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The last of the case studies documents the vast popularity of the apocalyptic thrillers, Left Behind. Coauthored by long‐standing New Christian Right architect Tim LaHaye, these books use a dispensational premillennialist framework to pronounce judgment on a sinning America by projecting the fates of sinners “left behind” after the Rapture. Using narrative strategies lifted from both horror and technothrillers, the authors enact their political sensibilities by situating long‐standing Christian Right social concerns in end‐of‐the‐world fiction. The chapter examines these themes and also surveys Christian apocalypticism, Christian publishing, and the political history of Tim LaHaye.

This chapter describes the Left Behind phenomenon—its origins, content, sales, and media impact. It focuses on the reception of the Left Behind novels and on the critiques that have been variously advanced by secular liberals, Roman Catholics, Protestants, evangelicals, and fellow dispensationalists. This chapter will argue that the Left Behind brand has begun to fragment, and that the novels’ vast revenues and blockbuster status has ultimately undercut their depiction of the marginalization of true believers as the end of the age approaches. While the novels have massively popularized an older version of dispensationalism, their success has simultaneously ensured that its coherence cannot be maintained. The chapter notes the series of interesting similarities between the Left Behind novels and earlier evangelical prophecy novels, and concludes by arguing that this genre consciousness allows the novels to be read as a barometer of evangelical cultural concerns.

“The Divine Terrorist: Religion and Violence in American Apocalyptic Christianity.” Through an analysis of the psychological-religious themes found in the popular novels the Left Behind series, this chapter examines the connections between Christian theology and violence in American apocalyptic Christianity. The analysis reveals many important commonalities between the outlook found in the Left Behind series and that of religiously motivated terrorists from around the world. The expression of some of these themes in the rise of the religious right is also pointed out, and the violent potential of American apocalyptic Christianity is explored.

This chapter begins with a brief review of research on the psychology of violence and the connection between violent media, particularly video games, and violent behavior. It also briefly reviews some of the psychological themes found in violent religious groups across religious traditions. This will be followed by a description of some of the violent imagery found in the Left Behind novels and the video game “Left Behind: Eternal Forces”, based on the series. This will underscore the thematic similarities between these examples of Christian media and the texts of violence found in violent and terroristic religious groups.

Examines the history of the idea of the rapture in American Protestantism and argues that belief in the rapture, although it has fundamentalist origins, needs to be understood as a much broader social movement and a much more integrated part of American culture. Looks briefly at the apocalyptic context of American culture and then at the more specific history of rapture belief and dispensationalism in the United States. Argues that readers of the Left Behind series no longer see themselves as intimately connected to fundamentalist belief but instead seek to integrate the rapture into a broader religious context. Similarly, the texts of the novels themselves do not so much condemn and dismiss contemporary culture as they seek negotiation with it, particularly in the roles of technology, consumer culture, and gender in society. The formulation of evangelicalism represented in the books is a significant departure from previous religious apocalyptic fiction.

Argues that especially with religious fiction, reading cannot be understood as a private act but must be placed into a social context. Readers engage in reading Left Behind through a series of networks that contribute to the meaning they give the text. This chapter examines two contexts in which the reading of Left Behind occurs: the church “home” and the usually religiously divided family. Within these contexts, readers find that their beliefs and practices are contested by the dissent of other believers, by the disdain of clergy, and by family members who resist the Left Behind series’ call to faith. Readers use the books to build narratives of identity and belonging, but only in divided and complex contexts.

Left Behind has been a controversial force in American culture, drawing regular criticism from secular and religious corners. This chapter examines that criticism and argues for a stronger understanding of the activity of readers. Readers are active interpreters of fictional texts, and their interaction with these texts is complex and often unpredictable. The dynamics of both fear and desire are at work in creating responses to Left Behind within complex social settings. Evangelicalism is wrongly understood as a “subculture” and instead needs to be conceived as a broad and fluid part of dominant popular culture in the United States. Rapture Culture urges its readers to consider popular fiction reading as a complex and dynamic act of faith in American Protestantism.

While the core of Left Behind’s readership is evangelical and white, the popularity of the books has seeped far beyond these boundaries. This chapter explores the response to Left Behind by non-evangelical readers or by readers who struggled to place themselves easily within contemporary evangelicalism. It argues that the series is persuasive as “truth” to those who are already convinced. It is far less convincing to those who stand outside its central doctrines. At the same time, those on the margins of Left Behind’s readership use the books in creative ways to make sense of their own lives and religious realities.

This chapter describes the way that readers use the Left Behind series to “read” and understand contemporary culture and the signs of the end of the world. Drawing on a wide range of beliefs and expectations about how the world will end, readers examine culture for signals that their understanding of the world is true. This chapter focuses specifically on technology and consumer culture as significant elements within end-times reasoning. When taken together, these cultural readings suggest that evangelical dispensationalism is taking on increasingly world-engaged forms and dispensing with its more escapist elements.

