Plotting Apocalypse by Chapman Jennie;

Author:Chapman, Jennie;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: 2013-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Christians or “Judah-ites”? Celebrity and Authority in Left Behind

Though Left Behind strives to uphold a hypodermic concept of media to make good its claim that media may be used for good or ill, the series’ own representations of media often undercut this premise. As I noted earlier, its characters seem aware, if only dimly, of the codes, conventions, cues, and devices that are mobilized in media communications for the particular effects that they have on audiences, who have learned to interpret—or, to use Stuart Hall’s term, “decode”—these often subtle signifiers in particular ways.18 Thus, for Tsion Ben-Judah to disseminate the gospel effectively, he must conform to the accepted conventions of the media he uses. His public persona must be engaging, charismatic, and authoritative if he is to have any hope of winning over the undecided; in this respect, the novels tacitly admit that messages on their own are not enough. The medium—in this case, Tsion himself—plays an enormous role in its own right. Fortunately, despite his fusty scholarly credentials, Tsion is more than media ready. As the Tribulation Force’s spiritual leader, the former rabbi establishes his renown by making a world-changing announcement on CNN that Jesus is the Messiah, before proceeding to hold thronged stadium rallies, preach mass sermons on his enormously popular Web site, and in the course of the series become a global celebrity, a Billy Graham for the end-times generation. In writing such a character, LaHaye and Jenkins speak to a readership whose world has been shaped by the figure of the celebrity preacher, a world where the names Pat Robertson, Oral Roberts, Jimmy Swaggart, and Joel Osteen resonate with as much intensity as David Letterman, Jay Leno, and Oprah Winfrey.

In the media-saturated world of contemporary American evangelicalism, celebrity preachers have come to represent a new elite that replaces the echelons of priesthood. Early Protestants condemned ecclesiastical hierarchies that gave almost godlike authority to bishops and forced laypeople to do their worshipping via these human mediators. Martin Luther’s “priesthood of all believers”—a concept common to all Protestant denominations, but one that finds a particularly radical expression among the Brethren, the tradition founded by the dispensationalist John Nelson Darby—stressed the essential saintliness of all believers in the eyes of God. Yet televangelism reinstates the priest or bishop in the form of the program host. A cult of personality, then, is one of the potential structural effects of televangelism. The following section examines how the preacher-as-celebrity trope plays out on the pages of Left Behind, specifically through the character of the rabbinical scholar turned evangelical hero Tsion Ben-Judah.

Tsion is not the Tribulation Force’s first celebrity preacher. The group’s original pastor, Bruce Barnes, who is martyred at the end of the second book, commands a considerable amount of attention in his own right. As an assistant pastor of a dispensationalist church whose lukewarm faith prevents him from being raptured, Bruce cuts a tragic figure: “I was a phony, I had set up my own brand of Christianity that may have made for a life of freedom but that had cost me my soul.

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