slacktivist

TF: That Guy

Tribulation Force, pp. 59-60

It's the third Sunday after the End of the World and everyone's going to church:

Rayford was glad he and Chloe had decided to go early to church. The place was jammed every week. ...

"Every week" here meaning that New Hope Village Church had been "jammed" the previous two Sundays. This is, again, kind of hard to explain. The Event whisked away every member of NHVC except for Bruce Barnes and Loretta. Now, despite the fact that Bruce has spent most of the ensuing weeks shuttered in his study, the place is overflowing.

We've already speculated that meta-Loretta must have been very busy indeed during this time. Somebody hired a church secretary, and a music director, and somebody to vacuum the sanctuary and take the trash out. Somebody also will have had to replace Bruce himself in his former role of "visitation pastor" -- since that kind of one-on-one counseling would be more important than ever these days. Bruce didn't do any of this himself. He, and the authors, seems to think his showing up in the pulpit at 11 a.m. on Sundays is all that it takes to keep the church filled, relevant and meaningful to these newcomers.

The authors do -- finally, 60 pages into the second book -- acknowledge that most people would be traumatized after the Event, and they speculate that such traumatized people might be looking for comfort or answers:

People were grieving. They were terror-stricken. They were looking for hope, for answers, for God. They were finding him here, and the word was spreading.

When we get to Bruce's sermon in the next section, we'll see again just what kind of God these newcomers were finding at NHVC. I rather doubt it's the kind of God that grieving, terror-stricken and hope-starved people would be looking for, since it's not really the sort of God one looks for as much as the sort of God one hides from. (That's true even for Bruce, hence his plan to Dig a Really Big Hole.) Once these seekers find this God, and learn that he is the source of their grief and their terror, you'd think they might start looking somewhere else for a source of hope.

"The word was spreading" won't explain why the church would be packed each week. People who are eager enough for hope and answers to find the place all on their own, without any help from Bruce, wouldn't be satisfied with being given such hope and answers for a lousy two hours per week on Sunday mornings. A church that's "jammed" on Sunday mornings, will also be pretty crowded on weekday evenings and Saturday afternoons. It's abundantly clear that Bruce hasn't been available to the new congregation any time except for Sunday mornings, so who is it who's handling all of the ministry and study and outreach and disciple-making the rest of the week?

LaHaye and Jenkins love taking pot-shots at liberal denominations and hidebound traditionalists who don't accept the gospel of premillennial dispensationalist prophecy, so we should note that they missed a golden opportunity here to incorporate more of that sort of thing into this story. The new church staff at NHVC could have consisted of several lapsed or liberal clergy from other churches in the area. Their testimonies of repenting from their apostasies of mainline Protestantism or Catholicism would have given L&J a chance to weave in more triumphalist business about the supremacy and unique legitimacy of PMD theology while also providing an explanation for who's actually running things while Bruce is locked away with his exclusive inner-inner-inner-circle leadership elite. It would also help to explain why these newcomers are deciding to show up here, at NHVC, on Sunday mornings instead of at the local Episcopalian or Methodist or Catholic churches.

Rayford smiled at his daughter. Chloe looked the best he had seen her since coming home from college. He wanted to tease her, to ask her if she was dressing for Buck Williams or for God, but he let it go.

I must admit that I just don't get this "dressing for God" concept.

I suppose the core idea might be something laudable having to do with the desire to look our best when visiting the House of the Lord, but we Christians don't believe we're ever not in God's presence, and obviously we don't wear our Sunday best every day, otherwise we couldn't call it that.

So right there I've got qualms about the way we take the idea of the Lord's Day and twist it into something that suggests the other six days are something less. Plus this idea of "dressing for God" raises some warning flags having to do with class and vocation. Why is it that a farmer or factory worker has to dress like a banker when he goes to church, but the banker gets to attend dressed like himself? (Unless the banker is a she, in which case she's expected to dress like she's on a fancy dinner date -- so let's add some warning flags, also, having to do with gender roles and sexism.)

If we're really "dressing for God," then shouldn't we be listening to what God had to say about clothes?

And why do you worry about clothes? See how the lilies of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will God not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?

Or this:

The man with two tunics should share with him who has none.

Or this:

I needed clothes and you clothed me. ... I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.

In poorer, working communities, getting decked out in your Sunday best for Sunday worship can be a form of celebration, like a bottle of perfume spilled at Jesus' feet. But for most suburban American congregations, "dressing for God" is just a disingenuous spiritual varnish on dressing competitively to impress or outdo one another. All of which provides me an excuse to retell one of my favorite stories from Mother Teresa (from her book, No Greater Love):

Not so long ago a very wealthy Hindu lady came to see me. She sat down and told me, "I would like to share in your work" ... The poor woman had a weakness that she confessed to me. "I love elegant saris," she said. Indeed, she had on a very expensive sari that probably cost around 800 rupees. Mine cost only eight rupees ...

It occurred to me to say to her, "I would start with the saris. The next time you go to buy one, instead of paying 800 rupees, buy one that costs 500. Then with the extra 300 rupees, buy saris for the poor."

The good woman now wears 100-rupee saris, and that is because I have asked her not to buy cheaper ones.

I'm ambivalent about the idea of school uniforms. I either like them or dislike them depending on which set of rigid, merciless fascists is most in charge of the school in question. If the school is one where students lives are ruled by teachers and administrators who believe in keeping the children in line by any means necessary, then school uniforms will be just one more means of control and discipline and I'm against them. But if the school is the sort of place where students lives are ruled by other students -- by the in crowd, the Queen Bees and the caste system of popularity that scorns and shuns and disenfranchises anyone who fails to conform by wearing the "right" clothes, then I rather like the idea of school uniforms. At a school like that, a uniform can be a kind of liberation from a cruelly and capriciously enforced fashion code. The sort of local churches where people talk piously of "dressing for God" seem to me to have more in common with this latter type of school, and I'm inclined to think that something like church uniforms might be, for them, equally liberating.

Anyway, we come next to a delightfully inadvertent and devastating piece of characterization -- a sentence that tells us far, far more about Rayford Steele and about the authors themselves than they realize:

[Rayford] took one of the last spots in the parking lot and saw cars lined up around the block, looking for places on the street to park.

Yes, Rayford Steel is That Guy.

You know That Guy. He takes two parking spaces to protect his paint job. He races past the pregnant lady to grab the last seat on the train. He sends back his steak and undertips. He drives on the shoulder all the way to the front of the traffic jam, then bullies his way back into line. He sees all of this as evidence that he's cleverer than the rest of us suckers. That That Guy.

That's Rayford Steele.

My first boss in my first job after college was That Guy. This made our business trips a nightmare. He didn't believe in checking bags -- that just slows you down. So instead he packed everything for a weeklong trip into a gargantuan bag three times larger than the size limit for carry-on luggage. (This was before 9/11 -- back when you could still bully airline personnel into letting you break the rules.)

My boss's giant "carry-on" bag was so large that he had to wheel it around on this folding metal contraption. Getting both his massive bag and the not-small folding metal thing into the overhead bin on the plane took a bit more bullying. He'd board early. When some ticket checker had the temerity to point out that his row hadn't yet been called, he'd just act entitled and put-upon, sighing acidly, rolling his eyes and calling them by the name on their name tag in a condescending tone until they'd surrender and let him by.

The other passengers were never happy to arrive at their seats only to find that one of the overhead bins in their section was already full and that half of the other one was taken up with some weird folding metal thing. They were even less happy after the plane landed and, while it was still taxiing to the gate and the seat-belt sign was still lit, my boss would jump up out of his seat and lay claim to the aisle for the reassembly of the wheeled metal thing. This reassembly, getting the giant bag down from the overhead bin and strapping it back onto the metal thing took 10 to 15 minutes, during which everyone who'd been seated behind my boss on the plane had to wait, standing in the aisle, unable to exit the plane.

That Guy.

The authors don't seem to intend to portray Rayford this way. They don't see anything strange or embarrassing in his swooping in to grab the last spot while others are forced to circle the block. Like Rayford himself, they seem oblivious to his behavior. That Guy never realizes he's That Guy.

Poor Chloe knows better, though, and even though the authors and her father ignore her presence here, the rest of us can appreciate her wincing horror at having to ride along with That Guy. There she sits in the passenger seat, grimacing with embarrassment and mouthing "I'm sorry" out the window at the old lady with the walker on the sidewalk as her father diagonally straddles the line between the last two parking spaces close to the church door.

We can see in this moment the long, heartbreaking history of Chloe's childhood and teen years -- all those times she's had to furtively apologize to those her father has cut in front of in line; the times she's had to surreptitiously supplement the 10-percent and not a penny more tip he's left at some restaurant after consulting the "Tip Calculator" card he's carried in his wallet since 1972; the times she's stared at her shoes in the car, wishing she were invisible, as her father cruised past a line of cars, driving on the shoulder in what he doesn't realize the rest of us refer to as the "Dickhead Lane."

Now think how even more excruciating things were for Chloe back when both her parents were present -- when Rayford's extravagantly inadequate tips were left alongside Irene's evangelistic tracts, or when he cut someone off in traffic in Irene's car with its Jesus Fish magnet on the back.

"And what does the Lord require of you?" the prophet Micah asks. "To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God."

Shorter Micah: Don't be That Guy.

"'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment," Jesus said. "And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'"

Shorter Jesus: Don't be That Guy.

You don't need to find the words of Jesus or the prophets authoritative to appreciate this point -- it transcends every religious tradition or moral system. The point is simply this: Follow the Golden Rule.

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Not because this will get you into Heaven or keep you out of Hell; not due to your gratitude for the undeserved grace of God; not because you love Jesus, who asks this of you or because you're trying to follow his model of the best of humanity; not because of the law and the prophets or because of some Kantian or Rawlsian imperative or some utilitarian calculus. Simply follow the Golden Rule because it will protect you from becoming a gaping asshole.

One last note. Of course Rayford Steele would race to take the last spot in the parking lot while others have to park blocks away. That fits -- unintentionally but perfectly -- with everything we have read up until now about Rayford's character.

But now try to imagine Nicolae Carpathia doing this. He just wouldn't, would he?

What a strange moral universe we have here in these books -- a world in which the embodiment of evil comes across as more considerate than our role model of virtue.

TF: The second-biggest story

Tribulation Force, pp. 56-59

I confess that I still can't make any sense out of what Nicolae Carpathia is supposed to be trying to do in his dealings with Buck Williams. It doesn't help that I also can't figure out what Buck is trying to do in his dealings with Nicolae.

The trouble comes from the fact that Buck isn't very, very dead at this point. Or at the very least in some secret dungeon at the United Nations* being tortured for an explanation as to how he managed to resist the AC-mojo brainwashing.

Let's review this relationship. Initially, it seemed the Antichrist was grooming the GIRAT to be his go-to friendly reporter. The arrangement would work the way these things always do, as an exchange of access for cooperatively fawning coverage. Neither Buck nor the authors would admit it, but he was quite useful in that role throughout the first book, providing invaluable assistance in helping Carpathia to suppress stories about Stonagal and Cothran and their role in the deaths of two of Buck's friends and of one of his rivals.

Buck was then hand-picked to be the sole witness to the birth of the New World Order -- the only journalist present at the meeting in which the form and the leaders of the One World Government were established, with 10 princes or lieutenants or whatever they're to be called put in charge of 10 vaguely defined regional divisions of the globe. This is where Nicolae's plans for Buck seem to have gone awry. Buck proved immensely helpful when it came to burying stories, but of little actual use when it comes to reporting them.

In all of the confusion surrounding the double homicide and the subsequent brainwashing in that U.N. conference room, it's possible at first to overlook the other, vastly more significant news to come out of that blood-shortened meeting. The bigger story went wholly unreported -- by Buck or by anyone else -- and still seems, days later, to be wholly unacknowledged and unnoticed. Buck sat there with a front-row seat as Nicolae Carpathia rebuilt, restructured and restaffed the government of the entire world. As that happened right there in front of him, as Nicolae worked his way around the table, elaborately swearing in each of his new potentates, assigning to each a tenth of the globe, Buck failed even to take notes on what he was witnessing. How hard would it have been to jot down, at the very least, the names and titles and jurisdictions of each of these new world leaders? That's Journalism 101 -- the sort of thing any intern sent to cover a school board meeting would have done as a matter of course. But not our Buck.

This was, please note, a huge story. Every political boundary and border on earth has been redrawn. Every constitution nullified. Every economy fundamentally altered. No matter who you are or where you live, the leader of your country is no longer the leader of your country. Your country is no longer your country. (Except, of course, for Israel, which is allowed to remain autonomous so that it can enter into a 7-year peace treaty with everyone else and then get destroyed after 3 1/2 years.)

Yet several days after this happened, no one in our story even seems aware that it did. Bruce and Rayford haven't gleaned a hint of it despite all of their CNN-watching. Even poor President Fitzhugh is apparently still sitting there in the Oval Office, not realizing that the USA is merely one regional district in the Global Province of Canamico and that he now is merely a ceremonial figure with less clout than, say, Prince Charles.

Buck Williams, the only reporter present at this epochal event, has yet to mention this reinvention of all nations to anyone, let alone to file a story on it. The equally incompetent Steve Plank and Nicolae Carpathia apparently forgot to mention it at their post-meeting press conference, and the 10 new world leaders themselves have evidently remained silent and anonymous. Even the authors themselves seem to have forgotten this occurred, spending the early chapters of this book, instead, on Buck's office politics, his fumbled flirtation with Chloe and Bruce's sense of being burdened with burdensome burdens.

This tectonic remaking of the world would seem to be the second biggest story of all time. Just quickly consider some of the lesser implications. Taiwan is politically unified with mainland China. India, Pakistan and Bangladesh are joined together as one. There are no longer two Koreas, Germany has once again absorbed the Sudetenland and Poland, and the Balkans are united as part of a single political entity. The world has been redrawn, with the outlines of something like the Ottoman and Holy Roman Empires reappearing on the map. And those vast, astonishing changes are, again, some of the lesser implications of what Nicolae has just done.

And yet, due to the distraction from the death of a couple of bankers, nobody noticed. What if we threw a New World Order and nobody came? If a OWG falls in the forest ...?

This launchpad collapse of the NWO suggests that none of the actors involved is capable of doing their job. Buck, Steve, Nicolae, the 10 princes and the authors themselves should all be fired for incompetence over this.**

Confronted with yet another bizarre impossibility, we readers are once more forced to concoct elaborate and implausible theories in an effort to account for the things the book has told us which cannot be so.

So here's mine. I'm going to account for this unnoticed remaking of the globe by accounting for another lesser, but still impossible, impossibility: The fact that Buck Williams is still alive.

Buck was the lone journalist at the table for the 10-princes meeting because Nicolae needed him to perform a job. He failed at that job and thus became unuseful and potentially dangerous. Several days later, Buck has vastly exceeded the life expectancy of people whom the Antichrist finds unuseful and dangerous.

The idea was to lure Buck to the meeting with the promise of exclusive access to the second biggest story in history. His presence there would mean that Nicolae would have a credible, disinterested and skeptical-but-convinced witness to brainwash into supporting the official double-suicide explanation of Stonagal and Cothran's deaths. It seems inexplicable, but in LB-world, Buck does have a reputation for being an independent and truth-telling journalist, so he'd be a useful guy to have on hand, allowing Nicolae to say, "Even if you do not believe my word or the testimony of those who work for me, listen to Mr. Williams and he will verify our account of what happened."

Carpathia double-checked everyone in the room to make sure the mojo had taken effect. God intervened directly to keep Buck from saying anything stupid just then, and Nicolae was, for the moment, fooled into believing Buck was brainwashed along with everyone else.

But then Buck blew it. He hadn't yet been made as a spy, but he abruptly stopped playing along and bolted, rushing off to his office to type up an account of what he had really seen. Once he revealed himself, ditching the police and the post-meeting press conference, Nicolae had to realize he had a rogue witness and a loose end.

This loose end called for a simple two-step solution. Step One: Apply a bit more brainwashing mojo so that no one remembers seeing Buck at the meeting, thus neutralizing any contradictory testimony he might offer as the rambling of a liar or madman rather than an eyewitness account. Step Two: Buck takes a one-way ride on the Staten Island Ferry or, better yet, his body is found the next morning in his apartment, the apparent victim of an autoerotic asphyxiation mishap.

Step Two is non-negotiable, I'm afraid. Sure, Nicolae may suspect that Buck, being Buck, won't bother to do anything or to tell anyone about what he has learned, but he can't afford to take the chance. When Buck ran out of that meeting, demonstrating his mojo-resistance, he signed his own death warrant.

Yet here he is still alive after several days -- carefree days during which he hasn't taken the slightest precautions to protect himself from the supreme global ruler, a man he knows will not hesitate to kill those who have knowledge against him.

My theory doesn't account for Buck's behavior. From the moment he fled that meeting, he must have realized he had only two options*** for staying alive. He could fake his own death and go into hiding, or he could arrange a meeting with Nicolae and beg for his life, offering to report or not report whatever he was told in exchange for being allowed to live. In the last book, you'll recall, when it was merely Cothran who wanted Buck dead, he chose both of those options in turn, so we know that Buck knows how this works and what's at stake.

