GeoJournal (2009) 74:183–189 DOI 10.1007/s10708-008-9219-8
Apocalypse, now? The geopolitics of Left Behind Jason Dittmer Æ Zeke Spears
Published online: 21 October 2008 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008
Abstract This paper is a reading of the geopolitical scripts, themes, and representations found within the Left Behind series. This best-selling series of twelve books, written by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, portrays the last 7 years of the world, a time known in premillennial dispensationalist eschatology as the Tribulation. During this period, the world becomes increasingly centralized, politically and economically, around Nicolae Carpathia, a figure that turns the United Nations into a one-world government called the Global Community. The increasingly oppressive New World Order is opposed by a group of new Christians known as the Tribulation Force, who see Carpathia for what he really is: the Antichrist, a figure later indwelt by Satan himself, who is intent on leading humans away from the true Christ. This paper begins with an overview of the books’ narrative, focusing on how specific geographies are constructed that tie certain places and peoples to either cosmic good or cosmic evil. The paper then explores three geopolitical themes that emerge in this reading of the text. First, the paper addresses the importance of spectatorship in defusing J. Dittmer (&) Department of Geography, University College London, Pearson Building, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, UK e-mail:
[email protected] Z. Spears Department of Geology and Geography, Georgia Southern University, P.O. Box 8149, Statesboro, GA 30460, USA
the ennui caused by the characters’ living through a preordained set of events. Second, the paper discusses the role of technology in enabling a resistant evangelical Christian identity that requires a dominating, yet not dominant, secular Other. Third, the paper addresses the relationship between violence and righteousness, as portrayed within this popular series. Keywords Geopolitical imaginations Popular geopolitics Premillennial dispensationalism Left Behind Israel Antichrist
Introduction Recent work in popular geopolitics has sought to understand the impact of popular culture on the geopolitical imaginations of everyday people, whether in the form of newspapers (Dittmer 2005b, 2007b; McFarlane and Hay 2003; Myers et al. 1996), cinema (Carter and McCormack 2006; Dodds 2003, 2005; Power and Crampton 2005), journalistic cartoons (Dodds 1996, 2007; Falah et al. 2006), magazines (Sharp 1996), or comic books (Dittmer 2005a, 2007a, d). This work has tended to be overly interested in representations found within the text (a critique provided, among other places, in Dittmer and Larsen 2007; Dodds 2006), emphasizing the role of textual producers in creating a dominant meaning for
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the text and marginalizing the role of audiences in the process of interpretation and meaning-making. This hints at a new model for research in popular geopolitics, which should aspire to analyze both production and consumption to discover the ways in which popular culture is deployed by producers and mobilized by consumers as they rework geopolitical imaginations. This paper then is part of a larger project looking at the role of the Left Behind books in evangelical Christian geopolitics. This short paper will begin with a discussion of Left Behind in the context of evangelicalism and popular culture. It will then go on to outline the geopolitical scripts contained within the twelve original books and emphasize the major themes of the series, recognizing that this reading over-privileges our roles as readers and researchers. Thus, this paper seeks to engage with the texts as if our reading is faithful to the authors’ intended geopolitical meaning. This is, admittedly, a somewhat naı¨ve assumption—but is intended to be counterbalanced by a contemporaneous study of evangelical audience interpretation and re-deployment of Left Behind in their understanding of current events (see Dittmer 2008).
Evangelicalism, popular culture, and Left Behind Evangelicals have made many attempts to reach out to the broader population through popular culture, especially since the 1970s. The rise of the Trinity Broadcasting Network since 1973 as a promotional device for evangelical movies, music, and books, as well as a clearinghouse for evangelical television programming, has proven the long-term market viability of evangelical popular culture.1 The bestselling book of the 1970s was The Late Great Planet Earth by Lindsay (1970), and other works such as the film The Omega Code (1999) and its sequel Megiddo (2001) similarly reached unexpected success in publicity and profitability. It is in this frame that Left Behind must be viewed; not as a unique moment of evangelical culture becoming a mainstream phenomenon (see the runaway success of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ), but rather as an example of the 1
TBN is the 9th largest broadcaster in the USA, claiming over five million households per week as viewers.
