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Is this creep-show catastrophe biblical?

At press time, more than 60 million copies have been sold of a mediocre yet extremely popular fiction that, under the cover of an improbable adventure plot, peddles an ideologically driven, wildly unbiblical theology.

I’m talking, of course, about the Left Behind series of books. (Da Vinci what? Never read it). Actually, while The Da Vinci Code is also reported to have sold 60 million copies, for Left Behind the 60 million is an umbrella figure covering Left Behind, its 11 sequels and three prequels, another series of 40 kids’ books, and several more series of novels, plus associated audiobooks, graphic novels, devotionals, and, of course, the upcoming video game. So, while its reach may not be as wide as Dan Brown’s, its fans are invested deeply enough to buy book after book.

Here, I’ve chosen to focus on the third film, Left Behind: World at War, because it was released in churches (the first two films had tanked at the box office). A reported 3,000 congregations, including a number of megachurches, elected to screen the film last October, often billing it as an evangelistic opportunity. But it’s not an entirely gospel message that this film gave its viewers, churched and unchurched – and it's not just a spiritual kind of warfare that it urges upon the faithful.

For those of you who missed the films, here’s a brief recap: the first movie, Left Behind, starts off with God smiting down the Russian military when it inexplicably attacks Israel, which is, also inexplicably, off its military guard. The plot moves on briskly to the titular so-called rapture event (a theologically fringe interpretation of 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 which turns a Pauline reassurance to believers into a creep-show catastrophe, with driverless cars crashing and distraught non-raptured people choosing suicide). The global disappearance of the saved precipitates soul-searching and eventual conversion on the part of airline pilot-cum-rapture widower Rayford Steele, his daughter Chloe, pastor Bruce Barnes, and star reporter Buck Williams.

Meanwhile, the Antichrist appears as a man named Nicolae Carpathia, a blondish Romanian with a Russian accent straight out of Rocky IV. Repeatedly promising global disarmament, peace, and an end to extreme poverty, and feigning great humility and commitment to dialogue, he moves to take over the world, starting, bizarrely, with the U.N. For someone with powers of mind control, he chooses a circuitous path to power: he promises to rebuild the Jerusalem temple, so an Israeli scientist will give him a fertilizer that makes deserts bloom, so he can turn 10 huge “worthless” tracts of land which his two mentors have purchased into 10 rich kingdoms (if I read the briefly shown map correctly, pretty much all of Zimbabwe and the Amazon basin were part of these easily purchased, um, deserts). At the climax of the first film, he gives each kingdom's ruler a seat on the Security Council, shoots his mentors dead in front of the new monarchs, and uses his mind control powers to convince everyone (except the recently converted Buck) that it was a murder-suicide.

In the sequel, Left Behind: Tribulation Force, Rayford and Buck, who have joined forces with Bruce and Chloe to fight Carpathia, accept prestigious jobs from the Antichrist in order to spy on him. It’s a week after the rapture, and Carpathia has already persuaded the planet to accept a one-world currency and “call[ed] on every nation to disarm, to put aside all their racial, social, political, and the deadliest of all, their religious differences.” This peacemaking stance is merely a ruse to get nations to turn over remaining weapons to the U.N., and to jump start Carpathia’s new one-world religion. The Antichrist also arranges a global press conference for an Israeli rabbi who has just finished a study on the identity of the Messiah. However, with a little espionage from our heroes and a helping of divine intervention, the rabbi is converted and proclaims on air that Jesus, rather than Carpathia, is the Messiah.

By the third film (Left Behind: World at War), the U.N. (now “Global Community”) is a fascist state whose storm troopers shoot Bible-runners on sight. When well-intentioned, patriotic militias move against the Antichrist, he uses the fight as cover to “attack America,” publicly mouthing the rhetoric of peace while privately giving orders via teleconference to Russian and Chinese (and U.S.) military officers. U.S. President Gerald Fitzhugh, who believed the peace line, mourns with the White House in flames, “What have I done? … I gave Nicolae everything he needed to kill thousands, millions of people.”

Mr. LaHaye, the Cold War called. It wants its paranoia back.

