Reverend Doomsday
According to Tim LaHaye, the Apocalypse is now
[I clipped this article which originally appeared in Rolling Stone Magazine.
By
Robert DreyfussIt might seem unlikely that the commander in chief would take his marching orders directly from on high -- unless you understand the views of the Rev. Timothy LaHaye, one of the most influential leaders of the Christian right, and a man who played a quiet but pivotal role in putting George W. Bush in the White House. If you know LaHaye at all, it's for his series of best-selling apocalyptic novels. You've seen the Left Behind novels everywhere: aboard airplanes, at the beach, in massive displays at Wal-Mart. In the nine years since the publication of the first novel, the series has sold 60 million copies. Next to the authors of the Bible itself, who didn't get royalties, LaHaye is Christianity's biggest publishing success ever.
LaHaye is a strict biblical reconstructionist -- taking the Good Book as God's literal truth. His books depict a fantastical, fictional version of what he and his followers think is in store for the human race. Not allegorically, not poetically, but word-for-word true. If the Bible (Revelation 9:1-11) says that billions of six-inch-long scorpionlike monsters with the heads of men, "flowing hair like that of women" and the teeth of lions, wearing crowns and helmets, will swarm across the globe gnawing on unbelievers -- well, that's exactly what LaHaye says will happen. And soon.
LaHaye's books, and his quirky interpretation of biblical prophecy that stands behind them, revolve intensely around Iraq, because LaHaye believes that Armageddon will be unleashed from the Antichrist's headquarters in Babylon. Since the 1970s -- when Iraq began a reconstruction project on the ruins of the ancient city, near Baghdad -- LaHaye has said that Saddam Hussein is carrying out Satan's mission. In 1999, LaHaye wrote that Saddam is "a servant of Satan," possessed by a demon, and that he could be "the forerunner of the Antichrist." Ultimately, says LaHaye, before Christ can return to Earth, Iraq, led by the Antichrist, must engage in a world-shaking showdown with Israel.
Of course, there have always been preachers on the margins of the religious right thundering on about the end of the world. But it's doubtful that such a fanatic believer has ever had such a direct pipeline to the White House. Five years ago, as Bush was gearing up his presidential campaign, he made a little-noticed pilgrimage to a gathering of right-wing Christian activists, under the auspices of a group called the Committee to Restore American Values. The committee, which assembled about two dozen of the nation's leading fundamentalist firebrands, was chaired by LaHaye. At the time, many evangelicals viewed Bush skeptically: Despite his born-again views, when he was governor of Texas, Bush had alienated many of the state's Christian-right activists for failing to pursue a sufficiently evangelical agenda. On the national level, he was an unknown quantity.
That day, behind closed doors, LaHaye grilled the candidate. He presented Bush with a lengthy questionnaire on issues such as abortion, judicial appointments, education, religious freedom, gun control and the Middle East. What the preacher thought of Bush's answers would largely determine whether the Christian right would throw its muscle behind the Texas governor.
Mostly preferring to stay out of the limelight, LaHaye has been the moving force behind several key organizations on the Christian right that have redrawn the boundaries of American politics. In 1979, at a time when ministers confined themselves to their churches, he prodded the Rev. Jerry Falwell to found the Moral Majority, a group that launched today's cultural wars against feminism, homosexuality, abortion, drugs and pornography. In 1981, he helped found the little-known but vastly powerful Council for National Policy, a secretive group of wealthy donors that has funneled billions of dollars to right-wing Christian activists. "No one individual has played a more central organizing role in the religious right than Tim LaHaye," says Larry Eskridge of the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals, calling him "the most influential American evangelical of the last twenty-five years."
When the meeting with Bush ended, LaHaye gave the candidate his seal of approval. For Bush, it was a major breakthrough, clearing the decks for hundreds of leaders of the Christian right, from TV preachers and talk-show hosts to Bible Belt pulpit pounders, to support the Bush-Cheney ticket in 2000. "Bush went into the meeting not totally acceptable," recalls Paul Weyrich, the grandfather of the religious right, who has known LaHaye for thirty years. "He went out not only acceptable but enthusiastically supported."
More than half a century ago, as a student at Bob Jones University, Timothy LaHaye began his public ministry as a pastor at a small church in a tiny town in South Carolina, not far from the campus. He'd grown up dirt-poor in Detroit, peddling newspapers during the Depression. His father had died when he was ten. In 1944, after finishing night school and attending a Bible institute in Chicago, he enlisted in the Air Force at seventeen and served in Europe as a machine gunner aboard a bomber.
At Bob Jones, the Christian-fundamentalist college famous for being anti-Catholic, LaHaye met and fell in love with a fellow Detroiter, Beverly Jean Ratcliffe. The two followed the school's strict "no touching" dating rule, which required lovers to stay six inches apart; a year later, they were married. In 1958, they moved to San Diego. At that time, Southern California was a hotbed of former McCarthyites, neo-Nazis and the John Birch Society, a right-wing group so paranoid and extremist that it denounced President Eisenhower as a communist. They all muttered darkly about secret societies, the evil United Nations and one-world-government conspiracies, views that LaHaye would soon make his own. For years, LaHaye spoke at Birch Society training sessions, getting to know many of its leaders and building his ministry in the part of California that, twenty years later, would be the launching pad for Ronald Reagan's 1980 presidential bid.
In the next dozen years, LaHaye built a veritable Christian empire: three churches, twelve elementary and secondary schools, a Christian college, an anti-evolution think tank called the Institute for Creation Research, the Pre-Trib Research Center to promote his views on how the world will end, and Family Life Seminars, a lecture program on sex, marriage and Christian living -- all while writing dozens of books. The Act of Marriage, a best seller published in 1976 and co-authored with Beverly LaHaye, is an explicit Christian sex manual, condemning "petting," abortion and homosexuality.
