slacktivist

L.B.: Scream 2 morality

Left Behind, pp. 50-53

Here we learn the sad fate of co-pilot Chris Smith. Ten pages earlier, Smith established himself as a villain by violating Rayford Steele's odd notion of chivalry and accepting the airline's offer of a bus ride back to the terminal.

I noted earlier (see "Scream morality") that:

Left Behind has its own moral rules that function like the rules for slasher flicks that Jamie Kennedy's character outlines in Scream. By violating those rules, Smith dooms himself as surely as that teenager who says, "Don't believe those crazy stories. Let's sneak off into the woods and have sex."

Rayford's indignant response at the time makes it clear that LaHaye and Jenkins want readers to regard Smith's accepting of a ride as an unpardonable sin. "Rayford glared at him ... 'I should write you up for this.'"

But it's difficult to puzzle out exactly what Smith did that was so wrong. The airline sent a bus to pick up its flight crew and Smith was willing to accept this privilege. Steele later accepts special privileges afforded to pilots (a special phone line, a helicopter ride home). And Buck Williams, the book's other protagonist, regularly cuts in line and takes advantage of his status as a privileged customer and club member. The lesson, I suppose, is that our heroes are allowed to be selfish because they are our heroes. Other people, like Smith, are not.

So just like the peripheral characters who die for their "sins" in a slasher movie, we know that Chris Smith is doomed. The next time we see him we can expect he'll be dead, another bloodied corpse in the woods of Camp Crystal Lake.

Sure enough:

[Hattie] turned and spoke into his ear. "They wheeled him past us while I was going into the lounge. Blood all over! ... I think he was dead!"

Rayford shook his head. What next? "Did he get hit or something? Did that bus crash?" Wouldn't that be ironic!

Here again is the major theme of the book. "Bad people" break the rules and die horribly. "Good people" see this as poetic justice and enjoy a chuckle.

The helicopter pilot fills Steele in on all the amusing details: Smith arrived at the terminal and learned that "his boys had disappeared and his wife was killed in a wreck." In grief, loneliness and anguished despair, Smith slashed his wrists and died.

Isn't that ironic?!?

L.B.: Thank heaven for little girls

Left Behind, pp. 49-54

Right. So. Where were we?

While trying to find some way home from the airport, Rayford Steele checks his mail and finds an in-joke between the book's co-authors:

Besides a pile of the usual junk, he found a padded envelope from his home address. Irene had taken to mailing him little surprises lately, the result of a marriage book she had been urging him to read. ...

That's probably a reference to one of these books by Tim LaHaye. He's written several books on the subject, which is interesting coming from a man whose own key to marital bliss was to convince his wife to get a job 3,000 miles away.

Rayford sticks the envelope from his wife into his pocket and sets out to find Hattie the hottie. But LaHaye and Jenkins tell us that the shock of the mass disappearances has softened Steele:

Funny, he had no emotional attraction whatever to Hattie just now. But he felt obligated to be sure she got home.

"Emotional attraction" seems not quite the right phrase to describe the subverted lust of Steele's previous fantasies for the "drop dead gorgeous" flight attendant. He'd been stringing her along for months, reassuring his ego that, at any point if he decided to, he could have an affair with this lovely but lonely younger woman. That's not so much "emotional attraction" as it is "warped, manipulative ego trip."

And now we're supposed to accept that Steele's cruel selfishness has suddenly been transformed into pure chivalry. He learns that he can sneak Hattie aboard a pilots-only helicopter ride to the suburbs where they live if he can find her in the next two minutes:

He grabbed a courtesy phone. "I'm sorry, we're unable to page anyone just now."

"This is an emergency and I am a Pan-Continental captain."

"What is it?"

"Have Hattie Durham meet her party at K-17."

"I'll try."

"Do it!"

Consider Rayford's use, again, of the word "emergency" here. Parts of the airport are actually still on fire. The runway is littered with wrecked planes and dead bodies. They have run out of room for incoming planes to land, but more planes are arriving every moment. To Rayford, none of that constitutes an "emergency." An emergency is something that affects him. If you've ever waited tables, the scene is all too familiar: 1) The lack of perspective; 2) the "do you know who I am?" assertion of importance; 3) the adolescent shouting.

Hattie arrives just in time for them to catch the helicopter ride, which is only supposed to be for pilots, but a little more bullying and bluster from Rayford and they let Hattie ride:

The pilot pointed at Hattie and shook his head. Rayford grabbed her elbow and pulled her aboard as he climbed in. "Only way she's not coming is if you can't handle the weight!"

"What do you weigh, doll?" the pilot said.

"One-fifteen!"

So now we know that Tim & Jerry like 'em small. Hattie weighs 115 pounds -- so readers who have been picturing the sexy flight attendant as, say, looking like Catherine Zeta Jones in The Terminal now have to downsize their mental image to something more like whichever of the Olsen twins it is that has the eating disorder.