There’s a lot more bad plot in World at War, but before I tackle that, let’s get a few things straight. The Antichrist in Revelation gets global political authority from Satan (13:2), not, as the Left Behind books and movies suggest over and over, by promising humans peace and nuclear disarmament. In fact, assuming that John’s attention didn’t just wander in the middle of his Antichrist description, the Antichrist’s power is overtly military, while Christians should embrace nonviolence: “If you kill with the sword, with the sword you must be killed. Here is a call for the endurance and faith of the saints.” (Revelation 13:10; see also Matthew 26:52). The world, except for Christians, worships the Antichrist because of his apparently invincible power (13:4, 7-8), not because he offers ostensibly humble words about tolerance – in fact, the Antichrist speaks arrogantly (13:5).

Revelation repeatedly emphasizes the revolutionary idea that conquering, for humans, comes about through patient endurance (1:9, 2:3, 3:10, 13:10, 14:12) and public avowal of faith (2:13, 3:8), including faith unto death (2:10, 6:9, 12:11, 20:4). Given this emphasis on sacrificial trust in God’s power, it’s disturbing to see the main characters in the Left Behind books and films repeatedly depend on their own strength and wisdom. Our heroes adopt the vaguely military-sounding name “Tribulation Force,” and in the film of that name Buck and Rayford both hide their Christianity in order to get jobs working for the Antichrist. Buck doesn’t even offer temporary resistance to what his future wife Chloe calls “this whole hanging out with the Devil thing.”

Apparently Revelation doesn’t tell you all you need to know about the Antichrist, and the need to spy on him is great enough that the means justify the ends: “We need that information to save souls!” pleads Bruce in Tribulation Force when Rayford resists the suggestion that he try to become the Antichrist’s personal airplane pilot. Bruce also offers the spiritual arguments that, “These are not ordinary times … if you don’t, someone else will.”

In other words, the main problem with the Left Behind movies and books is not the biblical literalism they incorrectly lay claim to over and over. The real problem is that Left Behind is a big old plateload of neo-con neo-gnosticism designed to almost completely ignore some of the most clearly stated points of Revelation (and the gospels), in the pursuit of a particular, arguably idolatrous, present-day political mythology.

By the way, it’s impossible to keep up a consistent claim to literally interpret Revelation, which repeatedly urges readers to take it figuratively (1:20; 11:4, 8; 13:18; 17:9-18), so LaHaye and Jenkins periodically admit or imply that the four horsemen aren’t literal men on horses, that the Antichrist doesn’t literally have seven heads, etc. But this illogic isn’t the main problem with the Left Behind books or films; in fact, practically the only thing the series gets right is the assertion that God can and will intervene powerfully, including with miracles, in human history.

What the three movies get wrong about history and the present-day world would fill a novel in itself, so I’ll hit only a few highlights: It is not true that those who ask for religious tolerance, and the people of the United States generally, will soon cheerfully allow Christians to be branded terrorists and the Bible to be banned as “hate literature.” Contrary to the opening scenes of the first movie, Jerusalem is not composed largely of Christian churches and shared Judeo-Christian holy sites. Jews have not been hungering for the past couple millennia to rebuild the temple and re-start animal sacrifices; modern Judaism is a synagogue-based religion.

Hunger is not a problem that needs to be solved by a new scientific fertilizer; world hunger today is a failing of political will, mostly the will of rich countries. (On the plus side, it’s nice to see that in the Left Behind movies the president, and both the pre- and post-rapture pastors of the multiethnic church, are African American.)

Oh, and if the world’s nations did (blessedly) agree to disarm, the U.S. and many others would definitely do the job themselves rather than gullibly hand over the nukes to the U.N., which is at best a moderately effective diplomatic, humanitarian, and statistics-gathering body with an inefficient structure, no military force except for short-term loans from member countries, and a yearly budget less than 4% that of Wal-Mart or British Petroleum. It would make far more sense for the Antichrist to try to seize global power by taking charge of Wal-Mart, which hasn’t signed onto multiple international conventions about religious and other human rights. Or, for that matter, the United States, which has the world’s strongest military (and, in its worst moments, some similarity to the “ Babylon” of Revelation 17-18).

But the Left Behind films are not about discerning the actual signs of the times; they’re about a extreme right-wing political script shaped over the last few decades. Concern for one’s neighbor is just a blind to impose the ultimate, repressive, godless big government on the globe. In this New Testament-turned-upside-down, any talk of peacemaking (“Peace is imperative. We must help our neighbors, forget our differences”) is a dangerous ruse, not a blessing. Same goes for concern for the poor; the only people in the Left Behind movies who voice any concern for them are the Antichrist and one of his equally evil backers. (Carpathia fleetingly appears on TV in front of a tent-dwelling African family, intoning “How can we find peace when people are starving?”) In fact, the movies give the impression that there aren’t any poor people - at least none worth more than four seconds of screen time.

