Smart Bombs, Serial Killing, and the Rapture: The Vanishing Bodies of
Imperial Apocalypticism

Peter Yoonsuk Paik 

(c) 2003 
PMC 14.1 

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1. One of the most well-publicized hypotheses regarding the terror of 9/11
is the notion that religious fantasies played a major role in inspiring
the militants of al-Qaeda to launch their suicide attacks on the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon. Only irrational fanatics could have been
capable of killing themselves for the sake of taking thousands of innocent
lives and destroying three buildings that symbolize Western power and
preeminence. Surely the hijackers must have been enticed and deluded by
the rewards promised by Islam to martyrs--instant entry into paradise
where they would be served by "seventy dark-eyed virgins." The lurid and
prurient nature of this fantasy has been invoked to account for the
terrorist bombings committed by the Palestinians against the Israelis, as
well. In the eyes of the liberal, capitalist West, such fantasies reveal
the obscene underside of the puritanical worldview associated with radical
Islam. The Muslim terrorist is capable of launching suicide attacks
because he has embraced an immoderately concrete vision of the afterlife
that has spawned in him a kind of psychosis. The belief that Islamist
radicals are religious fanatics acting from a delusional hatred of the
secular West or from contempt for the superseded religions of Judaism and
Christianity has played no small role in stifling questions about the
ideological factors behind these acts of terror, and about the legitimacy
of Israeli policy towards the Palestinians in the occupied territories. 


2. That the mystifications underlying the mass media discourse on Islamist
terror and the American military response to it might possess significant
theological content of their own comes as little surprise. One may recall
the jarring "slips," such as "crusade" and "infinite justice," terms
deeply disturbing to most Muslims, used by the Bush administration in the
immediate aftermath of the attacks of 9/11. Even as these terms were
hastily jettisoned under the criticism of American Islamic clerics, the
American invasion and occupation of Iraq has done much to confirm the view
that the actual policy of the United States has become that of a
latter-day crusade against the Arab world, whether in the name of
preventing the future use of weapons of mass destruction or establishing a
model liberal democracy in the region. Indeed, one might argue that it is
theological, absolutist notions of freedom and security that are driving
the war on terror. This article makes the case that the destruction
inflicted by the United States against Afghanistan and Iraq is no less
religious in nature than the terrorist acts of Islamist radicals by
examining the political fantasies behind much of the popular support for
the neo-imperialist policies of the second Bush administration. I first
discuss the legitimation for neo-imperialism among intellectuals
supportive of the administration and the popular millenarianism that
sanctions militaristic policies seen as fulfilling a divine plan. In
section two, I provide a brief analysis of the best-selling novel series
of the 1990s, Left Behind, which is based on a literalist understanding of
biblical prophecy concerning the millennium. In the third section, I
discuss the mode of spirituality that informs the apocalypticism which has
become pervasive in American culture--a form of religiosity that has
little to do with historical Christianity but is in fact far closer to the
ancient heresy of Gnosticism. In the fourth section I address how the
overarching themes and ideological orientation of this explicitly
programmatic series of novels emerge in mainstream Hollywood cinema. I
conclude with a discussion of how Christian doctrines, particularly that
of sacrifice, become derailed in the demonology that takes root from a
system of belief far more dualistic than that of traditional Christianity. 



I. Suicide of the Last Men 

3. In his article on the "fantasy ideology" of the militants of al-Qaeda,
published in the Heritage Foundation's journal Policy Review, Lee Harris
proposes that it is wrongheaded to view the attacks on the World Trade
Center and Pentagon as having been driven by political objectives (21-22).
Instead, Harris argues, we must come to grips with the fact that al-Qaeda
is interested chiefly in enacting a collective fantasy on the world stage,
a fateful and titanic drama in which they, self-cast as the forces of
righteousness, carry on a struggle against the decadent, apostate legions
of the Great Satan of the West. Yet, in spite of the unprecedented
destruction wrought by al-Qaeda on 9/11, Harris assures us that such
ideological fantasies--which in effect derail politics from the rational
pursuit of strategic interests into the enterprise of transforming human
nature and reality itself--are nothing new. The examples he provides, of
groups for whom politics served as a form of self-aggrandizing theatre,
include Nazis, Communists, Jacobins, and even Vietnam War protesters. 


4. Fantasy ideologies, according to Harris, are a "plague" and should be
dealt with accordingly, "in the same manner as you would deal with a fatal
epidemic--you try to wipe it out" (35). I will leave aside for the moment
the observation that the act of describing one's political enemies in
medical terms has served with disquieting regularity to legitimate
massacres and genocide. Rather, the underlying assumption governing
Harris's distinction between politics as the rational and practical
pursuit of concrete objectives and politics as the catastrophic enactment
of a divine drama is that the secular West has outgrown the seductions of
absolutist terror--so much so, in fact, that it is slow to recognize fully
the true nature of the threat posed by radical Islam. Harris fears that
the West has made itself more vulnerable to al-Qaeda in becoming bogged
down in futile questioning over the ostensible political motives behind
the attacks of 9/11, when, instead, it ought simply to devote its energies
to annihilating a foe with whom it is senseless to reason. The conclusion
that the liberal democratic West has effectively exorcised the demons of
political totalitarianism and religious fanaticism also surfaces in the
opposition between consumerism as a way of life in Western societies and
the ethic of self-denial driving the Islamist militants, as pointed out by
Slavoj Zizek in Welcome to the Desert of the Real, his recent book on 9/11
and the war on terror. In this particular ideological antagonism, the
citizens of the West have become "Nietzschean Last Men," whose primary
concern is the satisfaction of fleshly and material appetites and who
react with incomprehension at the suggestion that the only life worth
living is one which is devoted to a transcendent cause. The Muslim
radicals, by contrast, display the attributes ascribed to the Hegelian
master--it is they "who are ready to risk everything, engaged in the
struggle even up to their own self-destruction" (Welcome 40). 