"I can handle the weight!" he told Rayford. "But if she's not buckled in, I'm not responsible!"

"Let's go!" Rayford shouted.

He buckled himself in and Hattie sat in his lap. ...

Is that a padded envelope from your wife in your pocket? Or are you ... oh, nevermind.

... He wrapped his arms around her waist and clasped his wrists together. He thought how ironic it was that he had been dreaming of this for weeks, and now there was no joy, no excitement in it, nothing sensual whatever. He was miserable. Glad to be able to help her out, but miserable.

This prompts a long oh-what-a-fool-I've-been interior monologue in which we are told repeatedly that Rayford no longer feels the slightest attraction to this poor girl. We're supposed to gather from all this that his feelings toward Hattie have shifted into something wholesome and paternal. Yet his earlier fantasies also seem to have been at least partly paternal. Rayford is one creepy man.

Thankfully, once Hattie gets off of the helicopter, L&J seem to be finished exploring the fetid swamp of Rayford Steele's sexuality:

She wrapped her arms around his neck in a fierce embrace, and he felt her quiver in fear. "I hope everyone's OK at your place!" she said. "Call me and let me know, OK?" ... "OK!"

She wraps herself around him and quivers. She asks him to call her and he says he will, even though he has no intention of doing so. And then she's gone and he doesn't need to worry about her after that.

Nice guy that Rayford.

L.B.: There goes the neighborhood

Tim LaHaye responds to this Nick Kristof column with a letter to the editor in The New York Times:

Comparing my book "Glorious Appearing" to "fundamentalist Islamic tracts" is a real stretch. The Islamic radicals who bomb the innocent are not nice people!

Should Christ overlook their rebellion and welcome them into his kingdom? They would ruin it for everyone. You don't choose to live around people like that today; would you want to spend eternity with them?

LaHaye portrays heaven as a (pearly) gated community in Orange County. It's a good, exclusive neighborhood inhabited by good, exclusive people. God's main role is to keep out the undesirable types -- the people who are not "nice" and whom the saints like LaHaye would not "choose to live around."

LaHaye's vision of heaven, in other words, sounds remarkably like that of the Pharisees -- the devout evangelicals of their day. Jesus repeatedly warned them that prostitutes and tax-collectors would be getting into heaven ahead of them. (We always read this as former prostitutes and reformed tax-collectors, but that's not what he said.)

Christianity teaches that God retains the prerogative to judge the wicked -- to separate the sheep from the goats and the wheat from the tares. But it also emphatically teaches that this is God's prerogative, not ours.

Yet we like to play God. Despite Jesus' insistence that we couldn't tell wheat from tares with a guidebook and a microscope we still insist that we're qualified to help out with the weeding.

So we construct our parochial little visions of heaven. We portray heaven as a place where we get to spend eternity only with the kinds of people we like to be with. Thus for LaHaye, New Jerusalem is not so much a heavenly city as an unincorporated development in the heavenly suburbs.

L.B.: Sorrow Floats

Left Behind, pp. 48-49

Rayford Steele finally reaches a pay phone and places a call to his home. He's already read the plot summary on the back of the book and, realizing that he's in a novel about the "Rapture," knows that his born-again wife Irene won't be there to answer his call:

His answering machine at home picked up immediately, and he was pierced to hear the cheerful voice of his wife. "Your call is important to us," she said. "Please leave a message after the beep."

Rayford punched a few buttons to check for messages. He ran through three or four mundane ones, then was startled to hear Chloe's voice. "Mom? Dad? Are you there? Have you seen what's going on? Call me as soon as you can. ..."

Here as ever we witness Jenkins' tin ear for choice of detail. Those "mundane" messages from Rayford's life before the calamity could have offered telling reminders to both the reader and the character of all that he has lost and how vastly his world has changed. Each of those messages would either be from someone now disappeared or from someone else left behind -- a link, a connection, to some other survivor.

I wonder who would be calling the Steele household. Their impersonal answering machine message ("Your call is important to us") seems more suited to a tech-support line than to the machine of a family that regularly gets phone calls from friends.

Irene is such a wholehearted devotee of her church and its subculture that she isn't likely to know anyone else who might have been left behind. This points to one of the paradoxes of America's insular evangelical world. For evangelical Christians, evangelism -- spreading their faith to nonbelievers -- is an essential obligation. Yet evangelicals have constructed a comprehensive, separate, parallel world that virtually ensures they won't know any outsiders with whom they can share their faith.

As for poor Rayford, the guy doesn't seem to have any friends at all.

The message from his daughter introduces another major character in these books. Chloe is LB's ingenue. (For those keeping score at home, that's three female characters: Chloe, the ingenue; Irene, the madonna; and Hattie, the whore.) Chloe was away at Stanford, where relatively few of those elite intellectuals were taken home by God.

