Religion in American Popular Culture (Part 5): Biblical Epics and Evangelistic Filmmaking

“But he could laugh and cough, couldn’t he? He’s always depicted as so solemn, walking slowly, with his hands held like this . . .” [1]

“The Public, bless ‘em, must have a pretty face to look at . . . Well, isn't there any romance or adventure in the world without having a flapper in it?” ~ Carl Denham, from the movie King Kong (1933)

When Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of the Christ hit theaters in February of 2004, both the filmmakers and some segments of the general public were taken aback by the resounding success and popularity it achieved. It was not anticipated that a movie whose source inspiration was a medieval book of esoteric Passion visions penned in the 19th century by an Augustinian stigmatic nun [2], and which was dubbed entirely in the dead language of Aramaic, would make much of an impact on the modern movie-going public [3].

Hollywood veteran Mel Gibson fully realized the financial risks accompanying a bold venture such as this. But contrary to modest expectations and tentative, awkward steps in initial marketing and release that was unconventional almost by necessity, The Passion of the Christ did indeed make a resounding impact. According to an online poll conducted by Beliefnet.com (answered by approximately twelve thousand people and sponsored by Zondervan, the world’s largest publisher of Bibles), 62 percent were reading the Bible more as a result of seeing the movie. The poll also found that 41 percent of respondents had a more positive view of the Bible after seeing the movie, while 75 percent indicated when asked that the movie portrayed events “very close” to the Bible’s account of Jesus’ death [4].

This last statistic is of particular interest; it is no secret that images are rapidly replacing texts as a primary vehicle for information of all kinds, especially entertainment. This unseating of textual mediums means that, in a country for whose citizens religion is a deeply-embedded preoccupation, visual media is an obvious direction for communication of a distinctly religious (and especially evangelistic) bent to venture down. Religious themes have found their way into the medium of film almost from its very inception. As Robert Johnston points out in his book Reel Spirituality, religious subjects were prominent in many early films, many of which were made by religious people, and as the relationship between the church and the movie industry grew and matured, so did the quality of the way in which religion and the Bible were presented [5].

Midrash at the Movies

The ubiquity of this growth and maturation is evidenced by the fact that the version of the Old Testament with which a wide swath of the American public is most familiar is that of Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 epic film The Ten Commandments. Because of this well-known cultural blockbuster, which highly sanitizes the biblical life of Moses, a surprising number of people who revere the Bible are not even aware that the Moses character is depicted in the Book of Exodus as a sneaky murderer who goes on to lead a massive, ideologically-motivated slaughter of over 3,000 of his own people whom he initially freed from Egypt (Exodus 32).

The “cinematic redactors” (as I like to call them) were aided in their Midrashic process by their liberal use of sources. In crafting the script, the writers of The Ten Commandments drew not only from the Old Testament’s Book of Exodus, but also from the writings of Philo of Alexandria [6] and Josephus [7], both of whom added several creative details to the story. In addition to these sources, the film writers incorporated material from three fiction novels about Moses written between the mid-to-late nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth century [8].

The New Testament’s Gospels are similarly cinematic and dramatized in the minds of most of the American public, more so than anciently textual. In addition to Mel Gibson’s wildly popular Passion of the Christ, other successful cinematic ventures have included Franco Zeffirelli’s equally-Catholicizing but much-cleaner 1977 miniseries Jesus of Nazareth and Norman Jewison’s Jesus Christ Superstar, the 1973 film adaptation of the Andrew Lloyd Webber/Tim Rice rock opera of the same name. More recent offerings include Catherine Hardwicke’s 2006 American film The Nativity Story and the BBC’s 2010 miniseries The Nativity in the UK (written by Tony Jordan and directed by Coky Giedroyc).

