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As co-author of Tyndale's Left Behind series of apocalyptic fiction, Jerry Jenkins is one of the most commercially successful Christian novelists of all time. But he has written much more than end-times fiction: among his 150+ other books are the high school football novel Hometown Legend (recently made into a movie, which Jenkins produced with his son), and as-told-to biographies of Hank Aaron, Brett Butler, Bill Gaither, Orel Hershiser, Luis Palau, Walter Payton, Nolan Ryan, and others. He is also the owner of the Christian Writer's Guild.

Today, Tyndale releases a new futuristic novel, this time by Jenkins alone: Soon: The Beginning of the End.

Before we talk about Soon, let's talk about the success of Left Behind. Did you have any idea that this was going to take off like it did?

Oh sure. We thought it would sell 55 million copies.

Doesn't everybody when they sit down and write a book?

Actually, we thought that we had something pretty good, and that it might do 100,000 or 200,000 copies. And we would have been thrilled with that.

But one thing this phenomenon does is to make it impossible for us to try to take any credit for it. After a while you just have to admit that Somebody Else is involved.

But now you've thought about the success of the series, read the articles about it, and have heard the different theories. Obviously, Left Behind was not the first, nor will it be the last, end-times series. Why did the public, both Christian and those outside of the faith, find something absolutely captivating about Left Behind?

There is a God-hunger out there, and people are looking for things beyond themselves. They're buying books by the Pope, the Dalai Lama, and healing gurus.

But, as you say, there are other series like this. Part of me is gratified that the fiction itself must work in some fundamental way. People care about the characters, they keep turning the pages, and they want to know what happens next. Past that, without sounding too cliché, I think God clearly had his hand on this and wanted it to go.

Do you think 9/11 had much to do with the series' success?

We had a spike in sales, especially of the non-fiction book, Are We Living in the End Times, through the end of September, two years ago. But the series was already going crazy, and it's stayed at that pace since then.

But 9/11 did set the stage for Soon, because what I'm dealing with here is the potential loss of our right to practice our faith.

And at first with 9/11 we were all encouraged, because it seemed like all of a sudden God was okay with everyone again. But actually, God was okay but Jesus wasn't, because now we're getting into something divisive and exclusivist.

I think it behooves evangelicals to find some way to express that what we believe is the truth, yet we want people to know it breaks our hearts, too. We can't just be smug and condescending and say, "Well, Jesus is the only way to God. That's what the Bible says. Good for me, too bad for you." That's going to turn people to the point where they don't want to hear any of it.

We can't shrink from that truth, and yet we have to find ways to say it, because the truth of it alone is offensive.

In fact, the success of Left Behind has given you a media platform where you're regularly asked to defend that position.

I think some interviewers are halfway hoping that I'm going to be the sort of polemic evangelical who sits there smugly and says, "That's what it says, too bad for you." Instead, I say, "I realize this is offensive, and I realize that not everybody is going to accept this, but I feel my job is to share this news and what they do with it is up to them. But if they reject it, I would still pray for them, still love them, still associate with them."

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September (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47