Keeping the End in Mind: Left Behind, the Apocalypse and the Evangelical Imagination

Guest, Mathew

doi:10.1093/litthe/frs053

Cited by 2 publications

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References 10 publications

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“…The body count of billions of humans slain by divine beings dwarfs all other human catastrophes and wars combined, reflecting what can only be called a bloodthirsty desire for justice and vengeance against one's enemies on the part of the series' two Christian Right authors, Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. Having sold 80 million copies, and with 20% of the U.S. population having read at least one of the novels by 2006 (Chapman 2013, p. 4), Left Behind-its 12 part series, its sequel, its three prequels, its 40 adolescent novellas, its films and video game spinoffs-is studied closely by social scientists and historians as a window into the End Times theology and politics of the Christian Right, the politically muscular movement that propelled George W. Bush and then Donald Trump into the office of the presidency (see, e.g., Frykholm 2004;Gribben 2007;Guest 2012;Harding 2001;Shuck 2005;Vox 2017). With some notable exceptions (Chapman 2013;Hungerford 2010;Mleynek 2005), literary studies generally shies away from Left Behind and other fundamentalist fiction (Douglas 2020a, "Introduction").…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Revenge Is a Genre Best Served Old: Apocalypse in Christian Right Literature and Politics

Douglas

2021

Religions

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Apocalypse is a phenomenology of disorder that entails a range of religious affects and experiences largely outside normative expectations of benevolent religion. Vindication, judgment, revenge, resentment, righteous hatred of one’s enemies, the wish for their imminent destruction, theological certainty, the triumphant display of right authority, right judgement, and just punishment—these are the primary affects. As a literary genre and a worldview, apocalypse characterizes both the most famous example of evangelical fiction—the Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins—and the U.S. Christian Right’s politics. This article’s methodological contribution is to return us to the beginnings of apocalypse in Biblical and parabiblical literature to better understand the questions of theodicy that Left Behind renews in unexpected ways. Conservative white Christians use apocalypse to articulate their experience as God’s chosen but persecuted people in a diversely populated cosmos, wherein their political foes are the enemies of God. However strange the supersessionist appropriation, apocalypse shapes their understanding of why God lets them suffer so—and may also signal an underlying fear about the power and attention of their deity.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%