The Left Behind series centers a violent conquering Christ and rugged masculinity

Evidence

LaHaye’s novels are rife with paragons of rugged masculinity and redemptive violence. The hero is a man by the name of Rayford Steele, husband to faithful wife Irene, whose work for Richard DeVos’s Amway testifies to her charitable character. But Rayford’s libido draws him to a “drop-dead gorgeous” flight attendant; when his wife is raptured, he and the flight attendant are not. The series ends in a violent bloodbath ushered in by Christ himself. The conquering Christ brings peace through the sword, slaying tens of thousands of opposition soldiers who fall dead, “splayed and filleted,” blood bursting “from skin and veins,” entrails gushing to the ground. In acts of unprecedented violence, Christ’s enemies get what they had coming. LaHaye’s Left Behind books have sold more than sixty-five million copies; one survey estimates that one in five Americans has read at least one of the books. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 204

Categorization

• XREF: This is the core evidence for Du Mez’s method — commercial popular fiction transmitting militant-masculinity theology to mass readership. Sixty-five million copies and one-in-five readership quantify the reach.
• SEED: A possible critical angle: what does it mean that the most popular evangelical eschatology imagines Christ as an agent of genocidal violence — the ‘peace through the sword’ imagery as the fantasy backdrop for later Trump-era politics.