I’m having a crisis of confidence, and I blame Jesus.
Actually, my crisis is not so much about Jesus as it is about the impending rapture, which I don’t necessarily believe will happen. But I don’t believe the rapture won’t happen, either; I really don’t see any evidence for (or against) either scenario. It all seems unlikely, but still plausible. Interestingly enough, I don’t think there is a word for my particular worldview: “Nihilism” means you don’t believe in anything, but I can’t find a word that describes partial belief in everything. “Paganism” is probably the closest candidate, but that seems too Druidesque for the style of philosophy I’m referring to. Some would claim that this is kind of like “agnosticism,” but true agnostics always seem too willing to side with the negative; they claim there are no answers, so they live as if those answers don’t exist. They’re really just nihilists without panache.
Not me, though. I’m prone to believe that just about any religious ideology is potentially accurate, regardless of how ridiculous it might seem (or be). Which is really making it hard for me to comment on Left Behind.
According to the blurb on its jacket, the Left Behind book series has more than 40 million copies in print, which would normally prompt me to assume that most of America is vaguely familiar with what these books are about. However, that is not the case. By and large, stuff like Left Behind exists only with that bizarre subculture of “good people,” most of whom I’ve never met and never will. These are the kind of people who are fanatically good—the kind of people who’ll tell you that goodness isn’t even that much of an accomplishment.
Left Behind is the first of eleven books about the end of the world. It was conceptualized by Dr. Tim LaHaye, a self-described “prophecy scholar,” and written by Jerry B. Jenkins, a dude who has written over a hundred other books (mostly biographies about moral celebrities like Billy Graham and Walter Payton). The novel’s premise is that the day of reckoning finally arrives and millions of people just disappear into thin air, leaving behind all their clothes and eyeglasses and Nikes and dental work. All the humans who don’t evaporate are forced to come to grips with why this event happened (and specifically why God did not select them). The answer is that they did not “accept Christ as their personal savior,” and now they have seven years to embrace God and battle the rising Antichrist, a charismatic Romanian named Nicolae Carpathia, who is described by the author as resembling “a young Robert Redford.”
Everything that happens in Left Behind is built around interpretations of Paul’s letters and the Book of Revelation, unquestionably the most fucked-up part of the Bible (except maybe for the Book of Job). It’s the epitome of a cautionary tale; every twist of its plot mechanics scream at the reader to realize that the clock is ticking, but it’s not too late—there is still time to accept Jesus and exist forever in the kingdom of heaven. And what’s especially fascinating about this book is that it’s a best-selling piece of entertainment, even though it doesn’t offer intellectual flexibility; it’s pop art, but it has an amazingly strict perspective on what is right and what is wrong. In Left Behind, the only people who are accepted by God are those who would be classified as fundamentalist wacko Jesus freaks with no intellectual credibility in modern society. Many of the Left Behind characters who aren’t taken to heaven—in fact, almost all of them—seem like solid citizens (or—at worst—“normal” Americans). And that creates a weird sensation for the Left Behind reader, because the post-Rapture earth initially seems like a better place to live. Everybody boring would be gone. One could assume that all the infidels who weren’t teleported into God’s kingdom must be pretty cool: All the guys would be drinkers and all the women would be easy, and you could make jokes about homeless people and teen suicide and crack babies without offending anyone. Quite frankly, my response to the opening pages of Left Behind was “Sounds good to me.”
Things in Left Behind get disconcerting pretty rapidly, however, and part of what I found disconcerting was that its main character is a reporter named Buck Williams, which was also the name of a retired NBA power forward regularly described as the league’s hardest worker. As a result, I kept imagining this bearded six-foot-nine black guy as the vortex of the story, which really wouldn’t have been that much of a stretch, especially since the real Buck Williams was involved with the “Jammin’ Against the Darkness” basketball ministry. If the Rapture came down tonight, I’m guessing Buck would be boxing out J.C. by breakfast.
A mind-numbing percentage of pro athletes are obsessed with God. According to an episode of Bryant Gumbel’s Real Sports on HBO, some studies suggest that as many as 40 percent of NFL players consider themselves “born again.” This trend continues to baffle me, especially since it seems like an equal number of pro football players spend the entire off-season snorting coke off the thighs of Cuban prostitutes and murdering their ex-girlfriends.
