I had actually tried reading the Left Behind series a couple of years ago but never got a chance to really finish the first book. Like everyone’s mentioned, Glorious Appearing and the Fundamentalist Mindset essays go hand in hand. The Tribulation Force is trying to fight of the Antichrist, Nicholae Carpathia at the start of the novel, drenching the reader immediately in violent imagery. I think what we need to keep in mind though is that whereas the Rapture and its related events are all still hypothetical for us, the world of Glorious Appearing is a world that is undergoing the seven years of rule under the Antichrist. These characters have lost their family members to God and have been shown proof through Carpathia’s resurrection that there is more to come, which is why the language is so fundamentalist because it is happening in their concrete world.  What I’m particularly interested about though is more language of the essays. We’re all using terminology that Strozier and Boyd used but I found some of their definitions lacking and, to use another of their words, ‘simple-minded’.
A word that we see very frequently paranoia. Storzier and Boyd describe how there is paranoia as well as suspicion, preferring to use the latter in their essays because of the malevolence it invokes as well as psychological dimensions. The psychological aspect is what defines ‘paranoia’ most, being the name of a mental condition. The OED states that paranoia is a mental illness characterized by a “persistent delusional system, usually on the theme of persecution, exaggerated personal importance, or sexual fantasy or jealousy, often as a manifestation of schizophrenia,” a definition dating back to the mid-1700s. The general term of “excessive” and “unreasonable” fear is a relatively recent creation, dating back to the late 1950s, and goes beyond just constantly looking over your shoulder late at night just in case someone might be behind you.  Suspicion, on the other hand, is defined as “imagination or conjecture of the existence of something evil of wrong without proof” as well as “apprehension of guilt of fault on slight grounds or without clear evidence.” That paranoia denotes a more violent image of fundamentalism is entirely true, but we have to see that they’re not as interchangeable as the definitions used by Schneider and Hoffman made them seem.

On another note, a word that I was really surprised at seeing as it was used was ‘guru’, found in the first essay as well. I always thought of guru as a teacher, a leader, specifically a Hindu spiritual leader. That Lifton uses the word to describe the malevolent aspect of charismatic leadership served as a shock so I had to look it up. The original Sanskrit had the word as an adjective, meaning weighty or dignified. That it’s used in general now as a teacher, mentor, or pundit in no way gives the image of a malevolent being. Lifton uses “attack guruism” as his example though but I can’t really find a good definition of that anywhere. I suppose that is just another example of “selective retrieval”, as they mention it in the second essay. I know looking up the definitions seems really odd, especially with contemporary texts, but sometimes words carried different meaning before and if you’re aware of them, sometimes new ideas can be introduced, even if they’re brought in from an obsolete meaning or an antonym.