Movies like The Ten Commandments have become the new definitive version of the Old Testament’s legendary tales, the Book of Exodus having been relegated to the stack of raw material. On a general level, this is not a new trend. It is the modern incarnation of the homiletic Midrashim method of interpretation, applied in ancient times to biblical texts to fill in gaps left in the scriptural narratives. It is also essentially the same process indulged in by the Aramaic Targum, which popularized paraphrases and etiological expansions of the Jewish scriptures in the common language of the people near the end of the last century before the Christian Era. Even in Josephus’s classic historical work Antiquities of the Jews (composed near the end of the first century CE), Josephus promises his readers at the outset that to give only the most accurate details of the historical events, not adding or subtracting anything:

And now I exhort all those that peruse these books, to apply their minds to God; and to examine the mind of our legislator [Moses], whether he hath not understood his nature in a manner worthy of him; and hath not ever ascribed to him such operations as become his power, and hath not preserved his writings from those indecent fables which others have framed, although, by the great distance of time when he lived, he might have securely forged such lies; for he [Moses] lived two thousand years ago; at which vast distance of ages the poets themselves have not been so hardy as to fix even the generations of their gods, much less the actions of their men, or their own laws. As I proceed, therefore, I shall accurately describe what is contained in our records, in the order of time that belongs to them; for I have already promised so to do throughout this undertaking; and this without adding any thing to what is therein contained, or taking away any thing therefrom [9].

However, one finds upon reading the Antiquities that all manner of changes and imaginative additions crept their way in. For instance, consider Josephus’s explanation as to why Pharaoh tries to kill all the male infants and toddlers of the Hebrews; Josephus would have us know that Pharaoh does not undertake this campaign because he is afraid of the Hebrews for any particular reason, but rather because he is fearful of a single prophesied deliverer of his Hebrew minions:

[T]here was this occasion offered itself to the Egyptians, which made them more solicitous for the extinction of our nation. One of those sacred scribes, who are very sagacious in foretelling future events truly, told the king, that about this time there would a child be born to the Israelites, who, if he were reared, would bring the Egyptian dominion low, and would raise the Israelites; that he would excel all men in virtue, and obtain a glory that would be remembered through all ages. Which thing was so feared by the king, that, according to this man's opinion, he commanded that they should cast every male child, which was born to the Israelites, into the river, and destroy it; that besides this, the Egyptian midwives should watch the labors of the Hebrew women, and observe what is born, for those were the women who were enjoined to do the office of midwives to them; and by reason of their relation to the king, would not transgress his commands. He enjoined also, that if any parents should disobey him, and venture to save their male children alive, they and their families should be destroyed [10].

This premise is clearly ahistorical as well as extra-biblical (it is nowhere to be found in Exodus), but most people recognize it immediately, and erroneously believe it to be in the Bible, due to its inclusion in DeMille’s The Ten Commandments.

Defamiliarization

In addition to their etiological and harmonizing function, films that depict sacred narratives serve an actualizing function. That is, they are visual tools designed, whether consciously or subconsciously, to aid the faithful in visualizing the ancient accounts that form the basis of their worldview. This differs in kind from the enhancing powers of the written word of fiction novels, because visual media presents a ready-made vision to the viewer over which his or her imagination has no altering power, whereas the narratives of fiction novels are conformed to the subjective visions of different readers. In many ways this visual kind of experience is far more compelling to people than text; after all, a great many people would love nothing less than to jump into a time machine and travel back to first-century Palestine to meet Jesus face to face, like Michael Moorcock’s character Karl Glogauer in his science-fiction novel Behold the Man [11], or to be whisked away back in time by some ancient magic to witness firsthand the major stories and events related in the Bible, as in Hanna-Barbera’s animated series The Greatest Adventure.