Focuses on ways that readers use the texts to make prophecy—what they saw as biblical truth—come alive for them. Readers repeatedly report that the novels make difficult or obscure biblical texts, especially those in Revelation, come alive through mental pictures or visual images. Fiction opens up a road into truth because it frees the imagination to participate in the creation of truth. Readers vary greatly in how much fiction they allow into their making of the “truth,” but nearly all see fiction as a potential, but not absolute, vehicle of truth. Oddly, however, this securing of biblical truth through fiction is combined with an anxiety about individual salvation and whether or not the reader will be left behind. The story of the rapture provides readers with both tools and fears they use to construct religious meaning.

The primary work that readers ascribe to Left Behind is evangelistic. This chapter describes how readers speak of that evangelistic work and the urgency that they believe the rapture narrative gives it. Then the chapter examines the possibility of conversion through the reading of fiction. Looking at the publishers’ and authors’ accounts of these conversions, how conversion is depicted in the narrative, and how readers describe their own religious conversions, this chapter suggests that religious conversion through reading Left Behind is a very rare event indeed and one that only comes about in a particular kind of supportive social environment.

This chapter engages in a detailed discussion of the standards-based reform movement. In particular, it discusses the history of standards-based reforms, the theories underlying standards-based reforms, and research on the implementation of these reforms. Because standards-based reforms have become so blended with accountability policies, the chapter also discusses the growth of accountability policies in the U.S. and how these policies have tied into the standards-based reform movement. It focuses on two major goals of standards-based reform and accountability policies: aligning various education policies and ensuring that more ambitious instruction and high quality content are delivered to students. In doing so, the chapter sets the stage for a nuanced examination of how the courts have engaged with this movement, grounded in knowledge from the field of education policy.

This chapter trains its attention on the role that gender plays in how readers interact with Left Behind. It begins with female readers’ denial that gender is important to their reading of the books and their resistance to single out gender for discussion. Male and female readers identified with the stronger, male characters in the books and sought to learn from them how to live in the midst of strife. The chapter continues with a look at the history of gender in dispensationalism and the complex roles that it has played. The chapter concludes that gender has a relevance when it comes to the dispensationalist narrative. It shapes and informs that narrative, but readers themselves emphasize spiritual strength and personal devotion over the policing of gender.

This chapters examines literary texts that specifically construct their end-time scenarios around racial conflict or racial coming-together. DNA is the technologized term for “blood” in these racialized millennial fictions. Racialized apocalypses depict three different kinds of possible worlds: in one, Tribulation is the beginning of openly racial warfare; in another, it is the end of race war, with the last race(s) becoming first; finally, the inhabitants of the third type take an ecumenical approach, providing images of a rainbow coalition departing from Babylon and constructing the New Jerusalem. Authors of works in the first category are generally members of the dominant race, and their fictions indulge in “blaming the victim” on a cosmic scale. Authors of works in the second two categories have a variety of origins. Of course, some works are ambiguous or self-contradictory, but in general, one can delineate the natural and social laws of these three racial landscapes, and the fictions that take place in them are virtually interchangeable with each other, from Caesar’s Column of the 19^th century to the Left Behind series of the 21st.

This chapter focuses on the period between 2003 and 2011, which encompasses reaction against No Child Left Behind as well as the Obama administration's ambitious initiatives. It begins by describing the political backlash against the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, showing how it worked to limit the scope of reforms favored by business entrepreneurs, civil rights entrepreneurs, and their allies. Analyzing the agendas of business entrepreneurs, civil rights entrepreneurs, educational liberals, educational conservatives, and state leaders during the failed reauthorization of 2007–8, it argues that the proposals of business entrepreneurs and civil rights entrepreneurs anticipated many of the initiatives of the Obama administration. The chapter then discusses the Obama administration's Race to the Top initiative, illustrating how it extends the logic and principles of the NCLB in an effort to shore up standards-based reforms at the state and local levels. The final section speculates on education policy in the Obama administration in light of the 2010 elections.

This chapter focuses on the period between 1995 and 2002, which was bookended by the “Republican Revolution” against big government and by the passage of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act in 2002. It begins by reviewing how the so-called Republican Revolution affected the progress of standards-based reforms in Congress and the states between 1994 and 2000. It then shows how these developments shaped the ideas and advocacy of business entrepreneurs, civil rights entrepreneurs, and their allies in Congress. After tracing the various threads that contributed to the reemergence of support for federal leadership of standards-based reform, it examines the politics surrounding enactment of NCLB, both to explain why the legislation passed and understand how it accommodated existing interests and institutions. Finally, the chapter considers how enactment of NCLB set the stage for subsequent intergovernmental struggles over authority in education—in particular, how it influenced presidential candidate Barack Obama's education agenda in the 2008 election campaign.