Jesus loves you more than you will know

Last updated on: July 20, 2016 at 6:36 pm by Fred Clark

Jesus loves you more than you will know 2016-07-20T18:36:46-04:00 Fred Clark

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• At first I thought this was a long-anticipated piece of breaking news — “End-times author of ‘Left Behind’ breaks down …” — but then realized it was just a puffy profile of Jerry Jenkins, “End-times author of ‘Left Behind’ breaks down prophesy [sic] — and fiction.”

Despite the verb/noun mixup in that headline, Billy Hallowell of Deseret News is commendably far more precise than most in explaining that Left Behind represents only one peculiar sectarian version of what one peculiar, sectarian segment of Christians believe. But this is a book-tour interview, and he otherwise lets Jenkins talk, unchallenged. So it’s full of weirdly false claims like this: “He explained he and LaHaye had no intention of trying to convince anyone their position was right.”

But at least Hallowell doesn’t follow the pattern Alissa Wilkinson imitates in her Washington Post piece on the Left Behind series, assuming that the series was popular, so therefore it must have been an exciting page-turner. Here’s Wilkinson describing the books as: “… highly engaging reading for a mass market, fast-moving fiction with elements drawn from sci-fi, romance, disaster porn, and political and spy novels. Left Behind has the code-cracking conspiracy feel of a Dan Brown novel. … The traditional genre trappings and the mystery of what will happen next keep the pages turning.”

This is obscenely inaccurate, indefensibly distant from anything remotely true. Wilkinson, who teaches at a conservative evangelical college and is a film critic for Christianity Today,* seems to feel she has to repeat this nonsense as a defense of the series’ evangelical readership. If she pretends the books were engaging and capably written, then the tens of millions of white evangelicals who devoured them are excused for overlooking the books’ anti-biblical theology, their vicious misogyny, their sociopathic narcissism, and their John Birch Society political delirium.

Honestly acknowledging that these books are a relentlessly dull slog and a shoddy, incoherent mess would have the opposite effect — suggesting that this huge “Christian” audience apparently loved these books despite all of that, willing to put up with the boring, clichéd prose and the confusedly arbitrary “plot” just so long as they were able to find the heresy, misogyny, self-absorption and Bircher-madness they craved.

Or, at best, that those readers swallowed both the boring, horrible, story-mangling and the hateful attitudes because they belonged to a subculture that required them to do so. I mean, it’s not that they like gross incompetence mixed with narcissism and hate, but they had no choice. Buying and absorbing and being shaped by — and pretending to like — all of that was simply their religious duty. It was something their churches constantly taught them they had to do in order to fulfill the paramount Christian obligation to vote against Hillary and her Satanic baby-killers. (Sorry, that defense of these books is starting to blur together with the current form of the same argument in defense of a similar evangelical enthusiasm.)

• Speaking of profiles of authors with shameful histories … if you haven’t yet read Jane Mayer’s piece on The Art of the Deal writer Tony Schwartz — “Donald Trump’s Ghostwriter Tells All” — don’t miss it. Schwartz spent more than a year with Trump in putting that book together. He knows the man:

“Trump has been written about a thousand ways from Sunday, but this fundamental aspect of who he is doesn’t seem to be fully understood,” Schwartz told me. “It’s implicit in a lot of what people write, but it’s never explicit — or, at least, I haven’t seen it. And that is that it’s impossible to keep him focused on any topic, other than his own self-aggrandizement, for more than a few minutes, and even then …” Schwartz trailed off, shaking his head in amazement. He regards Trump’s inability to concentrate as alarming in a presidential candidate. “If he had to be briefed on a crisis in the Situation Room, it’s impossible to imagine him paying attention over a long period of time,” he said.

… This year, Schwartz has heard some argue that there must be a more thoughtful and nuanced version of Donald Trump that he is keeping in reserve for after the campaign. “There isn’t,” Schwartz insists. “There is no private Trump.” This is not a matter of hindsight. While working on The Art of the Deal, Schwartz kept a journal in which he expressed his amazement at Trump’s personality, writing that Trump seemed driven entirely by a need for public attention. “All he is is ‘stomp, stomp, stomp’ — recognition from outside, bigger, more, a whole series of things that go nowhere in particular.”

Read the whole thing. And organize.

• Mookie lives. (Yale has rehired the man, citing “the unique circumstances of this matter.”)

• Companies like to rely on “subcontractors” and “permatemps” to outsource their legal and ethical responsibilities and to suppress both wages and workers’ ability to seek better treatment. It’s a sleazy and transparently dishonest tactic, but it’s been an effective one because it allows employers to claim that — technically those people don’t work for us.

Pope John Paul II called bullshit on that 35 years ago in Laborem Exercens. And now the Obama administration and Secretary of Labor Tom Perez are trying to close this legal loophole as well by treating contract workers, long-term temps, and other “indirect” employees the same as those workers directly employed by the company.

The use of that terminology — “direct” and “indirect” employees — would have made the late pope very happy.

• Here’s a timely song by the Lemonheads, which this week I’m singing as Ms. Robinson. It’s a cover song, of course, originally written by Melania Trump.

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* Christianity Today is a publication that believes gay and lesbian couples are “destructive to society.”

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