Vanity
Fair: American Rapture
By Craig Unger
Best-selling author and evangelical leader
Tim LaHaye has contacts that extend to the White
House. That could spell trouble, since his theology espouses a bloody
apocalypse in Israel
On a scorching afternoon in
May, Tim LaHaye, the 79-year-old co-author of the
“Left Behind” series of apocalyptic thrillers, leads several dozen of his
acolytes up a long, winding path to a hilltop in the ancient fortress city of
Megiddo, Israel. LaHaye is not a household name in
the secular world, but in the parallel universe of evangelical Christians he is
the ultimate cultural icon. The author or co-author of more than 75 books, LaHaye in 2001 was named the most influential American
evangelical leader of the past 25 years by the Institute for the Study of
American Evangelicals. With more than 63 million copies of his “Left Behind”
novels sold, he is one of the best-selling authors in all of American history.
Here, a group of about 90 evangelical Christians who embrace the astonishing
theology he espouses have joined him in the Holy Land for the “Walking Where
Jesus Walked” tour.
Megiddo, the site of about
20 different civilizations over the last 10,000 years, is among the first stops
on our pilgrimage, and, given that LaHaye’s specialty
is the apocalypse, it is also one of the most important. Alexander the Great,
Saladin, Napoleon, and other renowned warriors all fought great battles here.
But if Megiddo is to go down in history as the greatest battlefield on earth,
its real test is yet to come. According to the book of Revelation, the hill of
Megiddo—better known as Armageddon—will be the site of a cataclysmic battle
between the forces of Christ and the Antichrist.
To get a good look at the battlefields of the apocalypse,
we take shelter under a makeshift lean-to at the top of the hill. Wearing a
floppy hat to protect him from the blazing Israeli sun, LaHaye
yields to his colleague Gary Frazier, the tour organizer and founder of the
Texas-based Discovery Ministries, Inc., to explain what will happen during the
Final Days.
“How many of you have read the ‘Left Behind’ prophecy
novels?” asks Frazier.
Almost everyone raises a hand.
“The thing that you must know,” Frazier tells them, “is
that the next event on God’s prophetic plan, we believe, is the catching away
of the saints in the presence of the Lord. We call it ‘the Rapture.’”
Frazier is referring to a key biblical passage, in the
first book of Thessalonians, that says the Lord will “descend
from heaven with a shout.… The dead in Christ shall rise first. Then we
which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds,
to meet the Lord in the air.”
The words “caught up” are sometimes translated as “raptured.” As a result, adherents cite this as the
essential scriptural depiction of the Rapture.
“Christ is going to appear,” Frazier continues. “He is
going to call all of his saved, all of his children, home to be with him.”
In other words, “in the twinkling of an eye,” as the Rapturists often say, millions of born-again Evangelicals
will suddenly vanish from the earth—just as they do in LaHaye’s
“Left Behind” books. They will leave behind their clothes, their material
possessions, and all their friends and family members who have not accepted Christ—and
they will join Christ in the Kingdom of God.
Frazier continues. “Jesus taught his disciples that he
was going to go away to his father’s house, but that he was not going to
abandon them, because while he was gone he was going to prepare for them a
suitable dwelling place.… And when the time was right, he would come back to
claim his own.… Jesus is going to come and get his bride, which comprises all
of us who are born again.
“I have no question that right now, as we stand here,
Jesus the son is saying to the father, I want to be with my bride.… In the same
way that we wanted to be with our mates … he wants to be with us. He wants us
to be with him.”
Frazier is a fiery preacher, and as his voice rises and
falls, his listeners respond with cries of “Amen” and “That’s right.”
“I’m going to tell you with zeal and enthusiasm and
passion Jesus is coming on the clouds of glory to call us home.… Now, ladies
and gentlemen, I want you to know, if you’ve read the ‘Left Behind’ books,
[but] more importantly, if you’ve read the Bible, you know … that Christ is
coming, and we believe that that day is very, very near.”
For miles around in all directions the fertile Jezreel Valley, known as the breadbasket of Israel, is
spread out before us, an endless vista of lush vineyards and orchards growing
grapes, oranges, kumquats, peaches, and pears. It is difficult to imagine a
more beautiful pastoral panorama.
The sight LaHaye’s followers
hope to see here in the near future, however, is anything but bucolic. Their
vision is fueled by the book of Revelation, the dark and foreboding messianic
prophecy that foresees a gruesome and bloody confrontation between Christ and
the armies of the Antichrist at Armageddon.
Addressing the group from the very spot where the
conflict is to take place, Frazier turns to Revelation 19, which describes
Christ going into battle. “It thrills my heart every time that I read these
words,” he says, then begins to read: “‘And I saw
heaven standing open.… And there before me was a white horse, whose rider is
called Faithful and True. With justice he judges and makes war. His eyes are
like blazing fire.’”
Frazier pauses to explain the text. “This doesn’t sound
like compassionate Jesus,” he says. “This doesn’t sound like the suffering
servant of Isaiah 53. This is the Warrior King. He judges and makes war.”
Frazier returns to the Scripture: “He has a name written
on him that no one but he himself knows. He is dressed in a robe that is dipped
in blood and his name is the word of God.”
This is the moment the Rapturists
eagerly await. The magnitude of death and destruction will make the Holocaust
seem trivial. The battle finally begins.
Those who remain on earth are the unsaved, the left
behind—many of them dissolute followers of the Antichrist, who is massing his
army against Christ. Accompanying Christ into battle are the armies of heaven,
riding white horses and dressed in fine linen.
“This is all of us,” Frazier says.