But wait, there are a few new millennium additions to the paranoid political script. In World at War, middle-class U.S. Christians are victimized by terrorism because of their faith (the Antichrist has biological weapons sprayed onto Bibles). This allows for some dramatic moments of martyrdom, as a couple main characters spend World at War delirious with fever at an underground church-cum-infirmary, and one dies before they figure out that communion wine is the “antidote.” But this plot does a disservice both to the actual Christians suffering for their faith elsewhere in the world, and to people who are trying to understand real-life terrorism. Terrorism is never justifiable, but if we are to stop it, it might help to understand that its perpetrators are angry not about Christian piety, but about the stationing of U.S. troops on Saudi soil, the invasion of Iraq, and Western disinterest in the plight of Palestinians.

When President Fitzhugh finally starts to get wise to the Antichrist in World at War, the Iraq war references come thick and fast. When he gets wind of the imminent “attack on America,” the president joins forces with allies Egypt and Britain, who propose moving “on [the Antichrist’s] power center in New Babylon … Tactical strikes first, followed by a quick ground push.” But before agreeing to the plan, Fitzhugh argues (as White House spokesman Ari Fleischer suggested before the Iraq war)that assassination is a better option: “We’ve got to take Nicolae [dramatic pause] out. If we kill him, we’ve avoided world war.” But wait, there’s more! To make sure he can trust Buck, the president interrogates him at gunpoint – after he has him abducted from the street and put in an empty cement room with a black bag over his head. But once Buck admits his allegiance to Christ (rather than Carpathia), the bag comes off – no hard feelings! Just needed to get that essential information.

The maddening thing is that, for all of their paranoia about those who mention peace, the Left Behind movies several times temporarily get the point that we need to depend on the Prince of Peace rather than our own conventional weapons. This is most striking in the third film. President Fitzhugh’s attempt to personally assassinate the Antichrist fails; bulletproof, Carpathia magically destroys his would-be assassin’s missile-summoning transponder before throwing Fitzhugh out of a skyscraper window. Meanwhile, U.S. militias’ attack on the Global Community has been rebuffed, and the U.S.-British-Egyptian attack foiled, just as the Christian main characters knew they would be. The president, whose life has been miraculously preserved, wanders back to the partially destroyed White House.

At this point, God summons Buck to meet the president and lead him to Christ. Each of the Left Behind movies has at least one scene where someone repents and accepts Jesus as Lord of his or her life; these scenes provide what little actual information about the gospel is contained in the three films. In addition to accepting forgiveness for his sins, the converted president realizes, as he will later tell the Antichrist, that, whereas Fitzhugh had thought that “the only way to defeat you [is] with weapons, with the military,” in fact “the answer was right there in front of us. Jesus Christ. The only way to beat you, in this life or the next, is to accept him.”

Heartbreakingly, World at War gets this point only in a bizarre, 1984-esque doublethink way. Right after leading the president to Christ, Buck does not offer him any instruction on being part of the Body of Christ, studying the gospel, or finding a church community for further fellowship. Instead, Buck nonchalantly asks the president, “What are you going to do now?”

And the president responds, “Though I can’t kill Nicolae, I might be able to slow him down … If I could take out his command center, I’d finally be able to do something.” (Note the equation of doing something with military action, rather than with patient endurance). And then the president marches right back into the Antichrist’s office (God miraculously blinds the guards to his approach), makes that speech about Jesus being better than weapons - and uses another missile transponder. Which works this time, destroying not Carpathia (who emerges unscathed from the flames during the final credits), but the top half of the skyscraper, along with the president and who knows how many other people. Because accepting Jesus makes your weapons work better, apparently. I wanted to cry.

So, for the readers, viewers, and writers of Left Behind in all its forms, here are a few good words: Blessed are the meek. Blessed are the peacemakers. Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your father in heaven. Take care of the poor at your gates. Be faithful until death, and God will give you the crown of life. And lay off the Gospel According to Dr. Strangelove, OK?

Elizabeth Palmberg is assistant editor of Sojourners.