Instead of either of those things, Buck flew to Chicago under his own name, leased a condominium, bought and registered a car -- all while maintaining his usual heavy schedule of regular phone calls to his known associates. He is restless and obsessively second-guessing himself, but only over whether or not he should call Chloe again so soon when she's still dealing with the death loss of her mother and brother and is probably, like him, wondering if the Apocalypse is the most opportune time to start a relationship.

So instead of potentially suspenseful passages involving half-glimpsed figures lurking in the shadows outside of Buck's condo and the palpable sense of impending doom that comes from his knowing that the attack could come at any moment, instead of that, we get a lot more of this:

Buck had half expected to hear from Chloe. He thought he had left it with Rayford that she would call at her convenience. Maybe she was the type who didn't call men, even when she had missed their call. On the other hand, she was not quite 21 yet, and he admitted he had no idea about the customs and mores of her generation. Maybe she saw him as a big brother or even a father figure and was repulsed by the idea that he might be interested in her. That didn't jibe with her look and her body language from the night before, but he hadn't been encouraging then, either. ...

But maybe she had phoned when he was with Bruce that morning. ...

Several more pages of that, actually. And it's hard to read those pages without resenting Nicolae for killing Buck like he ought to have done several days and chapters ago.

Buck is distracted from this mooning reverie by a voicemail message from Steve Plank, of which I'll offer only an abbreviated sample because, despite the fact that we know Steve has e-mail, he's still the kind of guy who thinks it's appropriate to play phone-tag while leaving book-length voicemail messages:

Did you get my message that Carpathia wants to talk to you? People don't make a habit of making him wait, my friend. ... I honestly don't know what he wants except that he's still high on you. He's not holding a grudge over your standing him up on his invitation to that meeting, if you're worried about that.

Tell you the truth, Buck, the newsman in you would have wanted to be there and should have been there. ...

Bailey tells me you're putting the finishing touches on the theory article. If you can get with Carpathia soon enough, you can include his ideas. He's made no secret of them, but an exclusive quote or two wouldn't hurt either, right? ...

The only reassuring thing about that message is that Steve doesn't seem aware that his boss is using him to lure Buck to his death, yet Buck doesn't seem terribly worried. He spends the next two pages weighing the pros and cons of Nicolae's invitation. On the one hand, it's quite an opportunity "to interview the leading personality in the world on the eve of the delivery of your most important cover story." On the other hand, you know, Antichrist.

He didn't know much about the Antichrist. Was the man omniscient like God? Could he read Buck's mind? ... He wished there was something in the Bible that specifically outlined the powers of the Antichrist. Then he would know what he was dealing with.

This is why Bible-professor Bruce couldn't fulfill his duties as Mr. Exposition and explain to Buck "what he was dealing with." There's a kind of weird integrity at work here. L&J concede that there's nothing in the Bible "that specifically outlined the powers of the Antichrist." They seem to share Buck's disappointment over this omission, but they are unwilling to go beyond what they believe the Bible teaches about the Antichrist prophecies. Those prophecies are, themselves, a fevered collage of inventions, fantasies, misquotations and virulent eisegesis, but the authors have mostly convinced themselves that those prophecies are really present in a simple and straightforward reading of the text and they won't go beyond that self-deluding imagined reading to offer a list of Antichrist superpowers that isn't there. LaHaye would say, I'm guessing, that the Bible tells us about the outcomes of the Antichrist's actions, but not about the powers he uses to produce those outcomes. (The exception would be Nicolae's brainwashing mojo, which seems to come from LaHaye's "literal" interpretation of passages saying that "many will be deceived" by false messiahs.)

At the very least, Carpathia had to be curious about Buck. He must have wondered, when Buck slipped away from the conference room where the murders had been committed, whether there had been some glitch in his own mind-control powers. Otherwise, why erase from everyone else's mind not only the murders, replacing them with a picture of a bizarre suicide, but also the memory that Buck had been there at all?

Clearly, Nicolae had tried to cover himself by making everyone else forget Buck was there. If such a move was supposed to make Buck doubt his own sanity, it hadn't worked. God had been with Buck that day.

Again, the idea couldn't have been "to make Buck doubt his own sanity," but to make him appear insane to everyone else and thus not a credible accuser when he described the murders he witnessed.

It's also strange that Buck understands the meaning of the "glitch" in Nicolae's mind-control, but that he assumes Nicolae himself would not understand what this signifies -- that "God had been with Buck that day." Buck doesn't seem to appreciate that Nicolae must suspect that he has become a Christian or, as Nicolae would call him, a martyr-in-waiting.

Buck at least gets this much right:

One thing was sure, he would not tell Carpathia what he knew. If Carpathia was certain Buck had not been tricked, he would have not recourse but to have him eliminated.

This strikes me as an overestimation of his own importance and uniqueness. Buck assumes that Carpathia may suspect him, but doesn't know for sure that "Buck had not been tricked." He apparently thinks he's special enough that Carpathia is willing to put off having him killed until he confirms which is which. But he isn't that special -- he works for the Chicago bureau now -- and that isn't how evil tyrants usually operate. They tend to err on the side of lethal prudence and the mere suspicion of disloyalty is enough to get you killed. It's not like they'll lose sleep if they find out later you weren't actually disloyal -- they're evil tyrants, that sort of thing doesn't actually bother them much.

And but so, here's my theory.

Nicolae sat in his office at the Plaza, kicking himself over his botched roll-out of the New World Order. In retrospect, he realized, it probably wasn't a good idea to try to pull off such a major announcement at the same time he was using his mojo to make everyone forget what they had just seen. The whole thing was exasperating -- three days later and people in Antwerp still thought of themselves and Belgian, rather than as citizens of the Great States of Britain. It didn't help, of course, that the newly appointed prince of the GSB had actually gotten himself arrested while trying to move into his offices on Downing Street, hauled off by a bunch of goons from MI5 who mistakenly still thought there was something called the British government (and who also didn't seem to have gotten the memo about global disarmament).

He realized he was going to have to re-do the whole thing.

Well, almost the whole thing. Not the killing of Jonathan and Joshua, of course -- that part had gone off well enough. But the rest of it, all of it, was going to have to be done all over again. He would re-do it a thousand times if that is what it took, dammit, and nobody was going to go anywhere until they were all quite done dividing the world into 10 kingdoms and making sure everyone everywhere knew that it has been divided into 10 kingdoms. And if doing all that meant keeping Buck Williams alive for another week so that they could get him back here to report on this, then so be it.

OK, so it's not the best theory, but really, I don't know how else to explain the fact that Buck Williams, foe of the all-powerful Antichrist, is still breathing.

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

* In the world of LaHaye and Jenkins, you just know the U.N. has secret dungeons, right there in Manhattan. And, probably, a network of tunnels connecting it to the subterranean bathhouse that's home to the headquarters of the dreaded IHA (International Homosexual Agenda).

** The authors here seem to be following the Rumsfeldian approach of ignoring difficulties in the hope that they will thereby not matter, all the while steadfastly ignoring that they are dis-proving everything they had set out to prove.

These novels were written to illustrate the near-future scenario that Tim LaHaye insists will happen. By vividly portraying what this scenario will look and feel like when it actually unfolds, he and Jenkins hope to convince readers of its reality -- to make us say, "My gosh, yes, this is so plausible and it all seems so real! This is obviously exactly where the world is headed. This is what the future has in store!"

Yet by setting down an endless string of ridiculous, inconsistent, contradictory and impossible events, they instead convince readers that LaHaye's prophesied future could never occur the way he promises that it must. Left Behind and all of its sequels disprove every tenet of premillennial dispensationalist mythology. They refute what they were meant to reaffirm.

This is one of the places where this self-refuting dynamic becomes so obvious that even the authors seem to have noticed it. Tim LaHaye teaches that, very soon, the whole world will be divided into 10 political kingdoms. He says the Bible teaches this, so it must be so, citing a "literal" reading of Revelation 13:1-2:

And I saw a beast coming out of the sea. He had ten horns and seven heads, with ten crowns on his horns, and on each head a blasphemous name. The beast I saw resembled a leopard, but had feet like those of a bear and a mouth like that of a lion. The dragon gave the beast his power and his throne and great authority.

There is only one possible meaning to that passage, LaHaye insists. If you take the Bible seriously, he says, you must conclude that it foretells an Antichrist very much like Nicolae Carpathia appointing 10 princes to lead the 10 divisions of the OWG. He believes that this will and must occur rapidly, without resistance, and due to nothing more than the fact that the Antichrist will be an immensely charming fellow.

It quickly became obvious to the authors, however, that writing a fictional account of such a scene would be impossible. A realistic portrayal of such a thing is, like the thing itself, unimaginable. Close your eyes and throw a dart at a map of the world and it won't land more than a few inches from somewhere that such a rapid and voluntary obliteration of borders and national identities is simply inconceivable. Ireland, Tibet, Iraq, Kosovo, Sudan, Quebec, Kashmir, Vietnam, Korea, Texas -- from Afghanistan to Zaire, an atlas offers an alphabetical refutation of LaHaye's ridiculous prophecy. Such a thing cannot happen. Such a thing will never happen. And any attempt to describe it happening will only serve to reinforce that irrefutable fact and to expose Tim LaHaye for what he is: a false prophet and a buffoon.

Faced with the impossibility of providing even the sketchiest fictional account of the division of the world into this non-literal 10-headed creature, the authors balk: "And then the Antichrist Nicolae Carpathia divided the world into 10 kingdoms and ... OMG, look at Verna's shoes! What a castrating shrew, huh?" It seems unlikely they're even fooling themselves with such a transparent dodge.

*** He would have had a third if he'd bothered to do his job and had taken notes at that meeting. The names and shapes of the 10 kingdoms and the names of their leaders still haven't become public knowledge. By showing that he knew those things, Buck could prove that he had been at the meeting and could thereby present a compelling case that Nicolae was both a murderer and a brainwasher. He'd probably still have to fake his own death, dye his hair, grow a beard and move to Paraguay, but at least he'd have been able to get a parting shot off first.

TF: Skip verse 10

Tribulation Force, pp. 53-55

Buck Williams spends a few more pages reviewing and admiring his miraculously complete Global Weekly cover story on the various theories circulating to explain the disappearance of every child on the planet, plus another few hundred million adults.

In that one sentence I've already described the Event in more detail than Buck seems to have done in his article. He's not alone in this -- in the world of Tribulation Force, no one stops to ask who is missing, or why them and not anyone else.

That no unbelievers would be curious about such questions is yet another impossibility. This is what we humans do when confronted with the inexplicable: We look for patterns. Buck and the other new believers don't have to look for patterns because they already know what the pattern is. They know that all of the missing adults were real, true, evangelical Christians who believed that Tim LaHaye was right about biblical prophecy. Yet Buck bewilderingly chooses not to mention this in his article on the disappearances. Like every other piece of evidence he has proving What Really Happened, he withholds this information from his readers.

As we've already discussed, Buck never had or committed time to write this article. Even if we go with the theory that Buck had the chance to type it up on the plane back from Germany, it seems unlikely that everyone he needed to interview for the piece was on that same flight. We're about to consider Buck's conversation with the Roman Catholic archbishop of Cincinnati, for example -- when was that conversation supposed to have taken place? Buck's painstakingly chronicled itinerary for the past 14 days did not include a visit to Cincinnati and we never read of him conducting any interviews by phone. (Our authors are not in the habit of skipping any detail of any phone conversation.)

But yet another reason Buck couldn't have written this article is that he just isn't up to speed on the subject. He has spent the past two weeks in a voluntary news vacuum. Bruce and Rayford have at least been watching CNN, but apart from their third-hand accounts of what they saw on TV, Buck has no idea what's going on in the world. He has picked up precisely one newspaper in the past two weeks, in which he read precisely one article -- his own obituary. He has no way of knowing what theories might be circulating in the current of current events because he hasn't so much as dipped a toe into the flow of news.

And there ought to be an unmanageably vast number of competing theories circulating, not just because we humans seek and require (and invent) patterns to explain the inexplicable, but also because circulating a vast number of competing theories is part of Nicolae Carpathia's job.

This is Disinformation 101: If you need to cover up a conspiracy, spread a thousand false conspiracy theories. Nicolae needs to keep people from learning the truth about What Really Happened. He may not know, specifically, about Bruce Barnes or New Hope Village Church or Pastor Billings' video, but he'd have to anticipate that there would be people like that out there and that steps would have to be taken to make sure that nobody would listen to them. This wouldn't require any recourse to his brainwashing mojo or his preternatural powers of persuasion -- all he'd need would be a sound studio to record hundreds of variations on Billings' "if you're watching this, it means I have disappeared" video. Most plausible explanations would fall under the broad categories of gods or aliens, but there are any almost infinite variety of such scenarios that might be retroactively "predicted" in these videos.

Another obvious step would be to commission dozens of "bible prophecy" experts to claim that the disappearances were the Rapture of the saints predicted in the Christian scriptures. These impostors would proclaim just enough detail from the premillennial dispensationalist truth, mixed in with just enough demonstrably false and easily disprovable nonsense, to discredit people like Bruce or Rayford once they started to speak out. "The Bible predicted all of this," Bruce would start to say, and everyone would think, "Ah yes, this bit. We've heard this and we know it's not true."

This would also of course be how Nicolae would deal with the "Two Witnesses" in Jerusalem. So Moses and Elijah are prophesying by the Western Wall? Very well  then, sprinkle a half-dozen more Moseses and Elijahs throughout the city. Have Abraham and Melchizedek prophesy by the Damascus Gate, warning people of the impending natural disasters that God is sending as a sign that they must obediently serve his chosen world leader. Send John the Baptist and John of Patmos to prophesy in the Kidron Valley and have Joseph and Daniel stake out a street corner on the Via Dolorosa. Dozens of pairs of "witnesses" would arise in every corner of the globe -- William Blake and Emanuel Swedenborg in London; Haile Selassie and Simon Kimbangu in Addis Ababa; Edgar Cayce and Madame Blavatsky in Machu Picchu; Nostradamus and Joan of Arc at the foot of the Eiffel Tower extolling the prophesied savior, the "golden-haired son of Cluj who shall appear to many as like unto Condor, only without the sideburns." Equip them all with enough plants and pyrotechnics to make the trip-and-die guys seem like small potatoes (I'm assuming that Nicolae is at least as capable at this sort of thing as Jannes and Jambres).

Mark Twain noted that "a lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can even get its boots on." Buck Williams has already given the lie a two-week head-start, so if Nicolae is anything like the Great Deceiver he's supposed to be -- or even if he were just a bush-league disinformationist along the lines of a Kim Jong Il -- the whole subject of "theories behind the disappearances" ought to be irreparably polluted by now by a flood of falsehoods and half-truths and the white noise of a thousand videos, prophets, witnesses and experts.

Nothing like any of that appears in Buck's article, which seems to restrict itself to Rayford's explanation of PMD mythology and a smattering of tabloid-style theories that Buck seems to have gleaned exclusively from the tabloids.

The good news is that by avoiding any real engagement with any actual competing theories, by refusing to debunk anything, by neglecting to even mention the official explanation, and by omitting all of the evidence he might have presented for the real explanation of WRH, Buck frees up a lot of room in his cover story. He uses this room to offer an extended rant against the Arminian heresies of the papist infidels.

That's right. Buck studiously avoids any discussion of Darby, Scofield or Hal Lindsay, but he goes out of his way to present a caricatured rehash of the Diet of Worms.

Most interesting to Buck was the interpretation of the event on the part of other churchmen. A lot of Catholics were confused, because while many remained, some had disappeared -- including the new pope, who had been installed just a few months before the vanishings. He had stirred up controversy in the church with a new doctrine that seemed to coincide more with the "heresy" of Martin Luther than with the historic orthodoxy they were used to. When the pope had disappeared, some Catholic scholars had concluded that this was indeed an act of God. "Those who opposed the orthodox teaching of the Mother Church were winnowed out from among us," Peter Cardinal Mathews of Cincinnati, a leading archbishop, had told Buck.

They probably first realized they were in trouble with their new pope when he chose the papal name of Calvin Zwingli I.

Buck decides to engage the archbishop in a theological debate. Because this Global Weekly article is obviously the appropriate place for that. And because Buck skimmed through the Gospels just the other night, so he's confident he knows the Bible better than this bishop possibly could.

Buck had been bold enough to ask the archbishop to comment on certain passages of Scripture, primarily Ephesians 2:8-9 ...

OK, stop. Two things.

First, there's no way that Buck knows anything about the book of Ephesians. He's never read it himself and, since it's not one of the "prophecy" books, Bruce never read it to him. It's absurd enough that Buck is going around citing chapter and verse, as though he'd grown up doing Sword Drills in Vacation Bible School, but it's even more ridiculous that he would be citing chapter and verse for a chapter and a verse that we know for a fact he's never read.

The explanation for this miraculous knowledge, of course, is that the authors know this passage, and they can quote it from memory, citing chapter and verse. And since Buck here is acting as the authors' mouthpiece, he magically knows everything they know.

This destroys any hope the reader has of a realistic story with realistic characters, but it can also be kind of fun. Just watch this:

READER: Hey, Rayford! Bev's birthday is in April, right?