In the early 1970s, alarmed by laws and court decisions on abortion and school prayer, LaHaye began organizing the churches of Southern California for political action. In 1979, he established Californians for Biblical Morality, a church-based political group that lobbied in Sacramento. In many ways, it was the genesis of the Christian right. "I met Tim and Beverly about thirty years ago, while I was on a preaching tour of Southern California," says Falwell. "I found out that he'd done something no conservative minister had ever done before: He'd organized hundreds of churches into a political bloc. At the time, I'd never heard of mixing religion and politics." LaHaye persuaded Falwell to consider doing the same. "More than any other person, Tim LaHaye challenged me to begin thinking through my involvement [in politics]," recalls Falwell. Paul Weyrich confirms Falwell's account. "He encouraged Falwell to get involved in the political process," says Weyrich, who heads the conservative Free Congress Foundation. "But Falwell was reluctant to do so, because he thought it would ruin his ministry."
In 1979, LaHaye and Falwell established the Moral Majority, with Falwell as its leader and LaHaye as a guiding member of its three-person board of directors. The Moral Majority drafted tens of millions of conservative Christian voters into the culture wars, swelling the ranks of the Republican Party and serving as Reagan's core constituency. But while Falwell was catapulted to national prominence, LaHaye stayed in the background. "He flew under the radar, very behind-the-scenes, and didn't seek publicity," says Falwell.
Two years later, LaHaye founded the Council for National Policy. An elite group with only a few hundred members, the CNP meets three times a year, usually at posh hotels or resorts, going to extraordinary lengths to keep its agenda and membership secret. According to members willing to speak about it, however, the council unites right-wing billionaires with scores of conservative Christian activists and politicians, and these encounters have spawned countless campaigns and organizations. Its ranks have included prominent politicians such as Ed Meese and John Ashcroft, and among its members can be found an editor of the conservative National Review, leading televangelists such as Pat Robertson and Falwell, representatives of the Heritage Foundation and other key think tanks, and activists including Grover Norquist and Oliver North.
Supported by moneybags such as Texas oilman Nelson Bunker Hunt, Amway founder Richard DeVos and beer magnate Joseph Coors, some in the group helped fund Oliver North's secret campaign to aid the Nicaraguan contra rebels during the 1980s and financed the right-wing jihad against President Clinton in the 1990s. (The impeachment effort was reportedly conceived at a June 1997 meeting of the CNP in Montreal.) In addition, the group has funded an army of Christian organizers. Falwell says that in the past two decades, he has raised hundreds of millions of dollars for his ventures, including Liberty University, through the CNP. "My guess is that literally billions of dollars have been utilized through the Council for National Policy that would not otherwise have been available," he says. Bush attended a CNP meeting at the start of his presidential campaign in 1999 to seek support, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld took part in the group's gathering last April in Washington, D.C.
"Without [LaHaye], what we call the religious right would not have developed the way it did, and as quickly as it did," says Weyrich.
Besides the Moral Majority and the CNP, LaHaye established a third organization, Concerned Women for America, run by his wife, Beverly, which today claims 600,000 members. From the late 1970s into the 1980s, CWA, in coordination with Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum, led a successful battle against the adoption of the feminist-inspired Equal Rights Amendment, and it thundered against gay rights, sex education in schools and abortion. While Schlafly organized the women in Republican clubs around the country, Bev LaHaye reached out to the women in churches, "the ones who were never involved in politics, who'd go to Bible-study groups," says Schlafly. "She reached a lot of people, particularly in the Christian churches, that I might not have been able to reach." Many of these women stayed involved, joining the ranks of religious-right activists.
By the mid-1980s, LaHaye was at the top of his game, powerful and well- connected, plugged into the Reagan administration and, through yet another of his groups, the American Coalition for Traditional Values, a pivotal factor in the 1984 election, registering Christian conservative voters through "pastor-representatives" in all 435 congressional districts. But he was also headed for a fall.
Lahaye's free-fall began in the mid-1980s, and by the end he'd almost been expelled from the political Garden of Eden. What set it into motion was his connection with the weird would-be messiah Rev. Sun Myung Moon, whose Unification Church cult of "Moonies" was viewed by most Christians as laughably heretical. When Moon got entangled in legal controversy, LaHaye sprang to his defense, amid reports that he'd received substantial funding from the wealthy Moon. By the time LaHaye backed away, it was too late. His credibility was shot, and the American Coalition for Traditional Values soon folded.
Then it got worse. In 1988, LaHaye was bounced from the presidential campaign of former Rep. Jack Kemp when the media learned of LaHaye's anti-Catholic views (he considers Catholics to have strayed from biblical truth and has referred to popes as "Antichrists"). After that, he was deemed nearly radioactive in politics. When he showed up later that year for a campaign event at the elder George Bush's home, the vice president rushed to Doug Wead, his liaison to the religious right. "Tim LaHaye is here!" Wead recalls Bush saying in alarm. By the early 1990s, LaHaye had retreated to a small Baptist church in Rockville, Maryland, and the Moonie-owned Washington Times noted that he had "left the national stage."
Within a few years, however, LaHaye would ride Left Behind back to the top. As LaHaye tells the story, one day, about 1994, he was sitting on an airplane, watching a married pilot flirting with a flight attendant, and it hit him: What would befall the sinful pilot if the Rapture happened now? What if, as LaHaye believes the Bible foretells, God suddenly snatches up to heaven all of the believers in Jesus? And that is how Left Behind starts. Everywhere, hundreds of millions of people vanish, leaving the unbelievers behind, from insufficiently pious Christians to Muslims, Catholics, Jews and everyone else. What follows is the Tribulation, in which God visits unspeakable plagues on the Earth, amid a climactic worldwide battle waged by a band of new believers, called the Tribulation Force, against Satan and the Antichrist. Seas and rivers turn to blood, searing heat burns men alive, ugly boils erupt on the skin of the disfavored, 200 million ghostly, demonic warriors sweep across the planet exterminating one-third of the world's population -- well, you get the idea. And why does a merciful God visit such horrors on mankind? According to LaHaye, "God intends that the terrible plagues and judgments of the Tribulation might cause the people of the world to repent and turn to him."
