(Originally posted June, 2005.)
Left Behind, pp. 102-104
These pages find Rayford Steele on the edge of a spiritual crisis. Steele thinks of himself as a man’s man, self-reliant, capable and proud. Here, for the first time, he begins to experience self-doubt:
Would it mean admitting that he didn’t know everything? That he had relied on himself and that now he felt stupid and weak and worthless? He could admit that. After a lifetime of achieving, of excelling, of being better than most and the best in most circles, he had been as humbled as was possible in one stroke.
That last sentence is wonderfully ambivalent. If Rayford is really “as humbled as possible” then what’s with all the boasting about being “the best in most circles”?
On the one hand, Rayford has finally begun to question his own self-sufficiency. There’s a genuinely Christian element here. For a less evangelical take on Rayford’s dilemma, consider the analogous language of AA and the other 12-step programs. Rayford imagines he is at rock bottom and considers, for the first time, the possibility of “letting go and letting God.”
But on the other hand, he doesn’t quite seem willing to let go. This might be an honest, even artful, depiction of the beginnings of a spiritual struggle except that L&J seem to share Rayford’s ambivalence.
He has lost one child, his young son, but not the other, his college-age daughter. We’ve already seen L&J’s explanation for this — Raymie was younger than the “age of reason” so he automatically receives the free ticket to heaven. Chloe is an adult who, like her father, was free to choose otherwise and thus, like her father, is “left behind.” Yet Rayford here looks for some further explanation for why his son was raptured/killed/saved and his daughter was not.
It wasn’t simply Raymie’s age and innocence that had allowed his mother’s influence to affect him so. It was his spirit. He didn’t have the killer instinct, the “me first” attitude Rayford thought he would need to succeed in the real world. He wasn’t effeminate, but Rayford had worried that he might be a mama’s boy — too compassionate, too sensitive, too caring. He was always looking out for someone else when Rayford thought he should be looking out for number one.
L&J acknowledge that self-reliance can be a kind of idolatry, or at least an obstacle to the surrender of self involved in surrender to God. They even approach the idea that some of our cultural notions of “manliness” contribute to this myth of self-reliance.
But at the same time, they like this notion of manly self-reliance — as demonstrated by that blurted out non-sequitur insistence that Raymie “wasn’t effeminate.” They want to be Buck and Steele — manly, capable men, “the best in most circles.” They can admit a need for God but not, you know, in some sissified way that would undermine their steely, young-buck macho self-reliance.
There’s a hint here of something I can’t quite fully suss out. An interconnectedness of L&J’s reflexive homophobia, their insistence on rigid gender roles and male dominance, and the strange notions of power and magic that color their notions of salvation. More on this later.
Left Behind, pp. 104-105
Remember that whole “Rapture” thing? Yeah, well, we’re done with that now.
Left Behind is often described as a novel about the Rapture and what happens afterward, but that’s not really accurate. It’s a novel about a whole series of events supposedly prophesied. These events are familiar to all adherents of the premillennial dispensational “prophecy” perspective. First the believers and innocents will be raptured. Then the Antichrist will rise. Then comes a series of judgments — the seas turn to blood, the four horsemen bring famine, war, disease and death, dogs and cats sleeping together, mass hysteria.
The odd thing about LB — and all the earlier PMD, last days novels that it derives from — is that these events are never portrayed as connected. As these books recount their checklists of prophecy, A, B, C, D and E all happen, but they do not flow out of one another. They are unrelated, discrete occurrences. LaHaye and Jenkins tell us about the Rapture, and then they tell us about the rise of the Antichrist, but the two things are jarringly disconnected. It seems almost like we’re beginning a new, separate novel here on page 104.
Buck Williams arrives at the seedy Midpoint Motel “a few miles from the tiny Waukegan Airport.” Buck looks at the decrepit motel room and wonders “what two places in the world this dive was midpoint between. Whatever they were, either had to be better.” That’s a joke. It’s even a pretty good joke. (I want to be fair here and offer praise where we can. Particularly since we’re about to encounter some of the worst writing in the book.)
The dismal room does have the one thing Buck cannot survive without: a telephone. It’s been a long walk from the limo, where Buck had paid $50 to use the driver’s car phone, to the motel room. Ten or 20 minutes may have passed since Buck was last able to use the phone, so he immediately dials his voicemail. He had no new messages, so:
… he listened to his saved message from Dirk Burton, which reminded him why he had felt it so important to get to London.
