Invest in Jesus: Neoliberalism and the Left Behind Novels

Invest in Jesus: Neoliberalism and the Left behind NovelsAuthor(s): Andrew StrombeckSource: Cultural Critique, No. 64 (Autumn, 2006), pp. 161-195Published by: University of Minnesota PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4489261 .Accessed: 04/02/2015 15:46

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INVEST IN JESUS NEOLIBERALISM AND THE LEFT BEHIND NOVELS

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In case of the Rapture, car will be driverless.

-Contemporary bumper sticker

In case of the Rapture, can I have your car?

-Another contemporary bumper sticker

Wildly selling throughout the past decade, the Left Behind series-fifteen novels that narrate an evangelical Christian apocalypse-has emerged as the most visible symbol of a thriving Chris- tian popular culture, and, by extension, an American evangelicalism that has sounded particularly triumphant in the wake of the 2004 election.' Despite their wide popularity, the books have only recently become objects of critical inquiry; as Melani McAlister notes, the books have been "all but invisible in liberal and intellectual circles" (774). When cultural critics have addressed the books, they tend to accept them as exactly what the authors claim them to be-straightforward extensions of a narrowly conceived Christian evangelical culture. Of course, this interpretation has some merit, especially given the conservative, evangelical credentials of the books' coauthors Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins.2 Nevertheless, this overreliance on authorial inten- tion tends to obstruct a full critique of the books as complex cultural objects. The purpose of this essay is to expand the critical framework in which the books have been read so far. I argue that, as much as the books reflect a narrow, Christian Right agenda, they also reinforce a more hegemonic ideology, the widely shared devotion to market capitalism known as neoliberalism. Although the novels, with their seemingly antimodern fundamentalism, seem to occupy the margins of

Cultural Critique 64-Fall 2006-Copyright 2006 Regents of the University of Minnesota


162 ANDREW STROMBECK

a certain America, in their devotion to free-market capitalism they occupy the center.

The two bumper stickers that I use as epigraphs humorously evoke the conflicted relationship between the premillennialist theology of the Left Behind books and the consumer culture in which it operates. While one would expect the series to celebrate the solemn sentiments of the former sticker, the books in fact take great joy in the more crass impulse of the latter. In the first volume, Left Behind, the apocalypse is a financial opportunity, a good time to pick up a car on the cheap. This consumerism reflects the books' own position as products of global capitalism, marketed and distributed using the same mechanisms as Microsoft software or Disney movies. The series enjoys a wide distribution; the sleek-looking, colorful books surface prominently everywhere, from Wal-Mart to Costco to Borders, dis- played for maximum promotion at the end of the aisle.3 This wide distribution, I argue, echoes the books' ideas; while the books do further a narrow conservative agenda, they simultaneously reinforce more widely accepted themes of markets and privatization. The books' cultural work extends beyond a mere recycling of a Christian agenda, and instead manifests a complex, but coherent, cultural logic. Reading the books in this light foregrounds not only their distinctiveness within a history of apocalyptic fundamentalism but also their continuity with the larger American culture. The ordinariness of neoliberalism organizes the apocalyptic imagination; visions of the apocalypse fuel the desire for neoliberal management. In the Left Behind books, the apocalypse is largely not transformative; throughout the books' upheaval and disaster, markets persist as the most efficient way of resisting totalitarian evil. And yet the smooth operation of neoliberal ideology ultimately proves unable to contain the books' suffering and destruction. Their devotion to market logic even in the face of catastrophe ends up demonstrating-if briefly-the shortcomings of neoliberalism's totalized vision.

APOCALYPSE OR NOW?

Building on a tradition of premillennialist theology, the Left Behind books begin with the "Rapture" (or disappearance), of all the world's


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Christians.4 The eponymous first book describes the chaos resulting from driverless cars, engineerless trains, and pilotless planes. After this apocalyptic inaugural event, the rest of the books relate the story of the Tribulation Force, a band of newly converted Christians (after the rapture, the conversions continue, assisted by helpful videotapes left by Raptured pastors) who endure and resist the Antichrist's global domination. The Antichrist is a Romanian businessman named Nico- lae Carpathia who rises to world power based on his charisma and "such an intimate knowledge of the United Nations that it was if he had invented and developed the organization himself" (Left Behind 246). In the aftermath of the world-shaking disappearances, Carpathia becomes the secretary-general of the U.N., gradually converting it into a world government called the Global Community. At first bene- ficent and humanitarian, the Global Community mutates over the course of the books into a totalitarian state with full control over the world's media and military. More importantly for this essay, the Global Community maintains a state-run economy; after the fourth book, no one can buy or sell anything without "the Mark of the Beast," a tat- tooed identification that the Christians refuse to accept.5 These Chris- tians-the members of the Tribulation Force-work to keep themselves safe while disseminating information about Christianity. In the post- apocalyptic era, they form a kind of underground resistance against the domination of the Global Community, a resistance that includes establishing an alternate, free-market economy for the Christians. In narrating these stories, the books offer readers action-packed pages, with enough car chases, gunfights, fire-breathing prophets, and narrowly escaped deaths to keep even the most distracted reader interested.6

The majority of reviews in the American mainstream press position the books as part of the Christian Right's political mission, especially its connection to the Bush administration. Such an interpretation is offered even by seasoned cultural critic Joan Didion, whose piece in The New York Review of Books can be roughly summarized by its title: "Mr. Bush and the Divine." Similar readings surface in academic criticism of the books, notably in Peter Yoonsuk Paik's recent asser- tion that the books represent one of the "political fantasies behind much of the popular support for the neo-imperialist policies of the second Bush administration" (1).7 Paik's reading characterizes the books as the product of, on the one hand, an American consumer


164 j ANDREW STROMBECK

culture "whose primary concern is the satisfaction of fleshly and mate- rial appetites" (3) and, on the other, of a rabid apocalypticism that welcomes wars as a fulfillment of prophecy (13). Other readers, notably Gershom Gorenburg, see the books primarily in terms of evangelical wish fulfillment. For their readers, Gorenburg argues, the Left Behind books offer the "delicious satisfaction of being right," a sense that those labeled "weirdos" by mainstream culture have won (33). Melani McAlister is one of the books' most astute readers, perhaps as a result of her long work on evangelical apocalypticism. McAlister criticizes accounts that foreground the authors' conservative credentials and, as a result, view the books as a "revival of 1980s-style political fundamentalism," as symbolized by Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority (781). But by interpreting the books as primarily "about" evangelical support for a Palestine-free Israel, McAlister perpetuates the idea that the books function as propaganda for the Christian Right. Although these readings all have a degree of truth, they obscure the books' complexity, a complexity foregrounded by Amy Johnson Frykholm's book- length study of Left Behind readers. With Frykholm, I argue that the Left Behind books represent the intersection of a number of cultural vectors; among these, fundamentalist Christianity looms large but is by no means totalizing.

In America, the apocalypse has always been a metaphor, as Robert Fuller demonstrates in his remarkable history of premillennialist theology, Naming the Antichrist. The Antichrist has been yoked to everything from Native Americans to Soviet Communism. In the period after 1970, as Fuller shows, the Antichrist has been primarily invoked against the products of both the liberal state and late capitalism. Writers like Hal Lindsey and Peter Lalonde locate the influence of the Antichrist in education, technology, the global economy, and multiculturalism. Computer technology, for example, has been invoked as the mechanism for the Antichrist's domination; the mark of the beast becomes an implanted microchip. In most respects, the Left Behind books remain consistent with the general outlines of recent premillennialist theology: the Antichrist is a charismatic figure; the Antichrist forms a one-world religion; the Antichrist creates a global economy; the Antichrist is a European leader who uses the United Nations. But the books deviate from some of the general contours of the premillennialist vision expressed by, say, Lindsey. It is here, I argue,


INVEST IN JESUS 165

that the books demonstrate their commitment to neoliberal values. First, while the books decry international financiers, the logic of free- market capitalism saturates their narratives. Second, the books refuse to damn the technological products of multinational capitalism-there is no fear of supercomputers here. Instead, the books' Christian characters use every technological advantage available, including sport- utility vehicles, satellite cell phones, and solar-powered wireless laptops. Finally, the books refuse to condemn multiculturalism and in fact emphasize the multicultural composition of their protagonist group. The overall effect of these choices is to emphasize fundamentalism's continuity, not discontinuity, with postmodernity. The books establish their Christian protagonists as typical late-capitalist subjects. Premillennialist theology emerges as merely one thread of a complex tapestry, a tapestry woven on the loom of neoliberalism. McAlister, among others, views these changes-multiculturalism and technology-as part of the books' fundamentalism, designed to widen the books' appeal by establishing their characters as "more modern than modern," thus dispelling the reputation of fundamentalists as "old- fashioned and unsophisticated" (783). Although McAlister nods to the cultural work these modifications accomplish, she locates the books' "core" with fundamentalist doctrine. In contrast to McAlister's view that the books represent merely an updated version of an old narrative, I argue that the books exhibit a more intact, more coherent cultural logic. In particular, I agree with Frykholm that the characters' modernity reflects changes in Christian evangelical culture as much as it does a "marketing scheme" for fundamentalist ideas. As Paul Apostolidis argues, this evangelical culture has come to identify with the petit bourgeois class that is the primary beneficiary of neoliberal politics.

