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In 1980, Christian companies produced just over $1 billion worth of books and other products a year. Today, annual sales of Christian books and products exceed $4 billion.

And until recently, religious publishing was largely a parochial, distant cousin of America's New York-based mainstream publishing industry. Today, many of the old barriers between religious and mainstream publishing have been obliterated by Internet sites like Amazon.com; superstores like Barnes & Noble and Borders; mass retailers like Wal-Mart, Sam's Club, and Costco; and bestsellers like the Left Behind series and The Prayer of Jabez.

"At the time when This Present Darkness came out, Christian publishers just didn't have the penetration into the wider market they have now," says Jan Dennis, the Crossway editor who acquired the novel. He now operates a literary agency in Colorado Springs.

Left Behind didn't cause all these changes, but it has certainly benefited from them all.

Jerry Jenkins has worked as a writer, editor, and publishing executive during the past three decades. Writing for both evangelical and mainstream publishers, he has witnessed the rapid evolution of Christian publishing—a transformation Publishers Weekly described as a "violent upheaval."

He has also been forced to adjust to his own newfound near-celebrity status. He was in an airport waiting room recently when he saw a man reading one of the Left Behind books. Jenkins walked up to him, asking what he was reading and whether he was enjoying it. When Jenkins finally said he had written it, the man looked up, eyed him, and said, "So you're Tim LaHaye?"

Jenkins' own modest childhood household mirrors that of the industry he has loved and served for so long. His father was a police chief, and his mother worked in a bank. "It was paycheck-to-paycheck back then," he says. "We were a part of the American drama."

His first book was Sammy Tippit: God's Love in Action, a 1974 title about a brassy street evangelist arrested for passing out evangelistic tracts in front of strip bars. "Broadman Press paid $1,250, and I gave Sammy 75 percent of that since it was his story," says Jenkins.

More than 100 books later, Jenkins has become a publishing sensation—which means he wrestles with guilt, experiences cognitive dissonance, and answers letters from angry readers who demand to know what he is doing with the millions he has made.

"You can get to resent a gigantic No. 1 bestseller unless you had something to do with it," he says at the Writing Stable, his newly built office in Black Forest, Colorado.

Jenkins has given away plenty of money, and he recently purchased the Christian Writers Guild from founder Norman Rohrer. He saw this as a chance to return thanks to the industry and develop its future talents.

The Left Behind series has also been a boon for Tyndale House Publishers. In 1998, before the series really took off, the company had sales of about $40 million. That figure more than quadrupled during the fiscal year that ended in April 2001.

Jenkins, Tyndale editors and executives, and just about everyone associated with the Left Behind phenomenon believe they could not have orchestrated such unprecedented success.

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April 22 2002, Vol. 46, No. 5