Reviewers trashed the Left Behind books as "almost laughably tedious" and "unrelievedly vomitous badness," and prominent Christian leaders condemned them as "unscholarly" and a "perversion" of the Bible. But the series gradually blossomed in Christian bookstores, gaining readers by word-of-mouth. In 2001 alone, the books sold a staggering 15 million copies. The intent of the books is frankly evangelical. "Our hope is that some people will be persuaded," says Jerry Jenkins, who co-authored the series with LaHaye.
The success of Left Behind gave LaHaye an enormous boost, returning him to prominence and making him truly born again. "At meetings of the Council for National Policy now, Tim and Bev are treated like rock stars," says Grover Norquist, perhaps Washington's leading conservative activist. Last fall, LaHaye released the first book of a new series called Babylon Rising, which takes his apocalyptic notions even further. Striking while the brimstone is hot, LaHaye has already received a reported $42 million advance deal from Bantam Books for the Babylon books, built around a swashbuckling, Indiana Jones-style biblical archeologist in the Holy Land.
Now seventy-seven, lahaye is considered rather scowly, even by his friends. A thin man who dyes his hair black, he wears a battery-powered earpiece and favors clashing polyester suits. "He can come across as stern and unloving," says Jenkins, especially when he gets up on his soapbox. "Then people say he can be too severe."
He is certainly gloomy about Earth's future. "We have more reason to believe that ours may be the terminal generation than any generation since Jesus founded His church 2,000 years ago," LaHaye told Rolling Stone via e-mail from his home in Palm Springs, California, citing not only biblical prophecy but weapons of mass destruction, incurable diseases, pollution and overpopulation. Despite Bush's election, Republican control of Congress and the success of his own organizations, LaHaye says that things are getting worse, and that "liberal, anti-Christian secularists still control government, media, education and other important agencies of influence."
That's a succinct summation of the tangled, conspiratorial mind-set conveyed in his books. In Left Behind, the "bad guys" just happen to be the same ones whom LaHaye, the Christian right and their allies usually demonize: the United Nations, the Europeans, Russia, Iraq, Muslims, the media, liberals, freethinkers and "international bankers," all of whom team up with the Antichrist, who ends up heading the U.N. and moving its headquarters to Babylon, Iraq. The "good guys," of course, are Christian believers, Israel and a phalanx of 144,000 Jews who accept Jesus. Another heroic force in the series is the right-wing American militia movement, which, as a world war erupts, makes a last-ditch, ultimately futile stand against the forces of Satan and the Antichrist in the United States.
According to LaHaye, civilization is threatened by a worldwide conspiracy of secret societies and liberal groups intent on destroying "every vestige of Christianity." Among the participants in this conspiracy are the Trilateral Commission, the Illuminati, the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the National Organization for Women, Planned Parenthood, "the major TV networks, high-profile newspapers and newsmagazines," the U.S. State Department, major foundations (Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford), the United Nations, "the left wing of the Democratic Party," Harvard, Yale "and 2,000 other colleges and universities." All of this is assembled to "turn America into an amoral, humanist country, ripe for merger into a one-world socialist state."
LaHaye professes no knowledge of whether President Bush buys into his views. "I have seen nothing from this president that would indicate that he is influenced one way or the other by my prophesy teaching," he says. But for Bush, an emotional, evangelical president who has repeatedly described the struggle against Saddam as a conflict between good and evil, LaHaye's views resonate with his. And though it's not known whether Bush has read any of the Left Behind books, he is a regular consumer of writing by other evangelists. Just recently, according to Falwell, Bush called a well-known born-again author, Rick Warren, to say he and Laura Bush had loved reading his new book, The Purpose Driven Life. Asked whether Bush is in accord with the End Times views of LaHaye, Falwell says, "My guess is that his views would differ very little, but that's conjecture." Jenkins, LaHaye's co-author, says only, "Every Christian ought to be happy that we have someone in the White House who says he believes what we do."
But the idea that Bush, in going to war against Iraq, might have been moved not by politics but by an apocalyptic vision is terrifying to some. Last October, the Rev. C. Welton Gaddy of the Interfaith Alliance wrote a formal letter to Bush, saying, in part, "Please assure the American people that you are not developing foreign policy on the basis of a fundamentalist biblical theology that requires cataclysm in Israel in order to guarantee the return of Christ." So far, he has not received an answer, and the White House didn't return calls from Rolling Stone asking whether the president has read Left Behind.
The final volume in the Left Behind series appears in the spring.
(January 28, 2004)
Mind Siege
By Tim LaHaye with David Noebel
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ISBN 0849916720
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Tim LaHaye keeps readers enraptured with tales of those Left Behind
INTERVIEW BY DEE ANN GRAND
"When I gave my life to the Lord, I thought I'd be a preacher," says Tim LaHaye, who despite more than 50 years of preaching is now best known as a phenomenally successful author. More than 30 million copies of LaHaye's books have been sold, including eight titles co-authored with Jerry Jenkins in the Left Behind series, the seemingly omnipresent apocalyptic novels.
With his latest book, Mind Siege, co-authored with David Noebel, the soft-spoken minister has raised the bar in Christian book sales. His critique of the ills of modern society premiered on The New York Times hardcover nonfiction bestseller list at number 17. At the same time the Left Behind series had five entries on the hardback and paperback fiction lists.
"I can't tell you what a thrill it is to walk into a Costco and see our books and other Christian books in the secular stores," LaHaye remarks.
And what set off this avalanche of publishing success? "About 40 years ago I had an experience where I wrote a tract," he explains. "After I'd preached a message on Sunday night, I'd print it up." One Monday, he went to visit a patient in the hospital. "Her family had given her the tract, she read it, then gave it to the other lady who was sharing the same room. And that [tract] led her to Christ. I kind of staggered down the hall and thought, Oh God, this is a new way to reach people!"
Years later, LaHaye and his wife took a trip overseas and were surprised to find just how far-reaching his printed products had become. "Bev and I did a trip around the world, and we'd been to Poland, a communist state. The spiritual leaders apologetically showed me a copy of my Spirit-Controlled Temperament. You see, they'd copied it without permission from the U.S. publisher. But I was elated they were using it."
