Meet The Prophet

By John Cloud/Rancho Mirage

Tim Lahaye is many things--influential theologian, founder of a Christian school system, co-author of a sex manual with 2.5 million copies in print--but he isn't a novelist. Which is a bit strange, since he enjoys top billing on the Left Behind novels, the wildly popular books that make the end of the world fun. When LaHaye first conceived the series--entirely written by author Jerry Jenkins--he hoped to sell maybe 250,000 copies. Last year's installment alone sold 3 million, and for the first time since 1994, the author of the best-selling novel in the U.S. wasn't named Grisham.

And yet it's hard to imagine a less likely fiction impresario than LaHaye, a retired Evangelical pastor who turned 76 in April. He didn't seriously contemplate writing a novel until his 60s--and then found he wasn't good at it (he hands over his notes for each book to Jenkins, 52, also a born-again Christian, who has written more than 80 novels). Instead, LaHaye has spent most of his life spreading his view of Christ and fighting for conservative principles, often through nonfiction. Very often--LaHaye has had 51 nonfiction books published, an eclectic mix of theology (for example, the forthcoming Merciful God of Prophecy), self-help (I Love You, but Why Are We So Different?, 1991) and psychology (Spirit-Controlled Temperament, 1966).

Why are so many people turning to someone like LaHaye--a guy more interested in reality than fiction--for novels? Because in this volatile moment, many people are starting to read the Left Behind books not as novels but as tomorrow's newspapers. LaHaye believes that the Scriptures lay out a precise timetable for the end of the world, and the Left Behind books let us in on the chronology. A man of few doubts, LaHaye offers answers to one of the biggest questions ever posed: When will it end? Well, you will know the end has begun when the true believers in Christ vanish from the earth "in the twinkling of an eye" (I Corinthians 15: 52), leaving their Levi's in a rumple. The rest of us are "left behind"--and that's just where the series starts.

Although the books did well before Sept. 11, sales soared in the confusing period that followed, and it's fair to speculate that last year's installment, Desecration: Antichrist Takes the Throne, would not have outsold John Grisham's Skipping Christmas to become the biggest novel of 2001 if the planes had not crashed. Near the end of the first volume, Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth's Last Days (1995), Jenkins writes of one of the heroes, "He wanted to believe something that tied everything together and made it make sense." Exactly so.

And just what ties it all together? LaHaye and Jenkins would say it's the Bible. As Evangelicals, they take every word literally, even those mystical-sounding parts of the Book of Revelation that seem to defy interpretation. LaHaye has devoted much of his career--and 13 of his nonfiction works--to puzzling out what the Bible's prophecies mean. He has explained it all in dense tomes for fellow theologians as well as in the accessible 140-page Charting the End Times: A Visual Guide to Understanding Bible Prophecy (written with Thomas Ice, 2001). "The future is settled, and not open to change," LaHaye says. There is comfort in that message.

A patient, detail-oriented man, LaHaye can transform complex biblical passages into a map showing what he believes to be the very battle plans for the last world war, beginning with the massing of the Antichrist's armies in northern Israel and ending with Christ's ascent on the Mount of Olives near Jerusalem. Jenkins skillfully filters the outlines that LaHaye provides through the adventures of heroes Rayford Steele, a pilot, and Cameron ("Buck") Williams, who starts out Left Behind as a 30-year-old virgin and senior writer for TIME's fictional competitor Global Weekly. Their mission is to help nonbelievers accept Christ during the rise of the Antichrist. This ultimate villain does his best to kill as many of the new Christians as possible, and in some episodes it's all Rayford and Buck can do to stay alive and protect their wives. (Yes, Buck finds a girl amid the chaos, and like many of the series' female characters, she is constantly in need of rescuing.)

Another writer might be overwhelmed by the grand scale of things, but Jenkins, an easygoing golf nut who lives in Colorado Springs, Colo., doesn't let it bother him. He doesn't slow the liquid-like pace of the novels even when his characters utter sentences such as "[H]e cannot be expected to handle the duties of both the U.N. and Botswana during this strategic moment in Botswana history, right, Steve?" Huh? No matter. Soon enough, the story returns to the explosions and earthquakes preceding Armageddon.

The Bible's prediction of violence during this period gives the Left Behind books their gore. The nuclear frights of, say, Tom Clancy's The Sum of All Fears wouldn't fill a chapter in the Left Behind series. (Large chunks of several U.S. cities have been bombed to smithereens by page 110 of Book 3.) Harvey Cox, a professor of divinity at Harvard, says part of the appeal of Left Behind lies in the "lip-licking anticipation of all the blood." But many nonbelievers come to Christ in the course of the books, and this holy "soul harvest" lends the series a buoyant optimism that many critics have ignored.

LaHaye's fascination with End Times began with his own optimism in the face of tragedy. At 9, he lost his gregarious father Frank to a heart attack. "I had a lovable family life, and it was gone," he says in a voice that sounds more like Nashville, Tenn., than his native Detroit. "I thought the world had come to an end. 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. I feel that today; I feel it like it happened yesterday."

These words have a slightly rehearsed quality--as a pastor and book-tour veteran, LaHaye has had to tell the same stories many, many times. But he tells them with sincerity. LaHaye doesn't have the stage presence required of a great preacher, but he knows how to show his heart one-on-one. Left Behind, which is published by the Christian press Tyndale House, has brought LaHaye and Jenkins something like $50 million apiece, and LaHaye recently signed a separate $42 million deal with Bantam Dell for a new series about an evangelical Indiana Jones. LaHaye neglected to tell Jenkins about the new deal in advance, leading some in the publishing business to call him greedy. (As with Left Behind, a working novelist will hammer LaHaye's thoughts into prose, though the new compatriot, Davis Bunn, won't take as big a cut--50%--as Jenkins did.) But LaHaye doesn't seem like a man motivated by money. Aside from driving a white Cadillac SUV the size of a tank, he and his wife of 55 years, Beverly, don't live lavishly. Their condo in Rancho Mirage, Calif., is at one of the less impressive country clubs, and LaHaye recently gave a seminar in Wichita, Kans., in a sports-coat/paisley-tie/blue-leather-loafer combo that looked as if it could not have been purchased after 1985.

