Slactivist on "Left Behind"

Slacktivist gives us a tour of surreal worldview of the all American heresy of Millenial Dispensationalism, through the pages of the truly dreadful Left Behind books. Here Slacktivist concludes that they're just not creepy enough.

Left Behind, despite its religious trappings, is part of a larger genre of earth-shattering apocalyptic tales. Contrast the opening chapters of LB with the early pages of Stephen King's The Stand, which offers a similar sweeping epic tale of the end of the world.

King's story is genuinely frightening. L&J's is not. This is, of course, partly because Stephen King is a better stylist. But the main difference is not King's skill as a storyteller, but his objective. When you read The Stand, he wants you to imagine this is happening to you.

The tone and objective of LB, instead, asks you to imagine this happening to someone else. The reader has no purchase, no foothold in the story -- and thus no reason to find it personally unsettling.

L&J's approach divides their readers into two categories. You can, like the authors, consider yourself among the departed, looking on these wooden characters with a gloating scorn. Or else you must be, like these characters, the object of that scorn. Either way, there's little room for the empathy necessary to make such stories truly frightening.

What I find truly frightening is that millions of otherwise sane Americans apparently believe this nonsense. Not only that, but this heresy, thanks to the political power of the Religious Right, is influencing American policy in the Middle East.