Frazier points out that Christ does not need high-tech
weaponry for this conflict. “‘Out of his mouth comes a sharp sword,’ not a
bunch of missiles and rockets,” he says.
Once Christ joins the battle, both the Antichrist and the
False Prophet are quickly captured and cast alive into a lake of fire burning
with brimstone. Huge numbers of the Antichrist’s supporters are slain.
Meanwhile, an angel exhorts Christ, “Thrust in thy
sickle, and reap.” And so, Christ, sickle in hand, gathers “the vine of the
earth.”
Then, according to Revelation, “the earth was reaped.”
These four simple words signify the end of the world as we know it.
Grapes that are “fully ripe”—billions of people who have
reached maturity but still reject the grace of God—are now cast “into the great
winepress of the wrath of God.” Here we have the origin of the phrase “the
grapes of wrath.” In an extraordinarily merciless and brutal act of justice,
Christ crushes the so-called grapes of wrath, killing them. Then, Revelation
says, blood flows out “of the winepress, even unto the horse bridles, by the
space of a thousand and six hundred furlongs.”
With its highly figurative language, Revelation is
subject to profoundly differing interpretations. Nevertheless, LaHaye’s followers insist on its literal truth and
accuracy, and they have gone to great lengths to calculate exactly what this passage
of Revelation means.
As we walk down from the top of the hill of Megiddo, one
of them looks out over the Jezreel Valley. “Can you
imagine this entire valley filled with blood?” he asks. “That would be a
200-mile-long river of blood, four and a half feet deep. We’ve done the math.
That’s the blood of as many as two and a half billion people.”
When this will happen is another question, and the Bible
says that “of that day and hour knoweth no man.”
Nevertheless, LaHaye’s disciples are certain these
events—the End of Days—are imminent. In fact, one of them has especially strong
ideas about when they will take place. “Not soon enough,” she says. “Not soon
enough.”
If such views sound extraordinary, the people who hold
them are decidedly not. For the most part, the people on the tour could pass
for a random selection culled from almost any shopping mall in America. There
are warm and loving middle-aged couples who hold hands. There is a well-coiffed
Texas matron with an Hermès
scarf. There’s a ducktailed septuagenarian and a host
of post-teen mall rats. There are young singles. One couple even chose this
trip for their honeymoon. A big-haired platinum blonde with a white sequined
cowboy hat adds a touch of Dallas glamour. There is a computer-security expert,
a legal assistant, and a real-estate broker; a construction executive, a
retired pastor, a caregiver for the elderly, and a graduate student from Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University. They hail from Peoria,
Illinois, and Longview, Texas, as well as San Diego and San Antonio. Most are
fans of the “Left Behind” books. Some have attended the Left Behind
Prophecy Conference on one of its tours of the U.S.
And while their beliefs may seem astounding to secular
Americans, they are not unusual. According to a Time/CNN poll from 2002,
59 percent of Americans believe the events in the book of Revelation will take
place. There are as many as 70 million Evangelicals in the U.S.—about 25
percent of the population—attending more than 200,000 evangelical churches.
Most of these churches are run by pastors who belong to conservative political
organizations that make sure their flocks vote as a hard-right Republican bloc.
A fascination with Revelation, the Rapture, and Christian
Zionism has always been a potent, if often unseen, component of the American
consciousness. More than three centuries ago, Puritans from John Winthrop to
Cotton Mather saw America as a millennial kingdom linked to both the apocalypse
and ancient Israel in a divine way that prefigured the Second Coming of Christ.
America was to be the New Jerusalem, the Redeemer Nation, a people blessed with
divine guidance.
Imagery from the book of Revelation has inspired poets
and writers from William Blake and William Butler Yeats to Joan Didion and Bob Dylan. “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”
draws references from Revelation. Elements of the book of
Revelation—secularized or otherwise—turn up in movies starring Gary Cooper (High
Noon), Gregory Peck (The Omen), Clint Eastwood (Pale Rider),
and Mimi Rogers (The Rapture), as well as in NBC’s Revelations.
Already, there have been two “Left Behind” movies—available mostly on video—and
a third is in production. LaHaye’s “Left Behind”
series of books, co-authored with Jerry Jenkins, has brought in $650 million to
Tyndale House, its now affluent Christian publisher.
On the Internet, raptureready.com put its Rapture Index
at 161 in the wake of Hurricane Katrina; anything over 145 means “fasten your
seat belts.” A number of Christian Web sites sell clothing emblazoned with
Rapture logos. There was even a team of NASCAR drivers, Randy MacDonald and
Jimmy Hensley, whose souped-up Chevy proudly
displayed “Left Behind” insignia—not the most propitious message for a driver
vying for pole position.
For all that, the new wave of Rapturemania
is more than just another multi-billion-dollar addition to America’s cultural
junk heap. In the 60s, how you felt about the Beatles and Rolling Stones,
marijuana and LSD, and civil rights and the Vietnam War told people whose side
of American society you were on. Likewise, Jerry Falwell
and Tim LaHaye, the pro-life movement and
marriage-protection amendment, and the book of Revelation and George W. Bush
are equally reliable gauges through which evangelical Christians today can
distinguish friend from foe.
As befits the manifesto of a counterculture, the “Left
Behind” series is a revenge fantasy, in which right-wing Christians win out
over the rational, scientific, modern, post-Enlightenment world. The books
represent the apotheosis of a culture that is waging war against liberals,
gays, Muslims, Arabs, the U.N., and “militant secularists” of all stripes—whom
it accuses of destroying Christian America, murdering millions of unborn
children, assaulting the Christian family by promoting promiscuity and
homosexuality, and driving Christ out of the public square.
