The Young Person’s Guide to the Apocalypse: Left Behind for Kids

Abstract

The Left Behind series, Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins’s novels about the end of the world as posited by a variety of evangelical Christianity called premillennial dispensationalism, remains the most popular of all Rapture fiction, but it has been criticized for shortfalls in its theology, ethics, world building, and literary quality. The Left Behind: The Kids series, published between 1998 and 2004, was a spinoff of the apocalyptic evangelical Christian Left Behind series aimed at younger readers. This article argues that author Chris Fabry uses the books to challenge, complicate, and resist aspects of the original series and to mitigate some of the criticisms levelled against it, particularly with regard to the treatment of non-believers, the value of community, and the role of Christian women.