The other principal critique comes from some of Jenkins’s and LaHaye’s fellow Christians, who find the books more interested in God’s wrath than God’s love\u2014as well as scripturally questionable. “It’s pulp fiction, based on a particular reading of the Bible,” says Randall Balmer, chair of the religion department at Barnard College. “It diverts attention from the mandate of the New Testament to love God with all your heart and soul and mind and to love your neighbor as yourself.” According to Tyndale’s research, more Jews, agnostics and atheists read the series than mainline Protestants, <\/strong>and back in 2000 even the president of the Lutheran Church’s conservative Missouri Synod denounced the “Left Behind” series as “an unbiblical flight of fancy.” Most establishmentarian Christians agree with Tina Pippin, a professor of religious studies at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Ga., in saying “Left Behind” “encourages people to see the world in terms of black and white, good and evil, with us or against us.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\nThese points only begin to scratch the surface – the objection, more specifically, has to do with the peculiarities of the particular interpretation of Revelation and eschatology embodied in these books, which is really only as old as the 19th century.<\/p>\n
The piece also contains this fascinating observation:<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Readers identify with the “Left Behind” characters in part because they seldom speak in Christian cliches..<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
REALLY?<\/p>\n
I’ve read six or seven of them (for professional reasons), and I was constantly busy, flicking cliches out of my hair.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Newsweek magazine…. Jenkins and LaHaye As a reader says, “an odd puff piece” on the pair. And it is rather puffy- nary a serious critique of the books’ theology or literary quality, only this: The other principal critique comes from some of Jenkins’s and LaHaye’s fellow Christians, who find the books more interested in God’s…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7274","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\n
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Jenkins and LaHaye As a reader says, “an odd puff piece” on the pair. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7274","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7274"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7274\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7274"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7274"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7274"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}