RAYFORD STEELE: Yes, the 30th.

READER: What'd you get her this year?

RAYFORD: Oh, I found this lovely butterfly broach, an antique with ... wait, crap, I mean, um, ah ... who is this "Bev" that you speak of? I don't know anyone named Bev. Irene, that's my wife's name, Irene Steele, not this Beverly LaHaye or whatever it was you said. And anyway I'm not supposed to be talking to you like this.

He falls for that one every time. And you should see what Buck does when you tell him that Gil Thorpe was never funny.

But let me get to the second point, namely this: Anyone who makes a habit of reciting Ephesians 2:8-9 without going on to recite verse 10 as well is a jackass.

Seriously. A colossal jackass.

Here's the first two verses, which ventriloquist-dummy Buck recites:

For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith — and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God — not by works, so that no one can boast.

And here's the next verse, the next sentence, the second half of that thought:

For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.

Now there's only one reason you'd ever quote those first two verses while omitting the third, and that's if you're doing what Buck is doing here -- tossing out what you believe to be the Lutheran trump-card in some pointless, abstract and distracting argument over "grace vs. works."

Buck at least has an excuse -- he's fictional, and thus on an even footing with the fictional strawman bishop he's debating here. But this same side of this same argument is presented  all the time in American evangelical churches, as though the fictional strawman Peter Cardinal Mathews were lurking in the lobby, just waiting to burst into the sanctuary to declare that we earn our way to heaven by doing good deeds, praying to Mary and buying indulgences.

Simply saying that evangelicals, like Buck, recite those first two verses without ever mentioning the third doesn't fully convey how emphatically they reject what Ephesians 2:10 has to say. They treat this verse like the 13th floor of a hotel. It's not part of their canon. I have sat through at least a half dozen sermons in evangelical churches during which the preacher read the first nine verses of this chapter and then launched into a condemnation of the evil works-righteousness of the evil good-works faction, concluding with, "So let's pick up reading at verse 11 ..."

What elevates this strange behavior to the status of jackassitude is that these folks have allowed their fiercely abstract debate over the mechanics of soteriology to tie them into knots to the extent that, for them, "good works" is an epithet, an obscenity. To do good, to be good, is treated as an affront to the sufficiency of grace.

Here in Tribulation Force, LaHaye and Jenkins are gleefully proud of the way their spokescharacter in this scene is able to cite scripture to prove the evils of good works. After Buck recites Ephesians 2:8-9, carefully stopping before verse 10 (jackass), the archbishop is reduced to stammering:

"Now you see," the archbishop said, "this is precisely my point. People have been taking verses like that out of context for centuries and trying to build doctrine on them."

"But there are other passages just like those," Buck said.

Oh, snap! Buck is thinking as the authors high-five one another for successfully out-debating their fictional bishop.

Of course Buck left his personal comments and opinions out of the article, but he was able to work in the Scripture and the archbishop's attempt to explain away the doctrine of grace.

And thus we come to the point. Martin Luther believed in the doctrine of grace. Buck, LaHaye and Jenkins believe in believing in the doctrine of grace. The archbishop of Cincinnati did not believe in that doctrine, and so he was left behind. Pope Calvin was raptured along with all the other RTCs because he had come to believe in the gospel of salvation by belief in the proper understanding of the mechanics of salvation. RTCs are not real, true Christians because of the grace of God -- they are real, true Christians because their sentiments are aligned with the correct side of the argument about the role of God's grace in salvation.

What L&J and Buck are arguing for here is self-refuting nonsense that swallows its own tail and it isn't easy to give a lucid description of such madness, but try thinking of it this way: They do not believe in Calvinism, but in Calvinism-ism. They believe that we achieve our own salvation by means of asserting that Luther, Calvin and Augustine were correct to say that we cannot achieve our own salvation. The logical implication of this would seem to be that Heaven will be populated with Calvin-ists and Luther-ans, but that Calvin and Luther themselves will be excluded. Those reformers mistakenly believed that God's grace would be sufficient to save them, not realizing -- as L&J do -- that God and grace are powerless apart from what really matters, which is our own assent to the proposition that grace is sufficient. To be saved, then, we need to say that God's grace alone is sufficient, but to mean by that that our belief in the power of our believing that we believe that is what is really sufficient to save us. Or something like that.

The point is that it is the authors and their mouthpiece who are here rejecting the doctrine of grace. The gist of that teaching is that God's grace is not dependent on our merit or worthiness -- that's what "grace" means, after all. But the authors believe God's grace is dependent -- that it is earned and not freely given. They believe grace is dependent on a correct understanding of grace, that it is contingent on whether or not its potential recipients can properly articulate how it works. They believe, in other words, in righteousness by works -- but mental, or sentimental, works, rather than tangible ones.

This whole lengthy aside is particularly troublesome in the context of this series, which elevates the apocalyptic passages of the Bible over the rest of it. Those passages are not very hospitable to Calvinism, let alone to the authors' Calvinism-ism. The authors' favorite book, Revelation, ends with a relentless and emphatic litany of judgment based solely on deeds: "The dead were judged according to what they had done ... Each person was judged according to what he had done." Or consider my favorite apocalyptic passage, Jesus' so-called "mini-apocalypse" at the end of Matthew's Gospel, the centerpiece of which is the parable of the sheep and the goats. That parable makes no mention of faith or grace or any other basis for judgment or salvation apart from how we treat "the least of these." Those who feed the hungry and befriend the criminals are saved. Those who don't, aren't. Period.*

Those passages can be reconciled with the idea of salvation by grace, but not in the way that Buck or the authors think of it. The idea -- which is embraced by Catholics and Protestants, Calvinists and Arminians alike -- is that grace is what enables the sheep to be sheep. God's grace is what affords us the possibility to be -- in the Pauline phrase that jackasses like Buck so studiously avoid -- created to do good works.

That idea leads to a workable doctrine of grace -- something more like the original Pauline and Augustinian notion that Luther and Calvin sought to recover. It says, "Grace. Therefore works." Buck and the braying crowd of Skip-Verse-10ers would argue the opposite of that, "Grace. Therefore not works." So I guess I shouldn't be calling them jackasses. "Goats" would be more accurate.

The poor archbishop was constructed and inserted here entirely for the purpose of this anti-works-righteousness rant in defense of thoughts-righteousness, so he's not meant to be anything more than a straw-man embodiment of the worst evangelical fantasies about what it is that deluded Catholics believe. The authors won't allow him to discern any pattern as to who was taken in the disappearances, and they insist that he must be -- like every character in Tribulation Force who isn't a member of the Tribulation Force -- wholly ignorant of any aspect of PMD rapture mythology, and those restrictions force him to seem a bit dim. But all of that together gives the bishop an incoherence which is just about the closest thing you'll find in this book to realistically conflicted human nature.

He comes across as someone who is struggling to make sense of the horrific tragedy of the Event, someone who is desperate to reconcile such horrors with the idea that a just and loving God is still in control. So he starts by trying to talk himself into the "winnowing" of evil theory:

"The Scripture says that in the last days it will be as in the days of Noah. And you'll recall that in the days of Noah, the good people remained and the evil ones were washed away."

He's got a point there, actually. The bishop is referring to Matthew 24, where Jesus says that the end of the age will be like "the days before the flood":

... until the flood came and took them all away. That is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. Two men will be in the field; one will be taken and the other left.

That last sentence is, of course, where the Left Behind series gets its name -- Matthew 24:40 via Larry Norman's "I Wish We'd All Been Ready." But neither L&J nor Larry seemed to notice that the flood reference clearly shows that getting "taken" is bad while being "left behind" is good.** That's part of why I think this passage makes far more sense if read as a memento mori.

When Buck pointed out to the bishop that the disappearances also involved children and babies:

The bishop had shifted uncomfortably. "That I leave to God," he said. "I have to believe that perhaps he was protecting the innocents."

"From what?"

"I'm not sure. I don't take the Apocrypha [sic] literally, but there are dire predictions of what might be yet to come."

"So you would not relegate the vanished young ones to the winnowing of the evil?"

"No. Many of the little ones who disappeared I baptized myself ..."

He's a straw man grasping at straws. He doesn't know how to make sense of what happened and he's willing to admit that, to confess, "I'm not sure." This makes me far more fond of him than I'm able to be of any of the cruelly certain characters the authors tell me I'm supposed to like.

Buck could have helped the archbishop. He could have opened his eyes to the pattern of the disappearances and explained the prophecies outlined on the back cover of the book, but he's no more interested in sharing that evidence with the bishop than he is in sharing it with his GW readers. So instead of telling the poor man what he believes happened -- what he knows happened -- he instead abruptly asks the guy "to comment on certain passages of Scripture."

"So you've lost many children from your parish, precious little ones you knew and loved yourself," Buck says. "Well then suck on this. Ephesians 2:8 and 9, bee-yatch! Aw yeahhh!" And then he spikes the Bible and starts doing his end-zone victory dance, leaving the poor man more bewildered than ever.

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

* This parable utterly contradicts Calvinism-ism's notion of salvation by assent to proper doctrine. The story suggests, instead, that salvation itself is unrelated to concern about salvation. The Son of Man tells the sheep that they are blessed and they reply, "I'm sorry, have we met? What's a 'Jesus' and what does that have to do with me?" They have no knowledge or understanding of the mechanics of salvation and it turns out they didn't need any. Soteriology is a red herring.

** The parallel passage in Luke's Gospel is more fun if you ever have to deal with a PMD in conversation. Be sure to use the King James Version when you bring up Luke 17:34 -- "In that night there shall be two men in one bed; the one shall be taken, and the other shall be left" -- and then argue that a literal interpretation suggests that precisely 50 percent of homosexuals will be raptured.

TF: Tweaking Buck's article

Tribulation Force, pp. 48-53

So Chloe isn't sure if she should call Buck and Rayford's all, like, "Just call him, don't play games." So then Chloe's all, like, "You're the one who told him I was asleep." And Rayford's all, like, "You liiike him," and Chloe's all, like, "Maybe, kind of." And the whole time Buck is, like, at his house, having the same exact conversation with himself.

This scene plays out several more times in this chapter and in those that follow. It's supposed to be, I guess, the circling dance of just-missed connections between two people meant for each other. I think it's actually meant to be cute -- that their self-inflicted anxiety is meant to be endearing.

I don't find it endearing. At best, the three of them seem immature. At worst they come across like a blander version of Sam and Diane from Cheers. (The first few seasons of that sitcom, taken as a whole, form a kind of definitive treatise on love, control, vulnerability and selfishness every bit as insightful as something like C.S. Lewis' The Great Divorce.)

Since all of this fretting and anxiety stems from phone calls never made or completed, it's also possible that this is intended as a a kind of fable -- a warning to readers of the kind of misery that befalls those who fail to use their telephones as often as they should.

In any case, we get a reprise of this scene every few pages throughout the first half of Tribulation Force and I think these are passages we can skim past. They're awful, of course, but awful in a pedestrian way. I'm more interested in the more instructively awful passages of this book, such as the continuing discussion between Bruce and Buck of Buck's pending trip back to New York.

"What do you think Carpathia wants?" Bruce asks Buck, apparently forgetting that what Carpathia wants is supposedly spelled out, in detail, in biblical prophecy and therefore shouldn't be hard to ascertain.

Buck shook his head. "No idea."

"Do you trust this Steve Plank?"

"Yeah, I trust him. I worked for Steve for years."

Yes, Buck and Steve go way back, since way before Steve went to work for the Antichrist and became his brainwashed pawn. So why wouldn't Buck trust him?

Note the double standard here between Steve and Hattie. "She went to New York on her own," Bruce said. "It was her choice." So her innocent decision to take a dream job with a man she thought was simply an idealistic politician makes her a slut, not worth risking oneself to rescue. She deserves to suffer. But Steve remains trustworthy, even though he's a journalistic sell-out who knew his new boss was somehow involved in the murder of Eric Miller (the reporter tossed from the Staten Island Ferry).

The larger problem, though, is that Bruce and Buck think it's still possible to trust anyone. What part of tyrannical evil global despot don't they understand? When dealing with a massive conspiracy, Mr. X reminded Agent Mulder, the first rule is "Trust no one."

That rule would seem doubly important in this case, considering Nicolae's demonstrated brainwashing powers. Bruce and Buck aren't sure what limits, if any, those powers have, so everyone they encounter should be presumed guilty until proven innocent.

The naivete here is remarkable considering the untold hours the authors seem to have spent fantasizing about being "persecuted" for their faith. Like many American evangelicals, they even seem to imagine that they are persecuted here and now. (Just look at what happened to Miss California -- condemned to be first runner-up despite her top-dollar new rack. It's persecution I tell you!) That same persecution fantasy is, of course, a big part of the appeal of these books for their evangelical readership.

Yet for all of that, the authors don't seem to have the slightest notion of what real persecution would actually entail, of what it would feel like or how it would work. They can't seem to understand that persecution requires a certain level of prudent paranoia. They ought to know better. Go into any of those so-called "Christian book stores" that sell the Left Behind books and you'll find copies of God's Smuggler and The Hiding Place. Nothing in the LB series comes close to capturing the dreadful reality of those books. All of the guillotines and OWG machinations to come in this series don't ever quite seem as bad as those descriptions of life behind the Iron Curtain or in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam. Their efforts to describe the ultimate most evil regime falls flat because of their astonishing ignorance about evil regimes that have actually existed -- or that exist now -- causing real suffering for real people.

Buck and Bruce haven't forgotten that Steve was brainwashed. They spend the next two pages rehashing the whole brainwashing scene --

"If Steve had just told me I hadn't seen it right, maybe I would have thought I was going crazy and had myself committed. But instead he told me I wasn't even there! Bruce, no one remembers I was there!"

-- but they don't seem to think it has any bearing on whether or not Buck should trust Steve's offer to arrange another meeting with Nicolae.

"The question now is, what does Carpathia want? Do you think if he talks to you in private he'll reveal his true self? or threaten you? or let you know he's aware that you know the truth?"

"For what purpose?"

"To intimidate you. To use you."

"Maybe. Maybe all he wants to do is try to read me, try to determine whether he succeeded in brainwashing me, too."

"It's pretty dangerous business, that's all I've got to say."

"I hope that's not all you've got to say, Bruce. I was hoping for a little more counsel."

"I'll pray about it," Bruce said. "But right now I don't know what to tell you."

And that's where they leave it. The trap is set and Buck intends to walk into it.

Good luck with that, Bruce tells him.

Back at the Steele household, Rayford and Chloe take another lap around the question of whether or not she should call Buck back and what she should say, etc. This is interesting only in that it begins, "When Rayford returned from running errands that morning ..." So it's just another typical Saturday morning here in the apocalypse.

I will leave it to the reader as an exercise to consider the last few dozens tasks you have performed that might be categorized as "running errands" and to figure out whether any of those might still be relevant, or possible, or in any way routine, in the childless world of the aftermath of the Event and the early stages of the Antichrist's OWG.

Buck spent the rest of the day tweaking ...

That would explain a lot. I'd imagine that his only hope for finishing his big cover story by Monday morning would be to spend the rest of the weekend furiously scribbling in a sleepless, meth-fueled rush to try to make up for all of the work he has yet to do. But of course the ellipsis in the quote above distorts its meaning. What it actually says, instead, is something flatly impossible:

Buck spent the rest of the day tweaking his cover story for Global Weekly on the theories behind the disappearances. He felt good about it, deciding it might be the best work he had ever done.

No. "Tweaking" implies that he is polishing a finished article and the article has most certainly not been finished. The article has scarcely even been begun. We know this. This is not ambiguous. The text allows no wiggle room on this point.

Every moment of Buck's life for the past two weeks has been accounted for in our story so far. Almost none of that time has been spent on this assignment, even tangentially. He flew from Chicago to New York to London to Germany to New York and back to Chicago. None of that travel was in any way related to this project. He ate cookies with Chloe and dinner with Rayford and fish and chips with Alan Tompkins. We've seen him flirt with three women and mistreat a fourth. We've seen him -- twice -- duck into the bathroom to search his soul. We've seen him conduct two interviews with the president of Romania, two with pilots, and a few more with whoever happened to walk by his desk there in the newsmagazine's office. And while we've also seen him place too many phone calls to keep count of, none of those calls involved any interviews or even cursory research for his inexplicably finished and allegedly awesome cover story.

He simply never wrote it. This never happened.

But be that as it may, what does the article say?

It included everything from the tabloidlike attack by Hitler's ghost, UFOs, and aliens, to the belief that this was some sort of cosmic evolutionary cleansing, a survival-of-the-fittest adjustment in the world's population.

It's not clear from that description whether that false range ("everything from ... to") covers Hitler's ghost, UFOs and aliens as discreet theories or if these are meant as a single theory -- Hitler's ghost somehow working in concert with the UFOs as well as aliens. Either way, the implication is that a large portion of the population is willing to grasp at ridiculous and implausible explanations for the disappearances. That's not fair. It wouldn't even be fair if Buck had bothered to conduct a representative sample of interviews to confirm that such beliefs were, in fact, widely held.

