these books are. They are a fictional narrative concocted by the authors to illustrate the fulfillment of prophecies which were also concocted by the authors. They are two opposing mirrors, with nothing in between.

L.B.: Buck and the Preacher

Left Behind, pp. 423-424

"I have a message and an answer for people genuinely seeking," the Rev. Bruce Barnes tells Buck Williams, adding that, if Buck meets that stipulation, "I have all the time you need."

"Well, sir," Buck said, nearly staggered by the emotion and humility he heard in his own voice, "I appreciate that."

Strolling through Left Behind, one frequently winds up tripping over phrases like that. They force one to stop, turn around and inspect the ground, wondering how such a strange and hazardous thing could have ended up there in the middle of the sidewalk.

Buck was "nearly staggered by the emotion and humility he heard in his own voice" -- is such a condition even possible? Just barely, perhaps, but not in the case of anyone you would care to know. The sentence as a whole was, I think, intended to convey the idea that Buck is humble, but what it actually tells us, instead, is that Buck is the kind of person who finds a humble-sounding tone in his own voice deeply moving.¹ That doesn't strike me as an endearing quality.

Buck explains to Bruce that his questions have nothing to do with the article he's supposed to be working on:

"It might have made sense to get a pastor's view for my story, but people can guess what pastors think, especially based on the other people I'm quoting."

"Like Captain Steele."

Buck nodded.

The more people refer to Rayford as "Captain Steele" the more one gets the impression that this is something he insists on. Apart from in-flight intercom announcements -- "This is your captain speaking ..." -- I have never, ever heard anyone speak of an airline pilot as "Captain Smith."² I'm wondering if this sounds as unnatural and strange to airline pilots themselves as it does to me.

The stranger thing here, though, is Buck's notion that his readers are well-served by leaving them to "guess" what the experts think based on the comments of those experts' most neophyte laymen followers. It's worse than that, actually, since the role or title of "pastor" doesn't actually require that one be an expert in anything other than, well, pastoring. "It might have made sense to get a pastor's view" for Buck's story only if he was interested in exploring the emotional and spiritual repercussions of The Event from the perspective of someone whose job it now was to minister to their traumatized congregations and communities. (None of which, as we've noticed repeatedly, interests Buck or the authors even slightly.) If he were looking for someone to provide a theological or biblical interpretation of The Event, then Buck should be interviewing a theologian or biblical scholar. Seeking such a perspective from the pastor of a randomly selected nondenominational congregation wouldn't make much more sense than seeking it from an airline pilot.

We get another quick dose of boilerplate Rayford worship --

"I was impressed with Captain Steele. That's one smart guy, a good thinker ..."

It's Buck talking there, I think, but it could just as well have been Bruce. They both speak of Rayford in the same awe-struck tone using precisely the same adoring vocabulary. For that matter, so does Rayford. Finally, having established their mutual respect for one another's sincerity and passion and for that of Captain Steele, it's time for Bruce to begin his sermon:

Bruce began by telling Buck his life story. "I once had wealth, power and the love of a beautiful woman. ... It was never easy for me. I was born a poor black child. I remember the days, sittin' on the porch with my family ...

No wait, I'm sorry, that's Steve Martin's opening monologue from The Jerk. Let me try that again:

Bruce began by telling Buck his life story, being raised in a Christian home, going to Bible college,³ marrying a Christian, becoming a pastor, the whole thing.

You get the sense that when Bruce gets up to give his testimony, he probably says "yada yada" a lot.

He clarified that he knew the story of Christ and the way of forgiveness and a relationship with God. "I thought I had the best of both worlds. But the Scripture is clear that you can't serve two masters. You can't have it both ways. ..."

As we've discussed previously (see "The real sin of the Rev. Bruce Barnes"), Bruce didn't have the best of any world in his sad, somnambular existence before The Event. The scripture he alludes to above says, "You cannot serve God and Mammon," but Bruce wasn't serving either one. His was exactly the kind of twilit misery -- wholly devoid of either pleasure or meaning -- that C.S. Lewis' Screwtape prescribes as the living death of Hell on earth, yet somehow LaHaye and Jenkins have confused this with Bruce's living the high life.

It's telling, too, that Bruce's wretched, Babbit-like existence is also said to have been outwardly indistinguishable from that of Irene or Vernon Billings or any of the other real RTCs at New Hope Village Church. Look again at that initial summary -- "being raised in a Christian home, going to Bible college, marrying a Christian, becoming a pastor, the whole thing" -- and see if even the authors themselves don't sound a bit bored by the mundane tedium of it. I suppose that's a side-effect of believing that one's primary calling in life is sitting around and waiting for the end of the world. That's not terribly easy to distinguish from sitting around and waiting to die. I imagine Christ had something different in mind when he offered his followers the promise of "life ... to the full."

"You can't have it both ways. I discovered that truth in the severest way." And he told of losing his family and friends, everyone dear to him. He wept as he spoke. "The pain is every bit as great today as it was when it happened," he said.

Well, yeah, since it only happened 10 days ago. As a former visitation pastor, Bruce really ought to know that 10 days is still pretty early in the process for coping with the loss of one's entire family.

But then Bruce's pain isn't primarily due to his loss of "his family and friends." Everyone else on earth has been dealt that same blow, yet no one else is portrayed as Bruce is, wracked by grief, shaken to the core and perpetually on the verge of tears. That's because they're not dealing with what he's dealing with -- the truth he discovered "in the severest way." The real cause of Bruce's pain is that he rejected the LaHaye Jesus and thus missed out on his chance to participate fully in the glorious cosmic I Told You So.

Then Bruce outlined, as Rayford had done, the plan of salvation from beginning to end.

Here, once again, we readers are told that someone is told "the plan of salvation," without our being able to read what that is. That's a curious repeated omission in a book that both authors insist was intended, foremost, for evangelism (although there are links for the unsaved at leftbehind.com). I would have been interested to read the highlights of the authors' version of this outline of the plan of salvation. (I'm guessing it wouldn't be the version that begins, "There was a man who had two sons ..." And, despite their enthusiasm for every other passage about the end of the world, I'm absolutely certain it wouldn't be the version that begins, "When the Son of Man comes in his glory ...")

Buck's response to all of this rings partly true:

Buck grew nervous, anxious. He wanted a break. He interrupted and asked if Bruce wanted to know a little more about him.

Here I'm guessing that, as with the descriptions of O'Hare Airport, Jenkins is working from firsthand knowledge. He has been in Bruce's shoes and he has seen how the person in Buck's situation responds. They seem nervous, increasingly anxious, as though they're looking for a break -- perhaps even an escape. Jenkins may not have correctly interpreted these signals, but at least he recognized them and does a capable job here of describing what they look like.

