{"id":72660,"date":"2026-01-16T07:00:53","date_gmt":"2026-01-16T12:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/?p=72660"},"modified":"2026-01-16T06:07:15","modified_gmt":"2026-01-16T11:07:15","slug":"lbcf-antiheroes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2026\/01\/16\/lbcf-antiheroes\/","title":{"rendered":"LBCF: Antiheroes"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

(A Left Behind series re-run originally posted in February, 2007.)<\/em><\/p>\n

GILES: It\u2019s the end of the world.<\/p>\n

WILLOW, XANDER, BUFFY: Again?<\/p>\n

GILES: It\u2019s the end of the world, everyone dies. It\u2019s rather important really.<\/p>\n

WILLOW: So what do we do?<\/p>\n

BUFFY: I stop it.<\/p>\n

Left Behind,<\/i> pp. 251-253<\/b><\/p>\n

Nicolae Carpathia meets the press, giving the authors the chance to offer more leftover lessons from Dale Carnegie:<\/p>\n

\u2026 Carpathia met the eyes of every person in the room, at least briefly. He never looked down, never looked away, never looked up. \u2026 Anytime he spoke to a member of the press he referred to them by name as Mr. or Ms. so-and-so. \u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>We get a full page of that, followed by this just-when-you-thought-it-was-safe sentence:<\/p>\n

The initial pleasantries over, Carpathia launched into another minispeech, again showing incredible knowledge and grasp of the U.N. and its mission.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is followed by, yes, another full page of Nicolae explaining his dream-category for Jeopardy!<\/i> (\u201cI\u2019ll take multilateral institutions for $400, Alex \u2026\u201d) All of which is LaHaye and Jenkins\u2019 way of warning readers that the United Nations is eeevil.<\/i> It exists in the present, they believe, only so that it can one day play the role they imagine it will play in the future as the launching pad for the one world government of the Antichrist and the reign of Hell.<\/p>\n

Carpathia\u2019s fondest memory regarding the U.N. involves the phrase that L&J believe confirmed their dark suspicions:<\/p>\n

With the end of the Cold War in the 1990s, however, your next president, Mr. Bush, recognized what he called the \u2018new world order,\u2019 which resonated deep within my young heart. \u2026<\/p>\n

Carpathia went on to discuss the various peacekeeping military actions the U.N. had taken since the Korean conflict of the 1950s. \u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s hard to know what to make of this, or of the capsule history of the U.N. that follows. Carpathia is the Antichrist, and that \u201cAnti-\u201d prefix seems like a strong indicator that he shouldn\u2019t be considered a reliable narrator. But he\u2019s not reliably unreliable. He speaks favorably of the phrase \u201cnew world order,\u201d and it seems clear that we\u2019re supposed to read this as a signal that this is something nefarious. Yet in the next breath he speaks favorably of the U.N.\u2019s peacekeeping history and it\u2019s role in Korea and it\u2019s hard to tell whether or not we\u2019re supposed to agree.<\/p>\n

Here is Carpathia\u2019s summary of U.N. history:<\/p>\n

Along the East River, from the razed slaughterhouses of Turtle Bay, as though in a race with the spectral flight of planes, men are carving out the permanent headquarters of the United Nations \u2026<\/p>\n

This race \u2014 this race between the destroying planes and the struggling Parliament of Man \u2014 it sticks in all our heads. The city at last perfectly illustrates both the universal dilemma and the general solution, this riddle in steel and stone is at once the perfect target and the perfect demonstration of nonviolence, of racial brotherhood, this lofty target scraping the skies and meeting the destroying planes halfway, home of all people and all nations, capital of everything, housing the deliberations by which the planes are to be stayed and their errand forestalled.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Oops, sorry. That, of course, is not from Left Behind.<\/i> That\u2019s actually from E.B. White\u2019s prescient essay, \u201cHere Is New York.\u201d<\/p>\n

