c. 1998 Religion News Service
UNDATED _ With his packed 747 cruising high over the Atlantic, pilot Rayford Steele’s thoughts turn to seducing perky senior flight attendant Hattie Durham. But when Hattie approaches, she’s distraught.”People are missing,”she tells Rayford.”Their shoes, their socks, their clothes, everything was left behind.” Before long, Rayford, Hattie, and passenger Buck Williams, a globe-trotting journalist, begin to realize millions of people from all walks of life and all corners of the globe have vanished without a trace. Experts attribute the mystery of the missing masses to UFOs, or a terrorist attack.
But as the central characters in this fictional drama wind their way through burning neighborhoods and wreck-strewn, corpse-lined highways, they confront this unambiguous theological message:”The Rapture had taken place. Jesus Christ had returned for his people.”Among the unraptured are liberal preachers, pew-sitting churchgoers, newspaper editors, and other skeptics.
So begins”Left Behind”(Tyndale House), a fast-paced, 468-page end-times novel co-authored by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins that has sold 750,000 copies, spawned a mini-industry of related products and inspired thousands of readers to prepare for meeting their maker.”We are using fiction to teach biblical truth,”says LaHaye, who came up with the idea for the novel more than a decade ago. Jenkins, an accomplished writer who has authored more than 130 books, brought the project to life when the novel was published in 1995.”What we hear from readers is that they have fallen in love with the characters and want to know what happens with them,”says Jenkins.
In their letters to the authors, or the electronic messages they’ve posted on the Web site of online bookseller amazon.com, readers say”Left Behind”and its sequels have delivered a wake-up call, inspiring them to get right with God and talk to their loved ones and neighbors.”Reading them really gave me a practical, down-to-earth picture of what the end times are going to be like, which was kind of frightening,”said Sandy Grimes of Colorado, who says the book inspired her to have heart-to-heart talks with her husband and son.”It is calling me to do what I’m supposed to do, which is share the good news of Christ.” Christians have long anticipated the culmination of human history.
In the first century, St. Paul instructed the Thessalonian believers”not to become easily unsettled or alarmed”by prophecies about”the day of the Lord.”Paul also warned against predicting”time and dates,”but detailed predictions have been a staple of both publishing and preaching for centuries.
The creation of the nation of Israel in 1948 sent the end-times industry into overdrive. Hal Lindsey’s”The Late Great Planet Earth,”which appeared in 1970 and was the best-selling nonfiction book in that decade in the United States, ushered in a brave new era of pop millennialism. Today, one can choose from among dozens of apocalyptic books, both fiction and nonfiction.
Theologians debate a variety of complex and conflicting end-times scenarios, all based on interpretations of St. John’s prophetic book of Revelation, with its dramatic portrayals of Christ’s thousand-year reign. The”Left Behind”series is based on a pretribulational, premillennial approach, which says that faithful believers will be”raptured”from the earth before a seven-year period of trouble and tribulation, which comes before Christ’s millennial reign.
The pretribulation/premillennial approach certainly offers the best dramatic opportunities, and the authors have exploited these possibilities at will.
Book two in the series,”Tribulation Force,”follows Rayford, Hattie and Buck as they struggle to survive in a post-rapture world.”Nicolae,”book three, focuses on the one-world reign of the Antichrist. And the recently released”Soul Harvest”describes life amidst earthquakes, divine judgments, and worsening conditions.
The authors don’t see any connection between the Christian concept of the millennium and the rapidly approaching year 2000, but Tyndale House Publishers in Wheaton, Ill., expects a downturn in sales after Dec. 31, 1999. “I have felt that there was a one-time window of opportunity to incorporate the rapture and end-time events in a novel that would captivate the interest of people,”said LaHaye, the author of nearly three dozen previous books, including best sellers on family and social issues.
Still, some Christian leaders are concerned about the booming popularity of books with a pretribulational bias.”Evangelical Christians differ on some points that are on the edges of theology,”said the Rev. D. James Kennedy of Coral Ridge Ministries in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Kennedy, a posttribulationist, considers LaHaye”a friend and a good Christian,”but thinks LaHaye’s belief that saints will be taken before the tribulation leaves people”unprepared if bad times come,”adding,”I believe that it is better to get one’s theology from the Bible than from novels.” Such concerns haven’t slowed sales of”Left Behind,”which went to the top of the Christian best-seller charts soon after it was released three years ago.
Tyndale asked LaHaye and Jenkins to expand the concept into a trilogy, and then a seven-book series. Now, new books in the series are scheduled to come out every six months, which isn’t fast enough for some rabid readers.
The first four titles are disappearing out of bookstores nationwide, selling a combined 2 million copies. A list of Christian best sellers published in a recent issue of Publishers Weekly shows the series holding down the three top paperback fiction slots as well as the two top hardback fiction positions.
The success of the series has spawned companion audiotapes, a series of related children’s novels (the first four have already combined for 250,000 in sales), a Web site (http://www.leftbehind.com) which is generating some 60,000″hits”a day, and a clothing line (one T-shirt proclaims:”Don’t Be Left Behind,”while a baseball cap uses the shorthand”DBLB”). Tyndale is shipping”Left Behind Headquarters”merchandising materials to hundreds of Christian bookstores.
And next year, plans call for a”Left Behind”-themed video, a syndicated radio series (also available on cassette or CD), and an nonfiction booklet called”Don’t Be Left Behind,”intended to be used in evangelistic crusades or by churches studying Bible prophecy.”This is out of our control,”says Tyndale’s marketing director Dan Balow.”We aren’t engineering all of this success. It’s God really using it in a mighty way.” Co-author Jenkins, who helped Billy Graham write his popular memoirs,”Just As I Am,”has had his share of best sellers. But he said he is confounded by the success of the”Left Behind”books.”They went from being brisk sellers, to best sellers, to amazing, to phenomenal,”he says.”I’ve run out of adjectives. It’s been a fun ride, and I feel humbled to be along.”
DEA END RNS