That notwithstanding, you can’t ignore the relationship between pro sports and end-of-days theology, and its acceleration as an all-or-nothing way of life. In the 1970s, the template for a religious athlete was a player like Roger Staubach of the Dallas Cowboys, someone who was seen as religious simply because everybody knew he was Catholic. The contemporary roster for God’s Squad is far more competitive; if you’re the kind of fellow who’d be “left behind,” you don’t qualify. These are guys like Kurt Warner of the St. Louis Rams, a person who would consider being called a zealot complimentary.
Warner is an especially interesting case, because his decision to become “born again” appears to have helped his career as a football player. Here was a guy who couldn’t make an NFL roster, was working in a grocery store, and was married to a dying woman. And then—inexplicably—his life completely turns around and he becomes the best quarterback in the NFL (and his wife lives!). Warner gives all the credit for this turnaround to his “almighty savior Jesus Christ,” and that explanation seems no less plausible than any other explanation. In fact, I find that I sort of want to believe him. In the fourth quarter of Super Bowl XXXVI, Warner made a break for the end zone against the New England Patriots; at the time, the Rams were down 17–3, and it was fourth and goal. Warner was hit at the one-yard line and fumbled, and a Patriot returned the ball ninety-nine yards for what seemed to be a game-clinching touchdown. However, this play was erased—quite possibly wiped clean by the hand of God. For no valid reason, Patriots linebacker Willie McGinest blatantly tackled Ram running back Marshall Faulk on the weak side of the play, forcing the referee to call defensive holding. I remember thinking to myself, “Holy shit. That made no sense whatsoever. I guess God really does care about football.” St. Louis retained possession and Warner scored two plays later, eventually tying the game with a touchdown pass to Ricky Proel with under two minutes remaining.
I’m not sure why God would care about a football game, but he certainly seemed interested in this one. It looked like Warner’s faith was tangibly affecting the outcome, which is a wonderful notion. However, New England ultimately won Super Bowl XXXVI on the final play—a forty-eight-yard field goal, kicked by a guy who grew up in South Dakota and is related to Evel Knievel. You can’t question God, though: The following Monday, I happened to catch a few minutes of The 700 Club, and a Patriot wide receiver was talking about how God is awesome. With competitive spirituality, it’s always a push.
Part of the never-ending weirdness surrounding Left Behind was the 2000 movie version that starred Kirk Cameron, still best known as Mike Seaver from the ABC sitcom Growing Pains. Cameron portrays the aforementioned Buck Williams, a famous broadcast journalist (this is a slight alteration from the book, where Williams is a famous magazine writer). If one views the literary version of Left Behind to be mechanical and didactic, the film version would have to be classified as boring and pedantic. But—once again—there’s something oddly compelling about watching this narrative unfold, and it’s mostly because of Kirk’s mind-bending presence.
It’s always peculiar when someone famous becomes ultra-religious (Prince being the most obvious example), but it’s especially strange when he or she actively tries to advocate their religiosity. Cameron says he became a “believer” when he was seventeen or eighteen, but nobody really cared until he got involved with Left Behind and suddenly became the biggest Christian movie star in America (which—truth be told—is kind of like being the most successful heroin dealer on the campus of Brigham Young University). His wife is also in Left Behind, and she portrays a (relatively) immoral flight attendant named Hattie Durham.
When interviewed about Left Behind when it was first released, Cameron usually played things pretty close to the vest and always stressed that he wanted the film to deliver a point of view about the Bible, but also to work as a commercially competitive secular thriller. However, I did find this mildly controversial exchange from an interview Cameron did with some guy named Robin Parrish on a Christian music site operated by about.com:
How accurate do you think Left Behind is? I mean obviously, there won’t be a real-life Buck or Hattie or whoever. But the events that transpire in the story, how accurate do you think they are? The movie or the book?
Both.
I think one of the most appealing aspects of the Left Behind story is that these are events that could be happening today or tomorrow. It’s very realistic. The events that happen in the story parallel, I think very realistically, the events depicted in the Bible. And whether you’re a pre-Trib Rapture believer, or a mid-Trib, or a post-Trib…
Yeah, is there anything that people who don’t believe in a pre-Tribulation Rapture can take away from this movie?
