Christian Thriller Series Marches Onward to Mainstream

Their novels are fiction, but it’s the authors’ deep-seated religious beliefs that underlie the “Left Behind” series, a wildly successful Christian thriller saga that appears to have crossed into the mainstream. So if thriller fans happen to be introduced to the Gospel along the way, all the better, say the authors, whose work is based on their fundamentalist interpretation of the Book of Revelations.

Though numbers on new converts would be difficult to tally, the number of copies the series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins has sold--unprecedented for a Christian series in the mainstream market--are not. The latest installment, “The Indwelling: The Beast Takes Possession,” is the seventh in the series about the end of the world and the ensuing fates of believers and nonbelievers. It has sold a little more than 2 million copies--debuting as No. 1 on the New York Times fiction bestseller list roughly two weeks after its release last month.

The seven installments together have sold about 18 million copies--roughly in the neighborhood of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, which has dominated the market for the last year. The previous two books from the “Left Behind” series--”Assassins” and “Apollyon”--were two of just eight books that sold more than 1 million copies in 1999, according to Publishers Weekly, the industry magazine.

“It seemed to me if we could put a fictionalized story of real people . . . and help them through the progressive stages of prophecy,” said LaHaye, 74, a longtime Baptist pastor in the San Diego area who has retired to Rancho Mirage, “it would really click in the minds” of readers.

There have been a handful of Christian books with successful sales in the mainstream book market in the past. Among them, in the late 1980s, Christian writer Frank Peretti’s novels “This Present Darkness” and “Piercing the Darkness” sold a total of 2 million copies in and outside Christian circles. But even that isn’t close to “Left Behind,” whose popularity beginning in 1995 was fueled by millennium fever, some industry analysts speculated.

“I think it’s unprecedented, and it will be difficult to repeat,” said Jana Riess, Publishers Weekly’s religion book review editor. “It has proven to be a catalyst for other publishers of Christian fiction. They have realized how interested people can become in serialized fiction.”

What’s more remarkable about the success is that mainstream publications’ bestseller lists include only sales from mainstream outlets as tracked by the American Booksellers Assn., which doesn’t poll Christian book stores. The New York Times listing, therefore, did not consider an additional 30% to 40% of “The Indwelling’s” sales at Christian stores, according to Tyndale House--the medium-size publisher based in Wheaton, Ill.--which has seen its own operations transformed as a result of the series’ success.

Many small Christian bookstore owners credit the series for revitalizing their businesses, while the series also has served to galvanize the Christian community.

There’s no way to know for sure the ratio of Christian versus secular buyers of the books, though those who come to the signings--resembling revivals complete with gospel singers--are Evangelicals.

The series’ Web site (https://www.leftbehind.com) serves in part as a message board for people to give testimonials about how the books have affected their lives.

“The more I read these books, the more I realize I need to make some changes in my life,” one person recently wrote. “I am closer than I have ever been to finding God and Jesus.”

The writing may not be gifted, and the Gospel message may be overbearing at times, Riess said, but the stories are generally compelling for the typical thriller fan.

“On a deeper level, the books really explore the American fascination with the end time,” she said. “And [the authors] are using fiction to tell a story that they believe is essentially true. . . . Their goal is to get people down on their knees.”

The success of this series may also be the culmination of the increased popularity of religious or spiritual writing in the mainstream market through the last decade. The Book Industry Study Group recently released data that indicates that such literature--with religious fiction included--is the second most popular category in the mainstream market.

But then again, there’s the marketing.

Tyndale in some ways has broken with its own conservative tradition in the promotion of the series--both in the aggressiveness of the marketing and the presentation of a Christian product. This year the publisher will spend what is for it an unprecedented $3.5 million on marketing, much of it in mainstream media such as ads in USA Today and on non-Christian radio nationwide, on top of $1.5 million last year and smaller amounts from years past, said Dan Balow, the company’s director of marketing.

To “brand” the series, in 1998 Tyndale began creating a series of products--videos, CDs, children’s books and even a radio drama that plays on about 500 mostly Christian radio stations around the country--associated with the books to create additional hype.

The books’ presentation strategy has concentrated on things like the ominous, darkly colored covers, a change from the traditionally tame presentation of most Christian products.

Eventually, there will be 12 books. The eighth one, “The Mark,” is due for release in November. The last book will be “The Glorious Appearing,” due in early 2003.

