Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth interpreted Revelation
for a generation of paranoid evangelicals who were terrified of the
Soviet Union and communism and were convinced that the existence of the
modern State of Israel was the sign that Jesus was on the way in our
lifetimes, as Lindsey claimed. According to Lindsey, Revelation was
"speaking" about the Soviet Union and imminent nuclear attacks between
the Soviet Union and the United States. When Mikhail Gorbachev became
president of the U.S.S.R., Planet Earth groupies claimed Gorbachev was
the Antichrist, citing the references in Revelation to the "mark of the
beast" as proof because Gorbachev had a birthmark on his forehead!
After everything predicted in the book came to nothing, Lindsey rewrote
and "updated" his "interpretations" in many sequels, in what must have
been some sort of record for practicing George Orwell's idea of
"doublethink" via editorial revision of ever-changing "facts." Trying to
follow the prophecy party line eventually got confusing, even for the
Lindsey followers, and Lindsey faded into well-deserved obscurity.
This would be amusing, if not for the lives touched by this crazy nonsense. For instance, a good friend of mine was dragged -- at age five -- to Alaska, where his parents huddled in an "End Times" commune, a place chosen to be out of the way of major cities so that when the bombs fell, his family (and some fellow "pilgrims") could await the Lord's return in safety.
My friend's life was almost destroyed by suffering through years of a cruel and bizarre lifestyle in which his family was reduced to eating their goats and bear meat hunted (with the many guns kept by the members of this particular cult) on the "mission's" garbage dump. Of course, school was not a big concern since Jesus was on the way! Discipline was harsh so that everyone could be found "pure of heart" at the Lord's imminent return. After five or six years of this, my friend's miserably duped parents dragged themselves back to a neighborhood near ours where it happened that my wife Genie and I got to know their utterly dislocated and severely damaged children, one of whom grew to become a close friend of ours.
Jenkins and LaHaye provide the ultimate revenge fantasy for the culturally left behind against the "elite." The Left Behind franchise holds out hope for the self-disenfranchised that at last soon everyone will know "we" were right and "they" were wrong. They are waiting for Jesus to do to the world what the Tea Party just did to America.
They'll know because Spaceship Jesus will come back and whisk us away, leaving everyone else to ponder just how very lost they are because they refused to say the words, "I accept Jesus as my personal savior" and join our side while there was still time! Even better: Jesus will kill all those smart-ass Democrat-voting, overeducated fags who have been mocking us!
Knowingly or unknowingly, Jenkins and LaHaye cashed in on years of evangelical/fundamentalists' imagined victimhood. I say imagined, because the born-agains had one of their very own, George W. Bush, in the White House for eight long, ruinous years and also dominated American politics for the better part of thirty years before that. Nevertheless, their sense of being a victimized minority is still very real -- and very marketable.
Now they have "won" the election, you'll see they will still cry "victim" against the "liberal elite" even when they are in charge again.
Whether they are winning politically or not, the mostly white
underclass of religious fundamentalists nurture a mythology of
persecution by the "other." Evangelical/fundamentalists believe that
even though they are winning, somehow they lost. It's why Sarah Palin
won't give interviews to the big bad "Them" in the media.
I used to be part of the self-pitying, whining,
evangelical/fundamentalist chorus. I remember going on the Today Show
with host Jane Pauley back in the late 1970s (or early 1980s). I debated
with the head of the American Library Association about my claim that
our evangelical/fundamentalist books weren't getting a fair shake from
the "cultural elites." We Schaeffers were selling millions of books, but
the New York Times never reviewed them. I made the point that
we were being ignored by the "media elite," which was somewhat ironic,
given that I had been invited to appear on Today to make that claim.
I dropped out of the evangelical/fundamentalist subculture soon after that Today appearance (years later I was back on Today in my secular writer incarnation, being interviewed about a book of mine on the military/civilian divide, but I decided not to mention that I'd been on the show about thirty years before in what seemed like either another lifetime or an out-of-body experience.)
Others carried on where I left off. The whole Republican mid term election victory was predicated on cashing in on years of Evangelical effort to sell the Right an image of being righteous outsiders.
A host of evangelical/fundamentalist Cassandras tour college campuses reinforcing their followers' perennial chip-on-the-shoulder attitude by telling fearful evangelical/fundamentalist students to hold fast against the secular onslaught. They tell their student listeners (and those students' even more worried parents) to not let "those people" -- professors, members of the Democratic Party, moderates, progressives, and such ordinary American men and women as Jews, gays, and members of the educated "elite" -- strip them of their faith. Hundreds of books by many evangelical/fundamentalist authors could be consolidated into one called How to Get Through College with Your Fundamentalist Faith Intact So You Won't Wind Up Becoming One of Them.
What just happened in this election is that the culturally left-behind hit back.
They won but will still claim they are victims of the "liberal elite." Actually they are victims of bad theology that has tutored them for generations to accept myth for fact.
It's no wonder that these folks believe lies more easily than truth. Sure the bad economy played a part in the mid-term results, but so did bad theology that has made a virtue out of being misinformed.
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