I’d encourage those people to take a look at the Left Behind film project Web site, which has answers to those kinds of questions. You know…I’m not a pre-Trib or post-Trib expert at defending this kind of stuff, but personally I think the movie is very accurate and in line with the Bible. There are some things in prophecy that we’re just going to have to wait and see how they happen, that we’re not going to really know until they do. The Bible says that Jesus is coming soon though, so I think more important than the pre-Trib or post-Trib debate is all of us being ready before either one happens.
Now, I have no real understanding of what a “pre-Tribulation Rapture” is supposed to signify symbolically; it refers to a Rapture that happens before the technical apocalypse, but I’m not exactly sure how that would be better or worse than a “mid-Tribulation” or “post-Tribulation” Rapture. Honestly, I don’t think it’s important. However, this point is important: Kirk Cameron thinks the idea of 100 million Christians suddenly disappearing is “very realistic.” And I don’t mention this to mock him; I mention this because it’s the kind of realization that significantly changes the experience of watching this movie. In the film, Buck Williams goes from being a normal, successful person to someone who ardently wants the world to realize that there is no future for the unholy and that we must prepare for the political incarnation of Satan; apparently, the exact same thing happened to Cameron in real life. In his mind, he has made a docudrama about a historical event that merely hasn’t happened yet. This is not a former teen actor forced to star in an amateurish production because he needs the money; this is a former teen actor who consciously pursued an amateurish production with the hope of saving mankind. Relatively speaking, all those years he spent with Alan Thicke and Tracey Gold must seem like total shit.
There is something undeniably attractive about becoming a born-again Christian. I hear atheists say that all the time, although they inevitably make that suggestion in the most insulting way possible: Nothing offends me more than those who claim they wish they could become blindly religious because it would “make everything so simple.” People who make that argument are trying to convince the world that they’re somehow doomed by their own intelligence, and that they’d love to be as stupid as all the thoughtless automatons they condescendingly despise. That is not what I find appealing about the Born-Again Lifestyle. Personally, I think becoming a born-again Christian would be really cool, at least for a while. It would sort of be like joining the Crips or the Mossad or Fugazi.
Every rational person will tell you that all the world’s problems ultimately derive from disputes that are perceived by the warring parties as “Us vs. Them.” That seems sensible, but I don’t know if it’s necessarily true; all my problems come from the opposite scenario. I was far more interesting—and probably smarter, in a way—when I refused to recognize the existence of the color gray in my black-and-white universe. When I was twenty-one, I was adamantly anti-abortion and anti–death penalty; these were very clear ideas to me. However, things have since happened in my life, and now I have no feelings about either issue. And I’m sincere about that; I really have no opinion about abortion or the death penalty. Somehow, they don’t even seem important. But that’s what happens whenever you start to understand that most things cannot be emotively understood: You’re able to make better conversation over snifters of brandy, but you become an unfeeling idiot. You go from believing in objective reality to suspecting an objective reality exists; eventually, you start trying to make objectivity mesh with situational ethics, since every situation now seems unique. And then someone tells you that situational ethics is actually an oxymoron, since the idea of ethics is that these are things you do all the time, regardless of the situation. And pretty soon you find yourself in a circumstance where someone asks you if you believe that life begins at conception, and you find yourself changing the subject to NASCAR racing.
This is not a problem for the born again. There are no other subjects, really; nothing else—besides being born again—is even marginally important. Every moment of your life is a search-and-rescue mission: Everyone you meet needs to be converted and anyone you don’t convert is going to hell, and you will be partially at fault for their scorched corpse. Life would become unspeakably important, and every conversation you’d have for the rest of your life (or until the Rapture—whichever comes first) would really, really, really matter. If you ask me, that’s pretty glamorous. And Left Behind pushes that paradigm relentlessly. Another one of its primary characters—airline pilot Rayford Steele—becomes born again after he loses his wife and twelve-year-old son. However, his skeptical college-aged daughter Chloe doesn’t make God’s cut, so much of the text revolves around his attempts to convert Chloe to “The Way.” And the main psychological hurdle Steele must overcome is the fact that he’s not an obtrusive jackass, which Left Behind says we all need to become. “Here I am, worried about offending people,” Rayford thinks to himself at the beginning of chapter 19. “I’m liable to ‘not offend’ my own daughter right into hell.” The stakes are too high to concern oneself with manners.
