Laughed Behind: Tribulation Farce

I've just spent far too much of my Sunday reading a savagely funny dissection of the geopolitical naivety, lack of imagination, errors of continuity and logic, and sheer Bad Writing of the first novel of the "Left Behind" series.

http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/left_behind/index.html

If you don't know it, "Left Behind" is a 12-book series by Jeffrey Jenkins and Timothy LaHaye about the Rapture, the event many Christians believe will take place (any day now) in which all of them - plus all children - everywhere in the world, will immediately *disappear*, being whisked directly to Heaven by God. Thereafter, a World Government is formed, the anti-Christ comes, and various extremely unpleasant events happen - all of which make those Left Behind wish strongly that they were somewhere else. The theme of the Left Behind books is: "you intellectuals, you laughed at us. Well, we told you so!"

This would all be rather silly, and of no importance, if it were not for a few observations:
1. Many who believe in the Rapture take features of the modern world like European monetary union, 9/11, the war in Iraq to be harbingers of the imminence of the Rapture. (The first and most important event, I'm told, is the founding of the state of Israel).
2. It is plain that many who believe in the Rapture *want* it to happen - they can't wait for it, in fact. This affects how they think and it affects how they vote.
3. The Left Behind series has sold something like 50 million copies. There are *millions* of people who believe this stuff. Even in the darkest depths of liberal Canada, I've met people who believe this stuff. In Democratic areas of the U.S. (such as Seattle, where I worked for a time) they are numerous indeed - and in the more religious areas of the U.S. they are apparently a veritable plague. *Somebody* is buying these 50 million books.

I will let Fred Clark, who is a much better writer than I am, reiterate the point:

This eagerness, this enthusiasm for apocalypse, is theologically malodorous, but it is also politically dangerous. Here again are L&J and
their 50 million readers cheering for entropy, celebrating calamity, wars and
rumors of war as the confirmation of their desires, and railing against
peace and progress as setbacks to this consumation for which they devoutly
wish. They believe that things must fall apart and the center must not hold,
because even now the beast is slouching toward Jerusalem.

They want this to happen. And, whenever they can, they vote for it.

Fred's review (as a series of blog posts over the past two years) reads as though he put more effort into it than the authors of the book he is reviewing did. It is hilarious and highly recommended.

An interesting element: careful "scholars" of the book of Revelation have noted that the allegorical tale therein seems to refer to Europe (the ten headed monster, a la the 10 members of the EU - although it's actually over twenty now), Russia (Gog and Magog, apparently), Israel (explicitly by name)... but there seems to be a player left out. The world's sole superpower, the home of most of the True Believers of this stuff, seems not to be referred to in Revelations. Is the United States supposed to lose power and influence before this stuff comes to pass? The way George Bush governs the country - by seeming deliberately to want to destroy America's economic position, military capabilities, and international standing - I almost wonder if his secret motivation is not to speed the Rapture along.