In the Left Behind series, then, the apocalypse is not simplistic. The books' apparent one-dimensionality, as propaganda for the Chris- tian Right, belies their complicated, contradictory richness. They combine scenes of Biblical interpretation, horror-movie imagery, spy novels, conspiracy theory, and family-rearing doctrine, to name a few. All of this makes for texts that writhe and buckle in culturally difficult ways. They struggle to contain issues of sexuality, gender, race, globalization, privatization, interpretation, and mass-mediation. Their narratives work to incorporate disparate agendas, all while churning



out a story catchy enough to capture the imagination of millions. A scene from the second book, Tribulation Force, will serve to demonstrate briefly this complexity. Set in Nicolae Carpathia's United Nations office, it describes a meeting between Carpathia and Cameron Wil- liams, a key member of the Tribulation Force. Carpathia announces his plans to purchase major media-"the great newspapers of the world, the television networks, the wire services"-and to use this media as a vehicle for the dissemination of his ideas. "If ever the time was right to have a positive influence on the media, it is now" (Tribulation Force 128). Because Williams is a leading reporter for the Newsweek- like Global Weekly, Carpathia asks him to run one of these media outlets. What Carpathia proposes-and eventually accomplishes-is government ownership of the media, since Carpathia is then the secretary-general of the United Nations. This scene indexes key political fears on the Right: concentrated global power and a conspiring "liberal" media. With his plan for global disarmament, Carpathia is, at least early in the series, nothing if not liberal. But by making the journalist Williams a key member of the Tribulation Force, LaHaye and Jenkins complicate an easy demonization of the media.8 More- over, as I will emphasize later, Carpathia's choice of Williams is part of a strange pattern of the Antichrist hiring Christians, a pattern that reflects the books' neoliberal adherence to market solutions. Williams is the best candidate for the job, the logic goes, and so of course he should be hired. While the Antichrist's identity as a businessman might seem to contradict the books' adherence to market values, it in fact demonstrates their complex relationship with capitalism. The books enjoy Williams's professional success even as they distrust the organizations that make this success possible. Finally, the idea of media consolidation here occurs within the historical context of conservative-driven deregulation of the media in the United States, which has left not liberals like Carpathia in control but conserva- tives like Fox's Rupert Murdoch and Clear Channel Communica- tion's Lowry Mays.

The apocalypse is now. In narrating events that occur in the near future, the books offer their readers a kind of "uncanny" connection to everyday events. The world they present is the contemporary world but a contemporary world whose characteristics have morphed to reveal prophecy. In a sense, the books describe what Derrida has called


INVEST IN JESUS 167

"spectral" time, a time that is "out of joint" because it is neither the future nor the present but a kind of ghostly future that haunts the present. In adapting prophetic time to the contemporary world, the books deliver an uncertain recognition for their readers, a world that indexes the empirical experience of late-capitalist life. The present shudders and buckles in the books, visible here, visible there, but always re- ceding. The apocalypse becomes a way to understand contemporary political problems, and in particular to unify the seemingly extreme elements of the Right with the more "centrist" (read: "hegemonic") philosophy of neoliberalism.

THE POLITICAL RATIONALITY OF NEOLIBERALISM

In a recent article, Wendy Brown points to a definition of neoliberalism that extends beyond the conventional understanding of the term as a set of economic policies. Although neoliberalism has been heavily critiqued in antiglobalization circles for the havoc it wreaks on debtor nations, Brown finds it operating more widely, as a form of governance that supersedes liberal democracy. Brown argues that neoliberalism, beyond simply privatizing state functions, in fact promotes markets more grandly, as "the organizing and regulative principle of the state and society" (11). For neoliberals, market rationality should penetrate into every corner of contemporary existence, placing state and individual decisions on the same continuum. Under neoliberalism, not only does the state perceive markets as the best solution to social problems-the best way to distribute wealth and democracy most widely-but ultimately, the state's role is only to construct citizens as "entrepreneurial actors" in everyday life, to the point where moral and ethical actions are framed in market terms.9 Neoliberalism "configur(es) morality entirely as a matter of rational deliberation about costs, benefits, and consequences" (15). In Brown's reading, neoliberalism is as much social philosophy as economic philosophy. As such, it has a set of values and a culture, both of which must be ideo- logically promoted for its economics to succeed. This means that neoliberalism is flexible enough to cannibalize multiple forms of social life; its values have the capacity to encompass both Clintonian cen- trists and Reagan-Bush neoconservatives (though, as Brown observes,



not without producing tensions).1'0 This also means that neoliberal culture idealizes those social actors who best conform to its mandates- and who most benefit from them-the global petit bourgeoisie of neoliberal professionals.

The Left Behind books are suffused with neoliberal values-specifically, those around market rationality and the validation of a global meritocracy. Even as the books seemingly decry the global community that many neoliberals (like George Soros) claim to want, they reinforce the political rationality that Brown describes, casting its characters as rational market actors first, Christians second. In the midst of apocalypse, good is privatized and evil state-run. The ideology of market reliance surfaces in the books' professionally successful characters, in their love of the technological symbols of global capitalism (SUVs, cell phones, high-powered laptops) and, in the face of a global state-run economy, the use of markets by good characters. Ultimately, too, the books establish faith itself as a market-based decision; believing Christians are simply rational economic actors making a good choice given the available options. In doing so, the books reflect on their own position as products of Christian capitalism and work to validate their own presence in the culture. But they also allow their readers to imagine the global system through the lens of a rigidly market-based ideology. The books perform "cognitive mapping," what Fredric Jameson describes as narratives that strive for "self-consciousness about the global totality," a totality that can be only dimly perceived (2)."

THE MILITIA COMPOUND AND THE GATED COMMUNITY

On the one hand, then, the Left Behind books occupy the margins, the extremist ideology of the far (Christian) Right. On the other hand, they occupy the very center, the adherence to market ideology that forms the core of contemporary American politics. In melding the far Right with neoliberalism, then, the Left Behind books simultaneously hail the subjects of the militia compound and the gated community.12 These two spaces could not be farther apart. One occupies the far margins, the remote states, the extreme edges of belief. The other seems ever closer to the symbolic heart of American public discourse, is saturated with anticrime, profamily, privatized discourse,


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and is contiguous with the corporate sprawl that covers more and more of the country's surface. Militias are nowhere; gated communities are everywhere. Militia groups symbolize a reactionary, far-Right ideology built around self-reliance and violence. Gated communities- which Linda Kintz calls the premier site of American evangelical Christianity-represent a self-dubbed "mainstream" America built around rising incomes and property values. The groups share some core beliefs, especially around distrust of government. But while the militia member resists and fears the global, the gated-community resident-or neoliberal professional-necessarily participates in global trade, both in working and consuming. In negotiating between these two ideologies, the books index a complicated set of beliefs.