Buck told of his own history, concentrating most on the Russia/Israel conflict and the roughly 14 months since. "I can see," Bruce said at last, "that God is trying to get your attention."

The Russia/Israel conflict mentioned there is what Buck earlier called "the Israel miracle," the explicitly divine destruction of the entire Russian air force. So here is the one certain thing we have learned from this book about "the plan of salvation from beginning to end" -- it means one thing for people like Rayford and Buck and something else entirely for all those Russian (and Ethiopian) pilots. Those tens of thousands of people lived and then violently died, apparently, just so God could try to get Buck's attention.

That may sound like I'm reading too much into Bruce's offhand comment, but this is actually the plot of the book -- of the whole series. This is the basis of LaHaye's entire End Times scheme. He believes that in the last days, God will try to get our attention through a series of massive and increasingly lethal miracles. It's less Judgment Day than divine tantrum.

Left Behind offers a convincing illustration of LaHaye's notion that such a flamboyant and wantonly destructive God might succeed in catching our attention. But even more so the book serves to illustrate that such a God would not deserve it.

A God deserving of our attention would be "a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity." That's Jonah's description of God, but the unholy prophet did not intend it as praise. Jonah -- LaHaye's spiritual ancestor -- was seething with anger over God's compassion. He refused to accept that all of those Ninevites -- all of those Russian and Ethiopian pilots, those Assyrians and Babylonians and New Babylonians, all of those enemies of the Tribulation Force -- should be spared the calamity he desperately wished to see befall them.

But the Lord said, "Ninevah has more than 120,000 people who cannot tell their right hand from their left, and many cattle as well. Should I not be concerned about that great city?"

- - - - - - - - - - - -

¹ Hmm. Put it that way and this sentence, which initially struck me as flagrantly awful, suddenly seems to be inadvertently insightful and useful. It gets at something I often find unsettling and unconvincing in the musical/liturgical style sometimes called "contemporary worship" (if you're unfamiliar with the genre, google "Hillsong" -- or just imagine "Kumbaya" on steroids).

At its worst (and it's not always at its worst), this "worship music" strikes me as a kind of overacting -- a desperate effort to be perceived as earnest that leaves me with the sour aftertaste of disingenuousness. The performers of such worship would likely respond that I'm not the one they're seeking to impress. Their intended audience is God, and God knows they're sincere. But I don't think that's quite true either. The real intended audience -- the listener such worship seeks most to influence -- is the performers themselves. The goal of such performances seems to be to achieve a state in which one is, to borrow Jenkins' accidentally insightful phrase, "nearly staggered by the emotion and humility one hears in one's own voice."

² I know two airline pilots fairly well and neither I nor anyone else who knows them calls them "captain." We all simply refer to them, respectively, as "Billy" and "Billy's idiot brother-in-law."

³ The distinction between "Bible college" and seminary conveys a universe of cultural meaning, the full extent of which can be difficult to convey to those not intimately acquainted with the American evangelical subculture. The Bible college is a strange and tenuous institution -- a structure designed to provide higher education while simultaneously accommodating fervent anti-intellectualism. Bible colleges are not, as they are sometimes portrayed, the evangelical equivalent of seminaries. The evangelical equivalent of seminaries are evangelical seminaries. The seminary/Bible college cultural divide is thus not between mainline Protestants and evangelicals, but between evangelicals and anti-intellectual evangelicals. In those parts of evangelicalism where anti-intellectualism is most fervent, Bible college is viewed as the proper destination for Real, True Christians while seminary is viewed as the secularized realm of pointy-headed intellectuals who have substituted fancy book-larnin' for a genuine relationship with a personal savior.

(PMD prophecy enthusiasts like LaHaye -- a seminary graduate -- are a bit more complicated. They're part of the anti-intellectual camp, but they're also obsessed with the trappings of scholarship and the desire to have their prophecy studies viewed as academically legitimate. Hence places like Dallas Theological Seminary.)

There are a few Bible colleges that manage to transcend the limitations of their anti-intellectual heritage, and there are more than a few qualified people teaching in Bible colleges throughout the country. Having said that, I would strongly discourage anyone from spending their money attending any institution with the appellation "Bible college."

L.B.: Passionate sincerity

Left Behind, pp. 421-423

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity

We left Buck Williams sitting in his car parked in front of New Hope Village Church, "his head in his hands." And there he sits for the next page, musing about how his carefully planned and ordered life had been knocked off balance by recent events:

But nothing had prepared him for the disappearances or for the violent deaths of his friends. While he should have been prepared for this promotion, that hadn't been part of his plan, either.

Any hint of the lasting emotional or existential effects of The Event are rare and welcome in Left Behind. The near total absence of any such effects is one of the strangest of this awful book's many defects. Two billion people get disintegrated in a flash, instantaneously transforming the planet into a world without children, and those that remain simply go back to work and get on with their week untroubled, their previous routines unaltered. A heavy snowfall would have more effect than The Event seems to have had in this book. Instead of a world in mourning, an endless string of memorial services and funerals for empty caskets (most very small), we get a world without any memorials or remembrances for the departed.

So I'm glad to hear Buck at least mention the disappearances as part of the list of things for which he was unprepared. Maybe it shouldn't have been mentioned in a way that suggests this global trauma wasn't a bigger deal than Buck's unexpected promotion, but at least he mentioned it.

We know the names of the friends Buck mentions who died violently -- Dirk Burton and Alan Tompkins. Calling Tompkins his "friend" seems a bit of an overstatement, since Buck only met the man a few hours before he was blown up by a car bomb intended for Buck. Yet he has thought of Tompkins repeatedly -- often enough that if he said that the loss of this man "tugged at his heart almost constantly" we might actually believe him. We couldn't believe Buck when he said that about the loss of his niece and nephew on the one occasion they seem to have crossed his mind. We don't know the names of those relatives. I doubt Buck does either.

Finally, with a last burst of trepidation ("he felt alone, exposed, vulnerable … he felt a bone weariness as he headed for the church"), Buck goes inside.

It was a pleasant surprise to find that Bruce Barnes was someone near Buck's own age. He seemed bright and earnest, having that same authority and passion Rayford Steele exhibited.

By now readers have to be wondering if these are the only adjectives Jerry Jenkins knows. (Police Officer: "Did you get a good look at the suspect?" Jenkins: "He seemed sincere. And passionate.") The point the authors are trying to pound home through this passionate and sincere refrain, I suspect, is that these are the characteristics that they believe every good Christian man should have: Passion and sincerity. The "authority" mentioned above is the product of those two attributes: Sincerity + Passion = Authority.

That arithmetic only works if you accept, as the authors apparently do, that one cannot be sincerely and passionately wrong. That may be why they assume that everyone they consider to be wrong or in the wrong -- i.e., you, me and every other non-RTC -- must be insincere.

