Disclaimer: If you are a person whose beliefs generally align with the views put forward in Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins' Left Behind series--i.e. you are a premillenialist dispensationalist Evangelical Christian--you probably will not want to read this review. If you are a fan of their prose I recommend similar caution. This is because whether you find such an action justifiable on my behalf or not, I am about to, as the expression sometimes goes, rip this book a new one.
And before I continue with this next entry in our Bookvember adventure, I want to give a secondary disclaimer to those of you who don't buy into the Left Behind mythos: I don't have anything against mainstream Christianity. While I have my own beliefs and I will confess that those beliefs sometimes rub up against Christianity, I recognize that typical Christian beliefs in the United States are relatively non-toxic. I write this with the recognition that there's no avoiding discomfort in a review such as this--but I really do have to share my opinions on this book, for the reaction it elicited in me.
Left Behind, for those of you unaware, is a series telling the tale of those "left behind" to face the Great Tribulation after the Rapture takes the forgiven to Heaven. In a general sense, the first book establishes the premise of the series while introducing our principle characters. There are the members of what will be called the Tribulation Force (a league of faithful Antichrist-fighters), and their allies: we focus primarily on adulterer pilot Rayford Steele and a reporter named Cam "Buck" Williams. There is a plot about how in the early days of the Rapture, an Israeli scientist named Chaim Rosenzweig figured out to fertilize desert sands without irrigation; for this, Israel suffered a massive assault from post-Soviet Russia, wherein not a single person was killed, apparently by the hand of God. In the wake of the Rapture the social order has developed further from this, moving towards a UN-led one-world government under the command of charismatic young Romanian politician Nicolae Carpathia. Carpathia--if you couldn't tell from the name--is the Antichrist, and our heroes of the Tribulation Force slowly uncover the conspiracy he's set in place to ensure the rise of his dominion.
Here's the thing about Left Behind: it is not an inherently bad idea. There is a lot of mileage to be gotten out of a Rapture story--perhaps because of the Left Behind series, there has been an embrace of the idea in pop culture, regardless of the degree of religious intent in its presentation. Both as a secular and religious idea, Left Behind has potential. If you want to tell a more secularized version of the story, you'd have your basic Post-Apocalyptic model, with some potential for fantasy exploration--you could pit your characters against demons, for example. You could keep it ambiguous if it's the Biblical End-of-the-World or just an event that resembles such. And if you wanted to tell it as a story meant to convert people to Christianity, that could work just as well! Christianity guiding principle is ostensibly salvation, and so even if it jiggles the rules on the Apocalypse a little bit--have a story where our heroes are saved by their actions in the face of their final test! Left Behind thinks it's telling the latter story (and I'm sure at least some of the heroes go to Heaven in the end), but like a lot of works by Evangelicals, where it chooses to put its focus is where it becomes a thing of malice rather than mercy.
The issue with any sort of Rapture story is that the idea of a Rapture is inherently exclusionary. Typically, the estimates on the total of souls allowed into God's Kingdom by Rapture-believers represent a distinct minority of the human race. This usually contrasts the pop culture depiction of the Rapture wherein enough people are gone that society as we know it has collapsed. That was what I was expecting in Left Behind--cities on fire, planes crashing to the ground, power outages, cats and dogs living together...mass hysteria. Instead, the basic economy stays intact, airlines stay open, there is comparatively little social strife en masse...almost implying that few people were taken to Heaven in the end. And we do get specifics on who was taken, and who wasn't.
To begin with, all fetuses are taken to Heaven. This is a prelude to the scene wherein we learn about the abortion clinics who encourage people to get pregnant and have abortions just so they can stay in business. And the people who get pregnant and abort just for fun. I've already opened enough Pandora's Boxes, so I'm not going to go much further with this thread, but if the authors actually believe these clinics and people exist, that is absolutely repugnant of them. At best, they are emotionally manipulative; and frankly, folks, I'm just tired of all this hand-wringing hate against women who just don't want or can't have children.
Then there is the telling passage where we are learning about how babies and children almost universally vanished. That is a bit more bearable to me because it's less emotionally manipulative; then they say "even a few teenagers" were Raptured. That's some pretty telling phrasing there. Whether it's the opinion of the character saying that or the voice of the authors speaking through them, someone in the equation believes all but a few teenagers are so corrupt that they deserve eternal torture. I could dig my grave even deeper by wondering why any of these people deserve eternal torture for things like adultery or looking at porn (or "magazines which fed my lust," as the milquetoast prose would have it), but the more I tried to avoid looking for stereotypical opinions in the book, the more I found them. Of course the two old white Evangelicals writing about the Apocalypse believe that once puberty hits you you're worthy of damnation. Why would adolescent mistakes be forgiven by an all-benevolent deity, amirite?