In both spaces, walls protect against a catastrophe that is simultaneously part of the future and present, a catastrophe imagined as both urban Other and bureaucratic totalitarianism. Both the militia compound and gated community respond to apocalypse with a vocabulary of security and escape. For the militia member, this vocabulary consists of stockpiled weapons, stored food, and remote compounds; for the gated-community resident, this vocabulary consists of rug- ged sport-utility vehicles, satellite phones, and unlimited wealth. The series' protagonist group, the Tribulation Force, indexes both spaces. In doing so, this group of Christians embodies both the survivalist and the neoliberal professional. On the one hand, the Tribulation Force employs the methods of the right-wing survivalist movement: self- reliance, security obsession, stealth, stockpiling, violence. But on the other hand, the members of the Tribulation Force engage in all of the fantasies inherent to the neoliberal professional: workplace achieve- ment, high-level recognition, unlimited finances, international travel, and occupation of elite spaces.

Given the Tribulation Force's name and revolutionary action, the participants' resemblance to militia members comes as no surprise. They stockpile food, create remote "safe houses" and set up an alter- native distribution network. More generally, as Gorenburg observes, the Left Behind series depends very much on militia-themed beliefs, the fantasies about Armageddon that have circulated through groups like the Militia of Montana, the Order, and Posse Commitatus (34). In locating the Antichrist in the United Nations, the books fictionally confirm longstanding militia beliefs that the U.N. is bent on world


170 1 ANDREW STROMBECK

takeover. The books' warnings against one-world currencies and one- world religions fall into a similar vein. Militia groups believe in an already-present end to the United States, an end that must be defended against with stockpiled weapons and pure beliefs. In the books, militias are structurally equivalent to Christians; by Armageddon, the series' eleventh book, militias are one of three groups-besides Christians- who have rejected the Antichrist's mark of the beast (the others are "devout Muslims" and "practicing Jews who did not believe in Jesus as messiah" [233]). The books affirm militia members' own apocalyptic fantasies; when the one-world government comes, when the black helicopters start flying, the militias will not give up their inde- pendence. The books suggest that their readers be physically as well as spiritually prepared. The enemy is coming, and one must take to the hills with weapons in order to survive. This idea is paralyzing but enjoyable. It is enjoyable in the way that the eighties paramilitary fantasy film Red Dawn is enjoyable, or in the way that Tom Clancy- inspired video games like Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow are enjoyable: the fantasy of being pitted, alone with one's resources, against an all-powerful enemy.

But if the books draw on themes beloved of the far Right, they articulate these themes within the confines of the gated community.13 Describing the gated community as the symbolic space of a certain evangelical Christianity, Kintz links militia isolation with these more conventional spaces of late capitalism:

Far-right groups escaping to "pure" places like the Pacific Northwest are only the most extreme version of this phenomenon based on achieving a sense of security that is highly dependent on purging difference and reconstructing communities of the same. These are handy structures, as well, for enabling global corporations and the wealthy to jettison their public responsibilities and any kind of commitment to the public good. In fact, that commitment has been redefined in terms of supply-side economics to mean that one's obligation to the social good is to become wealthy (108).

As she does throughout her book, Kintz here acknowledges the continuity between a neoliberal orientation toward government and the isolationism of the militia compound. She views the gated community as part of the same system of ideas, grounded in a desire for security, a security that translates into a division between the pure


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and the different. These communities, which have proliferated across the American landscape since the mid-eighties, control access to neigh- borhoods through walls, cameras, and security guards. As Edward Blakey and Mary Snyder argue, these communities represent merely the latest evolution in the idea of the suburbs. They function here, then, as shorthand for a host of (white) American practices of flight from the inner city, resistance to taxation, and faith in market-based solutions.

Contradiction between the two spaces arises primarily in their respective visions of the global. Whereas militias maintain a far-Right paranoia about global management in any form, gated communities implicitly reinforce a globalized, neoliberal vision. While the gated- community resident may maintain a distrust of government, they are clearly not "off the grid" when it comes to globalization, for the neoliberal professional's purchases, employment, and services all depend on global capitalism (a fact immediately visible at a Wal-Mart dur- ing a dockworkers' strike). The contrast between these two positions forms one of the Left Behind books' major contradictions. Despite their anxiety about one-world control, the books ultimately reinforce the neoliberal doctrine of privatization. The books simultaneously decry global control-the United Nations, a global religion, a universal currency-and celebrate global mobility. (As historian Mark Driscoll points out, although demonized as an enemy of American sovereignty, the United Nations has in recent years acted in concert with organizations like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.) They rail against "international financiers" one page and reinforce a privatized vision consistent with the IMF on the next. Ultimately, as I will discuss later, the books resolve this contradiction in their approach to subjectivity, as economic globalization is displaced onto cultural globalization. In reading the books, readers can imagine a world popu- lated by people who sound just like them; identity, in these books, is often a matter of switching appearances. The books here participate in utopian ideals of border crossing; even as they upend globalism in one section, they reassert it in this strange narrative of sameness.

The Left Behind books establish the suburbs as the proper place of fundamentalist Christianity and reinforce the gated community's flight from an urban Other. The residents of gated communities are insulated from, as Mike Davis puts it, "'unsavory' groups and individuals, even



crowds in general" (224). In his landmark reading of "Fortress LA," Davis explains that the desire for security derives from a fear of the apocalypse, specifically that form of apocalypse symbolized by the urban riots of the sixties. Davis reads Los Angeles as regulating these fears through the segmentation, privatization, and surveillance of public space, for the benefit of a middle class now enjoying a prestige symbol-security-once restricted to the very rich. Although gated- community advocates justify their high security in terms of crime rates, Davis argues that security has more to do with avoiding the apocalypse: these security measures are meant to keep out an under- class Other who threatens property, livelihood, and ultimately life. As Lauren Berlant notes, the secure, privatized space of the gated community has as its opposite the "culturally vital, multiethnic city" (5). The city, in her reading, represents everything that the "residential enclave where the 'family lives"' does not, including public services, diversity, and democratic participation. But the city represents the gated community's Other in another sense; the city, and its multiethnic residents, represents exactly that which drives fearful residents into gated communities. Often, as Davis implies, the city represents the apocalypse.

The Left Behind books describe the apocalypse in the language of Fortress LA. After the Rapture occurs, the world endures plagues and tribulations-most of the Left Behind series concerns itself with outlining these plagues, which include worldwide war, a mega- earthquake, scorpion-like locusts, blood-filled seas, and so on. But the first plague to visit the planet post-Rapture is one familiar to anyone watching television in the summer of 1965 or the spring of 1992: "The news was full of crime, looting, people taking advantage of the chaos" (Left Behind 207). The first victim of post-Rapture chaos is suburban security. After a break-in at the house of key members of the Tribulation Force-Rayford and Chloe Steele-pastor Bruce Barnes notes, "It's becoming epidemic. It's as if the inner city has moved to the suburbs. We're no safer here any more" (Left Behind 265). The word epidemic here links everyday fear of crime to the widespread horror of the apocalypse. As elsewhere, the books establish the apocalypse as an intensification of contemporary social problems. When Barnes later proposes building an underground shelter as protection from future horrors, the specter of "looting" haunts the idea. If the backyard fallout


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shelter organized a certain fifties suburban imaginary, the "safe room" organizes the post-sixties suburban imaginary. Davis writes, "Resi- dential architects are borrowing design secrets from overseas embas- sies and military command posts. One of the features most in demand is the 'terrorist-proof security room' concealed in the houseplan and accessed by sliding panels and secret doors"' (248). Fictionalized in the 2002 David Fincher movie Panic Room, these rooms represent the premier symbol of privatized security, the place where the home becomes a bunker. In the Left Behind books, the suburban home liter- ally becomes a bunker, as Rayford Steele explains:

Picture a subdivision, a housing development maybe thirty years old that has been tossed into the blender.... We took over half of a badly damaged duplex, two homes in one. We expanded a cellar to make an underground hiding place, which we didn't need-at least not that we knew of-until now. We rigged our own makeshift well and solar power plant, and took various routes to the place that made it look as if we could be headed anywhere." (The Indwelling 338)

This passage conflates the militia compound and the suburban home, as suburban space becomes heavily fortified. As Davis demonstrates, this ideal represents the limit logic of security-the ultimate in forti- fication against evil. The idea of immorality and evil yokes the Anti- christ's forces with more ordinary fears of crime. The paramilitary fantasy organizing militia life converges with the security fantasy organizing gated community life. In the books, the home becomes a fortress, with all of the equipment for defending against an apocalyptic Other. For the characters, the equipment of security condenses with rhetoric of home life:

"Closing the door, she checked the motion detector, then sat before the periscope. ... She rather liked having the contraption in the middle of her home. It satisfied some inner need to protect-control, Buck would have teased-her friends and loved ones, the more than two hundred who now lived underground in San Diego" (Armageddon 26).