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evangelical culture that has already become intricately interwoven with broader strands of American popular culture. The 1995 publication of Left Behind by Christian publisher Tyndale House began an unprecedented series of New York Times bestsellers, all written by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. The book that gave its title to the series was the first of twelve that fictionalize the end of the world, telling the story of a band of lapsed Christians, atheists, and agnostics left behind after the Rapture, a hypothesized event in which all ‘true-believing’ Christians will be spirited away by Jesus Christ to spare them the pain and suffering associated with the Tribulation. The Tribulation is a 7-year period of disaster and warfare that serves as a final opportunity for non-believers to convert before the final return of Jesus Christ, who comes to earth this time in order to punish the unbelievers and set up an earthly kingdom (Shuck 2005). The main characters of the Left Behind series band together to form the Tribulation Force, a group dedicated to converting non-believers and thwarting the plans of the Antichrist (a false Messiah), who establishes temporal and spiritual rule over the earth during the Tribulation. The series has spawned three prologues and one epilogue (which together with the original series have sold over 65 million copies) as well as a graphic novel, a video game, and a set of twelve books intended for kids aged 10–14 that tells the story of the end times through the eyes of children (these have sold over 10 million copies). Left Behind should not be seen as a definitive statement of Christian belief—in fact it draws on a particular strand of theology known as premillennial dispensationalism (on this, see Sturm 2006) that competes with other evangelical doctrines, such as postmillennial dispensationalism, and with non-evangelical Christian churches, like Catholicism and Episcopalianism, for Christian souls (leaving aside for a moment the collective missionary efforts of these churches to expand world-wide in non-Christian regions). The eschatology enunciated in Left Behind is thus highly contested, even in evangelical circles. Nevertheless, ‘‘[t]his apocalyptic reading of the Christian Bible, based on giving the Christ of Revelation a substantial precedence over the Jesus of Luke, has long been characteristic of the Christian millenarianism that has periodically re-emerged during times of radical change in European and
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American society,’’ (Agnew 2006, p. 184). Premillennial dispensationalism has been rising in cultural significance within the United States in parallel to the decline of American ability to provide a veneer of stability to global events.
Geopolitical summary of Left Behind The Left Behind series can be read in many different ways, as how-to manuals for the proper Christian life, as a technophilic orgy of action and adventure, or as a form of evangelical proselytizing. Given the number of potential readings and this paper’s focus on popular geopolitics, the following summary will emphasize the elements of the books’ storyline that illustrate the overarching geopolitical narrative. The books begin with the Rapture, in which many (but not all) self-proclaimed Christians disappear without notice. We learn that preceding the events of the books an Israeli scientist developed a formula that would make the desert bloom and had the potential to end hunger. Russia attacks Israel to get the formula, but its planes are destroyed in the air through divine intervention. In the chaos following the Rapture, the world becomes enamored of Nicolae Carpathia,2 a young charismatic politician from Romania, and he quickly rises to become Secretary-General of the United Nations. Carpathia’s ascent to global power is rapid, largely resulting from his charisma but also from his special ability to control minds. Under Carpathia’s leadership, the world begins to move towards a single currency and all national militaries are abolished.3 Carpathia moves the United Nations headquarters to the newly rebuilt city of Babylon in what had been Iraq and renames it the Global Community. Meanwhile, the main characters of the series (a group of highly-successful and charismatic former skeptics) convert to evangelical Christianity, recognize what is going on through their newfound study
2
While the name of Nicolae Carpathia obviously draws on Orientalist tropes, the character himself meets several common prophetic expectations about the identity of the antichrist: he was born within the boundaries of the Roman Empire, is ambitious, and is charismatic. 3 10% of the world’s weapons are donated to the United Nations and the remaining 90% destroyed.
