[Figure: <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/south_atlantic_quarterly/v102/102.4mcalister_figures.html#fig01>]
In the fall of 2001, about six weeks after the events of September 11, a novel called Desecration was released. The book was part of the pathbreaking Left Behind series written by conservative evangelist Tim LaHaye and writer Jerry Jenkins, which describes the "end of times," the rise of the Antichrist, and the final battle of Armageddon, all of which figure prominently in Christian apocalyptic theory. Desecration went on to become the best-selling hardback book of the year, moving John Grisham out of the number one spot he had held every year since 1994, and it did so after only three months on the shelves. 1 Desecration built on the remarkable success of its predecessors. To date, eleven books of the planned fourteen-book series have been released, and the last five have all debuted at number one on the bestseller lists. In total, they have sold more than thirty-two million copies (excluding graphic novels and children's versions) since the first book appeared in 1995. 2
The Left Behind novels are unabashedly fundamentalist fiction, based on literalist interpretations of the "end of time" as understood through the prophetic books of the Bible. Although the popular success of the series was already well established before September 11, the events of that day spurred a new interest in the books and the larger field of biblical prophecy. For many fundamentalists in the United States, the terrorist attacks were more than simply horrific political crisis or personal loss; they were also further proof that the end of times predicted in biblical prophecy was imminent. Those who mine the apocalyptic books of the Bible for signs of the Second Coming of Christ often argue that "wars and rumors of wars" as well as great sorrow and tribulation are key indicators of the quickening of God's plan. 3 When that plan unfolds, the Middle East will be the stage and Israel will be at the heart of the story, as Jesus Christ himself returns to fight on the side of his Chosen People against the Antichrist.
The Left Behind novels describe the experiences of a group of newly committed Christians who live through the terrible events leading up to Armageddon and Christ's return. In accordance with biblical prophecies, these believers must face the rise of the Antichrist, who will persecute Christians and Jews, take over as dictator of a one-world government, lead a global crusade against Israel, and eventually bring the world to Armageddon. 4 LaHaye and Jenkins have constructed fast-paced and plot-driven stories that are also generic hybrids, combining traditional evangelical homily with science-fiction-like threats and action-adventure thrills, complete with plenty of male bonding and high-flying capers.
Until recently, the series was all but invisible in liberal and intellectual circles, though that is changing. In 2002, LaHaye and Jenkins were the center of friendly interviews with CNN, ABC, NPR, CBS, CNBC, and Time magazine, among others. 5 Despite extraordinary newspaper and television coverage, however, each account of the Left Behind phenomenon finds it necessary to introduce the books to an audience who presumably finds their very existence to be news. Evangelicalism itself appears as a novelty to the major media, yet approximately one-third of Americans define themselves as "born again." 6 (Fundamentalists are best defined as a subset of evangelical Christians, who are generally more literal in their biblical interpretations and often more interested in prophecy than other evangelicals or mainline Protestant denominations or Catholics. 7) The popularity of Left Behind is no doubt connected to the much broader growth in the sales of religious-themed cultural products in the United States, ranging from books on New Age spirituality and Jewish dating to Christian T-shirts and Hindi lunch boxes. Sales of religious items have grown by more than a third in the past six or seven years. Kmart executives, for example, recently announced that religious and inspirational writing is the chain's fastest-growing category. 8
The Left Behind books are remarkably popular not only with the fundamentalists who form their core readership, but also with many more casual readers who pick up the books when they see the highlighted displays at Wal-Mart, or visit the special sales section at Amazon.com, or perhaps who have seen the ads "Read the Future" and "leftbehind.com" blazoned on the side of one of the cars at NASCAR races in recent years. As one scholar describes it, "In office settings, these things are being passed around like Stephen King novels or the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue." 9 Indeed, as each new installment races to the top of the hardcover charts, paperback versions of earlier books in the Left Behind series continue to dominate the paperback lists. 10 In addition, the series has spawned two movies, no fewer than five soundtracks, calendars, mugs, and an impressive line of screensavers and e-greetings. 11 What we are seeing, then, is a remarkable mainstreaming of evangelical pop culture, one in which nonevangelicals seem to be willing to read overtly proselytizing messages, as long as they are delivered in a readable genre.