Dirk, you’ll recall, is Buck’s conspiratorial source with connections to the mysterious cabal of international power brokers who secretly run the world from behind the scenes. You might think that the world-shaking events of the previous 36 hours would have also shaken the agenda and activities of these unelected, world-governing puppeteers and that they would now be scrambling to respond to the drastic changes in the world they thought they controlled. But no.
Dirk’s message makes it clear that the cabal is continuing its previous agenda as though nothing had happened. They seem unaffected, unphased by the dissappearance of nearly 2 billion people. Their political schemes are unaltered by the upheaval of the entire previous political landscape.
“Let me tell you something major,” Dirk says. In the immediate aftermath of the mass disappearances, it takes someone with an unhealthy tunnel-vision to think that “something major” could mean anything other than, say, revealing what happened to all those people, or what might happen next. But what Dirk means by “something major” is instead this: an unscheduled special election in Romania:
The big man, your compatriot, the one I call the supreme power broker internationally, met here the other day with the one I call our muckety-muck. You know who I mean. There was a third party at the meeting. All I know is that he’s from Europe, probably Eastern Europe. I don’t know what their plans are for him, but apparently something on a huge scale. …
Something is cooking, and I don’t even want to suggest what it is other than in person. Visit me as soon as you can. In case that’s not possible, let me just encourage this: Watch the news for the installation of a new leader in Europe. If you say, as I did, that no elections are scheduled and no changes of power are imminent, you’ll get my drift.
“No changes of power are imminent,” Dirk says. Buck and the authors seem to think this is a reasonable statement. Weren’t they paying any attention to the previous 100+ pages?
Let’s review: All the Christians in the world have disappeared. Even presuming that LaHaye and Jenkins have a very limited notion of who makes the cut as a “true” Christian, it’s at least possible that some elected official, somewhere in the world is among the disappeared.
But that’s the least of it. The world is in chaos. Nothing, absolutely nothing, will ever be the same. Apart from the hundreds of millions of adult “true” Christians who are suddenly gone there is also the matter of the billion or so children — as in all the children. The disappearance of the children would utterly change the political, economic and social fabric of every nation, city and village on earth.
“No changes of power are imminent”? No. Rather, every leader on the planet would now find their position in jeopardy — from the now irrelevant school boards on up to the presidents and kings. Parents the world around would be rioting, taking to the barricades.
This context of global chaos — the carnage of accidents and plane crashes, the ensuing economic collapse, the bewildering anguish of the missing children — would be fertile ground for would-be totalitarian rulers. Leaders already in power would be declaring martial law, suspending civil liberties and assuming for themselves sweeping new powers while reassuring their constituents that such steps were necessary to restore order. Many of the leaders who refused to take such steps would quickly be overthrown, replaced by more ambitious strongmen who saw this as their opportunity for revolution.
None of that happens in Left Behind.
The Rapture was a self-contained prophetic event confined to the first 100 pages of the book. It has no aftermath, no repercussions, as the authors move on to the next self-contained prophetic event: the rise of the global government of the Antichrist.
The post-Rapture chaos and political tumult could easily have led to the rise of such an authoritarian, worldwide leader, except that for L&J it doesn’t lead to much of anything. To explain the rise of Nicolae “Sundance” Carpathia, they resort instead to a half-assed conspiracy of international power brokers and an unrecognizably capable and powerful United Nations.
All of which is evidence that Carpathia is not qualified to be Antichrist. The fact that he fails to recognize the political opportunity presented by the post-Rapture chaos proves that he lacks the diabolical, power-mad instincts the job requires.
Likewise, the fact that Stonagal & Co. fail to recognize such an opportunity proves that they are not qualified to act as a shadow government. The fact that Dirk Burton is unable to adapt his conspiracy theories to account for the recent cataclysm shows that he is not qualified to serve as our haunted man-who-knows-too-much. The fact that Buck reads that “no changes in power are imminent” and nods along in agreement proves that he is not qualified to serve as the world’s foremost investigative reporter.
And, of course, the fact that LaHaye and Jenkins created all these woefully unqualified characters, and that they concocted such a worldwide catastrophe without ever imagining any repercussions beyond the difficulty of getting from O’Hare to Naperville proves, again, that they are not qualified to write anything worth reading.
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