Stunning to read Joe Bageant's critique of the Left Behind series.
What the 'Left Behind' Series Really MeansBefore he begins he showed these two quotes about the LeHaye series.
"Jesus merely raised one hand a few inches and a yawning chasm opened in the earth, stretching far and wide enough to swallow all of them. They tumbled in, howling and screeching, but their wailing was soon quashed and all was silent when the earth closed itself again."
-- From Glorious Appearing by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins
"The best thing about the Left Behind books is the way the non-Christians get their guts pulled out by God."
-- 15-year old fundamentalist fan of the Left Behind series
That is the sophisticated language and appeal of America’s all-time best selling adult novels celebrating the ethnic cleansing of non-Christians at the hands of Christ. If a Muslim were to write an Islamic version of the last book in the Left Behind series, Glorious Appearing, and publish it across the Middle East, Americans would go beserk. Yet tens of millions of Christians eagerly await and celebrate an End Time when everyone who disagrees with them will be murdered in ways that make Islamic beheading look like a bridal shower. Jesus -- who apparently has a much nastier streak than we have been led to believe -- merely speaks and "the bodies of the enemy are ripped wide open down the middle." In the book Christians have to drive carefully to avoid "hitting splayed and filleted corpses of men and women and horses" Even as the riders’ tongues are melting in their mouths and they are being wide open gutted by God’s own hand, the poor damned horses are getting the same treatment. Sort of a divinely inspired version of "Fuck you and the horse you rode in on."
This may be some of the bloodiest hate fiction ever published, but it is also what tens of millions of Americans believe is God’s will. It is approximately what everyone in the congregation sitting around me last Sunday at my brother’s church believes. Or some version of it. How can anyone acquire and hold such notions? Answer: The same way you got yours and I got mine. Conditioning. From family and school and society, but from within a different American caste than the one in which you were raised. And from things stamped deep in childhood -- such as coming home terrified to an empty house.
One September day when I was in the third grade I got off the school bus and walked up the red dust powdered lane to my house only to find no one there. The smudgy white front door of the old frame house stood open. My footsteps on the unpainted gray porch creaked in the fall stillness. With increasing panic, I went through every room, and then ran around the outside crying and sobbing in the grip of the most horrific loneliness and terror. I believed with all my heart that The Rapture had come and that all my family had been taken up to heaven leaving me alone on earth to face God’s terrible wrath. As it turned out they were at the neighbor’s house scarcely 300 yards down the road, and returned in a few minutes. But it took me hours to calm down. I dreamed about it for years afterward.
And then the Bageant ties the author to the John Birch Society.
Scratch LaHaye and you’ll find an honest-to-god surviving John Bircher. In the 1960s when LaHaye was a young up-and-coming Baptist preacher fresh out of Bob Jones University, he lectured on behalf of Republican Robert Welch’s John Birch Society. We are talking about a man who believed Dwight Eisenhower was an agent of the Communist Party taking orders from his brother, Milt Eisenhower. Along the way LaHaye extended his paranoid list of villains to include secular humanists who "are Satan’s agents hiding behind the Constitution." And the only way to destroy them is to destroy their cover.
Joe Bageant passed away in 2011. He called things as he saw them, did not mince words.
RIP Joe Bageant.
= new reply since forum marked as read
- Which is why is wasn't accepted in his own country in his own time -- as with so many others.
K&R
So here it is, top of the ninth round, and Gaia is on the ropes with cuts over both eyes, and no referee on the mat. Homo sapiens are moving in for the killer punch. It's been an ugly fight. But the truth is that there will be no winner. Certainly not man, considering that his triumph results in the specter of human self-extinction, dieback or die-off, or at least by massive die-back.
Call me a grim old fatalist, but I just do not see the human race turning things around. Not because humans are inherently evil (although pimping Gaia to death comes close), but because we are what we are. In any case, we are not going to stop eating, shitting, burning up stuff to stay warm, or following the genetic imperative to breed. How can we solve the problem when we are the problem, other than by self-extinction?
~Joe Bageant
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I think it was Bageant who said (paraphrase) that "The characters speak dialogue that sounds like it was written by Ostrogoths."
At least there's only one Atlas Shrugged - there's volume after volume of this shit.
