When interviewed about Left Behind when it was first released, Cameron usually played things pretty close to the vest and always stressed that he wanted the film to deliver a point of view about the Bible, but also to work as a commercially competitive secular thriller. However, I did find this mildly controversial exchange from an interview Cameron did with some guy named Robin Parrish on a Christian music site operated by about.com:
How accurate do you think Left Behind is? I mean obviously, there won’t be a real-life Buck or Hattie or whoever. But the events that transpire in the story, how accurate do you think they are? The movie or the book?
Both.
I think one of the most appealing aspects of the Left Behind story is that these are events that could be happening today or tomorrow. It’s very realistic. The events that happen in the story parallel, I think very realistically, the events depicted in the Bible. And whether you’re a pre-Trib Rapture believer, or a mid-Trib, or a post-Trib…
Yeah, is there anything that people who don’t believe in a pre-Tribulation Rapture can take away from this movie?
I’d encourage those people to take a look at the Left Behind film project Web site, which has answers to those kinds of questions. You know…I’m not a pre-Trib or post-Trib expert at defending this kind of stuff, but personally I think the movie is very accurate and in line with the Bible. There are some things in prophecy that we’re just going to have to wait and see how they happen, that we’re not going to really know until they do. The Bible says that Jesus is coming soon though, so I think more important than the pre-Trib or post-Trib debate is all of us being ready before either one happens.
Now, I have no real understanding of what a “pre-Tribulation Rapture” is supposed to signify symbolically; it refers to a Rapture that happens before the technical apocalypse, but I’m not exactly sure how that would be better or worse than a “mid-Tribulation” or “post-Tribulation” Rapture. Honestly, I don’t think it’s important. However, this point is important: Kirk Cameron thinks the idea of 100 million Christians suddenly disappearing is “very realistic.” And I don’t mention this to mock him; I mention this because it’s the kind of realization that significantly changes the experience of watching this movie. In the film, Buck Williams goes from being a normal, successful person to someone who ardently wants the world to realize that there is no future for the unholy and that we must prepare for the political incarnation of Satan; apparently, the exact same thing happened to Cameron in real life. In his mind, he has made a docudrama about a historical event that merely hasn’t happened yet. This is not a former teen actor forced to star in an amateurish production because he needs the money; this is a former teen actor who consciously pursued an amateurish production with the hope of saving mankind. Relatively speaking, all those years he spent with Alan Thicke and Tracey Gold must seem like total shit.
There is something undeniably attractive about becoming a born-again Christian. I hear atheists say that all the time, although they inevitably make that suggestion in the most insulting way possible: Nothing offends me more than those who claim they wish they could become blindly religious because it would “make everything so simple.” People who make that argument are trying to convince the world that they’re somehow doomed by their own intelligence, and that they’d love to be as stupid as all the thoughtless automatons they condescendingly despise. That is not what I find appealing about the Born-Again Lifestyle. Personally, I think becoming a born-again Christian would be really cool, at least for a while. It would sort of be like joining the Crips or the Mossad or Fugazi.
Every rational person will tell you that all the world’s problems ultimately derive from disputes that are perceived by the warring parties as “Us vs. Them.” That seems sensible, but I don’t know if it’s necessarily true; all my problems come from the opposite scenario. I was far more interesting—and probably smarter, in a way—when I refused to recognize the existence of the color gray in my black-and-white universe. When I was twenty-one, I was adamantly anti-abortion and anti–death penalty; these were very clear ideas to me. However, things have since happened in my life, and now I have no feelings about either issue. And I’m sincere about that; I really have no opinion about abortion or the death penalty. Somehow, they don’t even seem important. But that’s what happens whenever you start to understand that most things cannot be emotively understood: You’re able to make better conversation over snifters of brandy, but you become an unfeeling idiot. You go from believing in objective reality to suspecting an objective reality exists; eventually, you start trying to make objectivity mesh with situational ethics, since every situation now seems unique. And then someone tells you that situational ethics is actually an oxymoron, since the idea of ethics is that these are things you do all the time, regardless of the situation. And pretty soon you find yourself in a circumstance where someone asks you if you believe that life begins at conception, and you find yourself changing the subject to NASCAR racing.
This is not a problem for the born again. There are no other subjects, really; nothing else—besides being born again—is even marginally important. Every moment of your life is a search-and-rescue mission: Everyone you meet needs to be converted and anyone you don’t convert is going to hell, and you will be partially at fault for their scorched corpse. Life would become unspeakably important, and every conversation you’d have for the rest of your life (or until the Rapture—whichever comes first) would really, really, really matter. If you ask me, that’s pretty glamorous. And Left Behind pushes that paradigm relentlessly. Another one of its primary characters—airline pilot Rayford Steele—becomes born again after he loses his wife and twelve-year-old son. However, his skeptical college-aged daughter Chloe doesn’t make God’s cut, so much of the text revolves around his attempts to convert Chloe to “The Way.” And the main psychological hurdle Steele must overcome is the fact that he’s not an obtrusive jackass, which Left Behind says we all need to become. “Here I am, worried about offending people,” Rayford thinks to himself at the beginning of chapter 19. “I’m liable to ‘not offend’ my own daughter right into hell.” The stakes are too high to concern oneself with manners.
This is ultimately what I like about the Born-Again Lifestyle: Even though I see fundamentalist Christians as wild-eyed maniacs, I respect their verve. They are probably the only people openly fighting against America’s insipid Oprah Culture—the pervasive belief system that insists everyone’s perspective is valid and that no one can be judged. As far as I can tell, most people I know are like me; most of the people I know are bad people (or they’re good people, but they consciously choose to do bad things). We deserve to be judged.
I realize that liberals and libertarians and Michael Stipe are always quick to quote the Bible when you say something like that, and they’ll tell you, “Judge not, lest ye be judged.” And that’s a solid retort for just about anything, really. But the thing with born agains is that they want to be judged. They can’t fucking wait. That’s why they’re cool.
As I just mentioned, Rayford Steele loses his young son in Left Behind’s Rapture. As it turns out, every young child in this book vanishes, including infants in the process of being born. This is to indicate that they are “innocents” and have done no wrong. And oddly, this was the aspect of Left Behind I found most distasteful.