It’s a counterculture that sees Jews as key players in a
Christian messianic drama, a premise that has led to a remarkable alliance
between Christian Evangelicals and the Israeli right. As a result, political
views drawn from an apocalyptic vision—once dismissed as extremist and
delusional—have not merely swept mass culture but have shaped the political
discourse all the way to Jerusalem and the White House. And if they are taken
too seriously, the geopolitical consequences could be catastrophic.
The city of Jerusalem has a profound significance in the
traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. And to all three religions no
place in Jerusalem is more full of apocalyptic and messianic meaning than the
Temple Mount—the massive, 144,000-square-meter platform, 32 meters high, built
by King Herod as a base for the biggest and most grandiose religious monument
in the world, the shining white stone Temple of the Jews.
To Jews, the Temple Mount marks the holy of holies, the
sacred core of the Temple, where Jews worshipped for centuries. Beneath it,
Orthodox Jews believe, is the foundation stone of the entire world. The Mount
is the disputed piece of land over which Cain slew Abel. It is where Abraham
took his son, Isaac, when God asked him to sacrifice the boy. At its outer
perimeter is the Western Wall, or Wailing Wall, where Jews worship today. And
messianic Jews believe the Mount is where the Temple must be rebuilt for the
coming Messiah.
To Christians, the Temple is where Jesus threw out the
money changers. Its destruction by the Romans in 70 A.D. came to symbolize the
birth of Christianity, when a new Temple of Jesus, eternal and divine, replaced
the earthly Temple made and destroyed by men.
And to Muslims the Temple Mount’s Dome of the Rock is
where Muhammad ascended to heaven nearly 1,400 years ago, making it the
third-holiest site in Islam, behind Mecca and Medina.
After its victory over Arab forces in the Six-Day War, in
June 1967, Israel briefly seized the Temple Mount, thereby realizing the dream
of restoring Judaism’s holiest place to the Jewish people. But Moshe Dayan, the
venerated Israeli defense minister who won the battle, soon voluntarily
relinquished control of it to the Waqf,
a Muslim administrative body.
Over the next generation, some 250,000 mostly Orthodox
Jews, citing God’s promise to Abraham in Genesis—”all the land which thou seest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed for ever”—moved into West Bank territories occupied by Israel
after the 1967 war, and vowed to keep the government from giving the land back
to the Palestinians.
Since Dayan’s historic decision, Muslim authorities have
usually allowed non-Muslims to come to the Temple Mount, as long as they don’t
move their lips in ways that suggest they are praying. As a result, the Temple
Mount is one of the most explosive tinderboxes on earth. A visit to the site in
September 2000 by Ariel Sharon inflamed tensions that soon erupted into the
second intifada.
To evangelical Christians, the Mount is an elemental part
of messianic theology, because a complete restoration of the nation of Israel,
including the rebuilding of the Temple and the reclaiming of Judea and Samaria,
is a prerequisite to the Second Coming of Christ. Likewise, to Orthodox Jews,
nothing is more important to their messianic vision than reclaiming the Temple
Mount and rebuilding the Temple—yet no single event is more likely to provoke a
catastrophe.
No one knows this better than Yitshak
Fhantich, an independent security, protection, and
intelligence consultant who spent 28 years in Israeli intelligence, many as
head of the Jewish Department of Shin Bet. From 1992 to 1995, he was the man in
charge of investigating right-wing extremists, many of them strongly religious,
who posed a threat to the Temple Mount.
“The vast majority of settlers in the West Bank are
positive people with sincere religious beliefs,” says Fhantich.
“But when you combine religious beliefs with right-wing political views, you
have a bomb. The hard core among them will go to any extreme. They are ready to
do anything—from killing Yitzhak Rabin to blowing up the mosques at the Temple
Mount.”
Indeed, in 1984, Fhantich and
his team of 25 Shin Bet members assisted in the arrest of 26 Jewish terrorists
for planning to blow up the mosques on the Temple Mount in an attempt to
disrupt the peace process with Egypt, and in hopes that the Jews would then
rebuild the Temple so that the Messiah would come.
And in 1995, Fhantich
personally warned Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin about the danger he faced from
militant groups outraged by his agreement, as part of the 1993 Oslo accords, to
relinquish the West Bank and Gaza territories to the Palestinians. “I told him,
on the hit list, you’re No. 1,” Fhantich says. On November
4, 1995, Rabin was assassinated by a young Orthodox law student named Yigal Amir, whose activities Fhantich
had been monitoring for more than a year.
In the 90s, Fhantich says,
Israeli intelligence began watching Christian Evangelicals. “As the millennium
approached, you had many people waiting for the appearance of Jesus Christ.…
And Jerusalem, of course, is the home of the Jerusalem syndrome,” he says,
referring to the phenomenon whereby obsessive religious ideas can trigger
violent behavior. “If someone believes God told him to do something, you cannot
stop him.
“The mosques on the Temple Mount are like the red flag
for the bull. You have to be prepared minute by minute. These Christians, they
believe what they are doing is sacred. Some of them are so naïve they can be
taken advantage of. If something happens to the Temple Mount, I think these
American Evangelicals will welcome such an act. After all, religion is the most
powerful gun in the world.”
Moreover, a potential attack on the Temple Mount, as
disastrous as it would be, pales in comparison to the long-term geopolitical
goals of some right-wing religious groups. Orthodox Jews, Christian
Evangelicals, and the heroes of the “Left Behind” series share a belief that
the land bordered by the Nile and Euphrates Rivers and the Mediterranean Sea
and the wilderness of Jordan has been covenanted to Israel by God. Taken to its
literal extreme, this belief obliges Israel not only to retain control of Gaza
and the West Bank but also to annex all or parts of Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq, and
Syria. Such a campaign of conquest would be certain to provoke a spectacular
conflict.