But the books do more than establish well-defended suburban locales; they also allow their characters to travel the globe while remaining secure. They do so with the expensive technologies that symbolize the petit bourgeois professional. Throughout the books, characters make frequent use of sport-utility vehicles, satellite phones,



and high-powered laptop computers. For the neoliberal subject, these technologies symbolize both mobility and security. They take the safe house-if not the panic room-on the road. For vehicles, the characters choose only the heaviest, most expensive SUVs available: Hum- mers, Range Rovers, and Toyota Land Cruisers. Having just acquired a white Hummer, Cameron Williams marvels over its power ("the gigantic Hummer propelling itself easily over the jagged terrain") and observes to another character that the car could "crush" one of the Global Community's more compact cars (The Mark 106).14 With their aggressively designed exteriors and reputation for use in military con- texts, these vehicles epitomize security. For these characters-as, arguably, for the gated-community resident-SUVs become an extension of their limitless success, coupled with their endless need for more security. Satellite phones function similarly; in the books, all team members are outfitted with ultrasecure phones that work everywhere. Satellite phones are another expensive symbol of global mobility; they work in any country without any need to rely on local infrastructure. Finally, the team's reliance on high-powered, wireless-equipped laptops offers a third symbol of mobile security.15 Not only do neoliberal professionals physically rely on laptops, but, arguably the rhetoric of information technology has emphasized a utopian vision of borderless mobility, a vision enjoyed only by members of the global petit bourgeoisie.

The gates defend against an Other: inside, the chosen; outside, the unbelieving masses. These unbelieving masses divide into two groups: first, the Global Community forces-those employed by the Antichrist-and second, all nonbelievers, which in the beginning of the series means simply means not believing and later means taking the mark of the beast. The Tribulation Force builds safe houses to keep out the Global Community forces, much as Winston and Julia rent a room in Nineteen Eighty-Four to escape Big Brother. But in the Left Behind books, Big Brother and the proles get all mixed up; the safe houses here keep out everyone. In the books' apocalyptic imaginary, the Other is paradoxically that which causes and suffers the most from the disaster of apocalypse. The books have trouble differentiating between members of the Antichrist's organization and suffering non- Christians. Apocalyptic Otherness condenses with more ordinary Otherness. One of the books' most intriguing scenes in this regard is


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one from Desecration where Chloe Williams finds a group of inner- city Christians living in an abandoned Chicago bank vault. This group-survivors of a ministry called The Place-has lived separately from the books' other Christians, who are lead by the Tribulation Force and bound together by the Tribulation Force's Web site.16 These characters remain outside of this network until Williams discovers them. They are all "poor blacks and Latinos" and all former "pimps, whores, crack heads, drunks, players, hustlers, mothers with no husbands, and children with no fathers" (290). These characters represent the series' only attempt to represent the urban Other, a figure they otherwise relegate to "looting." To find these characters, Chloe has to venture outside the safe house and actually walk the streets of (deserted) Chi- cago. For a moment, it seems as though the world outside the gates is not as threatening as it seemed, that perhaps the books are capable of recognizing an (apocalyptic) Other. Even if the books treat these characters in a patronizing, stereotypical manner, this scene nevertheless offers a glimpse beyond the rigid exclusions of the gated community. But readers learn later that the group from The Place actually did pose a threat-they helped "compromise" the Tribulation Force's safe house. Two books later, Williams thinks, "It was [she] who had stum- bled upon The Place in Chicago with its exciting band of self-taught believers. On the other hand, all that activity, their moving in with the Trib Force, was the first step in compromising the safe house" (Armageddon 42). If, at the books' beginning, characters fret about the inner city moving to the suburbs, when the inner city moves to the safe house, the results are just as bad.

THE NEOLIBERAL PROFESSIONALS OF LEFT BEHIND

The gates protect a particular form of life; the citizens that live in these gated communities are the global petit bourgeoisie, the managers and professionals who represent the world's skilled workers, those who succeed under neoliberalism. For these workers, the market is a meritocracy, with the best jobs, and the most spoils, going to the most skilled. Left Behind replicates this logic by endowing its Christian characters with overwhelming competence. In the books, professionally successful Christians bear out a market ideology, a market that



naturally favors Christians. As McAlister observes, these Christians are "tough and modern people," as competent with technology as their secular peers (777). But they also tend to exceed these peers by leaps and bounds; in the series, the Christians are the highest-skilled and highest-paid characters on the planet. Cameron Williams is a star journalist. Rayford Steele is a successful pilot, skilled to the point where he is one of only six pilots qualified to fly the Antichrist's Air Force One. Other characters are expert programmers, Nobel Prize-winning botanists, head nurses, document forgers, and disguise specialists. The book registers the high skill of these characters in several ways: first, as with Williams, the Antichrist's organization hires them for important positions. Programmer David Hassid, for example, is a high-level director for the Global Community. Second, team members are able to outsmart the Global Community in near-preposterous ways. Has- sid has bugged both the Antichrist's palace and plane, and manages to listen in on conversations without even the suggestion of being caught. Hassid can also perform amazing feats of hacking, such as controlling the security system of a Chicago skyscraper from Bagh- dad. Finally, the books allow the characters to move through privi- leged spaces: first-class cabins, world headquarters, high-end hotels, and so on. Despite the chaos wrought by the apocalypse, these characters move around the world with ease. In a sense, they are much like the rich in Sdo Paolo, who fly helicopters from place to place in order to avoid the city's large poor population-a state of affairs that sometimes seems the logical end of Davis's Fortress LA.17

In his analysis of the "network society," a reading of neoliberalism's economy, society, and culture, Manuel Castells describes the development of a global elite-the dominant financial, technological, and managerial professionals-whose "segmentation and disorienta- tion" of the masses serve as twin mechanisms of domination (446). Castells finds two major characteristics of these elites' social organization on a global scale. First, they seclude themselves within elite spaces, whose ultimate manifestation and symbol is the gated community (447). Second, they maintain globally consistent spaces and lifestyles through which they operate--corporate hotel rooms, airport VIP lounges, first-class cabins, all of which, in d~cor and access to communications technology, "induce abstraction from the surrounding


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world" and serve as "symbols of an international culture whose identity is not linked to any specific society but to membership of the managerial circles of the informational economy across a global cultural spectrum" (447). This is the symbolic imaginary presented in the Left Behind series, the fantasy of global mobility and management that originates with an elite (of which LaHaye and Jenkins are members), and whose identity, as Paul Apostolidis argues, is consistent with a Christian evangelical identity.18

But what reader are these superskilled characters designed to appeal to? Do they perhaps provide a fantasy for readers left out of economic and political success? Joan Didion observes of the Left Behind series, "it is from this assumption of competence, of the ability to manage a hostile environment, that the series derives both its potency and its interest: this is a story that feeds on wish fulfillment, a dream of the unempowered, the kind of dream that can be put to political use, and can also entrap those who would use it" (81). Highly professional Christians appeal, of course, to Christians that feel unempowered, but they also contribute to a sense of Christianity as consistent with the scientifico-managerial world of global capitalism. In Didion's reading, the power fantasies of the series allow the disempowered to imagine the kind of life a managerial professional enjoys, with unlimited success, wealth, and mobility. But in another sense, the depiction of Christians as superskilled professionals is neither a fantasy nor surprising. As Paul Apostolidis points out in his reading of Focus on the Family, Christian culture often promotes a version of Christian fundamentalism congruent with secular management. In Apostolidis's reading, the terms Christian and professional are by no means contradictory. Focus on the Family's James Dobson, for example, promotes himself as a high-quality psychologist. In Dobson's self-presentation, Christians are "in this world" as well as "of this world," in the sense that they are extremely successful professionals. In the Left Behind books, one needs more than just faith for salvation in a certain Chris- tian narrative. One also needs professional skills, and these skills meld with one's Christian identity.

