First of all, it kind of contradicts the book’s premise, since we are constantly told that the ONLY way to get into heaven is to accept Christ, which no four-year-old (much less a four-month-old) could possibly comprehend. Granted, this is mostly a technicality, and I’m sure it’s intentional (for most exclusivist born-again groups, the technicalities are everything; the technicalities are what save you). But my larger issue is philosophicaclass="underline" Why do we assume all children are inherently innocent? Innocent of what? I mean, any grammar school teacher will tell you that “kids can be cruel” on the playground; the average third-grader will gleefully walk up to a six-year-old with hydrocephalus and ask, “What’s wrong with you, Big Head?” And that third-grader knows what he’s doing is evil. He knows it’s hurtful. Little boys torture cats and cute little girls humiliate fat little girls, and they know it’s wrong. They do it because it’s wrong. Sometimes I think children are the worst people alive. And even if they’re not—even if some smiling toddler is as pure as Evian—it’s only a matter of time. He’ll eventually become the fifty-year-old car salesman who we’ll all assume is morally bankrupt until he proves otherwise.
As far as I can tell, the nicest thing you can say about children is that they haven’t done anything terrible yet.
So let’s get to the core question in Left Behind: If the Rapture happened tonight, who gets called up to the Big Show? Judging from the text, the answer is “No one I know, and probably no one who would read this essay.” Left Behind is pretty clear about this, and the authors go to great lengths to illustrate how many of the people passed over by God are fair, moral, and—for the most part—more heroic than prototypical humans. This is a direct reflection of the primary audience for hardcore Christian literature; one assumes those readers would typically possess those same characteristics and simply need a little literary push to become “higher” Christians.
The best example in Left Behind is Rayford Steele, the person with whom we’re evidently supposed to “relate.” Buck Williams is the star and the catalyst (especially in the film version), but his main purpose is to move the plot along and provide the conflict. It’s through Rayford that we are supposed to understand the novel’s theme and experience. The theme is that you’re good, but being good is not enough; the experience is that you cannot be saved until you allow yourself to surrender to faith, even though that’s not really how it works for Rayford.
On the very first page of Left Behind, we learn that Rayford has a bad marriage, and it’s because his wife had developed an “obsession” with religion. We also learn that—twelve years prior—Rayford drunkenly kissed another woman at the company Christmas party and has never really forgiven himself. However, that guilt does not stop him from secretly lusting after the aforementioned Hattie Durham, even though he never actually touches her (interestingly enough, Rayford and Hattie do have a physical relationship in the film version of Left Behind, presumably because director Victor Sarin didn’t think moviegoers would buy the whole Jimmy Carter “I’ve lusted in my heart” sentiment).
Suffice it to say that Rayford would generally be described as a very decent person in the secular universe, which is how most Left Behind readers would likely view themselves. However, he can’t see the espoused “larger truth,” which is that there is only a future for those who take the Kierkegaardian leap and believe everything the Bible states (and as literally as possible).
Rayford can’t do this until his life is destroyed, so his conversion isn’t all that remarkable (it actually seems like the most reasonable decision, considering the circumstances). In many ways, this is the book’s most glaring flaw: It demands blind faith from the reader, but it illustrates faith as a response to terror. And since Left Behind isn’t a metaphor—it presents itself as a fictionalized account of what will happen, according to the Book of Revelation—the justification for embracing Jesus mostly seems like a scare tactic. It’s not a sophisticated reason for believing in God.
Of course, that’s also the point: There is no sophisticated reason for believing in anything supernatural, so it really comes down to believing you’re right. This is another example of how born agains are cool—you’d think they’d be humble, but they’ve got to be amazingly cocksure. And once you’ve crossed over, you don’t even have to try to be nice; according to the born-again exemplar, your goodness will be a natural extension of your salvation. Caring about orphans and helping the homeless will come as naturally as having sex with coworkers and stealing office supplies. If you consciously do good works out of obligation, you’ll never get into heaven; however, if you make God your proverbial copilot, doing good works will just become an unconscious part of your life.
I guess that’s probably the moment where I just stop accepting all this born-again bullshit, no matter how hard I try to remain open-minded. Though I obviously have no proof of this, the one aspect of life that seems clear to me is that good people do whatever they believe is the right thing to do. Being virtuous is hard, not easy. The idea of doing good things simply because you’re good seems like a zero-sum game; I’m not even sure if those actions would still qualify as “good,” since they’d merely be a function of normal behavior. Regardless of what kind of god you believe in—a loving god, a vengeful god, a capricious god, a snooty beret-wearing French god, whatever—one has to assume that you can’t be penalized for doing the things you believe to be truly righteous and just. Certainly, this creates some pretty glaring problems: Hitler may have thought he was serving God. Stalin may have thought he was serving God (or something vaguely similar). I’m certain Osama bin Laden was positive he was serving God. It’s not hard to fathom that all of those maniacs were certain that what they were doing was right. Meanwhile, I constantly do things that I know are wrong; they’re not on the same scale as incinerating Jews or blowing up skyscrapers, but my motivations might be worse. I have looked directly into the eyes of a woman I loved and told her lies for no reason, except that those lies would allow me to continue having sex with another woman I cared about less. This act did not kill 20 million Russian peasants, but it might be more “diabolical” in a literal sense. If I died and found out I was going to hell and Stalin was in heaven, I would note the irony, but I really couldn’t complain. I don’t make the fucking rules.
Just to cover all my doomed bases, I watched a few other apocalyptic movies after Left Behind: I rented The Omega Code and revisited The Rapture. The latter film—a 1991 movie starring Mimi Rogers—was a polarizing attempt to make the end of the world into a conventionally entertaining film, and I still think it’s among the decade’s more interesting movies (at least for its first seventy-five minutes). The Rapture opens with Rogers as a bored sex addict, and it ends with her dragging her child into the desert to wait for God’s wrath. Part of the reason so many critics like this film is because writer/director Michael Tolkin “goes all the way” and resists the temptation to end the film with an unclear conclusion. That’s commendable, but I wonder what the response would have been if Rogers didn’t question God at the very end; her character essentially wants to know why God plays with people like pawns and created a totally fucked world when making a utopia would have been just as easy (and though I realize these are not exactly the most profound of existential questions, it’s hard to deny that they’re not the most important ones, either).