{"id":70627,"date":"2025-05-16T16:33:17","date_gmt":"2025-05-16T20:33:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/?p=70627"},"modified":"2025-05-16T16:33:17","modified_gmt":"2025-05-16T20:33:17","slug":"lbcf-king-of-kings-and-capo-di-tutti-capi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2025\/05\/16\/lbcf-king-of-kings-and-capo-di-tutti-capi\/","title":{"rendered":"LBCF: King of kings and Capo di tutti capi"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

(A Left Behind re-run from January, 2006. Here we see how the Rapture Christianity of LaHaye and Jenkins is the opposite of what we read in 1 John: \u201cThere is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.<\/span>\u201c)<\/em><\/p>\n

Left Behind,<\/i> pp. 189-190<\/b><\/p>\n

The Rev. Bruce Barnes is an odd man. He\u2019s twitchy and God-haunted like Hazel Motes in Wise Blood.<\/i> He says he believes in the \u201cRapture,\u201d but we don\u2019t see him rejoicing over the salvation of his wife and children. Instead he acts more like God took them and left a ransom note. Now God wants him to proselytize, and he\u2019d better do it if he knows what\u2019s good for him.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Barnes has a similar terrified reverence for the dear departed senior pastor, whose former office he leads Rayford and Chloe into for his sales pitch:<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t sit at his desk or use his library,\u201d the younger man [Barnes] said, \u201cbut I do work in here at his conference table.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I kind of understand how Barnes might feel unworthy to sit at the late pastor\u2019s desk \u2014 whether from self-loathing or from a healthier form of humility. But why avoid the old man\u2019s library? Those books contain the gnosis,<\/i> the secret knowledge that leads to salvation as the senior pastor understood it.<\/p>\n

Plus they\u2019ve got all those wonderful dispensational timelines and prophecy checklists. The old guy was enough of an End Times fanatic to have recorded an in-case-of-Rapture video, so you know his library contains Ironside\u2019s fantastical charts, the complete works of Hal Lindsay, and even Tim LaHaye\u2019s own intricately detailed week-by-week accounts of the seven-year Tribulation that apparently started four days ago. If I were convinced, as Bruce Barnes claims to be, that all these books had just been proven right, I would be going through that library and marking the calendar, trying to figure out how many months I had to stockpile bottled water before Wormwood falls from the sky and turns the seas and rivers into blood.<\/p>\n

(Barnes\u2019 comment here also probably tells us something about one of Left Behind\u2019s<\/i> co-authors. LaHaye was himself a senior pastor and I\u2019m guessing he didn\u2019t like the other members of his staff touching his desk or his books while he was away from the big office.)<\/p>\n

\u201cI can\u2019t imagine God would call me to take over this work,\u201d Barnes says, \u201cbut if he does, I want to be ready.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd how will he call you?\u201d Chloe said, a smile playing at her mouth. \u201cBy phone?\u201d<\/p>\n

Barnes didn\u2019t respond in kind. \u201cTo tell you the truth, it wouldn\u2019t surprise me. I don\u2019t know about you, but he got my attention last week. A phone call from heaven would have been less traumatic.\u201d<\/p>\n

Chloe raised her eyebrows, apparently in surrender to his point.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s probable that Bruce meant to say \u201cdramatic\u201d there, rather than \u201ctraumatic,\u201d but let\u2019s not dwell too long on choosing the right word, since it\u2019s clear that Jerry Jenkins never did.<\/p>\n

The odd thing here is that Chloe seems utterly unfamiliar with the idea of being \u201ccalled\u201d to ministry. This is particularly odd when you consider that Chloe\u2019s mother, Irene, was a devout and vocal evangelical Christian, and that Chloe herself attended church regularly until she was a teenager. At most evangelical churches, even young children are taught to respect and to hope for a calling to \u201cfull-time Christian ministry.\u201d But It\u2019s unthinkable that one could attend any<\/i> church for more than a few months without becoming acquainted with the term \u201ccalling.\u201d<\/p>\n