But the novels are also indicative of the reenergized political and cultural power of a Christian Right that in the late 1990s had seemed to be in retreat. In hindsight, that retreat may have been genuine at the political level, as exemplified by the decline of the Christian Coalition and the failure of several evangelical campaigns for president, but it is far less apparent when one considers the politics of culture: by 1996, the books in the Left Behind series were already under-the-radar best-sellers. These extraordinary novels marry their evangelical religious commitments to a political agenda that combines traditional social conservatism, an emergent evangelical racial liberalism, and a strongly developed interest in contemporary Middle East politics, in which Israel is central to the unfolding of God's plan for the end of time.
These days, that interest is certainly not expressed or experienced only in novelistic form. As the conflict in Israel/Palestine has escalated in recent years, evangelical preachers and their communities have rushed to "Stand for Israel"-organizing support rallies, letter-writing campaigns, and tours of the "Holy Land" that are linked directly to the Israeli right. 12 These Christian Zionists seem to be having a very real influence on the Bush administration's policies, as they fire off e-mails, hold lobbying days, and organize rallies to insist that the United States take the strongest possible stance in favor of right-wing Israeli policies to fully subjugate Palestine. The link between political ideology and cultural consumption is of course never simple or direct, but in the past five years, and especially since September 11, the power of Left Behind as a major cultural phenomenon has an undeniable link with the resurgence of pro-Israel activism on the Christian right and the extraordinarily dangerous directions taken by the U.S. "war on terrorism" in the Middle East.
The Left Behind series is an exemplary cultural text, one that is simultaneously a symptom of and a strategy for the revitalization of Christian Zionism. The novels do their cultural work as part of a larger project of evangelical mapping -- that is, they aim to place evangelicals on the U.S. political map, as a modernized and mainstreamed political force who have moved far beyond the subcultural status that marginalized them even in the heyday of the Moral Majority. That process simultaneously maps the Middle East in highly specific ways. As it looks to biblical passages to support the "restoration" of Jews to Palestine, and as it marks Israel as the site of God's action in history, the fundamentalist vision of Left Behind makes Palestine and Palestinians literally invisible. And as Palestine is wiped off the evangelical map, it is also removed to the dustbin of history for a sizeable audience of American readers. . . .
Racial Liberalism, Racist Conservatism
The voice of the Left Behind series is distinctly modern in another way as well [in addition to its technological savvy]; it suggests that while the chosen believers at the end of times may be doctrinally narrow, they are culturally and racially expansive. The rather striking racial liberalism in the books has both a domestic politics and a global reach, and it is linked to both kinds of maps that structure the cultural politics of the novels: that is, race politics works both to map fundamentalism into the mainstream of U.S. domestic politics and to mainstream within U.S. foreign policy the evangelical mapping of a Holy Land without Palestine or Palestinians.
Domestically, the history of fundamentalism in the United States has often been one of racial exclusivity and prejudice. In the 1960s, the largely Southern base for white fundamentalists and evangelicals helped to establish their firm opposition to racial integration. 40 And into the 1980s, the Moral Majority and then the Christian Coalition did little more than pay lip service to issues of race, despite the fact that the doctrines of many black Christians were clearly evangelical. But in the 1990s, with the rise of the Promise Keepers and other new parachurch organizations, evangelicals began to talk more extensively about crossing racial barriers, and did so in ways that brought discussions of racism into the heart of white evangelism. Perhaps it should not be so surprising, then, that LaHaye and Jenkins put the white characters who form the core of the Tribulation Force through their multicultural paces. At various times, they work closely with at least two African-American male characters, one set of Chinese Christians, a Native American woman, two Arabs, and uncountable numbers of Israeli Jews. The plot consistently presents racial liberalism as the norm for the characters, and implicitly for the readers as well.