Today, LaHaye's books have been translated into 34 languages. "And I've never done one thing to cultivate that," he says adamantly, crediting all his success to God.
But there must have been a secret formula for the overwhelming popularity of the Left Behind series, which describes the fate of those left on Earth after the rapture, in which Christians ascend into heaven. "It's a series of things," LaHaye says of the books' appeal. "Timing is one thing. All people, even secular people, are seeing books on the market like The End of History. It makes them start thinking, where is this world going? People recognize something's going to happen, and they'd better get ready."
Another component in Left Behind's success, LaHaye says, is his co-author, Jerry Jenkins. "I think it's Jerry's masterful fiction writing. And he's never been given his due credit until now with the Left Behind series." Eight titles have been published in the series, with more to come.
"I think God has chosen to use this as a tool," LaHaye continues. "And Tyndale House has done a good job with marketing. They've done their homework."
With a wide array of topics, from the apocalypse to Bible prophesy, family life and the purported evils of secular humanism, who is LaHaye trying to reach? Both adults and children, he admits. "I have several audiences. That's why I write, with help, children's books, like the Left Behind: The Kids," LaHaye says. "I'm currently working on a Mind Siege for youth. And part of my vision is to do dynamic videos for kids."
But he doesn't stop with videos. LaHaye has set his sights on the big screen. Unhappy with the current Left Behind: The Movie -- so much so, he has filed a lawsuit against the movie's producers -- his goal is to create a "believable conversion" with a top quality, feature film.
At age 74, the author is bombarded with speaking invitations and does a weekly Prophetic Update on the television program The King is Coming. Does he believe his true calling is to warn about the coming of the rapture? "I hope," he says with a smile, but then adds, "Well, maybe that's one of them."
Author photo by Reg Franklin.
© 2001 ProMotion, inc.
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Christian Soldiers on the March
by Jennifer Block
In Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye's bestselling Left Behind series (think of it as a Star Wars Trilogy for the religious right--it has sold 35 million copies), one-quarter of the world's population has mysteriously disappeared, and the most God-fearing among those "left behind" form the Tribulation Force, a troupe of evangelicals who believe the End of Days is nigh and the Secretary General of the United Nations is the Antichrist.
There's no evidence that George W. Bush owns the leather-bound collector's edition, but he certainly would sympathize with the T-Force's distaste for multilateralism. To every UN meeting that has occurred since he assumed the presidency, Bush has sent pit-bull delegations seemingly bent on ravaging both the global spirit as well as hard-fought consensus built throughout the past decade on social justice and human rights, especially women's rights.
To represent this country to the world, Bush has replaced career diplomats with career ideologues: John Klink, a former chief negotiator for the Vatican, has been on nearly every US delegation to a UN meeting, joined by Jeanne Head of the National Right to Life Committee, Janice Crouse of Concerned Women for America--the group founded by Tim LaHaye's wife, Beverly--and others from the "pro-family" lobby.
The Administration's international policies on sexual and reproductive health and rights, meanwhile, have been a Christian fundamentalist's dream. Within hours of the inaugural ball Bush was at his desk reviving the "global gag rule," which essentially corners humanitarian organizations worldwide into hushing up about abortion. He then stripped the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) of 12.5 percent of its budget, withheld $3 million from the World Health Organization's Human Reproduction Program and is now earmarking $33 million--almost exactly the amount he took away from the UNFPA--to augment domestic abstinence-until-marriage "sex-ed." He dispatched his emissaries to throw colossal tantrums at the UN General Assembly Special Session on Children, the World Summit on Sustainable Development and, most recently, the Fifth Asian and Pacific Population Conference, bringing all three negotiations to a near-halt over objections to no-brainer public health concepts like "consistent condom use" for HIV prevention and "safe abortion" where it is legal.
Charlotte Bunch, director of the Center for Women's Global Leadership, sees this attack as part of a larger assault on internationalism in general. "Their overall goal has always been to weaken the United Nations, in particular its capacity to be a constraining force on the flow of global capital and militarism," she says. "Attacking reproductive rights is convenient because it also delivers for the right wing." And it's low risk. "The Bush Administration has been able to get away with what would be appalling to most moderate Republicans," explains Jennifer Butler, the Presbyterian Church's UN representative, who tracks the Christian right's activities at the UN. Very few people--including members of the press--pay attention to UN meetings, she observes. "Bush can throw a bone to the Christian right and score some points, and he can do that without a cost."
Bush's first major foray into UN politics was in March 2001, when--perhaps still a little high from the fund-slashing frenzy--he sent the US delegation swaggering into the UN Commission on Human Rights like "cowboys," according to Bunch. The Geneva meeting is six weeks long, and "one of the most highly orchestrated; second only to the General Assembly in attention to detail of diplomacy," she says. The delegation's behavior was so indecorous that at the end of the session, the Europeans declined to re-elect the United States to the commission for the first time ever (they were invited back after 9/11).
Two months later, Bush sent professional right-to-lifer Jeanne Head to represent our country's global health interests at the annual World Health Assembly, quietly laying off the usual crew of reps from groups like the American Medical Association and American Public Health Association.
The Administration finally attracted widespread outrage when at the UN Special Session on Children, held in New York in May 2002, the Tommy Thompson-led US delegation made a grimly ironic alliance with Iran, Syria, Libya, Sudan and Iraq in the midst of Bush's "with us or against us" declaration of war on Islamic fundamentalists. Together, joined by the Vatican, these culture warriors fought to purge the world of comprehensive sex education for adolescents, restrict STD-prevention and contraceptive information to heterosexual married couples, and redefine "reproductive health services" to exclude legal abortion.
Most of the 3,000 activists and diplomats in attendance came to New York intending to negotiate broader definitions and commit more services to young people, who are becoming infected with HIV at the rate of five per minute, according to the UN. Instead, they had to fight tooth and nail just to hang on to language already on the books. "The United States really hijacked the whole session," says Françoise Girard of the International Women's Health Coalition. Example: During discussion of a section referring to children in postconflict situations, Washington harped on the word "services" because it might imply emergency contraception or abortion. "Nobody could understand why the United States would oppose language that was basically saying, 'When there are children who have been victims of violence and trauma in war, we need to provide them with services,'" says Zonny Woods of Action Canada for Population and Development. "But because among those victims of violence there might be girls who were victims of rape, who might be offered emergency contraception or an abortion, they were willing to throw away the whole concept of 'services.' It was just insane."
