The direct and concise analysis of apocalyptic belief and its connection to fundamentalism in Charles B. Strozier, David M. Terzian, and James W. Jones’ Fundamentalist Mindset is in many ways a literary foil to the hyperbolic narrative formed in Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins’ Glorious Appearing. Obviously, these two works reside in antithetical realms of literature – both thematically and mechanically – but their complementary nature provides detailed insight into the nature of the religious apocalypse and its implications towards basic human understanding.
I tend to agree with most of the points made in Katharine Boyd and Strozer’s chapter, titled “The Apocalyptic,” but one glaring omission caught my eye. The authors cite Mortimer Ostow’s “Myth and Madness: A Report of a Psychoanalytic Study of Antisemitism,” from The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, as one of the essay’s main sources. According to Ostow’s article, there are three types of apocalyptic discourse that are created to address “social group formations.” The distinctions made between the three groups are noteworthy – the authors illuminate Ostow’s own assertions that the apocalypse myth can serve as a hopeful outlet for the oppressed, a tool to maintain oppression by those in power, or as a construct to encourage tangible reactionary behavior that is manifested typically through violence. Ostow’s succinct categorization is admirable, and does address the overarching factions that divide purveyors of apocalyptic myth, but from my own experience, he ignores a group that holds more power within the realm of apocalyptic belief than ever – the entertainment industry. Sure, the stated functions of the myth can be extrapolated to the world of film, television, novels, and other forms of media, but not without a distinct sense of cynicism that I try (largely unsuccessfully) to avoid. The three groups mentioned don’t seem to cover those that seek out the apocalypse for base pleasures and as a form of entertainment, a categorization that meshes with my own internal desires for the proliferation of the myth.
Glorious Appearing, in many ways, is a curious amalgamation of all three of Ostow’s apocalyptic factions, but it also embraces the idea of apocalypse as entertainment. It can be easy to approach fiction that relies on a heavy religious slant with an innate sense of cynicism, an approach that inherently limits the analysis of the text itself. As part of the Left Behind canon, it could be seen as a vessel of spiritual mumbo-jumbo or religious propaganda, and I admit that I held similar previously conceived notions about the series. Reading this installment however, left me with a contrasting notion of what it means to fictionalize Christian belief in an easily-absorbed, mass-marketed, and briskly written narrative. There is an incredibly fine line (almost to the point of invisibility) between Glorious Appearing and any other airport paperback, and based on this perplexing but ultimately fascinating characteristic – I attempted to read the novel as such.
Ultimately, I found that Glorius Appearing was enjoyable, if not pedantic. Despite obvious liberties taken with the base myth of Revelation, it comes across as a distinctly contemporary translation of its moldable, revered source material. Despite the problematic notions that derive from making a canonical biblical text into Stephen King-esque entertainment, I found that the implications of Glorious Appearing came across as less frightening than I had previously imagined. At its core, it does perpetuate certain conventional ideals that are troubling to me, namely its reduction of good and evil to incredibly simplistic terms, but as a whole, I found that I enjoyed the novel most enjoyable when I distanced my own prejudices from its inherently divisive central concept. This quality in itself can also be problematic, as I kept coming back to the series’ societal influence and incredible reach in comparison to other less well-known portrayals that exist in contemporaneous texts like The Road and Watchmen. Nonetheless, at least my judgments of the series now come from a degree of first-hand knowledge and not exclusively from my own cynicism.