It's not fair because UFOs and/or aliens are an obvious and eminently reasonable hypothesis for this unprecedented phenomenon. This was the ultimate Black Swan event -- all bets are off and no theory, no matter how implausible, can be dismissed out of hand. Two billion people vanished. That massive and astonishing Event requires a proportionately massive and astonishing explanation (see earlier, "It Could Be Bunnies"). Its scope, suddenness and precision seems to entail either outright miracle or the application of technology advanced beyond our wildest imagining. That leaves God (or the gods) and space aliens as our prime suspects. To paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from divine intervention.

We're not shown, or even told, what Buck had to say about these UFO/aliens theories in his article. It seems likely that article simply repeats the assumption we find here -- that the idea is dismissed out of hand as absurd and not worth exploring. Buck believes this idea is A) false and B) widely held. His responsibility as a journalist, then, is to refute it -- to marshal the evidence and present the facts of the matter even when, or especially when, those facts are contrary to the presupposed beliefs of his readers. His article ought to include the voices of experts from NASA and SETI and whatever data or evidence they could provide. But none of that is in there.

(For my money, the space-aliens theory is still in play. What we've learned so far is that these aliens have the technology to teleport or disintegrate human bodies instantaneously from a remote location. We've also learned that these aliens have the power to brainwash humans and that their devious scheme -- whatever it is -- involves some of them posing here among us as, say, a Romanian politician, or as a small-town pastor who produces video tapes to throw the humans off their track.)

The "cosmic evolutionary cleansing" theory doesn't begin to make sense. It sounds like what it is -- some kind of clumsy evangelical mockery of evolution by authors who don't have the slightest idea what it is they're trying to mock. This is why it's sad, on their own terms, that the authors never bothered to show us Buck working on this article. They could have shown us his interview with their parody of an evolutionist, rigging the conversation so that the condescending buffoon was rendered spluttering and speechless by Buck's zinging questions about the intelligent design of the banana or the cruciform shape of our model of laminin proteins. Jack Chick wrote this scene dozens of times, always providing just the dose of self-affirming ignorance that this series was meant to provide. But such a scene was apparently too much work for LaHaye and Jenkins who rushed to produce their book using the same method Buck seems to have used to produce his instant, no-research, no-interviews article.

Buck's article apparently also neglects to explore, or even to mention, the alleged official explanation for the disappearances -- the Rosenzweig/Carpathia hypothesis that two billion people disappeared due to:

Some confluence of electromagnetism in the atmosphere, combined with as yet unknown or unexplained atomic ionization from the nuclear power and weaponry throughout the world, could have been ignited or triggered -- perhaps by a natural cause like lightning, or even by an intelligent life-form that discovered this possibility before we did -- and caused this instant action throughout the world.

Since he was first assigned an article on "the theories behind the disappearances," Buck has spent many hours with both Rosenzweig and Carpathia, yet he's never bothered to talk to them about their pre-eminent theory. He's never asked them about it. He's never explored any of their alleged evidence, or asked for a clearer explanation of what "some confluence of electromagnetism" is supposed to mean, or asked even the obvious question of why a politician and a botanist should be regarded as experts on "unexplained atomic ionization."

As vague and inscrutable as that theory is, it's also old news by now, having become the accepted wisdom around the globe. People running errands on a Saturday morning make their small talk:

"Hey, Bill. How's the wife?"

"Gone, I'm afraid. You know, the unexplained atomic ionization."

"Oh, I'm sorry to hear that."

"Yeah. Your kids too, I suppose?"

"Yeah, both gone. Confluence of electromagnetism took 'em along with the rest. That's why I'm here at the bank, actually. Have to put a stop on those preschool tuition checks ..."

In addition to being a lazy and incurious as a reporter, though, it turns out that Buck is also a practitioner of the worst form of journalism -- adopting a posture of neutral objectivity in which he refuses to show any bias in favor of facts over non-facts.

In the middle of the piece, Buck had included what he believed was the truth, of course, but he did not editorialize. It was, as usual, a third-person, straight news-analysis article [sic]. No one but his new friends would know that he agreed with the airline pilot and the pastor and several others he interviewed -- that the disappearances had been a result of Christ's rapture of his church.

This is insane on so many levels.

Let's imagine that instead of the cause of the disappearances, Buck Williams had been assigned to write about the cause of a suspicious warehouse fire. Some people theorized that the fire was due to a lightning strike, or to faulty electrical wiring, or to unattended cooking materials. The fire occurred on a cloudless night, the power was shut off and the warehouse did not have a kitchen, but Buck decides not to mention any of that because he doesn't want to "editorialize." He wants to make sure that his "straight news-analysis article" doesn't include any biasing assessment of whether or not any given theory is actually true. So Buck includes all the different theories, giving each equal weight, leaving out only the official ruling from the fire marshal (too prejudicial, that, too biasing). Only Buck's closest confidants would know that he agreed with the pastor and the dozens of members from the church across the street from the warehouse who theorized that the fire was arson. So as to avoid any hint of editorializing and bias, he doesn't mention that dozens of members of this church witnessed a man pouring gasoline over the walls of the warehouse and tossing flaming oil-soaked rags to ignite the blaze before fleeing in a white Econoliner van with license plate number KLB 431. One parishioner videotaped the arson and showed Buck the tape, but he doesn't mention this either as he doesn't find it newsworthy.

That is, essentially, what Buck is doing here with his article on the disappearances. He doesn't simply have an opinion, he has proof. He's got Billings' videotape and all of Bruce's charts and prophecies. He can report not just what happened and why, but what is going to happen next and then what's going to happen after that.

Yet out of some warped notion of journalistic objectivity, he withholds these facts from his readers, refusing to allow them to see the evidence he has discovered. He thus presents facts as though they were merely opinions and wild fantasies as though they were the equivalent of facts. And then he leans back and congratulates himself, "deciding it might be the best work he had ever done."

All of that might have worked if it had been intended as a parody of Fox News or a lamentation over the wretched state of contemporary journalism, but Jenkins seems utterly sincere. He really seems to think that this refusal to let facts outweigh opinions is somehow the hallmark of quality reporting.

What it actually demonstrates is that Buck Williams is a Very Bad journalist. And also something of a Very Bad person.

TF: What's the story, Mr. Exposition?

Tribulation Force, pp. 45-52

Buck drops by the New Hope Village Church to talk to Bruce, who welcomes him and says Hello.

For Bruce, inevitably, "Hello" consists of a half-page rant about his own extra-special heavy burden from God and the extra-special humility with which he's facing it:

"Another long feast on the Word. I'm making up for lost time, you know. ... I'm trying to decide how to tell the congregation, probably within the next month, that I feel called to travel. People here are going to have to step up and help lead."

"You're afraid they'll feel abandoned?"

"Exactly. But I'm not leaving the church. I'll be here as much as I can. As I told you and the Steeles yesterday, this is a weight I feel God has put on me. There's joy in it -- I'm learning so much. But it's scary, too, and I know I'm not up to it, apart from the Spirit's power. ... But you didn't come to hear me complain."

Bruce is getting harder to endure. Whenever he's not kvetching about the enormous special burden God has laid on him, he's fretting about how essential and irreplaceable his special self is to the congregation at New Hope.

Everything Bruce says here about his obligation to the church is, again, based on the idea that this is a well-established, thriving evangelical community of long-term members, much like any other local evangelical congregation you might visit today. Since many such nondenominational congregations are held together by a dynamic and charismatic (in the secular sense) leader, Bruce imagines that he must be such a figure for the new believers stumbling together to form this hatchling community at NHVC.  It's hard to see how that could be the case, since this body of believers has largely formed on its own while Bruce was shuttered away studying his prophecies, emerging only occasionally and then only to speak to the three members of his exclusive "inner circle."

I doubt the rest of the congregation would mind if he took off on his travels. I doubt they'd notice.

In his absence, Bruce says, "People here are going to have to step up and help lead." But the church leadership model he seems to subscribe to discourages, or even forbids, such stepping up and sharing in leadership. It's an exclusive model, based on inner circles and inner-inner circles -- one in which leadership is an invitation-only club and the apocalypse shelter only seats four. Bruce comes across as the sort of leader who might be OK with people stepping up in his absence, but only if they step back down on his return.

In just two short weeks, Bruce has gone from the deep shame of being left behind to an apparent belief that he is the irreplaceable man at the head of this reborn church. He seems to think it's all about him. That if he is the leader, then everyone else must be the followers -- his followers, at that.

Thus we get this repeated refrain about Bruce's special burden and his special responsibility. That sense of specialness tends to carry with it the idea that such special people must also be entitled to certain special privileges. From there it's just a short skip down to the idea that these privileges must be defended against dangerous threats, like the idea of the priesthood of all believers.* What's special about being a clergyman if everybody is a minister?

Buck has come by to seek Bruce's advice on the Hattie Situation. The GIRAT has been behaving badly lately, but let's give him credit for realizing that he owes Hattie a favor. She set him up with Chloe -- a nice, smart, attractive young woman he really likes. In turn, he set her up with the Antichrist, the ten-horned beast from the pit of Hell. So I think he's right to feel he owes her one -- that he's obliged to try to rescue her from Nicolae and then, maybe, to introduce her to a nice podiatrist or a dentist or something.

"I just have two quick things, and then I'll let you get back to your study. First, and I've been pushing this from my mind the last few days, but I feel terrible about Hattie Durham. Remember her? ..."

I'm disappointed -- not surprised, of course, just disappointed -- that Buck's questions for his pastor don't have anything to do with his recent abortive epiphany about the upside-down, revolutionary nature of the Jesus he accidentally bumped into while reading the forbidden Gospels instead of the prophetically correct parts of the Bible. But we should still note that something wholly unprecedented has quietly happened here: Buck Williams feels obliged to help someone other than himself. And he's even prepared to act on that obligation.

Bruce, of course, immediately tries to talk Buck out of this. Trying to help Hattie, he notes, would be dangerous -- and surely no sense of obligation to others ought to entail danger (or discomfort, or effort, or anything else that might distract one from the only real moral obligation of maintaining one's personal purity). Plus, he reminds Buck, Hattie is a slut and therefore deserves her fate:

"The woman you introduced to Carpathia? Sure. The one Rayford almost had a fling with. ... As I recall, you tried to warn her about Carpathia."

"I told her she might wind up being his plaything, yes, but at the time I had no idea who he really was."

"She went to New York on her own. It was her choice. ... You want to rescue her from Carpathia, is that it?

"Of course."

"I don't see how you could do it without putting yourself in danger. She's no doubt enamored with her new life already. She's gone from being a flight attendant to being the personal assistant to the most powerful man in the world."

"Personal assistant and who knows what else."

"Probably so. I don't imagine he chose her for her clerical skills. ..."

See? Hattie chose to take this apparently wonderful career opportunity, and therefore she deserves to be brainwashed and enslaved by the embodiment of evil. Plus just look at how she was dressed -- she brought it on herself.

Yet Buck, uncharacteristically, seems determined. He plans to go back to New York where he's bound to encounter Nicolae Carpathia again, and so he needs Bruce to tell him what it is, exactly, he'll be up against.

"I don't know what to do."

"And you think I do."

"I was hoping."

This is Bruce's cue. This is what Bruce is here for. He's not the muscle or the comic sidekick or the girl -- he's Mr. Exposition and they're playing his song. We recognize this scene from countless novels, movies and TV shows. Here he is in his study, surrounded by all of his books of arcane lore. This is where he's supposed to come through like Rupert Giles or Geordi La Forge or the head squint in the crime lab of every single detective show.

"According to my studies/research/test results/computer simulation ..." he's supposed to say, and then he's supposed to explain to Buck just how to prepare himself for the villain he's about to face. This bit of requisite exposition equips the hero to deal with the challenge ahead while also outlining, for both hero and reader, the premise of the quest/case/adventure to follow.

More importantly, it explains the rules. There have to be rules -- that's the only way readers can know that the heroes and the authors aren't cheating. The rules explain how the archvillain works, what he/she/it is capable of and vulnerable to.

Such an explanation of the rules is dramatically necessary for a host of reasons, among the most important being that it explains why the hero can't Just Shoot Him. That always needs to be ruled out because, A) it doesn't make for much of a story, and B) it keeps the hero from wasting time and bullets on an ineffective approach or from looking stupid for not at least pulling the trigger and giving it a try. So Mr. Exposition will always explain to the hero that Bullets Won't Stop Him -- you'll need to drive a wooden stake through his heart, to fire an arrow into the gap in the scales of his underbelly, to shoot photon torpedoes into the two-meter thermal exhaust port that leads to the main reactor, to slay him with the magical sword that can only be wielded by the Chosen One who bears the sacred mystic amulet, etc.

We have every reason to expect just this sort of exposition and explanation from Bruce right here. He's supposed to be the brains of the outfit, the one who can tell us what's really going on and what it is we're up against.

So what's really going on? Buck asks. What are we up against?

I don't know, Bruce says.

And apparently he really doesn't. He can't help Buck prepare for another encounter with the Big Bad and he can't help the reader understand how this story is supposed to work. He doesn't know what the rules are because the authors don't know either.

Take just the pertinent question of whether or not Just Shooting Him would be an effective response to Nicolae Carpathia. It takes the authors forever to get around to addressing this, and then when they finally do -- in the form of Rayford contemplating crashing Nicolae's plane -- they sidestep and evade and mumble because they just don't know. Nicolae isn't meant to be bulletproof, exactly, but he's destined to live for the next seven years because of the prophecy. Bullets Can't Stop the prophecy.

But why not? And how not? What would happen if our heroes decided to defy augury and pull the trigger anyway? The authors have no idea. They can't imagine.

As the expository surrogate for such authors, Bruce is stuck with an impossible job. What's the story? Buck asks him. And Bruce balks because he doesn't know.

The authors don't know. They've got a prophecy check list -- a seemingly arbitrary sequence of events to be crossed off one by one -- but they don't have a story. They don't have a central conflict or a problem to be solved.

The authors seem to dimly grasp that there is some sort of conflict going on, some kind of problem, but they can't make out the contours of it. And so, like their would-be protagonists, they don't have any idea what can or should be done about it.

We could try to help out poor Bruce here. We could skim ahead through LaHaye and Jenkins' favorite book of the Bible and see what unfolds in the book of Revelation. There we might find a hint of the kind of story we're dealing with when we see that all these beasts and dragons and such are defeated finally by, of all things, a lamb. Bullets aren't going to work, but the lamb that was slain knows the secret to defeating our arch villain.

We could do a little more digging, hit the library in research mode and see what else there is to learn about this "Antichrist." The word comes from the first epistle of John, which tells us that the "spirit of antichrist" is the opposite of the "Spirit of God." So we're getting closer, but what is this "Spirit of God," exactly? "Let us love one another," the author of 1 John continues:

"... for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love."

Aha. So it's that kind of story. That's what we're dealing with here.

It's not about finding the special power that can defeat the archvillain's powers, but about a deeper, older kind of conflict. It's not about Bad Power vs. Good Power, but power vs. love. You recognize this story. This villain can't be defeated by silver bullets or wooden stakes or photon torpedos or a magic ring. We don't need a super hero, we need a lamb. The ring must be destroyed. Worthy is the lamb, worthy is the lamb that was slain.

That's the story. That's always the story, really. I love to tell that story because I know 'tis true; it satisfies my longings as nothing else can do, and etc.

But LaHaye and Jenkins don't seem to know that story. The Left Behind books do not have room for the lamb that was slain. The only response L&J can imagine to the Antichrist's power is even more power and so, after seven years of stalling, they bring in their deus ex machina** -- the T-2000 Killer Robo-Christ who stomps across Tokyo and zaps Nicolae to death with his deadly death-rays of deadliness.

So even though Bruce doesn't realize it here, in the end it turns out that bullets will stop the Antichrist -- just so long as you've got really, really big killer-Jesus bullets.

The ultimate defeat of L&J's ultimate villain is thus something of a let-down. Their Antichrist turns out in the end to be less fearsome and less impressive than a Sauron or a Voldemort. And thus their Jesus turns out to be far less impressive than either Frodo or Harry Potter.

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

* John Howard Yoder noted that that idea of the priesthood of all believers is often misunderstood as -- or is accused of being -- an attempt to abolish the clergy. Actually, he said, the opposite is true. The priesthood of all believers requires the abolition of the category of laity.

That's interesting. It illustrates a pattern, I think. Try to abolish serfdom, declaring that everyone is a lady or gentleman, and you'll likely be accused of trying to abolish the aristocracy and to destroy all the finer things in life. Try to extend any privilege into a universal right and you'll likely be accused of attempting to destroy that which you're trying to expand while those who seek to keep it restricted, limited and tightly controlled will pose as its defenders. I wish I could think of some other example ...

** Bad theology and bad mythology aside, this preordained deus ex machina ending is also what makes everything up to that point in these books seem like treading water and a time-wasting boondoggle. To the extent that there is a central conflict in this story, the authors' prophecy doesn't allow for it to be addressed until after seven years are spent, and even then our protagonists won't be allowed to play any direct role in resolving the conflict.

For all their grandiose talk, then, the Tribulation Force can never amount to anything more than a version of the Hardy Boys.