In the fourth book, for example, the first of two important African-American characters is introduced into the plot. Floyd Charles is a young physician who helps save Buck's wife Chloe when she is pregnant, injured, and on the run from the forces of the Antichrist. Dr. Charles is soon making regular visits to the Tribulation Force's safe house; he eventually ends up living there, and in the process, falling in love with a woman in the group, Hattie. When Floyd reveals his feelings for Hattie to Rayford, who functions as the Tribulation Force's leader, Rayford expresses deep concern. This concern, however, is not framed as an issue of race; the fact that Floyd is black and Hattie is white goes unmentioned in their discussion. Instead, Rayford is worried that Hattie is simply not a good enough person for Floyd, since she is both unconverted and remarkably selfish. Though Floyd conveniently dies before he can even declare his love to Hattie, much less act on it, it is nonetheless remarkable that the Left Behind series would present an interracial relationship as so utterly noncontroversial (what is controversial is falling in love with a nonbeliever). It says volumes about the ways in which white fundamentalism has changed its self-presentation, both within the community itself and in terms of its public voice on issues of race.
But though LaHaye and Jenkins have obviously made a conscious decision to bring African Americans into close proximity to the core characters, the novels register a particular self-consciousness about this fact, one that at times borders on self-parody. On several occasions, for example, Buck or Rayford make what the authors seem to think are rather cute jokes that play off the parallels between the concept of brothers in Christ and the trope of African-American men as "brothers." At another point, an older and uglier stereotype appears: when Rayford and Floyd are in trouble, Rayford asks the other African-American male character, T. M. Delanty ("T."), to help him by trading cars with Floyd. T. has never met Floyd, and Rayford explains that he can recognize Floyd because of the vehicle he is driving, and the fact that he "looks a lot like you." A few pages later, LaHaye and Jenkins have T. refer back to this apparent reality -- that black men basically look alike -- as useful in carrying out an escape plan. This character is forced, in other words, to testify in favor of the subtle racism of the books.
The global racial and religious politics of the novels are even more complex, and equally problematic. As the Tribulation Force expands its global reach -- over the course of the series, more and more of the action is set in New Babylon, Iraq, where the Antichrist has set up his headquarters -- the white American members run into diverse believers all over the world. In one novel, an Israeli Jew who has also converted to Christianity gets a friendly lesson on avoiding stereotypes from a Native American woman named Hannah Palemoon (The Mark, 215); later in the series, the young Chinese man, Chang, moves to the forefront of the action as he battles with his father over his Christian beliefs. And soon Chang's sister Ming becomes a leading character, and her emerging romance with a Korean believer is followed enthusiastically.
These international characters are among the most popular on the fan sites, and it is here that one gets the strongest sense of a worldview in which multiculturalism, albeit of a rather limited type, is the presumptive norm. One female fan, for example, has written a series of stories on a fan Web site about a young man named Jonathan Palemoon, who she describes as Hannah Palemoon's younger brother. On the story site, she listed among her character's strengths his "family and his heritage," and his martial arts skills. Early in the series, the African-American man "T" was frequently listed by contributors to the message boards as their favorite; since the last few books were released, Chang, the young computer hack with parent problems, has been widely embraced. 41
The internationalism of this multiculturalist vision is precisely of a piece with the stark doctrinal narrowness of the stories: anyone can convert, but conversion to (born-again) Christianity is of course necessary to be recognized by God. This has been the source of concern for a good many Jewish and Israeli commentators, who have pointed out that the fundamentalist love of Israel comes at the price of a belief in the massive conversion of Jews at the end of time -- 144,000 Jewish "witnesses" recognize Jesus as the Messiah and join with the non-Jewish believers to fight the Antichrist. As Gershom Gorenberg has argued, this seeming embrace of Jews and Israel is merely instrumental at best. At worst, it is vicious: Israeli Jews exist to testify, in the end, to the truth of Christianity. 42 But these views about conversion are, of course, entirely consonant with the larger fundamentalist view of the "narrow road" to heaven. When conservative Christians insist that Jews and Muslims and all others must be converted in order to see God, this is perhaps best understood less as racism or anti-Semitism, per se, than as the logical conclusion of the novels' severe doctrinal conservatism.