And in February, a Canadian film company will release a movie based on the first book,

“Left Behind.” Seven Years of the Antichrist

The latest installment, “The Indwelling,” takes place over three days about halfway through the Tribulation, the seven-year period in which the antichrist reigns on Earth after the Rapture, the event in which many believe the true believers are snatched out of their clothes and transferred to heaven to be with Jesus.

One of the main characters is Rayford Steele, an airline pilot who accepted Jesus after the Rapture. The Rapture took place in the first book during a flight in which many of Steele’s passengers, as well as his wife and children at home, disappeared.

Co-author LaHaye conceived the idea during a plane ride in which he observed a married pilot flirting with a flight attendant, and wondered what would happen to the man if the Rapture occurred then. He would have been left behind, he thought.

So will other nonbelievers who will stay and go through the Tribulation: a period of natural disasters, an evil reign under global government and, eventually, hell for those who don’t accept Jesus as their savior.

In the books, some of the heroes are Jews who accept Jesus. One is Tsion Ben-Judah, a former rabbinical scholar and Israeli statesman, who converts on international television.

It’s a clear timeline, LaHaye said: the Rapture, the Tribulation, Jesus’ second coming, the thousand-year reign of the heavenly kingdom and then the judgment in which Satan will be cast into the lake of fire.

LaHaye, already a successful author and speaker in the Christian market before the success of this series, has been a student of prophecy for 50 years. During his active ministry, the soft-spoken preacher founded three independent Baptist churches in the San Diego area--Scott Memorial, Shadow Mountain and Solana Beach--as well as a 10-campus elementary-through-high school system and the Christian Heritage College.

The Christian world, he says, is theologically split between those who read prophecy allegorically and those, like LaHaye, who take it literally.

“You have to understand it as a sequence of events,” said LaHaye, who interprets prophecy for Jenkins, who is responsible for putting the fictional characters through the events. “If you allegorize literature, you can make it mean anything.”

LaHaye--who has an upcoming book of commentary on the 1,000 prophecies of the Bible--believes the Rapture could occur any time because certain prophecies that must precede it have already occurred, including Israel gaining sovereignty and becoming once again the homeland of Jews.

He says somewhere between half a billion and a billion people will be ready for the Rapture. He defines “true believers” as those who accept Jesus as their personal savior.

In Los Angeles last week for an appearance on CNN’s “Larry King Live,” the authors took calls.

“I’m of the Jewish faith, and I’m very disturbed that I’m not going to go to heaven,” a woman said sarcastically.

Still, there hasn’t been any significant negative response to the books, certainly not from the Jewish community, the authors say.

Some of the most heated reactions have come from other Christians who want to debate the timing of events, such as at what point Jesus will return.

Tales That Work as Fiction

The religious aspects aside, the series still has to work as fiction, Jenkins said.

“It’s like a writer’s dream,” he said about working with biblical material.

Sure, he invented the characters of the Tribulation Force--cell phone-using, Internet-surfing Christians who hide out in abandoned buildings evading the Global Community police. But how much more dramatic can it get than what he calls the true stories of Revelations: bodies disappearing, devastating natural events, spiritual war between good and evil and the murdered antichrist who comes back to life in front of an international crowd of mourners.

Jenkins, 50, is also a lifelong Christian who lives in Colorado Springs, Colo. He began his career as a sportswriter, eventually writing books on professional athletes such as the late Chicago Bears running back Walter Payton and Dodgers’ pitcher Orel Hershiser.

Though they try to focus on fiction, the duo flavors the books with their own contemporary conservative Christian views--filling in views and details that are not necessarily explicit in the Bible.

The action incorporates scenes that touch on such issues as abortion, U.S. sovereignty--the antichrist is a former United Nations secretary general--and plenty of conversions.

“We try not to be preachy,” Jenkins said. But the two don’t deny that they have a broader worldview, just like other authors, artists and those in the entertainment business who display their views in their work.

When John Irving, the author of “Cider House Rules,” accepted his Academy Award for the screenplay based on his novel, Jenkins notes, Irving pointed to the pro-abortion-rights views expressed in his writing.

“We would diametrically disagree with him on those issues,” Jenkins said, but “to me, it was encouraging that he wasn’t pretending not to have a worldview. He had a message. And so do we.”

Jose Cardenas can be reached at [email protected].