5. Yet the opposition between fundamentalist Islam and the liberal West
often works to overshadow a significant rift within the West itself. This
is the divide between the "post-historical" social democracies of Europe,
which, according to Robert Kagan, have entered the Kantian realm of
"perpetual peace," and the still all-too historical United States, which
remains stranded in a Hobbesian world of unending struggle (3). Kagan's
distinction stems from the Nietzschean principle (which he leaves
unstated) that weak nations, such as those of Western Europe, embrace
international law as the primary means of exerting their influence,
whereas "brute force" is both the province and prerogative of the powerful
(6). Robert Kaplan, in Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan
Ethos, goes even further to argue that the United States effectively
constitutes a "new imperium" and urges that it should embrace the role of
global hegemon (148). What emerges is thus the contradictory image of the
United States as the lone remaining superpower that is at the same time
excessively reluctant to expend the lives of its own citizens as the cost
of maintaining its geopolitical dominance--hence its reliance upon
proxies, such as the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, for the
hand-to-hand combat, and its dependence upon the overwhelming destructive
force afforded by its advanced technology, as seen in the invasion and
conquest of Iraq. Do not Kagan's reflections on the American practice of
power politics--as well as Kaplan's advocacy of "stealth imperialism" by
the U.S. as a corrective to "the self-delusive, ceremonial trappings of
the United Nations" (148-49)--provide the murderous supplement to the
monotonous consumerism of the Last Men within the liberal capitalist
order? 


6. It has been the province of thinkers who have achieved positions of
governmental influence, from the liberal realist George Kennan to the
Stalinist Eurocrat Alexandre Kojève, to explain in frank, "explicitly
non-human" terms how the killing and impoverishment of millions is
necessary for the prosperity of the West (Rosen 94). In the case of
Kennan, the central matter is one of maintaining the imbalance of wealth
and resources that grossly favors the United States; thus, the U.S. should
abandon policies that champion "human rights, the raising of living
standards and democratization" (Pilger 98). As Zizek notes, Kennan's words
have the salutary effect of tearing away the hypocritical mask of
universal prosperity from late capitalism. But it is Kojève who
articulates most forcefully the position that catastrophes always happen
elsewhere and to other peoples. Kojève, a self-taught economist as well as
a lecturer at the École des Hautes Études, where he taught an entire
generation of French intellectuals, viewed his high-level position at the
French ministry of foreign economic affairs as an unparalleled opportunity
to unify theory and practice. For his idea of the "post-historical
utopia," which served as the philosophical underpinnings for his service
to the French state and the emerging European Economic Community, is
erected upon the "murders of millions of innocent persons in fulfillment
of Hegel's observation that history is a slaughter-bench [...] upon which
are prepared the feasts of the gods: the residents of the post-historical
utopia" (Rosen 94). 


7. Thus avowedly antihumanist ideas have been increasingly breaking the
surface of public discourse after 9/11--whether as the open advocacy of
imperialism by Robert Kaplan or the "new racism" that justifies itself not
on the basis of the "cultural" or "natural" superiority of the West but
according to "unabashed economic egotism" (Welcome 149). Yet such appeals
to brute, naked force and amoral national interest run counter to the
value system of Christian morality (underscored by the title of Kaplan's
book) that informs mainstream American society. It is instructive here to
refer to Zizek's account of ideology, the function of which is to "combine
a series of 'inconsistent' attitudes" inclusive of sentiments of both
assent and critique, so that the "obscene unwritten rules" which sustain
power may prevail over the public Law (Plague 75, 73). Ideology is thus a
way to "have one's cake and eat it," providing unity for heterogeneous and
contradictory positions, such as believing in the existence of a Christian
God and a moral universe while approving of tyrannies and massacres in
developing countries as the necessary conditions for one's own peace,
security, and economic well-being. Such antagonistic contents become
unified through a "quilting point" (point de capiton), an "effectively
[...] immanent, purely textual operation" that becomes comprehended as an
"unfathomable, transcendent, stable point of reference concealed behind
the flow of appearances and acting as its hidden cause" (For They Know
18). 


8. The "quilting point" relieves the unbearable pressure wrought by
irreducible ideological tensions by means of a reversal of perspective
that magically changes turmoil and discord into harmony and resolve.
Zizek's examples of a "quilting point" include the function of the Jew as
the bearer of contradiction in Nazi ideology as well as Saint Paul's
reversal of the view of Christ's death on the Cross, which transformed it
from a disastrous setback to the nascent Christian movement to its
greatest triumph. It is my contention that the support of
Christians--particularly the Christian Right--in the United States for
decidedly un-Christian policies, such as a neo-imperialist foreign policy,
a consumerist lifestyle, and the acceptance of a global system which
condemns entire populations to destitution for the sake of U.S.
prosperity, relies upon a "quilting point" that goes far beyond merely
realistic concerns about the nation's security. In fact, it is the very
opposite of security; it is the mass destruction of the planet through the
divine will of God that reconciles for these evangelicals the fact of
having to live in the soulless, indolent world of the Last Men with a
warlike imperialist foreign policy under the "third, properly symbolic
moment" of an imminent apocalypse. Accordingly, wars are to be accepted
not as the means for securing particular political ends, in terms of
cold-hearted realpolitik, but rather to be read--and welcomed--as signs
that the end-times have been set into motion. For the particular
configuration of empire, Third World poverty, the dominance of sinful
pleasures in the media, technological hubris, and the legal practice of
abortion can only be tolerated by means of intense fantasies about their
essentially temporary nature; such evils may reign at the present but will
be swept away shortly by the punitive catastrophes of God's judgment. 



II. Fateful Dispensations 

9. The view of the apocalypse that has become dominant at present among
Christian evangelicals goes by the name of dispensational
premillennialism. Promoted widely in the late nineteenth-century United
States by John Nelson Darby, an Irish-born preacher who became the leader
of a new sect, the Plymouth Brethren, after leaving the Protestant Church
of Ireland, dispensational premillennialism emphasizes an account of the
end-times based on a literalist reading of biblical prophecies (Boyer
87-88). Declaring that true Christians would be protected from the horrors
predicted for the end-times, Darby popularized the doctrine of the
Rapture, in which believers will vanish into thin air and be taken up into
heaven. The Rapture has held a privileged position in the apocalyptic
theology of Christian evangelicals, but evangelicals are divided about its
timing vis-à-vis the Tribulation, the seven-year period when the earth
will be overwhelmed by horrors and catastrophes of supernatural (and
genocidal) magnitude. Post-tribulationism holds that the Rapture will
occur at the Second Coming and that Christians will therefore have to
suffer through the plagues, famines, and wars along with everybody else;
this remains the viewpoint of a distinct minority that includes a number
of survivalists. The view that looms largest in the public consciousness
at present is the "pre-tribulationist" view, according to which believers
will be evacuated into heaven before the onset of horrors. Of the two, the
"pre-tribulationist" doctrine--the most widely held of the
premillennialist viewpoints--offers the rosiest end-time scenario for
believers and the ghastliest of sufferings for the faithless. Recent
pre-tribulationists include Hal Lindsey, the best-selling author in the
1970s according to the New York Times, and Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins,
co-authors of the Left Behind series that features many of the
best-selling novels of the last decade. 


