{"id":35054,"date":"2017-08-17T18:48:32","date_gmt":"2017-08-17T22:48:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/?p=35054"},"modified":"2017-08-21T10:07:38","modified_gmt":"2017-08-21T14:07:38","slug":"left-behind-trumpism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2017\/08\/17\/left-behind-trumpism\/","title":{"rendered":"Left Behind and Trumpism"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

The Left Behind series sold more than 65 million copies. I can\u2019t offer a precise\u00a0Venn diagram comparing\u00a0those 65 million readers\u00a0with\u00a0the just-under 63 million Americans who voted for Donald Trump, but I would imagine the overlap in the middle would be pretty big. Their appeal is the same, and so is the audience.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s an example of that, and an illustration of how it works, from culture-warrior \u201cpastor\u201d Sam Rohrer, speaking on the Christian-brand TheDove TV network this week<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Sam Rohrer of the American Pastors Network asserted that people who oppose President Trump\u2019s plans to restrict immigration are attacking God and are on the side of the Antichrist.<\/p>\n

\u201cWho is it that\u2019s pushing for open borders?\u201d Rohrer asked. \u201cIt\u2019s globalists, it\u2019s the one-world government out of which will come the Antichrist.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe concept of borders and nations and languages are God\u2019s ideas,\u201d he continued. \u201cGod, in Acts, says He laid out the nations before the foundation of the world. He actually had defined the geographical boundaries of the nations; God laid that out. So when there is an attack on boundaries, borders, language, immigration, when there is a denial of those things, it is an attack on God himself. And ultimately, we know that Antichrist view is what is leading up to the challenge we now have.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rohrer said that globalists and Islamists are \u201cwanting to dislodge God\u2019s plan for the nations\u201d through open borders and \u201canybody who agrees with that plan is in stark agreement with the Antichrist way of living and thinking and they are in opposition, directly, to the Bible and to Christ himself.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is how people like Rohrer \u201cread\u201d the Bible \u2014 by reading Left Behind<\/em> instead. What does the Bible have to say about immigrants, refugees, aliens and exiles? Well, for Rohrer, the Most Important Thing is to remember that \u201cthe Bible teaches\u201d us about the coming Antichrist who will soon \u2014 at any moment! \u2014 rise to usher in a One World Government. The Antichrist will do this by deceiving the world with talk of peace.<\/p>\n

Therefore, anyone who talks of peace is paving the way for the Antichrist. Anyone who seeks to reduce conflicts between nations is \u201cin stark agreement with the Antichrist way of living and thinking.\u201d<\/p>\n

This seems to be the only way these Christians can imagine learning what Jesus had to say or to teach about anything \u2014 by reverse-engineering the opposite of what they imagine the Antichrist will do.<\/p>\n

Left Behind<\/em> shaped the political imagination of its readers in many ways \u2014 including the most deliberate, which involved Tim LaHaye injecting the series with big doses of his own John Birch Society views. But the series\u2019 weird, warped theology can be discerned in much of America\u2019s similarly weird and warped political landscape \u2014 including the Trumpian and Trumpite defense of the white supremacists, white nationalists and Nazis who marched this weekend in Charlottesville, Va.<\/p>\n

Consider for example this strange picture writer Chris Arnade shared on Twitter<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\"LeftBehindFlags\"<\/p>\n

\u201cKind of wondering what is going on in this house right now,\u201d he wrote of this photo, taken last year in West Virginia.<\/p>\n

My guess is that they\u2019re reading Left Behind<\/em> and watching John Hagee DVDs. That would account for the odd sight\u00a0of a Confederate battle flag flying along with the flag of Israel.<\/p>\n

Yes, that seems like a contradiction \u2014 the flag celebrating the \u201cheritage\u201d of treason in defense of slavery is, after all, a favorite symbol for white supremacists and white nationalists who want American citizenship restricted to white \u201cChristians.\u201d Those rallying around that flag tend to be intersectional \u2014 wanting to disenfranchise or deport or eradicate both African-Americans and<\/em> Jews (among many others). So you might not expect them to also be flying a symbol of Jewish pride.<\/p>\n

But many of those same Confederate-flag-waving white nationalists also subscribe to Tim LaHaye\u2019s brand of Christian apocalypticism. That makes them enthusiastically \u201cpro-Israel.\u201d This doesn\u2019t entail support or affection for the children of Israel \u2014 for Jewish people as a whole \u2014 only for the political nation-state itself. They believe that supporting and allying with that political state puts them on the right side in the coming war with the Antichrist at Armageddon, after which all Jews will be forced to denounce their Jewishness and convert to Christianity or else they will be slaughtered, en masse,<\/em> and condemned to Hell as Christ-rejecting sinners.<\/p>\n

The apocalyptic Zionism of these Rapture-Christians has added appeal for Bircher types like LaHaye and many of his fans. They\u2019re \u201cpro-Israel,\u201d in part, because they don\u2019t want to live with Jewish neighbors here<\/em>. It\u2019s a not-so-subtle variation of the hateful \u201cGo back to Africa!\u201d impulse they have toward black Americans.<\/p>\n

So while those two flags may seem contradictory, for the Left Behind & Trump fans flying them, they\u2019re both variations of the same assertion: \u201cstark disagreement with the Antichrist way of living and thinking.\u201d And that, they imagine, must put them squarely in sync with the Antichrist\u2019s opposite, the Christ whose own words they have never otherwise read, heeded, or understood.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Left Behind series sold more than 65 million copies. I can’t offer a precise Venn diagram comparing those 65 million readers with the just-under 63 million Americans who voted for Donald Trump, but I would imagine the overlap in the middle would be pretty big. Their appeal is the same, and so is the audience.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":141,"featured_media":35055,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[21,238,158,28,240],"class_list":["post-35054","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-evangelicals","tag-immigration","tag-left-behind","tag-racism","tag-religious-right","tag-trump"],"yoast_head":"\nLeft Behind and Trumpism<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The Left Behind series sold more than 65 million copies. 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A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. You can reach him via email at slacktivist at hotmail dot com.\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/author\/fredclark1\/\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Left Behind and Trumpism","description":"The Left Behind series sold more than 65 million copies. I can't offer a precise Venn diagram comparing those 65 million readers with the just-under 63 million Americans who voted for Donald Trump, but I would imagine the overlap in the middle would be pretty big. 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A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. You can reach him via email at slacktivist at hotmail dot com.","url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/author\/fredclark1\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35054","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/141"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35054"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35054\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35055"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35054"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35054"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35054"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}