Religion: The Pop Prophets
Faith and Fiction: Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins are an unlikely team with a shared evangelical fervor—and America's best-selling writers
NewsweekMay 24 issue - This photo shoot isn't going so well. Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, coauthors of the best-selling "Left Behind" series of apocalyptic Christian novels, get to see each other only a few times a year, and they'd rather schmooze than pose for the cover of NEWSWEEK. The desert wind near LaHaye's home in Rancho Mirage, Calif., is kicking up, and the 78-year-old LaHaye's suspiciously brown hair won't stay down; Jenkins's wife, Dianna, solves that with a paper clip. OK, big smiles? "I gain 15 years on my face when I smile," LaHaye says, smiling. Now, what to do about the fact that Jenkins towers over his partner by about a foot? "Is there something LaHaye can stand on?" the photographer asks. "You can sit on my lap," Jenkins tells LaHaye. Finally LaHaye fetches a stack of phone books. "I understand this is how Tom Cruise poses," he says. OK, Tim? Put your arm on Jerry's shoulder. Jenkins grins and puts his hand lovingly on top of LaHaye's. Dianna Jenkins says, "Such a cute couple."
They're an odd couple, for sure: LaHaye, the golden-ager in polyester, veteran culture warrior and cofounder of the Moral Majority; Jenkins, the bearded baby boomer in jeans, best known (until now) for channeling the autobiographies of such Christian athletes as Orel Hershiser. They're also, arguably, the most successful literary partnership of all time. And if you define success in worldly terms, you can drop the "arguably." Their Biblical techno-thrillers about the end of the world are currently outselling Stephen King, John Grisham and every other pop novelist in America. It's old-time religion with a sci-fi sensibility: the Tribulation timetable comes from LaHaye; the cell phones, Land Rovers—and characters struggling with belief and unbelief—come from Jenkins. And their contrasting sensibilities suggest the complexities of the entire evangelical movement, often seen as monolithic.
The first volume, "Left Behind" (1995), kicks off with the Rapture—the sudden snatching up of millions of the faithful into heaven—and subsequent volumes follow airline pilot Rayford Steele and journalist Buck Williams, left behind to tough it out down here on earth through the seven-year Tribulation and the rule of the Antichrist. The 12th and final installment (not counting a planned sequel and prequel), called "Glorious Appearing," has the return of Jesus, the battle of Armageddon and the Judgment. It sold almost 2 million copies even before its March publication; it's still tied for No. 2 on The New York Times's list—which doesn't count sales at Christian bookstores. In all, the "Left Behind" books have sold more than 62 million copies.
Who's buying? Jenkins recalls a puzzled Chris Matthews asking a "Hardball" guest the same question. "I'm sure I don't have the quote exact, but it was something like 'Certainly not the people in the cities and the suburbs.' And I'm thinking, 'What does that leave? Barefoot people in the hollers handling snakes?'" Jenkins takes issue with a previous NEWSWEEK piece that called "Left Behind" a "Red State" phenomenon, but statistics from the publisher, Tyndale, bear this out: 71 percent of the readers are from the South and Midwest, and just 6 percent from the Northeast. (Hence Tyndale's sponsorship of a NASCAR racer, with the unlucky logo left behind.) The "core buyer" is a 44-year-old born-again Christian woman, married with kids, living in the South. This isn't the "Sex and the City" crowd—which helps explain why it took so long for the media to notice that one in eight Americans was reading all these strange books about the end of the world.
And why are so many people eager to do that? Well, check the news tonight. As the world gets increasingly scary, with much of the trouble centered in the Mideast—just where you'd expect from reading the Book of Revelation—even secular Americans sometimes wonder (or at least wonder if they ought to start wondering) whether there might not be something to this End Times stuff. After September 11, 2001, there was such a run on the latest "Left Behind" volume, "Desecration," that it became the best-selling novel of the year. And it's no coincidence that the books are a favorite with American soldiers in Iraq.
LaHaye and Jenkins—the prophecy teacher and the pop novelist—combine the ultimate certainty the Bible offers with the entertainment-culture conventions of rock-jawed heroism and slam-bang special effects. "Left Behind" gives believers an equivalent of such secular sagas as the "Lord of the Rings" books: a self-contained, ordered world with a wealth of detail in which a reader can become blissfully immersed, and the assurance that good must win out—but not so quickly that the audience can't indulge the human fascination with evil. Scholars reconstructing the popular history of the first years of the 21st century—if there still are any—will have to grapple with the phenomenon of "Left Behind." In an age of terror and tumult, they may find, these books' Biblical literalism offered certitude to millions of Americans amid the chaos of their time.
The many critics of the series see a resonance between its apocalyptic scenario and the born-again President Bush's apocalyptic rhetoric and confrontational Mideast policies. And they see LaHaye's far-right political agenda behind having fetuses Raptured from pregnant women's wombs, and making the Antichrist the secretary-general of the United Nations. Roman Catholics aren't happy that the Antichrist's assistant is the pope, and while "Left Behind" shows the common evangelical sympathy for Jews, they exist to be converted and to fulfill Christian prophecy. (For Jenkins and LaHaye, of course, so does everyone else.) And minorities may find the books' attempts at multiculturalism condescending. "I ain't seen no Bible for years," says one character, a "heavyset Latina." "What got me was that it wasn't fancy, wasn't hard to understand... All them Scriptures sounded true to me, 'bout being a sinner."
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