It had been a long time since Buck had been in a church. This one seemed innocuous enough, fairly new and modern, neat and efficient. He and the young pastor met in a modest office.

Scene-setting descriptions of place are rare in this book. We got a similar quick sketch of Irene Steele's country-kitsch bedroom decor and of Stanton Bailey's banker-ish, polished-brass office, but compared to most scenes in this book the above description of New Hope Village Church seems detailed and expansive.

This description tells us little about what the outside or inside of the church actually looks like, but I suspect that's not really the point. The point, rather, is to present a series of opposites to underscore that New Hope isn't like those other churches Buck might have been in years ago. Those weren't Real True churches. Thus where NHVC is "new and modern" those other churches are old and hidebound to tradition. Where the real church is "neat and efficient" and "modest," the false churches of the left behind are cluttered, inefficient (not cranking out the product) and immodest. All of that makes such churches, in the authors' view, anything but "innocuous."

"Your friends, the Steeles, told me you might call," Barnes said.

Buck was struck by his honesty. In the world in which Buck moved, he might have kept that information to himself, that edge. But he realized the pastor had no interest in edge. There was nothing to hide here. In essence, Buck was looking for information and Bruce was interested in providing it.

I don't see how withholding such information might provide any "edge," but I suppose that's just evidence that I wouldn't have what it takes to get by in "the world in which Buck moved" -- a world of cut-throat conversational chess where the stakes are high and the slightest mistake, such as mentioning that "your friends ... told me you might call," could leave you vulnerable to a fatal blow. ("Hello," the stranger said. Buck was about to respond in kind, but then he caught himself. That's just what he'd expect me to say. ...)

"I want to tell you right off," Bruce said, "that I am aware of your work and respect your talent. But to be frank, I no longer have time for the pleasantries and small talk that used to characterize my work. We live in perilous times. ..."

We should note again here that Bruce's earlier work was the role of "visitation pastor" for NHVC. That somewhat euphemistic title refers to ministers who spend their days not at the church, but in nursing homes, hospitals and hospices, by the bedsides of the sick, the suffering and the dying. "Perilous times" shouldn't be anything new for Bruce Barnes. "Perilous times" was his job description. "Pleasantries and small talk" might have their place in such ministry, but they could never be said to "characterize" that work. Further confirmation of something we have already seen: Bruce Barnes was a terrible visitation pastor.

"... We live in perilous times. I have a message and an answer for people genuinely seeking. I tell everyone in advance that I have quit apologizing for what I'm going to say. If that's a ground rule you can live with, I have all the time you need."

Bruce's long apology for why he's speaking unapologetically demonstrates a refreshing urgency. He knows that the world is going to end in less than seven years and that the remaining six years, 355 days are going to be marked by a series of unpleasant events each outdoing the last in mass casualties. He should be speaking urgently -- probably even more urgently than he speaks here. This would be a good time for what Richard Clarke memorably described as "running around town with your hair on fire."

Imagine that you were transported back in time to Christmas Eve of 2004. The stockings hang from the mantel, the pregnant pile of presents sits under the tree, A Christmas Story plays for the umpteenth time on TBS. And, unknown to anyone but you, the visitor from the future, hundreds of thousands of people from Madagascar to Malaysia have less than 24 hours to live. Wouldn't you maybe, I don't know, call someone and try to warn the world of what was about to happen? For that matter if, at that very moment, the executive editor from a prominent national newsmagazine were to walk into your home, wouldn't you consider that an opportunity to get the word out?

But Bruce doesn't really seem interested here in getting the word out. He knows that unrelenting calamity and mass death are about to happen on a global scale, but he's not looking for a way to warn the world of this impending doom. He's looking, instead, for a select few potential new members to initiate into his secret club, some few who have been carefully vetted and found worthy of hearing the full truth of what's coming. "I have a message and an answer," Bruce said, but then immediately qualifies that, "for people genuinely seeking." Seekers who are not "genuine" -- not sufficiently sincere and passionate -- need not apply. Bruce has no message and no answers for them.

A few pages ago, Bruce sat in this same office with the Steeles attempting to reinvent and rebuild the church from scratch. The model they chose didn't come from Pentecost but from the Pentagon -- "a sort of Green Berets." Buck arrives, the authors tell us, "looking for information and Bruce was interested in providing it," but that's not really what's going on here. Bruce is interested in screening Buck as a potential recruit. He's interested in providing just enough information to get him signed up, but much of what Bruce knows about the events of the coming months and years is information that Bruce seems to consider classified, only to be shared on a "need to know" basis.

Contrast Bruce's approach with that of the Jerusalem street preachers, LB's version of the Two Witnesses from the book of Revelation. Their message and answer is a monotonous chanted slogan, which hardly seems likely to persuade, but at least they're taking it public and not warily sizing up their listeners according to whether or not they seem to be "genuinely seeking."

We readers know, of course, that the authors have rigged the game and thus the answer that Bruce and the street preachers have is the right answer. But what about those who have latched onto the wrong answers? Ten days after The Event one would expect to find street preachers everywhere -- crackpot theorists, Max-Fennig-like alleged victims of alien abduction, and unhinged former parents turning every intersection into the Hyde Park Speaker's Corner. People walking around in "The End Is Near" sandwich-board signs would be as common in real life as in New Yorker cartoons. The Event would have revived and reinvigorated doomsday cults, dragging them out into the open where their sincere and passionate devotees would assault passersby, shouting, "I have a message and an answer!"

None of that happens here, of course, because, again: A) it would force the authors to explain how such people could be sincere and passionate, yet still wrong, and B) as we've seen, every character in the story seems to have read the back of the book and to know that they're in a premillennial dispensationalist novel in which the PMD End Times fantasy is true.

B does not result in spontaneous mass conversions, I suppose, because, as A indicates, the unsaved are also insincere -- they know they're wrong, but they choose, deliberately, to reject what they know is true. I don't know that the authors would put it that starkly, but that seems to be the underlying assumption for their characterization of all non-RTCs.

This makes sense when you consider the fate that the authors sincerely and passionately believe awaits all non-RTCs. I'm guessing that all of that mayhem, destruction and torment -- followed by an infinity of even worse mayhem, destruction and torment -- becomes easier to stomach if you convince yourself that its victims have deliberately and knowingly chosen such a fate.

L.B.: The Pope of Mount Prospect

Left Behind, pp. 421

After the Steeles meet with the Rev. Bruce Barnes, it's Buck Williams' turn:

Two hours after the Steeles had left, Buck Williams parked his rental car in front of New Hope Village Church in Mount Prospect, Illinois.

The real Mount Prospect is home to more than a dozen churches. I can't help but wonder if they also exist in the fictional world of Left Behind and, if so, what's going on at their buildings while Bruce stays up late at New Hope trying to design a cool logo for the Tribulation Force.

