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Born-again Rapture
...“Bible prophecy is history written in advance”, we’re told again and again in the Left Behind books, and in the course of the series, the mystical torments described in Revelation unfold in literalistic detail. Seas turn to blood, darkness veils the earth, and venomous locusts torment the unbelievers. This makes it increasingly difficult to account for the continuing apostasy of most of the world’s population. In Glorious Appearing, one of the characters wonders about this, while recalling the still-recent episode in which “200 million demonic horsemen” wiped out one-third of the people on the planet. Are unbelievers insane? “No, she decided, they were self-possessed” – self-possessed? – “narcissistic, vain, proud. In a word, evil”. But, even as she thinks this, the forces of evil are gathering on the outskirts of Petra, where the “Trib force” and “the Jewish remnant” are preparing for Christ’s return by watching Baptist preachers on DVD. Christ, the believers surmise, is “gonna kill a bunch of people”.

In an apocalyptic scene, the Antichrist’s swarthy legions advance, brandishing their weaponry. “And then, as if God had thrown the switch in heaven, light.” Christ descends on a horse and makes “magnanimous comments about Himself”. At his every word, “tens of thousands of Unity Army soldiers fell dead, simply dropping where they stood, their bodies ripped open, blood pooling in great masses . . . . It was as if the very words of the Lord had superheated their blood, causing it to burst through their veins and skin”. This operation is repeated several times at different locations, in order to conform to the various prophecies marshalled by LaHaye, and in consequence the cast spend most of the book chasing their Lord around the Middle East in armoured vehicles, exchanging pious greetings on mobile phones. The Antichrist, the smells-and-bells False Prophet and Satan himself are exquisitely punished, the sheep and goats divided. Then Christ’s millennial reign on earth begins.

It would be easy to make fun of Jerry B. Jenkins for thinking that “the spoils of war” means bomb damage, or for having a Jordanian member of the Tribulation squad operate under the codename “Camel Jockey”. But it would be hard to overemphasize the awkwardness with which he blends folksy humour, treacly sentiment and religiously justified bloodbaths. The Left Behind books have been energetically condemned by mainstream reviewers in the United States – not least by more orthodox Christians, who have been as offended by LaHaye’s manglings of biblical tradition as they have by his uncompromising sectarian zeal. Nevertheless, the series’s visions of beleaguered yet plucky evangelists speaks powerfully to the many millions of believers whom secular as well as religious ideologues have been mobilizing since the late 1970s. President Bush – whose endorsement by the Christian Right in 1999 and 2000 was brokered in part by the “renowned prophecy scholar” Tim LaHaye – might be acting as an astute political operator when he professes not to believe in the theory of evolution, to be conducting a showdown between good and evil and all the rest of it. But, as Joan Didion put it in a recent essay on the Left Behind phenomenon, “the kind of dream that can be put to political use . . . can also entrap those who would use it”.

Mr. Bush & the Divine

...The question of this administration's relationship to the Christian right has been frequently muddled, most deliberately, or opportunistically, by the administration itself. We have come to recognize the rhetorical signals the President sends to evangelicals, a constituency which, since its turn toward political action in the 1970s and with the encouragement of those Republicans who would use it, has itself become the party's plague of brimstone-breathing horses. By the 1994 congressional elections, Christian conservatives cast two of every five Republican votes. By the time of the 2000 Republican convention, Christian conservatives achieved a platform unswervingly tailored to their agenda, including the removal of language that could be interpreted as pro-choice, the removal of language that could suggest approval of civil rights for homosexuals, and the removal of language that could be seen to favor any form of sex education other than the teaching of abstinence. "It was a one hundred percent victory," Phyllis Schlafly of the Eagle Forum said of the completed platform.

Now as then, evangelical Web sites provide primers on influencing legislators and maximizing the Christian vote, as well as call-to-action discussions of inflammatory issues, for example whether Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore was right to defy a federal court order to remove his Ten Commandments monument from the state judicial building's rotunda. "Christian rights are being challenged," was the conclusion on the Ten Commandments question of a September edition of the LeftBehind.com Newsletter, which is e-mailed to followers of the series from leftbehind.com. To the same point, Focus on the Family's site offered a "Ten Commandments Action Center," where readers could "learn who to contact and what to say" in support of Judge Moore.

Donald Paul Hodel, who served first as secretary of energy and then as secretary of the interior during the Reagan administration, is now president of Focus on the Family, and in that capacity recently wrote to The Weekly Standard objecting to its favorable review of two books by the Protestant theologian D.G. Hart, who had suggested that the disinclination of American evangelicals to separate religious from public concerns was deleterious to both. "The fact is that without the hard work and votes of millions of Christians who have chosen not to be silent," Hodel warned, "there would be no Republican majority in both houses of the US Congress, no Bush presidencies, few Republican governors, and a small handful of statehouses in Republican hands."...

...We recognize that when the President stood in February 2003 in Nashville before a backdrop reading "Advancing Christian Communications" and told the National Religious Broadcasters that America's enemies "hate the thought of the fact" that "we can worship the Almighty God the way we see fit," he could be confident, his frequent mentions over the months of "churches, synagogues, and mosques" notwithstanding, that there would be no confusion among the 2,700 representatives of evangelical Christian radio and television stations in the Opryland Hotel that day about which God the President himself saw fit to worship. We recognized, early after September 11, his persistent use of the word "crusade" for what it was, a construction designed to slip past merely nominal Christians (the ones who prefer the churches that might as well be country clubs) but carry a specific message to the evangelical....

...This notion of the nation, or its president, having been chosen to fulfill some divine purpose was repeated many times, with the active encouragement of the White House. Within days of the September 11 attacks, White House aides were confiding to Time that the President was "privately" speaking of having been "chosen by the grace of God to lead at that moment." "I think President Bush is God's man at this hour," Timothy Goeglein of the White House Office of Public Liaison told the Christian weekly World, "and I say this with a great sense of humility." The President was presented as accepting his mission with an equal sense of humility: after his address to Congress on September 20, 2001, according to Deborah Caldwell, a producer at Beliefnet.com, he received a call from his speechwriter, Michael Gerson. "Mr. President, when I saw you on television, I thought—God wanted you there," Michael Gerson is supposed to have said. "He wants us all here, Gerson," the President is supposed to have said in response....

..."It seems as if he is on an agenda from God," one of the religious broadcasters who heard the President speak in Nashville in February had said to Dana Milbank of The Washington Post. "The Scriptures say God is the one who appoints leaders. If he truly knows God, that would give him a special anointing." Another had agreed: "At certain times, at certain hours in our country, God has had a certain man to hear His testimony." President Bush, the Post article had concluded, drawing in elements of the familiar fundamentalist redemption story and melding them with the dreams of the administration's ideologues about remaking the entire Middle East, "admires leaders who have overcome adversity by finding their life's mission, much as he has gone from drinking too much to building a new world architecture." We have now reached a point when even the White House may be forced to sort out how a president who got elected to execute a straightforward business agenda managed to sandbag himself with the coinciding fantasies of the ideologues in the Christian fundamentalist ministries and those in his own administration.