The Carter Glass Mansion, in Lynchburg, Virginia, is a
handsome manor house that serves as an administrative office for Liberty
University and offers a magnificent view of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Inside is
the office of Jerry Falwell, chancellor of the
university, founding father of the Christian right, and longtime friend and
colleague of Tim LaHaye, one of Liberty’s most
generous donors.
Recently recovered from a respiratory illness, Falwell, 72, is as serene and self-confident as ever,
answering questions with the disarming candor that has enabled him to build
personal friendships with even his fiercest ideological foes, from the Reverend
Jesse Jackson to pornographer Larry Flynt. Behind his
desk is a mounted page from the Palestine Post, dated May 16, 1948,
headlined STATE OF ISRAEL IS BORN.
Explaining his affinity for Israel, Falwell
says, “Long before I became a political activist, I’d been taught that the Abrahamic Covenant—Genesis 12 and Genesis 15—is still
binding, where God told Abraham, ‘I will bless them that bless you and curse
them that curse you.’
“It was obvious to me, beginning with the birth of the
Israeli state, in 1948, and the Six-Day War, in 1967, that God was bringing his
people back home. So I came to believe that it was in America’s best interest
to be a friend of Israel.… If America blessed the Jew,
Israel in particular, God would bless America.”
The special political relationship between the Israeli
right and Evangelicals dates back to 1977, when, after three decades of Labor
rule in Israel, Menachem Begin became the first prime
minister from the conservative Likud Party. A romantic nationalist and serious
biblical scholar, Begin pointedly referred to the lands of the West Bank by
their biblical names of Judea and Samaria, and he reached out to American
Evangelicals at a time when they were just coming out of a political
hibernation that dated back to the Scopes trial of 1925 and Prohibition. “The
prime minister said a person who has got the Bible in his home and reads it and
believes it cannot be a bad person,” recalls Yechiel Kadishai, a longtime personal aide to Begin. “He said the
Evangelicals have to know that we are rooted in this piece of land. There
should be an understanding between us and them.” One of the first people Begin
sought out was Jerry Falwell, who was achieving
national recognition through his growing television ministry.
In 1980, Begin presented Falwell
with the prestigious Jabotinsky Award, gave his
ministry a private jet, and shared vital state secrets with the televangelist.
Begin even called him before bombing Iraq’s Osirak
nuclear reactor, in June 1981. “He said, ‘Tomorrow you’re going to read some
strong things about what we are going to do. But our safety is at stake,’” Falwell recalls. “He said, ‘I wanted you, my good friend,
to know what we are going to do.’ And, sure enough, they put one down the
chimney.”
In the early days of his ministry, Falwell,
like other Evangelicals, had made a policy of not mixing religion and politics
at all—much less on a global scale. “I had been taught in the seminary that
religion and politics don’t mix,” he says. “Conservative theologians were
absolutely convinced that the pulpit should be devoted to prayer, preaching,
and exclusively to spiritual ministry.
“But in the 60s the U.S. Supreme Court had decided to
remove God from the public square, beginning with the school-prayer issue.
Then, in 1973, the Supreme Court had ruled 7-to-2 in favor of abortion on
demand. And I wondered, ‘What can I do?’”
Several years later, Falwell
got a call from Francis Schaeffer. An electrifying Presbyterian evangelist and
author, Schaeffer is probably the most important religious figure that secular
America has never heard of. Widely regarded by Evangelicals as one of their
leading theologians of the 20th century, Schaeffer, who died in 1984, was to
the Christian right what Marx was to Marxism, what Freud was to psychoanalysis.
“There is no question in my mind that without Francis Schaeffer the religious
right would not exist today,” says Falwell. “He was
the prophet of the modern-day faith-and-values movement.”
A powerful influence on Falwell,
LaHaye, Pat Robertson, and many others, Schaeffer
asserted in the wake of Roe v. Wade that Evangelicalism could no
longer passively accommodate itself to the decadent values of the
secular-humanist world, now that it had sanctioned the murder of unborn babies.
Almost single-handedly, he prodded Evangelicals out of the pulpit and into a
full-scale cultural war with the secular world. “I was in search of a
scriptural way that I, as pastor of a very large church, could address the
moral and social issues facing American culture,” Falwell
says. “Dr. Schaeffer shattered that world of isolation for me, telling me that,
while I was preaching a very clear gospel message, I was avoiding 50 percent of
my ministry.… He began teaching me that I had a responsibility to confront the
culture where it was failing morally and socially.”
In 1979, Falwell was still
“looking for a plan to mobilize people of faith in this country” when Tim LaHaye, then a pastor in San Diego, called him. LaHaye had just founded Californians for Biblical Morality,
a coalition of right-wing pastors who fought against gay rights and even sought
to ban the fantasy game Dungeons & Dragons in a Glendora community college
on the grounds that it was an “occult” game.
When he visited San Diego, Falwell
was impressed with how LaHaye had organized the
pastors to confront the state government on moral and social issues. “When he
told me how he did it, I wondered why we couldn’t do it on a national basis,”
says Falwell.
And so, in 1979, Falwell
launched the Moral Majority with LaHaye and other
leading fundamentalist strategists to lobby for prayer and the teaching of
creationism in public schools and against gay rights, abortion, and the Equal
Rights Amendment. LaHaye’s wife, Beverly, also
entered the fray that year by founding Concerned Women for America, to “bring
biblical principles into all levels of public policy” and oppose the
“anti-marriage, anti-family, anti-children, anti-man” feminism put forth by the
National Organization for Women.