Were the parishioners or members or attendees of those other churches -- the Baptists, Lutherans, Methodists, Episcopalians and Catholics -- among the disappeared? If so, have they also, like New Hope, begun to gather small cadres of those who realize what happened and what they missed?

The gist of LB thus far suggests that all of those mainline Protestants and Catholics would not make the cut come Rapture time. They might call themselves Christians, but they're not Real True Christians according to Tim LaHaye's idea of God's standards (which is to say, Tim LaHaye's standards -- he seems to think that on the day of judgment God will hire him as a consultant to separate the wheat from the tares). But even so, non-RTCs still have children. Or had children. The disintegration of every single child of every single family at all of those churches would lead to crowded sanctuaries filled with grieving, traumatized parents seeking answers.

Pastors like the now-departed Vernon Billings tend to stick to themselves. They don't associate or cooperate much with other clergy in their communities. They don't get involved with ministerial councils or interdenominational efforts. The stated reason for this is usually that light should have no fellowship with darkness, by which they mean that they would consider it a sin to associate with people like that liberal Methodist pastor who got arrested at that protest last year, or that woman from the Episcopal church who calls herself a priest, or that "welcoming and affirming" [epithet] from the local UCC church who wears a rainbow prayer stole.

Plus when the rabbi shows up at those interfaith meetings, they ask you not to mention Jesus when you pray, and you know the spell doesn't work if you don't say "in Jesus name."

Working with other churches is perilously ecumenical. Ecumenism -- cooperation among disparate Christian churches in recognition of our underlying unity -- is not considered a Good Thing by people like Billings, or Lahaye and Jenkins. Even the most harmless-seeming forms of cooperation, such as taking turns providing shelter through a local interfaith hospitality network or some such, are too dangerous. It's a slippery slope from there to syncretism, the collapse of absolute standards, moral relativism, one world religion, One World Government, human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together ... mass hysteria.

The Ghostbusters quote at the end there is hyperbole. The rest of that isn't. This is exactly what they believe. What they will tell you they believe. What they teach. Left Behind teaches this explicitly. Readers are intended to see the slippery slope between a metropolitan ministerial council and Carpathia's "Enigma Babylon One World Faith." This is meant as a warning.

This objection to interdenominational and interfaith cooperation was much-discussed in evangelical circles following 9/11. The scale and impact of that tragedy was such that a few RTC pastors for once set aside that objection, participating in some of the various memorial vigils and prayer services. That participation was a source of "controversy" and recrimination for months afterward. (That same kind of controversy never seems to follow, however, when the interfaith activity in question is a vigil for Terri Schiavo or an anti-abortion rally. That's interesting.)

The willingness to interact or associate with clergy from other denominations or faiths used to be one of the markers for differentiating between fundamentalists and evangelicals. Evangelicals rallied behind Billy Graham as he effectively worked with local churches from every denomination (even papists!) to help coordinate his mass-evangelism "crusades." Graham's mega-church heirs -- people like Bill Hybels and Rick Warren -- have taken a similar approach. I may not like everything Warren says, but I appreciate that he's willing to work with clergy of other denominations and even other faiths. This new generation of leaders, like Graham, insist that such cooperation is possible without compromising one's own identity. Their critics disagree, vehemently. And those critics are no longer found only in the fundamentalist/separatist wings of the subculture.

The fundies' white-knuckled anxiety -- their barely repressed doubts and their fear that their faith may be a house of cards that would crumble if exposed to the wider world -- seems to be spreading to other branches of the evangelical movement. That's the predictable result of adding weird mythologies to one's faith. The fundies convinced themselves that if the world is any older than 10,000 years then Jesus doesn't love them. Thus they have to avoid all exposure to science. Evangelicals are trying to convince themselves that homosexuality is a choice and that the invasion of Iraq was God's Will. Like the fundies, they have welded these ideas to the bearing walls of their faith, so that if they are not true, then nothing is true. They thus find themselves, like the fundies, having to avoid exposure to an awful lot of the real world around them.

There's one other reason that I think people like the Rev. Billings oppose interdenominational cooperation. It has to do with power and influence. Evangelical polity -- the structure of this unstructured, nondenominational movement -- is roughly feudal, like a collection of competing fiefdoms. It's very important to a guy like the Rev. Vernon Billings that he be the biggest fish in the pond. Acknowledging that his is not the only pond, and that it is far from the largest, threatens his sense of authority. Once you recognize the legitimacy, or even the existence, of all those other churches in town then it's much harder to maintain the illusion that you're the Pope of Mount Prospect.

Getting back to those other churches in town, if we accept the world of Left Behind as the authors have sketched it out for us, then we have to assume that most of the adults from those other congregations were not RTCs and so were not among the disappeared. Bruce Barnes was until very recently a faux-Christian himself, but he seems to view the clergy and laity of these other churches as an even more reprobate species of fraud. It thus never occurs to him to speak to them about what he knows or to attempt to recruit them to his cause.

But while it's not surprising that he doesn't reach out to them, it's strange that none of them are reaching out too him. Those other clergy may not believe the premillennial dispensationalist heresies that Billings taught, but they would all be familiar enough with the substance of them to recognize what they were seeing. They would realize by now what was happening -- realize that they, like all the church fathers and theologians they had ever studied, were wrong and that Billings and Hal Lindsay and (especially) Cassandra LaHaye were right. And despite their being overwhelmed with their duties chaplaining the traumatized community, those other clergy would all be getting in touch with Bruce Barnes.

That doesn't happen here. It doesn't happen for the same reason that Bruce has no problem renting a car or driving 20 miles out I-90 to Mount Prospect despite all the chaos and debris that should be but isn't affecting anyone, anywhere in this book a mere 10 days after The Event.

And but so anyway, Buck pulls up to the church:

He had a sense of destiny tinged with fear. Who would this Bruce Barnes be? What would he look like? And would be be able to detect a non-Christian at a glance?

The authors apparently imagine that his is a common question unbelievers have about RTC clergy: Does their non-Christian detection power work at a single glance, or does it require physical contact?

I can't figure out why anyone would ever think this. Nor can I figure out why the authors would think that anyone would ever think this. It's not just wrong, it's bewilderingly wrong.

And anyway why should Buck care? He's not trying to pass himself off as a Christian, so he shouldn't be worrying that Bruce's spiritual gaydar will penetrate his cunning disguise.

Buck sat in the car, his head in his hands. He was too analytical, he knew, to make a rash decision. Even his leaving home years before to pursue an education and become a journalist had been plotted for years. To his family it came like a thunderbolt, but to young Cameron Williams it was a logical next step, a part of his long-range plan.

What family wouldn't be thunderstruck? Buck finishes high school and then astonishes them all by announcing that he's going away to college to pursue a career. It's so utterly unprecedented.

