A History of the End of the World

including Koresh himself.

At one point during the siege, the FBI was given some curious but insightful advice by a pair of professors of religion who insisted that a close reading of Revelation held the key to ending the standoff with the heavily armed Davidians. Koresh was apparently convinced that the Davidians were the ones destined to be “slain for the word of God” when, according to Revelation, the fifth seal is broken. But the two scholars sought to persuade Koresh, by means of a radio broadcast, that he should read and heed the very next line in the book of Revelation: “And it was said unto them, that they should rest yet for a little season.”¹¹⁰ If Koresh could be convinced that “God intended the ‘little’ season to last until after the end of the siege, giving him time to stand trial and then resume a worldwide ministry,” explains Damian Thompson, “then the standoff would end peacefully.”¹¹¹

FBI negotiators, in fact, took the advice seriously enough to play a tape of the radio broadcast over the telephone for Koresh, and he reportedly agreed to abandon his stronghold at Mount Carmel once he had composed his own treatise on the meaning of the seven seals. But the FBI was not willing to wait long enough for Koresh, who was capable of sermonizing at extraordinary length, to complete his latest exegesis. “[T]hey were unfamiliar with religion’s ability to drive human behaviour to the point of sacrificing all other loyalties,” explains Thompson, writing of an era when the world did not yet fully understand what motivates suicide bombers.¹¹²

The role of Revelation in the siege of Mount Carmel was mostly overlooked at the time it was taking place, and entirely forgotten thereafter. The whole sorry affair has been written off as an unfortunate encounter between overeager law-enforcement agents and overzealous religious cranks, all of whom were spoiling for a shoot-out. But the tragedy would never have taken place—and the Branch Davidians would not have come into existence at all— but for the strange power of the apocalyptic idea. The book of Revelation carries some “dangerous baggage,” as we have seen already and will see again, and even the brightest and shiniest dreams of a new heaven and a new earth have a dark side.

Consider, for example, the remarkable media phenomenon known as the Left Behind series, which exploded into American popular culture even as the ugly memories of Waco were beginning to fade away.

When Tim LaHaye published a tract titled The Beginning of the End in 1972, he was yet another hard-preaching doomsayer who urgently sought to persuade his readers that the end of the world was nigh. Indeed, he offered a strong dose of dispensational premillennialism that differed not at all from what John Nelson Darby or Father Miller preached in their own day. “[W]e could well be the generation that sees the culmination of the ages and the ushering in of the Kingdom of Christ,” he writes. “Certainly we have more historical evidence for such a possibility than any generation of Christians in almost 2,000 years. In fact, I believe the Bible teaches that we are already living in the beginning of the end.”¹¹³

By 1995, however, LaHaye put himself in a very different place on the cultural landscape when he penned (with coauthor Jerry B. Jenkins) a slick apocalyptic thriller titled Left Behind. The message is exactly the same, but the medium is wholly different. Styled as a contemporary potboiler, Left Behind features the stock characters, exotic settings, and fast-paced plot that we would expect to find in a best seller by Robert Ludlum. Aside from the fact that Left Behind was published by Tyndale House, a leading publisher of fundamentalist Christiantitles, nothing on the front or back cover reveals that it is actually a thinly disguised theological tract. But the very first passage slyly introduces the reader to the doctrine of the Rapture when the hero, a commercial airline pilot called Rayford Steele, discovers that half of the passengers on his Boeing 747 have somehow exited the aircraft in midflight.

“I’m not crazy! See for yourself!” screams a distraught flight attendant. “All over the plane, people have disappeared.”

