How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found

An Essay from Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs

Chuck Klosterman

• Publisher: Scribner
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781451624847
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

Originally collected in Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs and now available both as a stand-alone essay and in the ebook collection Chuck Klosterman on Film and Television, this essay is about the Left Behind series.

How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found

I’m having a crisis of confidence, and I blame Jesus.

Actually, my crisis is not so much about Jesus as it is about the impending rapture, which I don’t necessarily believe will happen. But I don’t believe the rapture won’t happen, either; I really don’t see any evidence for (or against) either scenario. It all seems unlikely, but still plausible. Interestingly enough, I don’t think there is a word for my particular worldview: “Nihilism” means you don’t believe in anything, but I can’t find a word that describes partial belief in everything. “Paganism” is probably the closest candidate, but that seems too Druidesque for the style of philosophy I’m referring to. Some would claim that this is kind of like “agnosticism,” but true agnostics always seem too willing to side with the negative; they claim there are no answers, so they live as if those answers don’t exist. They’re really just nihilists without panache.

Not me, though. I’m prone to believe that just about any religious ideology is potentially accurate, regardless of how ridiculous it might seem (or be). Which is really making it hard for me to comment on Left Behind.

According to the blurb on its jacket, the Left Behind book series has more than 40 million copies in print, which would normally prompt me to assume that most of America is vaguely familiar with what these books are about. However, that is not the case. By and large, stuff like Left Behind exists only with that bizarre subculture of “good people,” most of whom I’ve never met and never will. These are the kind of people who are fanatically good—the kind of people who’ll tell you that goodness isn’t even that much of an accomplishment.

Left Behind is the first of eleven books about the end of the world. It was conceptualized by Dr. Tim LaHaye, a self-described “prophecy scholar,” and written by Jerry B. Jenkins, a dude who has written over a hundred other books (mostly biographies about moral celebrities like Billy Graham and Walter Payton). The novel’s premise is that the day of reckoning finally arrives and millions of people just disappear into thin air, leaving behind all their clothes and eyeglasses and Nikes and dental work. All the humans who don’t evaporate are forced to come to grips with why this event happened (and specifically why God did not select them). The answer is that they did not “accept Christ as their personal savior,” and now they have seven years to embrace God and battle the rising Antichrist, a charismatic Romanian named Nicolae Carpathia, who is described by the author as resembling “a young Robert Redford.”

Everything that happens in Left Behind is built around interpretations of Paul’s letters and the Book of Revelation, unquestionably the most fucked-up part of the Bible (except maybe for the Book of Job). It’s the epitome of a cautionary tale; every twist of its plot mechanics scream at the reader to realize that the clock is ticking, but it’s not too late—there is still time to accept Jesus and exist forever in the kingdom of heaven. And what’s especially fascinating about this book is that it’s a best-selling piece of entertainment, even though it doesn’t offer intellectual flexibility; it’s pop art, but it has an amazingly strict perspective on what is right and what is wrong. In Left Behind, the only people who are accepted by God are those who would be classified as fundamentalist wacko Jesus freaks with no intellectual credibility in modern society. Many of the Left Behind characters who aren’t taken to heaven—in fact, almost all of them—seem like solid citizens (or—at worst—“normal” Americans). And that creates a weird sensation for the Left Behind reader, because the post-Rapture earth initially seems like a better place to live. Ever...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found
• More by Chuck Klosterman