Of particular importance in interpreting the function of these films in this way is the concept of defamiliarization, the technique of enhancing the familiar by compelling audiences to view things that are commonly recognizable by the audience in an unfamiliar or groundbreaking way that is cathartic or refreshing to the imagination. The Christ narratives certainly fall within the category of the universally familiar. “Like the narratives of Greek tragedy, the Christ narratives dramatise a familiar story, the rudiments of which we are familiar with, even if we may not be believers, perhaps even more so than with those of other biopics, a genre to which in significant ways the Christ narratives belong [12].” Bible scholar Robert M. Price elaborates on this function quite eloquently:

Because the gospel events are extraordinary, superhuman, we have elevated them to the status of religious myth and dogma. And, ironically, these we take for granted! Once one has heard them embedded in dull sermons for years, clubbed to death by a decade of pedantic Sunday School teachers, the shocking mandates of the Sermon on the Mount come to seem as familiar as the words of a TV commercial . . . And so, if the tale is to strike us again, it must be defamiliarized. And the only way to defamiliarize it is to make it sound mundane, profane [13].

However, the concept of defamiliarization constituted a double-edged sword for Christians interested in spreading their gospel via the silver screen. When applied to such a revered figure as Jesus Christ, defamiliarization has the potential to strike many devout believers as subversive or heretical. As Gerald Forshey observes, “Jesus presented quite a different problem [than DeMille’s Moses] because he was the object of faith [14].” It is interesting to note that none of the major Jesus films that came from Hollywood in the twentieth century were produced by explicitly-branded Christian writers or studios, with the sole exception of Barnet Bain’s Jesus (1979). Although Cecil B. DeMille is mostly remembered for his biblical epics, most of his films were not biblically-based or inspired. His 1927 silent film The King of Kings builds up to a great defamiliarizing finale, in which the final sight given of Jesus as he ascends to heaven following his resurrection is above a vision of an urban cityscape in which modernistic architecture combines with belching factory-smoke. The intertitle “Lo, I am with you always” appears, as the music of the well-known hymn “Rock of Ages” plays in the background. Babington and Evans offer the interesting interpretation that this final scene “turns the crisis of evolution (rocks, geological strata, the evidence of the existence of life forms outside the scope of biblical explanation) back, even as we remember that the film was made only two years after the Dayton evolution or ‘Monkey’ trial of 1925, into images of comfort, solidity and refuge [15].”

On the other hand, enterprising evangelists soon realized that adapting their religious message to a secular movie-going audience, who would much rather immerse themselves in a good film than sit through a sermon, meant that they too would have to translate the sacred into the “profane,” to defamiliarize the sacred. But filmmaking of an explicitly Christian brand did not fully mature until the early 1970s. While evangelicals have historically not been fearful of technology and innovation, “it is certainly true that evangelicals were slow in catching on to the evangelistic possibilities of motion pictures, due at least in part to lingering doubts about Hollywood morality and its ‘communist’ sympathies [16].”

Thus, it makes sense that one of the first successful evangelical films to be made, spearheaded by Russell S. Doughten and Donald W. Thompson, featured a plot that explicitly depicted Communist tendencies in government as evil and even Satanic. The use of film media to further evangelistic ends was largely pioneered by Doughten and Thompson. Their claim to fame was the 1972 sleeper hit film A Thief in the Night, an end-times thriller in which a young woman awakes to finds herself alone in the world after her husband disappears in the “Rapture” (in Christian Dispensationalist theology, a term for the divine snatching away of the righteous from the earth at the end of time). The film follows her struggle to cope with a nightmarish world in which a one-world government emerges almost instantly after the worldwide disappearances and local authorities hunt her down with the intent to mark her as a loyal citizen upon pain of death.

Despite the relatively impactful nature of A Thief in the Night and its three sequels within the Christian subculture, Christian evangelical filmmaking slowly dwindled in originality and production quality over the next decades, due to its sequestered position within a narrow evangelical niche that saw little or no infusions of large funds enjoyed by big budget Hollywood fares. Hollywood business is rightfully very wary of films that explicitly promote a sectarian worldview, since they know such films will only appeal to a very small portion of the population. Witness, for example, the box-office failure of films that unsubtly and unambiguously promote specific religions and worldviews, such as 2000’s Battlefield Earth (Scientology), 2003's The Book of Mormon Movie, Volume 1: The Journey (Mormonism), or 2011’s Atlas Shrugged: Part 1 (Randian Objectivism). By the time Left Behind: World at War (the third installment in the Left Behind movie series) came along in 2005, it became the first in film history to be released exclusively in churches instead of a theater.

