The Pop Prophets

Jenkins's populism sounds much like LaHaye's, though any rancor against highbrows is tempered by his generosity. Like LaHaye, he grew up in "a good Christian home"--his mother led him to Christ when he was 6--in Michigan and the suburbs of Chicago. His ex-Marine father was a police chief and a "man's man"--who also wrote hundreds of rhymed love poems to his wife. Like his father, he's full of surprises. His favorite novelist is Stephen King, whom some evangelicals refuse to read because of his demonic supernaturalism. He calls John Irving's "The Cider House Rules" "a brilliant piece of work," despite its pro-choice agenda. He even stands up for the Harry Potter books, which much of the evangelical world--including LaHaye--calls propaganda for black magic. "I love 'The Wizard of Oz'," he says, "and I didn't want to grow up to be a witch."

Jenkins, a sportswriter since his teens, published novels for the evangelical market, including a series of Christian mysteries. His one shot at the mainstream, a 1987 novel called "The Operative," didn't sell. "I remember thinking, 'I've still got a pretty great career. I could pay our house off, put our kids in college.' And I would have been perfectly content." The success of "Left Behind," whose proceeds he splits 50-50 with LaHaye, seems to make him more uneasy than his partner about "the dissonance between the kind of means we have and the way we were raised, and our faith. I don't think this is going to keep me from heaven, because my salvation is based on faith in Christ, but if I love the money more than God, I'm going to answer for that." But Jenkins's friend Chris Fabry, who met him back when they both worked at Chicago's Moody Bible Institute, isn't worried that it's all gone to his head. "He's no different now than he was in the 1980s. He's still as excited about 'The Rookie' [his 1991 novel about a 13-year-old who gets to play for the Chicago Cubs] as he is about any of the other books."

At first Jenkins had purely professional doubts about LaHaye's project. "On the way to meet him," Jenkins recalls, "I was thinking, 'I don't know if I want to do this'." Other people had written End Times novels, and he remembered the apocalyptic film "A Thief in the Night," a church-basement favorite in the '70s. "I'm hesitant to say how cheesy it was because I know the guy who did it." Besides, he was busy working on Billy Graham's memoir "Just as I Am." And what was the intended audience--the evangelical market or a mass readership? Both, LaHaye told him. Bearing in mind the Epistle of James' warning not to be a "double-minded man," Jenkins tried to talk him out of it with a witticism. "A double-minded book," he told LaHaye, "is unstable in all its ways."

But Jenkins soon found the 21 increasingly dire plagues of the Tribulation "a novelist's delight." (Does he know how funny that sounds? "Well, sure," he says.) It was in "Glorious Appearing" that the going got tough. How should the Savior talk? "Am I going to have him be colloquial? There's the potential for sacrilege. 'Hi, how you guys doin'? Didja miss me?' " (He chose to stick close to Scripture.) And he and LaHaye came up against the limits of Biblical literalism. "The Bible says Jesus is going to slay his enemies with a sword that comes out of his mouth," he says. "We don't believe there's an actual sword in his mouth. The sword is his word." And if hundreds of millions of people got even 30 personal seconds with Jesus at Judgment, how long would they be standing there? Jenkins tried to work this out on his calculator, and opted for a simultaneous pluripresence--as in everyday prayer--in which "everyone has the same experience, all personal, in their own language and using their name."

Readers identify with the "Left Behind" characters in part because they seldom speak in Christian cliches: as Jenkins says, starting out with the Rapture means "anybody who would use evangelical lingo is gone after the first chapter of the first book." More important, Jenkins uses such characters as Rayford Steele's daughter Chloe to voice his own wrestlings with his faith. "To me there's a value in questioning, and even doubting sometimes. Chloe's big deal is, how does this sound like a loving God? People disappear, planes crash, people die--even people who might have believed, but it's too late. There is indication in the prophecies that God will harden some people's hearts. I don't get it myself; I don't understand how that fits in with God's plan. Yeah, those are hard things." Jenkins is nearly as troubled as his critics by the apparently vengeful elements in the books, such as that episode in "Glorious Appearing" in which too-late penitents are sent to hell vainly bleating, "Jesus is Lord." "One of the toughest things I deal with is that there are some evangelicals, with familiar faces, who seem to like that part of it. You know, 'We're right, you're wrong, that's what the Bible says, someday you're going to kneel and admit it.' That should break our hearts."

Still, Jenkins knows that is what the Bible says, at least ashe and LaHaye read it, and "we sort of have a responsibility to tell what it seems to say to us." For them--just as for Christians who think LaHaye and Jenkins have it all wrong--this is ultimately about love, for God and for their fellow humans. As they see it, they're on a rescue mission, with time running out. "We don't know when the Lord's going to come," LaHaye admits, and he likes to quote Matt. 24:35: "Of that day and hour no one knows, no, not even the angels of heaven, but My Father only." But don't the signs seem to be coming thick and fast? Even for evangelical Christians, of course, LaHaye and Jenkins's uncompromising reading of Scripture and of current events isn't the only choice. But if you assume, with them, that it's all true, the end won't be pretty for those left behind. While for those who listen up in time, it'll be a whole other story.

DAVID J. JEFFERSON AND ANNE UNDERWOOD

© 2004