I also don't really need to say that the book is racist, but when you've got a whole lot of celebration over Jews converting to spread the word of Christ, it's a little hard to avoid. Similarly, a lot of attention is drawn to the fact that the Antichrist is Romanian. Fiction is a slippery thing, in that it doesn't always represent the heart and soul of the creator, but if you do something too many times it's going to seem like a telling statement. I don't entirely know why LaHaye and Jenkins think Eastern Europeans are so sinister but it gets draining quickly.
Really, that's my issue with Left Behind: I went into it expecting better. The series is probably the most famous line of distinctly-genred "Christian fiction" books I know, and consequently, I was expecting something milder, more optimistic. And more convincing, because if Christian fiction is truly Christian it won't merely be entertaining. This sort of fiction should be convincing people to join up with what the authors (think they) practice, but instead it frames such a choice as one motivated by fear and exclusion. What is more is that, like a lot of the movies we've seen hitting theaters recently, it attempts to preemptively dismiss those who disagree with its view. This is not inherently an unsound argument strategy--you can toss out an opposing argument before it's aired, but it depends on how much you strawman your opposition, and how expertly you expose the irrelevance of such opposition. Near the end, the characters dismiss moderate Christians and their refusal to focus on the real problems of judging drug-users, abortion-havers, and porn-readers simply because the authors make them dismiss such people. After all, people, this is the Antichrist on the line, people!
Let's talk about this Antichrist. Nicolae Carpathia. What frustrates me is that that name is almost genius. He sounds like a fucking Doc Savage villain, and in a melodramatic, over-the-top pulpy atmosphere a character with that name could be used brilliantly. But this is meant to instead be a "subtle" tip-off that the head of the UN is the Son of Satan himself. The more I read that name the more I felt like the authors thought I was an idiot--that I couldn't figure out this guy was the Antichrist unless his name was some equivalent of "Damien Draculaston." I suspect from a certain point of view they do view their readers as not overly clever; that's why we're informed that Carpathia's enemies are heroic (i.e. masculine) via the fact that they have names like Rayford Steele, Buck Williams, Dirk Burton, and of course, Steve Plank. Maybe it's, yknow, "Plawnck," like the scientist, but if they mean like a plank of wood then it sounds like something Mike and the Bots would have called Reb Brown during Space Mutiny. If I can carry this tangent further, I have to comment on the fact that Rayford Steele's loved ones call him not "Ray" but "Rafe." "Rayford" is bad enough, but what could compel a writer to pen a series featuring a man named "Rafe Steele" as the protagonist?
Returning, though, to Carpathia--no, his name was not the only beef I had with him. Repetitious padding is what comprises most of Left Behind, but you will get so tired of hearing how Carpathia is handsome, famous, charming, the Sexiest Man Alive (which gets played up a huge deal), and 33 years old. Yes, I get it, he's 33 because that's how old Jesus was when he died--now I officially never want to read the words "33 years old" ever again. Then, the authors describe him on several occasions as "blond Robert Redford." NO. That is dishonest writing. If your fallback for physically describing your character is to compare them to a celebrity, you need another draft at best. Carpathia is set up to be charismatic because, as per the Christian tradition, he is a honey-not-vinegar sort of Antichrist, so nice and likable and talented that no one ever criticizes him, which is definitely an accurate and realistic view of humanity. We totally have people and things in our culture which are never criticized by anybody, right? In choosing this approach for him as a character, the authors make him come across as obviously evil--literally too good to be true. We humans wouldn't react to a man like him with adoration: we'd ask what he's selling.
Of course, another (possibly) unintended effect is that the book seems to encourage suspicion of those who bring peace and innovation. People have applied the idea of a charismatic and likable Antichrist to real figures all throughout history--"Of course Obama created a health care system which benefited millions! Giving you what you want is how the Devil hooks yeh." The message seems to be that political allegiances between nations, like the UN, are steps towards an order which will be easy for the Antichrist to rule. Consequently, it also warns us of figures in power bearing messages of pacifism. Admittedly, there have been real dictators who have abused our desire for peace to unleash terrible war--whether it's tricking us into thinking a war will bring peace or lying about their intent until their power is secured. But I've seen that fear used as an excuse to fight vague threats--somehow the presence of a supposed Antichrist induces moral corruption, but the definition of "corruption" and how it manifests often seems as vague and nebulous as the present definition of "political correctness." You get people believing that literally every politician is the Spawn of Satan and then you get people voted in who are going to make sure there's no education system to tell them otherwise. But I digress.
Eos, bring the dawn; Athena, heal my brain. Left Behind was disappointingly paranoid, misogynist, and boring. If you love reading books where the same details are repeated until they become meaningless, this may be your book. Christians deserve better fiction than this, in terms of both theme and writing quality. Dodge it like it'll burn you--and don't let yourself settle for this!
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