Courtly, genteel, and soft-spoken, LaHaye
hardly looks the part of a ferocious right-wing culture warrior. In public or
in private, LaHaye is understated, the antithesis of
the fire-and-brimstone preacher one might expect to deliver prophecies of the
apocalypse and Armageddon. Yet even Falwell has said
that LaHaye has done more than anyone to set the
agenda for Evangelicalism in the U.S.
LaHaye’s
belief in the Rapture dates back to his father’s funeral, in Detroit, when he
was just nine years old. “The minister at the funeral said these words: ‘This
is not the end of Frank LaHaye,’” he told The
Christian Science Monitor. “‘Because he accepted Jesus, the day will come
when the Lord will shout from heaven and descend, and the dead in Christ will
rise first and then we’ll be caught up together to meet him in the air.’”
Then the pastor pointed to the sky and the sun
unexpectedly came out. “All of a sudden, there was hope in my heart I’d see my
father again,” LaHaye said.
From then on, LaHaye was
entranced with Rapturist theology, which was
popularized in the U.S. in the 19th century by a renegade Irish Anglican
preacher named John Nelson Darby. A proponent of a prophetic branch of theology
known as premillennial dispensationalism,
Darby asserted that a series of signs—including wars, immorality, and the
return of the Jews to Israel—signal the End of Days. Once the end is nigh, all
true believers will be raptured to meet Christ. After
that, Darby taught, the world will enter a horrifying seven-year period of
Tribulation, during which a charismatic Antichrist will seize power. But in the
end, he prophesied, the Antichrist will be vanquished by Christ at Armageddon,
and Christ’s 1,000-year reign of peace and justice will begin. This, in brief,
is the theology taught by evangelists such as Jerry Falwell,
John Hagee, and many others—including Tim LaHaye.
After graduating from the ultra-conservative Bob Jones
University, in Greenville, South Carolina, LaHaye
began preaching in nearby Pumpkintown at a salary of
$15 a week. For 25 years, he served as pastor at Scott Memorial Baptist Church,
in San Diego, transforming it from a congregation of 275 into one with 3,000
members.
Along the way, LaHaye avidly
read Francis Schaeffer. “Schaeffer taught me the difference between the
Renaissance and the Reformation,” he says during the tour of Israel. “And you
know what the difference is? The Renaissance was all about the centrality of
man. The Reformation was all about clearing up the ways the [Catholic] Church
had mucked up Christianity—and getting back to the centrality of God.”
In The Battle for the Mind, his 1980 homage to
Schaeffer, LaHaye lays out his worldview far more
forcefully than he does in person, depicting America as a Bible-based country
under siege by an elite group of secular humanists conspiring to destroy the
nuclear family, Christianity itself, and even “the entire world.” There are no
shades of gray in this Manichaean tract, which asserts that secular humanism is
“not only the world’s greatest evil but, until recently, the most deceptive of
all religious philosophies.”
Life, LaHaye argues, has always
been a battle between good and evil. “The good way has always been called
‘God’s way,’” he writes, and evil has been the way of man—specifically, the
post-Renaissance, post-Enlightenment world of art, science, and reason. And, in
his view, nothing man has come up with is worse than secular humanism, which he
defines as “a Godless, man-centered philosophy” that rejects traditional values
and that has “a particular hatred toward Christianity.”
“LaHaye writes as if there’s a
humanist brain trust sitting around reading [American philosopher and
educational reformer] John Dewey, trying to figure out ways to destroy
Christianity,” says Chip Berlet, a senior analyst with Political Research
Associates and the co-author of Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close
for Comfort.
In truth, while tens of millions of Americans might
accurately be called secular humanists, very few characterize themselves as
members of a humanist movement. But to LaHaye that
only proves the deviousness of the humanist project. Instead of openly
advocating their point of view, he writes, humanists have used the mass media
and Hollywood, the government, academia, and organizations such as the A.C.L.U.
and NOW to indoctrinate unsuspecting Christians.
As a result, LaHaye argues,
good Evangelicals should no longer think of humanists as harmless citizens who
happen not to attend church. In The Battle for the Mind, he spells out
his political goals: “We must remove all humanists from public office and replace
them with pro-moral political leaders.”
“In LaHaye’s world, there are
the godly people who are on their way to the Rapture,” says Berlet. “And the
rest of the world is either complicit with the Antichrist or, worse, actively
assisting him. If you really believe in End Times, you are constantly looking
for agents of Satan.… [And if] political conflicts are rooted in the idea that
your opponent is an agent of the Devil, there is no compromise possible. What
decent person would compromise with evil? So that removes it from the
democratic process.
“Conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation
want to roll back the New Deal. LaHaye wants to roll
back the Enlightenment.”
Like Schaeffer’s writings, LaHaye’s
book went largely unnoticed by the secular world, but the Christian right
heartily embraced its declaration of war against secularism. Presbyterian
televangelist D. James Kennedy hailed The Battle for the Mind as “one of
the most important books of our time.” Falwell wrote
that all Christians must follow its tenets if America is to be saved from
becoming “another Sodom and Gomorrah.”
In 1981, LaHaye took up the
challenge, resigning his pastorship to devote himself
full-time to building the Christian right. He began by meeting with moneyed
ultra-conservatives including Nelson Bunker Hunt, the right-wing oil
billionaire from Dallas, and T. Cullen Davis, another wealthy Texas oilman who
became a born-again Christian after being acquitted of charges of murdering his
wife’s lover and his stepdaughter.
