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What do an airline pilot, a magazine reporter, a college student, the Romanian president, a beautiful flight attendant, and the visitation pastor of a church have in common? In the mega-selling novel of the late 1990s, when the rapture whisks millions of Christians away, these characters are among the millions more who are left behind.
The plot is a familiar one to pre-trib students of the endtimes. We've seen it in Scofield's notes, the old Thief in the Night movie, The Late Great Planet Earth, and Larry Norman's classic song ״I Wish We'd All Been Ready." When believers are caught up to meet him in the air," what happens to all the other people on earth?
According to Left Behind, the mass disappearance causes chaos in society, as people struggle to explain it. Aliens? A new kind of nuclear weapon? Of course some people realize (too late) that this was the rapture predicted in the Bible. The confusion leaves the door open for a charismatic young leader from a European country who seems too good to be true. A few of the new believers suspect that he's the Antichrist of biblical prophecy. This novel and its several sequels map out a course of events that fit the pretribulation view of biblical prophecy—the rapture followed by seven years of tribulation, during which the Antichrist emerges and the nations of earth rise up against the Lord, culminating in the battle of Armageddon.
Of course there are other interpretations of Scripture. Some Christians are "posttribulational" or "midtrib" or even "amil-lennial" in their beliefs about Christ's return. But the pre-trib view has been especially robust in the twentieth century, popularized by C. I. Scofield, the Moody empire, and Hal Lindsey,
among others. And whatever your beliefs, you have to admit that this view makes a great story.
That's what LaHaye and Jenkins capitalize on. LaHaye, a Bible teacher, has long had a feel for the conservative Christian audience. His Spirit-Controlled Temperament predated the Christian counseling movement with a simple method of selfunderstanding. (Long before Myers and Briggs labeled us with letters—INFP, ESTJ—LaHaye was asking whether we were melancholic or phlegmatic.) Jenkins, a former editor of Moody magazine, is perhaps the most prolific writer on the evangelical scene, with more than a hundred books to his credit. These two authors combined their talents to produce a publishing juggernaut.
By the end of the century, Left Behind had sold several million copies, and the entire series had sold more than ten million copies. Secular best-seller lists have long been skewed against books sold in Christian stores, but they couldn't ignore the numbers coming from the LaHaye-Jenkins series.
Maybe it's the new millennium. Maybe the Y2K bug go t peo-pie worried about the end of civilization. Since the 1960s, Christians have been crowing about the world's downhill slide (a key element in the pretribulation plot). Israel's growth as a nation (another key element) has added to the drama. And certain aspects of modern life (satellite TV, bar codes, computer-driven commerce) have made parts of this vision eerily real. Stir in some computer hysteria and the end-of-the-world hype that accompanies every new millennium (well, it happened in 1000 a.d.), and people are going to be interested in endtimes prophecy.
All of this, no doubt, has fueled the success of the Left Behind books, and those books have returned the favor, fueling this new endtimes interest in the church and in society at large.