Matching Tracksuits

I’ve always been fascinated with extremes, and for me, there is nothing more extreme in the contemporary American religious landscape than fundamentalist Evangelical Christians. They hold to some beliefs that they themselves would admit are fairly wild were another religion to espouse something similar. Few of their beliefs are more odd than their predictions about how the world will end. 

Christians have been eschatological in their theology from the beginning: Jesus in the gospels is always talking about the end of the word, and a substantial percent of Christians see large swaths of the Bible (both Old and New Testament) as prophecies about the “end times.” All this prophetic postulating has led Evangelicals to a belief in the rapture: Jesus will take all true Christians to heaven just before the end time hell-on-Earth led by the Antichrist. 

Christians will vanish off the face of the earth in an instant, the idea holds. Cars will suddenly become driverless; airplanes will fall from the sky as their flight crew disappears; and all the children below the ill-defined “age of reason” will disappear. 

(The Evangelical god is a merciful god: he won’t send children to hell if they don’t have the mental capacity yet to make an informed choice about whether or not to “give their life to Jesus.” In other words, despite children being born with the curse of Original Sin, they still get a pass — sort of a free forgiveness-with-Jesus card. Why everyone else can’t get that is a mysterious contradiction in the whole theory, but of course, the Evangelical god is a mystery. As is the Catholic god and the mainline Protestant god — all mystery when something strange or contradictory shows up.)

In the nineties, Tim LaHaye, a Baptist minister, and Jerry Jenkins, a dispensationalist Christian, wrote a series called Left Behind that explored the reality on Earth after the rapture had taken place, leaving behind millions and providing the series with its title. Left Behind, the first book in the series, tells the story of the rapture itself. It follows four main characters. 

Rayford Steele is a successful airline pilot married to Irene, a gungho evangelical Christiaion whom God takes up in the rapture and thus leaves Raford behind. 

Chloe Steele is one of Rayford’s children. A student at Stanford, she is logical and skeptical, thus rejecting God’s call and failing to become a true Christian. As a result, she too is left behind. 

Most interesting of all is Bruce Barnes, the associate pastor at New Hope Village Church (the church Rayford’s wife Irene attends). Though he is a minister in a church filled with people who are raptured, Bruce is left behind.

Finally, there’s Cameron Williams, given the ever-annoying nickname Buck because, according to other characters, he’s always bucking the system. He’s an award-winning journalist for Global Weekly, and he is on Rayford Steele’s plane when the rapture occurs. He sets out to discover the cause of all the disappearances, and in the meantime, he converts to Evangelical Christianity.

One of the most interesting questions in the book is the reasoning behind who was taken and who was left behind. There are some obvious groups that would have been left behind: non-Christians are all still around, and this group definitely includes liberals and the college elite. Chloe, a student at Stanford University, calls home after the disappearances:

“Mom? Dad? Are you there? Have you seen what’s going on? Call me as soon as you can. We’ve lost at least ten students and two profs, and all the married students’ kids disappeared. Is Raymie all right? Call me!”

There were about 13,000 undergraduate and graduate students in 1990.If the rapture took ten students, that represents only 0.0769% of the students This fairly clearly shows the Evangelical view of “secular” education. Once even True Christians enter a liberal university like Stanford, they will fall away from the faith. (Of course, most Evangelicals would argue that those who fall away from the faith were never True Christians to begin with. This No True Scotsman fallacy is one of Evangelicalism’s favorite arguments.)

While many people should have expected to be left behind, many people who thought they were Christians remained on Earth, much to their confusion. In this way, the book makes it clear that not all who call themselves Christians will make it in the end. There exists such a thing as “Christians so-called.” Rayford starts to see this quickly. When he lands and is waiting for a phone to call home, he gets to watch a little news:

Rayford was second in line for the phone, but what he saw next on the screen convinced him he would never see his wife again. At a Christian high school soccer game at a missionary headquarters in Indonesia, most of the spectators and all but one of the players disappeared in the middle of play, leaving their shoes and uniforms on the ground. The CNN reporter announced that, in his remorse, the surviving player took his own life.

But it was more than remorse, Rayford knew. Of all people, that player, a student at a Christian school, would have known the truth immediately. The Rapture had taken place. Jesus Christ had returned for his people, and that boy was not one of them.

This poor soccer player thought he was one of God’s elect, that he’d given his life to Jesus and completed all the requirements to be saved from the hell of end times only to discover at literally the last moment that he’d deceived himself.

