Evangelical preacher who wrote the Left Behind series
Tim Lahaye 1926-2016
Tim Lahaye was a hugely influential evangelical Christian pastor who used fiction to spread his apocalyptic message to the American people. It all began when he was on an internal flight across the US and noticed the married pilot flirting with a flight attendant. Suddenly, he wondered what would happen to the pilot if the Rapture – when true believers are whisked up to Heaven, leaving everyone else to remain on Earth at the mercy of the Antichrist – were to occur at that moment. The pilot, he speculated, would be left behind while dozens of “saved” passengers dematerialised. The result was Left Behind – a racy and often bloodthirsty series of 12 novels, reflecting his “end times” mentality, which have sold more than 65 million copies, and have spawned four sequels and prequels, a board game in which players earn “redemption” tokens, DVDS, and even a line of clothing with a Rapture logo.
Tim Lahaye was born into a working-class family in Detroit in 1926. When he was nine, his father – a mechanic – died of a heart attack. He was distraught, but a preacher told him that he’d not seen the last of his father; they would meet again. Lahaye began preaching while working at a summer camp, and then served as a gunner with the US Air Force, at the end of WWII, before going to college and becoming a theologian. By the 1960s, he had begun writing religious tracts, often with his wife, Beverly. One of them was called The Act of Marriage: it included detailed descriptions of genitalia, and claimed “Christians generally experience a higher degree of sexual enjoyment than non-christians”.
By the late 1970s, Lahaye had moved into politics, to wage war on a new progressive agenda undermining traditional values, said The Daily Telegraph. He served on the first board of the Moral Majority, to lobby in favour of causes such as the censorship of school 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 1981, he founded a secretive body called the Council for National Policy, which aimed to shift America to the Right. His political career reached its apogee in 1988, when he was appointed co-chairman of Jack Kemp’s campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. However, it then emerged that Lahaye had described Catholicism as a “false religion”, and warned that “brilliant Jewish minds have all too frequently been devoted to philosophies that have proved harmful to mankind”. At that point, “literature became a more appealing option” for him, said The Wall Street Journal.
The Left Behind series follows a group of bornagain Christians battling the secretary general of the UN – the Antichrist – in advance of Christ’s Second Coming. Lahaye provided the plots and the theology, and a former sports journalist named Jerry B. Jenkins did the actual writing. Published in 1995, the first book sold five million copies in five years; in 2001, after the 9/11 attacks, the ninth part in the series, Desecration: Antichrist Takes the Throne, knocked John Grisham off the top slot in The New York Times bestseller list. “If our books have done so well, it is because the Bible gives us the best possible plan for the future,” Lahaye told an interviewer. And it seems that many of his readers also viewed his books as more fact than fiction: according to a 2006 survey, almost a quarter of Americans believe the Second Coming will take place in their lifetime. Lahaye’s books made him millions, which he poured into various foundations. According to a family statement, he “graduated to Heaven” after suffering a stroke last month.