Not a week goes by in which this newspaper couldn’t be filled with accounts of anti-Catholic crudities.
A lot of it comes from political and cultural elites. That’s understandable, because the Church is the single greatest threat to their desires for a world unrestrained by belief in any alternative to the idols of individualism, materialism, and consumerism. But sadly, a lot of it also comes from the Protestant world, from our fellow believers in Christ Jesus.
Take the wildly popular Left Behind novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, which have sold more than 9 million copies in the last few years. Based on creative speculations about “the rapture,” the whisking up to heaven of the “saved” that will purportedly happen at Christ’s second coming, these novels are being pumped out by one of the nation’s largest and most reputable Protestant publishers, Tyndale House.
The Left Behind franchise isn’t anti-Catholic because it disagrees with Catholic beliefs or practices. What makes them anti-Catholic is that they present the Church as a willing handmaiden of Satan, trying to seduce souls from Christ and into eternal damnation.
Note that the only Catholics who get “raptured” in these books are those who leave the Church. Apparently worried that their audience might not get the message, LaHaye and Jennings depict the Pope getting raptured—but only because he starts teaching what Martin Luther taught. And it’s a Catholic cardinal who’s picked to lead the Antichrist’s world empire. Pretty subtle, isn’t it?
To jump on the anti-Catholic gravy train, another mainstream Protestant publisher, Zondervan, has rushed back into print LaHaye’s classic of nativist paranoia and delusion, Revelation Unveiled. The clever folks in marketing at Zondervan are calling it the “biblical foundation” of the Left Behind books. Indeed it is—if we take the word “biblical” to mean an embarassingly naïve literal reading of the text to promote preconceived prejudices.
In his biblical foundation, LaHaye “proves” that the Church is the whore of Babylon from the Book of Revelation. This reading, of course, is nothing but warmed over Luther without the amusement that can be derived from Luther’s over-the-top rhetoric.
But there’s something approaching blasphemy here. What LaHaye and his willing cohorts in the publishing world are doing is promoting a deliberate misreading of God’s Word to line their own pockets.
We don’t know how many Protestants or other unsupecting readers walk away believing these lies about Catholicism. We do know that these leading Protestant publishers see no irony or hypocrisy that they’re selling indulgences in paranoid fantasies in order to rake in what the Scriptures might call “filthy lucre.”
There’s no sense trying to argue the logic of LaHaye’s conconcted theories about the rapture. They are based on a tortured elaboration of a single line from St. Paul (1 Thess. 4:16–17) in which he describes how at the second coming those who are alive will be “caught up” and meet Christ in middle of the air.
Again, what he is peddling is nothing new, although there’s not a single ancient Christian authority, Protestant or Catholic, who ever read Paul the way LaHaye and company do. This particular article of conjecture dates to the 1800s and an American fundamentalist preacher named John Nelson Darby. Darby’s speculations were mainstreamed through the footnotes in the popular Scofield Reference Bible.
This is far from sola Scriptura. It’s not “Scripture alone,” but Scripture read as if with a decoder-ring found in the bottom of a box of Cracker Jack.
There’s no sense asking where it’s written that the Word of God is some sort of secret message to be deciphered by fitting together verse fragments and then overlaying then with a narrow reading of history. These people aren’t interested dialogue and the search for truth. It’s hard to tell whether they even care about scoring crude points in ecumenical politcs or whether they’re just out to make a big payday.
Whatever fault one may find with Catholicism, it can’t be said that there’s a single mainstream publishing house, or even a single Catholic leader in this country, devoted to destroying or even denigrating Protestants. In fact, it’s been the fervent desire of Church leaders to build friendships, trust, and understanding between Catholics and other Christians. And that remains our task in the face of hatred of the LaHayes of this world. We’ll be known by our fruits. LaHaye’s are the fruits of Babel— division and confusion caused by sin; at least 9 million paying customers lied to and deceived about their Catholic brothers and sisters.
Let’s keep our focus on working together with fellow believers to bring the world more and more under the Sign of the Cross, hoping against hope that no one is left behind when the last trumpet sounds.
Originally published in Our Sunday Visitor (November 5, 1999)
© David Scott, 2010. All rights reserved.