10. Left Behind, published in 1995 as the first novel in the series by
LaHaye and Jenkins, opens with a world thrown into disarray by the
mysterious disappearances of millions of people. As is common in the
representations of the apocalypse among evangelicals, the world is
paralyzed by an epidemic of plane crashes and car accidents after their
pilots and drivers instantaneously vanish. Not only have all true
Christians disappeared, as well as have all children under the age of ten,
but also all fetuses have vanished from wombs. The narrative focuses on
the ordeals of those "left behind," that is, former skeptics and nominal
Christians who, because of the mass disappearances, become converts to the
faith. One of the protagonists in the series is an airline pilot named
Rayford Steele, who had been growing apart from his devoutly religious
wife. After her disappearance, he becomes plunged into guilt, and visits
the church she had attended, where the senior minister had frequently
preached about the Rapture. A repentant junior pastor whose merely
cosmetic faith had failed to make him dematerialize hands Steele a video
made by the senior minister specifically in preparation for this
eventuality. "As you watch this tape," it begins, "I can only imagine the
fear and despair you face, for this is being recorded for viewing only
after the disappearance of God's people from the earth" (209). 


11. The episode involving the video is intended as an injection of reality
into the world of the novels, which have themselves been conceived as a
kind of paratext to biblical prophecy (co-author Jenkins has said in a TV
interview that he doesn't think that these novels are fiction).1 Real-life
churches enamored of apocalyptic prophecy have gone to the lengths of
making their own videos to explain the Rapture to non-believers after
their members have disappeared. Websites dealing with the apocalypse have
special sections containing information for those still on earth in the
wake of the divine evacuation. Yet the intensely programmatic aims of Left
Behind--as a fictionalized treatment of the fulfillment of Biblical
prophecies--interpellate the evangelical reader by satisfying the
contradictory demands of a split consciousness. On the one hand, the
reader is treated to the spectacle of divine wrath being visited upon
hapless non-believers during the time of the Tribulation--major American
cities are reduced to rubble by nuclear strikes, a meteor storm destroys
much of Iraq, 200 million ghostly horsemen kill a third of the earth's
population. The evangelical reader is thus invited to marvel at and enjoy
grandiose scenes of carnage inflicted by a punishing God (in Lacanian
terms, the act of perversely identifying with the enjoyment of the big
Other); as billions of unbelievers suffer gruesome deaths and tortures, he
or she can remain secure in the knowledge that the faithful will all have
ascended into heaven before these harrowing events take place. On the
other hand, the struggles of Left Behind's heroes, who are new converts to
Christianity, mirror (however hyperbolically) the widespread feelings of
marginalization and embattlement among evangelicals living in a society
that appears to them hopelessly corrupt, dangerous, and decadent. 


12. In the universe of Left Behind, the Antichrist is a charismatic
Romanian politician with the unlikely name of Nicolae Carpathia. In the
span of a few short months after the Rapture, he takes over the position
of Secretary General of the UN, receives possession of Air Force One from
an "emasculated" American president, purchases all the major media outlets
around the globe, and wins the support of an overwhelming majority of the
globe's population in establishing a one-world government. Naming this
universal regime the Global Community (GC), Nicolae takes on the title of
"Global Potentate" and oversees the mass disarmament of the former
nations' arsenals from the GC's capital, the newly rebuilt city of New
Babylon, in Iraq. A scenario in which a pitifully small band of defiant
Christians struggle against the might of a world empire may recall the
"heroic period" of the early Church when it suffered persecution at the
hands of the Roman emperors. Christian propaganda focusing on the courage
and martyrdom of the saints greatly impressed Georges Sorel, whose myth of
the general strike was influenced by the categorical refusal of the Church
to accommodate the ostensibly reasonable demand of the Roman state to
acknowledge the divinity of the emperor. As Sorel saw it, it was the
Church's uncompromising stance, which was judged by outsiders as
irrational and foolish, that enabled it to take power once the empire had
collapsed (211).2 The crude theology of Left Behind, however, depicts
miracles taking place with plodding regularity and world events fitting
mechanically into proper sequence in fulfillment of biblical prophecies.
The notion that born-again Christians will be exempt from having to endure
terrible suffering extends to the post-Rapture converts who are the
principal characters of the series. The two prophets at the Wailing Wall,
both converts from Judaism, routinely incinerate their Jewish and Muslim
assailants with fire from their mouths. A full-scale surprise air assault
by Russia against Israel results in the destruction of every single
Russian jet without a single Israeli casualty. When a plague of demonic
locusts is unleashed, the creatures sting only non-Christians, causing
such agony that they "want to die but [are] unable to" do so (Apollyon
205). There is a moment of unintended sadistic humor, in which the
authors' avowed philo-semitism reveals its underlying prejudice, when Buck
Williams, a member of the "Tribulation Force" of Christians mobilized to
combat the Antichrist, chides his friend, the skeptical Nobel-Prize
winning Jewish chemical engineer Chaim Rosenzweig, for not being more
scientifically curious about these supernatural insects, knowing full well
that the locusts' stings will cause him terrible pain. When the older man
doubles over with convulsions after being stung, he begs Buck to bring him
some water, to which Buck perfunctorily replies, "It won't help" (Apollyon
265). 


