Apocalypse Right

On Left Behind, The Book of Revelations, and the Religious Right

Ever since Jesus left, we’ve been told he’s coming back. Like a UFO, he will return and beam up his chosen people. Those who are ushered into the gates of heaven will be safe from the coming Tribulation. Repent all ye sinners or face the Mark of the Beast. All the billboards across America say the end is near. Surely, it’s only a matter of time?

So far, no dice. But we continue to enumerate the signs of the Biblical apocalypse: moral decay, pestilence, famine, hail, even plague. In 2020 during the COVID-19 lockdowns, a meme went around asking people to stop joking about the apocalypse because some people had religious trauma related to the Book of Revelations. As a child, I was certain I would be tossed into the Lake of Fire. I was certainly keenly aware of the coming doomsday, though I preferred Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where someone was tirelessly protecting the world from falling apart and sliding down into the abyss of the Hell Mouth. Growing up with a fear of the apocalypse steered me toward alternative end-time narratives: Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Adrienne Maree Brown’s Grievers, Ursula K LeGuin’s Always Coming Home, Jose Saramago’s Blindness. These are a far cry from George Orwell’s 1984, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, or even Joy Williams’ Harrow. The first set focuses on communities, groups, and reclamation. The second are far bleaker—stories of individuals struggling against the bitter end. The first group argues that, if the world is truly ending, we owe it to each other to build an alternative way of life. The second says it’s every man for himself. Narrow is the gate.

The Biblical story of Armageddon has been decoded by scholars like Elaine Pagels and Richard Bauckham as a story specifically about its own time with a primarily symbolic message for those who lived long after the fall of the Roman Empire. The book’s writer, John of Patmos, primarily references the churches in the Middle East as he knew it firsthand and was likely writing about Roman oppression of Jews and Christians through metaphor to evade further persecution. It was “wartime literature,” as Pagels puts it in her book Revelations or a “symbolic well” as theologian Bauckham writes in The Theology of Revelations. This hasn’t stopped the far right from using the imagery of the Biblical apocalypse to inspire political fanaticism. The right works to craft a cause worthy of devotion, to embolden its believers into a holy war with a slew of politically motivated violence. The world’s soul is at stake—a spiritual war for the souls of humanity between angels and devils. Of course, the Left are the demons bent on persecuting Christians, killing fetuses, and messing with biological truth.

The Bible offers a golden opportunity to unite people with disparate class interests through fear of the liberal other. Instead, the Right delivers a message of unilateral optimism for Evangelical values, promising to wage a holy war through the courts—or even through manpower if they have to. Whether to rage against immigration, storm the capitol on January 6th, or promote QAnon conspiracies, Jesus’ name is often invoked by the far right. In 2021, scholar Jason Springs coined the term “zombie nationalism” to describe the curious affinity between messianism and an evangelical notion of the great reckoning. The Left is going to get what’s coming to us, godless sinners one and all. Scholar Yii-Jan Lin has observed, “Trump and his party’s anti-immigrant rhetoric exploits this apocalyptic language. It plays on fears and disgust, but it also, more insidiously, works as a Christian nationalist dog whistle for those who believe America is God’s nation, and a white one at that.” Lin goes on to say that Revelations can be misconstrued to further xenophobic messaging. Dogs, sorcerers, and those who eat corpses are lumped in next to those who eat impure food. Trump himself has falsely claimed that immigrants were stealing and eating pets in Ohio.

This same fear of the Other emboldens Christians who argue for forced sterilization, population control, and borders in order to create some magical safety net. This is a form of ethno-nationalism prepared to defend itself against intruders. The pastor and writer David Jeremiah argues the end times will be full of “conflicts, border skirmishes, race wars, and national battles.” Through this lens, white Christian nationalists cry victim, arguing secular culture is oppressing them even as they gain greater political power. Their take on Biblical prophecy shores up a profoundly political propaganda. Consider the US’s Middle Eastern policy: the Christian Right believes in protecting Israel above all else since the Holy Land will play an important role in the end times. Trump installed political commentator and Baptist pastor Mike Huckabee as the American ambassador to Israel. In 2018, Trump moved the US Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem By harnessing apocalyptic rhetoric, the Right continues to incite political and spiritual warfare. Now that Trump has won, white Christian nationalists continue their quest to Make America Christian Again.