Well, at least he knew Chloe was still around. All he wanted was to hold her.

One hopes that when Rayford finally greets his daughter, he does not do so by saying, "Well, at least you're still around."

This section of the book reminded me of the "Sorrow Floats" chapter in John Irving's Hotel New Hampshire -- another story in which the mother and the youngest boy are suddenly lost. Irving's book is deeply affecting as he poignantly shows the impact these losses have on the rest of the family. L&J's book not so much. Yet here we do see the rare acknowledgement from L&J that the practical consequences of a sudden "Rapture" and of a sudden death are really no different. Does it really matter to those left behind whether it's little Egg lost in a plane crash or little Raymie whisked off to heaven like Elijah? Gone is gone.

The "Rapture" idea, ultimately, is a pretty flimsy device for the denial of death. The scripture passages LaHaye cites in support of this idea were written to give believers hope in the face of inevitable death. For LaHaye and his followers, the fear of death overwhelms that hope. Thus "we will not all SLEEP, but we will be CHANGED" is twisted into "we will not ALL sleep, but WE will be changed."

St. Paul was writing about what happens when believers die. LaHaye doesn't want to believe that true believers will die. Rayford's response to his wife and son's undying deaths -- albeit a response awkwardly rendered by Jenkins -- offers a glimpse of emotional honesty not usually permitted by LaHaye's fear- and denial-fuelled "Rapture" ideology.

I sometimes think that the best response, the best counter-argument, to End Times enthusiasts and apocalypse-obsessed "prophecy" nuts is not a comprehensive biblical and theological rebuttal, but rather to borrow a line from Olympia Dukakis in Moonstruck:

"Cosmo? I just want you to know. No matter what you do. You are going to die, just like everybody else."

L.B.: Shackled

Left Behind, pg. 48

Here is the final of the "dozens of stories" Rayford Steele sees CNN report on the aftermath of the Rapture:

At a Christian high school soccer game at a missionary headquarters in Indonesia, most of the spectators and all but one of the players disappeared in the middle of play, leaving their shoes and uniforms on the ground. The CNN reporter announced that, in his remorse, the surviving player took his own life.

Jenkins is a native of the evangelical subculture, so when he imagines a high school scene it is in an evangelical high school. Few such schools are large enough to field a football team. Those that are aren't near enough to other evangelical schools of a similar size to have anyone to play against. Thus evangelical schools play soccer, usual against other evangelical schools in leagues that are parochial but not "Parochial." Somewhere I still have a varsity jacket that announces Timothy Christian School's status as "JCAC Champs."

In the Jersey Christian Athletic Conference we traveled pretty far for games -- bus rides down to Trenton or up to Hackensack, Parsippany, Manhattan and Huntington, Long Island. This makes me wonder who it was that the MKs at this Christian school in Indonesia were playing against. Both teams are raptured, so both seem to have been composed of believers. Was this a game of American missionary students versus indigenous Indonesian Christian students? If so, why are the American students segregated from their brothers and sisters in Christ?

Anyway, that's just a quibble. My main point here is that this anecdote may be the ultimate example of the inverted gospel -- and inverted evangelicalism -- of Left Behind.

This story is the anti-Unshackled.

Unshackled is an old-time radio melodrama, recorded in front of a live audience. Since 1950, the Pacific Garden Mission in Chicago has produced this program, which is broadcast on stations all over the world.

You may have stumbled across it late one night when driving across one of those vast radio wastelands where you press the seek button on the AM dial and watch the numbers cycle through without picking up a signal. Suddenly, you crest a hill or the ionosphere shifts and you hear a swelling, lugubrious organ, the sound of footsteps, a door opening and the clink of ice in a glass. It's all terribly campy, but it's also fairly well done -- the actors and foley artists know what they're doing. The story is sheer melodrama and the organ accompaniment is overdone, yet it's also strangely soulful.

The Pacific Garden Mission is descended from the ministry of Dwight L. Moody. Like Moody himself, Unshackled combines all the show-business acumen of a televangelist with the earnest sincerity of an earlier age. The program is a soap opera for Jesus. Every story follows pretty much the same arc. A soul in despair -- without hope, without faith -- finds redemption and a reason to live in the mercy of a God who is dying to offer us another chance. It's both "the old, old story" of the gospel hymn and the old story of "the man in a hole" (a man falls into a hole, he gets out again). And thus, despite its overdose of schmaltz, it's strangely appealing.

Contrast this archetypal Unshackled story with the story of L&J's left behind left back stranded on an Indonesian soccer field. Here is a young man without faith, without hope. He is convinced the world is meaningless -- there is no God, death is absolute, life is absurd and love is a delusion.

