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Tell me about the rise of the apocalypse industry, if you will.
What we see in contemporary American mass culture really is that apocalyptic belief
has become big business. It's become an industry. It's a subset of the
publishing industry. ... And books that become successful literally sell
millions of copies. And what we're seeing is a kind of synergistic process where
a successful televangelist will publish a book which is successful, which
will then spin off into videotapes and movies and sometimes prophecy magazines,
and even we have bumper stickers and wristwatches and other kinds of material,
all of which reinforce popular belief and interest in Bible prophecy.
Who is Hal Lindsey?
Hal Lindsey is one of the most fascinating figures in the whole history of
contemporary prophecy belief. A person of very obscure origins. Very
little education. Late 1960s. He's a campus preacher out in southern
California. 1970, publishes a book, The Late Great Planet Earth,
which is really a popularization of John Darby's system. Theologically, there's nothing new there. What he
does is link it to current events: the Cold War, nuclear war, the
Chinese Communist threat, the restoration of Israel. All of these events, he
links to specific biblical passages in the classic fashion of prophecy
popularizers. And he and his ghost writer write the book in a very almost
slang-like, very accessible language. It's not a heavy theological book at
all. It's a popular book. And this book just took off and became the all-time
non-fiction bestseller of the entire decade of the 1970s, and it represented
the point at which publishers began to realize there's tremendous potential in
prophecy books. And so many other writers begin to write books in the same
popular way, that have an enormously broad appeal.
The significance of Hal Lindsey, I think, is he represents another one of
those moments of breakthrough, when interest in Bible prophecy spills out
beyond just the ranks of the true believers and becomes a broader cultural
phenomenon. And people who had never paid much attention to prophecy at all
hear about this book. They pick up the paperback. They see the way Lindsey
weaves together current events and finds Biblical passages that seem to
foretell those events, and they say, "Wow, this is amazing. There must really
be something to this." So Lindsey's a very important transitional figure, I
think. ...
Hal Lindsey seems to have had considerable influence not just on the part of
the public as a whole, but at some of the highest levels of government. He's a
somewhat boastful person, and it's not entirely clear how much to trust all of
his stories, but he does tell of giving seminars at the Pentagon, seminars at
the National War College, that were crowded, thronged with people. So there
does seem to have been in the 1970s a considerable interest in prophetic
interpretations, particularly as they related to Russia and the Cold War, at
some of the highest levels of government.
Go through the 50s, 60s, and 70s, and give a general thought about how
popularizers turn to film, TV, paperbacks, and what's happening to the new way
of disseminating an apocalyptic message in that time.
Prophecy believers since the time of the Millerite movement, the 1840s,
have been extremely skilled at using the latest technologies. And that's been
very much true in our own day. It's fascinating to see how this ancient belief
system is being spread, really worldwide, by ... all the technologies, from
mass paperback books to the Internet, World Wide Web sites, videotapes, even
feature length films. The entire apparatus of modern mass culture is
accessible to those who are believers and who wish to spread their message. ...
It's also interesting to see how the prophecy popularizers view modern
technology. On the one hand, they see all of these systems of mass
communication preparing the way for the Antichrist. But in the meantime,
they're quite ready to use these same technologies themselves, to spread the
word of their particular interpretation of Bible prophecy.
Again, Hal Lindsey and The Late Great Planet Earth sort of set the
standard for this, because Lindsey proved to be an enormously successful
marketer of his product. And The Late Great Planet Earth, published
initially by an obscure religious publisher in Michigan, is taken up by a mass
market publisher and produced in a mass market format that is sold in
supermarkets and airports and so on. A film is made of The Late
Great Planet Earth narrated, actually, by Orson Welles. So it set the
pattern of a multimedia phenomenon that we now see with a number of
prophecy popularizers today. ...
A perfect example of the mass marketing of prophetic belief is the Left
Behind series that is now selling by the millions of copies in modern
America. It's by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, and it's a series of novels
which deal in fictional form with pre-millennial dispensationalist
beliefs. It begins with the Rapture. It deals with a small group of
so-called Tribulation Saints that find each other during the period of the
Great Tribulation and try to survive the rise of the Antichrist. They're very
readable. They're very well written. And they are being marketed in a very
powerful and successful way. The publisher has a web site. You can comment on
the book. The publisher has produced a children's version of four kids going
through the Great Tribulation. I understand that a film version is in the
works. So the Left Behind phenomenon is a classic example of the way a very
ancient belief system has broken through into the mass market of modern
America. ...
What does the Left Behind series tell us about the way prophecy
believers are using the media today?
The Left Behind series of novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, I
think, tells us some very interesting things about the way prophecy belief is
being used today in this post Cold War period. For one thing, it deals with
contemporary themes: the new communications technologies. The characters in
the novels are all using the Internet and communicating by e-mail, and so it's
very up-to-the-minute in terms of the cultural material that's described. And
yet it deals with a sort of fictionalized version of a very ancient traditional
system of Bible prophecy interpretation: the Rapture, the Great Tribulation,
the rise of the Antichrist. The religious themes, the apocalyptic themes of
the series are very well known, very well established. But they're combined
with these contemporary allusions that give the series a very up-to-the-minute
quality. ...
Is there a contradiction between these stories both using and featuring
today's latest greatest technology (Internet etc.) and being true to the story
of the Book of Revelation?
I think there's inevitably a kind of distortion and trivialization of what in
some sense is a very profound insight. The apocalyptic world view is
one that speaks to the human condition in very profound ways, in terms of the
opposition of forces of chaos and order and so on. When it's translated into
the world of contemporary mass marketing, contemporary Hollywood film
techniques, inevitably, it seems to me, much of the depth, much of the
complexity, much of the meaning that it might have for people in terms of
encouraging them to really think about the nature of the world that we live in,
gets lost, and it simply becomes another product to be consumed and
forgotten.
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