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of Biblical prophecy and organize themselves as the Tribulation Force, dedicated to self-defense and evangelism during the forthcoming Tribulation. The American militia movement, with the aid of the American president, launches a coup d’etat against Carpathia but is crushed by the Global Community’s nuclear strikes, leaving the Tribulation Force as the only organized dissent. Under Carpathia’s rule as Supreme Potentate of the Global Community, the media are consolidated under his ownership and the ‘desert bloom’ formula is distributed around the world to create a socialist, egalitarian economy. However, an earthquake (predicted by the Tribulation Force through their Bible study) levels Carpathia’s New World Order. The Internet-based evangelism of the Tribulation Force begins to blossom, led by a converted Orthodox Jewish scholar. More disasters strike the Global Community, including an asteroid that hits the earth, causing a tsunami, and wormwood that poisons all the fresh water on earth. However, Israel is immune to all of these disasters and more and more Jews convert to evangelical Christianity. Another prophesied disaster strikes all non-Christians in the form of swarms of metallic locusts that sting, causing intense pain for months. At this point, about halfway through the Tribulation, the evangelical Christian community, led by the Tribulation Force, has created an underground co-op economy that will enable them to survive the forthcoming requirement by Carpathia that everyone who buys and sells wear ‘‘the mark of the Beast’’, a tattoo and sub-dermal microchip that demonstrates loyalty to Carpathia and the Global Community. The next disaster comes in the form of 200 million horsemen that are invisible to non-believers but slaughter them ruthlessly for months, killing onethird of the world’s population. Carpathia is assassinated by a friend of the Tribulation Force but rises from the dead 3 days later in an act that marks him as the Antichrist (although the Tribulation Force has known this since the first book). Now, however, he is literally Satan incarnate, and the official one world faith becomes Carpathianism, a religion devoted to him. At this point, under the Tribulation Force’s tutelage, there is a mass conversion from Judaism to Christianity at a rally, held at the Masada of all places. The Tribulation Force takes the offensive, using a plague of boils sent by God upon those with the mark of the Beast as an opportunity to take all of
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the newly-Messianic Jews to the mountain refuge of Petra. The world’s oceans turn into blood, prompting the Antichrist to order a nuclear assault on Petra in revenge. However, nobody is injured as Petra is under divine protection, and all inside are fed and watered via divine provenance. The Antichrist orders a new Holocaust to punish the Jews for their intransigence, and the unconverted Jews not in Petra are massacred in concentration camps. Similarly, Gentiles without the mark of the Beast are to be shot on sight. Carpathia notifies the world that he is Satan, and calls his armies to the Plains of Megiddo in Israel for the final showdown between good and evil, in which the remaining original Tribulation Force members are mortally wounded. However, asteroids rain onto the Earth, and a cross appears in the sky, which coincides with the divine restoration of the major characters’ health. Finally, Jesus returns to Earth, and the soldiers of the Antichrist are instantly killed and a tremendous global earthquake swallows their bodies. In a concluding sequence, Jesus condemns his enemies to the Lake of Fire and the believers who were Raptured or died during the Tribulation return to enjoy Jesus’s millennial kingdom. Spectatorship and the God-trick The above storyline perhaps sounds far-fetched to secular readers, but it is indeed rooted in a particular (and not uncontested) interpretation of the prophetic books of the Bible (such as Daniel, Ezekiel, and Revelation). Left Behind interprets these prophesies through the lens of the aforementioned premillennial dispensationalism, generating a particular eschatological vision. Indeed, vision is critical to any reading of Left Behind, as the narrative itself is driven by a desire to witness the end of the world. It is difficult to categorize Left Behind—simultaneously intended to reassure the faithful, convert the skeptical, and thrill both, the authors often tack uncomfortably between each goal with mixed results. The contradiction of these goals is what leads to a particular ocularcentrism in the books. Intended to instruct readers that the Bible can be mined for prophetic truths about the end of the world, they simultaneously must keep readers in suspense about what will happen in the narrative. The authors attempt to diffuse this tension by focusing the story
