The Pop Prophets

The premise for LaHaye's mistress-master-monster came to him by chance--if you believe in chance. ("I'm not one of those charismatics," he says, "but every now and then God gives me an inspiration.") On an airplane he noticed a pilot, wearing a wedding ring, flirting with a flight attendant. What if this were the moment God had picked to Rapture the faithful, leaving behind only their clothes and a lot of bewildered unbelievers? He tried to write a novel about it--done well enough, it might even sell 100,000 copies!--and quickly recruited a collaborator who flubbed the tryout; then his agent mentioned this new writer he'd just signed. "Jerry," LaHaye says, "was a real answered prayer." They devised a unique working method: for each book LaHaye sends Jenkins a 70- to 100-page outline of prophecy, with scriptural commentary. "And then he has the liberty to use his fictional gift to convey my message."

Despite what his critics say, LaHaye considers it a message of comfort and hope, and its roots are as much personal as Biblical--though that's a distinction LaHaye probably wouldn't make. He was 8 years old when he accepted Christ, 10 when his father died. "At his graveside, I was in despair," he recalls. "And the minister--I remember it as if it was yesterday--looked up at the sky and he said, 'This is not the end of Frank LaHaye. The day is going to come when Jesus will show himself and the dead in Christ will rise. And we who are alive in the Name will be caught up together in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air.' And one of my driving passions has been to help laypeople understand that the word of God means what it says and says what it means."

LaHaye's common-sense reading of the Bible is also tied up with a still-aggrieved sense of social class. "Those millions that I'm trying to reach take the Bible literally. It's the theologians that get all fouled up on some of these smug ideas that you've got to find some theological reason behind it. It bugs me that intellectuals look down their noses at we ordinary people." His family had been hard-pressed when his father lost his job at a Ford plant in Michigan during the Depression; his widowed mother worked in factories while going to night school to become a Bible teacher, and gave a tenth of her income to the church. ("Can you imagine? She made 60 cents an hour.") LaHaye worked himself through Bob Jones University; his first pastorate, in Pumpkintown, S.C., paid him $15 a week. "I wake up every morning," he says, "and I see this beautiful place, and that drop-dead gorgeous view of the mountains, and I think, 'This is fantastic.' Because God is faithful." How does he reconcile that with Jesus' injunction to sell all you have and give to the poor? "I can accomplish far more from my present lifestyle and the giving that I do to Christian work," he says. "If I just sold everything and gave it to the poor, I can't see where that would advance the Gospel as much as I'm doing." But wouldn't it advance the poor? "Well," he says, "you know how much I pay in taxes?"

To LaHaye, spreading the Good News is far more compassionate than redistributing the wealth. "He's like a boy when he gets up to preach," says Hindson. "He's smiling ear to ear." This is the motivation behind his conservative politics--for him, traditional moral values are a matter of spiritual life or death--and the "Left Behind" books, which he and Jenkins credit with bringing some 3,000 people to Christ. As Jenkins puts it, "Whatever people say about Dr. LaHaye--he's polemical, he's not politically correct--he really cares about souls." It's why he never gives up, even with that unsaved NEWSWEEK reporter, to whom he gives a copy of "Glorious Appearing" to pass along to his mother. There's that smile.

The first thing you see when you walk into Jerry Jenkins's office in his compound outside Colorado Springs is a pair of what look like size-XXL Yankees jerseys framed on the wall, celebrating his weeks at the top of the secular world's most prestigious best-seller list. On the back of one is the name JENKINS and the figure 1; on the front of the other, the word TIMES under the NY logo. They probably still fit him, even though he's lost 115 pounds on a low-carb diet. Jenkins had wanted to be a ballplayer ("Didn't we all?") until he hurt his knee in high school; later, he says, "it was my dream to compete in the mainstream-fiction market." Those shirts are pure autobiography, up there for anyone to see.

Jenkins is chronically modest: about his lack of a college degree, about his 150-odd books--"I don't sing or dance or preach; that's all I do"--and most of all about his literary gifts. "I was in Sam's Club the other day, standing behind a woman carrying a copy of 'Left Behind' in one hand and a fifth of whisky in the other. Something was going to put her to sleep that night." But it's clearly cost him some struggle to come to terms with what sort of writer he is. "Pedestrian writing, thin characters--I can handle the criticism," he says. "I write to pedestrians. And I am a pedestrian. I write the best I can. I know I'm never going to be revered as some classic writer. I don't claim to be C. S. Lewis. The literary-type writers, I admire them. I wish I was smart enough to write a book that's hard to read, you know?"