The Varieties of Apocalypse: The Christian Right and Affective Response

Violence's relationship to the sacred is one of the recurrent themes of religious studies.1 In the case of Christianity this theme has been regularly debated, given the core tension in Christianity between peace as represented in Jesus as the Lamb of God who inaugurates eternal concord and the justice of God which necessitates vengeance and violent sacrifice. That visibility is present in the divergence found between the pacifism of many Christian traditions and the militarism of others. Recently, scholars have sought to understand how the Christian Right has come to value violence as it does, especially in the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol. One answer to this question is found in works of apocalyptic fiction like the popular Left Behind novels of Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye. That at least is what Jessica Hurley and Dan Sinykin suggest in the introduction to their special issue of ASAP/Journal.2 Hurley and Sinykin argue that "apocalypse mediates the unevenly distributed risks of the contemporary social, political, and geophysical world," and artists and writers take up the form as a means "for resisting or abetting violence."

In what follows, I suggest that LaHaye and Jenkins's Left Behind series has helped the Christian Right understand violence as a motivator for conversion. Indeed, paying attention to the Christian Right's apocalyptic vision of violence in the Left Behind novels within the context of the violence evinced in other contemporary apocalyptic fiction (such as Cormac McCarthy's The Road)can help us better understand just how deeply affective its seemingly doctrinaire vision of salvation and right living actually is. The kind of conversion that LaHaye and Jenkins seek to produce turns out to be intriguingly unconventional. Instead of focusing upon doctrinal belief, as conservative dispensationalist theologies are often assumed to, conversion in the Left Behind series is far more about experiencing the right kind of feelings.3 Violence and the spectating of violence produce intense affective response, which in turn produce a surprising twist in the Christian Right's development: many within its dogmatic core, such as LaHaye and Jenkins, seem to become increasingly motivated to produce intense affective response, rather than the intellectual assent so commonly associated with conservative Christian conversion. And if violence can motivate conversion, which the evangelical church values highly, then it is not a difficult jump to find value in violence in other arenas where the Christian Right sees the need for change, including the political realm. LaHaye and Jenkins see the fear of God's vengeance as being on the one hand wholly justified according to God's retributive justice, but the stories also show that God's retribution can be a cautionary tale for the spectators of violence, motivating them to action in order to avoid the same fate. God's vengeance, meting out justice to humans who have violated his Law, is then wholly justified even as it is equally avoidable. What is more, watching God's vengeance unfold in violence may encourage acceptance of the conditions on which exception from that violence is conditional. While the Left Behind novels are ostensibly committed to the doctrinal dispensationalism on which their plot is premised, they behave aesthetically in very similar ways to mainstream Protestant liberalism due to their heavy reliance on feeling.

We shall see, accordingly, that LaHaye and Jenkins's fiction uses the apocalyptic form to demonstrate the key way to "abet" the violence of God in the acceptance of Jesus. Once this analysis is complete my question will still be: how far does the Christian Right have to move from thinking that God's violence as vengeance can motivate conversion in the spiritual realm, to thinking that their violence might motivate "conversion" in the political realm?  While it will be beyond the final scope of this short essay to answer this question, I would suggest the possibility that the Christian Right reader's affective response to the apocalyptic literature of radically conservative Christians, in turn forms that reader in a kind of political posture that is prepared to spectate the kinds of vengeance and violence we have seen in the Trump era. Indeed, it may be suggested that this emphasis upon aesthetic response in apocalyptic literatures helps to accelerate the consequent unimportance of intellectual response in politics: feelings come to be normative, while knowledge, doctrine and truth become less consequential.

