By Rahab Bridges
Our story begins with an angry, paranoid man who made his anger and paranoia everybody else’s problem. It is unfortunate how many stories start that way.
This man’s name was Dr. Tim LaHaye. Veteran, pastor, self-help sex manual writer, founder of the Council for National Policy, key Ronald Reagan ally, opponent of desegregation, and self-proclaimed leading expert on the Illuminati. Here's how the man describes himself:
I myself have been a forty-five year student of the satanically-inspired, centuries-old conspiracy to use government, education, and media to destroy every vestige of Christianity within our society and establish a new world order. Having read at least fifty books on the Illuminati, I am convinced that it exists and can be blamed for many of man's inhumane actions against his fellow man during the past two hundred years.
The words come from his little-known book, No Fear of the Storm, a book in which he also claims his own efforts to get Ronald Reagan elected delayed the machinations of the Illuminati “back another decade.” A book, I might add, that is deeply influenced by William Guy Carr’s 1956, Pawns in the Game, a text that openly cites the absurdly racist hoax, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a scholarly source.
That’s some useful context on Tim, but we’re not here to talk about No Fear of the Storm. We’re here to talk about a series that, even if you've never read it , you’ve almost certainly seen on the shelves of your local second-hand store. We’re talking about Tim LaHaye’s bestseller, Left Behind: A Novel of Earth’s Last Days.
If you're blissfully unaware of this book series, allow me to explain the series’ premise: in the blink of an eye every born-again Christian on Earth vanishes. Naturally, this triggers a global crisis. Unmanned cars crash, doomsday cults form, panic builds, all that fun stuff. Our dual protagonists (the outrageously handsome airline pilot Rayford Steele and the intrepid celebrity reporter Cameron “Buck” Williams) work to discover the truth behind the disappearances. They learn that Jesus has “raptured” believers to Heaven to protect them from a series of coming calamities. Rayford and Buck convert to Christianity and set out on a quest to evangelize the world. God has ordained seven more years for the billions of the titular left behind to become born-again Christians themselves. When those seven years are up, the Battle of Armageddon will break out, followed by “The Sheep and Goats Judgement,” in which all non-Christians will face their final, hellish doom. This judgement will usher in Jesus’ one thousand year reign on Earth.
Opposing Buck, Rayford, and the other Christians is the slick-talking, social-justice loving, communist-coded, Romanian President-turned UN General Secretary, Nicolae Carpathia. Nicolae plots to create a one-world government under the pretense of unity, then persecute Christians en masse once he has consolidated power. This is the antichrist. Not a good guy.
Released from 1995-2007, the Left Behind series was like a drug for an American populace fresh out of the Cold War and facing a new millennium. Materially more comfortable than ever but full of psychological and existential angst, the suburbanite masses were ready to dream up new apocalyptic frontiers. And I really do mean masses. These books were mega-hits, topping The New York Times and USA Today Bestseller Lists and getting praise even from LaHaye’s despised “secular media.”
Over the years 15 more novels would follow the original in a mainline series selling at least 65 million copies. If that wasn’t enough, Left Behind became a franchise, boasting 40 young adult books, 7 spin-off novels, numerous graphic novels, tie-in devotional and study books, 5 films (one starring a financially desperate Nicholas Freakin’ Cage), and even a real time strategy video game where you convert people instead of kill them (well, you can kill them, but you lose spirit points.) At its height, the series was making LaHaye and his co-author, Jerry B. Jenkins an estimated $15 million yearly. This thing was huge.
In a more rational world, this article would end with, “It was a schlocky, pedantic, but highly readable series perfectly situated to succeed in the Y2K era. After the early aughts we all forgot about it, and it certainly didn’t impact our politics, public health, or general belief in a consensus reality. End of story.”
Not end of story.
