The Left Behind series of books is extremely popular among conservative and fundamentalist Christians in America. This means that the ideology of the books is becoming part of the ideology of Christian America. Everyone should care about what that ideology is and what it means for America's future.

Joe Bageant writes:

If a Muslim were to write an Islamic version of last book in the Left Behind series, Glorious Appearing, and publish it across the Middle East, Americans would go berserk. Yet tens of millions of Christians eagerly await and celebrate an End Time when everyone who disagrees with them will be murdered in ways that make Islamic beheading look like a bridal shower. Jesus -- who apparently has a much nastier streak than we have been led to believe—merely speaks and “the bodies of the enemy are ripped wide open down the middle.” In the book Christians have to drive carefully to avoid “hitting splayed and filleted corpses of men and women and horses.” [...]

Fetishizing of the End Times as a spectacular gore-fest visited upon the unbelievers is nothing new. But the sheer number of people gleefully enjoying the spectacle of their own blackest magical thinking made manifest by mass media is new. Or at least the media aspect is new. It reinforces the major appeal of these beliefs, the appeal being (to restate the obvious) that they get to pass judgment on everyone who disagrees with them, and then watch God kick the living snot out of them. It doesn’t get any better than that.

The books are supposed to be fiction, and readers acknowledge that they are fiction, but they don’t really seem to believe it in their hearts:

[T]ens of millions of American fundamentalists, despite their claims otherwise, read and absorb the all-time best selling Left Behind book series as prophesy and fact. How could they possibly not after being conditioned all their lives to accept the End Times as the ultimate reality? We are talking about a group of Americans twenty percent of whose children graduate from high school identifying H2O as a cable channel. Children who, like their parents and grandparents, come from that roughly half of all Americans who can approximately read, but are dysfunctionally literate to the extent they cannot grasp any textual abstraction or overall thematic content.

The religious extremism in the books is accompanied by political extremism on the part of the primary author:

Scratch LaHaye and you’ll find an honest-to-god surviving John Bircher. In the 1960s when LaHaye was a young up-and-coming Baptist preacher fresh out of Bob Jones University, he lectured on behalf of Republican Robert Welch’s John Birch Society. We are talking about a man who believed Dwight Eisenhower was an agent of the Communist Party taking orders from his brother, Milt Eisenhower. Along the way LaHaye extended his paranoid list of villains to include secular humanists who “are Satan’s agents hiding behind the Constitution.” And the only way to destroy them is to destroy their cover.

From what I’ve seen, the writing of the Left Behind books is atrocious. I actually enjoy stories dealing with the “end of the world,” but these books just don’t seem worth spending the time with. The theology must be very appealing to Christians, though, given how much they read these books. If Christians think that this is good theology and a good, positive vision of the future and of their God, Christianity is in trouble.

 

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