Militant Jesus

Fri, 02 Jun 2006 16:43:04 -0700

Still from Eternal Forces

'Grand Theft Armageddon' and the rise of a violent Christian media empire

Editor’s note: Michael Standaert’s recently released Skipping Towards Armageddon: The Politics and Propaganda of the Left Behind Novels and the LaHaye Empire (Soft Skull Press) is a chilling look at the rise of Tim LaHaye and his Left Behind media juggernaut.

The final of three prequels to the Left Behind series will be released on 6.6.06, which makes a total of fifteen books in the wildly popular series. They have reportedly sold 70 million copies in the U.S. alone. Co-author (with Jerry Jenkins) LaHaye is a long-time minister and one of the most influential religious right activists in the country. He is the co-founder of Moral Majority, and a prominent member of the Council for National Policy, Concerned Women for America, and other right-wing organizations. The Left Behind books revolve around the notion of the Rapture – a line of belief in Protestant fundamentalism that reads the final book of the Bible, Revelations, as God’s literal outline for what the future holds in store for humanity. In this belief system, only the “true believers” will be taken to Heaven before a seven year period of tribulation and catastrophe marking the rise of the Antichrist. In the Left Behind books, the Antichrist character, Nicolae Carpathia, takes on virtually every liberal stereotype and in essence becomes the figurehead for all that is evil in the world, basically anything that does not conform to the line of belief LaHaye espouses. Those characters “left behind” are forced to choose either the way of Carpathia (Satan) or the way of those fighting against him (the Tribulation Force, made up of new “true” believers), who choose the way of Jesus, albeit one who bears a strikingly similar violent figure to the antichrist they are fighting against.

This fall, LaHaye will release Left Behind: Eternal Forces, a hyper-violent, graphically advanced video game that appears strikingly similar to the controversial best-selling Grand Theft Auto games. Instead of bashing hookers’ heads in and blowing away cops, in Eternal Forces you’re killing evildoers for the Lord. It’s the latest, and most violent, in a series of games produced by Left Behind Games. The video games are another outlet for LaHaye’s apocalyptic narrative and are meant to both make a profit that can be folded back into LaHaye’s activities (he boasts that nearly half of his earnings go to supporting his activism), as well as to reach out to audiences who haven’t been exposed to the Left Behind books. As in the books, the game draws the line between what they see as good and evil, dehumanizing both believer and non-believer into faceless, cardboard characters that are easily exterminated. Perhaps the most alarming message conveyed by the books and games is that everyone outside the line of Protestant fundamentalist belief for LaHaye is the enemy, no holds barred, and must be eliminated. For more about Left Behind: Eternal Forces go here. Information on the Richard Hofstadter mentioned below can be found here.

In this exclusive excerpt for GNN, Standaert describes how Jesus Christ is portrayed as a vengeful, unforgiving messiah in the Left Behind novels as opposed to the forgiving, loving one most often thought of by Christians:

Excerpt from Skipping Towards Armageddon:

Militant Jesus

The main character, the hero of the Left Behind novels, is Jesus Christ, the militant warrior messiah returning to conquer evil and bring a utopian paradise to the world. Upon his return tens of thousands of non-believing soldiers are struck dead. Here is LaHaye and Jenkins describing that final battle:

Their innards and entrails gushed to the desert floor, and those around them turned to run, they too were slain, their blood pooling and rising in the unforgiving brightness of the glory of Christ.

The Jesus the authors have created, with all his destruction and lust for power, often seems no better than the Satan he is fighting. “This vision of Christ, who eviscerates his human foesand drops them to the desert floor, is fast becoming the Savior for our times,” writes Paul O’Donnell at Beliefnet in a review of The Glorious Appearing. Hofstadter offers another thought: “Very often the fantasies of true believers reveal strong sadomasochistic outlets, vividly expressed, for example, in the delight of anti-Masons with the cruelty of Masonic punishments.” LaHaye truly accepts this version of a militant Jesus, the conquering knight on a white horse Jesus, the triumphant and warrior-like Jesus. “Unfortunately, we’ve gone through a time when liberalism has so twisted the real meaning of Scripture that we’ve manufactured a loving, wimpy Jesus that he wouldn’t even do anything in judgment,” LaHaye said in an interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes in early 2004. “And that’s not the God of the Bible. That’s not the way Jesus reads in Scripture.” Jenkins echoes these sentiments in the CBS interview, saying “That stuff is straight out of the Bible. The idea of him slaying the enemy with the sword, that comes from his mouth, which is The Word, and the fact that the enemies eyes melt in their heads, their tongues disintegrate, their flesh drops off, I didn’t make that up. That’s out of prophecy.” Here Jenkins and LaHaye willfully confuse the words of Jesus with the words written in the Revelation, mixing them in this long convoluted theology constructed through premillennialist teaching over the last 150 years.

