Glorious Appearing (Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, 2004)

I first heard about The Glorious End last month in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where’d I’d gone to promote Killing the Buddha: A Heretic’s Bible with my co-author, Peter Manseau. Albuquerque, in fact, seemed like the end of the line for our book. The local literati had flocked to the university that night to hear Al Franken, and the only customers at the store in which we’d been scheduled were absorbed in its extensive selection of gun magazines. Fortunately, the bookstore had a bar, so instead of selling books, we drank on the house. The bartender, at least, liked the sound of A Heretic’s Bible. He’d been raised a fundamentalist Baptist. Despite the fact that he now wore a black t-shirt with a red pentagram that proclaimed his allegiance to “Seitan,” “heresy” evoked warm childhood memories of Baptist bonfires into which adults and kids alike pitched copies of Anton LeVey’s Satanic Bible.

“The church bought ’em,” he said. “By the cartload. Hell, we probably kept that book in print.”

When they couldn’t get ahold of enough Satanic Bibles, he added, they’d throw other books into the fire. It didn’t matter what they were, just so long as they had two covers with pages in between and the sin of pride written all over them. “I used to complain, because I loved to read. I’d say, ‘How do you know those books are devilish?’ Pastor would say it didn’t matter — The End was coming soon and everything was gonna burn, and we were just stoking the flames.”

That was seeming a suitable fate for the unsold copies of Killing the Buddha stacked up like a little Tower of Babel, when a young couple arrived for the reading. They swore friends were coming, but no one else showed. Well, we said, we could call it a night. “No, no,” said the couple — “we want to hear you read, that’s what we came for.” No congregation too small, right? Peter and I stood and in the near-empty bookstore began trading lines from an account of an apocalypse church in Henderson, North Carolina. We’d burned it into our memories, which was a good thing, because the page looked a little blurry.

“‘Behind the pulpit…'”

“‘…two identical images stared down like the eyes of the church itself…'”

“‘…filled with fire and rapture and souls pulled into the sky. On a road that stretches to the horizon, cars drive into ditches, into telephone poles, into each other.'”

“‘In the foreground a tractor-trailer jack-knifes and bursts into flames, in the upper left a jet liner crashes into a high rise. The bodies of the worldly burn everywhere.'”

“‘But the souls of the saved unman taxis and graves and float through office windows, flying up toward Jesus, who shines above it all like the sun at high noon.'”

“‘That’s what going to happen and that’s where we’re going,’ a deacon named Billy Joe declared. ‘Not a doubt about that. Rapture’s gone come and we will be called to His presence. We are gone to meet our Heavenly Father. In Heaven.'”

Soon we were giving full voice to Billy Joe, his father, Billy, and their pastor, Buddy, recreating the Endtimes prayer service into which they’d recruited us.

“‘IN JESUS’ NAME!’

“‘C’mon down Jesus! C’mon down Jesus!’

“‘Shanaza palamniaz rapuptanah! Shana zarni pakling ostababajar!‘”

This was a rough approximation of the gift of tongues as experienced by Billy Joe, and even though we knew there was no way we could do justice to the profound strangeness of that sound, precise and nonsensical at the same time, grammatical and otherworldly, we tried. We stood on our chairs. We hollered. We raised our hands into the air like the turn-of-the-(19th)-century holy rollers who believed that the spirit acted on the same principles as electricity, the flesh its conductor.

“‘Paliate rotinatur opiscopicopum! Adjerminate oliosphate copulum horarum!’ 

“‘Sha na ba ta ba rabbadada ostapakanar!’

One by one the gun nuts came over to check out the ruckus and made for the exit, shaking their heads or glancing back over their shoulders. The Seitanist bar tender was grooving; the young couple looked afraid. Soon we’d cleared the room but for the three of them; but then an old lady came through the door, listened for a moment, and took a seat to hear more, nodding along to every word. We had found our true audience.

“That was something,” she said when we’d finished. She chuckled.

We hadn’t wanted to make fun of Billy Joe and his bretheren, so we said that their apocalypse theology was serious stuff.

“I know it is,” she said.

“It’s drawn mostly from Revelation,” we explained. “They believe it’s real.”

“Well it is real,” she said. “I know. I read all eleven books of it.”

Eleven? Say what you will about him, John of Patmos was not a prolific writer.

“I was very hopeful when I saw you two reading. I thought you boys was the authors, maybe,” she said. “You know. Mr. LaHaye and Mr. Jenkins.”

We did not sell many copies of Killing the Buddha that night. The Seitanist got his free and the couple appreciated the fright we’d given them enough to buy two. But the old woman said she’d wait for the real deal.

And now the wait is over: March 30 marks the release date of Glorious Appearing, the twelfth and final installment of Tim LaHaye’s and Jerry Jenkin’s astonishingly popular extended remix of Revelation, Left Behind.

With the exception of a perfunctory report by “conservative beat” reporter David Kirkpatrick in The New York Times, the secular press — having exhausted itself with examinations that were by turns alarmed, disdainful, and cautiously enthusiastic (sales, after all, equal truth) — is oddly silent on the eve of what will likely be the biggest publishing event of the year, and even, if the book is to be believed, of the last 2000 years.

There will be no Passion-like media frenzy over Glorious Appearing, beside which The Passion of the Christ appears, by any standards, sane, sober, and scriptural, not to mention relatively tolerant. Why not? Some of the answers are obvious — celebrity, the amount of time required to pass judgement (a couple of hours for a movie, many more for a series of books). Others are more ingrained. For all the haughty contempt heaped on Left Behind by the critics of The New Republic and The New York Review of Books, for all the fear with which they greet reports that some people take these books very seriously, they cannot manage to quite believe that Left Behind is real.

Real in the sense that it represents a persuasive worldview, an ideology and a theology you cannot wish away simply by declaring it “wrong,” or “backwards,” as if the series was a bad dream about distant, Bible-thumping country relations come to call on a family that has modernized, moved up in the world, graduated from hellfire to Wellbutrin.

The Revealer recommends instead what our senior fan in Albuquerque would call the “real deal.” LaHaye and Jenkins, in their own words:

“Chaim Rosenzweig had not slept, and after only two light meals of manna, he expected to feel the fatigue. But no. The best he could calculate, this was the day. He felt the swelling anticipation in both his head and his chest. It was as if his mind raced as his heart ached for the greatest event in the history of the cosmos.”

Don’t stop there — read more from Glorious Appearing here.

Why? Because it’s there, an Everest on the literary landscape, theology alive in the hearts and minds of more than 50 million readers.

Because, as the sheriff of Henderson, North Carolina warned us after we let him know we intended to pray with Billy Joe and his apocalypse church, “things that aren’t real can still hurt you.”