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on the Tribulation Force, showing this group of people swept up in the global forces surrounding the end of the world. However, it is through their eyes that the reader must witness these events as well, and thus the Tribulation Force often run tremendous risks because they are ludicrously drawn to watch prophesied events unfolding for the benefit of the readership. It is for the purposes of this spectatorship that the Tribulation Force comes to be numerically overrepresented with pilots, computer experts, journalists, and make-up experts/document forgers, all of whom enable Haraway’s ‘God-trick’ (1997) to be enacted, in which the situatedness of knowledge is undercut by an illusion of seeing the world objectively and in toto. Left Behind promises the reader a revealing of the way the world really is and will be, and the narrative revolves around putting characters in position to witness4 the end of the world. Technology and resistance A second theme running through the books was the role of technology in enabling a resistance to the globalizing forces of the Antichrist (Shuck 2005). While evangelical opposition to most forms of political and cultural globalization (such as the United Nations, the ecumenical movement, etc.) is well-documented (see Dittmer 2007c), it is the subversion of the globalization ‘system’ for evangelical purposes that is most noteworthy in Left Behind. For instance, the creation of a single, solar-powered global cellular phone network actually works to the benefit of the Tribulation Force by allowing them to piggyback their own communications over the network using their own specially-built mobile phones. Similarly, the Internet emerges as the greatest ally of the Tribulation Force in two ways: first, it enables the creation of a global black market that exists in parallel to the functioning legal economy (which requires participants to take the ‘mark of the beast’ to participate, thus condemning them to hell). Second, and crucially, it enables the Tribulation Force to conduct an untraceable ministry to the unsaved. This is critical, as the only remaining narrative tension in 4
Here we use ‘witness’ with a double meaning, reflecting the usual meaning tied to vision, and the evangelical meaning in which one ‘witnesses’ by telling others what they have seen and felt.
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the story flows from the question of how many can be saved before Jesus returns. Thus, the ability to resist the ‘beast system’ at all requires not only technology, but the skills to subvert that technology for your own purpose. Indeed, much of the spectatorship discussed just previously is enabled by the Tribulation Force hackers tapping into Carpathia’s surveillance society. Hence, American technophilia is put to the service of God, with the technology often seeming talismanic rather than monotheistic, rooted more in magic than in science (LaHaye and Jenkins 1997, p. 45): ‘‘Donny,’’ Buck said gravely, ‘‘you have an opportunity here to do something for God …’’ ‘‘I don’t want any profit off something that will help the church and God.’’ ‘‘Fine. Whatever profit you build in or don’t build in is up to you. I’m just telling you that I need five of the absolute best, top-of-the-line computers, as small and compact as they can be, but with as much power and memory and speed and communications abilities as you can wire into them.’’ ‘‘You’re talking my language, Mr. Williams.’’ ‘‘I hope so, Donny, because I want a computer with virtually no limitations. I want to be able to take it anywhere, keep it reasonably concealed, store everything I want on it, and most of all be able to connect with anyone anywhere without the transmission being traced. Is that doable?’’ That the Tribulation Force is almost entirely composed of Americans is not coincidental. The fusion of Americanism and evangelicalism found in Left Behind is powerful, rejecting elements of globalization that are viewed by readers as undercutting American sovereignty and cultural distinctiveness (the ‘Beast System’) while embracing those that enhance American influence and power (technology, global trade).
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into Tribulation Force ‘friends’ in competition with rock stars, cult leaders, and secularists, who are recruiting for the other side. In the game, players can return fire when attacked, killing agents of the Global Community. The question of violence and Christianity is dealt with in the FAQ section of the game’s website5: Does the violence depicted in the game run contrary to Jesus’ message on ‘‘love your enemy’’? Absolutely not. Christians are quite clearly taught to turn the other cheek and to love their enemies. It is equally true that no one should forfeit their lives to an aggressor who is bent on inflicting death. Forgiveness does not require absolute defenselessness. In the books themselves, the ethics of murder are dealt with relatively early on, with one whole book, the provocatively titled Assassins: Assignment–Jerusalem, Target–Antichrist (LaHaye and Jenkins 1999), documenting the ethical question of whether it is acceptable for Ray Steele, leader of the Tribulation Force, to kill the man he knows to be the Antichrist. The answer, he decides, is yes—however someone else beats him to it by mere seconds. Steele is not alone in his decision to resort to violence. Jesus Christ himself returns to the earth to save the Tribulation Force and other believers from certain military defeat at the hands of the Antichrist (LaHaye and Jenkins 2004, p. 286): And Jesus said, in that voice like a trumpet and the sound of rushing waters, ‘‘I AM WHO I AM.’’ At that instant the Mount of Olives split in two from east to west, the place Jesus stood moving to the north and the place where the Unity Army stood moving to the south, leaving a large valley. All the firing and the running and the galloping and the rolling stopped. The soldiers screamed and fell, their bodies bursting open from head to toe at every word that proceeded out of the mouth of the Lord as He spoke to the captives within Jerusalem.
