Thread by @eaton

Not pictured: my patient spouse muttering, “there is NO science in that picture” in the background

https://twitter.com/CRightcast/status/1343441861445357568

An interesting side note: The late 80s-90s saw almost every Christian publishing company dive into the End Times™ genre, with the exception of Bethany House (now part of Baker). They solidly staked out and still dominate the Christian historical fiction space, AFAICT

Nothing was ever really the same after Left Behind; everything existed in its shadow and Tyndale ended up publishing or licensing no less than *counts, carries a three* seventy-eight books in the Left Behind universe.

That includes the 10 volume graphic novel series, but not the two RTS games, four movies, and "inspired by the books" music anthology.

What's interesting — and this is going to be explored deeper on the upcoming @CRightcast episodes — is that there have been distinct waves of End Times Genre Fiction™.

A few early examples fit the bill — Lord Of The World from 1907 (!!!!) looks like a good candidate, and I'd argue that CS Lewis' The Last Battle from '56 fits the bill since it's explicitly a remix of Revelation in an allegorical universe.

But things don't explode until the 70s when Lindsey's "Non Fiction" work of "Prophecy Interpretation" The Late Great Planet Earth gets shoved into the Scifi section by its secular distributor and it blossoms in the fertile soil of disaster movies and Vietnam era cultural conflict

Within a couple years, the Weather Underground bombs the Capitol Building; the Club of Rome releases the infamous "Limits To Growth" report; the postwar economy slumps into stagnation, inflation, and industrial collapse; the Oil Crisis hits; there's a new war in the middle East…

Historians can look back and say, "Shit yeah, bills coming due," but his book was absolutely in the right place in the right time, and it added the tantalizingly epic elements of The Rapture and The Tribulation and The Great War of Armageddon to the mix, solidifying the template.

A wave of similar nonfiction "biblical prophecy" books followed but the real cultural explosion was in films and eventually novels that followed Lindsey's basic narrative template to make disaster/horror movies that would "scare kids into Heaven."

The directors and producers of the first movies in that wave — Ron Ormond ("If Footmen Tire You…") and Russell Doughten Jr ("A Thief In The Night") — worked on 50s and 60s schlock horror and pulpy action movies before hopping on the Rapture train. It shows.

A second wave in the 80s reflected, IMO, changing sensibilities among politically mobilized fundamentalists — fewer shock horror movies, more conspiracy thriller novels. Less "the UN will take over and kill the believers," more "Secret conspirators hold the REAL power…" twists.

By the late 80s you had novels like the prolific Michael Youssef's "Earth King," "Mastermind," "The Voice," and "Man Of Peace," all variations on powerful cabals (or individuals) bringing about one world government, currency, religion, etc. despite the best efforts of Good Men.

Published just 3y after his phyrric run for President, Pat Robertson's ostensible nonfiction book The New World Order riffed on the elder Bush's catch phrase for a post-Cold-War order and turned it into the umbrella term for every conspiracy theory ever.

Larry Burkett's "The Illuminati", published just a year later, fictionalized the same themes but pitted fundamentalist "freedom activists" and "faithful remnants" of the US Government against the dark conspiracy that had taken it over.

I read the HELL out of that one when I was a kid — the main character was a hacker named Jeff, and he saved the day! — but the novel's dark subtext was militia-style civil war between the FBI+Christian Fundamentalists, and the totalitarian liberals who wanted to destroy America.

A couple years after The Illuminati was released, Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people in the OKC bombing. His stated motives echoed the book's anti-federal themes.

(To be clear, there's no suggestion that McVeigh was inspired by — rather, The Illuminati reflected a growing theme of separatism and conflict that the right, both politically and religiously, was articulating in increasingly conspiratorial and apocalyptic terms)

The same year as the OKC bombing, though, Left Behind dropped. If the first wave of rapture fiction was Horror/Disaster, and the second was Conspiracy/Thriller, Left Behind marked the arrival of Rapture Adventure. The Clive Cussler version of tribulation theology.

@slacktivist, with his amazingly deep years-long series dissecting the books, is undisputedly the master analyst. He noted almost two decades ago that the LB books aren't *warnings* like many past examples, but *victory laps.*

Characters suffer, bad things happen, there's a powerful evil guy, sure… but the central theme of the stories is that The Whole World Has To Admit The Fundamentalists Were Right All Along.

Characters that recognize and admit that in the stories become heros and heroines, fighting for good. Characters that don't fess up inevitably transmogrify into servants of Satan.

That shift couldn't have been timed better. With the Soviet Union no more, the US at the reins of a global coalition, and evangelical energies focusing on domestic political conflict? "The Enemy Is People Who Don't Believe We're Right, And God Will Prove Them Wrong" *sold*.

There was plenty of exotically bad theology and weird Biblical prophecy contortions, but with 15 sequels? Dozens of spin-offs? Tie-in graphic novels? By the time the series was running at full tilt, it was just "We Are The Brave Resistance In An Apocalyptic Conflict," the book.

There was an uptick in Millennial Y2K themed stuff when the new century rolled around, but nothing since then has shifted the narrative landscape the same way. Coauthors LaHaye and Jenkins parted ways — each fired off their OWN rapture novel series! — but LB still reigns.

Lots of spoilers in this thread for the material @kristinrawls and I will touch on in the Rapture Stories series of @CRightcast, but this only really scratches the surface. The marriage of apocalyptic frames, prophetic certainty, and totalizing conspiracy mindsets?

Those are coming to fruition now. Whether intentional or not, they tilled and cultivated the soil that "Prophets for Trump" and Evangelical Qanoners and "Dominion machines are Satan's plot" all grow in.

(Also, bother, that should be @SlacktivistFred — pretty sure I make this mistake once every couple of months…)