LaHaye wasn't above urging the crowd in Wichita to preorder the new Left Behind book on the Internet "'cause I'm not sure you'll get it if you don't." But he doesn't beg like a cheap televangelist. Nor does he bluster like Jerry Falwell or Jesse Jackson. If he's having an argument--something that happens a lot when you fight for a single political and religious viewpoint all your life--LaHaye doesn't get louder; he gets softer. He leans back and takes a full minute to consider your point. And in the end he is always interested in what for him is the only real question on the table: Do you have a personal relationship with Christ? Would you like to? Within a few hours after we met for the first time, LaHaye gave me advice about my career, my love life and my salvation--and yet his questions didn't feel intrusive. He's that genuine.

LaHaye learned how to talk to people as a pastor. In his first two decades after graduating from Bob Jones University in 1950, he ministered in Minneapolis, Minn., and then San Diego. In 1974 he founded an Evangelical church in El Cajon, Calif., that today claims 3,500 worshippers each Sunday. As a pastor in turbulent California during the '60s, LaHaye saw all manner of good people get into trouble with drugs and sex and sin. He felt that fragile humans needed to be filled with the protective Holy Spirit early, and his churches quickly led to schools (his Christian Unified Schools of San Diego now sprawls across three campuses) and to a college called Christian Heritage. "You have to train up a child in the way he should go, according to Proverbs," LaHaye says. "All of us are vulnerable to leadership--and those who deny biblical absolutes are leading many of us away." LaHaye sees people as remarkably malleable creatures.

Shaping adult minds required a more entrepreneurial approach, and LaHaye began writing self-help books. Eventually he hit every conceivable publishing fad: sex advice (including 1976's The Act of Marriage, a blockbuster that declared "the husband's use of clitoral manipulation" to be godly); How to Win over Depression (1974); Anger Is a Choice (1982); Why You Act the Way You Do (1984).

The early '80s were a good time for LaHaye. His large ministry and publishing presence gave him influence on the ascendant religious right. He served on the first board of the Moral Majority, and in 1984 he started his own Washington group, the American Coalition for Traditional Values (ACTV, pronounced "active"). His wife had incorporated yet another group, Concerned Women for America, in 1979, and today it claims 500,000 members, about the same number reported by the National Organization for Women. In 1987, shortly after LaHaye became a co-chairman of Republican Jack Kemp's short-lived presidential campaign, a Baltimore Sun reporter examined one of LaHaye's theological books, 1974's Revelation: Illustrated and Made Plain. The reporter discovered that LaHaye had called Catholicism a "false religion" and said Rome "too often gives man a false security that keeps him from seeking salvation." The Sun reprinted the comments on a Friday; Catholics and reporters cried foul, and LaHaye resigned from the campaign the following Monday.

LaHaye has never backed away from the comments; in fact, they are reprinted in an updated, 1999 version of Revelation. Many argue with LaHaye's conception of God and heaven, but it is his views about this world that set him apart. He believes, for instance, that witchcraft is real, citing a coven of witches "outside Milwaukee" that sends its members to churches and confuses the pastors with spells. Similarly, he has written about a "secret order" called the Illuminati that has carried out a "conspiracy on the church, our government, media, and the public schools" for more than 300 years. His book Mind Siege: The Battle for Truth in the New Millennium (2000), co-written with David Noebel, says TV promotes incest and wife swapping as part of secularists' plans for "world domination."

On another subject--gays and lesbians--LaHaye's views are not just eccentric but downright odious. In his 1978 book The Unhappy Gays--which even today LaHaye calls "a model of compassion"--he wrote that homosexuality is "vile" and that gays share 16 pernicious traits, which include "incredible promiscuity," "deceit," "selfishness," "vulnerability to sadism-masochism" and "poor health and an early death." He wondered who was more "cruel and inhuman"--those who accept gays even though they are so unhappy or "those who practiced Old Testament capital punishment" on gays.

What's strange about these passages is that they seem at odds with LaHaye's own warm temperament. Even his co-author, Jenkins, doesn't share LaHaye's more conspiracy-minded views about the Illuminati or his prejudices against gays. LaHaye has promoted an instructional videotape that says the Harry Potter books are helping "disciple children into the darkest aspects of black magic." But Jenkins says Potter is fine for anyone who understands the difference between fantasy and reality. Still, he says of his partner, "He knows how to get attention. That's one of his gifts."

LaHaye got the idea for a fictional series about the End Times some 15 years ago, at a time when he felt he wasn't reaching enough nonbelievers. Perhaps that's why the Left Behind books for the most part avoid overtly conservative political statements. There is little mention of homosexuality, and even as the Antichrist raises taxes, he orders pipelines installed to drain Alaskan oil (President Bush, take note). There is also a yuppie aspirational quality to the books, which are full of pretty people with cell phones and seats in first class. In other words, Left Behind serves those readers who are just as worried about being left behind in this life as in the next. For the present, however, LaHaye is looking forward to finishing the Left Behind project--there will be two more books as well as a prequel. He's eager to start his new series, which will combine archaeology, prophecy and, of course, explosions.

"I have a gift for explaining complex subjects to common people," says LaHaye. And in these uncommon times, it's a gift that is increasingly well received.

--With reporting by Andrea Sachs/Colorado Springs

With reporting by Andrea Sachs/Colorado Springs