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Beyond Left Behind: The Lost Legacy of Tim LaHaye

Beyond Left Behind: The Lost Legacy of Tim LaHaye

Last updated on: December 13, 2023 at 2:49 pm by Guest Contributor

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Beyond Left Behind: The Lost Legacy of Tim LaHaye 2023-12-13T14:49:56-04:00 Guest Contributor

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Today we welcome Jared Stacy back to the Anxious Bench. Stacy is a PhD candidate in Theological Ethics at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. His research focuses on evangelicalism in the United States, right-wing politics, and neo-orthodox theology. Previously, he pastored in the United States both in New Orleans and near Washington D.C.. Currently, he lives in Scotland with his wife, Stevie, and their three kids.

Evangelicalism has an apocalypse problem. Of course, the way you or I read that sentence depends on how you or I define “evangelical” and “apocalypse”. But what if we add “Tim LaHaye” to those words? What changes?

Apocalypse simply means unveiling, or disclosure. In the apostolic tradition, apocalypse is not so much the end of the world as it is the beginning, the disclosure of a new creation ushered in by Christ.

But with LaHaye we find a more conspiratorial and paranoid apocalypticism which continues to both shape and determine not just evangelicalism but wider swaths of our political climate.

Beyond Left Behind

It is nearly impossible to understand evangelicalism today apart from LaHaye’s influence. And it’s not just evangelicalism. LaHaye’s ideas have shaped the present political climate in the United States in profound ways. But in order to see it, we have to move beyond the books for which he is famous, Left Behind.

LaHaye’s influence on evangelicalism normally focuses on the commercial success of Left Behind. It’s true, LaHaye’s Left Behind series was not insignificant. The commercial success of the books (over 80 million sold) is only exceeded by their lasting influence on evangelicalism and broader popular culture. We may not enjoy the books or advocate the theology they dramatize, but in reducing LaHaye’s contribution to the crisis of evangelicalism to the books alone, we ironically reflect Jerry Falwell’s endorsement of the books: “In terms of its impact on Christianity, it’s probably greater than that of any other book in modern times, outside the Bible.”

Left Behind was only part of LaHaye’s legacy, one which shaped not just evangelicalism but broader American culture. In Daniel Hummel’s analysis, the Left Behind novels—with their dramatization of the Rapture and totalitarian “end times” political orders— primed Americans, not just evangelicals, for the QAnon conspiracy universe. My research into evangelicalism and conspiracy theory sides with Hummel on this point.

Still, there’s more to LaHaye than Left Behind. We lose this “more” whenever we opt to define evangelicalism as something like a cast of characters. In this approach LaHaye becomes the man who took dispensationalism to the market, and cashed out. But LaHaye’s apocalyptic theology (and the politics it generated) found expression beyond the books.

Pastor, Conspiracy Theorist & Political Activist

LaHaye was part of a much larger movement which is still affecting the present, both socially and politically. Though LaHaye passed away in 2016, his apocalyptic theology (a combination of his most cherished biblical teachings, conspiracy theories, and political ideologies) continue to work like propaganda.

This propaganda is passed off under the qualifier “biblical” which gives it unquestionable power. And like all propaganda, it not only forms people, but directs them towards certain political actions. LaHaye helped paved the road on which this propaganda travels.

In 1968, then pastor LaHaye wrote a stern letter to Wheaton College, protesting leadership’s decision to host a memorial service for the “theological liberal heretic” Martin Luther King Jr. He went on to mock King’s ‘non-violent’ demonstrations and blame them for the deaths of 17 people. (Similar rhetoric would surface again from similar spaces to narrate the summer of 2020.)

He left the pulpit in 1981 to pursue political and commercial avenues of influence and activism. LaHaye became the first president for the Council for National Policy. But LaHaye always retained his fierce commitment to a particular apocalyptic theological system: pre-tribulation dispensationalism. Within this system, LaHaye—who also lectured at John Birch Society meetings—remained an avowed conspiracy theorist. This was fully compatible with being a dispensationalist in particular, and evangelical in general. In Rapture Under Attack (1998) he wrote:

I myself have been a forty-five year student of the satanically-inspired, centuries-old conspiracy theory to use government, education, and media to destroy every vestige of Christianity within our society and establish a new world order. Having read at least fifty books on the Illuminati, I am convinced that it exists and can be blamed for many of man’s inhumane actions against his fellow man during the past two hundred years…an enormous amount of evidence proves that secularization of our once Judeo-Christian society has not been an accident but is the result of the devilishly clever scheming carried on by this secret order.

Conspiracy theory was a feature, not a bug, of LaHaye’s apocalyptic theology. In fact, I’d like to argue conspiracy theory is a sort of apocalyptic discourse within evangelical spaces, one which continues to shape the social and political world with great effect. Left Behind series is merely an ideological concentration and commercial distillation of all LaHaye believed theologically and worked for politically. It continues to be diffused and refracted.

President LaHaye, CNP

I want to suggest that the Council for National Policy is just as crucial to understanding LaHaye’s continued impact on evangelicalism and the United States. While the books are concentrations of his theo-political ideas, the CNP incubates these ideas as both propaganda and realizes them through political activism. It deserves a more central place in our accounts of evangelicalism today.

In the early 80s, LaHaye worked vigorously alongside Falwell, the SBC’s titans of the Conservative Resurgence, Paige Patterson and Judge Paul Pressler, beer executive Joseph Coors, and Republican strategist Paul Weyrich to connect and fund the construction of a policy think tank. It would rival the left-leaning Council on Foreign Relations, and consolidate the neoliberal conservatism that put Reagan in the White House. LaHaye served as its first President.