13. The supernatural turns of the narrative of Left Behind indulge the
believer's sense of Schadenfreude: evangelical Christians are depicted as
the only people who understand why disaster is befalling the world;
everyone else fruitlessly flails about for answers or, worse, is duped by
the Antichrist's explanations. Such smugness towards mass death and
devastation is the result, I suggest, of the merger of American
premillennialism and American consumer culture. For what is the Rapture
but the "holiday from history" elevated to a cosmic principle? Moreover,
this merger of millennialism and consumerism accounts for the increasingly
wide appeal of apocalyptic scenarios and the recoding of apocalypse
itself. The idea that the saved gain spiritual salvation but are spared
physical suffering is a very different understanding of salvation than
that of the early Church and its impassioned embrace of earthly ordeals
and the risk of martyrdom. Indeed, the Rapture as a doctrine appears
acutely symptomatic of a people for whom history is unreal and who have
become convinced that disasters happen only to other people in foreign
countries. The apocalyptic, as authors as different as Ernst Bloch and
Norman Cohn remind us, has traditionally been linked to hopes for social
transformation. The post-Augustinian revival of millenarianism by Joachim
of Fiore was taken over by zealous Franciscans whose anger at the papacy
and the wealthy would leave its mark upon the numerous anarchic sects and
revolutionary uprisings that arose against the Church and nobility
throughout medieval Europe. The apocalyptic of Left Behind, by contrast,
is uncoupled from any concrete demand for social justice, and in fact
advocates a political stance that opposes peace, especially in the Middle
East, on principle, for the very reason that the Antichrist will dangle
the vision of international harmony before a gullible globe as an
irresistible lure for setting up his one-world government. Indeed, such
humanistic ideas as religious tolerance, the rule of international law,
and nuclear disarmament are all exposed in the novels as being ruses of
the devil. 


14. The categorical rejection of working for peace as playing into the
hands of the Antichrist results less in the active embrace of war as a
means of achieving concrete foreign policy objectives than in a viewpoint
which greets the outbreak of wars as confirmation that the Millennium is
near. The readiness to approve of wars as fitting into the workings of a
divine plan would make this brand of twenty-first-century American
millenarianism an ideological partner, albeit a volatile one, to the
neo-imperialism of the second Bush administration. There are, to be sure,
less widely known groups of evangelicals whose millenarian expectations
have led them to support nuclear disarmament, human rights,
environmentalism, and other causes promoting for social justice. Indeed,
the sharpest critics of premillennialist literalism are to be found among
evangelicals themselves. The eclipse of political and ethical dilemmas by
the question of individual salvation among most prophecy writers, who
repeatedly exhort those not yet born-again to accept Christ so that they
may escape the horrors of the Tribulation, nevertheless betrays a
fatalistic inertia that causes their doctrines to drift into
antinomianism. Take, for example, the words of doomsday popularizer Hal
Lindsey regarding the inevitability of World War III: "It's clearly not
going to get better before Jesus comes; it's going to get worse. Christ's
reentry to this planet is to save it from self-destruction, not to ascend
a throne that we have provided for Him" (281). Lindsey is merely one among
numerous prophecy writers who since the Progressive Era have dismissed
social reform as utterly futile in combating social, political, and moral
evils, which they believe will only increase as the end-times draw near.
Questions of morality thus become effectively cast aside when politics is
reduced to matter of choosing between actions that hasten the end and
those that delay or "distract" from it. 


15. This rationale is explicitly at work in the activities of the
so-called "Christian Zionists," evangelicals who, believing in the
decisive importance of Israel's role in the apocalypse, have become
fervent supporters for the hard-line, expansionist policies of the Israeli
Right.3 Christian Zionists raised $14 million in 2001 alone to resettle
diaspora Jews in Israel. They have also moved to cut off American
financial support to Israel when it seemed that the Israelis and
Palestinians were taking serious steps towards peace--when Ehud Barak,
early in his ill-fated administration, attempted to move the peace process
forward with the Wye River accord. In response, the conservative Christian
Israel Public Affairs Committee, which was set up to garner Christian
support for Israel, tried to block $1.6 billion in U.S. aid (Gorenberg
169). Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu have recognized the Christian
Right as the most steadfast backers of their aggressive policies against
the Palestinians, and the Sharon government frequently provides
expenses-paid trips to the Holy Land for leaders of the Christian Right
and holds meetings to discuss strategy with the Christian Coalition and
other groups (Goldberg; Engel). But according to the apocalyptic narrative
of the Christian Zionists, of which Left Behind presents an elaborately
detailed illustration, all Jews will have either been killed or become
converts to Christianity by the time of Christ's return. 



III. Onward Gnostic Soldiers 

16. It is thus in their fixation on Israel as the place where the decisive
end-time prophecies will be fulfilled that premillennialist eschatology
effectively crosses over into antinomianism--the doctrine that the
redeemed no longer need uphold the moral law. Although the term was first
coined by Martin Luther to condemn the views of Johannes Agricola, who
took the notion of justification by faith to the extreme of maintaining
that a Christian's salvation cannot be altered even by the intentional
commission of sins, antinomian beliefs can be traced to the Gnostic
repudiation of the Decalogue as an instrument of oppression devised by the
tyrannical creator deity, Yahweh, to keep human beings in a state of
spiritual bondage. Saint Paul, like Luther, was acutely aware of the
attraction that an amoral interpretation of Christ's sacrifice as the
extirpation of the Law might exert upon new converts to the faith, and so
devoted considerable energy in his Letters to affirming the holiness of
the commandments. Early Christianity, to be sure, was an apocalyptic sect;
although Paul and the Apostles believed that the Second Coming was at
hand, they discouraged speculation about when it would actually occur.
Instead, they stressed the responsibility of the Christian to lead a moral
life after he or she had become converted, that is, had undergone the
symbolic death that leads the believer to a new life free from the
dominion of sin. The believer must now live in the awareness of having
died to sin, "but the life he lives, he lives to God" (Rom. 6.10).
Contemporary premillennialism, on the other hand, is almost entirely
consumed by the specifics of end-time speculation, and its central fantasy
of the Rapture amounts to a blithe denial of physical death: a fantasy
that--if I may be permitted to reverse one of Luther's most memorable
metaphors--squeezes this second life granted by salvation into the bowels
leading out of earthly existence, in effect dispensing with the deeply
Christian idea of conversion as a traumatic encounter which slays and
recreates the believer as a subject--in this world. 


