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Piety and Polemic in Evangelical Prophecy Fiction, 1995–2000
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2016
Extract
No one studying the impact of Evangelicalism’s most successful cultural products could doubt their mass-market appeal both within and beyond the ‘conservative revolution’ of contemporary America. With concerns to fashion the spirituality of their readers, the Left Behind novels (1995–2007) represent the ‘first outlines of a fully commercialised, fully mediatised Christian blockbuster culture’. The series dramatizes the end-time expectations of a popular evangelical system of eschatological thinking, known as dispensational pre-millennialism. This system maintains that Christ could return imminently to ‘rapture’ true believers to heaven; that this rapture will be followed by a catastrophic seven-year period known as the ‘Great Tribulation’, in which the Antichrist will rise to power to persecute those who, despite being ‘left behind’, have converted to evangelical faith; and that the tribulation will end with the ‘glorious appearing’ of Christ, the last judgement and the inauguration of a thousand-year reign of peace known as the millennium. Despite the complexity of its theology, the series has sold over sixty-five million copies since the publication of their eponymous debut novel in 1995, and has been identified as the best-selling fiction series in American literary history. After 1998, successive instalments in the series topped the New York Times best-seller lists. The seventh novel in the series, The Indwelling (2000), topped the best-seller lists of the New York Times, Publishers Weekly, Wall Street Journal and USA Today.
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- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2012
References
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61 Ibid. 245–6.
62 Ibid. 260.
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67 Ibid. 209.
68 Ibid. 372.
69 Ibid. 209. Compare this statement with the words of Wendell Bell, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Yale University, who asserts that Evangelicals and other Fundamentalists ‘disturb me. They arrogandy assume an attitude of religious superiority, including beliefs that their religion is the only true religion and that their God is the only true God … They are a threat to the kind of future I’m talking about. They are extremist and intolerant. In the United States, for example, some evangelical Christians have religious beliefs that include “fanaticism, superstition and obscurantism.” Many such people believe “in personal (and self-serving) miracles,” are ignorant “of basic science and history,” demonize popular culture, try to censor textbooks, and display their separatist leanings by home-schooling their children’: Bell, Wendell, ‘On Becoming and Being a Futurist: An Interview with Wendell Bell’, Journal of Futures Studies 10 (2005), 113–24 Google Scholar, at 119–20.
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78 ‘My Biography’, <http://www.michaelhyatt.com/about.htm>, accessed 13 March 2011.
79 Surveys of evangelical responses to the Y2K phenomenon can be found in Lisa McMinn, ‘Y2K, the Apocalypse, and Evangelical Christianity: The Role of Eschatological Belief in Church Responses’, Sociology of Religion 62 (2001), 205–20; Andrea Hoplight Tapia, ‘Techno-Armageddon: The Millennial Christian Response to Y2K’, Review of Religious Research 43 (2002), 266–86; Nancy A. Schaefer, ‘Y2K as an Endtime Sign: Apocalypticism in America at the fin-de-millennium’, Journal of Popular Culture 38 (2004), 82–105.
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