Then the fateful day arrives. In the twinkling of an eye, his teammates and opponents vanish. He is confronted with stark, incontrovertible proof of the existence of God. Life, he realizes, does have meaning -- there is a basis for faith, hope and love. And so he kills himself.

Left Behindand Unshackled are telling opposite stories about opposite Gods. Pacific Garden is a rescue mission. The "Tribulation Force" is not.

L.B.: Global Weekly II

A few more quibbles with David Gates' Newsweek cover story on "The Pop Prophets," Left Behind authors Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins.

One of my complaints was already voiced in the comments to the previous post. Andrew Cory noted this odd assertion in Gates' article:

Left Behind gives believers an equivalent of such secular sagas as the Lord of the Rings books: a self-contained, ordered world with a wealth of detail in which a reader can become blissfully immersed, and the assurance that good must win out ...

This is actually two odd assertions: 1) that Tolkien's books are "secular," and 2) that therefore believers needed a religious "equivalent." It's not strange that LaHaye would believe such things -- he went to Bob Jones University, after all. But the fact that Gates accepts them indicates another example of that cardinal error of reporting on figures like LaHaye. Here Gates allows LaHaye to describe and define the wider context in which he exists, and Gates accepts LaHaye's definition without question. Thus anyone who is not sectarian -- and sectarian on precisely LaHaye's terms -- is regarded as "secular."

Thus Tolkien, a devout Christian, is a "secular" writer. His great epic, which is infused with and shaped by his own Christian faith while incorporating aspects of the anything-but-"secular" Norse and Arthurian mythologies, is therefore -- to LaHaye and to Gates -- a "secular" book. It doesn't matter to them that some of its main characters, such as Tolkien's wizard Gandalf, are deities of a sort. When the gods themselves -- and the devil too -- are described as "secular," it's difficult to know what that word is supposed to mean. (Perhaps it means "well-crafted" or "entertaining.")

Other commenters noted the one section where Gates actually does question LaHaye fairly vigorously, prompting a revealing response:

"I wake up every morning," [LaHaye] says, "and I see this beautiful place, and that drop-dead gorgeous view of the mountains, and I think, 'This is fantastic.' Because God is faithful." How does he reconcile that with Jesus' injunction to sell all you have and give to the poor? "I can accomplish far more from my present lifestyle and the giving that I do to Christian work," he says. "If I just sold everything and gave it to the poor, I can't see where that would advance the gospel as much as I'm doing." But wouldn't it advance the poor? "Well," he says, "you know how much I pay in taxes?"

For LaHaye, the Great Commission trumps the Great Commandment. It's acceptable, he begrudginglly allows, for Christians to heal the sick, comfort the dying, feed the hungry and look after orphans and widows in their distress -- but only if such activities are effective means to a different end, the spreading of "the gospel." Here Gates pushes LaHaye just a little bit, actually has the fortitude to make him reply to challenges to his worldview, and thus gives him enough rope to hang himself.

Unfortunately, Gates immediately undercuts this with his next sentence:

To LaHaye, spreading the Good News is far more compassionate than redistributing the wealth.

Not "... than feeding the hungry." Not "... than empowering the poor." Not even "... than sharing the wealth."

"Redistributing" is the word Gates uses, but again it is really LaHaye's word, LaHaye's terms, LaHaye's reality. For folks like LaHaye, any suggestion that the wealthy might want to share their abundance with the needy is a "redistributionist" scheme, i.e. socialism. Suggest that the wealthy landowner ought to round off the corners when plowing his field so that the poor might glean enough to live and you are accused of advocating "redistributing the wealth." You're Joe Stalin.

Gates here also misses a golden opportunity. LaHaye and Jenkins preach that the End is Near. They have also, over the last nine years, reaped an immense, Grisham-like fortune. What are they doing with the money?

LaHaye is 78 years old. If he were anyone else, one would assume he was doing some estate planning. But why do estate planning if the world is about to end?

Jenkins is a "baby boomer." An actuary would suggest he has several decades still ahead of him and a prudent investment counselor would recommend some stable, long-term investments. But if the world is going to end, is it really necessary to tie up your money in a Roth IRA? Does Jenkins invest in 30-year bonds? What about his mortgage? (Is it ethical to sign a 30-year mortgage agreement if you're certain that Jesus is coming back before the house will be paid off?) And what about the children and the grandchildren? Have they started college funds?

I want details here. This is important. "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also," Jesus said. So where is L&J's newfound treasure? Gates doesn't ask. But I could venture a guess.

L.B.: Global Weekly I

Via Eric Alterman I see that the cover story of the May 24 Global Weekly Newsweek is a long profile of Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins by David Gates.

Gates does a good job in many ways, offering many insights into the Left Behind authors that the two men seem to have missed themselves. But he has one major stumble and a few points with which I want to quibble.