Even the hardened skeptical reporter Buck Williams, who “never claimed any devotion to the faith,” remembers during a conversation with his father that his family “had [Buck] in church and Sunday school from the time [he was] a baby.” In exasperation, Buck’s father declares, “You’re as much a Christian as any one of us.”

Even Rayford Steele was something of a nominal Christian: 

For years he had tolerated church. They had gone to one that demanded little and offered a lot. They made many friends and had found their doctor, dentist, insurance man, and even country club members in that church. Rayford was revered, proudly introduced as a 747 captain to newcomers and guests, and even served on the church board for several years.

However, it wasn’t true Christianity. Irene learns this when she discovered the Christian radio station and what she called ‘real preaching and teaching.’” Rayford found the sermons at the new church “a little too literal and personal and challenging” and so he stayed away. Therefore, when the events of the novel actually begin, he’s at best a nominal Christian though more likly a lapsed Christian or even an apostate nonbeliever altogether.

Bruce, the associate pastor, is a much trickier case. In telling his story to Rayford, he explains that the “Bible says that if you believe in Christ you have eternal life, so [he] assumed [he] was covered.” Evangelicals like to say that’s all one has to do: believe in Jesus, believe in the efficacy of his sacrifice to cleanse you of your sins. If you do that, you’ll be saved from the consequences of your sin (i.e., hell). 

Bruce, however, finds that there’s more to it.

I especially liked the parts about God being forgiving. I was a sinner, and I never changed. I just kept getting forgiveness because I thought God was bound to do that. He had to. Verses that said if we confessed our sins he was faithful and just to forgive us and to cleanse us. I knew other verses said you had to believe and receive, to trust and to abide, but to me that was sort of theological mumbo jumbo. I wanted the bottom line, the easiest route, the simplest path. I knew other verses said that we are not to continue in sin just because God shows grace.

According to Left Behind, then, believing in Jesus is not enough. One has “to trust and to abide.” But what does that mean? And how do you know if you’ve done that? For Bruce, it’s “sort of theological mumbo jumbo,” which correctly suggests that there’s nowhere in the Bible that lays out what this trusting and abiding might look like. Indeed, there’s nowhere in the Bible that says, “In order to be saved from hell and spend an eternity with God, do this, this, and this.” Indeed, this is why we have so many Christian denominations: it’s just not clear what it takes to get right with the god of this religion.

Bruce goes on to explain,

I told my wife that we tithed to the church, you know, that we gave ten percent of our income. I hardly ever gave any, except when the plate was passed I might drop in a few bills to make it look good. Every week I would confess that to God, promising to do better next time.

So to be a True Christian, guaranteed of salvation, you have to give ten percent of your income to the church? Christians like to say that salvation is a free gift: “You don’t have to do anything.” This sure sounds like doing something, though.

Bruce explains further: “I encouraged people to share their faith, to tell other people how to become Christians. But on my own I never did that.”

Now our list of required acts has expanded to four items:

1. Believe in the efficacy of Jesus’s sacrifice.
2. Trust and abide.
3. Give ten percent of your income to the church.
4. Share your faith with others.

Yet that’s not all, because Bruce’s story continues, “I hardly ever read my Bible except when preparing a talk or lesson. I didn’t have the ‘mind of Christ.’ Christian, I knew vaguely, means ‘Christ one’ or ‘one like Christ.”

Now our list is:

1. Believe in the efficacy of Jesus’s sacrifice.
2. Trust and abide.
3. Give ten percent of your income to the church.
4. Share your faith with others.
5. Read the Bible.
6. Have the “mind of Christ.”

Later in the series (in the fourth book, Soul Harvest), when Rayford is explaining everything to a colleague named Mac, he discovers the inadequacy of the traditional explanation of what it takes to be saved.

“So, what’s the plan?”

“It’s simple and straightforward, Mac.” Rayford outlined from memory the basics
about man’s sin separating him from God and God’s desire to welcome him back.

“Everybody’s a sinner,” Rayford said. “I wasn’t open to that before. But with everything my wife said coming true, I saw myself for what I was. There were worse people. A lot of people would say I was better than most, but next to God I felt worthless.”

“That’s one thing I don’t have any problem with, Ray. You won’t find me claiming to be anything but a scoundrel.”

