This article links to that supposedly awful, dreaded Wikipedia several times. It does give a nice overview of things. Wikipedia is rigorous lately compared to the rest of this digital hellscape. I provide other sources, too. If you are at all concerned about any content warnings, please just glance at the wikipedia page for the book I reference, that's the best I can suggest, too complex to explain...
As some of you know, the past week had me busy setting up a Discord server called Eridanus-3. This was a bit of a goofy struggling since I’d not adminned any servers in many, many years. I think I figured it out, though. Today, though, I’m thinking about the news cascading at me across the Atlantic, and especially the reactions I’m seeing to it. I could write some biting spiel about that, but I don’t feel clever enough to tackle breaking news. So, I’ll write about a related topic that has long, and I promise you, long been in my queue of planned articles.
Let's Get Left Behind, Shall We?
A year or so ago, I created a bit of shrine on here to dystopian fiction. I want to understand its deep, perplexing importance to millennials throughout our lives. I read dystopian books voraciously as a child, and especially as an adolescent: books like The Giver, and Brave New World as well as 1984 and even Left Behind…
Wait. Record scratch, eh? If you know anything about this at all, you might be chuckling. Or maybe you’re just wondering about that last title? Maybe you’ve not even heard of it? What’s Left Behind even about, then? Blatant, complete and utter spoilers for the Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins ahead.
Anyways. Left Behind isn’t just a single dystopian work. It’s a whole series! In the mid-1990s, Left Behind (and the sequels) fit as kind of “Airport Fiction,” a weird sorta-genre folks bought at airport bookshops. Quite far from the sort of thing read in an English class (because reasons), but these books still captivated people.
The story actually began on an airplane, ironically! Pilot Raymond Steele and sweetie flight attendant Hattie Durham find that some passengers have vanished on their overnight flight en route to London. Nothing remains but their clothes on the seats. Radio contact tells them that several million other people have similarly vanished all over the globe. He manages to land in Heathrow, but what will happen next? What did happen? Is his family safe? And what about an intrepid journalist (Buck) who happens to also be on the flight?
If you don’t know any better this might actually sound cool. I definitely realize that. The events that transpire following Buck and Raymond landing in London definitely qualify as dystopian, too. You can extend that to the rest of the series too, where we see a worldwide occult police state. That’s a bit original, isn’t it?
Soon after the disappearances, a Romanian president named Nicolae Carpathia appears. His terrifying rise to power puts both of our airplane characters both in the usual position of dystopian protagonists. What separates Left Behind from other dystopian literature published around the same time, though?
Prophecies IRL?
Ever heard of The Rapture? Potentially, if you’re not American or in certain circles, you might not know about it. It’s an idea from (mostly) American protestant Christian eschatology, a part of a religious apocalyptic prophecy. To be more clear, though, it’s part of a particular interpretation of (alleged) Biblical prophecy.
Most sects of Christianity by far wouldn’t agree with this interpretation. The Catholics I knew in school were laughing at it. The large amalgamation of Evangelicals in America who do believe in this interpretation of the (alleged) prophecy, though, ensured Left Behind’s success. They believed the plot might actually happen someday.
You see, it works like this, as far as I’ve ever learned. God plans a proper apocalypse, pain, suffering and an Antichrist. He surely can’t plan for his Elect (ie, current living “saved” Christians) to be there for that. After all, they don’t really deserve it or whatever. So, they’ll be “Raptured,” and vanish in the blink of an eye, leaving behind nothing but their undies and such.
Just like the missing passengers aboard Steele’s continental flight, some of whom are described as leaving behind contact lenses of all things. Some Evangelical Christians in America believe this is soon to play out in real life, and will happen to them. Those current Christians, that is, will be taken to Heaven in glorified bodies.
Let me remind you. Not everyone gets taken up in this Rapture event, not is it limited to the “pure of heart” or something extremely anime like that. Instead, only “saved” Christians get to vanish. This, in case you’ve also never encountered the concept, typically means someone who’s asked Jesus in prayer to forgive all their sins and dwell in their heart. It’s usually treated as a once-in-a-lifetime thing that sends you straight to Heaven postmortem or, in this case… Raptured.
But the two protagonists of Left Behind failed to do that before the book’s commencement! Poor Raymond Steele on his flight into London with that cute flight attendant (totally not Bride of the Antichrist, but anyways) gets… left behind. Fear not, though. All isn’t lost! According to this interpretation of the Bible, those remaining on earth aren’t abandoned by God.