The first is the comic-book illustration that accompanies the online article (it's from the L.B. graphic novel. It portrays the chaos and destruction accompanying the story's Rapture-event in far more vivid detail than the book itself. (I just ordered a copy of this because I want to see how an illustrator tackles the difficult problem of translating this stubbornly un-graphic novel into a graphic novel.) The illustration really misrepresents the book -- and especially the actions of the book's heroes and therefore of the authors' idea of what constitutes heroism -- by highlighting the chaos and suffering that the book casually strolls past.

Gates attributes the popularity of the LB series to the chaos and fear that dominate our nightly news:

As the world gets increasingly scary, with much of the trouble centered in the Mideast -- just where you'd expect from reading the book of Revelation -- even secular Americans sometimes wonder (or at least wonder if they ought to start wondering) whether there might not be something to this End Times stuff.

Ah yes, chaos in the Middle East will remind people of the book of Revelation because John's apocalypse is all about the Middle East.

Except that it's not. Revelation, which was written on a European island in the Aegean, begins with letters to seven churches -- in Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia and Laodicea, for those keeping score at home. These churches were all in Asia Minor, specifically in western Turkey. Most of these cities are west of the Bosporus -- west of Moscow and Kiev, about the same longitude as Joensuu, Finland. Yes, the book of Revelation talks a great deal about Babylon, which had been in the Middle East, but by the time it was written, the Babylonian Empire was no more. There was, however, the Roman Empire. If the book of Revelation is about any place, it is about Rome.

Gates here commits the cardinal error of journalists writing about LaHaye and Jenkins and their books. He assumes that the Bible must say something like what they say it says. He assumes that their apocalypse is based on John's apocalypse -- and that if one reads the book of Revelation one will learn about things like the Rapture or about Gog and Magog. Because L&J say they read the Bible "literally," Gates assumes this is true. But no "literal" reading of the Bible would produce the kind of convoluted narrative LaHaye derives from leaping about through the scriptures, arbitrarily cutting and pasting a verse here, a chapter there, to cobble together a miasma that perversely interprets history as symbolism and symbolism as history.

"In an age of terror and tumult," Gates writes, "these books' biblical literalism offer[s] certitude to millions of Americans amid the chaos of their time."

"Literalism???" Aargh. You want "biblical literalism," look at St. Francis -- a man who literally turned the other cheek, walked the extra mile and sold all he had to give to the poor. Of course, if you ask a premillennial dispensationalist like Tim LaHaye about such literal biblical imperatives from the mouth of Christ, he will explain that such teachings do not apply to our current "dispensation." The Sermon on the Mount, like most of Jesus' teachings, applies only to some future millennial kingdom, he will tell you -- it's one of those passages that those of us living in the present age are free to dismiss. This is what passes for "biblical literalism"?

Imagine some idiosyncratic literary theorist who believes, say, that the key to reading Huckleberry Finn is understanding that its all a metaphor exploring the sexual relationship between Huck and Jim. Then imagine that everyone who interviews this strange theorist accepts his interpretation, repeating his assertions that this is the simplest, clearest and most common-sensical way of reading Twain's novel. That's pretty close to what Gates, like so many others, is doing here.

He does acknowledge, off-handedly, that some Christians may interpret the Bible a little differently, although he never explains how or why. And he even somewhat buys into LaHaye's know-nothing critique of the majority of theologians as intellectually elitist:

LaHaye's common-sense reading of the Bible is also tied up with a still-aggrieved sense of social class. "Those millions that I'm trying to reach take the Bible literally. It's the theologians that get all fouled up on some of these smug ideas that you've got to find some theological reason behind it. It bugs me that intellectuals look down their noses at we ordinary people."

And this:

Certainly LaHaye and Jenkins promulgate what might be called outsider theology. But they are outsiders: they grew up that way, and they're proud of it ...

You know, outsiders -- white, male North Americans. In LaHaye's populist scheme, it's perfectly acceptable to take millions from "ordinary people" without even bothering to give them well-crafted books in return. That doesn't make you an elitist. No, elitists are those smug intellectuals who study theology and try to make sense of the world.

L.B.: Pagan Babies

Left Behind, pp. 46-48

Finally, 30 pages after the mass disappearances have occurred, Rayford Steele looks up at an airport television and the reader gets to see some scenes from the worldwide Rapture.

From around the globe came wailing mothers, stoic families, reports of death and destruction. Dozens of stories included eyewitnesses who had seen loved ones and friends disappear before their eyes.

Okay, it turns out the reader doesn't actually get to see these scenes. We're actually just told that Rayford saw them. And we have Jenkins and LaHaye's assurance that these scenes were gripping and deeply moving.

If Jerry Jenkins had written the Arabian Nights it would be two pages long. Jenkins' Decameron would be over in ten minutes. His version of The Canterbury Tales might mention that the travelers told each other stories -- he might even tell us that the stories were really very interesting -- but he'd probably assume, as he does in Left Behind that what readers really want to know is the logistics of the pilgrims' travel arrangements.

