Fred Clark’s latest entry on the awfulness of the Left Behind books includes this amusing passage:
So let’s think about this. Imagine you’re Pastor Billings — or perhaps one of the thousands of actual pastors here in the real world who were inspired and instructed to make actual versions of such a video after reading Left Behind. You want to prepare the future-Christian viewers of that video to face the trials that await them in the Great Tribulation, but you can’t just give them detailed shelter-network instructions for fear the Antichrist or his minions might see this video as well.
That means you’re going to need some kind of code. Your secret message to the future Tribulation Force Christians will need to be communicated in some way that is decipherable only to the most determined and devout future students of your PMD faith. This secret, coded message will be pretty extensive. You’ll need to explain the necessity of the shelters and the gravity of the threats. You’ll need to explain about the 18-month period of peace and urge them to take advantage of that window of opportunity for their clandestine project.
But wait, is 18 months really enough time for such a project — particularly given the supply disruptions likely to follow in the aftermath of the Rapture? This huge, globally coordinated project would seem a more plausible undertaking for Christians now, before the Rapture.
Think of it, instead of merely leaving a collection of vague, I-told-you-so videos for the post-Rapture world to find, we could leave them a fully constructed, fully stocked global network of ready-for-use hidden shelters. That would, in a way, allow us to play a part in — and to claim at least partial credit for — the great global soul harvest of the Last Days. Constructing those tunnels now without the secret getting out might be difficult, but not impossible — and it would be far easier for us than it would be for them.
That leaves only the last hurdle of figuring out some way to let these future Christians know of the legacy we have provided, but doing so in a way that we can be sure the Antichrist and his legions will not be able to decipher. We can’t just leave the keys under the doormats of our churches with notes explaining where the secret trap doors are. Such instructions would need to be left — embedded or encoded — where only the truly devout could find them.
Here the PMDs’ arcane skill set will prove useful. They’re enthusiastic students of intertextual splicing, numerology and coded symbolism. Employing those skills, a shrewd author — or authors — might construct a book which, while outwardly appearing to tell one story, secretly contained a second, hidden and more detailed narrative.
Such a book, or set of books, might be difficult to construct so that it worked on both levels. It might mean that in order to communicate the coded message with as much precision and detail as possible, the authors would have to sacrifice style, plot, characterization, continuity, etc., in the secondary, surface-level story. So be it — the encoded instructions would be the books’ only true priority. And anyway it might actually be useful if the books seemed unreadable, sloppy and dull — that would discourage casual readers from inspecting them too closely and inadvertently stumbling onto their coded message. Ideally, the subject matter would be something that would seem off-putting to the Antichrist and his followers, but attractive to the intended audience of new believers in the post-Rapture world. You could even make the surface-level story about people just like those intended readers, that way they’d be sure to pay at least some attention.
You see what I’m getting at. I offer this as an actual possibility for your consideration.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In