NOTES

1. La Voie lactée, directed by Luis Buñuel (1969; New York City, NY: The Criterion Collection, 2007).

2. Anne Catherine Emmerich, The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ (New York, NY: Cosimo Books, 1923).

3. For my critical review of the movie, see Nathan Dickey, “The Golgotha Chainsaw Massacre: A Rambling Commentary on ‘The Passion of the Christ’,” The Journeyman Heretic (blog) 13 June 2012, http://journeymanheretic.blogspot.com/2012/06/golgotha-chainsaw-massacre-rambling.html (accessed 16 July 2012).

4. TheFreeLibrary.com, “Poll Finds ‘The Passion of the Christ’ Boosts People's Bible-Reading Habits; More Than 12,000 People Take Zondervan/ Beliefnet.com Poll,” PR Newswire 31 March 2004, http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Poll+Finds+%27The+Passion+of+the+Christ%27+Boosts+People%27s+Bible-Reading...-a0114780523 (accessed 16 July 2012).

5. Robert K. Johnston, Reel Spirituality: Theology and Film in Dialogue (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2006), 31-37.

6. Philo, On the Life of Moses, in Philo Volume VI: On the Life of Moses, ed. G.P. Goold; trans. F.H. Colson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). In broad outline, Philo’s Life of Moses is to DeMille’s Ten Commandments what Emmerich’s The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ is to Gibson’s Passion of the Christ.

7. See especially Josephus, Against Apion, in Josephus Volume I: Against Apion, trans. H.St.J. Thackeray (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966).

8. Dorothy Clarke Wilson, Prince of Egypt (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1949); Arthur E. Southon, On Eagle’s Wings (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1939); J.H. Ingraham, The Pillar of Fire, or Israel in Bondage (Philadelphia: G.G. Evans, 1860). Also, a novelization based directly on the earlier 1923 silent version of DeMille's movie itself was written by Jeanie MacPherson and Henry MacMahon (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1924). See also Melanie J. Wright, Moses in America: The Cultural Uses of Biblical Narrative (Oxford, UK and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003) and Brian Britt, Rewriting Moses: The Narrative Eclipse of the Text (London and New York: T&T Clark International, 2004).

9. Flavius Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews Preface, in William Whiston, A.M. (trans.), The Complete Works of Flavius Josephus, the Celebrated Jewish Historian (Chicago: Thompson & Thomas, 1900).

10. Ibid., Antiquities Book II, Chapter 9.

11. Michael Moorcock, Behold the Man (London: Allison & Busby, 1969).

12. Bruce Babington and Peter William Evans, Biblical Epics: Sacred Narrative in the Hollywood Cinema (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1993), p. 127.

13. Robert M. Price, Jesus Christ Superstar: The Making of a Modern Gospel (Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com, 2011), p. 16.

14. Gerald E. Forshey, American Religious and Biblical Spectaculars (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1992), p. 84.

15. Babington and Evans, Biblical Epics, p. 126.

16. Randall Balmer, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey Into the Evangelical Subculture in America (Oxford, UK; New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 65.

Religion in American Popular Culture (Part 4): Christian Novels

I shall become your apostle whether you like it or not. I shall construct you and your life and your teachings and your crucifixion and resurrection just as I wish [1].