Readers are allowed a glimpse of a few of the "dozens of stories" Rayford sees. Unfortunately, these details aren't provided to give the readers a sense of what it might feel like to be in his situation, but rather to make some theological and political points.

Story No. 1:

Most shocking to Rayford was a woman in labor, about to go into the delivery room, who was suddenly barren. Doctors delivered the placenta. Her husband had caught the disappearance of the fetus on tape. As he videotaped her great belly and sweaty face, he asked questions. How did she feel? "How do you think I feel, Earl? Turn that thing off." What was she hoping for? "That you'll get close enough for me to slug you." Did she realize that in a few moments they'd be parents? "In about a minute, you're going to be divorced."

Then came the screaming and the dropping of the camera, terrified voices, running nurses and the doctor. CNN reran the footage in superslow motion, showing the woman going from very pregnant to nearly flat stomached, as if she had instantaneously delivered. "Now, watch with us again," the newsman intoned, "and keep your eyes on the left edge of your screen, where a nurse appears to be reading a printout from a fetal heart monitor. There, see?" The action stopped as the pregnant woman's stomach deflated. "The nurse's uniform seems to still be standing as if an invisible person is wearing it. She's gone. Half a second later, watch." The tape moved ahead and stopped. "The uniform, stockings and all, are in a pile atop her shoes."

The bit of dialogue with "Earl" and his wife is pure sitcom cliche (does anybody in real life say "slug"?). But I wish they had told us more about the CNN newsman. Aaron Brown is the only CNN anchor who might be described as "intoning," but we probably shouldn't read to much into the implication here that the affable Mr. Brown has been left behind. We can be sure, however, that the newsman in question is not Wolf Blitzer. The perpetually hyperventilating Blitzer never intones -- he shouts, excitedly introducing another banal piece on the change of venue in some celebrity trial as though he were covering the attack on Pearl Harbor live. I can't say whether Blitzer would qualify to be taken in L&J's fictional Rapture, but if he weren't, a story this big would've made his head explode.

But of course the point of this little anecdote is not about CNN or about Earl's wife: it's a discourse on the theological and political state of the fetus. L&J's Rapture includes the idea of an "age of accountability." They believe that in heaven, unlike in Texas and Florida, young children belong to a different moral category than adults. They are, if not exactly innocents, not yet fully accountable and exempt from divine wrath.

The idea of an "age of accountability," or, in the Catholic phrase, "age of reason," is appealing in that it helps avoid the image of a cruel deity condemning innocent little babies to Hell. But that appeal is only necessary if you begin with a theology that suspects God is the sort of God who might otherwise condemn little pagan babies to Hell.

The thinnest ice on which a theologian can stand concerns questions about, "If you were God, who would you send to Hell?" The answer, of course, is, "I'm not God, so what're you asking me for?" Theologians are on much more solid ground considering questions about the character of God. (As a Christian, I believe that our best indicator of the character of God comes from the example of Jesus Christ, and I have a rather hard time picturing Jesus roasting pagan babies on a spit. But again, this is a belief based on the nature of God, not on the forensic calculus of an abstract age of accountability. I don't know if the concept is a wrong answer, but I'm pretty sure it's an answer to the wrong question.)

The bit about the nurse is the most vivid, detailed account so far in the story about the disappearances. (It may say something about Jenkins' as a storyteller that the only visual image we've been given so far is from a TV screen.) The effect of the scene is muted, however, by L&J's refusal to let us know how watching this made Rayford feel. He already suspects that his wife, Irene, is among the disappeared. Now he's finally seen just what this would mean. I'd have been satisfied with something hackneyed -- "the hairs on the back of his neck stood up" or "he felt a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach" -- but we get nothing. Rayford makes no connection. He has no response.

Next up, a brief discourse on the disposition of the bodily remains of believers who died before the Rapture:

A funeral home in Australia reported that nearly every mourner disappeared from one memorial service, including the corpse, while at another service at the same time, only a few disappeared and the corpse remained. Morgues also reported corpse disappearances. At a burial, three of six pallbearers stumbled and dropped a casket when the other three disappeared. When they picked up the casket, it too was empty.

I knew a fundamentalist preacher -- a blackhearted old man who drove his daughters and granddaughter literally insane -- who was a devotee of the Rapture mania of LaHaye and of Jack Van Impe. As he grew older, he became obsessed with what would happen to his body if he died before the Rapture. He was terrified that his daughters would have him cremated, which he believed would mean his body could not then be raptured like the corpses in Left Behind. He would plead with them, often tearfully, to promise that this would not happen. All this based on a warped reading of 1 Thessalonians 5 -- a passage in which Paul is trying to comfort believers about the death of their loved ones.

That same warped reading is the premise for this book.