The Left Behind books contain much that could rightly be described as dogmatic and doctrinaire.  Reading the books, one is struck by their sincere, almost painful, indoctrinating quality. Whether in the doctrinal expressions of the first volume's "Sinner's Prayer" or in the extensive treatment throughout the books of theology as mediated by various characters, including long excurses such as Chaim Rosenzweig's on the doctrines of Resurrection in the final book of the main story arc, Glorious Appearing, the books are full of doctrine.4 And as Amy Frykholm shows in her Rapture Culture, readers regularly talk about the ways that Left Behind functions as a "regime of truth" building for its readers an account of true doctrine.5 LaHaye and Jenkins insist that writing the novels gave them ample evangelistic opportunity. Indeed in their own accounts, the authors mention little about producing any experiences for their readers. On the contrary, they seem to be concerned principally with doing just the opposite: producing intellectual response and assent. So, where some today want to instrumentalize religion for artistic purposes, they want to instrumentalize art for religious purposes. The closest they come to endorsing the production of intense experience is when Jenkins indicates that the novels gave them the opportunity to use fiction to show people that, as Jenkins puts it, "violence [in fiction] is okay if it's not too graphic." But he doesn't seem to think that the goal is affective response as such, only that there is value in violence if it produces an experience of fear that keeps people from being "left behind."6 The violence for Jenkins is then an adjunct to the conversion of belief. But if they are trying to produce an affective response as religious experience through the power of art, this may prompt us to ask: just what kind of religion they are really committed to? Typically, conservative evangelical Christians argue for the truth of their beliefs, not that their faith should be embraced through sheer strength of feeling.

As Amy Hungerford describes it, LaHaye and Jenkins "stake their success" as writers on "whether or not the books actually produce conversions."7 Their Christianity — what New Testament scholar Barbara Rossing calls "Rapture and Armageddon politics"— when aestheticized in a novel becomes something of a violent spectacle.8 Rossing describes the core of this aestheticized politics as a "countdown of events of ever-escalating violence, all prophesied in advance . . . leading to the mother of all battles" so that Jesus can "return to earth . . . as an avenging warrior on a white horse to do battle with his enemies."9 Where the literary art becomes important, then, is in conveying the sheer scope and intensity of the violence that Jesus and those who are with him will bring upon the unregenerate.

A few representative passages suffice to demonstrate how LaHaye and Jenkins use violence. For example, in the penultimate novel of the original Left Behind sequence, Armageddon, LaHaye and Jenkins depict the rescue of the remnant of believers from the new city of New Babylon. They write that as their two planes took off from the city, they "circled the area for an hour" so the people in the planes "watched the utter destruction of the once great city" from the air above. We are told that they watched as "every building was leveled" and "every resident was slaughtered" by the "mysterious armies that invaded from the north."10 In Glorious Appearing, describing the last battle when Jesus returns to the earth to destroy the antichrist and establish his millennial reign, LaHaye and Jenkins write that "men and women, soldiers and horses seemed to explode where they stood. It was as if the very words of the Lord had superheated their blood, causing it to burst their veins and skin."11 If that wasn't violent enough, they describe how Jesus "merely" raised "one hand a few inches," and then a multitude "tumbled" into hell "howling and screaming."12  Likewise, the death of another group of the unregenerate is described: "even as they struggled, their own flesh dissolved, they melted and their tongues disintegrated" (380). Upon completing the series, it is difficult to remember much about their doctrine, what with all the slaughtering, leveling of buildings, superheating and bursting of blood and skin, howling on the way to hell, and dissolving flesh. It is hard to get past the horror of the violence, much less think about anything but avoiding this terrible and hellish destruction.13

But the intention is that the reader of Armageddon and Glorious Appearing moves toward conversion by experiencing the terror of witnessing the violence done to others that then might soon be done to him. Such violent passages act as a forceful inducement for the unregenerate to repent and come to Christianity. In this, LaHaye and Jenkins might seem to fit in a tradition that includes figures as diverse as Dante, Hieronymus Bosch, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, authors who use art as a cautionary tale to encourage moral behavior, repentance or even conversion from apostasy.

Although it is not subtle, the use of the cautionary tale pathos in Left Behind is important. For in texts like Dante's Inferno, Bosch's "The Garden of Earthly Delights," or Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown," the purpose of art is to encourage right behavior (orthopraxy) and belief (orthodoxy) through the vehicle of right feeling (orthopathos), but in Left Behind, amid the violence, intrigue, dissolving flesh, disintegrating tongues, and exploding men, women and horses, it is difficult to notice anything but the pathos. It is hard, in other words, to notice the beliefs that are being commended or conveyed because of the effects produced by what Rossing calls the "almost pornographic description" of violence.14 To be sure, the books prescribe  a set of right beliefs and behaviors, but these also seem secondary, simply guarantors of your being on the right team in the coming battle, so that you are in the position of watching (or reading) about the destruction, rather than being one of those "superheated," "dissolve[ed]" or "howling and screeching."15 Experiencing simultaneously the pleasure and terror of the destruction of the unregenerate then produces an emotional intensity that LaHaye and Jenkins bet will encourage repentance, and repentance will produce salvation. Thus, pornographic violence, the tropes of pulp fiction, action-adventure novels, and camp cinema, become the vehicles by which the apocalypse is both represented and — more fundamentally for Jenkins, LaHaye, and the rest of their dispensationalist supporters — ushered in. Since, after all, dispensationalists believe that conversions create the conditions for Christ's return, it might seem reasonable to borrow from art to produce affective responses that encourage conversion. 16 And yet, even though in Left Behind the affective response to violence overwhelms any doctrinal and catechetical function the texts might hope to serve, it remains important to recognize that in Left Behind doctrine still matters. Unlike some who might simply replace doctrine with feelings, LaHaye and Jenkins still represent and affirm doctrine even when the intent to indoctrinate flounders because of their means. LaHaye and Jenkins certainly want both the production of affective response and doctrine, whether or not we think the importance of doctrine survives the foregrounding of that experience of feeling in Left Behind.