It tends to go unnoticed when you first encounter these books as a child, but the Hardy Boys don't actually solve any of their cases. They don't foil the schemes of any of the criminals they encounter and they never actually catch the bad guys. Frank and Joe display more curiosity, pluck and ingenuity than any member of the Tribulation Force does, but for all of that they never wind up as the heroes of their own stories.

What happens in every Hardy Boys book is this: Due to some elaborate coincidence involving Chet's latest hobby, the boys stumble into a situation in which they overhear some criminals talking about crime. The boys track the criminals back to their criminal hide-out, at which point they are inevitably captured (and often knocked unconscious -- by the time they turn 20 they're both going to be punch-drunk from multiple concussion syndrome). The criminals politely explain to them the details of their scheme when, suddenly, the boys' father bursts into the room. By yet another coincidence, world-famous private detective Fenton Hardy always turns out to have been busily pursuing the very same group of criminals and he always arrives just in time to rescue his sons and send the bad guys to prison.

Throughout the many volumes of the Left Behind series, the collective actions of the Tribulation Force amount to less than the amateur sleuthing of Frank and Joe. Our heroes can't and don't do much of anything to solve the case themselves, and unlike the Hardy Boys they scarcely even bother to try. All the Tribulation Force really winds up doing is sitting around, waiting for Fenton/Robo-Jesus to show up to rescue them and arrest the bad guys.

(I'd love to read some of those Hardy Boys mysteries retold from the perspective of their father. One couldn't rework too many of the books as Fenton Hardy Mysteries, of course, since after the first handful readers would begin to wonder why this absentee father doesn't just send his sons off to military boarding school for their own safety.)

TF: Meta-NHVC

Tribulation Force, pg. 45

It's been a busy couple of weeks at New Hope Village Church:

Saturday morning Buck drove to New Hope Village Church, hoping to catch Bruce Barnes in his office. The secretary told him Bruce was finishing up his sermon preparation, but that she also knew he would want to see Buck. "You're part of Bruce's inner circle, aren't you?" she said.

So the church now has a secretary. That's new.

NHVC seems to have reconstituted itself, in just two weeks, into just the sort of typical evangelical church that the book's intended readers would recognize. Everything about the scene is reassuringly familiar -- like walking into a McDonald's or a Starbucks.

In the context of our story, though, it's more like walking into a Starbucks on the moon.

None of this should be here -- not the secretary, not the reassuring sense of established routine, not the large congregation behaving exactly like any typical pre-Event, pre-cataclysm large congregation. The very mundane normalcy of it all is itself surreal -- like that eerily out-of-place room at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

This secretary and this typical Saturday at an ordinary church don't belong in this story. Bruce has conducted a handful of meetings for skeptics and seekers, and he's had a couple of Sundays to drum up a new congregation, but that doesn't explain how NHVC would be able to completely replace its previous membership in two short weeks. Nor could anything explain how this replacement congregation would know how to behave exactly like the community they're replacing.

If any other authors had been writing this story, then the Event would likely have produced a wave of newcomers to the church. The Event was an incomprehensible mass tragedy -- the disappearance of everyone's children, of every child that everyone everywhere knows. That's unprecedented, of course, but from what we know of less comprehensive tragedies, we can imagine what would happen.

When tragedy strikes a community, a steeple becomes a giant sign reading "Chaplain's Office" and people just kind of show up at churches. Whether or not they belong to any given congregation, the response to communal tragedy is to congregate. This happens after mining disasters, earthquakes, tornados, floods, school bus accidents and shooting sprees. People gather at churches not to seek or to share answers, but just because the doors will be open, and there's a big enough room and a ready supply of candles. (School gymnasiums can play a similar role for similar reasons, but they never have enough candles and, for most of us, memories of gym class don't convey the same reassuring connotations as going to a "sanctuary.")

This impulse to gather is useful and even necessary as the community struggles to sort things out -- to figure out what just happened and who's affected and what do we need to do next. So the mayor and the police and fire chiefs and the head of the local Red Cross all make their way to the churches too. They'll gather at the edge of the candlelight vigil and assess the situation, enlisting and accepting the support of volunteers, accounting for the absent, and keeping the gathered community as well-informed as possible about what just happened or is happening. Downstairs, in the big practical space of the church basement, folding tables will be set up and volunteers will start organizing the emergency shelter or the first-aid station or the blood drive or the endless pot-luck dinner for the sand-bag teams. Someone will put on the big coffee urn that all church basements have because it's going to be a long night and no one's going anywhere until we sort out the full extent of the situation. The vigil and the volunteering can last for days, with sleepless people urging each other to go home and try to get a few hours sleep -- advice that no one seems willing or able to take.

That, more or less, is what happens all the time. But none of that happened here, in these books.

In the aftermath of the Event, NHVC was, for days, an empty husk, haunted only by the ghosts of Bruce and Loretta. There were no candlelight vigils and no ad hoc community gatherings. Mayors and police chiefs and Red Cross officials did not assemble, assess or respond and the need for some kind of communal Chaplain's Office seems to have been met via a CNN broadcast of a press conference by the president of Romania. Strangest of all, grieving parents all seem to have responded just the way Rayford Steele did. After a brief evening of sorrow, they went back to work, shopped for groceries and picked up their childless but otherwise unperturbed daily routines as though nothing much had happened.

We've noted, repeatedly, the sheer inhuman impossibility of this non-reaction to the Event. Here we add another impossibility to the list: A thriving, routine congregation of brand new, post-Event converts that behaves exactly like any thriving, routine congregation of life-long, pre-Event RTCs.

This is more insanity. None of the members of this congregation belonged to this church three weeks ago or even thought about joining. They know next to nothing about the content or substance of what it is that NHVC-type Christians are supposed to believe. With no Peter, Paul or Priscilla around, they'd be lucky to find even an Apollos to guide them. (Apollos, the Book of Acts tells us, was a dynamic preacher in the early first-century church, but a dynamic preacher who didn't really understand what it was he was supposed to be preaching about.)

More to the point, they wouldn't have the slightest sense of the mores or customs or routines of the congregation they're replacing. Sunday morning worship they could probably stumble through, but the rest of it was a structure and schedule designed for a community and a world that no longer exists. They would be far too busy trying to rebuild their own community in their own, new post-Event world to have the time or inclination to try to recreate this weird facsimile of the local church world that was.

This is what post-apocalypse stories are for -- what they're supposed to do. We see a new community coming together and applying its courage and ingenuity to build a new world and a new society in its new context, after the shipwreck or the flood or the invasion or the outbreak. By exploring what society would look like in that new context, such stories -- Swiss Family Robinson, Jericho, Jeremiah, Waterworld, Night of the Living Dead, Gilligan's Island -- provide a new perspective for understanding the meaning of our society in our context. Such stories take apart the world so that we can look inside to see how it works.

Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins have spent decades within the world of local evangelical churches. They ought to know that world -- how it works and why it works, or doesn't work, the way it does. They ought to know that world with enough intimacy and insight to be able to show us here how that world would be changed if we replaced everyone in it with new, tabula-rasa believers coping with a shared and devastating tragedy. The potential is for something like a retelling or reimagining of the Book of Acts -- or maybe like the Jerusalem church of CE 71 transplanted to 21st-century Illinois. Watching this community of neophytes attempt -- with false starts and halting steps -- to reinvent the wheel would give us a chance to remember or to relearn much that we might have forgotten or overlooked about wheels and how they roll.

But our authors, as we've seen time and again, aren't really interested in this world or how it works. They may have spent many, many years in local congregations, but they haven't been paying attention. We knew they didn't care enough to pay attention to non-RTCs, but here, with the impossibly unchanged pre-Event routine of the new New Hope Village Church, we see that they don't really care much about their own RTC community either.

The church secretary seems to have picked up on his disregard. There's a hint of frustration in her reference to "Bruce's inner circle" -- a trace of the exasperation of someone struggling with a monumental task who is forced to abide the irrelevant distraction of her boss's time-wasting preoccupations. It's the same sort of tone one hears in corporate offices when the underpaid and overworked administrative assistant is told to set aside some vital task in order to draft yet another memo in the CEO's name clarifying the distinction between a mission statement and a vision statement.

What we're seeing here, in other words, is a glimpse of meta-secretary, straining against the absurdity of her inexplicable presence in this impossible scene.

Who is this woman and how did she come to be working here? What was she doing three weeks ago and how did it come to pass that she was able to choose to stop doing that and start doing this? Does she even get paid to work here at the church, and if so, how does that work? The rapturing of Senior Executive Uber-Pastor Billings and the rest of the staff other than Bruce would have freed up much of NHVC's personnel budget, but that budget was based on a presumed level of weekly giving from a congregation that no longer exists. It seems unlikely that the new congregation would even know how to conduct an offering, let alone be in a position to rely on one. And if the secretary is getting paid, who is supposed to sign her paycheck? The church treasurer and the rest of its board are all gone -- every officer of the 501(c)(3) nonprofit that owns the church's bank accounts and its property.

So when this church secretary greets Buck outside of Bruce's office, we catch a glimpse not just of the meta-secretary, but of the whole meta-congregation. While Bruce is locked in the study, poring over the marginalia in Billings' old copy of 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Be in 1988,* these folks would be working hard to rewrite the second chapter of Acts, adding to their number daily those who were being saved.**

I imagine Loretta working with some new-member lawyers to reconstitute the church board, thus regaining access to NHVC's accounts so they can keep the lights on and so that the new congregation is no longer trespassing on the old congregation's property. Loretta's next step would have been to hire the secretary to keep Bruce out of the way, and then to hire enough on-call staff to keep the overwhelmed grief-counseling ministry operating 24/7.

Like the church secretary, Loretta is there at the church even on Saturdays because there's so much work to do. She's got a committee of volunteers finishing up the house-by-house canvassing of the neighborhood -- sorting out who's missing, who's dead and who's curled up in the fetal position, silently mouthing the names of their missing children. And she's got another volunteer committee in charge of duplicating and distributing Pastor Billings' video, which is also being shown, round the clock, on a giant screen set up in the sanctuary. Loretta's also trying to figure out the ethics of the second mortgage that the new treasurer wants to take out on the property -- does a 30-year mortgage count as stealing when the bank doesn't know the world is about to end, or is that an acceptable case of "plundering the Egyptians"? And then she's got that meeting this afternoon with those kids from the new church over in Wheaton.

With all of that on her plate, it was a relief that Bruce didn't ask her to be part of his inner circle. And it's perfectly understandable that she ducked around the corner to hide when she saw Buck arrive.

With the announcement that Buck was waiting, Bruce immediately swung open the door and embraced him. That was something new for Buck, too, all this hugging, especially among men. Bruce looked haggard.

In Jenkins' defense, when he typed this passage in 1996 he could have had no idea that the word "haggard" would one day induce giggles in the context of a discussion of discomfort with male expressions of affection.

... all this hugging, especially among men. Bruce looked haggard. "Another long night?" Buck asked.

OK, then.

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

* True story: In 1994, while working part-time in a bookstore, a customer asked me to special order a copy of that book. I looked it up and then told her that we couldn't get it for her because it was out of print.

"When did it go out of print?"

"My guess would be 1989."

"That's a shame. It's a great book."

"..."

** Actually, I would guess that for many of these new members, joining this congregation had little to do with being saved, or with personal faith per se. Many of these would be people who witnessed the Event two weeks ago and knew enough, from a thousand pop-culture references and allusions, to recognize a premillennial dispensationalist Rapture when they saw one.

Imagine some guy sitting at home watching the local news and laughing along with the reporter at the costumed geeks attending a local Star Trek convention. This guy, The Skeptic, has never seen a single episode of the show -- he couldn't tell Kirk from Picard if you paid him to guess. He thinks the whole thing is ridiculous.

But then, as he watches this live news report, a Klingon warship decloaks over the convention center and starts blowing up cars in the parking lot. As the news reporter stands there, dumbfounded and speechless, The Skeptic hears what even he recognizes as the beam-me-up-Scotty sound effect and suddenly all of the costumed geeks and conventioneers twinkle and vanish. Just before the cameraman faints and the signal is lost, The Skeptic sees the briefest glimpse of the starship Enterprise swooping in to engage the Klingon vessel.

It doesn't matter at this point that he's never seen the show -- the iconic spaceship is instantly recognizable even to The Skeptic. Instantly, The Skeptic realizes that everything he thought he knew was wrong -- that he is living in a Star Trek world and that everyone who might have been able to explain to him what that means is now gone.

Two weeks later, the former Skeptic finds himself at a Star Trek convention -- a convention he helped to organize along with hundreds of others, all of whom, like him, never watched the show and know next to nothing about it. And there is no one there to explain it to them. It is a Star Trek convention without Trekkers -- a Star Trek convention comprised entirely of people who haven't seen Star Trek and don't understand it.

That is what the congregation of the new New Hope Village Church would be like.

The authors seem to hold two contradictory views about this potential PMD-"genre-savvy" among those left behind. On the one hand, they portray the entire world as being cluelessly mystified when confronted with what should be instantly recognizable as a PMD Rapture. On the other hand, the whole point of these books is to warn every skeptic who rejects the supreme truths of PMD prophecy mania that they'll see, someday very soon, that the PMDs were right all along. This vindication and comeuppance relies on the idea that the Rapture will be universally and undeniably recognized as precisely what it is by all those left behind.

TF: Bible studies

Tribulation Force, pp. 38-43

Chloe Steele is smitten with Buck Williams. Lest we judge her too harshly for this, keep in mind that unlike the reader, she's never witnessed him in Buck-the-Player mode, working his charms on Hattie or Alice, and she's never seen him as Buck-the-D-bag smirking behind the back of his female boss.

Like Buck, Chloe is aware that the End of the World is not the most auspicious time to begin a relationship:

"Sitting here talking about my love life, or lack of it, seems pretty juvenile at this point in history, don't you think?"

Having read the back cover of the book, Chloe knows she's in a PMD apocalypse novel, and thus she considers a pragmatic approach to that predicament:

"It's not like there's nothing to fill my time even if I don't go back to school. I want to memorize Ezekiel, Daniel and Revelation for starters."

Rayford laughed. "You're kidding."

"Of course! But you know what I mean, Dad? I never would have dreamed the Bible would even interest me, but now I'm reading it like there's no tomorrow."

Rayford fell silent, and he could tell Chloe was struck by her own unintentional irony. ... "There aren't many tomorrows left, are there?"

I might like these characters a bit more if they occasionally expressed a hint of intentional irony. (If I were in their shoes, I don't think seven years would be enough time for "Hey, it's not the end of the world ..." jokes to ever get old.) A lack of appreciation for irony is often considered a mark of innocence, but I can't fully trust someone who seems unable to appreciate or savor irony. That strikes me as a sign of a dangerous lack of perspective.

It's too bad Chloe was kidding about her plan to memorize "Ezekiel, Daniel and Revelation for starters." That plan shows good instincts -- heading upstream for the most primary sources available is normally the best approach.

In the case of premillennial dispensationalism, however, such unmediated contact with the supposed primary source material would only be confusing. Without prior knowledge of the PMD mythology, there's no way anyone could read those books of the Bible and arrive at anything like it's intricately convoluted framework. The only way such a course of study might be helpful in understanding the PMD apocalypse would be if Chloe memorized them from a Scofield Bible -- not the text itself, just the footnotes.

The Bible, actually, is not a primary source for PMD eschatology. Pieces of it -- chapters, verses, words, syllables -- provide a portion of the raw material that people like Scofield, LaHaye or Hal Lindsay then combine with other ingredients to create, through textual alchemy, their finished product. But PMD eschatology is not found in, and does not come from, the Bible.

Consider just the events of our story so far. Russia destroys itself in an otherwise harmless nuclear attack on Israel. Every child on earth disappears, along with adults who are a very particular sort of Christian. Two men with guns trip and die while heckling two street preachers in Jerusalem. The pacifist president of Romania takes over the world, except for Israel, with whom he signs a peace treaty. Unless you were already steeped in the mythology and through-the-looking-glass logic of "Bible prophecy" delirium, you'd never guess that these events were meant to correspond to the Bible passages that Tim LaHaye says they "fulfill."

Or consider this sequence of events and see if you can find any rationale for reading the Bible in that particular order:

1. Turn to Ezekiel 38 & 39. Don't read the first 37 chapters of Ezekiel, they don't matter. And don't read Ezekiel chapters 40 to 48 -- they don't matter either. You're supposed to start reading Ezekiel at Chapter 38. That's obviously why it's Chapter 38.

2. Turn from Ezekiel 39 to 1 Thessalonians 4:16, being very careful not to read verses 13 and 14 of this chapter. (Those verses introduce the section that follows as being about death, hope and grieving and you're going to have to try, instead, to read this section as though it is about the disappearance of all of the earth's children, which it doesn't actually mention.) Anyway, read on through the 11th verse of the following chapter and then jump to the obvious next passage in the plainest, most literal and logical reading of the Bible ...

3. Revelation Chapter 11. Don't read the first 10 chapters of Revelation -- not yet. First finish Chapter 11, then turn to ...