The books bestow praise on professionals, in sometimes surprising ways, as is the case with journalist Williams (the contemporary Right being no friends of "the media"). Nevertheless, they also apply



market logic to professionals, differentiating-in the cold logic of university cutbacks-between useful and inutile professions. The seventh book, The Indwelling, demonstrates this logic in the treatment of a state- sponsored (and homosexual) artist, Guy Blod, who produces "God- less" art for the Antichrist's headquarters, and who is charged with creating a twenty-foot replica of Carpathia's body after he dies. The books mock Blod relentlessly, from the "French" pronunciation of his name, to his comfortableness with nudity, to his love for new clothes, to his manner of speaking (The Indwelling 61-66). This scene also presents a rich intersection between neoliberal logic and Christian conservatism. Guy's art is worthless because it's not useful; therefore he is useless as a professional. His skills, sculpting and painting, contribute nothing to the hard, utilitarian business logic of the post- apocalypse. Blod thus indexes the emphasis neoliberalism places on efficiency over cultural enrichment, an emphasis especially visible in university funding, as Lisa Duggan argues. Simultaneously, though, this scene echoes the debates around public funding of "indecent" art. Such scenes demonstrate the effortless melding of neoliberal and Christian conservative ideology.

This professional logic works in an inclusionary as well as exclusionary way. The heroes here are bourgeois professionals; the books contain few working-class characters (despite their readers' reputation for being lower class). When the books reach across class lines, they must first professionalize the working class. One character, Zeke, is a former mechanic and "former druggie-biker-tattoo artist" (Dese- cration 173). While the books repeatedly emphasize Zeke's homespun intelligence in the face of "intellectuals," they reinforce the logic of class division even as they apparently question it. First, they continually comment on a disjunction between Zeke's appearance and his natural intelligence: "Like everyone else, she liked the way he thought, though his way of expressing himself might fool a stranger into think- ing he was less than bright" (Desecration 173). Second, they make Zeke an expert in disguise and forgery. In making Zeke an expert, they professionalize him, making him into an "acceptable" member of the working class. Zeke's expertise contrasts markedly with the ordinary drudgery experienced in working-class life; he is effectively crafted into a neoliberal professional.


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NEOLIBERALISM AND MULTICULTURALISM

But how do the books reconcile their commitment to bordered elit- ism-the gated community of the petit bourgeois professional-with the ostensible egalitarianism of Christianity? They do so in multiple ways. As noted, the books tend to professionalize the working class. But they also displace class equality onto multicultural equality. The books officially care nothing for race, culture, or ethnicity. As such, they both reinforce a neoliberal vision of the globe and maintain a utopian vision of Christian egalitarianism. Egalitarianism here is the egalitarianism of the market, which responds equally to all subjects with resources ("Money is the great leveler," says Marx), which are the subjects the books establish for Christian conversion.

But this multiculturalism is ambiguous. On the one hand, as McAlister observes, it allows for a seemingly progressive multiculturalism even within the books' Christian conservative vision (789).19 On the other hand, multiculturalism erodes into a vision of subjects that are entirely alike in their difference. By the ninth book (Desecration) the Tribulation Force has expanded beyond its initial white American foundations to assemble a globally diverse team, with a Polish Jew (David Hassid), a Native American (Hannah Palemoon), a Jordanian Arab (Abdullah Smith), a Kuwaiti (Albie), a Chinese (Chang Wong), two Israelis (Chaim Rosenweig, Tsion Ben-Judah), and a Greek (Lukas Miklos). LaHaye and Jenkins present these characters as representa- tions of an even greater diversity. But this diversity is only superficial. For example, when the authors introduce Hannah, in the eighth book, she acknowledges cultural imperialism, noting the pain of living on a reservation and being stereotyped as "Indians with teepees," even while naturalizing the notion of Christians "witnessing" to her reservation (217). Initially, then, the books locate Hannah as culturally specific, as having an ethnic identity, but as the books proceed, her identity falls away, until she sounds no different than the "white" characters. Only her name remains, residue of a white imaginary around Native Americans. While McAlister attributes this superficial- ity to the authors' lack of cultural sophistication, I view the depiction of Hannah as very deliberate and indicative of a vision of "multiculturalism" that maintains some differences but at core demands a



cultural sameness. Once characters become Christian, they aban- don their cultural characteristics (789). The vision of "sameness" that emerges here, under the mark of God (and its opposition to the cor- responding mark of the Antichrist) is beyond race, beyond politics, beyond class, and beyond skill level: no matter their background, characters talk the same, act the same, and have the same values.

Although this sense of "sameness" in part intersects with a neo- conservative agenda of "colorblindness" visible in anti-affirmative action rhetoric, neoliberalism is at work here, too. What the Left Behind series offers at core is a kind of simulacrum of recognition, a universal acceptance cloaked in sameness-the same simulacrum offered by neoliberalism. Neoliberalism has to somehow account for the rights legacy of the Enlightenment; more narrowly, and recently, it has to account for the legacy of postwar social movements arguing for recognition. The Left Behind books, as documents both of neoconservativ- ism and neoliberalism, must somehow account for rights, and they do so by preaching a gospel of sameness. The global sameness here demanded by Christianity is analogous to the global sameness demanded by institutions like the IMF and the World Bank, institutions that require the same practices among member countries regardless of their particular cultural circumstances. Making bodies safe for Jesus is like making countries safe for capital. In the Left Behind books, as in neoliberalism, individuals from all sorts of backgrounds can get along, provided they capitulate to a bland sameness equally repre- sented by the neoliberal professional and the "Left Behind" Chris- tian. The global management symbolized by the hated United Nations makes its return here at the level of identity. While including multicultural characters, the books demand rigid adherence to gender codes and reduce ethnic/cultural identities to brief sketches. Ethnic identities emerge only as loose stereotypes, such as "the honor of the Middle Eastern man" or the "hard work of the Chinese." Otherwise, all characters sound and act no differently than the books' white characters. The books supersede a conservative view of identity- antimulticulturalist-with a neoliberal view of identity-necessarily global, and thus, to a degree, necessarily multiculturalist. As Lisa Duggan argues, culture is part and parcel of a neoliberal agenda, and neoliberal philosophy can work comfortably alongside identity politics, and the "culture wars" can serve as a key ally of privatization.


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She writes, "The culture wars strategy allowed emerging neoliberal forces to attack and isolate the cultures of downward redistribution located within social movement since the 1960s. The flip side of this strategy was the nurturing of forms of 'identity politics' recruitable for policies of upward redistribution" (42).

NEOLIBERAL FAITH

But the books' commitment to neoliberalism runs deeper than obses- sions with security, technology, and petit bourgeois professionalism. Market rationality surfaces in the very act that the books emphasize as central to their mission: conversion.20 Although, arguably, the books focus much more on fighting evil than on conversions, conversion is nevertheless what the books themselves claim they are about, both in terms of their narrative and their function as commodities. (The Left Behind Web site-www.leftbehind.com-has a whole section on readers who come to Jesus after finishing one volume or another.) In The Mark, the series' eighth volume, Hannah Palemoon-the Native Amer- ican member of the Tribulation Force-relates to another member that, before the Rapture, she'd known about Christianity from the mis- sionaries that came to her reservation. But she didn't convert, she says, because "I was afraid I'd wind up in a cult or a multi-level marketing machine" (217). Her statement conflates "wild" capitalism with "wild" religion. She learns later, of course, that she was wrong. Chris- tianity is not a cult, as the worldwide disappearance of Christians proves. Christianity is also not a multilevel marketing machine. It is more like a well-run corporation, and non-Christians would be wise to invest in it. The books promote conversion as a rational choice, with nothing of the difficulty of Pascal's "kneel down and you shall believe." Consider, for example, a speech made by Chaim Rosenzweig, a converted Jew (the books love to convert Jews) chosen to preach in a kind of showdown with the Antichrist:

Of the billions and billions of people who have ever lived, One stands head and shoulders above the rest in terms of influence. More schools, colleges, hospitals and orphanages have been started because of him than because of anyone else. More art was created, more music written, and more humanitarian acts performed due to him and his influence



than anyone else ever. Great international encyclopedias devote twenty thousand words to describing him and his influence on the world. Even our calendar is based on his birth. And all this he accomplished in a public ministry that lasted just three and a half years. ... Centuries after his public unmerciful mocking, his persecution and martyrdom, billions claim membership in his church, making it by far the largest religion in the world. (Desecration 231)