17. The question thus emerges as to whether premillennialism represents a
deformation of Christian orthodoxy, or if it springs from an entirely
different spiritual tradition. Let us recall here Harold Bloom's thesis
that Americans erroneously believe themselves to be Christian, but are in
fact Gnostic without knowing it. In Bloom's view, the exaltation of the
self, the democratic--and anti-intellectual--mistrust of external
authority, the vast spaces of the frontier, and the privileging of
experience over doctrine in the churches have given rise to a kind of
spirituality in the United States that has little in common with
historical Christianity but is in fact a modern recurrence of ancient
heresies. Such religiosity extends as well to the secular understanding of
American nationhood, as the insistence upon the exceptionality of
America's destiny likewise commands the zeal of a religious devotion. For
the ancient Gnostic as well as for the American Religion, the individual
self is the irrevocable source of authenticity and truth, over and against
any actual or imagined collectivity: 


urging the need for community upon American religionists is a vain
enterprise; the experiential encounter with Jesus or God is too
overwhelming for memories of community to abide, and the believer returns
from the abyss of ecstasy with the self enhanced and the otherness
devalued (Bloom 27). 



18. It is not repentance or brotherly love that is the defining attribute
of Gnostic salvation but freedom--freedom from history, the cosmos,
nature, as well as from morality itself. Gnosticism holds that the created
world (and also the human body and soul) was designed by the Demiurge as a
prison to hold the divine sparks, or pneuma, taken from the uncreated
abyss of light. The politically explosive, even paranoiac character of
Gnosticism in both its ancient and latter-day manifestations can be
deduced from its account of the creation, which presents a cosmology in
the form of a conspiracy theory. The minions of the tyrannical creator,
the Archons, work to keep humanity in a state of ignorance regarding its
own true, alien nature as well as the dark purpose of the created world.
Gnostic salvation thus comes in the form of a liberating knowledge that
awakens human beings to the presence of a divine spark hidden deep within
the soul. The American Religion, Bloom argues, asserts this harsh dualism
between spirit and matter in its "deepest knowledge," which is the
conviction of American Fundamentalists "that they were no part of the
Creation, but existed as spirits before it, and so are as old as God
himself" (57). 


19. The Gnostic valorization of freedom at the same time articulates an
exceedingly vindictive denunciation of the physical world, a condemnation
far harsher than any perspective found in Christian orthodoxy. The radical
dualism of Gnosticism means that its adherents assume a drastically
different spiritual posture from that of the Christian believer; whereas
the latter experiences saving knowledge as the increasing awareness of his
or her sinful condition in a divinely created cosmos, the Gnostic sets out
to regain his or her innocence in a world that is the misshapen and
unregenerate product of a malign deity. Thus, Gnosticism, in order to
sustain its belief in the innocence of the uncreated spark, must project
all that is baleful and malevolent onto the cosmos itself. The assertion
of this insuperable divide between one's inviolable self and the woeful
prison of matter generates an equally intractable sense of indifference to
one's actions in the world, since such indifference, which is actively
assumed out of disdain and horror and thus not to be mistaken for detached
quietude, demonstrates the powerlessness of the Demiurge to corrupt the
divine spark within. According to Bloom, the American Religion is likewise
defined by the conviction that the world and one's actions in it are
irrelevant to the purity of the self: "If your knowing ultimately tells
you that you are beyond nature, having long preceded it, then your natural
acts cannot sully you. No wonder then, that salvation, once attained,
cannot fall away from the American Religionist, no matter what he or she
does" (265). Furthermore, if the creation is truly identical to the Fall,
and the physical world reveals the designs of an antagonistic deity, then
the sacrosanct self becomes defined according to its hostility against the
order of being. For the American Religion's worship of freedom is at the
same time a war against otherness, which it understands as "whatever
denies the self's status and function as the true standard of being and of
value" (Bloom 16). 


20. The premillennialist doctrine of the Rapture is thus distinctly
Gnostic in character, as its image of mass ascent recalls not only the
taking into heaven of Enoch and Elijah in the Hebrew Bible (both of whom
are central figures in the Gnostic lore of the Kabbalah) but also the
crucifixion of the Gnostic Christ, who, according to the heretical
accounts, did not suffer a shameful and agonizing death but was instead
transfigured by the bliss of illumination. The proximity of
premillennialist eschatology to the heretical religiosity of the Gnostics
and the enormous gulf separating it from Christian orthodoxy also becomes
apparent in the fact that Left Behind emphatically breaks with the
doctrine of original sin, as all children under the age of ten, as well as
the unborn, are transported into heaven. What is astonishing is how this
typically secular belief in the "natural innocence" of human beings, often
derided by religious conservatives as a shallow, overly optimistic
understanding of human nature, surfaces in a narrative in which the
majority of the world's population will be annihilated in horrifying
catastrophes. There is, however, no contradiction that American
Gnosticism, in its very creedlessness, has not yet been able to unify,
least of all the perhaps altogether unprecedented phenomenon of an
imperial eschatology--the convergence of millenarian fervor and
imperialist domination that currently informs the foreign policy of the
Gnostics of the American Right. The early, pre-Constantinian Church,
Jürgen Moltmann notes, prayed "may thy kingdom come and this world pass
away," but once Christianity became the official religion of the empire,
the imperial church came to pray instead "pro mora finis," for the delay
of the end (162). The know-nothing eschatologists of the Rapture, on the
other hand, espouse an imperial politics while praying the prayers of the
disinherited who yearned for divine intervention to destroy the empire! 


21. The contradiction of an imperialist apocalypse is thus a coherent
manifestation of a heretical spiritual tradition that has survived
systematic persecution by taking on forms which mask its origins. The God
who works miracles in mechanistically fulfilling the predictions of his
prophets exhibits aspects, on the one hand, of the God of the Pentateuch
who rains frogs on Egypt and leaves manna on the desert floor every
morning, and on the other, of the Demiurge derided by Captain Ahab for his
automaton's lack of creative intelligence in slapping together a
jerrybuilt cosmos. According to Bloom, the American Religion is defined by
a startling reversal of traditional Gnosticism and worships the Demiurge
as God. In the contemporary instance, a God whose works are both visible
and historical becomes not the subject of ridicule (as was the case for
the ancient Gnostics), but rather idolized as a radically
anthropomorphized divinity. Such a reversed Gnosticism belongs nonetheless
to a rich and vital tradition of American thought and culture, as
Emersonian self-reliance and the flourishing of antinomian dissent in the
New World reflect unmistakably Gnostic preoccupations. In this new
millennium, Gnostic forms of thought have become commonplace in popular
culture, thanks in no small part to the ubiquity of New Age thinking that
buttresses everything from conspiracy theories about UFOs to the
psychobabble of our therapeutic culture. Gnostic concepts also dominate
treatments of religious themes in films and literary works not
distinguished by any explicit programmatic intent. Two recent Hollywood
films, ostensibly about the nature of faith--M. Night Shyamalan's Signs
(2002) and Bill Paxton's Frailty (2001)--attest to the insidious power of
Gnostic doctrines to deflect ethico-religious dilemmas into fantasies of
national idolatry. 