4. Revelation 6:1-2. Don't read the third verse yet, because first you need to turn to ...

5. The ninth chapter of Daniel. Skip the first 19 verses and start with Daniel 9:20.

If Chloe did, in fact, memorize Ezekiel, Daniel and Revelation, then this hopscotch approach to the Bible would probably strike her as even more arbitrary and insane. This approach can be made to seem almost sort of somewhat semi-plausible if it's being presented from the pulpit by a preacher who talks very fast and uses lots of distracting, authoritative-seeming PowerPoint charts, but neither Chloe nor any other reader could sit down and read Ezekiel, Daniel and Revelation and thereby conclude that such a course of events is prophesied to occur in such an order.

Within the fictional world she inhabits, memorizing Revelation might still be a prudent step. LaHaye's scheme doesn't follow the chronology that book presents as written, but for the most part he treats all of its seals, vials, trumpets and bowls as a straight timeline of Very Bad Things that Chloe would do well to be prepared to face.

But even in her fictional context, as a character inhabiting the world created by LaHaye and Jenkins, it would still be a waste of time for Chloe to memorize Ezekiel and Daniel. Don't get me wrong -- Ezekiel is fantastic and reading it is not at all a waste of time. The dung-fires and dioramas of the trippy prophet's street theater are unlike anything else in the Bible. Some of Ezekiel's imagery -- a wheel within a wheel, a valley of dry bones -- is as indelible as it is inscrutable. But them bones them bones them dry bones would be nothing but a distraction for Chloe. That story would be no more practical during the Great Tribulation than would the story of Daniel and the Lion's Den (or the less-popular Daniel and the Miracle Vegetarian Exile Diet).

Meanwhile, Buck is thinking of Chloe too:

Buck Williams lay on his stomach in his new bed for the first time. It felt strange. His was a nice place in a good building ...

Should there still be such a thing as "a good building"? Post-Event, an apartment building would either be filled with newly vacant units from which the stink of rotting food would seep into the hallways, or else it would be a building with no empty units, i.e., a building full of sinners. I guess this is a building filled with the better sort of sinner -- the quiet, considerate damned who never play their devil's music loudly too late at night.

Like Chloe, Buck decides to do a little Bible-reading, and he too knows the short list of Prophetically Important texts he's supposed to be studying. And yet, happily:

... he found himself turning to the Gospels rather than the Old Testament or the Revelation prophecies. What a revolutionary Jesus turned out to be. Buck was fascinated with the character, the personality, the mission of the man. The Jesus he had always imagined or thought he knew about was an impostor. The Jesus of the Bible was a radical, a man of paradoxes.

This is interesting. And promising ...

Buck set the Bible on the nightstand and rolled onto his back, shielding his eyes from the light. If you want to be rich, give your money away, he told himself. That's the gist of it. If you want to be exalted, humble yourself. Revenge sounds logical, but it's wrong. Love your enemies, pray for those who put you down. Bizarre.

Yes! Yes it is bizarre and that is, more or less, the gist of it. By George he's got it! Alright, now Buck, what does this mean for you as a new Christian? How does --?

His mind wandered to Chloe.

Aaaand that's that.

Buck's meditation upon the revolutionary, upside-down character of Christ and his kingdom evaporates as abruptly as it arose. And he never speaks or thinks of it again, never acts on it, never chooses or changes because of what it might mean.

It wasn't an epiphany after all, merely an observation -- a fleeting, half-glimpsed observation that flickered at the corner of Buck's eye and then disappeared forever.

But what a strangely out-of-place observation that was here, from this character, in these books. Buck almost guiltily turns away from the PMD-approved "prophecy" passages and thus, for one brief moment, he is able to encounter the Jesus of the Gospels. The "gist" of Jesus' message takes shape in Buck's mind as almost the precise opposite of who he is and how he lives his life. The self-centered, self-aggrandizing, vindictive GIRAT summarizes that message as generosity, humility and love for enemies. And then:

... Bizarre.

His mind wandered to Chloe.

And nothing ever comes of it. Buck spends the next three pages praying about what to say to Chloe:

All he wanted to know was whether he should keep pursuing Chloe. He started praying about it, and all of a sudden he was thinking about marriage and children. Craziness. Maybe that's how God works, he thought. He leads you to logical, or illogical, conclusions.

Buck calls her, gets stuck on the phone with Rayford instead, and then he just goes right back to acting the way we're accustomed to seeing him: Oblivious to others, exalting himself, hating his enemies.

This is immensely frustrating. It's like that scene in every episode of The Sopranos when Tony comes to a fork in the road and sees that redemption is possible, that redemption is available and that here, at last, is his chance to be relieved of his burden, to be released from his bondage, his chance at last to be the father, the husband and the man he has always longed to be and ... and he doesn't take it.

Except on The Sopranos that frustration was the point. Here, Buck Williams is supposed to be the good guy, the hero, a role model. To see Buck Williams offered this sudden opportunity only to shrug it away is just bewildering.

For three short paragraphs it almost seemed as though we were heading for a complete about-face. For a moment there, Buck resembles the Rev. Henry Maxwell -- the hero of the only American publishing phenomenon to rival the success of the Left Behind series. One hundred years before Jerry Jenkins started typing, Charles Sheldon wrote a similar scene in the early pages of his novel, In His Steps. The Rev. Maxwell is offered almost the same epiphany that presents itself to Buck here, but Maxwell seizes it and runs with it. "What would Jesus do?" he asks, and the startling answer, he realizes, is to be found in that paradoxical, revolutionary message of the Sermon on the Mount. Maxwell embraces that message wholeheartedly and it turns his whole world upside down until not one stone is left on another.

Buck Williams is given that chance here, but instead of taking it, he rolls onto his back and shields his eyes from the light till human voices wake him and he drowns.

I doubt that's how I'm supposed to be reading this chapter. I don't really think LaHaye & Jenkins intended for us to view Buck here as a spiritual J. Alfred Prufrock. But if not that, then what on earth was this scene for? Why were we shown Buck fumbling the handoff on what might have been a life-changing epiphany?

Bizarre.

TF: Love, Apocalypse Style

Tribulation Force, pp. 33-38

The awfulness of the remainder of this chapter seems -- by LaHaye & Jenkins' standards -- fairly mundane. The authors of the World's Worst Books usually set themselves apart as trailblazers, seeking out and exploring brave new forms of Bad Writing. But here they've wound up in the well-worn territory of the first blush of young love -- ground that has been well-covered by Bad Writers for centuries. On this particular topic, L&J don't necessarily distinguish themselves as far worse than all of their competition.

My response to these scenes of Buck and Chloe's awkward, halting, immature circling is also mitigated by two responses not provoked by most scenes in these books: relief and pity.

The relief arises from the extreme prudery of L&J's portrait of fundamentalist courtship. We'll look at some of the more peculiar aspects of this, which provide a bit of insight into the authors' premillennial dispensationalist subculture. But before exploring the quirks of this spiritualized, Neo-Victorian uptightness, let's first express our gratitude, the source of the relief I mentioned: This prudery also means that we will be spared the unthinkable horror of anything approaching an explicit love scene.

So that's good.

As for the pity, most of this series presents its heroes behaving monstrously, celebrating an inhumanly self-absorbed lack of empathy as a kind of virtue. Most of what we read here, then, leads me to view the authors with disdain. My emotional stance toward the authors throughout most of these books, therefore, is a desire to see them punished.

Here though, in this painfully awkward "romantic" subplot, we catch a glimpse of something autobiographical. The painfully confounding, sex-obsessed notion of purity portrayed here is likely all they know. It's what they have lived themselves. It's a reminder that the inhumanity they display and champion arises, at least in part, from their own miserable attempts to live inhumanly. And that merits a measure of pity.

The meeting that night ended with prayer, the three newest believers praying for Bruce and his weight of leadership.

I'm not sure that this category of "newest believers" means a whole lot in a room in which everyone has converted within the same two-week timeframe, but that's not really the point of that sentence. The point of that sentence is that pastors -- people like Bruce Barnes or Tim LaHaye -- carry this enormous weight of leadership, a burden we mere laypeople couldn't possibly hope to understand. (Matthew 24, the "mini-apocalypse" of Jesus, is an oft-quoted passage for PMDs like LaHaye. Matthew 23 -- Jesus diatribe against spiritual leaders who get overly full of themselves -- doesn't get nearly as much attention.)

On his way out, Buck turned to Chloe. "I'd show you my new car, but it doesn't seem like that big a deal anymore."

"I know what you mean."

Buck is referring to the dose of perspective he just swallowed due to what Bruce just told them about the onset of the Great Tribulation. He's not referring to the fact that the inside of his new car smells like spiky-haired Alice's perfume. Nor to the fact that used car lots would be flooded with kid-friendly minivans and vehicles of every make with fish symbols on them.

"You want to join us for dinner?" Chloe offers. To which Buck, displaying the uncanny perception of the Greatest Investigative Reporter of All Time, responds, "I'm not really hungry."

This is why I worry that seven years and 13 books may not be world enough and time for these two to get together.

"Anyway, I've got to get started moving into my new place."

"Do you have furniture yet?" she asked. "You could stay with us until you get some. We've got plenty of room."

He thought about the irony of that. "Thanks," he said. "It's furnished."

The "irony" of "we've got plenty of room" refers to the disappearance of half of the Steele family two weeks ago. Jenkins has given just enough thought to the post-Event scenario to remember that the Steele home is half-empty, but he still hasn't given any thought to what the disappearance of 2 billion other people might mean in terms of half-empty apartment buildings, half-empty neighborhoods or wholly empty elementary schools.

Rayford came up from behind. "Where'd you land anyway, Buck?"

Buck described the condo, halfway between church and the Weekly.

"That's not far."

"No," Buck said. "I'll have everybody over once I get settled."

Rayford had opened his car door, and Chloe waited at the passenger door. The three of them stood silent and awkward in the dim light from the streetlamps.

Part of this I recognize -- that sense of awkward silence "in the dim light from the streetlamps" as what is to be said and done before parting is being weighed and decided. But this familiar scene is rendered weirdly alien by the beginning of that sentence: "The three of them stood ..."

This continues and expands into a theme of sorts. The courtship of Buck and Chloe is a story involving three people. Rayford is an integral part of this budding romance, and none of them seems to regard that as strange or disturbing, inappropriate or intrusive.

The role of the father in this strain of evangelical "courtship" is more than a little bit creepy. One gets the sense here, as with those extremely creepy Purity Balls, that the authors view Buck as petitioning to replace Rayford as the male in charge of Chloe -- that Rayford, as her father, must play the part of surrogate for her future husband until that role is ceded over on her wedding day. This suggests an unsettling equivalence between father and husband -- as though daughters are supposed to be dating Daddy until they are handed over to the only other man they'll ever love. This suggests a parallelism between two things that really aren't, and really ought not to be, parallel, and ... well, just ewww.

"Well," Buck said, "I'd better get going." Rayford slid into the car. Chloe still stood there. "See ya."

Chloe gave a little wave, and Buck turned away. He felt like an idiot. What was he going to do about her? He knew she was waiting, hoping for some sign that he was still interested. And he was. He was just having trouble showing it. He didn't know if it was because her father was there or because too much was happening in their lives right now.

A bit of both of those things, I'd guess. Plus a heavy dose of two supposed adults who are capable of giving and receiving a "note" confessing romantic attraction without that note in any way altering their spiritualized timidity.

Wasn't getting interested in a woman right now a little trivial, considering all Bruce had just talked about?

Buck had already fallen in love with God. That had to be his passion until Christ returned again. Would it be right, let alone prudent, to focus his attention on Chloe Steele at the same time?

This recalls the ancient idea of a vow to celibacy that enables one to focus on devotion to God, but I don't think that's really what's going on here. Particularly since Buck doesn't seem called to the gift of celibacy:

He tried to push her from his mind.

Fat chance.

What I think we see a trace of here is the idea of an either/or, of love as a finite resource and a zero-sum game. One can either love God or "get interested" in someone else. And that either/or doesn't only seem to apply to romantic love here in Left Behind. It seems to extend also to love of neighbor, as though one must choose between the greatest commandment and the second, which is like unto it. Time after time, this is how we see our heroes behave in these books -- withholding or refusing to love their neighbors lest it distract them from loving their God.

LaHaye and Jenkins take this God or neighbor idea to monstrous extremes in these books, but they don't have exclusive claim to this particular heresy. Go into any of the "Christian book stores" that sell the Left Behind series and you'll also find a host of books on the subject of loving God. Those books will discuss praise, worship, personal purity, prayer, Bible study and all of the other legitimate but secondary or tertiary ways of expressing one's love for God. But almost none of those books will discuss what the Gospels, the prophets and the epistles all say is the primary, necessary expression of love for God: love for neighbor.

Jenkins shoots for romantic-cute here by cutting between scenes of Buck's anguished pining and scenes from Rayford's point of view in which Chloe expresses the very same emotions, doubts and fears. This is an old trick in romantic comedy -- as old, at least, as Rosalind and Orlando -- but it only works if readers have reason to like both characters, and if there is some valid reason, other than immaturity or stupidity, for them not to express these thoughts to one another.

Roger Ebert has noted that writing two characters who are meant for each other is the easy part of romantic comedy. The hard part is devising a way to keep them apart for an hour and a half without making them seem like idiots. Jenkins here gets both parts wrong.

I give him some credit, though, for alluding to one of the sources for the model of Christian romance he's aiming for here: "Let Buck get settled in and he'll come calling," Rayford tells Chloe.

"He'll come calling?" Chloe said. "You sound like Pa on Little House on the Prairie."

Laura Ingalls Wilder -- and probably also Grace Livingston Hill -- outlined the formula for the kind of chaste, pious, formal, father-centric courtship Jenkins is copying here. Their novels were written and set in a pre-telephone age, which is probably why Buck, with Chloe, avoids his favorite form of communication, opting for a more epistolary approach.

But did someone mention telephones?

Buck's apartment was antiseptic without his own stuff in it. He kicked off his shoes and called his voice mail in New York.

He's got three messages. The first is from Mrs. Col. Potter, letting him know she'd shipped his belongings out to Chicago:

The second message was from the big boss, Stanton Bailey. "Give me a call sometime Monday, Cameron. I want to get your story by the end of next week, and we need to talk."

The third was from his old executive editor, Steve Plank, now Nicolae Carpathia's spokesman. "Buck, call me as soon as you can. Carpathia wants to talk to you."

Buck sniffed and chuckled and erased his messages. ...

He chuckled? Really? Because if I hadn't even gotten started yet on the biggest assignment of my lifetime and my boss told me I had to get it to him in a week, "and we need to talk," I'd be sweating bricks. Chuckling also doesn't quite seem like an appropriate response to learning that you've been summoned by the Antichrist. Maybe it was a nervous chuckle, because Buck seems to understand that the call from Steve wasn't good news:

Carpathia wants to talk to you. What a casual way to say, The enemy of God is after you. Buck could only wonder whether Carpathia knew he had not been brainwashed. What would the man do, or try to do, if he knew Buck's memory had not been altered? If he realized Buck knew he was a murderer, a liar, a beast?

What would Nicolae do? Buck "could only wonder," we're told. But wondering is hardly the only thing he can do. He could fake his own death, change his name, dye his hair and take off to Paraguay, for starters. That might be a more reasonable response than chuckling and wondering.

Or at the very least he could decide that, as a person on the Antichrist's radar-screen, it would be wrong for him to put Chloe's life in danger, too, by pursuing a relationship with her. That would be a good rationale for why those two need to stay apart, providing a nice shot of romantic tragic nobility. But this doesn't occur to him. It doesn't really even occur to him to take any steps out of concern for his own safety. Or, for that matter, to get cracking on that big article.

We cut back to Rayford who is again watching CNN -- a reminder both of all the stories Buck hasn't been covering at all, and of the fact that Jenkins apparently hasn't watched enough CNN to get a sense of what it actually sounds like.

Rayford sat watching the television news, hearing commentators pontificate on the meaning of the announcements coming out of the United Nations. Most considered the scheduled move of the U.N. to the ruins of Babylon, south of Baghdad, a good thing. One said, "If Carpathia is sincere about disarming the world and stockpiling the remaining 10 percent of the hardware, I'd rather he store it in the Middle East, in the shadow of Tehran, than on an island off New York City. Besides, we can use the soon-to-be-abandoned U.N. building as a museum, honoring the most atrocious architecture this country has ever produced."

So the pundits all seem to agree that the relocation of the U.N. to ancient ruins in Mesopotamia is a good move. Sure, it's arbitrary, unnecessary, disruptive and expensive, but it will result in a massive arsenal being stockpiled in the Middle East, and what could possibly go wrong with that?

That last bit about the architecture of the U.N. building is meant to sound sophisticated and knowing. That's a bit out of place here, in a passage in which the authors loudly proclaim their own unsophisticated ignorance. The only thing less realistic and more off-the-wall insane than Carpathia's crazy-quilt agenda is the idea that everyone would just matter-of-factly accept such an agenda as though it were useful or helpful or as though it made any kind of sense at all in any way.

Pundits predicted frustration and failure in the proposed outcomes of the meetings between both the religious leaders and the financial experts. One said, "No single religion, as attractive as that sounds, and no one-world currency, as streamlined as that would be. These will be Carpathia's first major setbacks ..."

