Selling faith without selling out: reading the Left Behind novels in the context of popular culture

Summary

We all sense we are a part of something God is doing, and we are delighted he is using these books.

(Bill Anderson, President of Christian Booksellers Association)

Does having a book in Wal-Mart really matter to God?

(Rick Christian, President of Alive Communications literary agency).

Introduction

Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins's Left Behind novels are a cultural phenomenon of profound importance. They have sold in their multimillions; spawned a lucrative cottage industry of related merchandise and persuaded, according to the authors, many thousands of Americans to accept Jesus Christ as their saviour as the impending end of the world casts its inexorable shadow over history. Yet despite their popularity, much of the public discourse on the novels, itself sporadic and sometimes spurious, characterizes them at best as a negligible footnote in the story of recent American culture, and a thoroughly bizarre one at that. One bemused commentator writing in the British Daily Telegraph, for example, could only describe as “science fiction” the rapture theory on which the plot of Left Behind hinges, adding with some relief that “[t]o many pious Protestants and Catholics, this sounds completely bananas”. And it is not only the secular press that has trivialized the novels; even those with a vested interest in religious developments, be they practising Christians, faith leaders or scholars of religion, are often only vaguely aware of the apocalyptic novels which have proved so popular and influential across the Atlantic.