Piety and Polemic in Evangelical Prophecy Fiction, 1995–2000

Abstract

No one studying the impact of Evangelicalism’s most successful cultural products could doubt their mass-market appeal both within and beyond the ‘conservative revolution’ of contemporary America. With concerns to fashion the spirituality of their readers, the Left Behind novels (1995–2007) represent the ‘first outlines of a fully commercialised, fully mediatised Christian blockbuster culture’. The series dramatizes the end-time expectations of a popular evangelical system of eschatological thinking, known as dispensational pre-millennialism. This system maintains that Christ could return imminently to ‘rapture’ true believers to heaven; that this rapture will be followed by a catastrophic seven-year period known as the ‘Great Tribulation’, in which the Antichrist will rise to power to persecute those who, despite being ‘left behind’, have converted to evangelical faith; and that the tribulation will end with the ‘glorious appearing’ of Christ, the last judgement and the inauguration of a thousand-year reign of peace known as the millennium. Despite the complexity of its theology, the series has sold over sixty-five million copies since the publication of their eponymous debut novel in 1995, and has been identified as the best-selling fiction series in American literary history. After 1998, successive instalments in the series topped the New York Times best-seller lists. The seventh novel in the series, The Indwelling (2000), topped the best-seller lists of the New York Times, Publishers Weekly, Wall Street Journal and USA Today.