This is ultimately what I like about the Born-Again Lifestyle: Even though I see fundamentalist Christians as wild-eyed maniacs, I respect their verve. They are probably the only people openly fighting against America’s insipid Oprah Culture—the pervasive belief system that insists everyone’s perspective is valid and that no one can be judged. As far as I can tell, most people I know are like me; most of the people I know are bad people (or they’re good people, but they consciously choose to do bad things). We deserve to be judged.
I realize that liberals and libertarians and Michael Stipe are always quick to quote the Bible when you say something like that, and they’ll tell you, “Judge not, lest ye be judged.” And that’s a solid retort for just about anything, really. But the thing with born agains is that they want to be judged. They can’t fucking wait. That’s why they’re cool.
As I just mentioned, Rayford Steele loses his young son in Left Behind’s Rapture. As it turns out, every young child in this book vanishes, including infants in the process of being born. This is to indicate that they are “innocents” and have done no wrong. And oddly, this was the aspect of Left Behind I found most distasteful.
First of all, it kind of contradicts the book’s premise, since we are constantly told that the ONLY way to get into heaven is to accept Christ, which no four-year-old (much less a four-month-old) could possibly comprehend. Granted, this is mostly a technicality, and I’m sure it’s intentional (for most exclusivist born-again groups, the technicalities are everything; the technicalities are what save you). But my larger issue is philosophical: Why do we assume all children are inherently innocent? Innocent of what? I mean, any grammar school teacher will tell you that “kids can be cruel” on the playground; the average third-grader will gleefully walk up to a six-year-old with hydrocephalus and ask, “What’s wrong with you, Big Head?” And that third-grader knows what he’s doing is evil. He knows it’s hurtful. Little boys torture cats and cute little girls humiliate fat little girls, and they know it’s wrong. They do it because it’s wrong. Sometimes I think children are the worst people alive. And even if they’re not—even if some smiling toddler is as pure as Evian—it’s only a matter of time. He’ll eventually become the fifty-year-old car salesman who we’ll all assume is morally bankrupt until he proves otherwise.
As far as I can tell, the nicest thing you can say about children is that they haven’t done anything terrible yet.
So let’s get to the core question in Left Behind: If the Rapture happened tonight, who gets called up to the Big Show? Judging from the text, the answer is “No one I know, and probably no one who would read this essay.” Left Behind is pretty clear about this, and the authors go to great lengths to illustrate how many of the people passed over by God are fair, moral, and—for the most part—more heroic than prototypical humans. This is a direct reflection of the primary audience for hardcore Christian literature; one assumes those readers would typically possess those same characteristics and simply need a little literary push to become “higher” Christians.
The best example in Left Behind is Rayford Steele, the person with whom we’re evidently supposed to “relate.” Buck Williams is the star and the catalyst (especially in the film version), but his main purpose is to move the plot along and provide the conflict. It’s through Rayford that we are supposed to understand the novel’s theme and experience. The theme is that you’re good, but being good is not enough; the experience is that you cannot be saved until you allow yourself to surrender to faith, even though that’s not really how it works for Rayford.
On the very first page of Left Behind, we learn that Rayford has a bad marriage, and it’s because his wife had developed an “obsession” with religion. We also learn that—twelve years prior—Rayford drunkenly kissed another woman at the company Christmas party and has never really forgiven himself. However, that guilt does not stop him from secretly lusting after the aforementioned Hattie Durham, even though he never actually touches her (interestingly enough, Rayford and Hattie do have a physical relationship in the film version of Left Behind, presumably because director Victor Sarin didn’t think moviegoers would buy the whole Jimmy Carter “I’ve lusted in my heart” sentiment).
Suffice it to say that Rayford would generally be described as a very decent person in the secular universe, which is how most Left Behind readers would likely view themselves. However, he can’t see the espoused “larger truth,” which is that there is only a future for those who take the Kierkegaardian leap and believe everything the Bible states (and as literally as possible).