We're constantly being told that Buck is methodical and analytical (always a bad trait in LB), but we never see this. It seems that by "analytical" in this case the authors mean his stubborn refusal to accept the undeniable implications of explicit divine intervention. That actually seems like the opposite of analytical.

We've also seen that not only is Buck capable of making a "rash decision," he has a propensity for it. He flew to England to expose an international conspiracy, but less than 24 hours later he was cutting a deal with them and helping them to cover their tracks. He met Chloe yesterday, fell in love at first sight and impulsively booked the seat next to her on a flight to Chicago.

Again, this could have worked in a different novel where this was an intentional device -- the self-deceived voice of an unreliable narrator rather than the voice of one writer's Mary Sue substitute. But here the chasm between Buck's concept of himself and his actual character and behavior escape not just his notice, but the authors' as well. They don't perceive any such gap, and even if they did they seem to think that their assertions trump the actions they describe. We've never seen Buck think "analytically" and we have seen him, time and again, make rash decisions, but when the authors contradict this -- "He was too analytical ... to make a rash decision" -- that's supposed to settle the matter.

This is Bad Writing, but it's not wholly unrelated to the authors' Bad Theology. The same gap between what they tell and what they show, between asserted character and actual character, can be seen wherever the novel touches on the nature of God. They tell us that the God they believe in is good, just and loving. But the God they show us is a bloodthirsty, capricious, evil monstrosity.

That's partly the result of Bad Writing, too, but more than that it seems to be Bad Writing by Bad People. The character of God in LB is, like Buck and Rayford, another Mary-Sue wish-fulfillment surrogate for the authors. They have recreated God in their own image. And that image isn't pretty.

L.B.: Martyr envy

Or, Tribulation is a force that gives us meaning.

Left Behind, pp. 418-421

Meanwhile, in the suburbs outside of Chicago, a warm, domestic scene with the remaining members of the Steele family. Newly converted Chloe Steele voraciously reads in her dear departed mother's Bible and her father, immensely pleased, sits watching her. But not at all in a creepy way:

Rayford Steele was a happy as he had been since his own decision to receive Christ. To see Chloe smiling, to see her hungry to read Irene's Bible, to be able to pray with her and talk about everything together was more than he had dreamed of. "One thing we need to do," he said, "is to get you your own Bible. You're going to wear that one out."

"I want to join that core group of yours," she said. "I want to get all that stuff from Bruce firsthand."

Unlike her father, Chloe is at least able to stay awake while reading the Bible. We're not told what it is, specifically, that she's reading. Revelation, one assumes, and parts of Daniel but not the other parts. And little snippets from Ezekiel and Zechariah, the odd-numbered verses of Matthew 24, every third word in John's second and third epistles, and carefully redacted chapter fragments from 1 & 2 Thessalonians. For premillennial dispensationalists, the rest is just padding that doesn't apply to our "dispensation."

The PMD prophecy enthusiasts really would "wear out" a Bible if they tried to read one the way they claim it should be read. All that tearing out and reshuffling and re-editing on the fly would be tough on the binding. It's not really possible to pick up the physical book and read it this way. Even a Scofield Reference Bible, with its footnotes indicating all the arbitrary cross-references, would exceed the capacity of a ten-fingered reader to keep track of all the various and disparate passages it tries to stitch together as an allegedly single, secret narrative.

This is why the authors can tell us about Chloe hungrily reading the Bible, but they can't get more specific. It's also why Chloe herself realizes that she'll never be able to understand the End Times Checklist simply from reading the Bible on her own -- she needs Bruce's help to read it with the PMD decoder ring.

The telling word here is "firsthand." Bruce's interpretive overlay -- "all this stuff" -- is the "firsthand," primary source. The Bible is secondary at best.

It's also strange here that Irene's Bible seems to be regarded only as just another Bible. Here is an artifact of the wife and mother they have lost. It is a thing she treasured, that she held every day. Its margins are filled with notes in her own handwriting. My mother's Bible is not like any of the other Bibles, or any of the other books, I own. it is not merely a sacred text, but a sacred edition. It's impossible for me to read that volume without thinking of the hours my mother spent with it, of the prayers she prayed for me during the years she spent in those pages. To read that Bible is to have the sense, both sad and comforting, that I am somehow reading it with her.

So it's just alien-seeming that Rayford and Chloe seem to be treating Irene's Bible as indistinguishable from some Gideon edition pinched from a hotel room. It's alien-seeming, too, that they can sit together in this house and not be reminded, constantly, of Irene and Raymie. Yet there's no sense here of their presence or their absence.

I can't help but think of John Irving's Hotel New Hampshire when reading these scenes, and of the sadness that pervades that book due to the death of mother and poor Egg.¹ The authors of Left Behind seem to think they've already dealt with that sadness, that this sorrow and loss could be dealt with in a scene or two, allowing their characters and their checklist plot to move forward without ever looking back. There's never the sense here that sadness and loss linger. In Left Behind, sorrow doesn't float.

"The only part that bothers me," Chloe says as she wraps up her vague Bible study, "is that it sounds like things are going to get worse."

That's a major theme of LaHaye's prophecy scheme: "Things are going to get worse." This is the trajectory here in history -- so anyone who says different, or who tries to make things different, is likely evil. And it's even more the trajectory of the post-history "tribulation" period in which Chloe finds herself.

Late in the afternoon they dropped in on Bruce, who confirmed Chloe's view. "I'm thrilled to welcome you into the family," he said, "but you're right. God's people are in for dark days. Everybody is. I've been thinking and praying about what we're supposed to do as a church between now and the Glorious Appearing."

The "Glorious Appearing" is what LaHaye calls the Second Coming of Jesus. He can't call it that because, in his way of seeing things, it's really the third coming, with the Rapture being the second. PMDs have Jesus returning and re-returning to Earth so often that it'd make sense for him to spring for the EZ-Pass.

A pastor thinking about "what we're supposed to do as a church" might not seem unusual, but for LaHaye-types it is. From their perspective, "what we're supposed to do as a church" right now is wait for the Rapture, which could occur at any moment.

It could even happen ... riiiiiight ... now!

...

(Checks watch. Looks around.)

...

No? OK, maybe ... wait for it ... now!

...

Hmm, nope. OK, let's try again. ...

That pretty much is the PMD notion of the church's business agenda between Christ's ascension and the (first) second coming. There's plenty, of course, that the church and its members shouldn't be doing -- dancing, drinking, sneaking peaks at Playboy like the pre-conversion Bruce Barnes did. As their truncated version of James 1:27 reads, "Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: ... [snip] ... to keep oneself from being polluted by the world." The only thing they have to do besides sit around and wait for Jesus to come back is evangelism -- which as far as they can figure means recruiting others to also, um, sit around and wait.² Not terribly inspiring.