The US delegation succeeded in watering down the agreement, removing a paragraph on adolescent sexuality education and also some references to reproductive health services. And it blocked consensus on opposing capital punishment for adolescents, a detail that got lost in the media focus on the US obsession with abortion and abstinence.
At the World Summit on Sustainable Development, in Johannesburg last September, it was, as they say, déjà vu all over again. The United States, again in the dugout with the Holy See and a number of Islamic countries, deadlocked negotiations until the eleventh hour, opposing a litany of items, including language that would characterize female genital mutilation, forced child marriage and honor killings as human rights violations. "In the end, at 1 in the morning, they agreed to language that was almost identical to what they'd been fighting the whole time," says June Zeitlin, executive director of the Women's Environment and Development Organization. "We got what we wanted. But the United States succeeded in stalling the conference and in alienating a lot of countries."
Then came the real weapon of mass destruction, as far as women's rights are concerned: On November 1, Bush announced that the United States was considering withdrawing its support from the landmark agreement reached by 179 countries at the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo. For the global women's movement, the ICPD is considered a watershed event--the first time an official connection was made between population control and empowering women with information and contraception. With the Fifth Asian and Pacific Population Conference in Bangkok looming in December--a regional meeting for delegates to review the advances made in implementing the ICPD, not to revisit its basic principles--the United States was threatening to oppose the document unless all references to "reproductive health services" and "reproductive rights" were deleted.
But this time the Administration miscalculated. "They really overplayed their hand," says Françoise Girard. At an especially revealing moment during the December 11-17 showdown in Bangkok, US adviser Elaine Jones, an international relations officer in the State Department, took the microphone to express her country's--our country's--insistence that natural family-planning methods be emphasized in the conference document, offering her own experience with the Billings method of birth control (which involves checking the viscosity of one's own cervical mucus): "I've used the Billings method for ten years," Jones announced, "and it works." As titters spread across the room, one of the first of many responses came from, of all places, Iran. "Well, I'm an Ob-Gyn," said the Iranian delegate. "I have to tell you that natural family-planning methods have a very high failure rate. And by the way, it says so in all the textbooks that come from United States."
Less touchy-feely were the threats reportedly made by the United States to individual countries, specifically to the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Nepal, to withhold their piece of the USAID pie if they didn't vote along with the US delegation. "They were trying to push some governments around pretty hard," said one UN official on condition of anonymity.
"This is the fringe who've taken over US policy on sexual and reproductive health," says Girard. "Some people asked me, 'Do you think they're doing this because they want to save our souls?'" One first-time attendee from the United States said, "If they didn't have so much power I'd feel sorry for them."
In the end, however, the US delegation lost everything. When they demanded a roll-call vote on two sections of the ICPD agreement (dealing with reproductive rights and adolescent health) which they found objectionable, the votes came in at 31 to 1 and 32 to 1, with two countries abstaining--notably, Nepal and Sri Lanka. "They thought calling a vote would intimidate the Asians," says Girard, "when all it did was put on the record that the United States was completely isolated." Another observer remarked that the Americans "played themselves out of the game."
Ultimately, the Americans backed down on their threats to renounce the whole agreement, but they stunned other delegations with their "general reservation" to the document, a schizophrenic two-page addendum expressing disappointment that "the promotion of women's full enjoyment of all human rights is not emphasized more often," while also declaring, "Because the United States supports innocent life from conception to natural death, the United States does not support, promote, or endorse abortions, abortion-related services or the use of abortifacients." (Girard points out that if life begins at conception, the garden-variety Pill would be illegal.) The United States also opposed the term "unsafe abortion," a position explained by Jeanne Head during a fifteen-minute tirade at the closing ceremony: Abortion is never safe, because someone--the fetus--always dies. Thus the US delegation stated in its reservation, "The illegality of abortion cannot be construed as making it unsafe."
Says Girard, "If there was any doubt that Bush wants to overturn Roe v. Wade, it is clear now."
Sally Ethelston, vice president of Communications for Population Action International (PAI), remembers Cairo. "I'll never forget the faces of country delegates the afternoon they had finished their hardest negotiations. People emerged beaming because they knew they had forged something that would take the discussion so much further. And the United States played a major role in that process. What we see now is the United States playing the role of the bully."
"It's like Bush is sacrificing the women of the world to pay his political dues," says Terri Bartlett, also of PAI.
Regardless of whether Bush's machinations are payback to the religious right or born of a core belief that the UN will bring about the fall of man, activists in the global women's movement are not taking any more chances. Though many were expecting a 5th World Conference on Women to take place in Helsinki in 2005 (especially the Finns), the present consensus is that a ten-year follow-up to the 1995 conference in Beijing would be far too much of a risk. "Beijing is an incredible document," says Françoise Girard. "You look at it and really say, 'Wow.'" Still, women's activists are quick to insist that Bush isn't the only factor. "I wouldn't give him all the credit," says Zonny Woods. Conferences are a huge drain on time and resources, taking the best and brightest away from their work implementing the agreement. "If you think about it, we've been either having a major UN conference or preparing one for the past twelve years."
Indeed, the 1990s were not just about globalization of capital: There was the Rio conference in 1992, then a series of negotiations on climate change, forests and biodiversity. There were conferences on habitat, population and development, women, social development, human rights; then each of those had five-year reviews; then there were the conferences on racism, aging and HIV/AIDS; then the Special Session on Children.
"We don't need another conference in 2005," says Charlotte Bunch. "We need to keep working on implementing the Beijing platform. It hasn't been realized. Perhaps in 2010, or 2008, it will be a better political moment."
