anti–death penalty; these were very clear ideas to me. However, things have since happened in my life, and now I have no feelings about either issue. And I’m sincere about that; I really have no opinion about abortion or the death penalty. Somehow, they don’t even seem important. But that’s what happens whenever you start to understand that most things cannot be emotively understood: You’re able to make better conversation over snifters of brandy, but you become an unfeeling idiot. You go from
believing
in objective reality to
suspecting
an objective reality exists; eventually, you start trying to make objectivity mesh with situational ethics, since every situation now seems unique. And then someone tells you that situational ethics is actually an oxymoron, since the idea of ethics is that these are things you do
all the time,
regardless of the situation. And pretty soon you find yourself in a circumstance where someone asks you if you believe that life begins at conception, and you find yourself changing the subject to NASCAR racing.
This is not a problem for the born again. There are no other subjects, really; nothing else—besides being born again—is even marginally important. Every moment of your life is a search-and-rescue mission: Everyone you meet needs to be converted and anyone you don’t convert is going to hell, and you will be partially at fault for their scorched corpse. Life would become unspeakably important, and every conversation you’d have for the rest of your life (or until the Rapture—whichever comes first) would really, really,
really
matter. If you ask me, that’s pretty glamorous. And
Left Behind
pushes that paradigm relentlessly. Another one of its primary characters—airline pilot Rayford Steele—becomes born again after he loses his wife and twelve-year-old son. However, his skeptical college-aged daughter Chloe doesn’t make God’s cut, so much of the text revolves around his attempts to convert Chloe to “The Way.” And the main psychological hurdle Steele must overcome is the fact that he’s not an obtrusive jackass, which
Left Behind
says we all need to become. “
Here I am, worried about offending people,
” Rayford thinks to himself at the beginning of chapter 19. “
I’m liable to ‘not offend’ my own daughter right into hell
.” The stakes are too high to concern oneself with manners.
This is ultimately what I like about the Born-Again Lifestyle: Even though I see fundamentalist Christians as wild-eyed maniacs, I respect their verve. They are probably the only people openly fighting against America’s insipid Oprah Culture—the pervasive belief system that insists everyone’s perspective is valid and that no one can be judged. As far as I can tell, most people I know are like me; most of the people I know are bad people (or they’re good people, but they consciously choose to do bad things). We
deserve
to be judged.
I realize that liberals and libertarians and Michael Stipe are always quick to quote the Bible when you say something like that, and they’ll tell you, “Judge not, lest ye be judged.” And that’s a solid retort for just about anything, really. But the thing with born agains is that they
want
to be judged. They can’t fucking wait. That’s why they’re cool.
As I just mentioned, Rayford Steele loses his young son in
Left Behind
’s Rapture. As it turns out, every young child in this book vanishes, including infants in the process of being born. This is to indicate that they are “innocents” and have done no wrong. And oddly, this was the aspect of
Left Behind
I found most distasteful.
First of all, it kind of contradicts the book’s premise, since we are constantly told that the ONLY way to get into heaven is to accept Christ, which no four-year-old (much less a four-
month
-old) could possibly comprehend. Granted, this is mostly a technicality, and I’m sure it’s intentional (for most exclusivist born-again groups, the
believing
in objective reality to
suspecting
an objective reality exists; eventually, you start trying to make objectivity mesh with situational ethics, since every situation now seems unique. And then someone tells you that situational ethics is actually an oxymoron, since the idea of ethics is that these are things you do
all the time,
regardless of the situation. And pretty soon you find yourself in a circumstance where someone asks you if you believe that life begins at conception, and you find yourself changing the subject to NASCAR racing.
This is not a problem for the born again. There are no other subjects, really; nothing else—besides being born again—is even marginally important. Every moment of your life is a search-and-rescue mission: Everyone you meet needs to be converted and anyone you don’t convert is going to hell, and you will be partially at fault for their scorched corpse. Life would become unspeakably important, and every conversation you’d have for the rest of your life (or until the Rapture—whichever comes first) would really, really,
really
matter. If you ask me, that’s pretty glamorous. And
Left Behind
pushes that paradigm relentlessly. Another one of its primary characters—airline pilot Rayford Steele—becomes born again after he loses his wife and twelve-year-old son. However, his skeptical college-aged daughter Chloe doesn’t make God’s cut, so much of the text revolves around his attempts to convert Chloe to “The Way.” And the main psychological hurdle Steele must overcome is the fact that he’s not an obtrusive jackass, which
Left Behind
says we all need to become. “
Here I am, worried about offending people,
” Rayford thinks to himself at the beginning of chapter 19. “
I’m liable to ‘not offend’ my own daughter right into hell
.” The stakes are too high to concern oneself with manners.
This is ultimately what I like about the Born-Again Lifestyle: Even though I see fundamentalist Christians as wild-eyed maniacs, I respect their verve. They are probably the only people openly fighting against America’s insipid Oprah Culture—the pervasive belief system that insists everyone’s perspective is valid and that no one can be judged. As far as I can tell, most people I know are like me; most of the people I know are bad people (or they’re good people, but they consciously choose to do bad things). We
deserve
to be judged.
I realize that liberals and libertarians and Michael Stipe are always quick to quote the Bible when you say something like that, and they’ll tell you, “Judge not, lest ye be judged.” And that’s a solid retort for just about anything, really. But the thing with born agains is that they
want
to be judged. They can’t fucking wait. That’s why they’re cool.
As I just mentioned, Rayford Steele loses his young son in
Left Behind
’s Rapture. As it turns out, every young child in this book vanishes, including infants in the process of being born. This is to indicate that they are “innocents” and have done no wrong. And oddly, this was the aspect of
Left Behind
I found most distasteful.
First of all, it kind of contradicts the book’s premise, since we are constantly told that the ONLY way to get into heaven is to accept Christ, which no four-year-old (much less a four-
month
-old) could possibly comprehend. Granted, this is mostly a technicality, and I’m sure it’s intentional (for most exclusivist born-again groups, the
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