Kudos to Daniel Smith, a journalism student at Chaffey College in Rancho Cucamonga, CA, for writing a good piece on Tim LaHaye and dispensationalism for the campus newspaper, The Chaffey Breeze:
For the past month or so the news has been filled with natural disaster, pending horrible diseases, war and collapsing economies. It's all famine, destruction and pestilence these days - and it creates a spooky "doomsday" vibe that will surely make this Halloween all the more special.
I even saw a "special report" on one of those moronic news channels where they explored, in depth, the question in the backs of the minds of most God-fearing individuals (even the recovering ones like myself): are the end times upon us?
Some believe that the Bible mentions these events in the book of Revelation, where all sorts of bad stuff gets unleashed as God's grand finale for Earth. If you want a big word to add to your repertoire, this belief is called Premillennial Dispensationalism - the idea that time has already been divided into a clear beginning, middle, and end.
But not everyone agrees that Revelation is a who's who for the end of the world. Some say that it is a poetic depiction of the fall of Rome. Others, I'm sure, have found a way to use it to justify lynching gay people in Arkansas. As with most everything in the Bible, it tends to read like a really stoned teenager blogging about his trip to Taco Bell - sauce, nachos, something about a midget - all you can really be sure of is that he believes everything he's saying. In the end, it's all a matter of how you interpret it and what you're looking for.
Still, and perhaps understandably, there are a large number of people who really believe in the idea that earth will be destroyed in a fiery cataclysm that will rival a Jerry Bruckheimer film. In fact, according to a 2004 Newsweek poll, 36 percent of Americans believe this to be so.
This could be due to the popularity of Tim LaHaye's series of books called Left Behind. In these books, LaHaye details the apocalyptic events while holding out enough drama to save for the next installment. One might point out that divine intervention seems petty when released in 12 separate novels, but bestseller lists, like God, work in mysterious ways.
Another big idea that LaHaye tosses around is that of "the rapture." This is where all of the people who are on God's good side get sucked up to heaven in the blink of an eye so that they don't have to suffer. This phenomenon is expertly conveyed in the film adaptation of Left Behind, when a car suddenly crashes into a telephone pole with nothing but clothes left on the driver's sat - neatly folded.
Newsweek found that 55 percent of Americans believed in the rapture as of 2004. This not only shows the widespread acceptance of the idea, but when combined with the fact that only 36 percent actually believe in the end times that deem the rapture necessary, it also shows that 19 percent of Americans are really confused.
Even with that wide gap, it mostly shows that a whole lot of people think that they will be, at worst, distant observers if the proverbial should hit the fan. And it's such a nice idea, isn't it? Surely there are repercussions to thinking like that, though.
In 1981 Tim LaHaye founded the Council for National Policy, which is dedicated in part to bringing on the rapture, hence speeding along the end of the world. As with most every crazy religious organization founded by people with questionable motives, this one has grown to a frightening prominence.
Hold on to your hats and glasses, non-believers, because the list of club members has included George W. Bush, John Ashcroft, and Tommy Thompson with noteworthy appearances by Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. So if they should want to influence national policy, the Council certainly can.
So what would this policy look like?
First off, one major prerequisite for the rapture and concurrent destruction of everything is war and turmoil in the Middle East. Another good one is that the Jews will reclaim the Holy Land and then get into a big holy war with "Satan's minions" (and you get one guess who they say that will be).
As far as environmental policy goes, there would be no need to protect the very resources that will be gone soon anyway. Or, as James Watt, former Secretary of the Interior, said more clearly in 1981: "I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns."
The earth will be gone, so why bother doing anything to make sure that it is in decent shape when it's gone? Even better, this theory about what the Bible might say requires the earth to be all but destroyed by those upon it before Christ can return to finish the process for us. So policies that are antithetical to the environmentalist cause will serve to accelerate what some people see as "God's plan."
And let's drop any pretense of weapons of mass destruction or plans for democracy. Many dispensationalists believe that our current war with Iraq is good and holy in and of itself because it helps to foster the apocalypse. This is something that LaHaye openly admits.
And this is all with their eyes on the prize: the rapture. The interesting thing about this is that the very concept of the rapture is one that was concocted in the 19th century and was such a nice idea that people grasped onto it as if it were scripture. I suppose now would also be a good time to mention that the whole "end of the world" scenario is still up for interpretation as well.
All in all, we're looking at quite the spiritual crapshoot, especially given the ultimate price that must be paid in order to roll the dice.
But we have people running the country who are convinced and therefore engage in destructive, self-fulfilling prophesies that will no doubt eventually cause the death and destruction LaHaye and others say the Bible says is inevitable. But what if he's dead wrong? What if the rapture never comes and we realize too late that the whole thing seemed silly to begin with?
And then it occurs to me how funny it is that we fight wars against extremist theocratic rule in other countries. So long as it's the wrong extremist religion, I guess.
