Jonathan Kirsch - A History of the End of the World

Indeed, LaHaye’s motives in repurposing Revelation as a thriller are not merely mercenary. Before he took up his new calling as a best-selling novelist, LaHaye enjoyed a long and active career as a pastor and an educator, a televangelist and a leading figure in Christian politics. LaHaye is credited by Jerry Falwell as “the motivation behind the birth of the Religious Right,” 115and he served as cochairman of the failed presidential campaign of conservative Republican Jack Kemp, at least until he was asked to resign after he was quoted as calling Roman Catholicism “a false religion.” 116

Aside from the Left Behind series, LaHaye’s fifty books include tracts that condemn the United Nations, gay sexuality, “secular humanism,” and various other bogeymen of Christian fundamentalism. “He’s basically provided an agenda for conservatives on a range of issues from abortion and pornography to creationism, prayer in schools, and public education as a hotbed of secularism and liberalism,” according to Paul Boyer. 117And LaHaye himself readily acknowledges that the Left Behind series is a yet another weapon in the struggle for the hearts and minds of his fellow Americans.

“We are in a cultural war in this country, and there are two worldviews—one built on the writings of man and one on the writing of God,” LaHaye explained to one interviewer. “Those two views of what is going to help America and the world are 180 degrees in opposition.” 118

That’s exactly why the books in the Left Behind series embrace the same dualistic theology—and the same revenge-seeking rhetoric—that burn so hotly in the book of Revelation. All of the complexities of the modern world are swept away and replaced by the simple conflict between God and Satan—another borrowing from the book of Revelation. As the Tribulation begins, according to the plot line of the Left Behind series, a handful of Christians who missed out on the Rapture are inspired to join the struggle against the Antichrist, who is depicted as a slick Jewish politician with headquarters in modern Iraq, the site of ancient Babylon.

“They promote conspiracy theories; they demonize proponents of arms control, ecumenicalism, abortion rights and everyone else disliked by the Christian right,” complains Gershom Gorenberg in a review of the Left Behind series that appeared in the American Prospect. 119“Their anti-Jewishness is exceeded only by their anti-Catholicism. Most basically, they reject the very idea of open, democratic debate. In the world of Left Behind, there exists a single truth, based on a purportedly literal reading of Scripture; anyone who disagrees with that truth is deceived or evil.” 120

Not coincidentally, the Left Behind series peaked at the very moment when the Western world awakened to the new peril that had replaced the “evil empire” of the Reagan era—the challenge of militant Islam and, especially, the spectacle of religious terrorism on an unprecedented scale. Suddenly, everything old was new again; after all, the prophet Muhammad had been seen as a candidate for the Antichrist by the Christian world more than a thousand years before the Bolshevik Revolution. And when America went to war against Iraq, the struggle that George W. Bush called a “clash of ideologies” could be readily seen, yet again, as the war between the Lamb and the Beast.

By the time George W. Bush put himself in pursuit of the presidency, in fact, the bonding of politics and religion in America was nearly complete. Converted to born-again Christianity by Billy Graham after a drunken weekend at the Bush family compound in 1985, he had come to rely on the fundamentalist voting bloc as his core constituency. When asked during a debate among Republican presidential candidates in 1999 to cite his favorite political philosopher, for example, he answered “Christ,” and went on to explain: “When you turn your heart and your life over to Christ, when you accept Christ as the Savior, it changes your heart and changes your life.” 121And, once he reached the White House in 2001, Bush promptly launched a “faith-based initiative” that funded the social-welfare programs of various religious organizations.

“The nation’s founders, smarting still from the punitive pieties of Europe’s state religions, were adamant about erecting a wall between organized religion and political authority,” wrote journalist Ron Suskind in the New York Times. “But, suddenly, that seems like a long time ago. George W. Bush…has steadily, inexorably, changed the office itself. He has created the faith-based presidency.” 122

Bush is not given to making apocalyptic pronouncements of the kind that fell so readily from the lips of Ronald Reagan. He prefers the phrase “cultural change” to “culture war.” 123Bush, however, is plainspoken about what he sees as the targets of “culture change,” including abortion, gay marriage, embryonic stem-cell research, and the constitutional ban on prayer in public schools. In fact, he adopts a strikingly warlike tone in describing his self-appointed mission: “So the faith-based initiative recognizes that there is an army of compassion that needs to be nurtured, rallied, called forth, and funded,” he explained during an interview with representatives of various religious publications, “without causing the army to have to lose the reason it’s an army in the first place. 124

If Bush does not speak in the familiar vocabulary of apocalyptic fundamentalism, it is mostly because a new and updated “language arsenal” has been deployed in contemporary America. What was once called “creationism,” for example, is now known as “intelligent design”—a code phrase that means essentially the same thing—and Bush has advocated that both “intelligent design” and the scientific theory of evolution ought to be taught in public schools. What doctors call “end-of-life care” is now condemned as “euthanasia,” and Bush has called for a national commitment to “a culture of life, where all Americans are welcomed and valued and protected, especially those who live at the mercy of others.”

The fact that Bush is not a Bible thumper is itself a cause for concern among observers on both sides of the culture war precisely because they suspect that he is only concealing his true beliefs. “The nation’s executive mansion is currently honeycombed with prayer groups and Bible study cells, like a white monastery,” wrote historian and biographer Garry Wills in the New York Times. “A sly dig there is ‘Missed you at Bible study.’” 125Bush, as far as we know, does not display the placard that could be seen in the office of former Republican congressman Tom DeLay—“This Could Be the Day!” 126—but the unspoken suspicion among some of Bush’s critics is that he may secretly share the same urgent expectation.

Ironically, such suspicions are mirrored among Bush’s adversaries on the ragged edge of Christian fundamentalism. Bush père, for example, may have boasted of being a born-again Christian, but his insider status at the United Nations, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Trilateral Commission only confirmed the worst fears of the conspiracy theorists. And when Bush fils came along, the fact that both father and son had been members of Skull and Bones, a club for undergraduates at Yale that is often called a “secret society,” took on satanic meanings. “Indeed, it may be that men of goodwill such as Woodrow Wilson, Jimmy Carter, and George Bush,” writes Pat Robertson in The New World Order, “are in reality unknowingly and unwittingly carrying out the mission and mouthing the phrases of a tightly knit cabal whose goal is nothing less than a new order for the human race under the domination of Lucifer and his followers.” 127