“It’s a joke. They’re hiding, trying to—”

“Ray! Their shoes, their socks, their clothes, everything was left behind. These people are gone!”¹¹⁴

Thus began a sensationally successful media enterprise that demonstrates the power of the apocalyptic idea in its purest and simplest form. The Left Behind series, a protracted account of the Tribulation and the antics of the Antichrist, spawned not merely a string of novels but a multimedia empire, including books, comics, newsletters, audios, videos, and a Web site called “The Left Behind Prophecy Club.” Significantly, the publisher spun off a separate series especially for young readers, titled Left Behind: The Kids, which now consists of an additional forty titles. While Hal Lindsey was hailed as the best-selling author of the 1970s for selling 20 million copies of The Late Great Planet Earth, the Left Behind series has reportedly sold more than 50 million copies since the first title was published in 1995. And the end—surely to the disappointment of its authors—is nowhere in sight.

Indeed, LaHaye’s motives in repurposing Revelation as a thriller are not merely mercenary. Before he took up his new calling as a best-selling novelist, LaHaye enjoyed a long and active career as a pastor and an educator, a televangelist and a leading figure in Christian politics. LaHaye is credited by Jerry Falwell as “the motivation behind the birth of the Religious Right,”¹¹⁵ and he served as cochairman of the failed presidential campaign of conservative Republican Jack Kemp, at least until he was asked to resign after he was quoted as calling Roman Catholicism “a false religion.”¹¹⁶

Aside from the Left Behind series, LaHaye’s fifty books include tracts that condemn the United Nations, gay sexuality, “secular humanism,” and various other bogeymen of Christian fundamentalism. “He’s basically provided an agenda for conservatives on a range of issues from abortion and pornography to creationism, prayer in schools, and public education as a hotbed of secularism and liberalism,” according to Paul Boyer.¹¹⁷ And LaHaye himself readily acknowledges that the Left Behind series is a yet another weapon in the struggle for the hearts and minds of his fellow Americans.

“We are in a cultural war in this country, and there are two worldviews—one built on the writings of man and one on the writing of God,” LaHaye explained to one interviewer. “Those two views of what is going to help America and the world are 180 degrees in opposition.”¹¹⁸

That’s exactly why the books in the Left Behind series embrace the same dualistic theology—and the same revenge-seeking rhetoric—that burn so hotly in the book of Revelation. All of the complexities of the modern world are swept away and replaced by the simple conflict between God and Satan—another borrowing from the book of Revelation. As the Tribulation begins, according to the plot line of the Left Behind series, a handful of Christians who missed out on the Rapture are inspired to join the struggle against the Antichrist, who is depicted as a slick Jewish politician with headquarters in modern Iraq, the site of ancient Babylon.

“They promote conspiracy theories; they demonize proponents of arms control, ecumenicalism, abortion rights and everyone else disliked by the Christian right,” complains Gershom Gorenberg in a review of the Left Behind series that appeared in the American Prospect.¹¹⁹ “Their anti- Jewishness is exceeded only by their anti-Catholicism. Most basically, they reject the very idea of open, democratic debate. In the world of Left Behind, there exists a single truth, based on a purportedly literal reading of Scripture; anyone who disagrees with that truth is deceived or evil.”¹²⁰

Not coincidentally, the Left Behind series peaked at the very moment when the Western world awakened to the new peril that had replaced the “evil empire” of the Reagan era—the challenge of militant Islam and, especially, the spectacle of religious terrorism on an unprecedented scale. Suddenly, everything old was new again; after all, the prophet Muhammad had been seen as a candidate for the Antichrist by the Christian world more than a thousand years before the Bolshevik Revolution. And when America went to war against Iraq, the struggle that George W. Bush called a “clash of ideologies” could be readily seen, yet again, as the war between the Lamb and the Beast.

By the time George W. Bush put himself in pursuit of the presidency, in fact, the bonding of politics and religion in America was nearly complete. Converted to born-again Christianity by Billy Graham after a drunken weekend at the Bush family compound in 1985, he had come to rely on the fundamentalist voting bloc as his core constituency. When asked during a debate among Republican presidential candidates in 1999 to cite his favorite political philosopher, for example, he answered “Christ,” and went on to explain: “When you turn your heart and your life over to Christ, when you accept Christ as the Savior, it changes your heart and changes your life.”¹²¹ And, once he reached the White House in 2001, Bush promptly launched a “faith-based