Our buddy Tim knew how to play ball. Take a look at his resume. In 1981, LaHaye founded The Council for National Policy, an organization described by The New York Times as, “a few hundred of the most powerful conservatives in the country.” They met three times a year at undisclosed locations. Their notes, plans, membership rolls, and discussion topics were top secret. Through leaks, we have learned members and attendees included such figures as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, George W. Bush, Jerry Falwell, Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon, Elsa Prince, Trent Lott, Heritage Foundation and NRA leadership, Southern Baptist Convention bigwigs, judges and district attorneys, representatives and governors, media moguls and military officers…the terrifying list goes on.
It seems to me that Tim got so worried about the Illuminati that he made his own. Classic mistake, could happen to any of us.
A young Rahab picked up the first Left Behind novel in my Christian school’s library in 2011. I remember the librarian glowingly referred to it as, “basically the 67th book of the Bible.” Personally, I’d give the Bible more credit than a book that ends a conversion experience with “The deal was done” and doesn't know a way to describe sadness except as "heavy as lead" (the series loves that metaphor). By the time I picked up that first book, the Left Behind series had solidified itself as Scriptural fact in the minds of tens of millions of people.
Now, take a guess: Did LaHaye receive this obsessive fixation upon his books with humility, insisting his works were merely a fun exercise that remixed Biblical prophecy and church tradition? Or did he claim the books were given to him by God, insist without evidence that the novels converted thousands to Christianity, and write another book in 1999 (with a second edition in 2011) asserting that every plot beat in the Left Behind series was entirely Scripturally-grounded in nature and should be taken as literal?
If you can’t guess the answer, go back to the start of this article. You haven’t been paying attention.
Let’s go over a few core tenants of what LaHaye was able to plant in the public consciousness. I should note that he did not make up all these concepts, his influences range from the aforementioned Nazi book to Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth to the A Thief in the Night film series. But the explosive popularity of the Left Behind books, coupled with LaHaye’s aggressive speaking tours and wrapping of important Christian figures and scholars into his Pre-Trib Research Center all but cemented the following tenants in the American evangelical imagination:
- Jesus is coming back and the world is ending. Soon. Very, very soon.
- The end of the world will be accompanied by significant social upheaval. Wars, famines, plagues, disinformation, natural disasters, gay people existing in public, all those scary things.
- Literal satanic forces undergird every non-Christian institution. A cabal of Satan-worshippers controls the universities, the mass media, the banks, all of it. Above all, the United Nations is this cabal’s primary instrument.
- Very soon, the United Nations will come under the control of a charismatic communist who will speak of peace, universal human rights, and social welfare programs. He will use the UN to create a one-world government with himself at its head. You know he’s scary, because in Left Behind’s fifth entry, Apollyon, he says terrifying things like, “One of the hallmarks of my administration is tolerance. We can only truly be a global community by accepting diversity and making it the law of the land. It has been the clear wish of most of us that we break down walls and bring people together.” We call this fella, “the antichrist.”
- The antichrist will require all people to undergo some sort of procedure as an act of fealty to the new one world government. This procedure will leave you with a tattoo of some kind called, “The Mark of the Beast.” Without this mark you won’t be able to exist in polite society, and eventually will face execution. Anyone who gets the mark goes to hell when they die, even if they try to repent.
- Before things get so bad that it becomes the literal worst time in human history, Christ will snatch away all true Christians in a miraculous event called, “The Rapture.” Following this, seven years of satanic rule shall be unleashed on Earth, the final chance to turn to Christ before the true end comes.
- At the end of the seven years Jesus will return with an army, obliterate the forces of the antichrist at the battle of Armageddon, and set up a new eternal kingdom based in Israel.
The specifics vary from person to person, but talk to your average American evangelical and you’ll find they’ve picked up at least some of it. Furthermore, research shows that the more engaged someone is in an evangelical congregation, the likelier they are to buy into LaHaye’s theory of the apocalypse. 39% of Americans believe we are living in the end times, with a staggering 9 out of 10 protestant pastors believing they see signs of end times prophecy in current events. While LaHaye certainly doesn’t deserve all the blame for this trend, it is indisputable that the standard evangelical idea of the end times is deeply colored by this strange series of glorified airport novels.