To whom, I wonder, is the idea of a single world religion supposed to sound attractive? I can't begin to imagine what such a religion would even look like or why anyone would find it compelling. Yet L&J assume that everyone would find it compelling -- that such a thing would somehow fulfill the unspoken desire of every religious believer or atheist outside of Real, True Christianity, and that every Jew, Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, Episcopalian, Pagan and atheist would gladly abandon whatever belief system they held in exchange for this amorphous and undefined spiritual esperanto. To really believe that, as L&J apparently do, one can't have ever actually met anyone who was Jewish, Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, Episcopalian, Pagan or atheist. How is that possible?

Enter Chloe, "Her freshly washed hair was wrapped in a towel."

"Got a date this weekend?" Rayford asked when the news broke for a commercial.

"Not funny," she said.

"It wasn't meant to be. Would that be so strange, someone asking you out?"

"The only person I want to ask me out has apparently changed his mind about me."

"Nonsense," Rayford said. "I can't imagine all that must be on Buck's mind."

"I thought I was on his mind, Dad. Now I sit here like a schoolgirl, wondering and hoping. It's all so stupid. Why should I care? ..."

Yes, that's exactly what I was thinking too. It's all so stupid. Why should I care?

This father-daughter discussion continues for another page, leading to:

"He should have asked me out for something to eat, but he didn't even accept our invitation."

"Our invitation? I was in on that?"

"Well, it wouldn't have been appropriate for me to ask him out by myself."

And suddenly here we are back in the 19th century with the Ingalls and Grace Livingston Hill.

Chloe, we are being asked to believe, does not think it would be appropriate for her to share an unchaperoned meal with Buck. This outlandish sense of propriety seems not to be intended as a result of her recent conversion, but rather something she already believed as a non-RTC undergrad at Stanford. Part of why Chloe and Buck are meant for each other, it seems, is that they both -- even in the years before their conversion -- have maintained perfect chastity.

It is, of course, possible that two attractive, mentally competent, red-blooded American young people might compile a cumulative 50 years of unblemished virginity. But this would be a remarkable thing, and the authors are presenting it as something utterly un-remarkable. That strains realism. It's also not easy to reconcile with the authors' own portrait of Last Days America as a hedonistic Sodom and Gomorrah where, as in the days of Noah, the godless eat, drink and make merry.

The sense one gets is that Buck and Chloe had to be presented as unspoiled. Had either of them ever been kissed it would have rendered them, in the authors' view, as unworthy of the other's affection -- unworthy perhaps even of the second chance at salvation they have been given.

We've previously discussed L&J's "say the magic words" understanding of salvation and how this suggests something like Gnosticism. Buck and Chloe aren't presented as repentant sinners saved by grace as much as they as initiates into the secrets and mysteries of Those Who Know The Code. Thus instead of the more conventional Christian story of sin and redemption, we get something more like a Gnostic story, portraying pure souls worthy of attaining enlightenment.

Put another way, Buck and Chloe's perfect chastity conveys the sense that forgiveness of sins is available, provided you don't really have that many sins that need forgiving. "It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick," Jesus said. "I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance." In L&J's world, however, Jesus isn't so much a doctor as he is an American health insurance company, skimming for the most lucrative healthy patients and rejecting anyone with a pre-existing condition.

This has pastoral consequences as well. Some 60 million American evangelicals have read these books. The sexual activity of American evangelicals does not differ in any statistically significant way from the sexual activity of their non-evangelical American counterparts, so there must be tens of millions of those readers who encountered this romantic subplot and found there the message that they were guilty of unpardonable sins, forever marked and tainted, spoiled and unworthy. That's a horrible, horrible message. It's heretical, too, but mainly it's just cruel.

All of this Bad Theology also makes for Bad Romance. It presents Buck and Chloe's affection for one another as something conditional and contingent. Conditions and contingencies aren't usually what we're looking for in a love story.

TF: Bruce's Big Plan

Tribulation Force, pp. 28-32

"Three men and one woman are trapped in a building! Send help at once! If you can't send help, send two more women!"
-- Rufus T. Firefly (Groucho), in Duck Soup

Bruce Barnes has a plan. That, it turns out, is why he's called this special emergency executive session of the Tribulation Force -- even though it's taken him eight pages to get to the point, what with all the crying and male-bonding going on.

But Bruce knows, specifically, what the future holds. He knows about the trials and the wrath to come and he knows about the job he and the others will have to do. And with all of that in mind, he has devised the following two-part strategy:

1. Dig a really big hole.

2. Hide in it until Jesus comes back.

Bruce's plan involves an actual hole in the actual ground, but apart from that detail his plan is remarkably similar to the strategy employed by millions of American premillennial dispensationalist Christians now. These Christians -- people H.R. Niebuhr might have classified as belonging to the "Christ terrified of culture" category -- are trying to dig themselves an underground bunker by creating a subcultural bubble free of all worldly temptations such as sex, science, books, film or ideas.

This would seem to make PMD types like Tim LaHaye less threatening to others than their theological opposites -- the dominionists and other post-millennial, theocratic types who seek to conquer the world, setting up a sectarian kingdom for Jesus to come back to reign over. Theocrats want to rule the world. PMDs just want to hide until it's over. So where the former set out to dictate how others must also live, the latter -- in theory -- simply expect the world to keep getting worse and worse until it falls apart and don't claim there's anything they can or should do about it.

That's in theory. But alas, in practice, PMDs turn out to be much closer to the theocrats than their premillennial pessimism would indicate they ought to be. This is illustrated by the career of LaHaye himself -- he helped found both the Moral Majority and the Stonagal-esque Council for National Policy -- and of his wife Beverly, Queen Bee of Ladies Against Women. PMDs, it turns out, want to hide, but in a really BIG hole -- one the size of America, actually. And that means dragging the rest of us down there with them and forcing us to live by the rules of that temptation-free world as well.

Even if PMDs were, in practice, as harmlessly passive and bystanderish as their theology suggests they should be, they would still pose a dilemma for those of us outside of their hidey-hole. We are not meant to be passive bystanders, after all, and it seems cruel and uncaring to allow these, our PMD neighbors, to live out their lives in the stunted confines of their hole without at least affording them the possibility of liberation.

But anyway, back to Bruce Barnes and his plan.

"I feel such a tremendous responsibility for you all. You know I'm trying to run this church, but that seems so insignificant compared to my study of prophecy. I'm spending most of my days and evenings poring over the Bible and commentaries, and I feel the press of God on me."

"The press of God?" Rayford repeated. But Bruce broke into tears.

Four pages later, he's regained his composure and is somewhat better able to describe the enormous responsibility he feels and to convey the crushing weight of his own godly awesomeness:

"All I know is that the closer I get to God, the deeper I get into the Bible, the heavier the burden seems on my shoulders. The world needs to know it is being deceived. I feel an urgency to preach Christ everywhere, not just here. This church is full of frightened people, and they're hungry for God. We're trying to meet that need, but more trouble is coming."

Bruce repeatedly struggles, and fails, to reconcile those two concerns -- "to meet that need" and "more trouble is coming." His first suggested course of action doesn't quite address either one:

"That's the reason for this meeting. I need to tell you all something. I am going to have a two-hour meeting, right here in this office, every weeknight from eight to ten. Just for us. ... We have no time to waste."

The reason for this meeting is to announce future meetings -- lots and lots of regularly scheduled future meetings, because "we have no time to waste." We've all heard that before. Bruce sounds like he'd have a bright future in corporate management.

"We need to be starting new churches, new cell groups of believers. ... The Bible talks about 144,000 Jews springing up and traveling throughout the world. There is to be a great soul harvest, maybe a billion or more people, coming to Christ."

I'm just not really clear on how cloistering themselves in Bruce's study every weeknight is supposed to lead, even indirectly, to more churches being started. Studying "prophecy" in an invitation-only small group doesn't seem like an effective church-planting strategy. I guess maybe the "144,000 [singing, virgin] Jews" are supposed to spring up to take care of the front-line work.

"That sounds fantastic," Chloe said. "We should be thrilled."

"I am thrilled," Bruce said. "But there will be little time to rejoice or to rest. Remember the seven Seal Judgments Revelation talks about?" She nodded. "Those will begin immediately, if I'm right. There will be an 18-month period of peace, but in the three months following that, the rest of the Seal Judgments will fall on the earth. ..."

Bruce, like Tim LaHaye, has a way of running off the rails when he gets into the details of his prophecy scheme. One can, in fact, open the book of Revelation and find mentioned there seven "seals" of divine judgment. By mentioning that fact first, Bruce casts a kind of biblical halo over whatever non-sequitur nonsense he says next -- "Remember the seven Seal Judgments Revelation talks about? Well, then Godzilla, lamb chop, munchkin, glockenspiel gumdrop." And everyone nods along as though he was somehow citing chapter and verse with authority.

This is where "Bible prophecy experts" leave me dumbfounded. It's not simply that they're offering some strange interpretation or some overly imaginative exegesis -- they just flat-out make stuff up. Arbitrary, deliriously weird stuff. "Remember the seven Seal Judgments Revelation talks about?" Yes, in fact, I do remember that. It's in Revelation 6. Feel free to read that yourself some time and look for any hint or basis for spinning out this 18-month/3-month business. It can't be found there.

This might sound to you like I'm simply disagreeing with LaHaye/Bruce over the meaning of a passage in our sect's sacred text, but it's much more than that. It's not like a couple of Melville scholars arguing over the meaning of the whiteness of the whale. It's more like encountering a supposed Melville scholar who tells you that Moby Dick is mainly about killer robot ninjas from outer space.

A close reading of Revelation 6 also suggests that Bruce is seriously underestimating the body count from those seven seals:

"One fourth of the world's population will be wiped out. I don't want to be maudlin, but will you look around this room and tell me what that means to you?"

Rayford didn't have to look around the room. He sat with the three people closest to him in the world. Was it possible that in less than two years, he could lose yet another loved one?

One fourth of the world's population will be gone a mere 21 months from now. That notion might have a bit more emotional impact if it weren't being suggested here, a mere two weeks after the callously little-regarded disappearance of one third of the world's population.

"We don't want to simply survive, though," Buck said. "We want to take action."

Buck Williams said this. He's looking ahead, thinking of all the phone calls and flights back and forth it may require for him to arrange to be seated at the table when those seal judgments occur so that he again has the opportunity to sit mutely, paralyzed by fear, as he watches them unfold firsthand. That's our Buck.

"I was thinking about going back to college," Chloe mused. "Not to Stanford, of course, but somewhere around here. Now I wonder, what's the point?"

"You can go to college right here," Bruce said. "Every night at eight."

In one respect, this is similar to something Buck thought earlier in this chapter:

He still had a job and he was writing important stuff, but learning to know God and listening to him seemed his primary occupation. The rest was just a means to an end.

The intent of both of those passages seems to be an exhortation to Christians to remember where their priorities ought to lie in living the Christian life. Such passages seem a bit confused in the context of this story. They're directed to the readers of this book -- people living now in our pre-apocalyptic world, where it makes sense for them to hold on to their day jobs. Whether the same advice makes sense for Buck, living in the midst of apocalyptic wrath, is another question.

In any case, Bruce's advice to Chloe -- that church Bible study is all the college she needs -- has more than a whiff of sexism to it. Buck and Rayford's initial reaction to the new meeting schedule, after all, was to remind Bruce that they are men and thus they have to work:

"I'll be traveling a lot," Buck said.

"Me too," Rayford added.

Bruce didn't say to them, "You can go to work right here. Every night at eight." That advice was reserved for the girl. And it all works out for Chloe anyway, in the authors' view, since it's there in Bruce's study that she secures her MRS degree -- the only reason they can imagine for a woman going to college in the first place.

Now, at last, we come to the core of Bruce's plan:

"I think we need a shelter. ... Underground. ... During the period of peace we can build it without suspicion. ... I'm talking about getting an earthmover in here and digging out a place we can escape to. ..."

Buck was impressed that Bruce had a plan, a real plan. Bruce said he would order a huge water tank and have it delivered. It would sit at the edge of the parking lot for weeks, and people would assume it was just some sort of storage tank. Then he would have an excavator dig out a crater big enough to house it.

Meanwhile, the four of them would stud up walls, run power and water lines into the hold, and generally get it prepared as a hideout. At some point Bruce would have the water tank taken away. People who saw that would assume it was the wrong size or defective. People who didn't see it taken away would assume it had been installed in the ground.

The Tribulation Force would attach the underground shelter to the church through a hidden passageway. ...

Before turning to the shortcomings of Bruce's Big Plan, let's first consider its strengths.

Look again at those seven seals in Revelation, then skim ahead through the further bowls, vials and trumpets of judgment described in that book. If you believe that's what the next few years hold in store, then hiding in a hole seems like a prudent and reasonable response.

I also appreciate Bruce's concern for his shelter to be hidden and secret. That corrects a common mistake made by most doomsday cults. Doomsday cults always seem to opt for the large, conspicuous, above-ground compound. Such compounds practically scream, "Here we are now, please come raid us." They invite the sort of scrutiny that leads, inevitably, to some federal agent spotting your ammunition stockpile through a pair of binoculars, and then before you know it you're besieged by the FBI, the ATF and the state police and, if you don't want to look like a hypocrite, you're going to have to respond in accordance with the Manichaen, apocalyptic rhetoric you used to build up your following and ... well, you know the rest. It never ends well.

So let's commend Bruce for getting the secret, hidden and underground ingredients right here. I'm not sure that suburban Chicago is the optimal location for a secret underground headquarters, but that may not matter so much when we consider the scope of the two distinct threats this shelter needs to hide and protect them from. There's the Antichrist, of course, and the virtually omnipresent agents of his fearsome OWG. But he's actually, by far, the lesser of Bruce's worries. His bigger problem is figuring out how to shelter and hide from a menace who is literally omnipresent.

Because really that's what this shelter is for: Hiding from God and the massive, relentless and indiscriminate outpouring of God's wrath over the course of the next seven years.

"Where can I go from your Spirit?" David asks in the 139th Psalm. "Where can I flee from your presence?"

If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
       if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
       if I settle on the far side of the sea,
 even there your hand will guide me,
       your right hand will hold me fast.
If I say, "Surely the darkness will hide me
       and the light become night around me,"
even the darkness will not be dark to you;
       the night will shine like the day,
       for darkness is as light to you.

David meant these words to be reassuring. His idea of the character of God made the idea of God's inescapable presence a comforting thought. LaHaye & Jenkins paint a portrait of God that suggests a far less comforting understanding of that constant presence. "His eye is on the sparrow and I know he watches me," suggests, to L&J, that neither I nor the sparrow has any hope of escaping the divine crosshairs which are, even now, targeting us for famine, war, pestilence, earthquakes, hail and demonic locust-hordes. These things aren't the Antichrist's handiwork in this story, they're from God. Bruce's big hole is meant to hide them from God.

With that in mind, I kind of doubt his water-tank ruse is going to work. It seems unlikely to fool the church's neighbors, let alone Nicolae and his minions. And "Hey, look over there at the big water tank!" seems an unpromising approach to deceiving someone both omnipresent and omniscient.

The other big problem with Bruce's Big Plan isn't theological, merely logistical: The shelter only has room for four.

What about Loretta and the rest of the "frightened people" for whom Bruce is supposed to feel such a heavy burden of responsibility? What about the millions in all those new churches that will arise during the coming "soul harvest"?

Screw 'em, I guess. No room for them here. Let 'em dig their own damn hole.

What's called for here, obviously, is something far bigger than Bruce's Big Plan. They don't just need one four-person shelter hole, but a vast, worldwide network of shelter holes for all of the millions of second-chance soul-harvest Christians of the post-Rapture.

The scope and magnitude of that necessity shows us how inadequate Pastor Billings' In Case of Rapture video really was. The man knew, in detail, exactly what was awaiting the intended viewers of that video. He knew their only hope of surviving would be just the kind of underground shelter network Bruce hints at here. And yet he offers no such advice, no more specific instructions for those viewers. That seems callously negligent.

In Billings' defense, though, he needed to be cautious about saying too much or being too specific in his video. He couldn't risk it falling into the wrong hands.

So let's think about this. Imagine you're Pastor Billings -- or perhaps one of the thousands of actual pastors here in the real world who were inspired and instructed to make actual versions of such a video after reading Left Behind. You want to prepare the future-Christian viewers of that video to face the trials that await them in the Great Tribulation, but you can't just give them detailed shelter-network instructions for fear the Antichrist or his minions might see this video as well.

That means you're going to need some kind of code. Your secret message to the future Tribulation Force Christians will need to be communicated in some way that is decipherable only to the most determined and devout future students of your PMD faith. This secret, coded message will be pretty extensive. You'll need to explain the necessity of the shelters and the gravity of the threats. You'll need to explain about the 18-month period of peace and urge them to take advantage of that window of opportunity for their clandestine project.

But wait, is 18 months really enough time for such a project -- particularly given the supply disruptions likely to follow in the aftermath of the Rapture? This huge, globally coordinated project would seem a more plausible undertaking for Christians now, before the Rapture.

Think of it, instead of merely leaving a collection of vague, I-told-you-so videos for the post-Rapture world to find, we could leave them a fully constructed, fully stocked global network of ready-for-use hidden shelters. That would, in a way, allow us to play a part in -- and to claim at least partial credit for -- the great global soul harvest of the Last Days. Constructing those tunnels now without the secret getting out might be difficult, but not impossible -- and it would be far easier for us than it would be for them.