In 1678, Reformed Baptist preacher John Bunyan published his famous allegorical work The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come, a work which, despite its sectarian Protestant overtones, has nevertheless captivated readers across many wide-ranging branches of Christian denominations. One of the earliest known examples of the Christian Novel, Pilgrim’s Progress is an allegorical narrative illustrating through metaphor many aspects of the religious life of devotion (in essence a novelizing or dramatization of the New Testament epistles) by way of the story of Christian, an Everyman character who embarks on a perilous journey from his hometown, the City of Destruction, to the Celestial City where he seeks the culmination of the salvation and escape from judgment he found along the way. The narrative is notable for the way it takes abstract theological doctrines and issues and concretizes them for the reader, making abstract concepts more real by turning them into people and obstacles that the protagonist encounters within the confines of the secondary world. The story is related in the form of a dream experienced by a nameless wanderer who makes a brief appearance at the very beginning: “As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where was a den, and I laid me down in that place to sleep, and as I slept I dreamed a dream [2].”

This allegorizing technique was used by the medievalist and novelist C.S. Lewis in his famous series of novels The Chronicles of Narnia [3], which followed in the tradition that was in many ways pioneered by Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, illustrating key religious and theological concepts and teachings by way of creative storytelling whose plotlines, themes and characters parallel a number of items of Christian faith. Prior to Pilgrim’s Progress, the technique was utilized by poets rather than novelists, prominent instances being Dante’s Divine Comedy (1321) and Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667)[4]. Both these epic poems dramatized, with creative license, doctrines relating to the afterlife (prime fodder for satiating peoples’ imaginations with added details) and the Fall of Adam and Eve, respectively [5].

The distinctive art form known as the Christian Novel represents the religious devotee’s desire to “dream,” to cognitively move beyond the “wilderness of this world” to experience a fuller and more complete narrative that goes beyond the familiar texts of canon scripture and satisfies gaps left in the imagination by that familiar canon. The “dream” of Bunyan can thus be viewed as a metaphor for religious escapism through the medium of fiction, an escapism for which there is a fine line between enhancement of a religious worldview and what many might lampoon as “spiritual pornography [6].” In this sense Dante’s Divine Comedy was not much different from Boccaccio’s bawdy Decameron.

The enhancement of traditional, over-familiar faith texts that religious fiction novels offer is analogous to the particular kind of enhancement known as etiology. Deriving from the Greek word aitiologia (“giving a reason for”), etiology refers to the study of why things occur, including the reasons underlying why things are as they are and behave as they do. For example, an etiological myth seeks to explain the rationale for names of places or peoples, and/or to create a mythic history for those places and peoples [7]. In other words, etiological supplements provide fodder for filling in gaps in knowledge and for satisfying conceptual difficulties in the process of imagination. A great deal of fan fiction falls easily into the category of etiological supplements. And of course, Christianity and the Bible hold a massive fan fiction base larger than any others combined (especially in America), and in fact have for centuries.

Dimestore Apocalypses

The more enigmatic and mysterious a particular portion of Scripture comes across, the more likely it is to receive fan fiction treatment in the interests of fleshing out tantalizing details not disclosed in canonical scripture. This explains the great popularity and success of Christian novels that deal with the “end-times” as described by the major prophetic books of the Bible, such as Daniel and Revelation. Take, for example, the Christian concept of the Antichrist, a figure who is mentioned in only one verse in the whole Bible (I John 2:18), but who nevertheless has utterly fascinated believers and nonbelievers alike for the last two thousand years, likely due to the equation of “Antichrist” to the “Beast” in Revelation and the “Man of Perdition” in Daniel. As religious historian Bernard McGinn remarks, “What is most significant about Antichrist’s appearance in literature has been the attempts to probe the motivation (and at times even the psychology) behind ultimate human evil . . . It is probably no accident that novels and novellas, where motivation and character development are so important, display the most interesting Antichrists [8].” A great deal of these fictional accounts, certainly the ones we are primarily concerned with here, are the brainchild of religious believers seeking to present a doctrine they view as theologically accurate in a compelling, contemporary way which will not only titillate believing readers, but also draw in potential converts who would not normally pick up a Bible or a Bible commentary.

