MARKS OF THE BEAST: The Left Behind Novels and the Struggle for Evangelical Identity

With the Left Behind series nearing 70 million in sales, neither religious nor secular theorists and academics can ignore its influence. Shuck, a religion professor at Williams College, turns his decidedly academic mind to exploring modern prophecy fiction, specifically the work of Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. His study is not a lightweight look at the phenomenon. It's a heavily academic analysis of "personal and collective identity among prophecy-believing evangelicals." He explores the background of dispensationalism and its underlying tension between a desire for action and the "blessed despair" of knowing God controls everything, as well as the fine points of evangelical identity. Believers, he says, are torn between preserving their identity and becoming involved in culture to make a safe place for themselves. Shuck offers a thorough discussion of what theorists call our modern "network culture" at present and in the novels, offering the conclusion that while Left Behind protagonists fight the Beast's system using its own strategies, "They may... build the perfect Beast, even as they purport to resist it." Shuck does not address scriptural interpretation, instead focusing the cultural and historical highlights of the series, which he concludes is "not simply innocuous fiction." (Dec.)