Doctrinally, LaHaye and Jenkins are conservative Christians, dispensationalists who believe in a literal interpretation of the book of Revelation, but in their commitment to the power of affective response to encourage conversion they look like something else entirely: because of their emphasis on the experience of feeling, they look like Protestant liberals. Admittedly, their mission is fiercely (even dogmatically) doctrinal, but, in the end, the affective force of the violence in the Left Behind books ends up overwhelming any doctrinal possibilities they might contain. Because of the intensity of the experience produced by the violence of their battles, they fail to prioritize doctrinal conversion. They certainly might terrorize some, but Left Behind fails not only to occasion but also to encourage a change in belief.17

Of course, not all of Christianity has been as worried about right belief and doctrine as conservative evangelicals have tended to be. Some Christians have emphasized affective intensity as central to Christianity. Historian of religion Ann Taves asserts that the key component of "twentieth century liberal Christian" theology is the placement of "experience" at "the center of Christianity."18 Thus, Taves argues, among 20^th century Christians liberal Protestantism preeminently emphasizes religious experience. Liberal Protestant theology of experience most values the "force" of "feeling."  But Taves further argues that the "sui generis" conception of religious experience, "seemed like a promising source of religious renewal" for many theologians "who followed in the footsteps" of that most liberal of "the liberal Protestant" theologians Friedrich Schleiermacher.19 Liberal Protestants, she continues, believed that "a certain kind of experience," distinct from all others, "constituted the essence" of Christianity. 20 Liberal Christianity centers on experience of intense affect for Taves, but for the Christian Right, as Molly Worthen shows throughout her Apostles of Reason, Christianity centers on affirmation of doctrine.

Thus, it seems that in failing to create an occasion for a change in belief through its representation of violence, Left Behind ends up sharing a lot in common with one of the most well received recent apocalyptic works of fiction: Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Not only was The Road adored by critics, but its reviewers continually noted that there was something "profound" going on in the book and many thought that profundity was something of "an avowed religious intent."21 But if McCarthy's reviewers were right to see that The Road had some sort of religious quality to it, we might ask: what kind of religious quality?

We can begin to see the answer in what Hungerford says about McCarthy. She acknowledges that he "made his reputation with the Biblical style of Blood Meridian," but it is The Road that shows "where the strain of literary and religious thought . . . will go in twenty-first century American writing."  And where The Road goes according to Hungerford is in the direction of producing a "feeling of biblical force."22 The key word in Hungerford's phrase isn't "biblical" or "force," but rather "feeling." It is an affective response unlike any other, conceived of as not only unique, but uniquely religious. In The Road, the boy is framed as the word of God, but in its style the novel depicts a world where God might be absent (or have absented Himself).23 This religious effect is produced in The Road at least in part by what reviewers unanimously note as the plain style of the novel.24 Ashley Kunsa suggests that McCarthy's plain style is consistent with the novel's world, a world "reduced to the basics," where we should expect to find that the language is stripped to its "rudiments."25 What Kunsa implies, and I think she's right, is that McCarthy's prose style is a function of the novel's post-apocalypticism: in a destroyed world there is a sense to a stripped-down language.  A plain prose is style necessary for a world as bare and stripped as the one McCarthy describes as "barren, silent, godless."26  But more than that, when this "barren, silent, godless" world is described in a prose style that imitates its barrenness, the reader is affectively moved.