IV. Post-Ironic Affirmations 

22. In Signs, Mel Gibson plays a former Episcopalian minister named Graham
Hess who has recently lost his faith after the death of his wife in a
tragic road accident. The film opens with a shot of large, mysterious
patterns set into the cornfield near his farmhouse, where he lives with
his two small children and younger brother, a former baseball player named
Merrill Hess, played by Joaquin Phoenix. Shrugging off the crop circles as
a prank, Graham remains defiantly skeptical in the face of mounting
evidence that an alien invasion is imminent. When the evening news shows
UFOs hovering over many of the major cities of the world, Merrill suggests
to Graham that there might be a divine purpose at work behind their
arrival. Graham curtly dismisses any such notion of providence, saying
that the last words of his wife, "swing away," were spoken under the haze
of pain-killers which caused her to fixate on a memory of watching Merrill
playing in a baseball game, and that this incident proved to him that the
cosmos is ruled purely by chance. Once the aliens attack, however, Graham
realizes that his refusal to believe in the aliens' existence has
endangered the lives of his family, and so renounces his skepticism. At
the film's close, when Merrill confronts an alien that has taken his
nephew hostage, Graham suddenly recognizes the true import of his wife's
final words--he directs Merrill to the baseball bat mounted in the wall
behind him and instructs him to "swing away" at the extraterrestrial,
thereby saving the life of his son. Even his son's asthma proves
providential, as an attack closes his lungs and thus saves him from the
toxic gases emitted by the alien. 


23. Apart from the blatant consumerism of the film's theology, in which
the workings of God are made to fit the demands of a neat and tidy
Hollywood resolution (God reduced tautologically to the mere function of
deus ex machina), Signs is notable for its dimensionless literalism, its
outright lack of metaphoric depth in its portrayal of the aliens. Science
fiction, as a speculative genre, is rich in allegorical potential--one
need only to call to mind the parable of Western imperialism in H. G.
Wells's The War of the Worlds, in which Great Britain gets to suffer the
fate it inflicted upon the peoples it colonized. In Signs, by constrast,
the aliens do not "stand for" anything at all; still less do they
incarnate "something outside the rational chain of events, a lawless
impossible real," to which, according to Zizek, the birds in Hitchcock's
film attest (Looking Awry 105). The aliens' sole purpose, rather, is to
serve as the pretext for the dubious conversion of the film's protagonist. 


24. In the "post-ironic" age we are now said to inhabit (especially after
9/11), in which one is called upon to renounce excessive skepticism and to
embrace the responsibilities born of a new solemnity and earnestness, the
very structure of the suspense narrative undergoes a dramatic shift. In
earlier narratives about the supernatural, the genre of the "fantastic" as
elucidated by Tzvetan Todorov in his classic study, the primary tension
often emerges from and is defined by a protagonist's--and the
reader's--activity of questioning whether or not ghosts or other
paranormal beings really exist. The strategy of the post-ironic film about
the supernatural hinges upon the surprise disclosure that the protagonist,
with whom the audience has identified from the beginning of the narrative,
is already dead. This narrative turn was made famous by Shyamalan's
earlier film, The Sixth Sense (1999), and also by Alejandro Aminabar's The
Others (2000), both of which interpellate the viewer as a ghost that has
refused to acknowledge the fact of his or her own death. What these films
seek to accomplish, whether by therapeutic ministrations or by the
realization that death bridges two extensions of monotonous life, is the
domestication of what Zizek, following Kierkegaard, calls the "ultimate
horror," which is not death but the inability to die (Ticklish Subject
292). 


25. To get a better sense of the ideological shifts at work in the
post-ironic age, let us imagine a version of Signs made according to an
alternate set of symbolic coordinates. In a perhaps more traditionally
"ironic" version, Graham, instead of being convinced of God's nonexistence
after the death of his wife, actively inveighs against God as being cruel
and malicious. Indeed, he would look upon the alien invasion as another
instance of a bored and sadistic deity making a plaything out of human
fate, that God's gratuitous reaping of human life is no different from the
aliens' "harvesting" of human victims, and even raising the blasphemous
suggestion that God himself is an alien. Such a film, regardless of
whether it would go on to refute or validate these hypotheses, would not
only achieve the narrative coherence missing from the existing Signs but
would also directly confront the influence of Gnostic cosmology and its
valuations. For what is at stake in Gnosticism is the human will
that--often unwittingly--turns God into the devil. Indeed, in this
re-imagining of Signs, the aliens would indeed come to represent
something--the repressed alien God who was once identified with the
blissful, uncreated abyss but now returns in the guise of the
exterminating deity of a wished-for Armageddon. 


26. Signs, by contrast, presents the audience with a false wager, a
dilemma about the existence of God that remains extrinsic to the strange
events linked to an alien invasion, being instead programmatically foisted
onto the eruption of the marvelous. As mentioned earlier, when Graham and
Merrill first talk about the arrival of the alien ships, Gibson sternly
rejects Merrill's view that this fantastic event confirms the existence of
a providential God governing the structure of the cosmos. The film
therefore proceeds to muddle the distinction between faith and
belief--that is, while faith is related to a binding symbolic pact, such
as the covenant between God and Abraham or the Christian understanding of
Christ's death on the cross, one can "believe" in the existence of God (or
in other deities or spirits for that matter) without necessarily having
"faith" in Him, as in The Brothers Karamazov, where Ivan Karamazov
condemns God for being unjust and unmerciful. Instead of developing
Graham's lack of faith as a refusal of the paradoxes of theodicy, Signs
suppresses the question of faith by displacing it onto that of
belief--Graham's lack of faith in God translates seamlessly over the
course of the film into his unwillingness to believe in the menace posed
by the aliens, even as newscasts show armadas of flying saucers preparing
to land and one of his neighbors is attacked by them. The narrative takes
pains to emphasize the fact that his refusal to see the invasion as proof
of God's existence is what keeps from him taking reasonable steps to
defend his family. In the film's ideological universe, God can be counted
on to demonstrate in astonishingly explicit terms that every tragedy or
loss unequivocally serves higher and beneficial purposes, while skepticism
is revealed as nothing less than a denial of reality itself. Signs thus
shares with Left Behind a world in which the unbeliever commits the sin of
stubbornly persisting in disbelief regarding the objective miracles of the
alien invasion or of the Rapture that takes place before his or her eyes.
The fact that belief is validated by miracles experienced on a collective
and public scale turns any skepticism into a kind of psychosis in the face
of cataclysms being meted out by divine power. 