Though still in its infancy, the Moral Majority had more
than seven million people on its mailing list and had already played a key role
in electing Ronald Reagan president. Beverly LaHaye’s
Concerned Women for America was on its way to building a membership of 500,000
people, making her “the most powerful woman in the new religious right,”
according to the Houston Chronicle. She and her husband also co-authored
a best-selling marriage manual for Christians, The Act of Marriage, full
of clinical advice such as the following: “Cunnilingus and fellatio have in
recent years been given unwarranted publicity [but] the majority of couples do
not regularly use it as a substitute for the beautiful and conventional
interaction designed by our Creator to be an intimate expression of love.” And
in the mid-80s, LaHaye created the American Coalition
for Traditional Values, which played an important role in re-electing Ronald
Reagan, in 1984. He later became co-chairman of Jack Kemp’s 1988 presidential
campaign but was forced to resign when anti-Catholic statements he had written
came to light.
With right-wing groups expanding at such a dizzying pace,
LaHaye helped to found the Council for National
Policy (C.N.P.) as a low-profile but powerful coalition of billionaire industrialists,
fundamentalist preachers, and right-wing tacticians. Funded by Hunt and Davis,
among others, the organization set out to create a coherent and disciplined
strategy for the New Right.
Though its membership is secret, the rolls have
reportedly included Falwell and Pat Robertson; top
right-wing political strategists Richard Viguerie,
Ralph Reed, and Paul Weyrich; Republican senators
Jesse Helms and Lauch Faircloth (both of North
Carolina), Don Nickles (Oklahoma), and Trent Lott
(Mississippi); and Republican representatives Dick Armey and Tom DeLay (both of
Texas). The late Rousas John Rushdoony,
the right-wing theologian who hoped to reconfigure the American legal system in
accordance with biblical law, was said to be a member, as was John Whitehead of
the Rutherford Institute, who was co-counsel to Paula Jones in her lawsuit
against Bill Clinton.
“Ronald Reagan, both George
Bushes, senators and Cabinet members—you name it. There’s nobody who hasn’t
been here at least once,” says Falwell, who confirms that
he is a member. “It is a group of four or five hundred of the biggest
conservative guns in the country.”
The C.N.P. has access to the highest powers in the land.
In 1999, George W. Bush courted evangelical support for his presidential
candidacy by giving a speech before the council, the transcript of which
remains a highly guarded secret. And since the start of his presidency, Falwell says, the C.N.P. has enjoyed regular access to the
Oval Office. “Within the council is a smaller group called the Arlington
Group,” says Falwell. “We talk to each other daily
and meet in Washington probably twice a month. We often call the White House
and talk to Karl Rove while we are meeting. Everyone takes our calls.”
According to The Wall Street Journal, two high-ranking Texas judges who
spoke to the Arlington Group in October at the suggestion of Karl Rove
allegedly assured its members that Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade.
Sometime in the mid-80s, Tim LaHaye
was on an airplane when he noticed that the pilot, who happened to be wearing a
wedding ring, was flirting with an attractive flight attendant, who was not. LaHaye asked himself what would happen to the poor unsaved
man if the long-awaited Rapture were to transpire at that precise moment.
Soon, LaHaye’s agent dug up
Jerry Jenkins, a writer-at-large for the Moody Bible Institute and the author
of more than 150 books, many on sports and religion. In exchange for shared
billing, Jenkins signed on to do the actual writing of the “Left Behind”
series—a multi-volume apocalyptic fantasy thriller composed in the breezy,
fast-paced style of airport bodice rippers but based on biblical prophecy.
The first volume, Left Behind, begins with a
variation of what LaHaye observed in real life. While
piloting his 747 to London’s Heathrow Airport, Captain Rayford
Steele decides he’s had just about enough of his wife’s infuriating
religiosity. Thanks to Christian influences, she now believes in the Rapture.
He puts the plane on autopilot and leaves the cockpit to flirt with a
“drop-dead gorgeous” flight attendant named Hattie Durham.
But Hattie advises him that dozens of passengers have
suddenly and mysteriously vanished. They have left behind their clothes,
eyeglasses, jewelry, even their hearing aids.
The Rapture has come. Millions of Christians who have
accepted Christ as their savior—including Rayford
Steele’s wife and young son—have been caught up into heaven to meet Him. Left
behind are the vast armies of the Antichrist—those ungodly, evolutionist,
pro-abortion secular humanists—and a smaller group of people like Steele, who
are just beginning to see that Christ is the answer.
So begin the seven years of Tribulation forecast in the
book of Revelation. Rayford Steele and his band of
Tribulation warriors are mostly ordinary folks right out of the heartland—not
unlike the participants in LaHaye and Frazier’s tour
of Israel. Doubters no more, they begin to form the Tribulation Force, to take
on the armies of the Antichrist and win redemption.
Soon, the Force learns that the Antichrist is none other
than Nicolae Carpathia, the
dazzlingly charming secretary-general of the United Nations and People
magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive.” Carpathia turns the
U.N. into a one-world government with one global currency and one religious
order. Try as they might, the Force can’t stop him from killing billions by
bombing New York, Los Angeles, London, Washington, D.C., and several other
cities, or from establishing himself as dictator and implanting biochips that
scar millions of people with the number of the beast.
In fact, Carpathia and his
Unity Army seem all but unstoppable until Glorious Appearing, the last
volume in the series, when it becomes clear that God has another plan—the
Second Coming of Jesus. The battles between the forces of Christ and of the
Antichrist begin in Jordan, with Carpathia urging his
troops to attack, only to be confronted with the ultimate deus
ex machina: “Heaven opened and there, on a white
horse, sat Jesus, the Christ, the Son of the living God.…
Jesus’ eyes shone with conviction like a flame of fire, and He held His
majestic head high.… On His robe at the thigh a name was written: KING OF KINGS
AND LORD OF LORDS.”