The wave of Christian end-times novels that have flowed into the Christian subculture for the last fifty years serve a dual function: they are a way of making sense out of the failing of Jesus to return, and they feed off the certainty that he is still coming back. What believing connoisseurs of these novels are actually doing is the former. What they say they are doing is the latter. What seems to be clear upon reflection is that the function of these novels and movies about the Christian end of the world is to psychologically fill in glaring gaps; according to the beliefs which fundamentalists have hammered home to them in church every week, the Second Coming ought to be happening at any time now. In fact, it should have happened before now. Needless to say, it is not happening. So what is the next step? In their imagination, they are able to visualize the apocalypse happening, and this largely suffices. The imagination serves to soften and soothe the wound of disappointed expectation.

A striking example of this psychological function is seen on the back-cover blurb summary of evangelist Ernest W. Angley’s 1950 novel Raptured, a novel which is clearly and unambiguously fantastical in nature: “With God’s help, determine for yourself whether the days of rapture are fact or fairy tale! Read about real people, in real situations, in this remarkable, inspiring book [9].” One finds this technique again with Jim Grant’s novelization of the 1972 evangelical horror film A Thief in the Night: “After reading A Thief in the Night, there is only one question you need to answer: Whose place would I want to be in? – Patty’s or Jim’s?”[10] By way of background, Patty in this story is the hapless character who, due to her lack of salvation, “had discovered too late that the loving God, who had allowed the world to go on as He had just so that as many as would could come to Him, had finally called a halt and moved into the next phase. She had discovered that the straight way was the only way. And now she was straight in a crooked world [11].” This indulgence in blurring the lines between reality and fantasy is seen to an even greater extent in Salem Kirban’s 1970 novel 666, a novel in which photographs and actual newspaper clippings are interspersed throughout the text to lend it a subliminal realism. In the introduction to his novel, Kirban writes, “This book . . . is a novel. Therefore much of it is fiction. However, it is important to note that very much of it is also FACT [12].”

There have been enough failed predictions within most adults’ lifetimes that many of them must have experienced disappointment, but the power of fiction is such that it eases the frustration. Seeing the vicissitudes of the Tribulation play out on the page via the imagination may not be as good or satisfying as the real thing, but wounds of disappointment and yearning are salved nonetheless.

“The secularization of the sacred apocalyptic myths,” writes Conrad Ostwalt “has been completed in Left Behind [13].” The Left Behind series of novels, conceived in the early 1990s by evangelist Tim LaHaye and written by Jerry B. Jenkins, is arguably the most popular and influential set of Christian novels of the last hundred years [14]. Called “The great Christian apocalypse of our day” by Bible scholar Robert M. Price [15], the Left Behind series represents the culmination of a long, struggling (often awkwardly-handled) tradition among Christian writers to dramatize or novelize the apocalypse. Total sales of the books have surpassed 65 million copies, and since the release of the first book in 1995 [16], the venture has spawned a multimedia franchise that includes three movie adaptations (all starring popular evangelist Kirk Cameron), a spin-off series aimed at younger readers entitled Left Behind: The Kids, comic books based on the novels, three video games, and radio dramas that in many ways mimics George Orwell’s famous War of the Worlds radio drama.

The wild popularity of the series demonstrates that evangelical culture has become extremely proficient and competent in adopting secular standards to improve the Christian message. This is made all the more fascinating when one considers the extremely literalist standpoint with regard to theological doctrine that the authors of Left Behind assert and from which the storyline and concept is derived. As Robert Dreyfuss notes, “[LaHaye’s] books depict a fantastical, fictional version of what he and his followers think is in store for the human race . . . If the Bible (Revelation 9:1-11) says that billions of six-inch long scorpionlike monsters with the heads of men, ‘flowing hair like that of women’ and the teeth of lions, wearing crowns and helmets, will swarm across the globe gnawing on unbelievers – well, that’s exactly what LaHaye says will happen [17].”