27. It is impossible to overlook the ideological revision of Christianity
at work here, in which the believers are protected by a God dealing in
miraculous contrivances. The very crudeness of a consumerist theology in
which belief draws the reward of earthly well-being undermines the
traditional Christian idea that faith exposes the believer to suffering
and hardships, often with tragic consequences. If Signs were about the
properly Christian dilemma of faith, Graham's belief in God might in fact
lead him to place his children at terrible risk, not the other way around.
He would do this not because he doesn't love his children, but rather
because faith, as the suspension of the ethical and the universal, demands
that no other relationship come before the relationship of the faithful
with God. I am taking Kierkegaard's reading of the story of Abraham's call
to sacrifice Isaac as paradigmatic for the Christian conception of faith.
The recent Gnostic rewriting of this tale in Bill Paxton's Frailty (2001)
proves quite instructive in its distance from Kierkegaard's
interpretation, with divergences that lay bare in compelling ways the
spiritual dimensions of the new imperial politics. 


V. My So-Called Jihad 

28. Set in a small town in Texas in the late 1970s, Frailty stars Bill
Paxton (who also directs) in the role of Meiks, a working-class father of
two young boys named Adam and Fenton. His wife having died giving birth to
the younger son, Meiks is presented as an exemplary single parent, devoted
and caring, warm-hearted yet firm. He is shown preparing meals for his
sons, making jokes with them, helping them with their math problems, and
so on. But one night, the father comes rushing into the bedroom shared by
his sons to tell them that he has received a vision from God. An angel had
come bearing the message that God had chosen him and his family to fight
the demons that have been unleashed on earth in preparation for the final
clash between God and the devil. The younger son Adam readily accepts his
father's account as truth, whereas Fenton shrinks in horror, believing
that his father has gone insane and is having homicidal delusions.
Subsequent visitations by the angel reveal to Meiks the weapons he is to
use--a length of metal pipe, an axe, and a pair of gardening gloves--and
he receives the first list of names of the demons he is to "destroy"
(Meiks makes much of this distinction between "killing people" and
"destroying demons.") Then, late one night he returns home carrying a
bound and gagged middle-aged woman whom he has kidnapped. When Fenton
implores him to spare her life, Meiks responds by admitting he too doesn't
want to go through with slaughtering the woman, but God's commands must
nevertheless be obeyed. 


29. The fundamentalist literalism behind the belief in the Rapture is
echoed here in the father's conviction that he can discern who, among
those who look like ordinary persons, is actually a demon. When Meiks
removes his white gloves and touches the flesh of his victims, he goes
into convulsions while receiving visions of the evil acts they committed.
Conversely, when Fenton brings the incredulous town sheriff to the house
to show him the body of a recently executed victim, the father crumples
over and begins to vomit after killing the officer, sickened at having
been forced to take an innocent life to protect their sacred mission.
Revealing that Fenton has been named by the angel as being one of the
demons, thereby accounting for the boy's reluctance to fight the forces of
evil, Meiks declares that, in this one instance, he is determined to
disprove the angel's message. In a memorable scene portraying the
manipulative, guilt-inducing power in a father's admission of his own
impotence, Meiks confides to his terrified elder son, just before locking
him up in the dungeon built for their victims, "You're my son, and I love
you more than my own life. You know what's funny about all this, Fenton?
I'm afraid of you." 


30. The father's words prove prophetic when, after being released from the
basement, Fenton is commanded by his father to prove his newfound faith by
executing their latest victim. Handed the axe, the son turns the weapon
against his father, killing him instead. The guilt assumed by the elder
son goes beyond this act of parricide--it is later revealed, in a
characteristically post-ironic narrative twist, that the skeptical Fenton
is really the "God's Hands" serial killer sought by the FBI, not the
believing younger brother Adam, who had willingly participated in the
"destruction" of the demons. At the end of the film, the audience learns
that it is in fact Adam who is telling the story in flashback while
impersonating Fenton, in order to trap the FBI agent who is the latest
"demon" to appear on his list. Thus, as in Shyamalan's better-known Sixth
Sense, the thrill experienced by the audience at the conclusion of the
film consists of the overturning of its spectatorial position ("the
protagonist has been dead all along!"). In Frailty, the two characters
with whom the viewer identifies--the FBI agent trying to solve the
killings, the rational and compassionate "good" son who was traumatized by
his father's gruesome actions--are revealed in the end to have committed,
respectively, matricide and serial murder. Such a dispossession of the
spectator's points of identification must not be understood simply as an
effect of the film's creators resorting to the only narrative trick still
capable of taking today's audiences by surprise. Rather, the "real story"
that emerges once the skeptical point of view is feigned and then
discarded validates the bloody undertakings of the father and younger son.
The film establishes that, far from being a deluded madman, Meiks, as well
as his son Adam, does possess the supernatural ability to perceive the
demons hiding in human form. Indeed, Frailty essentially indicts the
audience for its very presumption of critical distance; in the film's
moral universe, skepticism and doubt are attributes belonging to demons
who murder their own parents, whereas ruthless, exterminating violence
defines the actions of the righteous. 