Millions of previously “unsaved” soon turn their hearts to Christ. They won’t ascend to Heaven until the world ends, though, leaving them in constant peril from Nicolae Carpathia’s evil regime. This inspired Left Behind itself, and the chaos on Raymond Steele’s airplane, his missing passengers, Nicolae Carpathia and more. In Left Behind, we’re invited to join the “Tribulation Force,” a guerrilla group fighting the Antichrist, who ultimately become known as the “Tribulation Saints” once God actually shows up…
I’ll admit I myself might not be the greatest at explaining it, so pop over to Wikipedia for a full, neutral summary, as usual.
The series was pinned by two evangelical pastors, as you might expect. These books actually topped many charts in the late 1990s and early 2000s. They were, ironically, the kind of book people read on planes, but it hardly stopped there. "The Left Behind series have rivaled Harry Potter as the biggest surprise success of the last decade in the book business,” said David D. Kirkpatrick from The New York Times.
Indeed, book ten in the series, The Indwelling: The Beast Takes Possession (cool name, I admit) debuted at the top of the NYT bestseller list, and others ranked very highly. These books really were brush dust jackets with the likes of Harry Potter and other overly-popular Y2K clichés. But why?
I remember these books read earnestly by religious adults of all sorts (but mostly young) in my life. In the deeper corners of eschatological Christians smitten with premillennial dispensationalism (I think it’s called?), this series was treated like Harry Potter. I knew some of those folks back in my hometown, after all, and Left Behind was one of the more exciting Christian books they could find. Maybe they appeased an existing sense of doom, stirred by things like 9/11 and the year 2000 itself? More on that in a bit...
The Enduring Rapture Fandom
The books weren’t particularly popular with teens when I was that age. A lot of the kids would read the first one cynically and put it down, though. That was, admittedly, what I did at thirteen or so. If people believed in a Rapture, I at least wanted to know what one was, even if it made zero sense. The concepts in the book bounced off me nicely, and didn’t even give me any real ironic fascinations at that point. I did occasionally brush up against this weird, and expanding Rapture fandom later on, though.
In the late 2000s, Christian eschatology in America got stoked again, mostly due to concerns that soon-to-be president 44th US Barack Obama might be the Antichrist. In America, someone somewhere usually theorizes that every presidential candidate is a potential Antichrist. It’s a sort of tradition. This was oddly different? Unsure why, but most of these Rapture types seemed to treat Obama’s election as an apocalypse of its own. Can Nicolae Carpathia even compare?
With Obama’s extreme charm and meteoric rise to fame, though, even some rather milquetoast evangelicals were tying themselves in knots trying to connect him to that prophecy. Racism undeniably motivated many, and there’s little point in denying that, especially given the birth certificate snipe hunts. People were talking about the Rapture again, the Antichrist, the Tribulation, all of it.
This probably boosted sales of Jenkins and LaHaye’s dystopian book series, just a bit? More importantly, there were elaborate predictions of just how close Biblical prophecy was to finally taking place. People wrote long screeds, mostly online, about how the books’ events were soon soon soon to take place. Prophecy, etc.
One particular online forum was simply called Rapture Ready. The posters on Rapture Ready were “born-again” Christians. They believed they would soon be a part of the Rapture itself, not anything afterwards here on earth. They still wanted to prepare, though. Somehow, and perhaps for unsaved loved ones who would be… left behind.
The forum had very strict moderation, rules, and belief requirements prior to posting. There was a small area for nonbelievers, of course. I never joined, seeing no point in it, but I recall reading it back in those days. The moderation team had to strictly ban “date-setting,” as in positing a particular day when the Rapture might occur.
They also had to stop people from outright calling Obama the Antichrist when he wasn’t doing anything much out of the ordinary. It was quite strange, really. If you followed enough off-site links, you’d quickly find people doing extreme mental (and Biblical) gymnastics to convince themselves that he certainly was the Antichrist.
Rapture Ready the forum, if I remember right, toed the line when it came to the matter of “preppers,” and getting ready for actual civil unrest. Most talk of it was (obviously) banned to avoid the place turning into a right-wing gun club or something even more awkward.
Perhaps the strangest part of the site was a roleplaying thread I briefly browsed. I swear this existed. It was short and involved members roleplaying as if the rapture had just happened and they’d just found out about it. They posted just like someone would have on Livejournal or another site miming manga characters for a normal roleplay. Here, they were playing original characters (presumably not themselves, being “saved”).
The whole format and diction and everything matched perfectly with an average roleplay I’d seen elsewhere. This one, however revolved around something very like those Left Behind books. It took me a few minutes of pondering at the time before it hit me that the people participating probably roleplaying normally elsewhere, possibly under other (secret?) names. That’s how they’d known the format.