LaHaye is
not the first author to cash in on the apocalypse. Hal Lindsey’s 1970 Christian
End Times book, The Late Great Planet Earth, which predicted that the
world would come to an end around 1988, was the No. 1 nonfiction best-seller of
the 70s. Nevertheless, LaHaye, Jenkins, and their
aptly named literary agent, Rick Christian, had a tough time interesting
publishers in their concept. Finally, LaHaye’s
nonfiction publishing company, Tyndale House, put up $50,000, boasting that it
could market the book well enough to sell half a million copies.
Kicking off the series in 1995, as the millennium clock
ran down, provided a convenient marketing device. According to The
Washington Post, by 2001, 27 million copies of “Left Behind” books had been
sold, along with 10 million related products such as postcards and wallpaper.
Thanks to the astounding growth of Evangelicalism in America, even the
uneventful passing of the millennium failed to dampen sales, which increased so
greatly—to a pace of 1.5 million copies a month—that the series, originally
planned to be 7 books, was extended to 12. By now, according to BusinessWeek, the “Left Behind” series has
brought in more than $650 million to the Illinois-based Tyndale House, the
largest privately owned Christian publisher in the country. Not surprisingly, LaHaye has sought to extend his brand with children’s
versions, a prequel (The Rising) written with Jenkins, and a new series,
“Babylon Rising,” about an Indiana Jones–like hero who uncovers the secrets of
biblical prophecies.
When Jerry Falwell reflects on
the past 25 years, even he is astounded at how far the Christian right has
come. “I was not at all sure in 1979 when I started Moral Majority that we
really could make a difference. But I knew we had to try,” he says. “A quarter
of a century later, I’m amazed at how a huge nation like America could be so
affected and even turned around by the New Testament Church.
“We’re gaining ground every time the sun shines. I don’t
think this phenomenon is cresting, because there is a spiritual awakening in
America right now.”
When he started out, Falwell
recalls, he was thrilled if 35 people came to church and left more than $100 on
his offering plate. Today, revenue at his Thomas Road Baptist Church tops $200
million a year—and is likely to exceed $400 million in the near future.
The evangelical market is so big now that mainstream
corporate America doesn’t dare ignore it. The Purpose-Driven Life, by
California pastor Rick Warren, published in 2002, has already sold 23 million
copies, making it the fastest-selling nonfiction book of all time. Now religion
is the hottest category in publishing, bringing in more than $3 billion a year.
Time Warner, Random House, and HarperCollins have all put together religious
imprints. There are more than 2,000 Christian radio stations. Christian music
now outsells all classical and jazz releases combined. The EMI Group and Sony
BMG Music Entertainment have acquired religious labels.
And the peak is nowhere in sight. “This is just the
beginning,” says Tim LaHaye. “Now we have media like
we’ve never had before—alternative media, the Internet, and Fox News.”
Throughout America, especially the South, a massive,
fully developed subculture has emerged. In Greenville, South Carolina, more
than 700 churches serve just 56,000 people. On a highway not far from town, a
billboard reads, LET’S MEET ON SUNDAY AT MY HOUSE
BEFORE THE GAME. —GOD.
And it’s not about just going to church. There are movie
nights for Christians, summer camps for Christian kids, Christian “poker runs,”
Christian marriage-counseling sessions, Christian Caribbean vacations,
Christian specialty stores, and Christian ministries for singles, seniors, and
the divorced.
“It plays exactly the same role in shaping your beliefs
that the counterculture of the 60s did for the left,” says a former
Evangelical. “Politically, you end up voting for that which reinforces your
belief system. How you will appear in the eyes of the God you believe in—that’s
your anchor.”
It is an insular world that is almost completely
segregated from the secular world, including the mainstream media. “No one in
our family read newspapers,” says another former Evangelical, who left her
church in Yuba City, California, and eventually moved to New York. “Growing up,
our only source of information in my life was the pastor. We believed in what
God had told him to say because we were children, and he was our shepherd, and
he had been chosen by God.”
A crucial part of that theology dictates a love for
Israel, an affection based on faith more than on information. “When I grew up,
I did not know Jews walked the face of the earth,” she says. “I thought they
lived only in biblical times. They were my brothers and sisters in the Lord,
but I didn’t know they still existed.”
That love of Israel is sometimes accompanied by racist
hatred of Arabs. On several occasions, an Israeli guide on LaHaye
and Frazier’s tour told the group that Arabs “breed like fleas” and would soon
be forced into the desert. LaHaye’s followers
responded with warm laughter and applause.
From Israel’s point of view, there are many reasons to
welcome American Evangelicals, regardless of how well-informed they may be.
Tourism is one. Last year, 400,000 Christian tourists visited Israel, where
they spent more than $1.4 billion. “During the intifada, loyal Christians still
came as tourists. We have to go to the grass roots. It is so important to make
them lovers of Israel,” says Benny Elon, Orthodox
leader of the right-wing National Union, former tourism minister, and a frequent
guest of the Christian Coalition’s in the U.S.
And given that there are more than 10 times as many
Evangelicals in America as Jews, it is understandable that Israel might seek
their political support. “Israel’s relationship with America can’t be built
only on the AIPAC [American Israel Public Affairs Committee] and the 2.5
percent of the population in America who are Jews,” says Elon.
“When Israel enjoys support because it is the land of the
Bible, why should we reject that?” adds Uzi Arad, who served as foreign-policy
adviser to former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and now heads the Institute
for Policy and Strategy, a think tank in Herzliya,
Israel. “Whether it is because of expediency or because on some level we may be
soulmates, each side offers the other something they
want. And the Christian right is a political force to be reckoned with in
America.”