White viewed the U.N. with hopeful admiration. L&J view it, instead, as a tool of Satan. They convey this view by having Mr. Anti praise the institution in terms that echo the sentiments, if not the style, of White\u2019s essay:<\/p>\n

\u201cAs you know,\u201d he said, speaking again of things long before he was born, \u201cthe U.N. has its legacy in the League of Nations, which I believe was the first international peacekeeping body. It came about at the end of the First World War, but when it failed to prevent a second, it became anachronistic. Out of that failure came the United Nations, which must remain strong to prevent World War III, which would result in the end of life as we know it.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

My guess is that Jenkins found the word \u201canachronistic\u201d in his thesaurus and latched onto it without bothering to learn its actual denotation and connotations. What he seems to mean here is something more like \u201cobsolete\u201d or \u201cirrelevant.\u201d<\/p>\n

The misuse of this particular word to convey this particular meaning is rather telling. L&J are premillennial dispensationalists, meaning they follow a complex interpretive scheme that emphasizes certain \u201cprophetic\u201d passages. If you accept that their interpretation of these passages is true, then you must also accept that these same passages were not true, or at least did not apply, for everyone who ever read that scripture from the time it was written until now. Other passages, such as the Sermon on the Mount, are interpreted as belonging to a future dispensation \u2014 the millennial kingdom of Christ \u2014 and as such are, today, both irrelevant and anachronistic.<\/i> So you can see how these two concepts might be closely regarded for L&J.<\/p>\n

The thing that does seem anachronistic in Carpathia\u2019s statement is the reference to \u201cWorld War III\u201d as a future potentiality. In LB,<\/i> World War III has already happened<\/i> \u2014 we read about it in a flashback back on pages 9-15. That war \u2014 a full-scale nuclear assault on Israel (don\u2019t worry, no one there was injured) \u2014 resulted in the destruction of a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council by the visible hand of God. As we\u2019ll see confirmed in the next section, L&J have forgotten all about this.<\/p>\n

All that aside, this paragraph again raises the question of what we are to make of the things Nicolae says. If Rayford Steele or the Rev. Bruce Barnes had said, \u201cWe must prevent World War III, which would result in the end of life as we know it\u201d then we would know that the authors agreed with the statement. But since these words are placed in the mouth of Mr. Anti, it appears that the authors want us to disagree.<\/i><\/p>\n

This is part of what makes this book so deeply strange. It presents us with seemingly familiar figures: the arch-villain seeking to destroy the world, the heroes who oppose the arch-villain. In most such stories, the heroes succeed in thwarting the villain\u2019s plot \u2014 they dismantle the bomb, re-seal the Hellmouth, fend off Galactus ,or save the cheerleader to save the world. That\u2019s what makes them heroes.<\/p>\n

But here, the heroes do not \u2014 cannot<\/i> \u2014 succeed, because the end of the world is divinely preordained. The arch-villain, the Antichrist, is playing a necessary role in this divine drama. In fact, he is the protagonist here \u2014 the one moving the action along toward its inevitable conclusion. The authors regard that conclusion \u2014 doomsday, the end of the world \u2014 as a happy ending.<\/p>\n

The authors are eager to see this happy ending occur, not just in their fiction, but in real life. It\u2019s no wonder, then, that they hold the opposite view from E.B. White\u2019s admiration of the United Nations. In the race he describes, LaHaye and Jenkins are cheering for the destroying planes.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Left Behind gives us an arch-villain with a dastardly plan to destroy the world. It also gives us a scrappy band of heroes who .. also eagerly want to see the world destroyed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":141,"featured_media":69785,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-72660","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nLBCF: Antiheroes<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Left Behind gives us an arch-villain with a dastardly plan to destroy the world. 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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":"LBCF: Antiheroes","description":"Left Behind gives us an arch-villain with a dastardly plan to destroy the world. 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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\/72660","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=72660"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72660\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/69785"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72660"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72660"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72660"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}