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

Abstract

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.

Big‐tent eschatology: Apocalypse as a mobilizing concept for the January 6, 2021 Capitol Riot

“…Each component offers a narrative placeholder that can be dressed up in the trappings of present crisis; Gog and Magog, for example, have come to represent the image of the invasion of a heathen horde, which over the years has been mapped onto the Soviet Union, then Iran, as needed 7 . By “flattening” the Book of Revelation into a way of reading the present and applying a “patchwork collage approach of premillennial dispensationalist theology,” ambivalent images can be decoded over and over again according to each major news cycle (Douglas, 2021, 9). The result, after more than a century of such practices, is an accretion of interpretations that generates a connotations‐stacked, mix‐and‐match compendium of symbols with which one can make sense of the present.…”

“…One claimed the country was at a “crossroads,” where one path leads to freedom and the “the other path leads to socialism, globalism, destruction—a dismantling of our great nation as we know it … Now is our moment to save our republic and protect our freedoms from the corrupt and destructive forces at work” (Seidel, 2022, 4). “Revelation,” here too, translates to a familiar “Manichean binary,” that demands action as the sole resolution, yet both sides of the binary are described in largely secular terms (Douglas, 2021, 5). Similarly, another ad features “multiple speakers talking about losing the nation, losing freedom, the last stand, and ‘fighting’ to prevent that” (Seidel, 2022, 2).…”

“… 5 5 For the purposes of this essay, my definition of apocalypse attempts to walk a neat line between a more expansive, philosophically organized definition about subjectivity in crisis and a more traditional genre‐focused definition. For more incisive definitions of the genre, see Collins (1998) or Christopher Douglas (2021). …”

Evangelical literary tradition and moral foundations theory

“…In a previous article, I analyzed Left Behind's genre of apocalypse as the worldview that animates much Christian Right literature and politics. For a hundred pages in Glorious Appearing , Jesus rides through the air making speeches that cause mass slaughter of his enemies, its authors clearly enthusiastic for the just destruction of annihilated bodies (Douglas, 2022, 2). If Job is an individual theodicy, apocalypse is a communal theodicy, and Biblical scholarship helps us see its development in response to Judean oppression under Seleucid empire and then Jesus followers' response to persecution under Roman empire.…”

“…That the genre has now returned as the most successful evangelical fiction 2200 years later attests to its radical (mis)appropriation by a politically powerful American demographic that nonetheless has been compelled to share political and cultural power in the last half‐century, a softening of privilege it has experienced as persecution, “conflating future oppression under the Antichrist with contemporary policies that decenter or deprivilege them. Antichrist abolishing Christianity tomorrow is anticipated by secularists making them bake a cake for gay husbands today” (Douglas, 2022, 12). Like The Shack , and in the same service of theodicy, the Left Behind series proliferates divine beings as a way of managing believers' concerns about God's responsibility for their suffering.…”