Bruce Barnes, however, knows that the second coming 2.1 won't be happening at any second. He has some time to kill before the (second) second coming, so he has to figure out something for his flock to be doing for the next seven years. At least for those few who manage to live that long.

Chloe wanted to know all about that, so Bruce showed her from the Bible why he believed Christ would appear in seven years, at the end of the Tribulation. "Most Christians will be martyred or die from war, famine, plagues or earthquakes," he said.

Chloe smiled. "This isn't funny," she said, "but maybe I should have thought of that before I signed on. You're going to have trouble convincing people to join the cause with that in your sign-up brochure."

Bruce grimaced. "Yes, but the alternative is worse. We all missed out the first time around. We could be in heaven right now if we'd listened to our loved ones. Dying a horrible death during this period is not my preference, but I'd sure rather do it this way than while I was still lost. Everyone else is in danger of death, too. The only difference is, we have one more way to die than they do."

"As martyrs."

"Right."

Ooooh, martyrs! How exciting!

And here we come to the vicarious appeal of these books for American evangelicals. The perilous Tribulation that Bruce Barnes describes is frightening, yes, but at least it's not as dull as the uninspiring sit-around-and-wait, do-nothing existence they've come to believe is their lot in life here in history.

Here in Left Behind they can reimagine the Christian life as an exciting adventure. It's similar to the speakers we had on youth group retreats back in high school. They would tell these thrilling stories of Christians who were persecuted for their faith -- first century believers or 20th-century Christians in China or behind the Iron Curtain. The stories would reach a crescendo where the persecuted faithful were forced to choose between denying their faith and certain death. "What would you do?" the speakers would ask. And then, with every head bowed and every eye closed, we were given the opportunity to come forward yet again to re-re-dedicate our lives to Christ.³

I don't know whether those speakers realized the secret envy we had when listening to those stories. The lives of those martyrs seemed so much more exciting and meaningful than our own did. Plus there was something weirdly appealing about a one-time, one-question, pass-fail test in place of the tedious day-after-day. In our imaginations, at least, the martyr's egress sounded almost easier than the pilgrim's progress (as somebody once said, the hardest thing in this world is to live in it.) We imagined that, like the grandmother in Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," we could've been good kids if it had been somebody there to shoot us every minute of our lives.

This is something Christopher Hedges captures in his book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning:⁴

The eruption of conflict instantly reduces the headache and trivia of daily life. The communal march against an enemy generates a warm, unfamiliar bond with our neighbors, our community, our nation, wiping out unsettling undercurrents of alienation and dislocation. War, in times of malaise and desperation, is a potent distraction. ...

War makes the world understandable, a black and white tableau of them and us. It suspends thought, especially self-critical thought. All bow before the supreme effort. We are one. Most of us willingly accept war as long as we can fold it into a belief system that paints the ensuing suffering as necessary for a higher good, for human beings seek not only happiness but also meaning. And tragically war is sometimes the most powerful way in human society to achieve meaning.

Which is quite similar to one of my favorite passages from Walker Percy's The Last Gentleman:

What happens to a man to whom all things seem possible and every course of action open? Nothing of course. Except war. If a man lives in the sphere of the possible and waits for something to happen, what he is waiting for is war -- or the end of the world.

The intended readers of Left Behind are waiting for the end of the world. Or for war. Either one would do. Either one would seem more meaningful than the headache and trivia of daily life that constitutes what they now think of as "discipleship." And Left Behind lets them experience both, at least vicariously.

That sense of excitement, of how much more thrilling this would all be, can be seen in the next paragraph:

Rayford sat listening, aware of how his world had changed in such a short time. It had not been that long ago that he had been a respected pilot at the top of his profession, living a phony life, a shell of a man. Now here he was, talking secretly in the office of a local church with his daughter and a young pastor, trying to determine how they would survive seven years of tribulation following the Rapture of the church.⁵

The "phony ... shell of a man" refers to Steele's life before his conversion, but it's hard not to think of the authors and their readers relating to that as a description of their own mundane lives when contrasted with the thrilling adventure of life as God's guerrillas during the Tribulation.

Bruce tells the Steeles about a new core group he has decided to form (not to be confused with the original core group, of which Rayford is already a member):

"I've also been thinking about a smaller group within the core. I'm looking for people of unusual intelligence and courage. I don't mean to disparage the sincerity of others in the church, especially those on the leadership team. But some of them are timid, some old, many infirm. I've been praying about sort of an inner circle of people who want to do more than just survive."

Here they are, just nine days after the Rapture has caused them to start rebuilding the church from scratch, and already they've begun creating hierarchies and inner circles. Give them another week and they'll break out the robes and funny hats.

"... It's one thing to hide in here, studying, figuring out what's going on so we can keep from being deceived. ... But doesn't part of you want to jump into the battle?"

Rayford was intrigued but not sure. Chloe was more eager. "A cause," she said. "Something not just to die for but to live for."

"Yes!"

"A group, a team, a force," Chloe said.

"You've got it. A force."

Chloe's eyes were bright with interest. Rayford loved her youth and her eagerness to commit to a cause that to her was only hours old. "And what is it you call this period?" she asked.

"The Tribulation," Bruce said.

"So your little group inside the group, a sort of Green Berets, would be your Tribulation force."

"Tribulation Force," Bruce said, looking at Rayford and rising to scribble it on his flip chart. "I like it."

The authors' only regret about this passage was that they couldn't get Tyndale House to bind in pre-order cards for Left Behind II: Tribulation Force right here on this page.

Once you get beyond the overweening self-congratulation and general awfulness of that passage (take your time, I had to go out and run some errands and then come back to it), it's interesting to note that Bruce and Chloe, in searching for "something not just to die for but to live for" settle on "a group, a team, a force" and not a cause, a purpose, a mission. Bruce attempts to imagine a cause or a mission that this "force" would be fighting for, but the best he can manage is to imagine what it would be fighting against:

"When it becomes obvious who the Antichrist is, the false prophet, the evil, counterfeit religion, we'll have to oppose them, speak out against them."

So again they aren't for Christ, they're anti-Antichrist, which again is far from the same thing. The former really could be "something to live for." The latter might be something to die for, but more likely is merely something to kill for. That tends to be the problem when you define yourself in terms of what you're against instead of what you're for. That also tends to be the problem, as Hedges notes,⁶ with relying on war as your source for meaning.

The authors, fortunately, are only tangentially interested in giving readers something to kill for. Their main interest is just in supplying enough of the tantalizing possibility of such vicarious excitement that readers will go out to buy the sequel. And what was that sequel called again? Oh, right:

"You still want to be part of the Tribulation Force?"

Rayford nodded and smiled at his daughter's firm reply. "I wouldn't miss it."