On the other hand, notes Jennifer Butler, the destructive role of the Bush Administration deserves wide attention. "If we don't tell people what's really going on, how can we mobilize them?" The UN shapes global norms, she argues, and if the superpower breaks away, it gives every other country license to back away from its commitments. "Since Beijing, you can't speak of any major world issue without applying some sort of gender lens," she says. Health ministries have implemented new programs, budgets have been allocated, national policy has been revised. But if Bush is allowed to continue his attack, "we will see a rollback, a slow erosion of the world culture that has been redefined to say it's not OK to violate women's rights."
And it's not only feminists who are fearful. There's plenty of buzz within the UN about how these conferences need to be made more, let's say, childproof. "We have got to figure out a way to avoid this again, because this is not productive at all. Because AIDS won't wait. Unwanted pregnancies won't wait," says a UN official.
Says Butler, "Maybe it's time to sound the alarm bells."
An Empire of Their Own
by Melani McAlister
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have never had such a bad feeling about a war ever before," wrote Sha Twa Nee on the Prophecy Club message board in April. This war, she said, "has given me such a 'heaviness' in my heart, a knowing that it is only the beginning of more to come.... I do believe we are living in the end times and that this war with Iraq is the precursor war to Armageddon...never have there been so many signs as now in history."
As conflict in the Middle East raged this spring, many evangelicals were afire with fears and hopes that they were witnessing the quickening of God's plan for the "end of times." The discussion, which traversed the Internet, Christian radio talk shows and church sermons, was intensified by the fortuitously timed publication of Armageddon, the latest novel in the Left Behind series. Conceived by evangelist Tim LaHaye and written by collaborator Jerry Jenkins, Left Behind is a fictionalization of a particularly incendiary school of biblical prophecy. The eleven books published so far describe the adventures of a group of evangelical Christians who face the rise of the Antichrist, a series of terrible plagues and judgments from God called the Tribulation, the battle of Armageddon and, ultimately, the Second Coming of Jesus. Like the previous four books in the series, Armageddon debuted at number one on the New York Times and other bestseller lists. With sales of well over 40 million (not counting its graphic novels and children's books), Left Behind is a publishing juggernaut.
The series is also a cultural phenomenon that goes well beyond books. Since the eponymously titled first novel in the series was published in 1995, there have been two films, several CDs, an interactive game, mugs and T-shirts, and an impressive web presence, with many active discussion groups (including "The Prophecy Club"), fan fiction, screen-savers, etc. The Apocalypse is at the heart of a growing evangelical popular culture industry, which is aimed at the approximately one-third of Americans who claim to be evangelicals or "born again." This industry includes a rapidly expanding book market, which has major publishing houses, notably Warner Books and Bertelsmann, rushing to sign up evangelical authors for their new "Christian" imprints. Contemporary Christian music is the fastest-growing segment of the music industry. And conservative Christian films, videos, radio, national conferences and community events have evolved into mass-marketed sites for talking about evangelical concerns, from family life to weight loss to global missionary work. Instead of condemning popular culture, as they did in the past, many evangelicals are now feverishly adopting its forms to create a parallel world of entertainment, a consumer's paradise of their own. Just ten years ago, it was still a fledgling subculture; today, it is anything but.
Having carved out this distinct universe, born-again Christians are now able to find almost total product substitution for mainstream media: There are evangelical versions of everything from rock music and films to romance novels and true-life tales. Much of this sprawling cultural universe is not oriented around discussions of biblical prophecy--many committed evangelicals aren't particularly interested in the subject--but an impressive subset takes the "end times" as its subject. Novels and films are churning out an intricate set of narratives that blend fundamentalist orthodoxy and conservative politics in a nightmarish vision of the world's imminent demise. Given that a recent Time/CNN poll showed that 59 percent of Americans believe that the events in Revelation are going to come true, the extraordinary popularity of the apocalyptic Left Behind series is something to be taken seriously indeed.
The series, which will include fourteen novels in all, is one long story. The opening book tells of a group of Americans, either nominal Christians or secularists, who, because they lack sufficient faith, are "left behind" when God takes all true believers into heaven in an event known as the Rapture. These unbelievers soon realize their mistake, and convert to evangelical Christianity. In preparation for the horrific yet enthralling events of the "end times," they form themselves into an underground "Tribulation Force." Rayford Steele, a strong-willed pilot in his 40s, is the head of the group. He is joined by his daughter Chloe and her husband, Buck Williams, a tough-minded crack journalist. The team is soon joined by Tsion Ben-Judah, an Israeli rabbi who has come to understand that Jesus was in fact the Jewish Messiah. As the plagues begin, bringing locust-looking demons and terrible natural disasters, from the drying up of seas to the darkening of the sun, Ben-Judah becomes an end-times prophet, teaching millions of new converts on his Internet site about the biblical meaning of the unfolding events.
Meanwhile, the rising Antichrist is Nicolae Carpathia, a handsome, urbane and lethally devious Romanian national who started his ascent to power as Secretary General of the United Nations (a longstanding object of fundamentalist wrath). Before long, Carpathia establishes himself as a global dictator and foists onto a gullible population a totalitarian, one-world government, a single global currency and a syncretic universal religion that combines Catholic-style pomp with New Age rhetoric. Soon the Antichrist builds himself a massive capital city from which to rule the world--in New Babylon, Iraq. (Obviously, this plot element connected impressively with the recent war, though it was already in place in Left Behind novels from the late 1990s.)
s the series progresses, and the final confrontation between good and evil approaches, the Antichrist intensifies his persecution of all who resist his power, particularly Jews and Christians. Opposing him, the Tribulation Force expands rapidly, gathering other committed converts all over the globe. The revolving cast of characters features not only whites, blacks and Native Americans but also Chinese, Greeks, Arabs and countless numbers of Israeli Jews. They are a tough, multinational cohort of guerrilla warriors, including military men, housewives, computer hackers and pilots--many, many pilots. They fly back and forth between their secret hide-outs in the United States and the sites of the real action, in Israel and Iraq. They manage to keep an eye on the goings on at New Babylon via deep-cover operatives and untraceable bugging devices. In short, they are highly competent and modern people, who whip around the world at a moment's notice in fighter jets or private planes, e-mail one another over highly encrypted computers and rescue those in danger.
