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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A47488-2002Jul22.htmlhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A47488-2002Jul22.html
The End, To Be Continued
With a 10-Book Winning Streak, This Revelation Duo Is Gearing Up for More
By Linton Weeks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 23, 2002; Page C01
What on earth is going on?
Evangelical Christians Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, authors of the apocalyptic -- and fictional -- "Left Behind" series, have sold more than 35 million books in seven years. The just-released 10th volume, "The Remnant," debuted at No. 1 on the hardcover fiction bestseller lists of USA Today, Publishers Weekly and the New York Times and No. 5 on The Washington Post list.
How do you explain this national hunger for made-up stories about the Book of Revelation? Is it because we live in a swerving world of widespread terror, spiritual weirdness and extreme personal dysfunction? Are we so scared to death of death that we hope to crack the code of the Bible and uncover secrets of eternal life? Does the books' success merely prove yet again that there are lots of good stories in the Bible?
What we do know is that multitudes of people across the country are buying stacks and stacks of "Left Behind" books from Wal-Marts, Costcos, chain book stores and just about any place they can find them, which does not include some Washington troughs of the knowledge class, such as Politics & Prose and Kramerbooks. Listen to the testimonial of Donna Blansett, a mother of four in Clintwood, Va., who happened upon a big stack of "Left Behind" books. "I was birthday-shopping for one of my daughters at the Wal-Mart in Claypool Hills, Virginia. I love to read," she says. "I picked up the first one, 'Left Behind,' and read the jacket. I've always been interested in Revelation. I was so amazed. After reading that book I decided I didn't want to be left behind."
"Every payday I went back and bought another book," says the 33-year-old corrections officer. "I dropped to my knees after reading the first one and said a prayer. I've been a Christian ever since."
The premise is this:
God has decided that it's time for the final reckoning. He draws millions of born-again Christians straight up to Heaven -- leaving only their clothes, dental fillings, pacemakers, anything material -- in what some call the Rapture. Millions of unworthy others remain on Earth; they are . . . left behind.
The series covers a period of seven years called "the Tribulation," during which the earthbound ones still have a chance to turn to Jesus as their savior. Among those left behind, four factions arise: Christians who muster a loose-knit coalition called the Tribulation Force; true believers of other religions, such as Judaism and Islam; followers of the Antichrist who band together in the Global Community to fight people of other religions; and a great number of people who don't know which way to go. At the end of the period, Jesus will appear and begin a 1,000-year glory-filled reign.
These books, and accompanying kids' versions, graphic novels, audiocassettes and videotapes, have generated hundreds of millions of dollars for the authors and their publisher, Tyndale House. And, according to the authors, some 3,000 people like Blansett have found Jesus while reading the books.
The authors plan to be through by 2006. The end, as they say, is near.
Jenkins says he's "itching to do other things." LaHaye has signed on with another writer, T. Davis Bunn, to do another series of Christian adventure books for Bantam, a division of Random House. It's a four-book contract for $42 million. Even more startling than the Bill Clinton-level advance is the fact that they've broken into New York publishing, which has avoided Christian books. But in a business of declining sales and shrinking expense accounts, this stuff could start looking good.
Best-selling novelist James Patterson, for instance, has sold only 25 million copies of his books since 1976, according to the Wall Street Journal.
In town recently for a book signing at the National Press Club, LaHaye and Jenkins stand side by side. LaHaye, 76, is short, compact and dark-haired. Jenkins, 53, is tall, big-boned and graying. Jenkins wears glasses; LaHaye does not. Jenkins looks like a stevedore, LaHaye a matador.
They know all too well that Jesus admonished his disciples: "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God."
"There is a huge weight of accountability and stewardship," Jenkins says. "We feel we're going to have to answer for this stuff."
Jenkins says to LaHaye: "If I ever act like I deserve this, just punch me in the mouth."
Jenkins adds that he is giving a lot of his money to Christian endeavor. "The government shouldn't get more than God gets."
Simply put, Jenkins says, he and LaHaye are depicting the end of the world the way they think it will happen. "If readers disagree," he says, "we don't hate them."
But, "if this is true, people need to know it."
Jenkins says that if he had a friend who thought that the only way to get into Heaven would be to wear a purple necklace, he would want that friend to at least tell him.
"If you believe that God created you," says LaHaye, "then you believe that God has the right to determine how you get to Heaven."
"If you believe that you are an evolved bit of protoplasm," LaHaye says, "well . . ." He shrugs and lifts his hands, palms up.
Tim LaHaye has a long history of political evangelism, not the sort of résumé you'd expect for half of a novel-writing duo, much less one of the most successful duos in literary history.
In 1979, he and his wife, Beverly, founded the Washington-based Concerned Women for America to support the traditional notion of family, oppose abortion and be highly critical of the United States' participation in the United Nations. "I've opposed the United Nations for 50 years," LaHaye says.
He was on the first board of directors of Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority. He has been an outspoken opponent of homosexuality. He says he has ministered to gay Christians and "I have discovered that it was a very unhappy lifestyle."
He warns against a powerful, conspiratorial cabal called the Illuminati that he says has influenced major global occurrences for hundreds of years.
"The thing I find interesting," says LaHaye watcher Rob Boston of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, "is that the political agenda is a little subtle in the series."
