Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Progressive Christian
TF: Born to sorrow

TF: Born to sorrow

Last updated on: November 17, 2010 at 3:45 pm by Fred Clark

TF: Born to sorrow 2010-11-17T15:45:42-05:00 Fred Clark

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Tribulation Force, pp. 281-289

To create is to love.

Artists know this. To paint a picture, sing a song, play a part or write a story is an act of love. This is a truth expressed on the very first page of the Bible, a refrain in the creation story of the first chapter of Genesis. One expects a creation story to be a hymn of praise to the creator, but Genesis turns that upside down, presenting the story as a hymn of praise by the creator to the creation. As God is portrayed bringing into being every piece of the world, the story repeats the refrain, "and God saw that it was good."

To create is to love is also a truth expressed in the second creation story in Genesis, in the remix that follows the first one. That second story — taking place in a single day instead of seven — portrays a hands-on creator forming humanity out of the dust of the earth and breathing life into our nostrils. It's a lovely image of the intimate caring of an artist at work.

I heard a more down-to-earth example of this same truth recently in an NPR interview with Frank Langella originally recorded shortly after Frost/Nixon came out. Langella described a conversation he had with Anthony Hopkins in which the two actors reminisced fondly about their old friend Richard Nixon. I don't know if either man ever met Nixon in person, but they had both brought him to life on film and thus, inescapably, they had come to love him. That didn't mean they admired everything about him or that they overlooked his many flaws — far from it — but they had come to know him intimately and thus to understand him. And to understand is to forgive.

To create is to love, but apparently not always. Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins do not love Hattie Durham. They despise their creation. Their contempt for her and disgust with her is tangible in every scene she appears in.

I think the authors expect their readers to share in this contempt, but that's not how this works. When an artist creates a character that the artist does not love, readers or audience members don't come to dislike that character, they come to dislike the artist. It is the writer — or actor, or painter — who reveals himself as unlovely. The character just becomes an expression of that unloveliness.

When one encounters a character like Hattie, a creation unloved by her creators, one has to wonder why she came to be at all. Creation takes work, so why put in all that effort for something you do not love?

When we see what becomes of poor Hatties in these books — what awful things are done to her first by Rayford, then by Nicolae, and throughout by the authors themselves — an answer begins to suggest itself. Hattie Durham was created to suffer and then to be destroyed. That is why she was made. Her creators sought an object to punish and to destroy and so Hattie Durham was brought into being.

"Bad Theology produces Bad Writing" has been one of the recurring themes of our survey of these books. We've seen, time and again, how that plays out in creating a nonsensical plot driven by motiveless characters caught in a disjointed series of arbitrary, implausible and inexplicable events, but it goes deeper than that. LaHaye and Jenkins have created their world in imitation of the way they imagine God has created this world. It is a world, they believe, that was created to be punished, to suffer and then to be destroyed and replaced. That is its purpose, the reason it was made.

As always, Bad Theology produces Bad Writing. (And vice versa.)

What this capriciously cruel notion of creation means in practical terms is that passages like this one in Chapter 13 of Tribulation Force are almost unbearable. Any reader who doesn't share the authors' contempt for Hattie — shaped by that same cruel notion of the creator — will find this difficult to get through. You wind up reading such passages trying to defend her, to take her side, even though the authors haven't provided any basis for you to do that.

That problem is compounded in this particular Hattie section by Jenkins' attempt here to use her as the voice of exposition. For Jenkins, exposition usually involves an artificial-seeming conversation in which one character who knows what's going on explains it all to another character who doesn't. That makes the latter seem exceptionally slow-witted and dim. The latter character, in this case, being Rayford Steele.

Rayford spends five pages here saying little more than variations of "I don't understand what you're telling me, please repeat with additional detail." It's almost that explicit. Here are just a few lines from Rayford's side of this conversation:

"What does that mean?"

"Tell me what the point was."

"Go on."

"OK."

"I'm just saying I follow you, though I'm not sure I really do."

"Still with you, I think."

"I've got lots of questions, Hattie."

Rayford slumped and sighed, "Hattie, for the love of all things sacred, just tell me what's going on."

Five whole pages of that. If he were more cheerful, he'd come across like the host of an infomercial — "Amazing, Billy — such an incredible product must sell for hundreds of dollars, right?" But he's so surly and impatient throughout that he just comes across as angrily uncomprehending.

Jenkins is also in a bit of a bind here because this technique of one-sided expository conversation also tends to make the other character — the one who knows what's going on — seem smarter and more competent. And Jenkins despises Hattie too much to allow her to seem smart or competent. His solution here is to portray Hattie as barely capable of communicating the simplest facts, extending and belaboring the whole process. Working one's way through eight pages of such a conversation is not a pleasant experience.