Tim LaHaye died in the summer of 2016. He was 90 years old. Like so many other angry, paranoid men who made their anger and paranoia everyone else’s problem, LaHaye died in comfort and luxury, completely untouched by the terrors he had unleashed. The coming months would see the US consumed by accelerating political division, controversy, and anger. Just over one year after LaHaye’s death, a new (or, if you prefer, remixed) strain of apocalyptic ideology would begin to infect evangelical America in the form of the QAnon movement, a strain that in many ways must be seen as LaHaye’s own progeny.
Where can LaHaye's mark be seen in modern conservative politics? The clearest example is the far right's increasing apocalypticism. The dream of the day of judgement (often indistinguishable from the horrifying “day of the rope” of such fascist texts as The Turner Diaries) is not a new mindset on the right. However, this line of thinking found a renewed political valence first in Rapture fiction, then in the QAnon movement.
QAnon inherits much of the LaHaye-esque paranoia, blending it with a real-but-warped popular understanding of real-life elite corruption, depravity, and exploitation. This birthed a strain of apocalyptic thought from which we see such trends as growing political violence, vaccine misinformation, election denial, and an outright fascist coup attempt in January of 2021.
LaHaye and his ilk were wildly successful in priming their audience of evangelical Christians for such messaging. Research found that white evangelicals in particular were the most susceptible demographic in the United States to the QAnon brand of conspiracy. The Institute for Social Sciences found significant correlation between evangelicals and sympathy for, to outright agreement with, QAnon’s central theses. The Public Relations Research Institute found that one fourth of white American protestants accepted the core tenants of QAnon in 2021. Wheaton College’s Billy Graham Center Research Institute, (certainly no “secular humanists!”) found nearly half of self-identified evangelicals accepted QAnon’s framing of the media being controlled by their enemies, with greater participation in evangelical churches tied to greater likelihood of holding QAnon-adjacent beliefs.
Indeed, a direct comparison can be made between the esoteric messages released by QAnon’s originator, “Q Clearance Patriot” (who began his misinformation career with claims about a coming “storm” to wipe away non-believers in the MAGA project) and a character in the Left Behind series that serves as LaHaye’s own mouthpiece, a character through which the particularities of LaHaye’s theory of political struggle, organization, consolidation, and change becomes clear, This character’s name is Tsion Ben-Judah.
Perhaps tired of even the pretense of writing a story with a plot and characters, LaHaye created a Tsion-Ben Judah in the second Left Behind novel (Tribulation Force). Many aspects of his characterization are deeply antisemitic. Indeed, I find even the name “Tsion Ben-Judah” to be, shall we say, Rowling-esque. Add another thumbs down sticker to LaHaye’s record, if you can find a place to fit it in next to all the others.
Tsion Ben-Judah is a scholar in the employ of the Israeli government, tasked with learning how to identify the coming Messiah. Although he doesn’t find the truth in time to be Raptured with all the Christians, Ben-Judah’s studies lead him to conclude that rather than indicating a figure that is as of yet still to come, Old Testament prophecy was pointing towards the coming of Christ. He accepts Christianity as fact and Christ as the promised Jewish Messiah.
Tsion Ben-Judah takes up the role of intellectual cornerstone of the Tribulation Force (a sort of half-militia, half-Bible study organized to resist the antichrist) and begins to write a blog full of prophecies, predictions, hidden wisdom, and anything else that allows LaHaye to drop full articles into the middle of his novels without a break for pesky concepts such as “character development” and “prose.” He would go on to reuse these articles in piecing together his future spin-off “non-fiction” books such as the second edition of Are We Living In The End Times?