Secular, mass-market novels in the horror genre that borrow elements from religious apocalypses adopt an ostensibly different approach than the material written primarily for Bible believers. For one thing, secular treatments of biblical themes in general display more flexibility, more comfort and ease at using creative and artistic license with sacred texts. The Omen series of novels and films, which appeared in the 1970s and marked the beginning of a tidal wave of secular novels that incorporated religious end-times elements, is a great example of this. Stephen King’s apocalyptic blockbuster The Stand (1978; revised, restored, expanded, 1991) was another significant contribution to this trend, one of the best examples of highly selective adaptation of scripture.

Interestingly enough, however, an analysis of these secular mainstream novels finds that there is not as great a divide between them and their more religiously-oriented counterparts as one might initially expect. For example, The Omen was originally conceived by evangelical Robert Boyd Munger, who intended the film to serve as an evangelistic scare. As Bible scholar Robert M. Price points out, “The producers even took on Hal Lindsey as a consultant, but he dropped out when he saw the project going off in what he deemed unscriptural directions [18].” Hal Lindsey, of course, is the infamous author of The Late Great Planet Earth , the single bestselling title of the 1970s [19]; his evangelical influence on the first stages of the film’s production is retained in a few isolated but still eye-raising bits of dialogues. For instance, in David Seltzer’s novelization of the screenplay, a Catholic priest frantically pleads with Ambassador Thorn, the story’s main protagonist and unwitting abettor of the child who will become the future Antichrist: “You must accept Christ as your Saviour. You must accept him now [20].” However, there exists a decidedly anti-Catholic bent among many Christian end-times prophesiers, and Lindsey is no exception. Catholics, of course, are portrayed as heroes in The Omen series. Thus, while one can still detect some evangelical influence, it is for the most part drowned out in the final product.

Another peculiarity worth pointing out is the fact that that in Gordon McGill’s novel version of The Final Conflict (the third installment in the series), Jesus is reborn just as the evil Antichrist character Damien Thorn expected and tried to plan for by attempting to kill every infant boy in Britain. Damien cannot get to his target, however, because Jesus is born without any birth records among Gypsies living in the countryside [21]. In the movie version of The Final Conflict, this premise is changed completely. As it turns out, Jesus returns miraculously to earth as an adult, just as the fundamentalists expect. It is rather apparent that an individual or group exerted religiously-motivated pressure on the screenwriter to alter the originally-planned ending.

The Stand by Stephen King is an example of an apocalyptic novel that delivers to readers real, genuine suspense. Unlike in LaHaye’s series, in which every jot and tittle of the Book of Revelation is dramatized, the characters here do not immediately understand what is happening to the world. Some only suspect that what is described in Revelation might be playing out, but they are not played out blow-by-blow, heightening the mystery:

The Antichrist, that’s what I think. We’re living out the Book of Revelation right in our own time . . . how can you doubt it? “And the seven vials were opened . . .” Sure sounds like the superflu to me.

Ah, balls, people said Hitler was the Antichrist [22].

By contrast, there is no real suspense element at work in LaHaye’s series, because he has simply mapped the biblical apocalypse out literally and invited his readers to grab their proverbial popcorn and watch it come to life. Additionally, because LaHaye and Jenkins attempt to track the Bible as accurately as they imagine the Bible is guiding them to, it becomes easier for their audience to accept their narrative in a literal way, subconsciously believing in its truth based on the Bible’s teaching that what they read is how events are going to unfold, while consciously recognizing the novels as fiction. This process of assimilation is prodded on by the authors’ incorporation of constant obtrusive preaching in the form of various characters explicating to each other exactly how they know what is in store for them based on their readings of biblical prophecy.

