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Of course, when both authors and audience share a basic commitment to dispensational theology, it becomes extremely difficult to develop new contours in plot. A narrative paradigm has been established by biblical exegesis, and no author who takes his market seriously would dare to challenge its fundamental conventions. But the Left Behind novels, emerging from the evangelical subculture during a period of immense change, do make a determined effort to reinvent the genre.
LaHaye and Jenkins plot their novels in a post-Cold War world. The Russian threat has disappeared, and the Left Behind novels take account of contemporary geopolitical crises to negotiate America's new apocalyptic "other." The Antichrist—now a Romanian—is too charismatic to be a Communist. His reign, consolidated through the machinery of the United Nations, nevertheless subverts the nation state.
The collapse of national sovereignty is a staple of end-times fiction. Watson's Antichrist, following a long-established exegetical tradition, was a Jew. But Watson writes that tradition into the cultural context of early 20th-century Britain, exploiting anti-Semitic conspiracy theories to suggest that Britain's distinctive political identity was under serious threat. "The peoples of all the world" associated Britain with the "two thoughts of safety and liberty," but Britain in the tribulation would be ruled by a Jew from his palace in Babylon.4
Almost a century later, LaHaye and Jenkins dramatize similar fears of international bodies. When the Romanian Antichrist seizes control of the UN, opposition to his one-world internationalism comes from the American president, Gerald Fitzhugh, "a younger version of Lyndon Johnson" and "the greatest friend Israel ever had."5 But Fitzhugh cannot trust his military. As his top officers increasingly align themselves with the Antichrist's one-world program, the president finds his only allies in the "surprisingly organized" "patriotic militia forces."6 But their resistance is futile. The Antichrist's UN destroys British and American resistance in a brief nuclear war.
Equally fascinating is the manner in which the novels negotiate the end of the other Cold War, the hostile standoff between the competing branches of Western Christendom. Throughout the rapture novel tradition, Roman Catholicism has been given a negative press. Watson's heroes were "ultra-protestants" adhering to a "Moody and Sankey religion."7 The motives of their enemy were undisguised: "Romanism boldly declares its aim to win, or coerce Britain back into her harlot fold."8 LaHaye and Jenkins certainly moderate this mood. In Left Behind, the Pope is among the raptured, though perhaps only because he has embraced Luther's "heresies"; but, in later novels, the rapture seems to have also involved entire Catholic congregations whose evangelical credentials are in no way signaled. Such rapprochement is tempered, however, as the novels identify the replacement pope as the Antichrist's false prophet. In the aftermath of Evangelicals and Catholics Together, the Left Behind novels seek to have their cake and eat it.
But perhaps it is in characterization that the Left Behind novels show their greatest affinity with the Watson tradition. Watson's trilogy established the trope of the loyal church leader surprised to find himself left behind. In The Mark of the Beast, Watson describes how the church secretary of one of the most prestigious churches in London discovers that he remains after his wife and daughter have been taken. His fate parallels that of Left Behind's Bruce Barnes, who discovers, despite his Bible college training and years of pastoral service, that he had never really been born again. Rapture novels consistently use these situations to present the failed leader's conversion to evangelical faith and dispensational literalism.
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