Ben-Judah’s blog (which is never given a name) gains great fame based on his grand predictions of what is to come. In Apollyon, he is described thus “Ben-Judah was ridiculed for his beliefs…He said an earthquake would come. It came. He said hail and blood and fire would scorch the plants. They did. He said things would fall from the sky, poisoning water, killing people, sinking ships. They fell…I want to know what Dr. Tsion Ben-Judah says is coming next! Don’t you?”
It ought to be noted that the context of this praise for Ben-Judah is it being used as a counter-argument to refute a panel of experts who are knowingly providing fraudulent scientific-sounding explanations for the judgements of God plaguing the dying Earth. These books are full of lying scientists, lying journalists, lying doctors, lying academics…in the world of Left Behind, anybody who is considered an expert on anything other than the Bible should automatically be assumed a liar.
By the series’ end Tsion’s blog has over one billion readers, or “pretty much every…believer in the world,” according to Apollyon. And what does LaHaye’s own mouthpiece do with this gargantuan following? Beyond predicting the future with perfect accuracy based on his God-given ability to divine meaning from the Scriptures, he urges his followers, “Now is the time, my dear brothers and sisters…This is our chance to put into place mechanisms that will allow us to survive when the world system requires its own mark one day.” (This is a reference to point 5 from the list above, the “Mark of the Beast.”)
These “mechanisms” get very serious, very fast. At Ben-Judah’s instruction people break the law, form militias, build black market economies to get around the UN/antichrist’s formal, anti-Christian economy, and, most importantly, refuse the Mark of the Beast, which involves being injected with a microchip tracker. At the Battle of Armageddon, thousands go to their deaths fighting at Ben-Judah’s urging, with the blogger himself perishing in a hail of gunfire fighting the antichrist’s forces (he will be raised again in a glorified body and given eternal life just a few hours later.)
LaHaye did not see these tactics as merely an interesting plot point or something future Christians would need to do. He was a strong proponent of building organizations parallel to existing “secular” ones, a sort of Christian spin on the traditionally leftist concept of dual power. LaHaye advocated for separate Christian schools (this was deeply entwined with his segregationist opinions, I might add), Christian think tanks, Christian activist circles, Christian media companies, Christian medical practices, Christian anything-you-can-think-of really!
In a lecture to a group of students at Christian Heritage College, Lahaye railed against the very concept of Christians in non-Christian spaces, saying to leave the security of faith-based institutions and interact with the world beyond is to expose yourself to the whims of “mental perverts.” He described parents who send their children to “secular colleges” (defined as any non-Christian school) to which they have scholarships, rather than taking out hefty loans to attend private Christian schools, as individuals who “didn’t have enough faith.” As if the speech was too subtle, he made his reason for his separatism explicit: “If you control the mind, you’ll control the body.”
Furthermore, LaHaye saw no reason to allow non-Christians into Christian spaces, even for the sake of evangelism. “If you take a ghetto thinker out of the ghetto and put him in an ideal environment, pretty soon he has a ghetto,” he claimed in the same sermon from above. One might believe that he might hide this stark (and racist) perspective from all but his fellow hardliners, but it’s entirely apparent in the Left Behind novels if you look for it. For instance, in the tenth Left Behind novel, The Remnant, we meet a woman named Krystall who will soon desperately wish to join the Tribulation Force and become a Christian. Unfortunately for her, she has already received the Mark of the Beast and is refused entrance to the Christian safe haven of Petra despite risking her life to support the Christian cause. In the eleventh book, Armageddon, she is killed in her efforts to protect the persecuted Christians, at which time her soul–too corrupted to be saved by God–is cast into hell for eternity.
How do the Christians in the novel speak about Krystall when weighing whether to try to save her after all she’s done for them? To quote one member of the Tribulation Force, "Sad as it is, she made her decision, took her stand, and accepted the mark…She's going to die anyway…and when she does, she's not going to like what eternal life looks like.”