Today, the CNP continues to function as a patronage system, propaganda network, and political think tank. It is as much of a feature of the American political system on the left as the right. In spite of the constant conspiratorial panic and increasing antiseptic tropes from conservatives surrounding George Soros, the CNP plays the same game.

Its network unites donor money, like the Koch brothers, with political figures like Mike Pence or Ginni Thomas, to private military contractors (like Blackwater’s Eric Prince, who was CNP adjacent), and evangelical leaders like James Dobson and data researcher George Barna, to media executives like Dennis Prager and Salem Radio’s Stuart Epperson. Salem’s network features Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA, also a CNP member. The CNP enacts its policies like much of the American political system: through power and propaganda. For a more detailed analysis of the CNP, I commend to you Anne Nelson’s Shadow Network.

The CNP furnished the resources to make the “Big Lie” plausible. In February 2020, months before the election, the CNP hosted an annual gathering which featured preemptive lectures over the ways “Big Tech” was planning to commit fraud in the 2020 Presidential Election. The CNP stipulated possible “action steps” every participant could take in their given field to promote the idea of Big Tech interference and thus prevent it. Trump’s claims of election fraud were bolstered and propagandized by the CNP. But the plausibility of these claims, at least among evangelicals, continues to be the way they “fit” within a preexisting apocalyptic theology and its mode of speech.

This conspiratorial spirit is theological and has been diffused politically within the CNP, but it has been welcomed within evangelical spaces for much longer. Tim LaHaye’s legacy, seen both through and beyond Left Behind, lives on in the institutions and networks he constructed to contain and sustain those ideas. This, too, is evangelicalism.

Grappling With The Legacy

A friend from Australia shared an old Maori proverb with me: Kia whakatōmuri te haere whakamua, or in English: “I walk backwards into the future with my eyes fixed on the past.” Yahweh called Israel to a similar posture: “Remember the former things of old” (Isaiah 46.9) and “take care lest you forget the Lord, who brought you out of the land of Egypt” (Deut 6.12). In the Christian tradition, Barth describes this call to remember as both retrospective and prospective. We remember the resurrection and anticipate the Second Coming. But what of the in between? What of the parts of our inheritance that call us to divestment?

I consumed LaHaye’s books as a young Christian. They gave me this mixture of zeal, dread, and fanaticism. It was an apocalyptic cocktail I soon came to associate with the Holy Spirit. As you might imagine, unraveling this confusion, along with the anxiety it provoked, has proven a longer and more chaotic process than I imagined (or probably would’ve chosen for myself).

Many of us read these novels within a culture and a practice of politics that reinforce this sort of conspiratorial apocalypticism. It’s worth asking how we ought to grapple with theology (or theology as ideology) that we inherit from those whose lives are problematic or contradictory, on the one hand, and yet without whom we could scarcely imagine our own faith on the other?

It was this very question that formed a seminar with my colleagues in theological ethics at the University of Aberdeen. It was aptly entitled “Troubled Inheritance” by the brilliant theologian Sarah Shin. The seminar dove into the sexual behavior of theologians Karl Barth and John Howard Yoder in order to ask pointed questions of our own traditions.

The seminar yielded fresh insights into the ways theological error and divergent/abusive praxis occur together. In LaHaye’s case, we’re met not only with the anxious apocalypticism of the novels, but also their social and political expression.

To understand LaHaye means to understand the broader legacy beyond the books. To understand the context that conditioned his theology, and the ideological supplementation of proclamation that turned it into propaganda. Sarah Shin puts it this way:

Theologians have become increasingly aware that they do not write theology in the abstract. Even if we wish to disassociate ourselves from problematic fathers (and mothers), the reality is that their influence is all around us. To contend with the challenge of their biographies, theologians must understand how those theological progenitors theologized, how they affect the way we think, and how they impact the way the church thinks today, amidst the trauma that their biographies represent and contributed towards.

The troubled inheritance of evangelicalism cannot be ignored through hagiography or through purportedly objective historical reconstruction.

We do not need to turn a blind eye to the varied and problematic points of our traditions for fear that faith itself might collapse. If it does, it only serves to purify what wasn’t faith to begin with. As David Bentley Hart observes, “Christianity entered human history not as a new creed or system of religious observance, but as an apocalypse.” The disclosure of Jesus isn’t meant to spur Christians into a conspiratorial frenzy.

The Christian apocalypse discloses the way things really are, that is in the light of Christ. But conspiracy theory (while claiming to disclose the way things are) is really a disoriented apocalypticism. It is theologically devastating before it is politically dangerous. The disclosure of Jesus means the end is actually the beginning, the last word is really the first word, the bad news is only visible in the light of the best news. Conspiratorial apocalypticism forgets this.

It is a well-worn criticism that evangelical apocalypticism in the United States is as dangerous as it is anti-democratic. But what if the problem is that evangelicalism has not been nearly apocalyptic enough? I think grappling with LaHaye’s legacy means taking that question seriously.

I have been wrestling with this inheritance, as have many of you. We’ve endured in countless ways evangelicalism’s own “apocalypse”—the disclosure of a movement endlessly clinging to power and resisting the love of God for the world.

And so I’ve come to wonder whether the Christian apocalypse itself is what makes the very notion of “repairing” evangelicalism—though noble sounding—sound more dangerous than dutiful. A bit like covering ourselves with leaves when we hear God walking in the garden. For all the conspiratorial apocalypticism we’ve inherited, we are not nearly apocalyptic enough.

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