Christianity and Context

I occasionally attend a progressive reading group at my law school. Last night, the topic of the discussion was the "religious right" and the conversation centered on trying to understand evangelicalism as a movement. The discussion started with a clip from the film adaptation of the bestselling novel "Left Behind." The response to the clip was mostly bewilderment, mixed in with some confusion.

Honestly, I can see why. For the most part, our lives are dominated by the mundane. We spend most days thinking about meetings, classes, dinner, the weather, etc.. To go from that, to a movie where the central plot line revolves around the disappearance of millions of individuals is shocking. It's shocking because the movie isn't science fiction, but rather one movement's idea as to what the future is supposed to look like.

But for individuals who believe in God, and who believe in the possibility of miracles, it's a much easier transition from that to the vision of the future put forward by "Left Behind." And it needs to be noted that just because one is even a Christian doesn't mean such an individual is committed to believing in that particular idea about the end of the world. So if you want to analyze evangelicals, or religious folk in general, I suppose the best thing to do is to start with theism and then work your way to "Left Behind." That way, you not only could start to understand why "Left Behind" was such a huge hit, but you could get a better understanding of religious folk as a whole, and not just one individual's idea of the future.

The interesting question, then, is do evangelicals know that non-Christians think that "Left Behind" is inexplicably strange, and should they even care? I suspect that many evangelicals don't know what non-Christians think about "Left Behind." But we should know what others think, and we should care as well. There needs to be a balance between presenting some conception of Christianity to a secular culture that resonates with that culture, and the desire to be provocative. "Left Behind", if nothing else, is provocative. But did it strike anyone not associated with evangelicalism as remotely plausible? I suspect that it did not.