Jerry Jenkins may be one big reason that LaHaye's political leanings are played down. "Reverend LaHaye is a pretty outspoken conservative," Jenkins says. "We met in 1991. As far as I know, the height of his political activity was before that."
Jenkins says that if LaHaye had written the books, he might have just come right out and named the Trilateral Commission and the Bilderbergers as villains. "There are enough hints in the series, like the secret meetings of financiers, to satisfy people who want that," he says.
Born in 1926, LaHaye grew up in Detroit. Jenkins was also born in Michigan -- in Kalamazoo. After graduating from high school, Jenkins, again like LaHaye, went to Moody Bible Institute for a year or so.
Jenkins wrote sports stories for a suburban paper. "All I ever wanted to be was a sportswriter," he says.
In 1974 Jenkins returned to Moody to work for the college's magazine, and eventually became vice president for publishing. Over the years he has written about 150 books, including as-told-to autobiographies of baseball stars Hank Aaron, Orel Hershiser and Nolan Ryan.
He also helped Billy Graham write his memoir "Just as I Am." Jenkins and LaHaye were introduced to each other by LaHaye's agent.
"I'm not a theological scholar," Jenkins says, "and Dr. LaHaye's not a novelist."
They act so much like father and son, sometimes, that you're tempted to ask LaHaye, "What are you feeding that boy?"
He is feeding Jenkins theology. Before Jenkins hunkers down to write each volume, LaHaye passes along a thick notebook of comments and commentary on the part of Revelation that Jenkins will be writing about.
Originally, Jenkins says, he was going to write one book about the Rapture. That became a trilogy. Then six. Then 12. (No. 11, tentatively titled "Armageddon," is due at the publisher Sept. 11, and should be out next spring. Book 12, "The Glorious Appearing," is scheduled to be published about a year later.)
Now he believes that there is enough material for 14 books, including a prequel, which explores the lives of major characters before the Rapture, and a final book, perhaps called "Final Judgment," about life in Heaven.
Asked why they chose to use fiction to tell this story, Jenkins says, "It can convey truth with a capital T."
He says that Jesus used fiction when teaching. He points to the parables. "Most Bible scholars think those are fictitious," he says, "earthly stories with heavenly meanings."
The idea of the Rapture -- as one interpretation of Revelation -- has been around since the 19th century, according to Bill Leonard, professor of church history at Wake Forest University. Leonard, a Baptist who has studied evangelistic movements for years, says, "It is a literalizing of what some Christian communities see as highly symbolic, metaphorical language."
When it comes to dealing with Revelation, Leonard says, Christians pretty much fall into three categories. Many mainstream Christians are amillennialists, "who believe that the world will end with Christ's return, but that these millennial calculations are an overreading of symbolic language." He says that, in his own view, God will bring an end to time.
The post-millennialists, epitomized by classic American preachers such as Jonathan Edwards and Charles Grandison Finney, believe that as The End nears, the church will change certain unjust social structures and usher in a golden age. "Society and church get better and better," Leonard says. Finney, for instance, was an ardent abolitionist who believed that the freeing of slaves was a step toward the Second Coming of Jesus.
The pre-millennialists, Leonard explains, argue that the world is not going to get better and better, it's going to get worse and worse until the Rapture. Then follows the Tribulation and the battle between God and the Antichrist. "In the end God is the winner," Leonard says, "but Satan beats the hell out of us until that happens. Literally."
One of the first great pre-millennialists was Dwight Lyman Moody, founder of the Chicago Bible college that shaped the spiritual lives -- and fictional worldview -- of LaHaye and Jenkins. "This world is getting darker and darker," Moody said in the 1870s. "Its ruin is drawing nearer and nearer: If you have any friends on this wreck unsaved, you had better lose no time in getting them off."
So why, Leonard is asked, is the "Left Behind" series so popular?
"Everybody likes to think they know the secret," he says, "that the Bible is a book of code that if you read it correctly, you can know it better than everybody else does. And you can get ready."
Plus, he says, "the Book of Revelation makes wonderful copy -- mystery, drama, good and evil."
He also says that it is human nature to fret about the end time. "Take every era in Christian history and somebody predicts that Jesus is going to return soon."
He recalls Hal Lindsey, author of the best-selling 1970 nonfiction book about the apocalypse, "The Late Great Planet Earth." "In that generation Russia was the great Antichrist," Leonard says. "Now everybody has switched to the European Union or Hillary Clinton or Saddam Hussein."
Inside the tiny Agape Christian Book Store on 15th Street NW, owner Gus Theoharis says "The Remnant" is really moving. Sitting at a desk near the cash register and reading from the Book of Isaiah at lunchtime, Theoharis says the new volume "is hot-selling, I can say."
Each time he orders five or so, the book sells out. "In 10 days I have ordered three times."
At $24.99, "it's not a cheap book," he adds.
The "Left Behind" books, Theoharis explains, "are very close to what people believe the end times will be. I think a lot of it can be true. I always have."
Of course, Theoharis points out, "it's fiction. No one can blame them for misinterpreting the Bible. In fiction, anything goes. That protects the writer."
As he takes money for two of the books, he speaks matter-of-factly about the end of all time. "I have reservations about the way things are going to happen," he says, moving toward the front door to wait on another customer. "I don't think that is how the Lord is doing business."
He looks out on the sunny midsummer day. "God," he says, "will do business decently and in order."
© 2002 The Washington Post Company
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