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How did images of sky-borne trumpets and visions of dragons capture the far-right? For a long time, the apocalypse and the Book of Revelations inspired more lofty interpretations—Paradise Lost, James Baldwin, African American spirituals, Bosch, and Michelangelo. Left Behind, on the other hand, is a Christian-bookstore-ready work of science fiction co-authored by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins that reimagines the end times for contemporary Evangelicals. It became a series, sixteen books in total, running from 1995 to 2007. With titles like Antichrist is Born and The Destroyer is Unleashed, it is a distinctly militaristic look at the apocalypse. Something violent to rally the base. There have been two film adaptations of the first book, the second in 2014 with Nicolas Cage. Crossover eschatology is a lucrative industry, enough to sustain many Christian copycats of non-Christian culture. Left Behind however fulfills a unique role: educating a population on Biblical prophecy through visceral, fast-paced storytelling.

The books do a fairly good job of breaking down the basics of Revelations. Without any warning, a significant number of men, women, and children are raptured, vanishing from the face of the earth. (There are obviously no nonbinary people in this universe.) Strange things start happening in Jerusalem. Witnesses profess the miracle of God and tell the world to turn to the one true Savior. The Antichrist begins using the United Nations to turn the world into one world power promising everlasting peace. Left Behind focuses on a rag-tag crew—a pilot named Rayford Steele, his daughter Chloe, journalist Buck Williams, and pastor Bruce Barnes—who form a Tribulation Force to execute God’s plan for humanity. The first book ends shortly before the Tribulation Force begins mounting an underground resistance to the Antichrist’s united world power. Our heroes have seven years to withstand a brutal onslaught of spiritual trials, international intrigue, and wicked conspiracy. Then the Lord will return to battle the Whore of Babylon, the False Prophet, and the Antichrist, throwing them into the Lake of Fire. Both of the films work overtime to make sure you know who the good guys are. The 2001 movie adaptation begins with an intense bombing in Israel. Over a cheesy soundtrack, a professor remarks, “No one has more enemies that want to see her destroyed than Israel”—only for warplanes to fly overhead and begin bombing a field of wheat. Of course, this is a deeply Zionist distortion of reality; in Christian apocalypse narratives, Palestinians are always seen as the enemy. The 2014 movie makes sure we know someone who’s raptured is Christian because the watch that falls off their arm has John 3:16 etched into it. Not the whole verse, just the notation.

LaHaye’s novelization of the apocalypse presents the typical formula Evangelicals trot out. After the rapture, some turn to God and others become barbarians, zombies willing to follow any world leader promising world peace who won’t take away their drugs and premarital sex. Muslims often figure in as specters of world evil, the tipping point that causes the carefully arrived at peace of the nineties to erupt into chaos. Visions of nuclear war plague everyone until the Antichrist comes to tidy up loose ends. It’s fitting that neoliberal organizations like the UN figure in LaHaye’s vision as agents of evil, promising one thing but delivering another. No one can enact God’s promise of peace. Anyone who tries is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Trust no world leaders! Except Republicans. It doesn’t matter what policies they enact so long as they bring back school prayer and toss off a few expanded religious liberty policies. The paradox of Christianity is a puzzlebox that rarely makes sense to the secular world, but make no mistake, it holds powerful sway over the average churchgoer. Many Christians are thoroughly convinced the apocalypse is a real, looming threat with visceral consequences for their potential afterlife real estate. By channeling such emotional imagery, Republicans tap into a profoundly motivating belief system.

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According to Dr. Jeremiah, the Book of Revelations is easy to decipher. There are thirty-one prophecies of the Apocalypse, he says crisply. “Five nations in particular emerge,” he writes. “Israel, Europe, Russia, Babylon, and America.” Of course, the US was almost thousand-years away from coming into being when John of Patmos died. Here again is the fantasy of being a part of the chosen people. Muslims, meanwhile, aren’t included in Jeremiah’s vision of the end times. In his 2019 diatribe The Book of Signs, Jeremiah writes “There are still two pivotal prophecies concerning Israel that have not yet been fulfilled: Israel does not yet occupy all the land originally promised to it, and its people have not yet turned to Christ.” When writing about the establishment of modern Israel in 1946—the Nakba—Jeremiah centers on President Truman’s tears upon hearing how he instrumentalized a nation for the Jewish people. Jeremiah quotes Dr. LaHaye’s (of Left Behind fame) writing on Biblical prophecy: “Why would the God of prophecy not refer to the supreme superpower nation in the end times in preparation for the One world government of the Antichrist?” Israel is merely a pawn. If America had existed at the time, she would be the center of the apocalypse, not the land of Judea.

