Shopping for the end of the world: 'Left Behind', evangelical culture, and apocalyptic consumerism (Tim F. LaHaye, Jerry Jenkins)

The Left Behind series narrates a conservative evangelical apocalypse that, while it seems obsessed with future events, provides a guidebook for living out Christian faith in contemporary consumer culture. Using apocalypse to explain the logic of shopping, the geography of globalization, and the construction of religious, racial, and national identity, the series articulates a theology of cosmopolitan consumerism. Together with this theology comes an ethics in which responsibility---to other humans, to animals, to the earth, and to the future---is subsumed under the role of martyr in the movie of the end of time.; The Left Behind series deploys such theology and ethics in a battle with the "secular" over real spaces and places. The fantasy of homogenous, exclusively Christian space that motivates this battle ironically enables play at the borders of gender, race, and nation. But the series' fascination with ritual violence suggests that such geography can only be purchased through bloodshed, and that the martyrdom that suspends responsibility depends on a sacrificial appropriation of Jewish suffering. Found not just in Left Behind but in a range of evangelical worship performances, practices, places, and texts, this sacrificial theology and its geography help us to understand conservative evangelical culture---but they also demonstrate that we should rethink responsibility in the context of consumer practices in general, and point us toward ways of doing so. The series should compel us to ask what it would really mean to stop shopping for the apocalypse.