“And yet, see? Most people think you’re a nice guy.” “I’m OK, I guess. But I know the real me.” “Pastor Billings pointed out that the Bible says, ‘There is none righteous, no, not one’ and that ‘all we like sheep have gone astray,’ and that ‘all our righteousnesses are like filthy rags.’ It didn’t make me feel better to know I wasn’t unique. I was just grateful there was some plan to reconnect me with God. When he explained how a holy God had to punish sin but didn’t want any of the people he created to die, I finally started to see it. Jesus, the Son of God, the only man who ever lived without sin, died for everybody’s sin. All we had to do was believe that, repent of our sins, receive the gift of salvation. We would be forgiven and what Billings referred to as ‘reconciled’ to God.”

“So if I believe that, I’m in?” Mac said.

“You also have to believe that God raised Jesus from the dead. That provided the victory over sin and death, and it also proved Jesus was divine.”

“I believe all that, Ray, so is that it? Am I in?”

Rayford’s blood ran cold. What was troubling him? Whatever made him sure Amanda was alive was also making him wonder whether Mac was sincere. This was too easy. Mac had seen the turmoil of almost two years of the Tribulation already. But was that enough to persuade him?

But this contradicts what Bruce later teaches as the requirements for being a True Christian. After he tells his story about how it happened that an associate pastor in an Evangelical church missed out on the rapture, he explains to Rayford what one must do to be saved:

First, we have to see ourselves as God sees us. The Bible says all have sinned, that there is none righteous, no not one. It also says we can’t save ourselves. Lots of people thought they could earn their way to God or to heaven by doing good things, but that’s probably the biggest misconception ever. Ask anyone on the street what they think the Bible or the church says about getting to heaven, and nine of ten would say it has something to do with doing good and living right.

This is the standard explanation in Evangelical circles about how to obtain salvation. But what about that list we culled from earlier portions of Bruce’s story? What role does “living right” play in all this? Bruce explains: “We’re to do that, of course, but not so we can earn our salvation. We’re to do that in response to our salvation.” In other words, once we’re saved, we should start acting like it. We should be reading our Bible, having the mind of Christ, trusting and abiding, and — lest we deprive our pastor of funds to complete his work — giving ten percent to the church.

This still leaves the question of what all these things mean. What exactly is trusting and abiding, and how can we be sure we’re doing it? What precisely does it look like to have the mind of Christ? This formulation leaves Evangelical in constant doubt of their own salvation, and so it serves as an ever-present stressor, constantly pushing the Christian to examine her life and  constantly undermining that faith at the same time.This push and pull of grace versus works, salvation verses damnation is perhaps the most unhealthy aspect of Christianity.

Once Bruce is done with his story and explains how to be saved, he leaves it in Rayford’s hands. However, he does “leave [him] with one little reminder of urgency.”

You may have heard this off and on your whole lives, the way I did. Maybe you haven’t. But I need to tell you that you don’t have any guarantees. It’s too late for you to disappear like your loved ones did a few days ago. But people die every day in car accidents, plane crashes—oh, sorry, I’m sure you’re a good pilot—all kinds of tragedies. I’m not going to push you into something you’re not ready for, but just let me encourage you that if God impresses upon you that this is true, don’t put it off. What would be worse than finally finding God and then dying without him because you waited too long?”

This fear aspect of Christianity (and I guess Islam as well) is the one of the most dangerous and harmful ideas in the religion. It haunts believers even after they’ve left the faith: if I was wrong, abandoned the church, and then die, what? The answer to that question lingers: hell.

But it’s not just fear for oneself. When Rayford converts (“accepts Jesus as his Lord and Savior”), he instantly becomes worried about Chloe:

He felt hopeless about Chloe. Every thing he had tried had failed. He knew it had been only days since the disappearance of her mother and brother, and even less time since his own conversion. What more could he say or do? Bruce had encouraged him just to pray, but he was not made that way. He would of course, but he had always been a man of action. Now, every action seemed to push her farther away. He felt that if he said or did anything more, he would be responsible for her deciding against Christ once and for all.

What an utterly hopeless situation! This god Rayford has come to believe in might send Chloe to hell because Rayford can’t get through to her, and worse, the god is so impotent that Rayford might actually push Chloe away from his god and to his god’s hell.Overall, Left Behind presents the horrors and illogic of Evangelical Christianity in a manner that demonstrates Evangelical Christians’ complete lack of self-awareness. These issues would be plain to them if they were fervent believers of another faith looking at Christianity, but being so deeply enmeshed in the belief system, they’re completely oblivious to these issues.