Apocalypservice

Via Atrios, we read Rick Perlstein's Village Voice report on a meeting between various White House staffers and representatives of the Apostolic Congress -- a Pentecostal group that's pretty fringe-y and esoteric, even by Pentecostal standards.

Perlstein correctly points out that this splinter-group of a splinter-group of Christians has some frightening notions of foreign policy derived from their frightening (and heretical) apocalyptic theology. But he also probably overstates the fear factor here -- this isn't a group that's influencing the White House, it's a group that the White House is stroking and patronizing.

The group sent "45 ministers including wives" to the White House, where they sat in a room as a series of second- and third-tier staffers came through to assure them that the president appreciates their concerns and is counting on their support. At the end of the day, they were allowed outside to wave as the president departed in a helicopter. It was their only glimpse of him. (Robert G. Upton, the AC's leader, described this as a "heart-moving send-off of the President in his Presidential helicopter.")

The White House shores up support in a fragment of its base, and Upton gets to return to his office and crank out fund-raising letters assuring his deluded followers that he has insider access with "key leaders" in the Bush administration. But Perlstein hints that perhaps this strange bunch may have actually influenced Bush's foreign policy:

Three weeks after the confab, President George W. Bush reversed long-standing U.S. policy, endorsing Israeli sovereignty over parts of the West Bank in exchange for Israel's disengagement from the Gaza Strip.

That implies a kind of cause-and-effect that doesn't seem supportable. Perlstein reports that Elliott "Yes, I lied to Congress" Abrams (whose official title is "NSC Near East and North African Affairs director") had: "attempted to assuage [the AC's] concerns by stating that 'the Gaza Strip had no significant biblical influence ... and therefore is a piece of land that can be sacrificed for the cause of peace.'"

What this shows is that Bush's disastrous decision to embrace the Sharon plan had already been made -- Abrams was just trying to get the holy roller wackos on board. This is actually bigger news, indicating that the decision was made nearly a month before it was announced. (But again, it seems Colin Powell didn't find out about it until the rest of us did.) Also big news: an implied admission that the Sharon plan is a cynical swap of worthless land in Gaza for valued land in the West Bank.

Perlstein pithily summarizes the Apostolic Congress' outlook for the Middle East:

Claiming to be "the Christian Voice in the Nation's Capital," the members vociferously oppose the idea of a Palestinian state. They fear an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza might enable just that, and they object on the grounds that all of Old Testament Israel belongs to the Jews. Until Israel is intact and David's temple rebuilt, they believe, Christ won't come back to earth.

That, in a nutshell, is their goal: a Greater Israel that stretches from the Mediterranean to the Euphrates (so it's actually larger than Old Testament Israel) and a reconstructed Temple in Jerusalem. Their reasoning is not so much theological as magical. By bringing about these things, they hope to make Jesus come back. This is sorcery, not eschatology.

I've mentioned this before, but this so-called-theology precisely parallels the plot of many an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Zealous fanatics loyal to some secretive prophecy try to bring about the signs that will summon their master and bring about the apocalypse and the death of nearly everyone on earth. (Buffy and the gang, contra the Apostolic Congress, regard this as a Bad Thing that should be stopped.)

Perlstein provides an amusing glimpse of the Apostolic Congress' staffperson in Israel, Kim Johnson, whom he describes as:

An ecstatic figure who from her own reports appears to operate at the edge of sanity ("Two of the three nights in my apartment I have been attacked by a hair raising spirit of fear," she writes, noting the sublet contained a Harry Potter book; "at this time I am associating it with witchcraft") ...

Johnson's fear of "witchcraft" is ironic in that her organization's entire enterprise is an attempt at sorcerously summoning a powerful spirit, forcing him to reappear in the flesh and to fight against all their enemies. If that's not Black Magic, what is?

Elliott YILTC Abrams has had a good bit of experience in working with Christians from the religious right, including a stint as director of the "Judeo-Christian" Ethics and Public Policy Center (a kind of WPA for out-of-work Neocons). But he blunders here by talking of "the cause of peace."

"Peace" is a dirty word for this bunch. You know who likes "peace"? The Antichrist, that's who. For these folks talk of "peace" or of international cooperation suggests the coming Antichrist and a one-world government. Abrams might as well have said, "In this case, I think Nicolae Carpathia is right." (Carpathia is the fictional Antichrist of the Left Behind novels -- we'll get to him eventually, I promise.)

Yet, despite this blunder, it's troubling that Elliott goes to such lengths to reconcile the administration's policies with the esoteric terms of the group's theology. One assumes -- or at least desperately hopes -- that Bush's support for the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza is motivated by something more than that territory's limited role in the prophecy theories of post-Christian Rapture enthusiasts.