My bullshit sensing field never allowed me to approach the book displays close enough to pick one up. However, the cover art did make quite an impression on me. 
And I did consider and worry about the number of volumes in the series, providing hours and hours of brainwashing content to format the RW Christian Fundie Army for the coming Apocalypse.
I'm glad to know Joe Bageant wrote about this, I always appreciated his writing. 
because I feel that I, as a loyal member of the RW American Christian Taliban, need to prepare my minions for the coming Apocalypse.
Do I need this? Probably...
And he's not around. 
My post was thoughtless and immature. Your post is despicable and dishonest and malicious. 
I'll stay here all fucking night if you want to keep accusing me of advocating criminal activity. You don't like people saying anything about atheists, that is for sure and certain.
Chock full of good stuff.
Good to see you.
you got me started looking up some oldies but goodies. BTW some of those eyeballs ain't so friendly. 
My cousins, on my mom's side eat this shit up! I think that's why my mom and I both stopped going to church.
Thanks again for the reminder and link!
Sort of a divinely inspired version of "Fuck you and the horse you rode in on."
But seriously, folks, this is why it's terrifying to live around the Rapturists.
Now, I have never harmed them, would do anything to help them, but because I don't buy their religious claptrap, they are going to rejoice in my any-minute-now-our-god'll-be-here-to-validate-us excruciating death.
Hell, if they think the end is near, they may just decide to preemptively gut me open, since that's "what Jesus would want us to do to a nonbeliever."
I love my neighbors, but they don't love me back the same way, I fear. I never fantasized about their deaths, that's for sure.
SICK SICK SICK people who read and enjoy that violence porn.
And thank you for the heart and the thought behind it. 
... shortly before he died (I've got an inscribed copy of "Deer Hunting With Jesus"
He was a good man.
I hear it got terrible reviews. Almost nobody is worse than Kirk Cameron.
Oh wait... 
that’s a very good thing. The first book in LaHaye’s series follows two protagonists: "revered" airline pilot Rayford Steele and superstar journalist Cameron "Buck" Williams. Unexplained disappearances rock the world, and a charismatic Antichrist rises to power, while Rayford, his daughter Chloe, and Buck prepare to survive the end times as part of the guerrilla "Tribulation Force." This all sounds tremendously exciting, until you realize that both men are arrogant and vindictive bores, the Rapture is forgotten within a few chapters, and the Antichrist is a minor Romanian politician jockeying for leadership of the UN. With its unpleasant characters, glacial pace, and bizarre preoccupation with phone calls and travel plans, Left Behind may be one of the dullest books (and most cynical money grabs, since its story would be stretched over 15 more volumes and a young adult series) to ever hit the bestseller lists. A 2000 film adaptation, starring Kirk Cameron of Growing Pains, didn’t redeem it. I’m reasonably confident guessing the original script for this version of Left Behind was not written for Tim LaHaye’s megafranchise at all. The characters and basic setup of the book are channeled into a disaster movie about Rayford (played by Nicolas Cage) struggling to land his plane amid the chaos of millions of people inexplicably disappearing. It’s more Langoliers than Leftovers: runways have gone dark, fuel is running low, and the remaining passengers are growing more paranoid by the minute. There’s no UN, no Antichrist, and in fact the whole plot of the movie covers 25 pages in the book — although, granted, they’re probably the most exciting 25 pages ... Unfortunately, Left Behind has bigger problems as simple entertainment. It starts with an aimless, meandering half-hour of pointless banter and earnest discussion between major characters, interspersed with almost completely extraneous vignettes of people who will never be seen again. Chloe and Buck are introduced with a forced meet-cute, and the passengers on Rayford’s plane are thinly drawn cliches created to fill supernatural-disaster-movie quotas ... Left Behind bears some of the hallmarks of a made-for-TV religious movie, including a bland, schmaltzy, and often totally inappropriate score ..."
A terrible book about the apocalypse gets even bleaker
By Adi Robertson on October 9, 2014 10:00 am
My mom and my sisters raved about them. They are religious. I thought they were boring and the characters were not interesting. There was one named 'Buck' because he 'bucked the system'. How creative - NOT! The book covers looked great though!
Thanks for this post. These guys are even nuttier than I thought.
Both had hair-trigger bullshit detectors and an enviable way with both common sense and words.
