Revenge is a genre best served old: Apocalypse in Christian Right literature and politics
Date
2021
Authors
Douglas, Christopher
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Religions
Abstract
Apocalypse is a phenomenology of disorder that entails a range of religious affects and experiences
largely outside normative expectations of benevolent religion. Vindication, judgment, revenge,
resentment, righteous hatred of one’s enemies, the wish for their imminent destruction, theological
certainty, the triumphant display of right authority, right judgement, and just punishment—these
are the primary affects. As a literary genre and a worldview, apocalypse characterizes both the most
famous example of evangelical fiction—the Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins—and
the U.S. Christian Right’s politics. This article’s methodological contribution is to return us to the
beginnings of apocalypse in Biblical and parabiblical literature to better understand the questions of
theodicy that Left Behind renews in unexpected ways. Conservative white Christians use apocalypse
to articulate their experience as God’s chosen but persecuted people in a diversely populated cosmos,
wherein their political foes are the enemies of God. However strange the supersessionist appropriation,
apocalypse shapes their understanding of why God lets them suffer so—and may also signal an
underlying fear about the power and attention of their deity.
Description
Keywords
apocalypse, Christian Right, Left Behind, Bible, monotheism, polytheism, theodicy, evangelical, fundamentalism, suffering, religious violence, power, evil
Citation
Douglas, C. (2021). “Revenge is a genre best served old: Apocalypse in Christian Right literature and politics.” Religions, 13(1), 21. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel13010021