- - - - - - - - - - - -

¹ So much so that I've come to picture a young Seth Green as Raymie. Jodie Foster as Chloe wouldn't work, but Jodie as meta-Chloe would be perfect.

² And, yes, thereby also to escape Hell. If what you're being saved to seems pointless then what you're being saved from has to be especially vivid. My favorite picture of Hell is the gray, isolating London of C.S. Lewis' The Great Divorce. Lewis' vision of Hell is difficult to distinguish from life in the church as envisioned by the PMD crowd.

³ Eventually I started keeping track of the number of times I had done this. It seemed absurd to me and I couldn't help but think it would look the same to God. So I decided that I was done with that. No more re-re-re-dedications. This was considered bad form, since the pattern for these speakers was first to invite the unsaved to get saved, then to invite the already saved to re-dedicate themselves, then to continue gradually widening the invitation until everyone had left their seats and gathered down front. I was never fully able to convince my youth pastor that, for me, not going forward was more important, more meaningful, than doing so for the umpteenth time. He was deeply worried about me every time we had one of those altar calls and I wound up being one of only two people who didn't go forward. (I never asked, and so never learned, what her story was.)

⁴ Thank you, Amanda, for getting me this. If book recommendations come on a scale from one to 10, consider this an 11: War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.

⁵ I've written before about one of my favorite movie plot formulas -- the Innocent Man Embroiled in an International Scheme. Part of the appeal of that formula is something similar to what Hedges and Percy describe -- crisis shatters, and thus enlivens and gives meaning to, the mundane. That paragraph about Rayford presents what is probably the most inept and least appealing variation of this formula that I've ever seen.

⁶ Seriously, go read War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.

L.B.: Super powers

Left Behind, pp. 415-417

Nicolae Carpathia has super powers.

Usually, I don't have a problem with stories involving super-powered characters. I've been reading and enjoying such stories my whole life. Whether it's Peter Pevensie or Peter Parker, Harry Potter or Buffy Summers, I'm game. Just provide some kind of explanation (radioactive spider, the Chosen one, cosmic rays, the effects of our yellow sun on the last son of Krypton) and set out some basic rules and limitations so that the power, and thus the story, isn't completely arbitrary and I will gladly come along for the ride.

The other thing I'll need to consent to such stories is a bit harder to describe. The storyteller needs to provide some indication, some clue, that this is that kind of story. This can be some basic genre shorthand or some other kind of signal, but it has to come fairly early on so that I don't feel betrayed when suddenly one of the characters begins doing things that no ordinary human can do. There's probably a name for this or some better way of describing it, and for that I'll defer to those more immersed in the theory and the study of such stories, but what I'm getting at is that it's no fair to have Miss Marples suddenly explain in Chapter XXXII that she was able to solve the mystery by using her X-ray vision. That sort of thing violates a reader's trust. Pull a stunt like that and your super-powered character is in-credible rather than incredible.

Our question here is whether Nicolae Carpathia's sudden manifestation of super powers presents this sort of betrayal. We've only just begun to see the full extent of his mind-control mojo at work. In the remaining pages of this volume, Bruce Barnes will babble a bit of pseudo-scriptural phlebotinum to provide a half-hearted explanation for Nicolae's powers, and then those powers will be displayed unambiguously. Is that fair?

On the one hand, this seems like the worst sort of ninth-inning rule change. We've been told -- on the back cover and in the story itself -- that Left Behind is supposed to be a ripped-from-the-headlines style thriller set not just in a world like our own, but in the very world we live in. Not the world we live in plus X (where X is magic, vampires, superheroes, etc.), but simply a fictional version of the world we live in. Changing the name of Newsweek to Global Weekly doesn't violate the terms of that agreement, but changing the laws of physics does.

Set aside for the moment the authors' woeful inability to portray this or any other world accurately or believably. That's not the issue here. The issue here is that they've told us all along that this story was set in a world in which we know there's no such thing as super powers or mind-control mojo, and then suddenly -- when they've plotted themselves into a corner and there's no other way to escape -- we meet a super-powered character who is able to work his mind-control mojo and thereby to prevent their nonsensical plot from grinding to a halt. That sure seems like cheating to me.

But on the other hand we've also been told all along that this will be an explicitly supernatural story. From that perspective, complaining about the sudden appearance of a character's supernatural powers in Left Behind would be a bit like complaining about the existence of paranormal phenomenon on The X-Files. Yet Nicolae's super powers still seem to be in a different category from the book's other supernatural events. There's a big difference between making God a character and allowing God to act with divine powers and the idea that the president of Romania can also do miraculous, godlike things. A monster of the week with telepathic abilities would be part of the bargain for viewers of The X-Files. If Mulder and Scully had suddenly begun using telepathy, that would have violated the bargain.¹

The authors would argue, I think, that giving Carpathia miraculous abilities is fair game because he is the Anti-Christ. Since Christ was able to perform miracles, his evil twin should have the same abilities. That would be easier to swallow if Carpathia's Antichrist powers more closely paralleled the sorts of miraculous deeds attributed to Jesus Christ.

In the Gospels, Jesus is tempted by Satan in the wilderness to perform miracles in order to amass power. The Antichrist, one would expect, would have succumbed to those same temptations.² We should be seeing the Antichrist performing antimiracles -- perversions and inversions of the miraculous signs and wonders told of in the Gospels.

Unlike John of Patmos or the author of John's epistles (the only place the word "antichrist³" is used in the Bible), LaHaye and Jenkins don't really seem to regard the sense in which the Antichrist is Christ's opposite. That opposition is hard to miss in the book of Revelation -- beast vs. lamb, power vs. love is one of the book's central themes -- but L&J seem to have missed it both there and in their representation of it here. Their Antichrist is an anti-christ, an anti-messiah, in the sense that he is a false liberator who brings slavery. But where Carpathia chooses to pursue power, those who oppose him do the same. L&J's version of the evil beast will be defeated, ultimately, not by the lamb, but by the good beast. In Left Behind, good triumphs over evil not because it is intrinsically different, but because it is simply more powerful. God has a bigger gun than the devil.⁴

But however the authors mean to account for it, the bottom line remains this: Nicolae Carpathia has super powers. Their story -- meant to present what they believe are real events that will really happen sometime soon -- has a character with super powers in it. Make of that what you will.

It's not clear whether Nicolae has been using those super powers in the preceding scenes. It's impossible to believe that the ambassadors of every nation on earth would have been willing, or thought themselves able, to abandon their respective nations' sovereignty and capacity for self-defense just because they were asked politely to do so by a handsome young polyglot, so it sure seems like Carpathia's mind-control powers must have been at work at the United Nations.