That leaves only the last hurdle of figuring out some way to let these future Christians know of the legacy we have provided, but doing so in a way that we can be sure the Antichrist and his legions will not be able to decipher. We can't just leave the keys under the doormats of our churches with notes explaining where the secret trap doors are. Such instructions would need to be left -- embedded or encoded -- where only the truly devout could find them.

Here the PMDs' arcane skill set will prove useful. They're enthusiastic students of intertextual splicing, numerology and coded symbolism. Employing those skills, a shrewd author -- or authors -- might construct a book which, while outwardly appearing to tell one story, secretly contained a second, hidden and more detailed narrative.

Such a book, or set of books, might be difficult to construct so that it worked on both levels. It might mean that in order to communicate the coded message with as much precision and detail as possible, the authors would have to sacrifice style, plot, characterization, continuity, etc., in the secondary, surface-level story. So be it -- the encoded instructions would be the books' only true priority. And anyway it might actually be useful if the books seemed unreadable, sloppy and dull -- that would discourage casual readers from inspecting them too closely and inadvertently stumbling onto their coded message. Ideally, the subject matter would be something that would seem off-putting to the Antichrist and his followers, but attractive to the intended audience of new believers in the post-Rapture world. You could even make the surface-level story about people just like those intended readers, that way they'd be sure to pay at least some attention.

You see what I'm getting at. I offer this as an actual possibility for your consideration.

What I am suggesting, in other words, is that there exists -- really, right now, in this actual world -- an elaborate network of secret and fully provisioned shelters connected to PMD evangelical churches around the globe. These shelters have been built, in total secrecy, by devout PMD congregations in anticipation of the coming Great Tribulation that they all attest they are confident is coming very, very soon.

These Christians all believe they will be raptured away before that day arrives, but that other new Christians -- the converts of the coming "soul harvest" -- will be here on earth to witness its horrors. Since they cannot stay behind to counsel or otherwise aid those young Christians through the coming trials, they have done the next best thing -- preparing the hidden shelters for their use.

Detailed instructions on the locations of and access to these shelters have been left behind, embedded in an elaborate code in the pages of the Left Behind novels. To ensure that this coded message in a bottle is easily accessible to the future believers, the PMDs have printed millions of copies, buying them in bulk and scattering them throughout the world in libraries, waiting rooms, rummage sales and remainder bins everywhere.

This is, I admit, an audacious and preposterous theory. But we need an audacious and preposterous theory to explain the otherwise inexplicable awfulness of these Very Bad books and their even more mysterious success as global best-sellers and an unprecedented publishing phenomenon. Which is more likely -- A global conspiracy constructing a worldwide network of hidden shelters with perfect secrecy? Or the idea that these books -- these awful, awful books -- have sold tens of millions of copies to readers who somehow enjoy them without being repulsed and offended by their careless, shabby, impenetrable and contradictory storytelling?

I suppose the latter is likelier, but both possibilities seem equally disturbing.

TF: Stoppage Time

Tribulation Force, pp. 21-29

The Left Behind books are filled with vast, massive impossibilities -- every child on earth vanishes and everyone's daily routine continues unaltered; a jetliner makes a harrowing emergency landing, threading its way amidst the unprecedented wreckage of a half-dozen passenger planes, and no one on board ever gives it a second thought; a passage that reads, "I looked, and there was a white horse! Its rider had a bow; a crown was given to him, and he came out conquering and to conquer" is interpreted "literally" as foretelling the arrival of some hippy peacenik.

Against the backdrop of such epic madness it's easy to lose sight of these books' smaller, more intimate impossibilities. Yet here we come to another reminder that the interpersonal events recounted here are every bit as strange, alien and inhuman as the international ones:

Chloe looked at [Buck] expectantly when she greeted him, yet she did not hug him, as Steele and Bruce Barnes had done. Her reticence was his fault, of course. They barely knew each other, but clearly there had been chemistry. They had given each other enough signals to begin a relationship, and in a note to Chloe, Buck had even admitted he was attracted to her.

Jerry Jenkins is well-served here by his habit of telling about things like this note without ever showing them to us, because such a note seems, if not quite impossible, at least unimaginable. "Dear Chloe. I admit I am attracted to you. Let us never speak of it again. Cordially, Cameron."

I appreciate that the target audience for these books includes readers in the hinterlands of the evangelical subculture where dating as it is practiced in most of the West remains a forbidden and largely unknown custom. LaHaye & Jenkins are writing for people who subscribe, instead, to the invented neo-Victorian practices of evangelical "courtship," as well as for Pensacola students and Bill Gothard Seminar devotees who would view even that stilted practice as dangerously titillating. We're talking about people whose first date may have been with Dad at a "Purity Ball." And it's possible that some readers coming from such a background might relate to the awkward, pre-Disney-Channel-age behavior displayed by Buck and Chloe here.

But these characters are not supposed to be from-the-cradle fundamentalists. Chloe is supposed to be a Stanford student. And Buck is supposed to be a Manhattan sophisticate. The very last scene even seemed to imply, intentionally or not, that he enjoyed seducing the support staff for quickies in train station parking lots.

It's simply bizarre that two such characters would immediately following their conversion metamorphosize into socially maladept, awkwardly chaste, thoroughgoing Gothardites.

That's not to say that Buck shouldn't be feeling some hesitation here. Chloe's father has been a constant presence since they first met, and most of their interaction has taken place in a pastor's study. Plus, he's 30 and she's 20 -- so he's bordering on Matthew McConaughey in Dazed and Confused skeeviness. At some point, Buck has surely done the arithmetic and realized that by the time Chloe is his age, the world will have ended three years ago.

On the other hand, the Final Countdown has begun and with the big clock ticking, you'd think Buck would be reciting "To His Coy Mistress" with a particular urgency. Add in the general aphrodisiac quality of crisis adrenaline, and these two ought to be on their own personal seventh seal by now. They may be premillennial dispensationalist fundamentalists, but they're not Shakers for goodness' sake.

Actually, though, I'm grateful that particular element of realism is lacking here. I really, really wouldn't want to have to read a Jenkins-scripted love scene. Particularly when what he does write reads like this:

[Buck] had to be careful. ... Only a fool would begin a relationship at a time like this. And yet wasn't that exactly what he was -- a fool?

Feh.

Another less-than-convincing passage we skipped past last week involved yet another attempt to recognize that some kind of grieving ought to be occurring in this post-Event world:

[Rayford] had always considered emotion weak and unmanly. But since the disappearances, he had seen many men weep. He was convinced that the global vanishings had been Christ rapturing his church, but for those who remained behind, the event had been catastrophic.

Even for him and Chloe, who had become believers because of it, the horror of losing the rest of their family was excruciating. There were days when Rayford had been so grief-stricken and lonely for his wife and son that he wondered if he could go on.

I'm having a hard time fitting those dark days of "grief-stricken" paralysis into the existing timeline for our story. Rayford's daily activities since the Event are almost fully accounted for. He hasn't missed a single day of work. He hasn't even skipped a meal. Nor has anyone else that we've seen.

Here, for the first time, we learn that Rayford has "seen many men weep." That's a start, but all the children of the world have stolen. The world ought, then, to be more full of weeping than we can understand. But we've been looking at this post-Event world for nearly 500 pages now and it remains cruelly composed, dry-eyed and unmoved. This 10-word retroactive patch-job -- "for those who remained behind, the event had been catastrophic" -- can't begin to correct that. A world of stolen children is not identical to this world, plus a few weeping men. It's a different world entirely.

There's no trace of that different world in any of these books.

Anyway, we left off with Bruce discussing what he's learned about Nicolae Carpathia's quirkily ambitious agenda for his First 100 Hours as the newly appointed almost-global potentate. We already looked at one bizarre piece of this agenda -- relocating the global seat of the One-World Government to Mesopotamia. And now we'll turn to two more items: the OWC and the OWR.

"The international financial community, whose representatives were already in New York for meetings, has been charged with the responsibility of settling on one currency."

So representatives of international financial institutions are right there in Manhattan? What are the odds of that?

This idea of one world currency arises, I think, from the passage in Revelation 13 describing the "mark of the beast" (which is actually the mark of the second beast, just to be precise):

He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead, so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark ...

LaHaye & Jenkins -- and Nicolae -- seem to think that establishing such a global monopoly would require a single, global currency. More than that, they seem to think that establishing such a one-currency system would inevitably lead to such a global monopoly. I'm not sure I follow their reasoning there, but at least it's a change from the usual PMD nonsense about ATMs and UPC codes.

"That's not all," Bruce went on. "Do you think it was coincidental that leaders of the major religions were in New York when Carpathia arrived last week? How could this be anything but the fulfillment of prophecy? Carpathia is urging them to come together, to agree on some all-inclusive effort at tolerance --"

BUZZZZ! Tolerance -- he said tolerance! We know that's evil. Tolerance is just a code-word for relativism and a lack of moral absolutes. Tolerance leads to a belief in evolution, homosexuality and Hitler.

I'm really not overstating there. That's exactly the signal and warning this word is meant to convey. That's what it means to the authors and to their readers and that's why it's included here.

"... to agree on some all-inclusive effort at tolerance that would respect their shared beliefs."

"Shared beliefs?" Chloe said. "Some of those religions are so far apart they would never agree."

Chloe is meant yet again to serve as the rational, "intellectual" foil, showing off with all that book-learning she got at Stanford. Unfortunately, her objection doesn't quite make sense. It is certainly true that the world's various different religions are "far apart" on many matters of doctrine about which none of them would ever be willing to compromise. That's why they're various and different. But that fact doesn't preclude the existence of another set of "shared beliefs." And it isn't hard to come up with a fairly long list of such shared beliefs: the Golden Rule; honesty is good; betrayal is bad; courage is good; preying on the defenseless is bad; hospitality is good. Christians and Muslims, for example, can agree on all of those things even though they will never agree on the Five Pillars or the doctrine of the Trinity -- that's why they're either Christians or Muslims.

So Chloe's rational objection here isn't really all that rational. In any case, Bruce once again dismisses her:

"But they are agreeing," Bruce said. "Carpathia is apparently making deals. I don't know what he's offering, but an announcement is expected by the end of the week from the religious leaders. I'm guessing we'll see a one-world religion."

"Who'd fall for that?"

"Scripture indicates that many will."

Poor silly Chloe is still trying to make sense of the prophecies, so once again Bruce has to correct her: They don't have to make sense, they're prophesied.

If you're someone who believes anything other than the particular brand of Christianity that L&J believe, then please note what's being suggested about you here. Carpathia is able to get everyone to abandon the essence of what they believe by "making deals."

What L&J are suggesting here is that all those people who supposedly believe all that other stuff besides Real, True Christianity don't really believe it at all. In the authors' view, those other religions are well on their way to uniting in a single faith because they already have so much in common. They all share the same starting point -- the rejection of Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Savior. And they all secretly know that they're based on falsehoods that no one could really believe. And they're all wrong.

The idea seems to be that any supposed difference between these various "false" religions cannot be sincere. Passionate sincerity, after all, is the mark of true faith.

Rayford finds all of this Antichrist business unsettling:

Rayford actually knew two people -- Buck and Hattie -- who had personally met the Antichrist! How bizarre was that? When he allowed himself to dwell on it, it sent a dark shiver of terror deep inside him.

He seems to possess a fully formed fear and revulsion of the "Antichrist." How did that happen so quickly? Such "a dark shiver of terror" might make sense for Bruce, who spent years listening to the Rev. Billings' Antichrist horror stories. But Rayford is still a novice. He wouldn't seem to know enough yet -- the name shouldn't frighten him much more than the names Sauron, Voldemort or Darth Vader might frighten someone unfamiliar with the stories in which those characters appear.

Rayford's knowledge about the Antichrist seems to violate one of the implicit conceits of the Left Behind series -- namely, as we've discussed before, that the Left Behind series is set in a world in which nothing like the Left Behind series exists. The unsaved masses are presumed to be wholly ignorant about Jesus and even the most general sense of the PMD prophecy mythos. These people aren't even able to recognize a Rapture when they see one firsthand. Attributing such ignorance to them is necessary for this story to work, because if most of the doomed were aware of the prophecy check list, and they behaved accordingly, then the prophecy might not be fulfilled. So Tim LaHaye cannot be allowed to exist in the world of Left Behind. Or at least, if he does, his writings must remain obscure and unread in that world.

Here in our real world, of course, the broad outline of Tim LaHaye's views are widely known and tens of millions of copies of his books circulate in print. Hundreds of pastors have also, at LaHaye's urging, recorded their own versions of In Case of Rapture videotapes. So if it turns out that 2,000 years of Christian theology are wrong and the future does begin to unfold as LaHaye says it will, those who are left behind should recognize what they're up against and they'll have plenty of resources to get ready. In our real world, the rise of the Antichrist wouldn't just conjure up the vague dread Rayford feels, it would prompt a massive, armed response from masses of people who would always be two steps ahead of the Antichrist's schemes. He wouldn't stand a chance.

Thus, by outlining their prediction in such detail, L&J may have, unwittingly, ensured that it can never come to pass. (Which is kind of the opposite of the plot of Twelve Monkeys.)

On top of the OWG, OWC and OWR and their planned relocation to New Babylon, Bruce says there was one more piece of Carpathia's agenda "that really got to me":

"The next major order of business for Carpathia is what he calls 'an understanding' between the global community and Israel, as well as what he calls 'a special arrangement' between the U.N. and the United States."

So there's this One-World Government, OK? A global community encompassing every nation on earth. And it sets up diplomatic relations with Israel. And with the United States.

But wait, if the OWG includes every nation on ...? Oh, nevermind.

Bruce isn't sure what to make of the deal with the U.S., "because as much as I study I don't see America playing a role during this period of history." That's an almost verbatim quote from Tim LaHaye's stock answer whenever he is asked about the role of America in the End Times. He seems genuinely perplexed by this mystery. "As much as I study," he says, he can't seem to find any mention of America in Revelation, or Daniel, or Ezekiel.

It's eerie. It's almost as though the authors of those books didn't even know this hemisphere existed.

Carpathia's "understanding" with Israel is, of course, the Antichrist's peace treaty -- complete with built-in expiration date. 

Chloe looked up. "And that actually signals the beginning of the seven-year period of tribulation."

"Exactly." Bruce looked at the group. "If that announcement says anything about a promise from Carpathia that Israel will be protected over the next seven years, it officially ushers in the Tribulation."

This brings us to an odd little tangent to allow LaHaye to expound on one of the trademark features of his individual brand of PMD. Every "Bible prophecy expert" needs to have several such distinguishing flourishes. These men are the cartographers of the End Times, each redrawing a map whose outlines were long ago established and refined by Darby, Scofield, Ironsides, Lindsay, et. al. To demonstrate the value of their own contribution to the established "scholarship" -- and thus to get booked as the keynote speaker at more church prophecy conferences -- relative newcomers like LaHaye have to toss in some signature embellishments. The naked Rapture is one of LaHaye's. So too are the early appearance of the Two Witnesses and his emphasis on the milestone of the 3.5-year midpoint of the Tribulation (which is why this book is so uneventful).

And Bruce is about to explain another piece of LaHaye's trademark arcana:

Buck was taking notes. "So the disappearances, the Rapture, didn't start the seven-year period?"

"No," Bruce said. "Part of me hoped that something would delay the treaty with Israel. Nothing in Scripture says it has to happen right away. But once it does, the clock starts ticking."

This is part catechism, part polemic. Details like this are the stuff of heated arguments among prophecy seminar headliners. LaHaye is firing a shot in one such argument here: "No ... nothing in Scripture says ..." Them's fightin' words, and those no-good heretics who claim that the seven-year period begins with the Rapture won't take that sitting down, either. This is deadly serious stuff.

Deadly dull stuff, too, so let's not worry as much about the particulars of the dispute as about the strange idea here of this vague period of stoppage time before the End of the World.

Why were Bruce and his hapless Tribulation Force comrades just sitting around idly for the past two weeks when he knew they had only a short, indeterminate window in which they might arguably have been able to forestall -- or even to prevent -- the onset of the Great Tribulation.

Two days ago, remember, Buck and the Antichrist-to-be and a loaded gun were all together in one room. If Buck had appreciated the urgency of this brief opportunity, he might have made better use of that promising circumstance.

And what if he had succeeded? What if, instead of silently weeping through Carpathia's double-homicide hypnosis act, Buck had managed to get his hands on the gun and to kill Carpathia? Does Satan (or God, or the two of them co-operatively -- I'm not sure how this whole designation of an Antichrist process works) have an understudy waiting in the wings? Sure, killing Nicolae might just mean they call up the next guy from the minors, but I'd rather face the rookie than the starting team.

But what if there isn't a roster of backup Antichrists available? No Antichrist would have meant no treaty with Israel. And that would have meant no seven-year period and thus, in turn, no End of the World. So would God then have to put all the children and the RTCs back from where he took them? Or would the world just kind of limp along in loophole limbo until the heavenly attorneys could sort this mess out?

We'll never know the answer to any of those questions, of course, since our supposed action heroes wasted their window of opportunity passing notes and harassing their co-workers.