Rapture Culture: Left Behind in Evangelical America (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "The narrative of the rapture, drawn from the tradition of Christian fundamentalist apocalypticism, has achieved unprecedented popularity through a recent series of evangelical adventure novels..." (more)
Key Phrases: Tribulation Force, Ann Marie, Tyndale House (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From The Washington Post

Jesus is hot. And at least among scholars, Jesus lovers are too. While experts in American religion have in recent decades shifted their gaze from Protestants to practitioners of Buddhism, vodun and other hip faiths, scholarship on evangelicalism is enjoying something of a revival today. Two new books aim to contribute to this resurgence by exploring evangelicals and mass media. What happens, their authors ask, when the Messiah becomes the message?

Rapture Culture, by Amy Johnson Frykholm, examines the Left Behind fiction of Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. The latest in a long line of blockbuster books for the born-again crowd, this apocalyptic series has sold more than 40 million copies from its debut in 1995 to the publication earlier this month of its 12th offering, Glorious Appearing. Loosely based on the biblical book of Revelation, these novels open with the rapture, when true believers are stolen away to heaven, leaving cars, contact lenses and unbelievers behind. Then come seven years of tribulation, brought on by a fiendish Antichrist who glories in famines, earthquakes and the proverbial wars and rumors thereof. In the end, Jesus makes his much-anticipated appearance and, with a fervor seemingly meant to avenge for each and every lashing doled out in Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ," slices and dices his way through millions of evildoers.

But the plots of these bloody thrillers are not Frykholm's concern. Her interest instead is how readers interpret them. It's a wonderful idea -- we know very little about the effects on readers of pious fiction -- but unfortunately Frykholm, who teaches religion, literature and cultural studies at Colorado Mountain College, does not quite pull it off.

Rapture Culture began as a dissertation at Duke University, long a hotbed of postmodern theory, and most readers will find far too much once-trendy po-mo lingo here for their taste. The first sentence of the book lovingly invokes the Russian cultural studies saint Mikhail Bahktin, and over the ensuing pages the author trots out all manner of postmodernist clichés, some palpably false, some undeniably true, but none particularly enlightening.

When Frykholm moves beyond theorizing in general about texts ("written anew with each reader") and their meanings ("malleable and unstable") to analyzing the reception of the Left Behind series in particular, she is more helpful. Her main claim, likely influenced by Bahktin's "dialogics," seems to be that readers interpret these books not as solitary individuals but in groups (at home, in church, at work). So far, so good. But in the end she tells us what we already know (or suspected): that the stories comfort some and annoy others, that readers interpret the novels through their own ideological lenses, and that non-evangelical readers think less of the series than evangelicals do. (Apparently Frykholm herself is in the former category, since she cannot resist the temptation -- irrelevant to her project -- to declaim that the LaHaye-Jenkins books are patriarchal, anti-Semitic and homophobic.)

Finally, Frykholm also gets at least one important matter badly wrong. The rapturous reception of the Left Behind novels suggests, she writes, "a new engagement with the world" among U.S. evangelicals, who presumably had their heads buried in the sand before LaHaye and Jenkins joined forces.

To her credit, Heather Hendershot knows that this is a bunch of hash. In Shaking the World for Jesus, she places the Left Behind narratives inside the much broader story of evangelical engagement with popular culture. Far from Luddites, evangelicals were early adopters of the holy trinity of 20th-century technologies: radio, television and the Internet. And here Hendershot argues that, despite their undeserved reputation (born at the infamous Scopes trial in 1925) as anti-modern rubes, evangelicals have actually embraced for decades "any 'modern' means that could be used to spread the Gospel."

A professor of media studies at Queens College, City University of New York, Hendershot focuses on three of those means: publishing, television and films. (She also includes, for reasons that are never made clear, an utterly unrelated chapter on a decidedly un-evangelical gay and lesbian church in Dallas called the Cathedral of Hope.)

What most intrigues Hendershot about the $4-billion-per-year "Christian lifestyles industry" is how the evangelicals in it negotiate the injunction to be "in the world but not of it." There is a clear divide, she finds, between aggressive Bible thumpers, who are not quite in the world, and their more ecumenical brethren, who are too seamlessly of it. Uncompromising proselytizers such as the Christian rock singer Carman win high marks for scruples but low marks for effectiveness. (You won't find his "Addicted to Jesus" on MTV, or his licks on the lips of non-Christians.) On the other hand, more nuanced believers, such as the pop singer Amy Grant (of "Baby, Baby" fame), gain a place on Wal-Mart's shelves only at the cost of soft-pedaling their faith.

