I heard of the “Left Behind” book series, where it dramatizes (I’m guessing here based on vague comprehensions) the apocalypse, as American fundamentalists would imagine it. People are magically transported to heaven and the remaining suckers are going to get it, from Satan, and not in a good way.
I admit not having read it, or seen the TV series. All I know I have mentioned above.
Question: Do people watch this and read this, in the sense that people watched Superman II, appreciating the lessons to humanity but not actually expecting the man of steel to rescue them in real life, or is this Left Behind series taken seriously? Do millions of people actually believe this series, as in they expect this to happen within their lifetime? Or in any human lifetime?
Short answer: some people (specifically, Premillennial Dispensationalists, if you want to do some research) really do believe the world will experience a period such as the Left Behind books dramatize.
For a moment I thought that there was a “left behind” scenario where the people left behind had to tough it out against Satan/evil forces but they still had Superman on their side. Sounds cool to me
The Apocalypse is fairly well accepted Christian doctrine.* What actually happens at that point may be a topic of debate, but that it will happen, and that it could happen at any point in time is what pretty much every Christian should believe. The Fundamentalists just happen to be the only ones who actually talk about it.
Yes yes, there’s some Christian group who disagrees with any particular thing in the Bible. Get over it.
That there will be an end of the world and a Judgment Day is pretty widely accepted. What is unique to the various Dispensationalists is the idea of the seven years of tribulations and rapture of the true believers (before or after the seven years depending). That is based on some convoluted reading of Daniel and Revelations. The Left Behind series is co-written by a Fundamentalist preacher who believes in the pre-Tribulation Rapture. He has said that the books are more than fiction, they are supposed to lay out the exact sequence of events that will happen any time now and prove that he was right all along.
If you are interested in what these books are about and what they are for, I suggest this informative series of posts. Warning: The author has gone through the first book and movie and is about half way through the second book in 30 pages worth of posts.
I think the OP’s point was whether people saw the Left Behind series as entertaining but fictional (like Superman or Twilight or Transformers) or as a story about something that could really happen.
I doubt that the OP has any particular issue with the specific format of The End of the World that is displayed in Left Behind – particularly seeing as he hasn’t even read it. I take his sense of curiosity to relate to the issue that some group of people really believe in the Apocalypse as a perfectly reasonable and potentially imminent occurrence brought on by the Creator of Everything and Personification of Love and Everything Good.
I do not see why you would assume that. I am a lifelong atheist, but the general idea of The Second Coming and Judgment Day, to which, I guess, as you say, virtually all Christians subscribe, does not intuitively strike me as nearly as absurd as The Rapture does.
Perhaps, logically, from an atheistic (or other non-Christian) perspective, they are all equally absurd, but The Second Coming and Judgment Day are notions that have been prominent in our culture for almost 2,000 years (so even skeptics have had plenty of chance to get used to them), and the Bible is pretty explicit about them, so it makes sense that if someone is going to buy into Christianity in general, they will buy into those too. The idea of The Rapture, on the other hand, has not been at all widely believed for very long, and the Bible is not at all explicit about it (if it really mentions it at all). Even many (even, probably, most) Christians are likely to find the idea of The Rapture (and its aftermath) as depicted in these books to be absurd. If someone tells me they believe that The Second Coming will happen one day, I think they are mistaken, but they do not automatically forfeit my intellectual respect. If someone were to tell me that they believe The Rapture is going to happen sometime soon, then they pretty much will have forfeited it.
“People are magically transported to heaven and the remaining suckers are going to get it, from Satan” Is pretty apt a description of the Catholic interpretation, as I understand it. The Rapture mythology has its particularly intricacies, but I believe that this description is a fairly good overview of general Christian thought, not just the Fundamentalist. Here is, for example, a quote from the Wikipedia page on the Apocalypse:
"The simple pictures of the end of the age in the books of the Old Testament were images of the judgment of the wicked, as well as the resurrection and glorification of those who were given righteousness before God. The dead are seen in the book of Job and in some of the Psalms as being in Sheol, awaiting the final judgment. The wicked will then be consigned to eternal torment in the fires of Gehinnom, or the Lake of Fire mentioned in Revelation.
“The New Testament letters written by the Apostle Paul expand on this theme of the judgment of the wicked, and the glorification of those who belong to Christ or Messiah. In his letters to the Corinthians and the Thessalonians Paul expounds further on the destiny of the righteous. He speaks of the simultaneous resurrection and rapture of those who are in Christ, (or Messiah).”
Everyone gets judged, including the dead. The good go with God, the bad go to Hell.
The doctrines used in Left Behind are based on the Rapture–in which The Saved will be taken up into Heaven & the sinners, pagans & Catholics will be left to deal with the nasty details of Armageddon. Yes, that’s simplistic. If you really want all the gory details, check out the Wikipedia article I linked.
As Christian doctrine goes, it’s rather new. It goes beyond the strictly Bible-based beliefs of the true Fundamentalists. And it’s rejected by most Christian denominations.
Tim Lahaye, one of the co-authors, is a founder of the Religious Right. He met his wife Beverly at Bob Jones University. She went on to found Concerned Women for America originally to fight the Equal Rights Amendment. (You know, one of those women who tours the country to lecture other women about Their Place in the Home.) Check out their site to see what causes these “Christians” are flogging; for example, they were the first to inform us of The War Against Christmas.
I don’t know whether most Left Behind readers actually believe that stuff. But it’s made a shitload of money for the writers.
I can only help you semi-anecdotally, but that’s probably about as much as anybody can help you.
Like all Christian fiction (and there’s a lot of it out there, and sometimes it’s rather good - Left Behind is rubbish) it is most widely considered almost entirely made up. It’s pretty much universally agreed that one day this world is going to end, as the book of Revelation seems to suggest, but as to how that is going to happen, well, there’s hundreds of books on the subject and they all disagree.
Only the minority, I would guess, actually believe it’s close to the truth. But once you take away the characters (which uh, I hope nobody believes are (going to be) real), it’s basically just one of many models of the End of the World as We Know It. You can visit a church of the very same denomination who’s pastor/vicar/teachers will tell you entirely different things about it all.
That’s gonna be news to most Catholics I know; it sure does not sound like anything I heard through years of C-school. And to many classic Protestants who as far as I knew shared the POV that the whole phenom of living and dead rising, believers being swept up into the clouds to meet Jesus, and a final Cosmic ass-whupping, is what happens after everybody in the world goes through the period of tribulations, whatever form they take (of course, most major branches of Christianity for centuries were – and many are – happy to accept that Revelation was an allegorical prophesy and that it meant nasty things would happen, but not necessarily literally as it says, and if you kept the faith you’d make it OK)
You beat me to it! I just discovered the Slacktivist less than two weeks ago, and all I can say is, he’s the guy I wanted to be when I grew up. His blogging of the first book and a half of the LB series are bitingly funny and wonderfully well-written, unlike the series itself.
Here’s a link to the beginning of his blogging of the LB series:
That page number will change over time, but that’s easily rectified.