Further miring all of this down is the fact that everything being discussed and explained here has already been discussed and explained earlier. Readers already know all of this. Rayford already knows all of this. He already knows the answers to the questions he's asking. He already knows the information he whiningly demands she tell him. He's already figured out "about the flowers and the candy" and he already knows about Nicolae's plans to commandeer Air Force One as his private jet.

Here for example is Rayford some 60 pages earlier on pg. 224:

Being known as the pilot of Air Force One — or even Global Community One — for seven years was simply not on his wish list.

Not only did he already know that Air Force One was going to become Nicolae's personal plane, he even already knew that it would come to be called "Global Community One" — several chapters before Nicolae supposedly announced the "Global Community" brand name.

As for the flowers and candy, Rayford already knew about the imaginary stalker scheme because his Pan-Continental boss, Leonard Gustafson, let that slip back on pg. 248:

"I mean, Rayford, you'd never forgive yourself if something happened to that little girl and you had a chance to get her away from whoever is threatening her. … I'm talking about the roses, or whatever the bouquet was. … Sometimes a person has a reason to leave … if your daughter is being hassled by someone."

Rayford finally put all that together about 30 pages ago, after Chloe received the candies, the tell-tale "Windmill Mints from Holman Meadows."

The only new thing we learn in these eight agonizing pages is that Hattie hadn't intended to tip her hand quite so obviously:

"Hattie, did you think I wouldn't put two and two together when you sent Chloe's favorite mints, available only at Holman Meadows in New York?"

"Hmph," she said, "maybe that wasn't too swift."

This illustrates Nicolae Carpathia's main flaw thus far in the Antichrist business: staffing.

The man is trying to run a global evil empire with a four-person crew consisting of himself, Hattie, Chaim and Steve. That's just not going to work. He needs minions. To go global, he'll need millions of them. If you trying to become the evil totalitarian ruler of the entire planet, you're going to need minions and lackeys and secret police in every corner of every village of the globe. Mind mojo notwithstanding, you just can't expect to pull this off with only a press secretary, a botanist and your girlfriend working for you.

The whole fictional-stalker ruse was ill-conceived from the outset, but if Nicolae had any hope of making it work he needed to have Chloe followed by a team of minions who could then supply unnervingly personal details in the notes accompanying the anonymous gifts. Flowers with an unsigned card aren't creepy enough to convince somebody to relocate for the safety of his family. But imagine that Chloe spills coffee on her blouse one morning then, later that day, receives an unsigned package containing a brand-new, identical blouse — perfectly tailored — with a note reading, "You will be mine."

In Nicolae's defense, this clumsily conceived and executed scheme is part of his attempt to expand his staff. He has spent most of this book trying to manipulate Rayford and Buck into working for him. Should he succeed, that would be a statistically significant 50-percent increase in the size of his Antichrist staff. But a new pilot and a midwestern newspaper editor aren't the most urgent vacancies facing his organization, and no two — or two thousand, or two million — new hires could be nearly enough to begin the task of global domination he has before him.

The truth of the matter — and I find this reassuring — is that no totalitarian regime can ever be adequately staffed. No such evil regime can ever hope to employ enough secret police to monitor every thought and action of every person at all times. Even with unlimited resources to hire such police, the regime would in turn need more monitors to monitor them, and still another layer of monitors to monitor those monitors, ad absurdum.

Totalitarianism of the sort that Nicolae is attempting simply can't be done without a large degree of cooperation. The only way to make it work is to convince and coerce your subjects into monitoring each other. You need them willing and eager to inform on any suspicious or insubordinate speech or behavior. Create a context in which that becomes the norm and you can get by with some manageable number of secret police — though you'll still need far, far more of them than Nicolae has yet even contemplated hiring.

Ensuring this kind of collaborative repression usually involves a system of rewards and punishments. The rewards don't need to be much — increased chocolate rations for those who loyally betray their neighbors and relatives (all of this is more manageable if you're dealing with a desperately impoverished population, the closer to the bottom of Maslow's pyramid the better). The punishments can be random and arbitrary, just as long as they're flamboyantly severe.

It's old-fashioned divide and conquer. You're not so much trying to make people fear your secret police as you are trying to make them fear the neighbors who might turn them in to those secret police. Create a context in which the safest course of action for any individual as an individual is to provide a terrified assistance to their own subjugation and most people will abandon any consideration of the greater good in order to do what is safest and easiest for them individually.

