A spate of recent books has claimed that, to understand the bizarre state of America in 2025, you need to go back to the days of Kurt Cobain, Ross Perot, and the Unabomber. Yet this surge of interest in the 1990s has somehow overlooked a billion-dollar multimedia empire, one that mashed up salvation and the apocalypse, Christian utopia and secular dystopia.
This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days, a Twilight-Zone-ish thriller that is part Pilgrim’s Progress, part Book of Revelation. Revisiting these books in 2025 brings to mind Philip Roth’s old quote about fiction struggling to keep up with the warped nature of American life:
The American writer in the middle of the 20th century has his hands full in trying to understand, describe, and then make credible much of American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one’s meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist.
Left Behind authors Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins bypassed this conundrum by doing the opposite: writing warped fiction that reality eventually caught up to. The results are frightening, but also fascinating—all the more so three decades later.
Enlightened critics are likely to dismiss Left Behind as justly forgotten, Christian-nationalist fanfiction, airport-paperback propaganda from the days of fax machines and floppy disks. But LaHaye and Jenkins anticipated, and maybe even created, a new sense of urgency among devout Christians about the bleak state of America’s soul—and encouraged them to do something about it. Along the way, they built a bridge from 1950s Birchers to twenty-first-century Birthers. If the 1980s gave us a band of heroic teens thwarting Soviets in the movie Red Dawn, the nineties gave us Left Behind’s “ragtag group of new believers [who] form the ‘Tribulation Force,’” as Salon put it. These guerilla warriors “thwart the murderous plans of…[a] U.N.-leader-cum-prince-of-darkness” who is “often just called ‘the evil one,’ Osama bin Laden-style.” His “rise is engineered by a cabal of bankers,” and “supported by Israeli liberals enthralled by his devious promises of peace.”
In many ways, the Left Behind books dramatize centuries-old prophecies based (loosely, to say the least) on passages in the books of Daniel, Ezekiel, and Revelation, with their apocalyptic imagery of rising, tyrannical empires led by an anti-Chris—Gog from “the land of Magog,” for example. Ultimately, an “attitude of despair may…represent [Left Behind’s] most potent influence on contemporary American culture,” Glenn Shuck wrote in his 2005 study Marks of the Beast, adding that such narratives leave readers feeling that they “must all choose sides.” That’s something that today’s left and right can probably agree on: some sort of end is at hand. It’s clear that Americans see the United States as neither a single harmonious community nor a collection of spirited factions, but more like a competing army of angels and demons. In the endless culture wars of 2025—QAnon conspiracies, right-wing Zionists teaming up with antisemites, anti-government theocrats fighting for publicly funded religious schools—Left Behind offers urgent, if sometimes distasteful, lessons for our exhausted nation, and perhaps even a way out of this mutually assured ideological destruction.
“Rayford Steele…used to look forward to getting home to his wife,” the first book begins. “But lately he found himself repelled by her obsession with religion.” Later, Rayford’s wife asks: “Can you imagine…Jesus coming back to get us before we die?”
Which is exactly what happens to millions of the Earth’s devout Christians. Prior to the Rapture, Israel had become “the richest nation on earth,” thanks to an invention that allowed its “desert sands…to bloom like a greenhouse.” Israel’s success produced many “financial wizards” of the “international” variety, but also provoked an attack from Russia, which has forged a “secret alliance” with Israel’s many “oil-laden” Middle Eastern enemies. Meanwhile, a charismatic young leader named Nicolae Carpathia rises from the mountains of Romania (an unsubtle nod to the vampiric Count Dracula), vowing to heal a traumatized world. Steele and his friends form the Tribulation Force, which will help convert those who weren’t raptured in preparation for the final battle.
The Left Behind series—sixteen action-packed, often preposterous novels chronicling the seven years after the Rapture and before the Tribulation—sold almost ninety million books. There are also spinoff series for children and adults, music collections and video games, and six (and counting) popular movies, starring the likes of Kirk Cameron, Louis Gossett Jr., and Nicholas Cage. Decades before the Wall Street Journal reported in September 2024 that “religious movies are sweeping Hollywood” with “rich investors pouring in millions,” Left Behind established a model for blending entertainment, ideology, and theology—a combination that’s quite popular in Washington these days.
No one will confuse Left Behind with, say, Tom Perrotta’s compelling 2011 post-Rapture novel The Leftovers, later adapted into the moving HBO series of the same name. Or even The Chosen, a TV series based on the Gospels now in its fifth season, created by Jerry B. Jenkins’s son. The Left Behind books generally steer clear of narrative conventions (pregnant pauses, introspective glances) that might hint at angst or ambiguity. Once the post-Rapture stakes are clear, Rayford Steele inhabits the stark, hard-boiled moral landscape of a Mike Hammer detective story.
