The End: How It Got That Way

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.

--By David Van Biema. With reporting by Amanda Bower/New York