Left Behind: Pretrib Porno
October 18, 2003
by: Fred Clark
Pages 1-3.
The first words of Left Behind are "Rayford Steele," the protagonist's name.
It sounds like a porn star's name — and in a sense it is.
The Left Behind series is dispensational porno, but it's more than that. One of the most disturbing things about this book is the way LaHaye and Jenkins portray men, women and the relationships between them.
Note that Tim LaHaye's wife is something of a professional misogynist. She runs the 500,000-member "Concerned Women for America" — jokingly referred to by its critics as "Ladies Against Women." For years, while Beverly LaHaye's husband pastored a church in San Diego, Mrs. L. spent most of her time 3,000 miles away, in Washington, D.C., running a large organization committed to, among other things, telling women they should stay at home and sacrifice their careers for their husbands. She is not an ironic woman and doesn't seem to find any of this inconsistent. (Nor, as I found out firsthand, does she appreciate jokes about the Freudian implications of the view from her L'Enfante Plaza office window. Sometimes the Washington Monument is just a cigar.)
Our porn star hero, Rayford Steele, interacts with women just like any porn star does — minus, of course, the sex. It's all about dominance, exploitation, titillation and the stroking of — in this case — egos.
The character Rayford Steele is, like the authors, no longer a young man. Younger authors might not have been compelled to give their protagonists names — "Steele" and "Buck" — that seem such a blatant assertion of male virility. Bev is apparently not the only LaHaye who seems oblivious to phallic imagery.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2003/10/18/left-behind-pretrib-porno/
He does a fantastic job destroying the author and his end times porn.
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