The problem for Nicolae, and for any other would-be totalitarian despot, is that most people is not all people. And not only is resistance inevitable, it's also contagious. And when non-cooperation reaches a tipping point, your absolute rule ceases to be sustainable.

But nobody ever said that being the Antichrist was going to be easy. If Nicolae wants to succeed in his chosen vocation then he needs to commit himself to learning the craft of Antichristing. He has so much to learn and so little time to learn it all that I'd recommend a crash-course of study at the Albert Einstein Institution. Gene Sharp knows more about how repression works than anybody else on the planet and he might be able to get Nicolae up to speed on the scope and demands of the job and on the time-tested Best Practices for totalitarian regimes.

This is why Sharp's research has been translated into so many different languages and why it is read with desperate urgency by every despotic government. Sadly for those despots, but happily for the rest of us, they're unable to find in Sharp's research the loopholes they're looking for. The inescapable lesson of all his studies is that antichrists and pharaohs may arise, but their efforts cannot be sustained in the long term — and not even in the short-term if their subjects refuse to cooperate.

Come to think of it, that's pretty much the same lesson conveyed in religious apocalyptic literature as well, unless one reads it through a distorting lens of the sort that Tim LaHaye attempts to provide.

The unbearable conversation between Hattie and Rayford ends with a return to LaHaye's Kill All Sheep theory of Bible prophecy.

According to LaHaye, the foremost responsibility of Christians is to be on guard against the coming Antichrist. Since that Antichrist, he says, will present himself as a wolf in sheep's clothing, LaHaye advises his readers to be wary of anything sheeplike. A vigilant shepherd, the authors insist, should kill all sheep on sight, just to be safe.

If someone comes along speaking of peace, unity, love or justice, that person might be just using those things as a mask for evil purposes, so presume they are guilty. If someone talks like Christ, they might really just be a lying *Anti-*Christ, so anything that smacks of loving your neighbor, or loving your enemy, or blessed are the poor or the peacemakers should be carefully avoided.

The Lamb's clothing that L&J bring up here involves what they present as an alarm-bell phrase: "the greater good."

"You told him I was a Christian."

"Sure, why not? You tell everyone else. I think he's a Christian, anyway."

"Nicolae Carpathia?"

"Of course! At least he lives by Christian principles. He's always concerned for the greater good. …"

For the authors, you see, "concerned for the greater good" is a clear signal of dangerous evil. For Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, the following clip from Wrath of Khan is a horrifying display of monstrous evil: "What do you think of my solution?"

Now of course it's true that the idea of "the greater good" can be abused and hijacked by malevolent people who are really intent on its opposite. That's no less true of "the greater good" than it is of "peace" or "love your enemy" or "blessed are the poor."

Cult leaders from Jim Jones to Chairman Mao have manipulated their followers through appeals to "the greater good." So have David Cameron and Alan Simpson. Johnny Knoxville regularly appeals to something like the notion of "the greater good" as a means of convincing his dearest friends to subject themselves to hilariously unspeakable torments. "Dulce et decorum est, Steve-O, now bend over."

And it's even true that we could guard against every such abusive usurping of the idea by simply rejecting the idea itself. Kill All Sheep. We could simply oppose every appeal to "the greater good" or the common good because it is an appeal to the greater good or the common good — which is what L&J are suggesting here by making this idea a hallmark of their Big Bad.

If we followed this advice, it would go a long way toward guarding against cults and communists. And taxes. And armies. And democracies, constitutions, rights, schools, libraries, schools, religious congregations, fire brigades, police forces, markets, roads, sewers, towns, neighbors and communities.

That seems like a lot to give up. So before I sign on with the authors' anti-greater-good political philosophy, I'd like to know what they intend as a replacement.

Left Behind

Previous Post

November 12, 2010

Fix the deficit: Cure diabetes

Next Post

November 19, 2010 Al Mohler: Seller of defective maps

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category class warfare evangelicals Iraq Left Behind Mammon music Uncategorized

Select a Month October 2026 September 2026 August 2026 July 2026 June 2026 May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 September 2008 August 2008 July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007 July 2007 June 2007 May 2007 April 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 December 2006 November 2006 October 2006 September 2006 August 2006 July 2006 June 2006 May 2006 April 2006 March 2006 February 2006 January 2006 December 2005 November 2005 October 2005 September 2005 August 2005 July 2005 June 2005 May 2005 April 2005 March 2005 February 2005 January 2005 December 2004 November 2004 October 2004 September 2004 August 2004 July 2004 June 2004 May 2004 April 2004 March 2004 February 2004 January 2004 December 2003 November 2003 October 2003 September 2003

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

Who said, "Here am I, send me"?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Ezekiel Jeremiah Elijah Isaiah