Oct 14 2009
Careful now
This is a response to Daniel, but I want everyone to take note of it.
Frykholm discusses this issue in a chapter called “Witness to the Apocalypse” in a far more nuanced way than this quote taken out of context might imply. She is critical of the publishing house’s claims for conversion, because they indicate that it is a sudden epiphany experience that their books foster. But her point is that conversion is far more gradual and complex an experience of transformed identity–and she indicates that reading the Left Behind books can indeed be a part of that–but not in the way Tyndale wants to claim, which is a one to one correlation. She says, for example, that the “stories of readers’ conversions teach us that while Left Behind can serve as a means to conversion, it can only be a part of a much larger process of conversion that involves a richer social context than being handed a book on a street corner might suggest” (172). She concludes her chapter this way: “For nearly all readers of Left Behind, the books leave them with an urge to action–to witness to the strange truth of the rapture, to share their faith with the lost. They share this truth in their social networks with those who agree and with those who resist the message” (174).
Ah, this was my mistake.
I was reading “conversion” as “going from religion X to Christianity.”
Still stranger, with this wider reading of what “conversion” means, how could the publisher not have any testimonials?
Makes me think something fishy is going on.
I think you are right about the way the book probably puts off most non-believers (it surely does the trick for me). What I wanted to stress is that the conversion process is usually more complex than a sudden change of mind, so the press is making a case for something that isn’t really how conversion works. And, as you point out, it’s not a very compelling case anyway.
The second point is that there are many kinds of Christians. The group of 76.8 % of Americans who self-designate is divided up among many denominations and maybe half of them would be fundamentalist in the way the book is. In many cases, conversion actually happens to people who already identify as Christian, but have wavered or have been more liberal. For them, the book might be a factor in coming back to fundamentalism or moving from a mainstream form to fundamentalism.
I understand the nuance, but it’s still strange that the publishers could not find even seven legitimate conversions – epiphany or not.
The book might be an urge to action for Christians to share their faith but that doesn’t mean that non-believes are reading the book.
Polling data from the 2001 ARIS study, described below, indicate that:
76.5% (159 million) of Americans identify themselves as Christian. Source: <http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_prac2.htm>
My original point was that the book was not written for non-believers but condemns them to hellish times – not cool. The quote I brought seems to show that the book is not that effective on non-believers, which is stunning just because out of 63,000,000 at least a few dozen should have converted. Or, all this could mean that not too many non-believers have read the book.