But Evangelicals have also played a role in disrupting
the peace process. “I was ambassador for four years of the peace process, and
the Christian fundamentalists were vehemently opposed to the peace process,”
says Itamar Rabinovich, who
served as Israeli ambassador to the U.S. between 1993 and 1996, under the Labor
governments of Rabin and Shimon Peres. “They believed that the land belonged to
Israel as a matter of divine right. So they immediately became part of a
campaign by the Israeli right to undermine the peace process.”
No one played that card more forcefully than Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, who as prime minister used the Christian
right to fend off pressure from the Clinton administration to proceed with the
peace process.
On a visit to Washington, D.C., in 1998, Netanyahu hooked
up with Jerry Falwell at the Mayflower Hotel the
night before his scheduled meeting with Clinton.
“I put together 1,000 people or so to meet with Bibi and he spoke to us that night,” recalls Falwell. “It was all planned by Netanyahu as an affront to
Mr. Clinton.”
That evening, Falwell promised
Netanyahu that he would mobilize pastors all over the country to resist the
return of parts of the occupied West Bank territory to the Palestinians.
Televangelist John Hagee, who gave $1 million to the
United Jewish Appeal the following month, told the crowd that the Jewish return
to the Holy Land signaled the “rapidly approaching … final moments of history,”
then brought them to a frenzy chanting, “Not one inch!”—a
reference to how much of the West Bank should be transferred to Palestinian
control.
The next day, Netanyahu met with Clinton at the White
House. “Bibi told me later,” Falwell
recalls, “that the next morning Bill Clinton said, ‘I know where you were last
night.’ The pressure was really on Netanyahu to give away the farm in Israel.
It was during the Monica Lewinsky scandal.… Clinton had to save himself, so he
terminated the demands [to relinquish West Bank territory] that would have been
forthcoming during that meeting, and would have been very bad for Israel.”
In the end, no one played a bigger role in thwarting the
prospect for peace than the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, who rejected a
deal with Netanyahu’s successor, Ehud Barak, in 2000. In general, the Christian
right has not gone to the mat to fight a two-state solution to the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But when the peace process finally resumed during
the Bush administration, the Christian right made certain its theology was not
ignored. In March 2004, according to The Village Voice, a delegation
from the Apostolic Congress, a religious group that believes in the Rapture,
met with Elliott Abrams, then the National Security Council’s senior director
for Near East and North African affairs, to discuss its concern that Israel’s
disengagement from Gaza would violate God’s covenant with Israel. As it
happens, Netanyahu, for non-theological reasons, shared the Christian right’s
concern about the Gaza pullout to such an extent that he resigned from Sharon’s
cabinet last summer and has vowed to challenge him for the prime minister’s
post.
But this intrusion of End Times theology is of deep
concern to Israelis who are not as hawkish as Netanyahu. “This is incredibly
dangerous to Israel,” says Gershom Gorenberg, a Jerusalem-based journalist and the author of The
End of Days, a chronicle of messianic Christians and Jews and their
struggle with Muslim fundamentalists over the Temple Mount. “They’re not
interested in the survival of the State of Israel. They are interested in the
Rapture, in bringing to fruition a cosmic myth of the End Times, proving that
they are right with one big bang. We are merely actors in their dreams. LaHaye’s vision is that Jews will convert or die and go to
hell. If you read his books, he is looking forward to war. He is not an ally in
the safety of Israel.”
Far from being a Prince of Peace, the Christ depicted in
the “Left Behind” series is a vengeful Messiah—so vengeful that the death and
destruction he causes to unconverted Jews, to secularists, to anyone who is not
born again, is far, far greater than the crimes committed by the most brutal
dictators in human history. When He arrives on the scene in Glorious
Appearing, Christ merely has to speak and “men and women, soldiers and
horses, seemed to explode where they stood. It was as if the very words of the
Lord had superheated their blood, causing it to burst through their veins and
skin.” Soon, LaHaye and Jenkins write, tens of
thousands of foot soldiers for the Antichrist are dying in the goriest manner
imaginable, their internal organs oozing out, “their blood pooling and rising
in the unforgiving brightness of the glory of Christ.”
After the initial bloodletting, Nicolae
Carpathia gathers his still-vast army, covering
hundreds of square miles, and prepares for the conflict at Megiddo. As the
battle for Armageddon is about to start, Rayford
Steele climbs atop his Hummer to watch Christ harvest the grapes of wrath.
Steele looks at the hordes of soldiers assembled by the Antichrist, and “tens
of thousands burst open at the words of Jesus.” They scream in pain and die
before hitting the ground, their blood pouring forth. Soon, a massive river of
blood is flowing throughout the Holy Land. Carpathia
and the False Prophet are cast into the eternal lake of fire.
According to LaHaye and
Jenkins, it is God’s intent “that the millennium start
with a clean slate.” Committing mass murder hundreds of times greater than the
Holocaust, the Lord—not the Antichrist, mind you—makes sure that “all
unbelievers would soon die.”
One of Steele’s colleagues decides he’ll have to talk to
God about what to do next. After all, now that the secular humanists are gone
and only believers remain, America is a very, very sparsely populated country.
But if enough people are left, he wonders, isn’t this the perfect opportunity
“to start rebuilding the country as, finally for real, a Christian nation?”
This is Craig Unger’s second piece for
V.F. His article “Saving the Saudis,” from the October 2003 issue, evolved
into the best-seller House of Bush, House of Saud (Scribner).
Illustrations by TIM SHEAFFER
as of 1-2008