They were probably very pleased here to suddenly have a Left Behind roleplaying game to join, something potentially wholesome? No clue here…I expect it still exists as a site, but I’m not visiting it again?
And why…?
There honestly seemed to be a palpable disappointment in some online venues when things didn’t turn out that way by 2010. Even now in 2025, there are people despondent that Russia hasn’t attacked Israel yet like in the books.
A much earlier Time magazine article by a journalist named Nancy Gibbs points this out rather plainly. I think it gives us ample space to read between the lines.
Talk to the people who were already inclined to read omens in the headlines, and you hear their excitement, even eagerness to see what happens next. "We sense we are very close to something apocalyptic, but that something positive will come out of it," says Doron Schneider, an Evangelical based in Jerusalem. "It's like a woman having labor pains. A woman can feel this pain reaching its height when the child is born--and then doesn't feel the pain anymore, only the joy of the happy event." Even the horror of Sept. 11 was experienced differently by people primed to see God's hand in all things. Strandberg admits that he was "joyful" that the attacks could be a sign that the End Times were at hand. "A lot of prophetic commentators have what I consider a phony sadness over certain events," he says. "In their hearts they know it means them getting closer to their ultimate desire."
Many Christians had many different opinions about this, though. The Mennonite (yes, Mennonite) Brethren Forum shared an article circa 2005, about the Left Behind novels, those dystopian books I mentioned in the beginning of this. They didn’t see the whole thing as particularly productive or Christian, and actually saw it as awfully mean-spirited and bloodthirsty, sounds like? I’ll admit I might miss some of the theology here, but:
[T]he Left Behind Series encourages its readers to join in the fun of God’s violence, to be God’s Green Berets as a Tribulation Force that rises above all of the moral questions about war and violence precisely because this is God’s war—and war is God’s will.
What can I say? As I think you know, I’m not a Christian, and certainly not part of the Rapture fandom. To me, though, it seems like this dear is kind of right, though?
I might be able to venture a guess further as to what was going on. Throughout the 1990s, a lot of the Evangelical families I knew personally in America were forbidding their children from doing things. In particular, a lot of my prayerful peers weren’t allowed to watch (or read!) media like Harry Potter or a lot of the typical classics of those years. In fact, Evangelicals did a veritable crackdown on media just prior to Y2K. Goosebumps typically got the boot for being too gross or a bit occult. Some particular Christians directly opposed sci-fi classics like A Wrinkle in Time at the school level for their occult themes, too. Harry Potter may have “shaken up publishing,” but a lot of Evangelicals back then wanted nothing to do with it.
Thing is? People still love stories, don’t we? Evangelical Protestants (and their offspring) included. When those offspring (around Y2K) came of age, they were quite happy to bury their noses in epic fantasies that, for once, they didn’t have to feel weirdly convicted about. Stories where the heroes and heroines were “God’s Green Berets.” They could read all this, and listen to sermons assuring them that it was true, too. They could dream about being whisked away at the blink of an eye, to a Heavenly vantage point from which they’d watch a real-life bloody Antichrist battle. It’s okay, though. Christ wins. Christ always wins.
It’s not too different than plenty of leftists (or heck, people all across the spectrum) wanting to hop into this or that other dystopia thinking “Oh, I could’ve fixed things.” It’s maybe a bit too close for comfort when women on Facebook make constant, often unwarranted, comparisons between current regimes and dystopian fiction. It reads like the person wants the dystopia in order to be the Green Beret, the hero or Tribulation Saint, at least on some level. In this case, maybe they just want to see it. Either way, they seem to talk more about this than seeing Jesus himself in the supposed Rapture.
I’ve seen a comparable urge simmer deep in other people in other situations. It's honestly never really a good thing. Nobody should expect that role. Here, though? In this stripe of Evangelical Christianity, it’s really bloodthirsty. The people trying to prove prophecies, after all, got more than a little excited by September 11th, 2001, and by all kinds of other awful events. Maybe 9/11 isn't the best example, but celebrating escalating tensions worldwide? Praying for World War Three? That can’t be normal, healthy, or productive in the long run, regardless of what “Gog and Magog” do. What even.
The name Nicolae Carpathia is kind of like saying John Mississippi, I guess? I’ve heard tell that the authors name their “foreign” characters based on local geographic features in the countries of origin, to make them sound authentic. Our Antichrist (yes, Nicolae Carpathia) is named for the Carpathian Mountains.