The world at large, meanwhile, is presented to readers by globetrotting magazine correspondent Cameron Williams—“the youngest ever senior writer for the prestigious Global Weekly,” known to all as “Buck, because…he was always bucking tradition and authority.” Buck’s latest assignment is the world’s response to this “phenomenon,” which includes an emergency UN meeting and “ecumenical religious confab.” There, the dashing Carpathia woos chat-show hosts and world leaders before spearheading a flurry of initiatives: a single global currency and a single unified religion, “probably headquartered in Italy,” since Carpathia is “by heritage Italian.” In case the hostility to Catholicism is not clear, Carpathia also wants to move the UN to “Babylon.” And by the second book (entitled Tribulation Force), Carpathia recruits the archbishop of Cincinnati (named Peter—get it?) to become Pontifex Maximus Peter II, pope of “Enigma Babylon One World Faith.”
Nuanced this is not. Fear of concentrated power in the Vatican—or Stalingrad or FDR’s White House—is hardly new. Carol Balizet’s 1978 Rapture novel The Seven Last Years also exploited the evil-pope trope, while the 1973 film Thief in the Night transformed the UN into the malevolent “Imperium.” Ronald Reagan famously demonized all things large, distant, and federal, yet by the early 1990s—with Communism vanquished and the first Gulf War won decisively—the only thing left to worry about, it seemed, was “the economy, stupid.”
That changed very quickly. In the twelve months that followed Pat Buchanan’s infamous 1992 Republican Convention speech—“There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war…for the soul of America”—there was bloodshed at Ruby Ridge, Waco, and Fort Macy Park in Virginia, where White House counsel Vince Foster killed himself.
A whole new conspiracy-industrial complex was born. Soon came Timothy McVeigh, the Unabomber, the Internet, Y2K, 9/11. Left Behind tapped into a whole new “audience that had never paid much attention to the predictions of the doomsday prophet Nostradamus, or been worried about an epic battle that marks the end of time,” Time noted. But soon these books—once “sold mostly in Christian bookstores,” according to scholar Amy Johnson Frykholm—began flying off shelves at “Costco, Sam’s Club, and national book chains.”
Then, a downright Carpathian figure—from the mountains of Kenya and Hawaii—emerged. His promises to heal a traumatized world earned him devoted followers as well as a Nobel Peace Prize. Tim LaHaye eventually said, “I can see by the language he uses why people think [Barack Obama] could be the antichrist. But from my reading of scripture, he doesn’t meet the criteria. There is no indication in the Bible that the antichrist will be an American.”
LaHaye easily could have joined the large, loud, Islamophobic anti-Obama chorus. There are Muslim characters in Left Behind who are plainly othered and racialized. Yet they still become productive members of the anti-Carpathian Tribulation Force. LaHaye and Jenkins “seem to respect the intensity of Islamic belief,” argues Glenn Schuck, while Jenkins himself has said, “One of the strengths of the devout Muslim…is that he will resist an all-inclusive, one-world religion.” Say what you will about such claims, but for all of their exclusionary rhetoric, right-wing Evangelical Protestants are apparently willing, at times, to be flexible.
While the unsubtle anti-Catholicism of Left Behind reflects centuries of often bloody theological conflict with Protestants, the influential, trad-Catholic wing of today’s GOP—retrograde, selective, and hypocritical as it may be—is apparently willing to set such differences aside in much the same way. As are so-called Evangelical Zionists. Asked by The Atlantic’s Jennifer Senior “about the rivers of anti-Semitic slime” on Steve Bannon’s radio show, MAGA loyalist Peter Navarro was “honest about this problem.” But he also added: “You know. It’s a big tent.”
Offensive? Sure. Maddening? You bet. Still, there is an important lesson here for embattled progressives.
For decades, they’ve been pitching their own big tents, offering a diverse array of marginalized Americans refuge from right-wing Christian-nationalist white supremacists. And yet, slowly but surely, significant numbers of non-white, non-Christians have been joining what we might call a coalition of the faithful—supporting religious charter schools and public displays of traditional faith while opposing controversial kids’ books and public displays of pretty much anything “woke.” Whatever else they do, the Left Behind books (as Glenn W. Shuck has put it) “open up a space for political activity this side of the Rapture.” Especially for those conservatives willing to accept that the post-Rapture Tribulation just might last longer than seven years.
“Humanism is man’s attempt to solve his problems independently of God,” Tim LaHaye once said. For a long time, such proclamations were just another way of saying, at the expense of diversity and tolerance: Onward, Christian (i.e. Protestant) soldiers! Enlightened Americans (i.e. secular progressives) were reliably appalled, but took solace in demographic change as a counterweight to LaHaye’s worldview: In 2023, for the first time ever, one of New York City’s ten most popular boy names was Muhammad. Nationwide, Christians may be an American minority as early as the 2050s, according to a recent Pew Research Center report. In the “cultural war” Pat Buchanan declared, white Christians were eventually—inevitably—going to lose.
Three decades later, enlightened seculars are the ones who need to take a hard look at their assumptions and misconceptions—especially when it comes to the future of American faith. Otherwise, they might be the ones left behind.