Violence and righteousness The third and final theme to be discussed in this space is the role of violence in the Left Behind narratives, particularly in the occasions when the Tribulation Force use it on its enemies. This has become an issue recently in the broader population, as the Left Behind: Eternal Forces video game was released in November 2006, in which players attempt to convert people
5
Found at http://www.eternalforces.com/faq.aspx, last accessed 12/10/07.
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This heavenly militarism promotes Jesus from the sacrificial Lamb of God to the Commander-in-Chief of a battle for the world’s soul that is underway right now.
Conclusions The Left Behind books attempt to elide the difference between what may happen (i.e., the books, in which those ‘left behind’ after the Rapture suffer horribly even if they decide to convert to Christianity) and what will happen. The question the books beg is, ‘‘What if it was true?’’ This question is meant to proselytize as well as operate as a disciplinary device for current adherents to stay on the path. However, it also has geopolitical consequences. Perhaps the most important geopolitical consequence stems from the way the books discuss peace. Peace, in Left Behind, is threatening. The Tribulation Force believes through their study of prophecy that the world will decline, suffering war and disaster, until the final return of Jesus and the creation of a just kingdom. Because the end of this entropic process is the ultimate good, the process itself must be good—including the slaughter of nonbelievers (justified as a last warning to survivors to turn to Jesus). Any detours towards peace and tranquillity are the work of the Antichrist, who promises peace but delivers tyranny. To the extent that these books are successful in proselytizing for their views, this also becomes the belief of the readership. Thus, this teleological view of a descent into anarchy not only short-circuits the narrative tension of the fiction but also undermines the realworld belief in a peaceful future. By stripping the Tribulation Force of any agency except that of converting non-believers (the end of the world being preordained), LaHaye and Jenkins also potentially strip their readers of any sense of their own capacity to participate in geopolitics. The potential for a major U.S. voting bloc (28% of the U.S. population believes the Bible is literally true, see Anonymous 2006)6 to believe that any action by the world’s 6
Please note that the population of people who believe the Bible is literally true is overlapping, but not congruent with, those who espouse the premillennial dispensationalist theology the Left Behind books espouse.
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superpower to ameliorate global conditions is against God’s plan could be catastrophic. Perhaps from a different perspective, we, the authors, are also asking: ‘‘What if it was true?’’ The impact of this anti-pacifism has been visible both in support by most evangelical Christians for the extension of American empire in Iraq and Afghanistan and also in widespread evangelical opposition to the climate change agenda. Both the ‘War on Terror’ and climate change fit nicely into LaHaye and Jenkins’s end times scenario. ‘‘They [LaHaye and Jenkins] are providing nothing less than a Bible-based geopolitics for US-policy on a wide range of issues, from taking sides in the Israel-Palestine conflict and doing nothing about global warming to the obviously diabolical meaning of the terror attacks of September 11, 2001,’’ (Agnew 2006, p. 186). This fusion of American foreign policy and premillennial dispensationalism is not unprecedented, as many have pointed out (Herman 2000; Kaplan 2004). The overlap between neo-conservative and evangelical geopolitical imaginations has become fertile ground for the Bush Administration, including disdain for the United Nations and support for Israel. At this point concerted efforts must be made to prevent this discourse of Armageddon from becoming the materiality of Armageddon. Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank Jim Craine, Klaus Dodds and all anonymous reviewers for their assistance in the preparation of this paper. All flaws remain our own.
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