This is how LaHaye saw all those even slightly outside the bounds of his dogma, and he worked tirelessly to condition his millions of readers to think in these exact same terms. The lesson of the unfortunate Krystall pushes beyond being a cautionary tale about trucking with evil, instead becoming an outright threat: you can behave in a manner that is mostly correct, believe almost perfectly, but if your stride even slightly breaks lockstep with the movement you shall be exposed to the insatiable wrath of God. In Krystall’s case, her unpardonable sin is undergoing an injected procedure that the government assures her will make her safer and improve society more broadly. The leap to an anti-vaccine (or as I prefer to call it, pro-measles) position from this sort of mindset is not hard to imagine.
The lesson of Krystall gives further insight to the LaHaye-ist perspective on how Christians ought to view outsiders. To hammer the lesson home (or perhaps to pad word count), the book Armageddon essentially tells the Krystall story twice, featuring an unnamed woman writhing on the ground before the judgement of God, begging for forgiveness, quoting every Bible verse she knows. The Christian characters shake their heads in pity, describing people like her thus: “God would harden their hearts and they wouldn't be able to choose him even if they wanted to.” The book then goes on to state (without explaining how!) that this is not inconsistent with their God as a, “...loving and merciful one who seemed to look for ways to welcome everyone into heaven, not keep them out.”
We are meant to believe that God wants all people to believe the truth and spend eternity in Heaven, and yet intentionally locks the majority of humanity out of Heaven. The only logical resolution to this paradox is to conclude that the overwhelming mass of humanity is not part of “everyone,” not part of “people.” This dehumanization is put into practice in LaHaye’s take on the Battle of Armageddon, when the United Nations attempts to subjugate Israel and its now-returned defender, Jesus Christ Himself.
As the battle of Armageddon reaches its climax at the end of the series’ twelfth entry, Glorious Appearing, the masses of Christian soldiers and the returned Christ do not treat their enemies as people, but as damnable masses to be turned into (literally) a sea of blood so high that it rises to the necks of horses. LaHaye describes it thus: “..tens of thousands at a time screaming in terror and pain and dying in the open air. Their blood poured from them in great waves, combining to make a river that quickly became a swamp…Millions of birds flocked into the area and feasted on the remains.”
If the above scene is not vicious enough, Glorious Appearing takes care to specify the majority of the people who die in this fashion are Arab and Chinese. Furthermore, it takes special time to describe the people of God (Christians and chosen Israelis) revelling in this bloodshed as they view it from the Christian-conquered city of Jerusalem.
Can there be any surprise that those primed by this message so openly embraced the call for QAnon’s storm, a violent moment of supposed righteous judgement? What about the so-called “War on Terror,” cheered on and architected by the evangelical-aligned Bush administration? What about the ongoing American-Israeli genocide in Gaza, or the current war on Iran, so-often sold as a clash of civilizations? What about the right's willingness to turn on their own who fall even slightly out of the fold, like the recently-deported gay conservative pundit Milo Yiannapoulos, or the January 6th mob's eager wish to hang their former ally, Vice President Mike Pence? What about the terrorizing, incarceration, deportation, and murder of immigrants, legislation meant to drive trans and queer people out of public life, or acts of day-to-day bigotry, bias, and discrimination? When you believe those not like you are fated from the start to end up as a puddle of blood under your righteous boot, it becomes much easier to accept all atrocities committed against them.
It can be hard for an outsider to American conservatism to understand how such fanaticism spreads, especially through institutions like the church which are ostensibly meant to be Earthly embodiments of Jesus’ love and grace. But when we consider that many of these people have spent decades heeding the words of the Tim LaHayes of the world, primed by the millions to receive the cryptic communications of a Tsion Ben-Judah type figure, told to cordon themselves off into a rival society, and encouraged to prepare for wanton, unforgiving slaughter of their inhuman enemies, can we really be surprised when the politics of paranoia and violence have deadly consequences?