Invest in Jesus. Productivity is up, way up.21 Like the choice to bank at Bank of America because they're everywhere, or to buy Microsoft because they're the biggest, the choice to convert to Christianity is a simple matter of market logic. You get more bang for your buck; kneel down and your purchase will be secure, or at least backed up with the longest encyclopedia articles. Christians, the good guys, the marked, are those who make good market decisions. The books present character conversions similarly; the events of the book are supposed to always add up to faith. For example, after the Antichrist is resurrected, one character, clearly on the road to her conversion, notes, "It's all true, isn't it?" to which a Christian character replies, "Of course it is ... what are you going to do about it?" (374). Faith, like good investing or consuming, is merely a matter of making good observations and acting on them. The characters, then, act in accordance with what neoliberalism demands of its subjects: that they be rational actors in all spheres.22

Technology further links conversion to neoliberalism. The Scrip- tures say all the world will hear about Jesus; since the advent of satellite technology, televangelists have pointed to it as a means for this prophecy to come true. In the books, the Tribulation Force sets up a satellite dish on a rooftop-apocalyptic events having decimated the "wired" world. Referencing Matthew 10:27, a character describes this set-up as "preaching from the housetops" (The Mark 291). But the books take technology a step further and post Jesus on the Internet. Tsion Ben-Judah, another converted Jew who serves as the Tribulation Force's Number One Preacher, teaches a "billion people" through a "big Internet church," the "most popular Web site in history" (Dese- cration 120). The apocalypse yields the ultimate dot-com boom, with Ben-Judah's site scoring numbers that would shame Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos. More than any other technology, the Internet serves as a metaphor for neoliberalism's spread across the globe, the fantasy


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of borderless commerce. The reality, of course, is that a digital divide persists and likely will persist for the foreseeable future. For most of the world, the Internet is and will remain only a metaphor for connectedness.

CHRISTIAN FUNDAMENTALISM AND THE SPIRIT OF GLOBAL CAPITALISM

In many ways, of course, the commitment to neoliberal faith here is nothing new. In Holy Terrors, Bruce Lincoln argues that American Protestantism, lacking a central bureaucracy, has historically seen entrepreneurial success and affluence as a measure of spiritual success. In a sense, then, the logic of what is now called neoliberalism penetrates deep into a certain history of evangelical faith. Market logic overtakes theological logic, eliding the potential conflicts between the life of the spirit and the life of the economy. And it works both ways: Duggan refers to neoliberalism as a "reigning theology" (3) and to its promoters as a "secular priesthood" (19). The slippage between the theological and the economic echoes and repeats the slippages between the moral and the economic, a state of affairs whereby making money equates to morally responsible action. Brown nicely sums up the neat ties binding neoliberalism and moral action, writing, "neoliberalism equates moral responsibility with rational action; it relieves the dis- crepancy between economic and moral behavior by configuring morality entirely as a matter of rational deliberation about costs, benefits, and consequences" (15). Following in the footsteps of the (controver- sial, even for evangelicals) "name it, claim it" movement (when you pray for a Cadillac, be sure you tell God which color), the Left Behind series presents faith as just one more consumer choice. In a sense, it reproduces the choice to buy the books within the pages of the books itself. The books work to reinforce not just a community of readers but a community of consumers.23

In their validation of neoliberal values, these books demonstrate that the relationship between Protestantism and capitalism diagnosed by Max Weber continues under late capitalism, moving from what Weber saw as a focus on accumulation to a focus on consumption and markets. Christianity becomes the vehicle for articulating a gated



paradise on earth, imagining a heavenly conflict translated into everyday economics (while continuing to profess belief in a real heaven, where, one would suppose, capitalism is divinely frictionless). The Left Behind books validate the desiring structures of both consumption and markets; Jesus is a good investment, with the ultimate pay- off. In supporting neoliberalism, the books demonstrate the Right's successful fusion of corporate capitalism and social conservatism. But they also demonstrate the extent to which neoliberalism has canni- balized even the most "extremist" forms of social life, registering that the much-discussed post-Reagan "triumph of the Right" is itself sub- servient to a larger hegemony.24 Partly, of course, what this reflects is the genealogy of the New Right, which, as historian Bruce Schulman demonstrates, has been tethered to free-market beliefs from its origins in the seventies.25 In The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics, Schulman depicts the Right not as an uneasily grouped coalition but as a tight network of groups that co- ordinate on a whole set of issues, from abortion to antitaxation. In this sense, the contemporary strain of Christian fundamentalism has been crossbred with neoliberalism for the past thirty years.

Late capitalism, and the neoliberal philosophy that promotes it, produces violent disruptions of nation, community, and family- downsizing, privatizing, and commodifying every form of social life, "parsing human beings into free-floating labor units, commodities, clients, stakeholders, strangers, their subjectivity distilled into ever more objectified ensembles of interests, entitlements, appetites, desires, purchasing 'power'" (Comoroff and Comoroff 333). Against these disruptions, Christian fundamentalism-whatever its faults-would seem to offer a stable realm: a return to community, a resurgence of civil society, sanctity for the individual. But in the Left Behind books, at least, none of these values can come at the cost of challenging the market. Instead, they are positioned as products of the market itself. It is the market as much as Biblical belief that offers salvation in the series. The books offer proof of the utopian goals proffered by neoliberals-that unfettered market capitalism really does produce a more equitable, free, and moral society. Like other productions of the Christian Right, though, the Left Behind books demonstrate the inconsistency of Christian Right ideology, the cracks and fissures


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running through the movement. While the group's leaders-men like LaHaye, Focus on the Family's James Dobson, and Pat Robertson- cling staunchly to a probusiness, neoliberal vision, such ideas sit un- certainly alongside the hope for utopian transformation latent in some forms of Christianity. Even the decision to be "born again," here rationalized as a market decision, potentially translates into a hope for transformation. If, as Ulrich Beck and others argue, the neoliberal abandonment of the welfare state has lead to a state of despair (a despair Beck calls risk, but despair nevertheless), Christianity, even in its most fundamentalist form, should respond to this despair. But in the Left Behind series, what Christianity asks of its followers is not Kierkegaard's transformative leap of faith but rather a mere continu- ation of everyday life in the neoliberal United States. At their core, the Left Behind books establish fundamentalist Christians as not much different than other late capitalist subjects. Christian conservatism, which often seems essentially alienated from American culture, in fact participates in the same market rationality as everyone else.

THE UNRECOGNIZED AND THE FUTURE: PETRA AS REFUGEE CAMP

Out of these books, then, emerges a vision of Christian fundamentalism as located not at the extremes of global culture but rather at its core. Fundamentalism's supposed antimodernity evaporates, and fundamentalist Christianity emerges as entirely consistent with the supposedly religion-neutral ideology of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism emerges as humanity's only protection against apocalypse; security and economic freedom work in fluid coexistence with premillennialist theology. But if the Left Behind books present a complicated logic of management, if they face apocalypse by retreating behind symbolic and actual gates, in narrating disaster they nevertheless open a space to consider the contradiction between neoliberal efficiency and the chaos of disaster. And if disaster is something that the neoliberal professional continually wards off, disaster can nevertheless become a means for an imaginary identification with neoliberalism's Other, the refugee.