Reverend Barbara Rossing, who teaches at the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago, attempts to debunk many of the Darbian premillennialist ideas about Revelation that LaHaye supports in a book called The Rapture Exposed. Her argument is that LaHaye and others are marketing a “false view” of this militant Jesus, pieced together from a variety of references in the Bible. She and most other mainline Christians insist on Jesus as a “non-violent lamb” who conquers through his dying for sin, not through slaughtering non-believers. “They make this an us vs. them kind of theology,” she said.4 “If you’re not with us, you’re against us.”

In many ways Carpathia’s utopian global society is a mirror of the utopian global society premillennialsts yearn for. The stark difference is the utopian society premillennialists urge is not of this world, not in human hands, but one which is promised after the destruction of that human world to be later rebuilt and presided over by the militant and vanquishing God-King Jesus. Rayford Steele’s daughter Chloe remarks early in the book Armageddon that they are “less than a year to real freedom” — a remark that essentially says freedom or hope in freedom is not of this world. Fortunately for her, she doesn’t have to wait a year — she is captured and killed by the end of the book. She eventually does make a cameo appearance later when all the Tribulation saints return with the warrior Jesus.

Before she is executed via the guillotine, Chloe combines the Americanist myth with the premillennialist narrative, directly equating her execution with Jesus’s crucifixion, quoting Patrick Henry’s famous regret about “one life to live” but calling him a martyr instead of a patriot, followed immediately by Jesus’s “they know not what they do.”

Chloe turned to the people and spoke softly. “A famous martyr once said he regretted he had but one life to give. That is how I feel today. On the cross, dying for the sins of the world, my own Savior, Jesus the Christ, prayed, ‘Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do.’”

On the following page is a reference to the words of Jim Elliot, a missionary executed by a tribe in South America in 1956 for trying to convert them, a construction which attempts to bind patriotism and religious martyrdom together with Jesus dying on the cross.

The treatment of Chloe’s death hints at a problem for premillennialists and prophecy believers in general — America doesn’t appear in the Bible. To get around this they often say, as pastor Bruce mentions in Tribulation Force, echoing the real life words of LaHaye, that America will be sidelined and not a player in “End Times” events. Yet wherever possible they draw in the Americanist myths in crafting their narrative, and combine it, as in Chloe’s execution, with the premillenial narrative. Other than these neo-premillennialists and Orthodox Jews, the only group that doesn’t fall for Carpathia’s plan for world domination in the Left Behind books is the American militia movement; this group appears prominently in the novel Tribulation Force. Part of this militia rebellion is portrayed as coming from Carpathia’s bent on disarming the whole world, cleaning up nuclear weapons and attempting to impose peace. Here, Carpathia explains to Buck the purpose of disarmament:

“Millions have vanished. People are scared. They are tired of war, tired of bloodshed, tired of chaos. They need to know that peace is within our grasp. The response to my plan to disarm the world has been met with almost unanimous favor.”

“Not by the American militia movement.”

“Bless them,” Carpathia said, smiling. “If we accomplish what I have proposed, do you really think a bunch of zealots running around in the woods wearing fatigues and shooting off popguns will be a threat to the global community? Buck, I am merely responding to the heartfelt wishes of the decent citizens of the world. Of course there will still be bad apples, and I would never forbid the news media to give them fair coverage, but I do this with the purest of motives.”

Before the battle with Carpathia, the militia groups had started hording weapons. Later, even the president of the United States lends his support in the militia sneak attack on Washington, D.C., New York and London, the latter by a group of English patriots. By the end of that book the militia movement is for the most part destroyed, leaving behind a network of premillennialist militia forces — the Tribulation Force — to take their place.