This term and this idea aren\u2019t purely religious esoterica, either. They\u2019re part of Western culture. The idea that every person, including the laity, has a calling was a central theme of the Reformation and has helped to shape the culture of those nations \u2014 including this one \u2014 with roots in Protestant Christianity. In other words, if Chloe somehow managed to avoid hearing the term during all her years in church and the rest of her daily life, she certainly should have encountered it at Stanford when she had to read Durkheim or Weber, or even in freshman Intro to Western Civ.<\/p>\n

This is an example of the kind of creepy, subcultural weirdness that pervades LB<\/i> and so much of the other entertainments \u2014 from \u201cContemporary Christian music\u201d to those awful direct-to-DVD \u201cChristian\u201d movies \u2014 produced by and for evangelicals. The people producing these products have little sense or understanding of the larger culture and its relationship with their symbiotic subculture. They take for granted that every reader\/listener will comprehend the coded jargon particular to the subculture, which tends not to be the case. At the same time, they assume that all outsiders are completely ignorant of many of the aspects of their faith that are held far more broadly than just within their subculture.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also yet another example of the characters in LB<\/i> contradicting L&J\u2019s explicit characterization of them. Chloe, they tell us, is sharp-witted and clever, but that\u2019s not how she comes across here.<\/p>\n

Barnes won\u2019t be deterred. He saw what God did to his wife and kids, and to all of his coworkers, and he knows the Big Guy means business. So Barnes cuts right to the business himself:<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t want to be rude, but I don\u2019t want you to be either. I asked for a few moments of your time. If I still have it, I want to try to make use of it. Then I\u2019ll leave you alone. You can do anything you want with what I tell you. Tell me I\u2019m crazy, tell me I\u2019m self-serving. Leave and never come back. That\u2019s up to you. But can I have the floor for a few minutes?\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There\u2019s an urgency here, but it seems more the urgency of fear than of love. Barnes\u2019 concern is less for the fate of the Steeles\u2019 immortal souls than it is for his own fate if he should fail to discharge his duty to present the Big Guy\u2019s message. This reminds me again of Annie Dillard\u2019s account of her encounter with another of the Big Guy\u2019s messengers, a woman whose doorbell she rang asking for permission to cross her property along Tinker Creek. This is from Dillard\u2019s Teaching a Stone To Talk<\/i>:<\/p>\n

The woman was very nervous. She was dark, pretty, hard, with the same trembling lashes as the boy. She wore a black dress and one brush roller in the front of her hair. She did not ask me in.<\/p>\n

My explanation of myself confused her, but she gave permission. Yes, I could walk their property. \u2026 She did not let me go; she was worried about something else. She worked her hands. I waited on the other side of the screen door until she came out with it:<\/p>\n

\u201cDo you know the Lord as your personal savior?\u201d<\/p>\n

My heart went out to her. No wonder she had been so nervous. She must have to ask this of everyone, absolutely everyone, she meets. That is Christian witness. It makes sense, given its premises. I wanted to make her as happy as possible, reward her courage, and run.<\/p>\n

She was stunned that I knew the Lord, and clearly uncertain whether we were referring to the same third party. But she had done her bit, bumped over the hump, and now she could relax.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Like Barnes, this woman was scared. Her fear also was not driven by concern for the soul of her target, but by the consequences she might meet if she failed to carry out her duty in this encounter. \u201cThe fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,\u201d Proverbs says, but this kind of quivering, flinching, dog-that\u2019s-been-beat-too-much fearfulness is not what Solomon had in mind.<\/p>\n

This woman, like Barnes, acts less like she\u2019s dealing with God than like she\u2019s dealing with the Godfather.<\/p>\n

Maybe Barnes\/Jenkins used the right word after all. For them, dealing with God really does seem to be traumatic.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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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. 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