Schaeffer on Tim LaHutari

Frank Schaeffer has a long item at the Huffington Post — reworked from an excerpt from his new book — on "The Evangelical 'Mainstream' Insanity Behind the Michigan 'End Times' Mania."

Or, in other words, how the World's Worst Books helped to shape the crazy/stupid of the anti-American Hutari militia.

Frank Schaeffer is growing increasingly blunt in his critique of American evangelicalism. This criticism is, correctly, not just direct at the nuttier prophecy freaks like Tim LaHaye, but at the soul-devouring rot of misplaced indignation that has become the core of even "mainstream" evangelical Christianity here.

He speaks of evangelicals as the "terminally aggrieved." Yes. Both of those words are accurate. Evangelicalism is dying of umbrage.

That it is Frank Schaeffer — son and heir of the late Francis Schaeffer — making this critique is enormously significant. (Some background on Francis Schaeffer here.) Imagine if L. Ron Hubbard had a son who was now going around declaring that Scientology is a load of bunk.

Frank Schaeffer believes evangelicalism took a wrong turn in the late 20th century. He's worth listening to on this point, because when it took that turn his dad was in the driver's seat and he was riding shotgun, reading the directions. If Schaeffer's critique has gotten more urgently shrill, that simply reflects the earnestness of someone now trying desperately to unring the bell or to unsoil the bedsheets.

Anyway, here's Frank Schaeffer's indictment of Tim LaHaye, Jerry Jenkins, their awful books and their ignoble appeal for their intended audience:

The evangelical/fundamentalists — and hence, from the early 1980s until the election of President Obama in 2008, the religious right as it informed U.S. policy through the then-dominant Republican Party — are in the grip of an apocalyptic Rapture cult centered on revenge and vindication. …

The Left Behind series is really just recycled evangelical/fundamentalist profit-taking from scraps of "prophecy" left over from an earlier commercial effort to mine the vein of fearsome End Times gold. A book called The Late Great Planet Earth was the 1970s incarnation of this nonsense. It was written by Hal Lindsey, a "writer" who dropped by my parents' ministry several times.

Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth interpreted Revelation for a generation of paranoid evangelicals who were terrified of the Soviet Union and communism and were convinced that the existence of the modern state of Israel was the sign that Jesus was on the way in our lifetimes, as Lindsey claimed. …

According to Jenkins and LaHaye, who have taken over the Hal Lindsey franchise of apocalypse-for-fun-and-profit and expanded it into a vast industry, the "chosen" will soon be airlifted to safety. …

The key to understanding the popularity of this series … isn't some new or sudden interest in prophecy, but the deepening inferiority complex suffered by the evangelical/fundamentalist community.

The words left behind are ironically what the books are about, but not in the way their authors intended. The evangelical/fundamentalists, from their crudest egocentric celebrities to their "intellectuals" touring college campuses trying to make evangelicalism respectable, have been left behind by modernity. They won't change their literalistic, anti-science, anti-education, anti-everything superstitions, so now they nurse a deep grievance against "the world." This has led to a profound fear of the "other."

Jenkins and LaHaye provide the ultimate revenge fantasy for the culturally left behind against the "elite." They do theologically what Sarah Palin does politically: divide the world and America into "Them" and Us."

The Left Behind franchise holds out hope for the self-disenfranchised that at last everyone will know "we" were right and "they" were wrong. They'll know because Spaceship Jesus will come back and whisk us away, leaving everyone else to ponder just how very lost they are because they refused to say the words, "I accept Jesus as my personal savior" and join our side while there was still time! Even better: Jesus will kill all those smart-ass, Democrat-voting, overeducated people who have been mocking us!

All the folks in Michigan did was decide to start the killing a little early.
Knowingly or unknowingly, Jenkins and LaHaye cashed in on years of evangelical/fundamentalists' imagined victim-hood — something that is now key to understanding the Tea Party movement.

I say imagined … [but] … their sense of being a victimized minority is still very real — and very marketable. Whether they were winning politically or not, they nurtured a mythology of persecution by the "other." Evangelical/fundamentalists believed that even though they were winning, somehow they had actually lost.

Most of that sense of lost battles is related to the so-called culture wars issues in which evangelical/fundamentalists did not fare so well, from the legalization of abortion to gay rights. But rather than admitting that they were often losing the arguments, or had come across as so mean (or plain dumb) that few outsiders wanted to be like them, they blamed everyone else, from the courts to organizations such as Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, The New York Times, and the "left-wing media." Just about any scapegoat would do to deny or disguise the simple fact that fewer Americans wanted to follow the evangelical/fundamentalist Church Ladies into their gloomy cave (and/or the never-never land of the Rapture) and park their brains there.