Then again it also seems impossible that people the world over would be "in a mood to party" upon hearing that their nations, languages, religions and currencies were about to be replaced with new, one-size-fits-all global versions. So is Nicolae somehow projecting his mojo over the airwaves, enchanting the globe via satellite TV? If so, why isn't Buck affected? He hasn't yet performed the counter-spell invoking the protection of the Holy Spirit, yet he alone doesn't seem thrilled with Carpathia's announcement of global dictatorship.

It's been five pages since the last phone call, so the phone rings and Buck seems guarded and sullen as he discusses the announcement with his old buddy Steve Plank.

"Pretty exciting, isn't it?"

"Mind-boggling."

"Listen, Carpathia wants you here Monday morning."

"What for?"

"He likes you, man. Don't knock it."

It may just be my imagination, but Steve seems to be sounding a bit more hip-cat since he went to work for the Antichrist. In the next page, he will use the word "hustle" as a verb.

Steve explains that Carpathia is planning a meeting with "his top people and the 10 delegates to the permanent Security Council." It seems from the way they discuss this that those delegates will be selected by Nicolae, rather than appointed by their respective nations. Whether this is how L&J imagine the U.N. works now or if this is meant to be understood as one of Carpathia's "reforms" isn't clear, just as it isn't clear why a Security Council is even necessary now that all the member nations have been disarmed and subsumed into the OWG.

They briefly discuss the role of Jonathan Stonagal and whatisname Todd-Cothran, though Jenkins seems to have lost all interest in trying to make any sense out of their conspiratorial conspiracy of conspirators. He seems relieved to have rendered them redundant and no longer seems to care whether or not they still seem menacing and mysterious. Steve half-heartedly tries to drum up a bit of the old menace by telling Buck that "nobody tells Stonagal" what to do.

"Not even Carpathia?" Buck asks.

That should be, for him, a rather pointed question. As Steve is well aware, Stonagal and Todd-Sidekick tried to kill Buck with a car bomb just a few chapters ago. The only reason he's not still running for his life is because Carpathia apparently intervened on his behalf, convincing Stonagal to let Buck live in exchange for Buck's promise never to report on their murky dark doings. So when Steve answers, "Especially not Carpathia. He knows who made him," you'd think a reasonable response on Buck's part would be to go back into hiding. Instead, he agrees to go to the meeting and to sit in a room with the two men who killed his friends Dirk and Alan and very nearly killed him as well.

For what it's worth, Steve reassures Buck that Carpathia, although unable to control Stonagal, is:

"... honest and sincere, Buck. Nicolae will not do anything illegal or underhanded or even too political. He's pure, man. Pure as the driven snow."

Sadly, Buck will soon learn what readers figured out hundreds of pages ago -- that Carpathia is neither honest nor sincere. That's a shame. He'd be much more interesting if he were. Then at least we might be able to grasp some motive behind his grasping for power. There could be a compelling story in the tragedy of an honest and sincere man who sought unlimited power in the hopes of achieving unlimited good, of fixing the world through brute force. But that would have made Carpathia the good beast and, as we've already seen, the part of the good beast is already taken here in Left Behind. In the authors' view, fixing the world through brute force is God's job. (Makes one wonder what they think all that business with the cross was about.)

Steve tells Buck that he will be the only reporter present at this meeting of the new global cabal:

"What's the catch?"

"No catch. He didn't ask for a thing, not even favorable coverage. ..."

Because, you know, for Steve and Buck, the idea of exchanging access for favorable coverage is no big deal.

"... not even favorable coverage. He knows you have to be objective and fair. The media will get the whole scoop at the press conference afterward."

"Obviously I can't pass this up," Buck said, aware his voice sounded flat.

Buck isn't the only one who seems aware that this all sounds flat and unenthusiastic. Jenkins will reprise this entire conversation in the next chapter, and he seems to put a bit more effort into it the second time around.

"What's the matter, Buck? This is history! This is the world the way we've always wanted it and hoped it would be."

"I hope you're right."

Steve means it. One, unlimited, unaccountable and all-powerful global government enforcing one world language and one world religion really is "the world the way [he's] always wanted it to be" because Steve is an Imaginary Liberal. Imaginary Liberals are all closet fascists, don't you know. If you want to know how they really want and hope the world to be just take the opposite of everything they say and conjure up the most illiberal nightmare conceivable -- a world without civil liberties or democracy or freedom of conscience. The fact that liberals all speak and act against such a nightmare scenario is simply evidence of their duplicity.

Imaginary Liberals are thus irredeemable, which is why Buck here has to be shown as less than enthusiastic about the IL dream come true. Buck is destined to be redeemed, so he has to be shown to be a not-really liberal member of the liberal media just as he had to be shown to be a virgin bachelor playboy.

Steve says there's one final favor Carpathia has to ask of Buck:

"He wants to see that stewardess friend of yours again."

"Steve, no one calls them stews anymore. They're flight attendants."

"Whatever. Bring her with you if you can."

"Why doesn't he ask her himself? What am I now, a pimp?"

"Stews?"

Buck objects to being viewed as a pimp. He may also object to Hattie being viewed as a prostitute, although he never says so. His unprecedented siding with Hattie here reflects the authors' notion of chivalry, not some kind of feminism. If the little ladies want to be called "flight attendants," then we should humor them.

"C'mon, Buck. It's not like that. Lonely guy in a position like this? He can't be out hustling up dates. ..."

"I'll ask her," he said. "No promises."

"Don't let me down, buddy."

Normally, I'd agree that world leaders "can't be out hustling up dates," but there's nothing normal about Carpathia's position. It's not like he has to worry about his reputation or about getting re-elected. He's scandal-proof, untouchable. Plus everyone who would have had some moral objection to his sexual escapades disintegrated last week. If he wanted to Nicolae could Casanova his way through the Manhattan phone book (alphabetically, of course), sweet-talking women in nine languages (eight of which are soon to be forbidden). If the People magazine thing and his Redford-ish looks didn't work, he could just put the mind-whammy on 'em.

But even though he could have any woman in the world, the only one he wants is Hattie. Just as the only reporter he wants present at his big meeting is Buck and, later in the series, the only pilot he wants to hire is, yep, Rayford Steele. There are still 4 billion people on earth, but Carpathia is working closely with the authors to ensure that only a handful of them are ever involved in this story.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

¹ This may actually have happened in Season 9, but by that point I'd gotten almost as confused and off-track as the writers.

² I suppose that Carpathia's enlisting of Rosenzweig's miracle formula franchise is vaguely like turning stones to bread, but he's just piggybacking on somebody else's miracle there and there's little to indicate that this dubious parallel is intended by the authors.

³ Antichrists, actually, plural. Which is more than a bit troublesome for the PMD mythology.

⁴ Or put it this way, in LB, Frodo uses the ring to destroy Sauron. That doesn't make for the sa