Rayford can’t do this until his life is destroyed, so his conversion isn’t all that remarkable (it actually seems like the most reasonable decision, considering the circumstances). In many ways, this is the book’s most glaring flaw: It demands blind faith from the reader, but it illustrates faith as a response to terror. And since Left Behind isn’t a metaphor—it presents itself as a fictionalized account of what will happen, according to the Book of Revelation—the justification for embracing Jesus mostly seems like a scare tactic. It’s not a sophisticated reason for believing in God.
Of course, that’s also the point: There is no sophisticated reason for believing in anything supernatural, so it really comes down to believing you’re right. This is another example of how born agains are cool—you’d think they’d be humble, but they’ve got to be amazingly cocksure. And once you’ve crossed over, you don’t even have to try to be nice; according to the born-again exemplar, your goodness will be a natural extension of your salvation. Caring about orphans and helping the homeless will come as naturally as having sex with coworkers and stealing office supplies. If you consciously do good works out of obligation, you’ll never get into heaven; however, if you make God your proverbial copilot, doing good works will just become an unconscious part of your life.
I guess that’s probably the moment where I just stop accepting all this born-again bullshit, no matter how hard I try to remain open-minded. Though I obviously have no proof of this, the one aspect of life that seems clear to me is that good people do whatever they believe is the right thing to do. Being virtuous is hard, not easy. The idea of doing good things simply because you’re good seems like a zero-sum game; I’m not even sure if those actions would still qualify as “good,” since they’d merely be a function of normal behavior. Regardless of what kind of god you believe in—a loving god, a vengeful god, a capricious god, a snooty beret-wearing French god, whatever—one has to assume that you can’t be penalized for doing the things you believe to be truly righteous and just. Certainly, this creates some pretty glaring problems: Hitler may have thought he was serving God. Stalin may have thought he was serving God (or something vaguely similar). I’m certain Osama bin Laden was positive he was serving God. It’s not hard to fathom that all of those maniacs were certain that what they were doing was right. Meanwhile, I constantly do things that I know are wrong; they’re not on the same scale as incinerating Jews or blowing up skyscrapers, but my motivations might be worse. I have looked directly into the eyes of a woman I loved and told her lies for no reason, except that those lies would allow me to continue having sex with another woman I cared about less. This act did not kill 20 million Russian peasants, but it might be more “diabolical” in a literal sense. If I died and found out I was going to hell and Stalin was in heaven, I would note the irony, but I really couldn’t complain. I don’t make the fucking rules.
Just to cover all my doomed bases, I watched a few other apocalyptic movies after Left Behind: I rented The Omega Code and revisited The Rapture. The latter film—a 1991 movie starring Mimi Rogers—was a polarizing attempt to make the end of the world into a conventionally entertaining film, and I still think it’s among the decade’s more interesting movies (at least for its first seventy-five minutes). The Rapture opens with Rogers as a bored sex addict, and it ends with her dragging her child into the desert to wait for God’s wrath. Part of the reason so many critics like this film is because writer/director Michael Tolkin “goes all the way” and resists the temptation to end the film with an unclear conclusion. That’s commendable, but I wonder what the response would have been if Rogers didn’t question God at the very end; her character essentially wants to know why God plays with people like pawns and created a totally fucked world when making a utopia would have been just as easy (and though I realize these are not exactly the most profound of existential questions, it’s hard to deny that they’re not the most important ones, either).
Within the scope of mainstream filmmaking—it was released on the same day as the Joe Pesci vehicle The Super—The Rapture clearly seems like a religious movie. But it’s really not, because it doesn’t have a religious point of view. When push comes to shove, Tolkin’s script adopts a staunchly humanistic take: The Mimi Rogers character asks God why his universe doesn’t make sense. Like most people, she thinks life should be a democracy and that God should behave like an altruistic politician who acts in our best interests. You hear this all the time; critics of organized religion constantly say things like, “There is no way a just God would send a man like Gandhi to hell simply because he’s not a Christian.” Well, why not? I’m certainly pulling for Gandhi’s eternal salvation, but there’s no reason to believe there’s a logic to the afterlife selection process. It might be logical, and it might be arbitrary; in a way, it would be more logical if it was totally arbitrary. But the idea of questioning God’s motives will always be a fiercely American thing to do; it’s almost patriotic to get in God’s face. I’m pretty sure a lot of my friends would love the opportunity to vote against God in a run-off election. Even I’d be curious to see who the other candidate might be (probably Harry Browne).