In Means without End, Giorgio Agamben describes the refugee as the figure who poses the premier conceptual challenge to late-capitalist geopolitics. Agamben calls the refugee "a limit-concept that at once brings a radical crisis to the principles of the nation-state and clears the way for a renewal of categories that can no longer be delayed" (23). Although Agamben's target is the sovereignty of the nation-state, not neoliberalism per se, his ideas apply generally to the type of inside- the-gates/outside-the-gates exclusions I describe here. Also, even if the domain of the neoliberal professional extends across national bound- aries, the nation-state retains a potent resonance, for within both the militia compound and gated community, nationalism remains a preferred vehicle for defining Otherness. For Agamben, the refugee represents that form of human life that is no longer representable within the domain of the nation-state. But the very exclusion of the refugee confronts global power with an inassimilable challenge: "people who have really lost every quality and every specific relation except for the pure fact of being human" (19). The always-degradable category of "human rights" erodes when the refugee appears. The refugee defies the smooth operation of global categories and, by extension, the smooth operation of global capitalism. In the neoliberal twenty- first century, it is arguably disaster alone that makes the suffering of the Other visible in the global media (of which the Left Behind series is a part).26 Famines, floods, wars, plagues, earthquakes are the only vehicle for understanding the Other as human. (Compare, for example, coverage of the Iranian earthquake of 2003 with recent coverage of the Iranian nuclear program.) The refugee becomes that which is unmanageable by neoliberalism.27

For the most part, the Left Behind books validate and enhance a logic of Otherness, a logic that works neatly with the ideology of neoliberalism. But because the books narrate so much disaster, they instill scenes of suffering masses that are hard to forget. It is here-in its acknowledgment of the suffering masses, in its depiction of global suffering-that the series points, however briefly, to a future beyond neoliberalism. The Left Behind books offer their readers repeated visions of displaced peoples creeping across decimated landscapes. The apex of these scenes is the massive spectacle of many thousands of Jews taking refuge in the fortress city Petra, after the Antichrist decides to destroy all Jews:


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George put down well outside the growing throngs at Petra, opened the door for ventilation, and Buck and the others dozed on as load after load of more escapees was delivered. Rayford and Chaim had decided to keep Chaim's presence a secret for as long as possible so as not to interfere with the massive move into the safe place. Though some had begun walking in and others were airlifted, hundreds of thousands clogged the Siq, awaiting their helicopter hop inside. They sang and rejoiced and prayed. (Desecration 262)

Here, the books offer their readers an image familiar from contemporary newscasts-the vision of thousands of people on the move. The context here-fleeing from ethnic cleansing-further links the Left Behind Jews to the specter of the refugee. But the narrative contains the impact of this image, both by depicting these refugees as "singing and rejoicing and praying" and by keeping security lines intact: the Jews here enter into one massive gated community. As a result of this containment, readers cannot transfer the impact of this image elsewhere, to the other depictions of suffering throughout the books, the locusts and plagues and mega-earthquakes that generally affect the outside masses-those who do not sing and rejoice and pray. The books contain the image of the refugee within a logic of Otherness.

But this logic of Otherness eventually breaks down, if momentarily. For the majority of the books, the Other both deserves its apocalypse and embodies it. As noted, the books have difficulty differentiating between the proles and Big Brother, between the suffering masses who have not accepted Jesus and the agents of the Antichrist. Both tend to be equally threatening and thus equally deserving of death by fiery hailstorm, demonic soldiers, mega-earthquakes, or neo-bubonic plague. But this sort of logic proves difficult to keep up, and by the series' end, a sort of compassion for the Other begins to emerge, if shakily. By the eleventh book, all non-Christians who have taken the Antichrist's mark cannot be saved. Only at this point in the books are Christians free to be compassionate toward the fallen-and at this point the line between inside-the-gates and outside-the-gates becomes less rigid. Rayford Steele thinks,

(He) knew the prophecy-that people would reject God, enough times that God would harden their hearts and they wouldn't be able to choose him even if they wanted to. But knowing it didn't mean Rayford under- stood it. And it certainly didn't mean he had to like it. He couldn't make



it compute with the God he knew, the loving and merciful one who seemed to look for ways to welcome everyone into heaven, not keep them out. (18)

Here, the Other becomes less alien. At long last, the series dares to question the tyrannical, brutal logic of the premillennialist God. Steele, here, is more merciful than his God, even if he still falls back on the immobile truth of prophecy. Even if this is a case of forgiving those who are already damned, of visiting the imprisoned after clamoring for their imprisonment, it nevertheless represents a break. If, as Guy Debord argues, late-capitalist ideology can only admit truths once they no longer apply-"it is inasmuch as individual reality is not that it is allowed to appear" (16)-the Left Behind books point to such reality at the moment of its eclipse. That is, the artificial division of the world into gated and nongated hesitates only at the moment this division succeeds absolutely.

Only in these passages does the books' commitment to the icy logic of neoliberalism start to break down, only here does the exclusionary ontology of the gated community show cracks. Here, the books' care- ful division of the world into deserving and undeserving loosens. Here, the specter of the refugee emerges to haunt the clean, security- based logic of neoliberalism, and the masses outside the gates become something more than simply a threatening Other. It resembles the moment when the Bush administration's justification for the Iraq War dissolved into humanitarianism. One hopes that the world will remind them of this justification when the next flood of refugees is unleashed. At such moments, the books reveal the limits of neoliberalism's over- determination-in Brown's words, the way the "economy must be directed, buttressed, and protected by law and policy as well as by the dissemination of social norms designed to facilitate competition, free trade, and rational economic action on the part of every member and institution of society" (10). Neoliberalism's need to incorporate "every member and institution" leaves it open to gaping exceptions, which can be leveraged to challenge its relentless logic. Fundamen- talist Christianity's strident rhetoric fails to evade this logic. But the refugee, as emerging in the Left Behind books, presents the potential for just such a challenge.


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CONCLUSION

Far from one-dimensional documents of the Christian Right, the Left Behind books offer a rich glimpse into a certain American imaginary, one consistent with historical American paranoia but simultaneously attuned to the latest in late-capitalist ideology. As novels of disaster, but disaster contained by neoliberal security, they offer a comforting and hegemonically reinforcing narrative. Their rampant popularity, especially in the post-September 11 era, manifests their resonance in the American imagination. Their complex cultural imaginary extends beyond a narrow Christian agenda. The books register not only the difficult question of how the Right unites big-corporation politics with social conservatism but also the ability of neoliberalism to cannibalize all forms of political and social life. Ultimately, the problem with the books is not that they are oppositional but that they are not oppositional enough. From a Left viewpoint, the American Right's rampant success of the past thirty years has been viewed with dis- may but also with envy; accounts of the Right, such as Apostolidis's or Berlant's, often end with a wistful note-"if only the Left could do it this well." The Left Behind books, as cultural products at the apex of a Christian Right vision, demonstrate instead the degree to which the triumph of the Right is itself something of an illusion, and that the real triumph lies with the relentless procession of post-Fordist capitalism. In their reinforcement of a neoliberal vision, these books point ever more to the need for a new politics that supersedes the oppositions upon which neoliberalism rests so easily. Otherwise, the gates will continue to go up without much protest.

Notes

1. While Christian popular music has arguably made deeper inroads into the mainstream consciousness-every three months, it seems, a band like Switchfoot or Jars of Clay crosses over onto secular charts-this Christian music is generally not easily identifiable as such, since these bands' lyrics tend to be ambiguous about their Christian origins.

2. LaHaye played a key role in the recent ascendance of the political Chris- tian Right, helping found both the Moral Majority and the less well-known but more influential Council on National Policy. Jenkins writes for the Moody Bible



Institute and ghostwrote Billy Graham's 1997 autobiography. Critics can be for- given, then, for reading the Left Behind books as manifestations of their authors' religious and political agenda. As Amy Johnson Frykholm observes, the books do seem designed to further this political agenda, or at least this is how Tyndale Publishers frames the books in its advertising to Christian bookstores (155). For Tyndale, Frykhouk argues, there exists no difference between increasing the com- pany's bottom line and converting more souls.

3. In addition to the series' novels, the Left Behind brand has produced two movies, a children's series, graphic novels, and a "military" and "political" series (a video game is apparently forthcoming), which relate the events of Left Behind from the viewpoint of other characters. Besides advertising widely and maintain- ing a thriving Web site, Tyndale Publishers has also sponsored a NASCAR vehicle.

4. As a number of commentators note, the American version of this theology has been shaped primarily by two sources: the teachings of nineteenth-century preacher John Darby and the publication of the Scofield Reference Bible, which used footnotes to chart Darby's ideas about the rapture and tribulation. See, for example, Frykhouk 15-18.

5. In the second chapter of Capital, Marx, quoting the Book of Revelation, uses the Mark of the Beast as a metaphor for the money-form, the basis for the market exchange so lauded by neoliberalism: "And that no man may buy or sell, save that he had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name" (181). For Marx, the apocalypse arrives as soon as commodity exchange takes over culture.

