The seventh book of the series, The Indwelling: The Beast Takes Possession, was released in May 2000 and immediately recorded several milestones, including being the first work of Christian fiction to be #1 on the New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal and Publisher’s Weekly bestsellers lists.
The series has become a full-blown industry, with a Left Behind series for kids, audio tapes and CDs, and a major motion picture was released in February of this year. The popularity of this series and the goal behind them is worth examining since many Catholics are reading them and nearly everyone knows someone who has read part or all of the series.
Neither Lahaye or Jenkins are strangers to success in the evangelical Protestant publishing world. Jenkins has authored or co-authored over a hundred books, including being the literary sidekick for best-selling autobiographies by Billy Graham, Hank Aaron, Walter Payton and other celebrities.
Lahaye, a graduate of Bob Jones University, has been a well-known pastor, author and speaker in various evangelical circles since the 1970s, pastoring a mega-church in San Diego, founding FamilyLife Seminars and the PreTrib Research Center. He has also authored non-fiction books on marriage, sexuality, personal growth and, of course, Bible prophecy, to the sum of several million copies.
Novels about the end times and the Rapture have been popular fare within Fundamentalist and evangelical circles since the 1970s, and in many ways the Left Behind books are par for the course. One unique feature is the arrangement between Lahaye and Jenkins: the former provides the general storyline; the latter does the actual writing. The books attempt to render the events of the Book of Revelation in a fictional narrative, following the lives of several characters in the aftermath of the Rapture – the secret, silent removal of “true Christians” from earth prior to the seven years of Tribulation.
These characters discover that they’ve been “left behind,” come to accept the Biblical “truth” of the Rapture, have “born again” experiences and begin working to save as many souls as they can from impending destruction and the emerging Antichrist. All of this is in keeping with the premillennial dispensationalist view of the end of the world which is the preeminent eschatological system of conservative American Protestants.
From a literary perspective the Left Behind books are less than impressive, even for fans of supermarket paperbacks. The writing is mediocre, saturated with cliches and filled with wooden dialogue between two-dimensional characters. But the average writing and paper thin characters hardly matter since the real point of the series is to present a theological system, as evidenced by the nearly endless number of pages filled with sermons, lectures and explanations about the Rapture, impending doom and . . . well, the Rapture. In essence, the books are “tract-novels,” stories wrapped around huge chunks of blatant proselytizing.
This is not lost on many readers of the series, as a perusal of their reviews on the internet indicates. Some non-Christian readers expressed annoyance at the “religious jargon,” but others enthused with comments such as “I just finished this book and must say that it’s the best novel I ever read,” and “Upon stumbling upon Tim LaHaye & Jerry Jenkins’ novel, Left Behind, I could finally get a grasp of Revelation through the glimpse of modern-day and real people I could relate to.”
However, when a reader claimed that one of the books depicted most Catholics as being “left behind,” Jenkins responded by saying the books are “not anti-Catholic” and that “[a]lmost every person in the book who was left behind was Protestant. Astute readers will understand where we’re coming from. True believers in Christ, regardless of their church ‘brand’ will be raptured.” (www.amazon.com, August 26, 1999).
But Jenkin’s response doesn’t tell the whole story. For that one must turn to Lahaye’s three “non-fiction” books on Bible prophecy. Two of these – Rapture Under Attack and Revelation Unveiled – are recently revised and reprinted editions of earlier books and the third, Are We Living In The End Times? is a new release co-authored with Jenkins. Rapture Under Attack is a combative defense of the pre-tribulational Rapture, light on scholarship and heavy on bombastic rhetoric.
More interesting, however, are the latter two books, since both are packaged to tie-in with the Left Behind books. Both contain lengthy and blatant anti-Catholic attacks which would make Jack Chick and Loraine Boettner proud, especially since much of the anti-Catholic material used is directly or indirectly taken from those authors.
In Revelation Unveiled, Lahaye uses the traditional Fundamentalist tactic of correlating the church of Thyatira (Rev. 2:18-29) with “The Pagan Church” of Rome. This apostate Church mixes paganism with Christianity, resulting in the Dark Ages and the existence of “Babylonian mysticism,” a term used repeatedly to describe Catholicism. Boettner’s infamous list of “doctrines” is provided (p. 66), including the horrible practices of using holy water and singing the Ave Maria.
Lahaye later praises “the greatest book ever written on [Babylon] . . . the masterpiece The Two Babylons, by Rev. Alexander Hislop . . .” and states that “to my knowledge” the book has never been refuted (266), indicating the low level of scholarship he practices, not to mention his ignorance of Catholic apologetics (and historical scholarship). After reproducing several paragraphs of Hislop’s book Lahaye proclaims that “[a]fter reading the above quotations, you may be inclined to think me anti-Catholic, but that isn’t exactly true; I am anti-false religion.” (269).
Are We Living in the End Times?, co-authored by Jenkins, is cut from the same anti-Catholic cloth. Writing about the “Mystery Babylon religion,” the authors make the unsubstantiated claim that “[e]very false religion in the world can be traced back to Babylon.” Babylon “is the mother of all false religions and Jerusalem is the mother of true faith” while Rome “is the mother of an unholy mixture of the two” (172). The history of Christianity’s demise into pagan practices such as “prayers for the dead, making the sign of the cross, worship of saints and angels, instituting the mass, and worship of Mary” are presented in breathless Chick-ean fashion (173-174).
The “spiritualizing of Scripture” instituted by Augustine is pinpointed as the key moment in the decline in “scriptural authority” (174), while the disappearance of the Scriptures for 1100 years is fully explained: they “were kept locked up in monasteries and museums” while “the Dark Ages prevailed” (174). After Lahaye and Jenkins solemnly note “that as many as 40 million persons were killed during that period when Babylonian mysticism controlled the church” (175), one must conclude that Lahaye and Jenkins are openly anti-Catholics and proud of it.
(This article was originally published in a longer form in the November 2000 issue of This Rock magazine, a publication of Catholic Answers).