In Armageddon, the members of the Tribulation Force join the "Remnant" of Israel, a core group of Jewish converts who have taken sanctuary at Petra, in Jordan, where they are fed manna from heaven each day. This group of Jews is held in special favor by God, thanks to their conversion. When Jesus returns (in the next novel), it is to fight on behalf of Israel against the massed power of the Antichrist. And, as the characters in Left Behind reassure one another repeatedly, biblical prophecy has already made the outcome clear: "We know how it ends. We win."
If this plot summary seems bizarre, the remarkable thing is that the scenario laid out in the novels is in no way outlandish or even very creative, if measured against the rich tapestry of evangelical fiction and nonfiction literature and film over the past twenty-five years. Since 1970, when Hal Lindsey published the hipster-styled book of prophecy interpretation The Late Great Planet Earth, which went on to become the bestselling nonfiction book of the decade, evangelical prophecy scholars have published one popularizing book after another, many of which were Christian bookstore bestsellers. In the mid-1970s, a low-budget film about a group of teenagers facing the Rapture traveled widely on the church-basement circuit. Its theme song, "I Wish We'd All Been Ready," became a staple of youth groups and Christian concerts for a decade. By the 1980s, several authors, including Pat Robertson, started turning the pious tracts into rollicking adventure; Frank Peretti's This Present Darkness (1986) sold several million copies; and the 1999 film Omega Code was the year's most successful independent release. In the late 1990s prophecy also moved to the Internet, with sites like raptureready.com and prophecynewswatch.com.
Left Behind readers are likely to have been immersed in that cultural milieu. The publisher, Tyndale House, says that 85 percent of its readers describe themselves as "born again," and almost 65 percent first heard about the series through friends or relatives. The average reader is a white married woman from the South, between 25 and 54 years old, who attends church weekly. Latinos make up 9 percent of the readers; African-Americans are 7 percent. These latter numbers are striking. More than 15 percent of Left Behind readers are people of color--that's certainly a lot higher than the percentage of blacks or Latinos who watch Friends--and it indicates more racial diversity than talk about "white evangelicals" generally suggests. Then again, given that two-thirds of the African-American population identifies as evangelical or born-again Christian, the number of African-American readers is actually rather low.
Different authors and preachers have offered their own specific visions of the apocalypse prophecy scenario: Ardent prophecy watchers may be biblical literalists, but their interpretations are developed by piecing together passages that are scattered across the "prophetic" books of the Bible, in acts of constructive meaning-making that would make any English professor proud. Still, the basic outlines are not really up for grabs, and by now certain stock images--the clothes left on an empty airline seat when a believer is Raptured, or the smooth-talking Antichrist holding forth at UN headquarters--have become ritualistic markers of a highly politicized religious culture.
The links between global politics and the "prophetic calendar" are matters of doctrine among the large swath of evangelicals who are also ardent prophecy watchers. For these true believers, the Middle East, particularly Israel and Iraq, is deeply important, both religiously and politically, as the theater of God's actions in the final days. LaHaye has often argued that the founding of Israel--the return of the Jews to their land--is the "supersign" that the Second Coming is approaching. In Left Behind, as in virtually every other prophecy adventure, Israel is the only nation God favors. Despite the well-documented nationalism of many Christian conservatives, most interpreters argue that the United States as a nation hardly figures at all in the end times. After all, as several Internet commentators have pointed out, America is not mentioned in the Bible. Jerry Falwell suggested something similar back in 1985, when he announced that "if we fail to protect Israel, we will cease to be important to God."
If he's right, then the United States must matter to God a great deal these days. The remarkable influence of the Christian right and more specifically Christian Zionism on the current Bush Administration's Middle East policy has been hard to miss. Right-wing figures in Congress like Oklahoma Republican Jim Inhofe and House majority leader Tom DeLay have close working relationships with evangelicals like LaHaye, Falwell and Ralph Reed. These evangelists and politicians are in turn deeply connected to the Israeli right, including Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his financeminister, Benjamin Netanyahu. The relationship has deepened in recent years--it seems as if some Jewish pro-Israeli organization is always giving Pat Robertson an award, and among grassroots Christian conservatives, there are multiple campaigns to raise money to settle immigrant Jews in the West Bank and Gaza--but the connections pay off particularly well in times of crisis. When the Israelis pushed into Jenin last year, for example, killing dozens of Palestinians and leaving thousands homeless, Falwell organized a massive e-mail campaign to call for the United States to "stand firm" behind Israel, while DeLay spearheaded Congressional opposition to any weakening of the Bush Administration's pro-Sharon stance. At about that time, DeLay discussed his recent trip to the Middle East before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. "I didn't see any occupied territory," he told the appreciative audience. "What I saw was Israel." More recently, DeLay declared himself "an Israeli of the heart" in a rabid speech before the Knesset.
Not surprisingly, some Israelis and American Jews have expressed profound unease with this kind of support. Gershom Gorenberg, author of The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount, has called this evangelical embrace a "strangely exploitative relationship," in which evangelicals love Israel primarily because they believe its existence proves that biblical prophecies are true. The history of conservative Christian anti-Semitism is no small issue here, and LaHaye himself is no small contributor to that history. LaHaye was active in the Moral Majority in the 1980s and was later forced to resign as co-chairman of Jack Kemp's 1988 presidential campaign for having called Catholicism a "false religion" and for blaming Jewish suffering on the Jewish rejection of Jesus. More recently, in an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg in Slate magazine, LaHaye announced that "some of the greatest evil in the history of the world was concocted in the Jewish mind." "The Jewish brain," he added kindly, also "has the capacity for great good." LaHaye's crude views are hardly the norm among evangelicals, but the suspicion remains that the pro-Israeli positions emerging from the Christian right are at best instrumental and at worst a dangerous enthusiasm for the impending destruction and/or mass conversion of Jews. The criticisms have led a few evangelical leaders, including Pat Robertson, to deny that biblical prophecy plays a primary role in their pro-Israel positions.