Neither Frykholm nor Hendershot is an evangelical, but both seem disappointed that evangelical media are so bad at making new Christians. "I searched in vain," Frykholm writes, "for a person who could testify to a life changed through the reading of Left Behind." And Hendershot, rather than analyzing with care the tendency of evangelical media to preach to the choir, seems content simply to lament it. Neither author seems to notice that this same tendency is rife in virtually all didactic entertainment, from Michael Moore's films to Rush Limbaugh's radio schtick. Why should evangelical media be any different?

Decades ago the sociologist Peter Berger contended that worldviews perpetuated themselves (and the societies in which they were embedded) through "plausibility structures" that sustained in the minds of believers the reality of those perspectives. Churches and religious institutions do much of this work, but so does the Left Behind publishing firm, Tyndale House, the evangelical girls' magazine Brio and Billy Graham's World Wide Pictures. Although evangelicals often raise funds for their forays into mass media by promising to make converts, the real purpose of those raids may simply be to hold on to believers already made through procreation or proselytizing. Even religious traditions that prize sudden transformations in tent meetings must labor to keep the hearts and minds of the Christians they have birthed and baptized. And evangelical media, whatever we may think of their politics, or the virtues of alchemizing atheists into Christians, play an important part in doing just that.

Reviewed by Stephen Prothero

Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

Review

"An informative, brightly written analysis of apocalyptic sentiment on the popular level. This is a most interesting book and an important contribution to the growing literature on evangelicalism.--Randall Balmer, author of Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America
Rapture Culture offers fresh and illuminating insights into one of the most significant cultural phenomena of our era, the explosion of interest in biblical prophecies of the end times. Drawing on in-depth interviews, Amy Johnson Frykholm shrewdly explores the popular reception of the bestselling Left Behind prophecy novels as readers share their responses in the context of family, church, and other social networks. This eminently readable book explores the interaction of contemporary American religion, cultural politics, gender issues, and the mass media. Highly recommended. --Paul S. Boyer, author of When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture
"This fascinating book is a one-of-a-kind look at how people read religious literature. Thoroughly engaging, it asks us to consider the importance of imagination in the construction of a spiritual life. The author gives us an inside view of often conflicting interpretations that Christians give of the drama of the End Times."---Colleen McDannell, author of Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; 1 edition (March 4, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195159837
• ISBN-13: 978-0195159837
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #397,492 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Rapture Culture Review, June 21, 2004

By	William Frank (Leadville, CO United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Rapture Culture by Amy Johnson Frykholm explores both the reactions of readers to the Left Behind series, and the historical and societal context of the readers and the authors of this series, which has sold so phenomenally. Amy Johnson Frykholm provides excellent background material on the roots and growth of the evangelical movement in American popular religion over the last 150 years. She also explains rapture belief and its historical development both in its predominant form of dispensational premillenialism and less common forms of dispensational belief.

Frykholm shows that belief in the secret rapture of true believers in Jesus Christ draws believers together not only into their church groups, but forms them into a distinct culture within the larger society. She explores the way this rapture culture affects the relationships of believers among themselves, with their families and with those outside the culture. She also shows how the rapture culture produces strongly homogeneous political convictions.

Frykholm explores the background and convictions of the authors of the Left Behind series, Timothy LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. Much of the book is a fascinating and illuminating discussion of the varieties of reactions of readers to the books, drawn from a series of interviews by the author with a diverse cross-section of readers.

I strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in gaining insight into evangelical Christianity and the theology of the secret rapture of Jesus Christ which sets evangelicalism apart from mainline Protestant Christianity as well as from Catholic and Orthodox Christianity.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent work in many regards, February 18, 2007

By	Martin R. Stacy (Omaha, Ne USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Ms Frykholm provides her informative analysis with sympathy toward the people/movement/phenomenon she observes. Her work neglected to note that the Scofield Bible which is held by many as the cornerstone of Rapture teaching was (if my information is correct) published originally by Oxford. She failed to compare evangelical Christian culture in America before and after the adoption of dispensational/rapture theology. She also presumes that someone converted by a book would have an interest in documentation. That is rarely the case. A couple of my friends became evangelical Christians after contact with the teaching of Hal Lindsey. And even though both are socially prominent in the community and unashemed of their faith, I don't believe they have ever publicly credited Hal's theology. While one can sympathize with Ms. Frykholm's desire, I have never seen people who get salvation from endtime theology highlight the book that caused them to become Christians. Rather they concentrate more on the Bible, their new social contacts in their church, and perhaps on more "prophecy" study. It would also have been nice contrast the endtimers' social networks with either some non-endtime evangelicals social networks or perhaps a non-evangelical's social network. Nonetheless, this book probably is one of the very few that treat a large part of Americans' beliefs/lifestyle seriously and ought to be read by every thinking evangelical and every non-evangelical that wants a better grasp of rapture culture.