6. A note on textual selections: a full treatment of the rich, dense books in this series would take far more than a short essay. Nevertheless, the texts in the Left Behind series display a consistency and continuity that allows them to function as a coherent system of ideas, with their various themes interacting rhi- zomatically. As a result, I strive to treat the books here as one large text, which, for all intents and purposes, they are. But because the books develop one long story, with the early books providing back story and the later books offering a full- fledged global vision, picking episodes from among them is necessary for a dis- cussion of how the books develop a multifaceted neoliberal vision.

7. Glenn Shuck's Marks of the Beast: The Left Behind Novels and the Struggle for Evangelical Identity was published too late to be considered in this essay.

8. As Paul Apostodilis shows in his reading of Oliver North on James Dob- son's Focus on the Family (132-34), these ambiguous feelings toward the media are characteristic of a Christian media culture that uses every telecommunications tool at its disposal, even while decrying the pernicious influence of media on the country.

9. Of course, neoliberalism is in some ways simply a new term for the set of policies promoted beginning in the 1970s. The rise of "cultural neoliberalism" constitutes a response to the flexible accumulation of post-Fordist capitalism. Prefiguring Brown and Duggan, though along slightly different lines, David Harvey observes the wide dissemination of market values under flexible accumulation:


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"Entrepreneurialism now characterizes not only business action, but realms of life as diverse as urban governance, the growth of informal sector production, labour market organization, research and development, and it has even reached into the nether corners of academic, literary, and artistic life" (171).

10. These tensions do surface in the Left Behind books. The first book, for example, castigates abortion as part of an "industry," critiquing the operation of markets in at least one sphere of social life (268). But these tensions tend to be exceptional; the books' overarching logic supports markets.

11. Jameson touches on the idea of cognitive mapping in Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism but develops it more fully in his reading of conspiracy films in The Geopolitical Aesthetic, from which this quotation is taken.

12. On militias and militia culture, see Berlet and Lyons; Aho, The Politics of Righteousness and This Thing of Darkness; and Neiwert. On gated communities, see Blakely and Snyder.

13. The connection is not lost on those with a militia mindset. Military ana- lyst and mercenary Thomas Chittum, in his racist, apocalyptic Civil War II-a book much praised on far right Web sites-reads both militia spaces and gated communities as different forms of preparation for what he sees as a coming race war: "Anglos in the southwest are abandoning the Reconquista lands, seeking refuge in the Pacific Northwest and Rocky Mountain states .... Other anglos, mostly affluent professionals, are stockading themselves in walled and guarded suburbs all over the southwest" (164). Although reactionary and racist, Chittum nevertheless seems to grasp some of the key fears operating around largely white gated communities. The rhetoric around these communities, couched in fears of increasing crime, easily translates into "anglos stockading themselves."

14. The fundamentalists' love for SUVs is so noticeable that it has prompted its own countermovement within the evangelical community, a group of environ- mentally inclined Christians who run the anti-SUV "What Would Jesus Drive" Web site: http://www.whatwouldjesusdrive.org/.

15. As McAlister notes, much of the books' technology-such as universally accessible wireless networks-is currently impossible. McAlister attributes this to the authors' "technological naivety"-implying, perhaps, that more sophisti- cated readers understand that such things are infeasible. I would argue that if LaHaye and Jenkins exaggerate their technology, these exaggerations are well within the technological imaginary of a neoliberal elite. In other words, even if universally accessible networks aren't currently available, that's exactly what the neoliberal professional desires (and gets, to a degree, since many of the world's elite spaces-first-class lounges, hotels, and luxury coffee chains-are indeed wireless accessible).

16. The idea of The Place supports, of course, the Right's preferred, privatized solution for the problems of the inner city: the Bush administration's "faith- based initiatives."

17. See Faiola Al. 18. In interviews, LaHaye has repeatedly described the scene of the series'



inspiration, in which he notices a married pilot flirting with a flight attendant and then imagines the Rapture occurring right then and there. The voyeurism and self-righteousness of this scene aside, it's also interesting that it necessarily occurs in a first-class cabin (pilots seldom venture into coach). Thus, the entire series originates, fittingly, within an elite space.

19. For an interesting consideration of how multiculturalism works in concert with the masculinist Christianity of the Promise Keepers, see Mike Hill's After Whiteness.

20. Frykholm reads the books' market approach to faith as merely a choice of metaphor. She observes of an interview with Jenkins, "Becoming a 'son' of God involves something modeled on consumer culture--a commodity exchange with salvation as that commodity" (168). Frykholm tends to describe many of the series' narrative choices in terms of Jenkins's particular tastes. Since my own reading sees the books as products of a larger cultural imaginary (of which LaHaye and Jenkins are a part), I view this choice of metaphor as not incidental but represen- tative of larger currents in the book.

21. The passage above is from Desecration, the volume published in 2001. Its sales shot up, way up, after the September 11 attacks, making it the best selling fictional book of the year.

22. As Brown observes, neoliberal social policy often consists simply of producing as many rational actors as possible. She writes, "Because neo-liberalism casts rational action as a norm rather than an ontology, social policy is the means by which the state produces subjects whose compass is set by their rational assess- ment of the costs and benefits of certain acts, whether teen pregnancy, tax cheating, or retirement planning. The neo-liberal citizen is calculating rather than rule- abiding, a Benthamite rather than a Hobbesian. The state is one of many sites framing the calculations leading to social behaviors that keep costs low and productivity high" (16).

23. Again, as Frykholm notes, this seems to be intended by Tyndale, who endlessly promotes the books as community-building commodities.

24. The example of the Left Behind books also demonstrates that the supposedly "rational" forces of capitalism quite easily make use of the "irrational" desires of fundamentalism. This phenomenon is not limited to Christian fundamentalism, Timothy Mitchell has demonstrated the key role fundamentalist Islam has historically played for the world oil industry, arguing that Benjamin Barber's famed "Jihad vs. McWorld" opposition masks a symbiosis that Mitchell terms "McJihad."

25. Schulman describes California's Proposition 13 antitax revolt-which triggered an avalanche of privatization-as the galvanizing moment when a strug- gling conservatism found its full voice. From here, Schulman argues, New Right organizers were able to build a powerful network of related interests, including evangelical Christians, that gained victory after victory, culminating in Reagan's election. In her description of cultural neoliberalism, Duggan assigns Proposition 13 a similarly important status.


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26. In "The Mass Public and the Mass Subject," Michael Warner famously argues that disaster serves to fix the identity of the late-capitalist subject. "The transitive pleasure of witnessing/injuring (through disaster) makes available our translation into the disembodied publicity of the mass subject. By injuring a mass body-preferably a really massive body, somewhere-we constitute ourselves as a noncorporeal mass witness" (179). For the most part, this is exactly the way disaster functions in the Left Behind series: readers witness the mass injuries resulting from demon-locusts and identify themselves with the unsympathetic gaze watching the destruction. But even if Agamben's refugee merely represents an inassimilable remainder, a point where Warner's disaster-identification mechanism breaks down, it still may offer a lever with which to pry open the airtight hegemony of market solutions found in the Left Behind series.

27. This idea is visible also in the resistances it produces. In coverage of the 2005 tsunami, the American media continually worked to challenge any vision of the Other as human, regularly focusing on either the paltry number of American dead or the ways in which Third World "bureaucracy" and "corruption" thwarted the aid efforts of the West. The rumors of a "child trade" were especially distasteful in this regard.

Works Cited

Aho, James A. The Politics of Righteousness: Idaho Christian Patriotism. Seattle: Uni- versity of Washington Press, 1990.

-~. This Thing of Darkness: A Sociology of the Enemy. Seattle: University of Wash-

ington Press, 1994. Agamben, Giorgio. Means without End: Notes on Politics. Trans. Vincenzo Binetti

and Cesare Casarino. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Apostolidis, Paul. Stations of the Cross: Adorno and Christian Right Radio. Durham,

N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000. Barber, Benjamin. Jihad vs. Mc World: How Globalism and Tribalism Are Reshaping the

World. New York: Ballantine, 1996. Beck, Ulrich. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage Publications, 1992. Berlant, Lauren. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and

Citizenship. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997. Berlet, Chip, and Matthew N. Lyons. Right Wing Populism in America: Too Close for

Comfort. New York: The Guilford Press, 2001. Blakely, Edward J., and Mary Gail Snyder. Fortress America: Gated Communities in

the United S

Invest in Jesus: Neoliberalism and the Left Behind Novels

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