In contrast, 1999’s The Omega Code is much like Left Behind in that it doesn’t really offer any options besides buying into the whole born-again credit union. Since both stories are so dogged about the Book of Revelation, they share lots of plot points (i.e., two Israeli prophets screaming about the Second Coming, the construction of a church on The Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, a miracle agricultural product that will end world hunger, etc.). The main difference is that The Omega Code has ties with Michael Drosnin’s The Bible Code, arguably the goofiest book I’ve ever purchased in a lesbian bookstore. Drosnin’s book claims the Torah is actually a three-dimensional crossword puzzle that predicted (among other things) the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin; more importantly, it allows computer specialists to learn just about anything—the date of the coming nuclear war (2006), the coming California earthquake (2010), and the best Rush album (2112). I have no idea why I bought this book (or why it was assumed to be of specific interest to lesbians), but it forms the narrative thread for The Omega Code, a movie that was actually less watchable than Left Behind. Surprisingly, The Omega Code earned about three times as much as Left Behind ($12.6 million to $4.2 million), even though it was made with a much smaller budget ($8 million and $17.4 million, respectively).
I’m not sure why The Omega Code made more at the box office than Left Behind; it’s kind of like trying to deduce why Armageddon grossed more than Deep Impact. But the most plausible explanation is that Left Behind tried a marketing gamble that failed: It was released on video before it was released in theaters. At the end of the VHS version of Left Behind, there is a “special message” from Kirk Cameron. Kirk appears to be standing in the Amazon rain forest while explaining why the movie went to Blockbuster before it went to theaters. “You are part of a very select group,” Cameron tells us, “and that group makes up less than one percent of the country…[but] what about the other 99 percent of the country?” The scheme by Left Behind’s production company (an organization that calls itself Cloud 10) was to have every core reader of Left Behind see the film in their living room in the winter of 1999 and then instruct each person to demand it be played theatrically in every city in America when it was officially released on February 2, 2000. “We need you to literally tell everyone you know,” Kirk stressed in his video message.
I was working as the film critic for the Akron Beacon Journal in early 2000, and—all during January—I kept getting phone calls from strangers, telling me I needed to write a story about some upcoming movie that I had never heard of; I’ve now come to realize that these were Left Behind people. I can’t recall if the film ever opened in Akron or not. Regardless, there is a part of me that would like to see this as an example of how Left Behind is different from other kinds of entertainment. Its audience truly felt it had a social and spiritual import that far exceeded everything else that opened that same weekend (such as Freddie Prinze Jr.’s Head Over Heels). And I’m sure that some of the people who called me that January truly did believe that a Kirk Cameron flick could save the world, and that it was their vocation to make sure all the sinners in suburban Ohio became aware of its existence. However, I can’t ignore my sinking suspicion that the makers of this movie merely assumed their best hope for commercial success was to manipulate the very people who never needed a movie or a book to learn how to love Jesus. They took people who wanted to rescue my soul and turned them into publicists. Which makes me think the people at Cloud 10 are probably a few tiers below Stalin, too.
There are eleven books in the Left Behind series, and many have excellent subtitles like The Destroyer Is Unleashed and The Beast Takes Possession, both of which may have been Ronnie James Dio records. I am not going to read any more of them, mostly because I know how they’re going to end. I mean, doesn’t everybody? I went back and read the Book of Revelations, which doesn’t make much sense except for the conclusion—that’s where it implicitly states that Jesus is “coming soon.” Of course, Jesus operates within the idiom of infinity, so “soon” might be 30 billion years. Sometimes I find myself wishing that the world would end in my lifetime, since that would be oddly flattering; we’d all be part of humanity’s apex. That’s about as great an accomplishment as I can hope for, since I just don’t see how I will possibly get into heaven, Rapture or otherwise.
When I was a little boy, I used to be very thankful that I was born Catholic. At the time, my Catholicism seemed like an outrageous bit of good fortune, since I considered every other religion to be fake (I considered Lutherans and Methodists akin to USFL franchises). Over time, my opinions on such things have evolved. But quite suddenly, I once again find myself thankful for Catholicism, or at least thankful for its more dogmatic principles. I’m hoping all those nuns were right: I’m angling for purgatory, and I’m angling hard.