Arabs and Muslims, however, fare particularly badly, though they are also subject to a version of the deadly love offered to Jews. In 2002, the news media reported a rather extraordinary series of anti-Muslim slurs by fundamentalist leaders: Falwell's infamous declaration on 60 Minutes that "Mohammed was a terrorist," and Pat Robertson's warning on his Christian Broadcasting Network that Muslims are "worse than the Nazis." 43 Yet in the Left Behind series, Arabs and Muslims are woven into much more complicated cultural tapestry. On the one hand, there is the demonic Pakistani who is the Antichrist's head of security (and who joins a virtual Rainbow Coalition of evil, including the Antichrist himself, Romanian Nicholae Carpathia; his "right-hand man," the Italian-American Leon Fortunato; and the leader of the abominable One World Faith, the former Catholic U.S. bishop Peter Matthews; and later the Chinese security expert Walter Moon). Yet there have been over the course of the series, several moments in which Islam and/or Arabs figured importantly. In the most recent novel, there is a fairly long scene in which a group of Chinese Muslims prove themselves to be hold-outs against the Antichrist and are thus about to be executed. The tenets of Islam are summarized briefly but respectfully. Just before they are about to die, a group of the Muslims convert to Christianity and thus assure their assent to heaven (Remnant, 282-97).
In the earlier novels, two key Arab characters emerged, both of whom are Muslims who convert after the Rapture. Both are presented as highly positive individuals. One, "Al-B" or Albie, is described as a native of Al Basrah, Iraq, which in later novels is glossed as simply "north of Kuwait." He plays a key role in many of the novels' most daring rescues and escapes. The second is Abdullah Smith -- "the name looks weird," his friend Mac explains, "but he has his reasons" (Apollyon, 333). Abdullah is a Jordanian pilot, and is almost always named as a favorite character on the fan sites. One young person has even taken his name as her nom-de-web, and he is often featured in fan fiction as well. In fact, Abdullah is one of the central characters of the entire last half of the series. As one of the pilots who can ferry the Tribulation Force members back and forth between the United States and the Middle East, he is key to the plot. But he is also figured as a good friend to several of the male characters at the heart of the story, particularly Rayford Steele.
Abdullah is one of the tough men of action who provide the story's emotional center; he is laconic but has a rough and earthy sense of humor that allows him to trade friendly insults with another pilot, a white American named Mac. When Abdullah first appears, his broken English is presented as the source of "friendly" amusement for the readers and other characters (Apollyon, 353, and Assassins, 136). Later, as he becomes more central to the Tribulation Force, he and Mac trade the kind of ethnic jokes that are supposed to be the staple of locker-room and battlefield bonding: he makes fun of Mac's "Texan" talk and calls him a "cowboy"; Mac returns by calling him a "camel jockey" (Remnant, 350-53). Here, as with the African-American characters in the earlier novels, LaHaye and Jenkins exhibit a genuine but awkward embrace of diversity and yet a none-too-subtle racism. Abdullah is warmly welcomed into the fraternity of Christian believers, but he must consistently perform as a (racially) marked man.
The more subtle but perhaps more important signifier within the world of Left Behind is the fact that Abdullah is located as Jordanian, not Palestinian. In fact, there are no Palestinian Arabs ever mentioned in a series where much of the action takes place in Jerusalem and the surrounding areas. There are Arabs, presumably, in the masses who gather to hear the Antichrist when he speaks in Jerusalem, but in those moments, it is Jews and Israel that matter: Israeli Jews are central doctrinally, and they are key characters in the novels, as they convert, provide leadership to other believers, and, in the most recent novel, find themselves gathered and protected in the city of Petra, as the Antichrist marshals his forces. (On the other hand -- and surely this is not incidental -- there are no American Jews in Left Behind.)
So it is that the mapping of characters' identities is also a mapping of the space of Palestine/Israel, precisely because the very notion of "Palestinian" is made invisible, impossible. There are Muslims and there are Arabs in Left Behind, but there are few Arab Christians and there are no Palestinians. Within the logic of the series, Palestinians cannot convert like Abdullah or Albie and they cannot resist like the righteous Chinese Muslims, because they are simply outside the representational possibilities of the Left Behind world. Dick Armey's suggestion that Palestinians should be removed from the West Bank and Gaza, and Pat Robertson's insistence that Israel should never compromise one bit of land, are enacted within the novels as wish fulfillment: there is no Palestinian problem on the evangelical map. . . .
[The full text of the article is available at <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/south_atlantic_quarterly/v102/102.4mcalister.html> & <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/south_atlantic_quarterly/v102/102.4mcalister.pdf> if you have individual or institutional access to the Project Muse.] ***** -- Yoshie
* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>