I understand why the White House is playing nice with these people. They represent a block of voters Bush will need in November. Ideally, the Bush team wanted to pat these folks on the back, make them feel appreciated, and then quietly send them back home. That's why none of the staffers who met with the group were willing to discuss the meeting with Perlstein. Upton also seems to have been told not to discuss the meeting with the media, which is why he splutters a defensive denial when Perlstein asked him about the e-mail he sent describing the meeting. (Tsk, tsk, pastor -- lies make baby Jesus cry.)

Tim Goeglein, "deputy director of public liaison and the White House's point man with evangelical Christians," who moderated the Apostolic Congress' sessions, was asked by members of the group what they could do to help the White House. "Pray, pray, pray, pray," Goeglein told them.

In other words: We want to keep you on our side. And we want to keep you out of sight.

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P.S.: Since both Left Behind and Harry Potter are mentioned above, allow me to point you to this Slate article from Steven Waldman, in which he examines the similarities between the two popular book series -- and their very important difference.

P.P.S.: Apologies to Don McCloskey for stealing the title of this post from the title of this song.

L.B.: Go to Hell

Left Behind, pp. 45-46

Untold millions are still untold
Untold millions are outside the fold
Who will tell them of Jesus' love
And the heav'nly mansions awaiting above?

So our man Rayford Steel has finished his "emergency duty," which consisted of walking to the terminal of O'Hare airport instead of accepting a ride. Confronted with the chaos and carnage of mutiple plane crashes, a lesser man -- a Bernie Laplante -- might have panicked and done something foolish, but not Steele. He surveyed the scene and his professional training kicked in. His duty was clear: he walked the other way.

Now, safely back at the terminal, "Rayford wanted more than anything to sit and talk with someone about what to make of this."

Apparently, Hattie doesn't count. The two of them just walked more than two miles together. Despite their long acquaintance -- "They had spent time together, chatting for hours over drinks or dinner" -- she's still just a pretty girl and not really "someone" worth talking to.

In the terminal, "Everyone scurried about, trying to find some link to the outside world, to contact their families, and to get out of the airport."

The cell-phoneless Rayford and Hattie join in the scurrying, splitting up to try to call their families.

Here again we see the storytelling mastery of Jerry Jenkins. He knows that what readers are longing for now is another passage on the logistics of telecommunications. And he delivers.

Steele makes his way to a pilot's lounge where a "supervisor" alerts them that some special phone lines have been reserved, just for pilots. Steele gets in line with the privileged few.

Here LaHaye and Jenkins had me worried. Steele seemed to be in real peril. According to the Scream morality governing the world of Left Behind, accepting special privileges because of your status as a pilot is a grievous sin.

Hadn't Steele just chewed out his copilot Smith for just such behavior? Smith accepted a ride back to the terminal, but Steele had refused -- even despite the airline's insistence. Yet now, with an airport full of people desperate to make phone calls, Steele happily jumps at the chance to use a special phone line and to "bypass the normal trunk lines out of here, so you won't be competing with all of the pay phones in the terminal."

But then I realized the difference between Smith's actions and Steele's. Smith accepted a ride in public. ("How would that look?" Steele had said.) But no one would know that Steele was bypassing the other callers on a privileged, pilots-only line. In the world of LB, it's okay to use your privilege to get ahead as long as no one sees you do it.

Rayford got in line, beginning to feel the tension of having flown too long and known too little. Worse was the knowledge that he had a better idea than most of what had happened. If he was right, if it were true, he would not be getting an answer when he dialed home.

Here I caught a first whiff of what it is that really separates the Left Behind novels from most of the evangelical genre fiction that had gone before.

Evangelical Christianity, at its core, is radically inclusive. Evangelicals, born-againers, want everybody else to become born-again too.

Granted, this inclusivity isn't always expressed in the most winsome or persuasive manner, but it's the heart and soul of evangelicalism. As the Sunday school chorus quoted at the top of this post shows, the goal of evangelicals has traditionally been to reach out to the lost, to the "untold millions" of the unsaved.

Most evangelical fiction has conveyed this evangelistic impulse -- albeit with the unfortunate awkwardness and fecklessness that characterizes too much of their evangelism. But that's not what one finds in Left Behind. Here you find little concern -- and even less of a sense of responsibility -- for the plight of the untold millions. What one finds instead is a sense of triumphalism. Those "inside the fold" feel no sense of obligation to those on the outside -- they are bad people who are getting what they deserve and the godly remnant gets to watch, more in delight than in sadness. This is a major theme of the book and one we'll be exploring in more detail in the chapters to come.

Rayford realizes that he "had a better idea than most of what had happened," yet he feels little obligation to share this news. At this point in the story Rayford is not yet a Christian himself, but his outlook doesn't change greatly even after he becomes one. In Left Behind the gospel is not the good news of salvation to be shared with the untold millions. It is a secret to be treasured, hoarded and hidden under a bushel by the chosen few.

And what about those untold millions? They can go to Hell.