This general caveat undoubtedly holds some truth; many evangelical Christians, even those who don't hold a particular interest in prophecy, are deeply committed to a pro-Israel stance. But if we pay attention to the lively world of evangelical popular culture, it becomes clear that prophecy narratives mobilize a particular kind of energy and enthusiasm. A generic sense of support for God's Chosen People becomes something far more exciting and more emotionally powerful when placed in the context of what many evangelicals believe to be the most religiously significant events of all time. On the multiple web message boards on leftbehind.com, for example, enthusiastic posts situate Israel's history and current politics within an ongoing series of discussions about "Are We Living in the End Times," or "How Soon Will It Be?" Recently, one contributor wrote in to say that she is anxious and feels the world is spiraling out of control. The reply from another poster: "Relax! Enjoy seeing the Bible come to life! It's proof that it IS REAL!"
Quite a few moderate and liberal evangelicals have criticized the theological bent that turns every current event into an occasion to prove that the end is near. Randall Balmer, an evangelical who has written a series of influential studies of the movement, says that the focus on prophecy emerges out of a "theology of despair" based on a "slavishly literalistic" reading of Revelation. He describes Left Behind as "camp fiction," and calls it both triumphalist and self-righteous. Other commentators aren't nearly so generous: Christian Century magazine described Left Behind as simple-minded "beam me up theology."
But that "beam me up" theology is central to the books' appeal. At the level of fundamentalist doctrine, the Left Behind series is unreconstructed and proud of it: There is only Jesus Christ, and Christianity is the only truth. Winning converts is the primary moral duty of the characters (and, one presumes, of the novels themselves). The narrative inveighs repeatedly against abortion, sexual "immorality" and false religion. At the same time, the fast-paced chase scenes, direct visitations by angels and humorous banter among the tough-minded fly-boys lend excitement to the long didactic messages in which Tsion Ben-Judah details the meaning of particular biblical verses, or the endless repetition of scenes in which yet another character recounts how he or she found Jesus. What makes these novels work is that they seamlessly integrate an apocalyptic religious view with a strongly conservative political vision, and locate both in a universe of supernatural action adventure in which good and evil are fully and finally revealed.
The war between good and evil is the moral heart of the series, and the utter lack of ambiguity in the situations it evokes is the utopian lamp in the dark world of the end times. Religiously, the purity of believers is contrasted with the evil religion propounded by the Antichrist and his henchmen. Those on the wrong side of God suffer the kind of tortures that right-wing radio commentators like Rush Limbaugh have sometimes seemed to wish on "Feminazis": They are bitten by demon-locusts and suffer terribly for five months; they are struck down by flashes of fire and sulfur, trampled by ghostly, death-dealing horsemen who ride the skies and attack only nonbelievers. Believers, on the other hand, are immune from much of this suffering, though they do face death and danger, and occasionally become martyrs for their cause.
A more earthly right-wing political critique is fully integrated into this narrative, and all the traditional far-right bugbears make an appearance. The one-world government of the Antichrist, for example, has its origins in a shadowy conspiracy between a group of Trilateral Commission-like financiers and the fearful members of the UN, who are so desperate for "peace" that they allow themselves to be taken over by a dictator. And that totalitarian rule embodies every conceivable form of liberal tyranny. It is simultaneously economic (the Antichrist introduces a single currency), cultural (he has a monopoly on world media) and political (his police state employs "Morale Monitors" who patrol the streets, hunting down and executing any dissidents). Oh, and the Antichrist also tries to make his lover have an abortion. So it is that when one of the Antichrist's henchmen describes the Tribulation Force members as "right-wing, fanatic, fundamentalist faction," we as readers are invited to consider the source and take it as a compliment. We know whose side God is on, and who will be destroyed at the end.
Of course, the Left Behind series is fiction, and fiction is not a hypodermic needle, injecting beliefs into unwary victims. The fact that we watch a particular TV show or read a particular set of novels doesn't mean we buy their entire world-view. I am a big fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but I'm not at all inclined to believe that there is a hell mouth in California. (I do, however, occasionally allow myself to imagine that Martin Sheen is President.) We cannot assume, then, that every Left Behind reader is, or becomes, a prophecy-talking, Bible-believing, UN-bashing conservative Christian. Nor can we assume that all evangelicals, even politically conservative ones, share the ideology of the prophecy set. Indeed, there is some evidence that fans of the series read the books as if they were Stephen King novels, and the series has received reviews on both science fiction and horror websites. Even on the official leftbehind.com chat-rooms, many younger readers announce that their other favorite books are the Star Trek and Star Wars series, or novels by Marion Zimmer Bradley and even Anne Rice.
But Left Behind is more than a collection of novels. It exists within an evangelical milieu both broad and deep. That universe is both highly interactive and intimately familiar to most of its readers, filled with stock apocalyptic imagery, detailed biblical exegesis and action-adventure realism that marries contemporary evangelical fascinations, conservative political values and popular-culture pleasures. This kind of thick context makes it much more likely that the Left Behind novels will be received as prophecy, not dismissed as fluff, by the evangelicals who form their core audience.
Left Behind also highlights something important about the way mass culture works. Rather than creating a homogenized McWorld, as so many critics have claimed, popular culture can and does reinforce ideological and cultural divisions, fostering sharp distinctions between communities. The evangelical population in the United States is becoming more numerous, more politicized--particularly around foreign policy--and more powerful than ever before. This transformation is as much cultural as political, or rather, it is inextricably both at once. Those of us who care deeply about the future of politics, domestic and international, cannot afford to ignore the fact that evangelicals are no longer merely a subculture. They are fast becoming a--perhaps the--dominant force in American life. As the Middle East smolders, many people have debated the role of George W. Bush's Christian beliefs in his foreign policy, and we are daily confronted with the lobbying muscle of the Christian right. But if we want to understand conservative Christians as a political force, we must pay attention to the galvanizing power of culture. The astonishing success of the Left Behind series suggests that the conservative obsession with biblical prophecy is increasingly shaping our secular reality. I wish we'd all been ready.
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Beyond Garbage, March 10, 2011