Defenders of LaHaye might argue that he never directly called vaccines the Mark of the Beast, he wasn’t a Trump affiliate (more of a Huckabee guy), and to my knowledge never cast doubt on the validity of elections. But he did teach tens of millions that any attempt at international cooperation is inherently satanic. He slandered the concept of academic or professional expertise and questioned the legitimacy of any system not directly under the control of the church. He suggested that all world events flow from either divine judgement or the machinations of the illuminati. He told Christians the Rapture would save them from the bulk of the consequences and horrors of an increasingly unstable world, thus they might as well make a full-court press for political and social power. He encouraged his adherents to seek wisdom not from peer reviewed studies or thoroughly researched journalism, but from radical media outlets that reaffirm their own biases. He promoted a moral framework that allows for horrendous brutality against those who do not conform to his own western Christian standards. He even used his books to glorify Christian militias and anti-government networks, all while secretly organizing sympathetic elements among the ultra-powerful in a plot to “retake” the US for Christ.
To an adherent of LaHaye, there is no truth, public trust is toxic, and any attempt to fix the world we have rather than focusing on the next one is a Trojan horse sent by the devil himself. History is merely a violent power struggle between satanists and Christians, and the winners have already been picked by cosmic destiny.
If you take his views to their logical conclusions, any action in pursuit of furthering fundamentalist Christian goals, be it murdering political opponents, blackmailing people with your secret knowledge of their sexuality, sabotaging attempts at world peace, infiltrating governments as sleeper agents, and openly mocking your enemies as they are damned to hell are legitimate. Wait, did I say “if you take his views to their logical conclusions?” You don’t even have to do that. Every single thing I just listed is done and seen as morally correct throughout the course of the Left Behind series.
It is with no pleasure that I tell you we are living in Tim LaHaye’s world.
I must conclude this article with an unfortunate fact: To an adherent of LaHaye’s ideology, the very existence of this piece of writing is further proof of the satanic secular humanist conspiracy. Were LaHaye alive, I have no doubt he would dismiss me as a “Luciferian” (one of my favorite insults of his) without any interrogation of my actual beliefs. After all, he had no problem describing fellow Christians in these precise terms, dismissing the very concept of good faith disagreement with his interpretations of the Bible, politics, and the world..
I do not know how I could win someone over that believes all of society is designed to persecute them as part of a grand supernatural conspiracy. I cannot imagine my impulse, which is to shake them and ask, “Do you fucking hear yourself?” would bear much fruit. What I do know is that LaHaye’s theory of building organization and mobilizing like-minded individuals is not the exclusive domain of segregationists, homophobes, and violent imperialists. Nor does he hold a monopoly on engaging in cultural and political struggles via media and the arts.
Whoever you are, be you anything from a Christian to one of LaHaye’s dreaded secular humanists, I would encourage you to think about how you can pursue a world with less division and more solidarity. LaHaye and his followers supercharged a culture that dismissed the very existence of concepts such as truth and trust, opting for an ideology of warring separatist blocs mounting offensives to seize or, failing that, to break, all shared institutions of civic, artistic, and intellectual life. If we would prefer to keep our world from going the way of the one in the Left Behind novels (the series ends with a full three quarters of the Earth’s population dead), it’s high time to build movements that self-consciously push in the opposite direction.
Maybe this is just misguided faith talking, but if we do that, I honestly believe we can build a world where angry, paranoid men can no longer make their anger and paranoia into everybody else’s problem.
And then as a stronger, safer, healthier society, maybe we can all commit to forgetting about Dr. Tim LaHaye and his book series that helped unleash a deluge of nightmares supposedly done in the name of a loving God.
Rahab Bridges (she/her) is a writer, podcaster, and certified queer based out of Atlanta, Georgia. She is the author of They Called Her Rebel: A Fantasy Novel About Late-Stage Capitalism, People Power, and Queer Love and a host of Workers’ Lit, THE literature podcast for hot, cool, gay, and/or working class people. She is intensely passionate about social, economic, and climate justice, anti-imperialism, queer liberation, and penguins. You can find her on Bluesky @workerslit.bsky.social or on workerslit.com.