Nicolae: The Rise of Antichrist; pp. 293-299
Hattie Durham is 0-for-2 when it comes to long-term relationships. Her second attempt has been pretty much a disaster, with the man she took to be charismatic and charming turning out to be dull, distant and controlling. And also, it turns out, the Antichrist. Finding out that her second recent boyfriend is the Beast from the Abyss, the apotheosis of evil, and a tyrannical dictator bent on world destruction and wanton slaughter has been a disappointment.
Dating the Antichrist is almost as bad as her previous relationship, with Rayford Steele — another dull, distant, control-freak who turned out to be into some really weird emotional kink. (“My desires are … unconventional,” he had explained, early on. “We must never touch. …”) And at least the Antichrist wasn’t married.
Hattie is still young, of course, so we could imagine that there’s still plenty of time for her to find happiness. But, cruelly, it turns out there isn’t plenty of time for anyone in these books. The world is coming to an end about five years from now.
Even more cruel, it seems Hattie is doomed to spend those five remaining years bouncing back and forth between the two awful men who tag-teamed to ruin her 20s. She’s finally mustered the courage to flee Nicolae Carpathia, yet now she finds herself back on an airplane, once against being lectured by Rayford Steele.
Note: Let me warn you that the remainder of this post includes some really disturbing content. Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins use Rayford Steele like a lens here to focus and concentrate their misogyny into a single, searing, blinding point. And for the rest of this chapter they play with Rayford and Hattie the way a cruel child might play with a magnifying glass and an anthill. It’s pretty creepy stuff.
(Seriously, we’re headed here toward a discussion of LaHaye and Jenkins’ philosophy of rape, and it’s quite likely that this is something you just don’t want or need to subject yourself to reading about. I kind of wish I hadn’t subjected myself to reading this, and even now I’m tempted to just ditch the whole chapter and post more capybara videos because this crap is really horrifically unsettling and evil and I don’t want anyone to feel blindsided when they get to the appalling end of this post.)
“Why do you want to make me feel guilty for considering an abortion?” Hattie Durham asks.
“I can’t make you feel guilty,” Rayford said. But he was still going to give it his best shot. She was a woman and he was a man, and to Rayford, that meant it was his moral duty to try to make her feel guilty — guilty for considering an abortion, guilty for having slept with Nicolae, guilty for having been willing to sleep with him, guilty in general for being a woman.
But Rayford fears this may be an impossible task. Hattie is not a Real, True Christian. He thus assumes that she is therefore devoid of conscience:
He had to remind himself that she was not a believer. She would not be thinking about the good of anyone but herself. Why should she?
Projection is the closest that Rayford can ever come to empathy. He recognizes that, before his conversion, he was a remorseless, self-absorbed, narcissistic monster incapable of considering anyone other than himself. He thus deduces that everyone else who has not yet been converted is the same now as he was then.
Among the many flaws in this deduction is Rayford’s mistaken assumption that he became anything other than a remorseless, self-absorbed, narcissistic monster at any point after his conversion.
He begins the next phase of his attempt to induce guilt by trying to convince Hattie to see understand why he considers abortion even worse than the Antichrist:
“Hattie, just humor me for a moment and assume that that pregnancy, that ‘it’ you’re carrying, is already a child. It’s your child. Perhaps you don’t like its father. Perhaps you’d hate to see what kind of a person its father might produce. But that baby is your blood relative too. You already have maternal feelings, or you wouldn’t be in such turmoil about this. My question is, who’s looking out for that child’s best interest?”
You can’t argue with that. Rayford asks Hattie to assume his conclusion as her premise, and you literally cannot argue with that. (This begs the question, again, of what we are to call question-begging now that “begs the question” is used mainly to mean “raises the question.”)
But after he helpfully outlines the circle of his basic argument, Rayford’s speech goes badly off track:
“Let’s say a wrong has been done. Let’s say it was immoral for you to live with Nicolae Carpathia outside of marriage. Let’s say this pregnancy, this child, was produced from an immoral union. Let’s go farther. Let’s say that those people are right who consider Nicolae Carpathia the Antichrist. I’ll even buy the argument that perhaps you regret the idea of having a child at all and would not be the best mother for it.”
Rayford doesn’t seem to understand how stipulation works. When we say, “Let’s say …” the point is usually to make a conditional concession of the other person’s point for the sake of argument. Rayford gets this backwards. He invites Hattie, for the sake of argument, to concede all of his assertions: “Let’s say I’m right about everything. Let’s go farther. Let’s also agree that you are wrong about everything. Let’s just stipulate for the sake of argument that you are unfit for motherhood — that you are to motherhood the equivalent of what the Antichrist is to governance. Let’s just start by agreeing that you are a wanton, immoral hussy who was born with your legs apart and will be buried in a Y-shaped coffin. …”
Again, you can’t argue with that because, again, it’s not an argument. It’s a bundle of assertions mixed with insults.
So far so bad — but this is Left Behind, so of course it’s going to get even worse. And it does.
How much worse could it possibly get? How about LaHaye and Jenkins and Steele sharing their philosophy of rape?
“Let’s say it was immoral for you to live with Nicolae Carpathia outside of marriage. Let’s say this pregnancy, this child, was produced from an immoral union. Let’s go farther. Let’s say that those people are right who consider Nicolae Carpathia the Antichrist. I’ll even buy the argument that perhaps you regret the idea of having a child at all and would not be the best mother for it. I don’t think you can shirk responsibility for it the way a rape or incest victim might be justified in doing.
“But even in those cases, the solution isn’t to kill the innocent party, is it? Something is wrong, really wrong, and so people defend their right to choose. What they choose, of course, is not just the end of a pregnancy, not just an abortion, it’s the death of a person. But which person? One of the people who made a mistake? One of the people who committed a rape or incest? Or one of the people who got pregnant out of wedlock? No, the solution is always to kill the most innocent party of all.”
There you have it. For Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins and the good Christian men of Tyndale Press, rape is something “committed” by two people. There’s the rapist and the co-rapist.
This seems to be the first and only place where LaHaye and Jenkins ever regard women as fully equal to men. Women are not fully equal in marriage, in the church, or in society — but they are, to the authors, equally culpable for rape. In any rape, they say, the woman is “one of the people who committed a rape.” She is “one of the people who made a mistake.”
I do not posses the capability, the time or the space to explore here all the ways that this is monstrously wrong. Whole books could be, and have been, written to shred and dismantle the misogynistic ideology crystallized here in this bit of rape-talk from LaHaye and Jenkins. I cannot rewrite all of those books here in response to this scene.
But what I can do is remind you that this isn’t simply one appalling aberration on page 296 of the third book in this series. This is an inescapable ideology that pervades every page and paragraph of these books.
Jerry Jenkins is, for the most part, terrible at world-building and continuity. His fictional world contradicts itself repeatedly. He introduces huge changes and then forgets about them just a few pages later. But on this one point he is reliably, relentlessly consistent. The misogyny in this chapter — the contempt and disgust for women displayed here — permeates the entirety of this story and of the theology that drives it. Sometimes it’s the background, sometimes, as here, it’s in the foreground. But it is always present in these books. It is always being assumed and it is always being taught.
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