We can see the force of this affective response by looking at what Kunsa describes as the debate over "the issue of meaning versus meaninglessness" in the novel.27  She explains that some critics, like Vereen Bell, see McCarthy as a "nihilist" with "no first principles, no foundational truth."28 Further, Bell sees McCarthy's philosophy of language as sounds empty of signification, while others, like Edwin Arnold, challenge this McCarthy-as-nihilist thesis and argue that there is "always the possibility of grace and redemption" in McCarthy's "darkest" tales with their plain prose.29 This debate reveals how the style works; for while it looks like they are disagreeing, I would argue that Arnold and Bell can both be right.  McCarthy could be committed simultaneously to a minimalist prose and to "the possibility of grace and redemption."  Bell and Arnold have just misunderstood what McCarthy might mean by "redemption" and have missed even how spare and minimal language — like "barren, silent, godless" — might achieve such an end. Of course, one need not agree with Bell's account of the language in the novel as straining meaning — and I don't think I do — to accept that the style of the novel produces intense affect and elicits aesthetic response. This is language understood more as sound, as causal manipulator, as effect more than sign, but in seeing salvation as a kind of intense affective response we can bring Bell and Arnold's positions together.  For if it is the affective response to works and texts that matters most to postmodern authors, as Hungerford argues — and, furthermore, if affective response is something one can have from language even at its most meaningless, nihilistic or spare — then there is no reason that McCarthy could not produce spare and minimal prose, something little more than noise or sounds even, that itself produces a powerful affective response for his readers.30 

While The Road is inevitably connected with Christian eschatology by being set in a post-apocalyptic world, its truest religious significance lies in the root meaning of "apocalypse" in Greek: to reveal.  McCarthy is seeking to produce a revelatory affective experience for his reader by emulating the Bible's style, not its doctrine, and thereby replacing it, transforming "biblical authority into literary authority reconceived as supernatural authorship or rhetorical power," in Hungerford's phrase.31  It is as if the goal of The Road is to reveal and produce intense emotion through that "rhetorical power," rather than to produce knowledge or belief. The effect of this "reconceiving" is to substitute the Bible with a secular scripture, the spare but thereby affectively intense minimalist language of the book, revealing to the reader of that "scripture" the religious power of language.  This religious power is the fantasized religious power of postmodern art more generally and its consequence is the production of an experience of intense emotion rather than the conversion to any belief.

In the end McCarthy's account of the religious power of language turns out to be an implicitly Protestant liberal account of the power of literary art — despite the fact McCarthy was raised Catholic.32 For McCarthy's nearly mystical minimalism, what is worth borrowing from Christianity is not any doctrine, but the structure understood to produce experiences of affective response.  And there may not be anything all that strange about an author like McCarthy, one with no expressed religious intentions or goals, trying to write a novel that produces a kind of Protestant liberal theology by instrumentalizing the power of religious experience and affection for aesthetic purposes.  It might even be unproblematic to try to produce something in art that is akin to the power of religious conversion or theophanic experience in religion, since these are both experiences of often documented intensity.  In this attempt, McCarthy seems simply to be recognizing that the Christian religious legacy, including a genre like the post-apocalypse, could be something worth emptying so you can borrow it.

But if McCarthy's actions are not strange, what certainly is strange is that Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, Christian Right authors of the Left Behind novels, seem to be just as concerned with religious experience and affective intensity as McCarthy is. While they are not seemingly all that concerned about their prose style, they are very concerned with producing another experience for their readers: the experience of abject terror through spectating violence, a violence that, but for grace, should be directed at you. Thus, what we see here is the way that The Road and Left Behind, two seemingly dissimilar works, turn out to be more similar in one way than at first imagined, for in both affective response to violence displaces doctrine. Turning then to the readers of Left Behind books as I conclude, I return to the question I asked at the beginning of this paper: does this experience of violence come to function as a pedagogy for practice in the political realm? Was Left Behind's portrayal of violence and the powerful affective response it produces a pedagogy for the Christian Right's structure of feeling that led to recent events like those on January 6, 2021 at the Capital? It is too soon to say, but it is no great step from thinking violence could motivate spiritual change to thinking that it might motivate action in the political realm, even for those who follow the Prince of Peace.

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Caleb D. Spencer (@calebdspencer) is Associate Professor of English at Azusa Pacific University and co-editor of Literature and Religious Experience (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022). He is also an associate editor for Christianity & Literature (JHUP). His writings are in Religion and Literature, Christianity & Literature, Modern Theology and the Journal of Religion and Popular Culture.

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