“To Sacrifice One’s Intellect Is More Demonic than Divine”: American Literature and Politics in Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days

Abstract

All that, including the pogrom of several billion souls: atheists, Catholics, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, and others who do not subscribe to the dispensationalist creed, is part of God's master plan to bring all to the true faith. For Darby, this theodicy was not a problem: his divine omelet clearly called for the breaking of a few billion eggs. The fact that God's retribution might rain indiscriminately on all people on Earth, born-again or not, was more disconcerting. In the end, Darby decided that, rather than suffer the equivalent of Amalric's 'Kill them all, for the Lord knows them that are His', true Christians would be spirited up to heaven just before the reign of terror began. Bailed out by the Rapture, they could then safely look down on God's carnage of those left behind. As to who qualifies as a true Christian, Darby's teachings were no different from that of the Calvinists, the Puritans, and the Separatists: nobody knows except the Lord.