The Reverend Tim LaHaye
Religious fundamentalist whose novels prophesying the ‘Rapture’ became bestsellers in America
THE REVEREND TIM LAHAYE, who has died aged 90, was one of the most influential – and, some argued, one of the most dangerous – Christian fundamentalists in America, credited with moving religious fanaticism based around a belief in an imminent apocalypse into the American cultural mainstream.
An unorthodox but powerful element in LaHaye’s ministry was fiction. His Left Behind series of 12 novels (co-written with Jerry Jenkins) became the publishing phenomenon of the turn of the 21st century, selling more than 58 million copies, with four of them topping the New York Times bestseller list. The ninth book in the series, entitled Desecration: Antichrist Takes the Throne, was published a month after the September 11 2001 terrorist attacks and ousted John Grisham from the top spot.
On the surface, LaHaye’s books were old-fashioned adventure stories, but their core was theological, inspired by pre-millennialism, a teaching based on an imaginative reading of certain New Testament texts, which prophesies that the Second Coming is imminent and that before it comes, Christ will summon all “true believers” who will dematerialise Star Trek- style in an event called the “Rapture”: the first novel in the series opens with passengers vanishing from on board a transatlantic Boeing 747 leaving nothing but piles of clothes, jewellery and dental fillings.
Left behind will be the unbelievers – not just atheists, but also Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans, Methodists and everyone else, who will then endure seven years of catastrophes (the Tribulation) presided over by the Antichrist. At the end of this, Christ (an English speaker, naturally) will reappear in the Second Coming after which Armageddon, the final battle between good and evil, will take place. Finally the triumphant Christ will rule in peace for a thousand years (the Millennium) before the world comes to an end.
Most of the Left Behind series concerns the adventures of a group who become “born again” Christians after the Rapture and who spend seven years racing round the world in fast cars and helicopters fighting the evil forces of the Antichrist – a Romanian-born Secretary General of the UN whose troops are called “peacekeepers”, and who is based in Baghdad.
If mainstream Christians found this too ridiculous to take seriously even as make-believe, a series of opinion polls carried out in 2002 suggested that a large percentage of Americans regarded the novels less as pulp fiction than tomorrow’s news reports. They found, for example, that nearly a quarter of Americans believed that the Bible had predicted the September 11 attacks; about the same number believed that Jesus would return in their lifetimes, and nearly two in three (including, or so it was said, President George W Bush) believed the Book of Revelation’s apocalyptic prophecies to be broadly accurate.
LaHaye certainly saw his novels as more prophesy than fiction: “If our books have done so well, it is because the Bible gives us the best possible plan for the future,” he told an interviewer. His intention had been to persuade people to “come to Jesus” and change their lives before it was too late.
LaHaye’s theology was accompanied by some fairly extreme political views. He was anti-evolution, anti-abortion, anti-Catholic, anti-gun laws, antipacifism, anti-UN (the notion of global peace he regarded as a con-trick perpetrated by the Antichrist to postpone the apocalypse), antienvironmentalist, anti-Harry Potter, anti-feminist and virulently antihomosexuality. LaHaye once asked who was more “cruel and inhumane” – those who tolerate homosexuals or those who “practise Old Testament capital punishment” on them.
What alarmed many about LaHaye was the way in which he translated ideology and personal prejudice into practical politics. In 1979 he established Californians for Biblical Morality, a political group that helped to plant the seeds of the American Christian Right movement. He served on the first board of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, set up in 1979 to lobby in favour of causes like school prayer, the censorship of textbooks and the packing of courts with “pro-family” judges, and against anything supported by “the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians”.
In 1984 LaHaye founded the American Coalition for Traditional Values which, with his wife Beverley’s counter-feminist Concerned Women for America, became two of the most influential lobby groups in the US. In 1987 he served as co-chairman of the Republican Jack Kemp’s short-lived presidential campaign, only to be forced to resign after newspapers quoted extracts from a book in which he had described the Roman Catholic Church as “the mother of harlots”, a “false religion”, “more pagan than Christian”.