Fear not, Jeremiah’s books have ideas on how other nations fit into God’s end plan too. The European Union signals the beginning of One World Order, and, of course, Russia will invade Israel, but “Godless Russia is no match for the king of kings.” Meanwhile, rampant moral decay—Jeremiah cites parental disrespect, no-fault divorce, adultery, feminism, hedonism, meaningless marriage rites, sexual perversion, and juvenile delinquency—is the primary sign of the end times. Jeremiah derides Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes” for its moral depravity. “His fans did not realize that his love songs were written for his boyfriends, that his marriage was a sham.” Ouch. If Cole Porter is an example of spiritual debasement, I’m not sure what that means for the rest of us. Jeremiah doesn’t shy away from reactionary, right-wing takes either. He pens a whole chapter on “Radical Islam” and the threat it poses to the US. He writes that every month “255 Christians are killed.” This in addition to attacks on churches, forced marriages of Christian women (to heathens, I imagine), and abductions.

Like the Left Behind series, Jeremiah favors martial metaphors. “Suppose America and China both launched a missile at the same time, each programmed to travel into space at a right angle from the location of its launch.” He cites few previous Biblical scholars, preferring off-the-cuff remarks rather than rigorous citations. Unlike C. S. Lewis or other Christian apologists, he does not aim to welcome others into the fold. Jeremiah merely wants to rally the base for his own political and economic ends. He’s a best-selling author and a businessman. (Curiously, he succeeded Left Behind author Tim LaHaye as the pastor at Shadow Mountain Memorial Church.) His political affiliations drift ever right. Anti-immigration, anti-abortion, pro-Israel. These are all issues he cited as key to his political calculus during the 2016 election. Jeremiah has met with Trump at least once and has argued he feels safer in a world where the GOP maintains political power, believing they enshrine Christian values. Even though he didn’t specifically endorse Trump, he certainly dropped hints. Jeremiah likes to appeal to apocalyptic rhetoric to stir his believers into action. If the fate of the world is at stake, we better repent and support only truly godly politicians.

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The historian and scholar Rachel Wagner has dubbed the white Evangelical Christian approach to the end of the world the “cowboy apocalypse:” “The messiah in a cowboy apocalypse doesn’t save the world; he just saves his world.” In this polarized political climate, Christians don’t need to rescue everyone. Just each other. The Right approaches the Armageddon not just as a war waged by Jesus, but by the righteous on the wicked. Wagner links this scapegoating to the right’s fanatical fear of terrorists, people of color, and sexual deviants. The end times can be harnessed to evoke a racist fantasy of mass destruction.

Whether in the work of Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind or pastors like David Jeremiah, the end is always coming—and signified by the worldliness of our hollow, modern time. Heathens stand in the way of our great nation. Last fall Trump seemed to cite the dystopian film The Purge, suggesting a similar event to cull the weak, “one really violent day” all bets are off in order to create order for the rest of the year. The reason this isn’t already allowed? “The liberal left… want[s] to destroy our country.”

January 6th found Trump using similar religiously-motivated language. “Let my people in,” Trump said, like a Messiah welcoming his millennial army, ready to retake the White House from the interlopers. After he was shot in 2024, many mega pastors claimed that Trump is God’s chosen one.

So Jesus has returned after all. He’s here to right the wrongs of the godless Left. During the January 6th insurrection, signs saying “Jesus Saves” and giant crosses were displayed right next to gallows. The Lord isn’t coming back to bring peace, but a sword this time. By painting our era to be a unique time of spiritual chaos, Christians can then serve up the solution: a Christian president ready to take on Big Woke politics.

The writing’s on the wall. In the Book of Daniel, where the phrase originates, a mysterious hand appears to write a divine prediction. You have been weighed and found wanting, the Lord tells King Nebuchadnezzar. So, has the Holy Father found the dictator wanting or the godless liberals? Time will tell. Spin is everything. If it’s a battle between good and evil, I’d certainly want to be on the side of the angels. Wouldn’t you?