Of course, fundamentalist Christians are the primary audience LaHaye and Jenkins have in mind, but no doubt they are also interested in attempting to save the unconverted through the vehicle of a bestselling fiction novel series. The Left Behind series ostensibly serves the same intended function of Pastor Rick Warren’s massively popular book The Purpose-Driven Life [23]. Both were written for fundamentalist audiences for whom the dogma contained in both must have been familiar territory, and yet The Purpose-Driven Life was billed and heavily advertised as a book filled with great new insights, new and profound epiphanies that could be effectively employed as a convincing evangelistic tract. The same mindset underlined the emergence of the Left Behind franchise, which has developed into a full-blown example of pop culture “Wal-Mart evangelism” that seeks to scare general fiction readers into salvation in the checkout aisle.

NOTES

1. Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster Inc., 1960), 478.

2. John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678; reprint ed., New York: Signet Classics, 2002), 11.

3. C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe: A Story for Children (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1950); Prince Caspian: The Return to Narnia (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1951); The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1952); The Silver Chair (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1953); The Horse and His Boy (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1954); The Magician’s Nephew (London: The Bodley Head, 1955); The Last Battle (London: The Bodley Head, 1956).

4. John Milton, Paradise Lost & Paradise Regained (1667, 1671; reprint ed., New York: Signet Classics, 2001); Dante Alighieri (1321), The Divine Comedy: The Inferno, The Purgatorio, and The Paradiso, trans. John Ciardi (New York: New American Library, 2003).

5. Modern Christian writers, in addition to writing novels, have also imitated the epic poem genre, most notably Calvin Miller’s blank-verse epic poem The Singer (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1975), an allegory of the life of Christ.

6. For example, see Fred Clark, “L.B.: Explicit Content,” The Slacktivist (blog) 6 June 2005. http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2005/06/06/lb-explicit-content/ (accessed 10 June 2012).

7. See Hermann Gunkel, The Legends of Genesis: The Biblical Saga & History, trans. W.H. Carruth (1901; reprint ed., New York: Schocken Books, 1964), 25.

8. Bernard McGinn, Antichrist: Two Thousand Years of the Human Fascination with Evil (New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers, 1994), 263. See also Nathan Dickey, “The Literate Antichrist: A Dilemma for Christian Eschatology,” The Journeyman Heretic (blog) 22 March 2011. http://journeymanheretic.blogspot.com/2011/03/literate-antichrist-dilemma-for.html (accessed 10 June 2012).

9. Ernest W. Angley, Raptured: A Novel on the Second Coming of the Lord (Old Tappan, NJ: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1950), back cover blurb.

10. Jim Grant, A Thief in the Night (Chicago: Moody Press, 1974), back cover blurb.

11. Ibid., pp. 83-84.

12. Salem Kirban, 666 (Chattanooga, TN: AMG Publishers, 1970), 11.

13. Conrad Ostwalt, Secular Steeples: Popular Culture and the Religious Imagination (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2003), 96.

14. For my critical analysis of the series, see Nathan Dickey, "The Subcultural Apocalypse: A Critical Analysis of the 'Left Behind' Series," The Journeyman Heretic (blog) 14 June 2011. http://journeymanheretic.blogspot.com/2011/06/subcultural-apocalypse-critical.html (accessed 10 June 2012).

15. Robert M. Price, The Paperback Apocalypse: How the Christian Church Was Left Behind (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2007), 271.

16. Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 1995).

17. Robert Dreyfuss, “Reverend Doomsday,” Rolling Stone 19 January 2004, 45.

18. Price, The Paperback Apocalypse, 241.

19. Hal Lindsey and Carole C. Carlson, The Late Great Planet Earth (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1970).

20. David Seltzer, The Omen (New York: New American Library, 1976), 60.

21. Gordon McGill, The Final Conflict (New York: New American Library, 1980).

22. Stephen King, The Stand: The Complete & Uncut Edition (New York: Signet, 1991), 888.

23. Richard Warren, The Purpose-Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here For? (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2002).