The man with the plan was an Anglican priest turned traveling evangelical preacher named John Nelson Darby, who arrived in the U.S. in 1862 for the first of seven visits, bearing a radical new eschatology. Darby and minister Cyrus Scofield, who would expand the evangelist's ideas in the vastly influential Scofield Reference Bible, divided God's relationship with man into seven ages (the current sixth began with the death of Christ). Their vision grimly upended the previous wisdom. Far from getting ever better, things on earth would progressively worsen, until the Antichrist, also known as the Beast, arose. A seven-year, hell-like Tribulation would begin, survived by only a small human remnant. Not until then would Christ return, defeat the Antichrist and commence his Millennium. Much of Darby's scriptural synthesis had been suggested piecemeal by earlier thinkers.

His most striking innovation was the timing of a concept called the Rapture, drawn from the Apostle Paul's prediction that believers would fly up to meet Christ in heaven. Most theologians understood it as part of the Resurrection at time's very end. Darby repositioned it at the Apocalypse's very beginning, a small shift with large implications. It spared true believers the Tribulation, leaving the horror to nonbelievers and the doctrinally misled, thus moving Christianity's us-vs.-them concept of heaven and hell into a new and exciting theater.

In the post-Civil War decades American Evangelicals seized on Darby like a life preserver. At the time of the Scofield Bible's publication in 1909, they were establishing a set of "fundamentals," which included painstaking interpretations of Scripture. Darby's scheme became a pillar of the new Fundamentalism. (The Scofield Bible can still be found in churches across the country.) When Fundamentalism was humiliated and marginalized after the Scopes "monkey trial" in 1925, it merely confirmed for Evangelicals the Darbyite assumption that the world was getting progressively more wicked—beyond any help but the conversion of new souls to Christ.

In fact, Premillennial Dispensationalism (Darbyism's official name) was—and remains—one of the narrowest and most inward-turned strands in American religious belief. Barnard College's Randall Balmer, author of several books on Evangelicals, has called it "a theology of despair," and indeed its conviction that the world is headed irredeemably south breeds a grim indifference both to individual nonbelievers and to the American project as a whole. In The Remnant, a character remarks that "the world is a spent cartridge." In real life, when televangelist Pat Robertson floated a presidential run in 1986, a New Hampshire pastor complained, "Wait a minute. The next event on the [End Times] clock is the return of Christ. Things in society should get worse rather than better. If Christians worked to turn our nation around, that would delay Christ's return."

Luckily for the Republic, few Americans are truly Darby obsessed anymore. The Civil War has receded into history, and so, thanks to people like Billy Graham and Robertson, has Evangelical marginalization. Most Christians today, although affected by Revelation, feel led by other Scripture to make the current world a better place and to understand "Love thy neighbor" more broadly than as an order to convert him or leave him to the Antichrist.

Balmer maintains that over the past few decades, Christians' growing re-enfranchisement has resulted in a decrease in End Times sermons. How, then, to explain Left Behind's astounding sales? Western Michigan University's Brian Wilson suggests that for a population that still denies itself Stephen King, fearing his books' occult overtones, the series' authors, Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, provide a horror story with doctrinal sanction.

One of the best things about End Times theology has always been the late-night gab sessions it provokes. "Could those UPC codes in the supermarket [be] the Mark of the Beast?" write Balmer and Lauren Winner in Protestantism in America. "How do Desert Storm and the Persian Gulf War fit into the prophetic scheme? ... Although this may seem improbable to those outside the subculture, it is a lot of fun."

Or it was, until Sept. 11 turned it serious again.

—With reporting by Amanda Bower/New York

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