Revenge Is a Genre Best Served Old: Apocalypse in Christian Right Literature and Politics

Apocalypse is a phenomenology of disorder that entails a range of religious affects and experiences largely outside normative expectations of benevolent religion. Vindication, judgment, revenge, resentment, righteous hatred of one’s enemies, the wish for their imminent destruction, theological certainty, the triumphant display of right authority, right judgement, and just punishment—these are the primary affects. As a literary genre and a worldview, apocalypse characterizes both the most famous example of evangelical fiction—the Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins—and the U.S. Christian Right’s politics. This article’s methodological contribution is to return us to the beginnings of apocalypse in Biblical and parabiblical literature to better understand the questions of theodicy that Left Behind renews in unexpected ways. Conservative white Christians use apocalypse to articulate their experience as God’s chosen but persecuted people in a diversely populated cosmos, wherein their political foes are the enemies of God. However strange the supersessionist appropriation, apocalypse shapes their understanding of why God lets them suffer so—and may also signal an underlying fear about the power and attention of their deity.

Moments of Millennium: Three Fictionalisations of Revelation 20 in Relation to Zoroastrian Eschatology

While the Millennium as described in Revelation 20 is the penultimate terminus in the premillennial dispensational end-time scheme, not much attention has been given by scholars or commentators to its precise nature. Scant mention is made of the nature of human life during this period. Claiming fidelity to absolute literalism, yet lavish in artistic license, three authors have recently plotted fictional accounts of what they imagine will happen after Christ returns to earth to reign for 1000 years. These novels are 1000. . .a Novel of the Millennium by Salem Kirban, Kingdom Come by LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins and Thunder in Paradise: Satan’s Last Storm by Jonathan Cash. This article seeks to draw out a correlation between these animated accounts and the text of Revelation 20, and in a step further, to examine their apparent resemblances to ancient Iranian texts in the post-exilic period.

Getting Rapture Ready: The Materiality of the Rapture in North America

Evangelical and fundamentalist belief in the Rapture, an event in which righteous Christians are called up to heaven, can be found in fiction, prophecy books, and on the internet, yet much of the scholarship on the Rapture focuses upon the rhetoric and beliefs of this impending beginning of the end. However, rapture readiness is also an act of faith with bodily practice, artifacts, and materiality. This article explores rapture practice, RaptureReady.com, and the work of Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins to argue that the Rapture is more than words and requires material action to become ready for the end and avoid the cataclysm of the Tribulation period and judgment.