The influence of LaHaye and others of a similar persuasion on the Republican Party of the 1980s and 1990s is unquantifiable, although in 2003 the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals described LaHaye as the most influential Christian leader – ahead of Billy Graham – in the United States in the previous 25 years.
Apart from domestic social policy, LaHaye’s pre-millenialism also had implications for foreign policy. He believed that a precondition of the Second Coming was that the state of Israel should be re-established within its biblical borders. He also believed that the Battle of Armageddon would be brought about by hostile forces, based in Iraq, mounting a massive attack on Israel.
If LaHaye’s vision did not, as some alleged, play a direct part in influencing the approach of President George W Bush to issues involving Israel and Iraq, Bush could at least count on the support of millions of fundamentalists who saw his strategy as fulfilling biblical prophesies, just as he could be sure of retribution if he undermined the preordained sequence of events. Thus when he demanded, in 2003, that Israel withdraw its tanks from the West Bank, the White House reportedly received 100,000 angry e-mails from Christian conservatives. The matter was quietly dropped.
Tim Lahaye was born in Detroit, Michigan, on April 27 1926 into a working-class family. His father Frank, a machine repairman, died of a heart attack when he was nine and his mother then went out to work in a Ford factory to support her three children. His father’s death was a catalyst for his religious beliefs. “I thought the world had come to an end,” he told an interviewer. “But the minister said, ‘This is not the last we will see of Frank LaHaye.’ Suddenly in my heart a great hope was born: I will see him again.”
After serving as a machine gunner aboard a bomber in the Second World War, LaHaye attended Bob Jones University, a college in South Carolina known for its culturally conservative and fundamentalist religious position. He began his ministry while he was still at university, becoming a pastor at a small church in South Carolina. He went on to receive a doctorate from Western Theological Seminary in Michigan and served a Minneapolis congregation until 1956 when he became head of the evangelical Scott Memorial Church in San Diego, California.
During his 25-year ministry in San Diego, LaHaye’s church grew to three separate congregations. He also founded 10 Christian schools, a Christian Heritage College, set up Family Life seminars, co-founded an Institute for Creation Research and designed a self-improvement scheme called the LaHaye Temperament Analysis (based on the medieval theory of the four humours). He wrote dozens of books – including self-help manuals like How to Win over Depression (1974), Anger Is a Choice (1982), Why You Act the Way You Do (1984), I Love You, But Why Are We So Different? (1991) and the best-selling The Act of Marriage (1976) in which he claimed that religious wives have sex more often and enjoy it more than non-believers.
In the 1990s he turned to fiction, enlisting the help of Jerry Jenkins, a former journalist and born-again Christian who had ghosted Billy Graham’s memoirs. Their first novel, Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days topped the Christian book charts in 1995 and stayed there for three years. Soon the Left Behind books became a fixture at every chain store and airport book rack in the country. In 2002 LaHaye signed a $24 million contract for a new set of novels with a hero described as an “evangelical Indiana Jones”.
The Left Behind series spawned a full-blown merchandise industry with CDs, DVDs, calendars allowing the chosen to count the days until Rapture, clothes sporting a Rapture logo, a board game in which players earn “redemption tokens” that can be cashed in for eternal life, even a book for those who miss the great event, called Oops, I Guess I Wasn’t Ready (what to do if you miss the Rapture).
LaHaye and Jenkins became millionaires many times over, but unlike some others in the fundamentalist movement, LaHaye was not motivated by money. Most of his fortune was donated to religious institutions such as the Pre-Trib Research Centre (dedicated to detecting signs of the imminent apocalypse) which he set up in 1993.
A skinny man with dyed brown hair, LaHaye was surprisingly soft-spoken and patient given the virulence of his views. But then he had no reason to get angry with sceptical newspaper interviewers. He knew he was right.
Tim LaHaye married, in 1947, Beverly Davenport, a fellow student at Bob Jones University. She survives him with their two sons and two daughters. The Reverend Tim LaHaye, born April 27 1926, died July 25 2016