31. Of course, religious (and political) faith does involve the overcoming
of skepticism and doubt, and ruthless violence might even be the very
action it enjoins. Indeed, Kierkegaard was drawn to Abraham's sacrifice of
Isaac for precisely these reasons: to affirm the incommensurability
between the moral law and the divine injunction. The Danish philosopher
was well aware that virtue, common sense, and morality easily become
obstacles to the unconditional commitment demanded by God. Frailty
explicitly alludes to Abraham's ordeal, when Adam, having thrown off the
pretense of being Fenton, tells the FBI agent that his father had been
commanded by God to kill his son: "You see, God asked Dad to destroy his
son, much like he asked Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. But Dad
couldn't do it, and God didn't take pity on Dad like he did Abraham."
Doesn't the category of the religious necessarily involve in some
fundamental sense the repudiation of the ethical and of any notion of the
good, defined in human terms? And if faith is ultimately to be opposed to
ethics, reason, and common sense, doesn't Frailty merely present an
updated illustration of Kierkegaard's idea of the teleological suspension
of the ethical? The answer is no, and we may proceed by looking at how the
film significantly deviates from Kierkegaard's understanding of Abraham's
sacrifice. 


32. In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard defines the "paradox of faith" as
the idea that the "single individual is higher than the universal" (70).
Thus, insofar as the person of faith has "an absolute duty" to God, for
Abraham the ethical/universal is the temptation which seeks to dissuade
him from acting according to his faith. Kierkegaard contrasts the trial of
the man of faith with that of the classical tragic heroes Agamemnon and
Brutus. The mythical Achaean king and the defender of the Roman republic
are forced to sacrifice their children for the sake of a greater social
good--the necessity that compels them is thus the object of public
approval and veneration and their actions are recognized as ethical.
Abraham, on the other hand, is ready to commit an act of killing without
any reference to the higher good of ethics. His sacrifice of Isaac is
emphatically not for the sake of preventing a greater evil, and serves no
purpose other than the fact that God has commanded it. One should stress
here the wrong-headedness of attempts to critique the story of Abraham and
Isaac as an oppressive myth that perpetuates the violence of patriarchal
authority by referring to real-life instances where fathers have murdered
their own children, such as the father who stabbed his daughter to death
in California in 1990 or the 1996 case of Robert Blair in New Hampshire
(in both instances, the father appealed to the biblical story of Abraham
to justify and explain his act of killing), as detailed by anthropologist
Carol Delaney in her book, Abraham on Trial: The Social Legacy of Biblical
Myth (1998). According to Kierkegaard, God's terrible commandment not only
separates Abraham from the ethical, but also renders his dilemma
incommunicable to others. The incommunicable nature of his ordeal thus
makes Abraham either a man of faith or a murderer, but what his faith
precisely excludes--the identity he is not ready to assume--is the "middle
position" between the two, namely that of the murderer who makes the
excuse that God commanded him to do it. 


33.  In Frailty, by contrast, the divine command given to Meiks lacks the
mystifying and futile character of the injunction imposed upon Abraham. He
is ordered to kill Fenton not because his faith is being tested through an
ordeal, but rather for the very pragmatic reason that his elder son is a
demon and thus places in jeopardy the family's mission of fighting the
forces of evil. If the film were faithful to Kierkegaard and had evoked
the Abrahamic sacrifice in all of its appalling gratuitousness, Meiks
would have been called to slay his innocent, obedient younger son.
Similarly, whereas according to Kierkegaard, Abraham's faith brings him
into contradiction with the moral law, the divine command in Frailty never
conflicts with the demands of the ethical universal. Meiks's failure to
slaughter Fenton is presented both as a breach of moral necessity and as a
lapse in practical judgment, as it results in his own death at the hands
of his son. Thus, the divine injunction is not experienced as radically
and inexplicably horrifying; rather, Meiks maintains to the end the
illusion that he is acting on behalf of the good when God imposes upon him
the command to do what is terrible. Frailty thus domesticates the terrible
command by keeping it on the side of the moral law and collective good (as
opposed to the Kierkegaardian constellation of the divine
injunction/transgression of the law/separation from the universal). As
such, the film fails to achieve the status of what Zizek calls the
"properly modern post- or meta-tragic situation," which comes about when
"high necessity compels me to betray the very ethical substance of my
being" (Did Somebody 14). 


VI. Collateral Sacrifices 

34. Frailty also avoids the problematic of secrecy that is decisive in
Kierkegaard's account of faith, invoking instead a theology of visible
redemption through its supernatural motif whereby Meiks and his younger
son Adam are able to distinguish, simply by laying their hands on others,
which persons are beings of unregenerate evil. A similar plot device is to
be found in Left Behind, in which the saved can be distinguished from
non-believers by the mark of God on their foreheads--a mark, furthermore,
that can be perceived only by other believers. Of course, one can object
that Frailty's basis in the Bible is tenuous at best anyway, since Jesus
Christ and his disciples went around casting out demons, not slaying those
possessed by them. But one may counter that such deviations from the
Gospel are far too common in religious contexts across the American
cultural and political landscape to be regarded as mere exceptions to
orthodoxy, as a theology of visible salvation is not of Christian
provenance but profoundly Gnostic in inspiration. The mystical ability to
fathom the hidden guilt of others or instantly recognize their status as
unbelievers may give rise in these two instances to an infantile view of
good and evil which easily lends itself to the demonizing of one's
political enemies, but the vision of sanctified violence that emerges at
the end of Frailty bears particular relevance for the way in which wars
have been conducted in the post-Cold War order. For the violence in the
film is sanctified precisely insofar as it is surgical--its victims, with
the one regrettable instance of collateral damage in the town sheriff (for
which the film implicitly faults Fenton's skepticism), are without
exception murderers and pedophiles who would otherwise get away with their
crimes. 


35. The idea of surgical killing, which is claimed to annihilate enemy
combatants and matériel while minimizing civilian casualties, was of
course a major legitimating factor for the recent war of conquest against
Iraq as well as for the Persian Gulf War of 1991. Images of computer
guidance systems directing bombs and missiles to Iraqi military targets
dominated the television newscasts during the previous conflict, while the
first Bush administration successfully kept pictures of dead and wounded
bodies, the traditional imagery of war, off the air. The Air Force,
however, announced on 15 March 1991 that 93.6% of the tonnage of the
explosives that fell on Iraq were in fact conventional bombs, belying the
surgical nature of the destruction inflicted upon Basra, the second
largest city in Iraq before the war (Walker). Furthermore, even as the
destroyed and damaged equipment of the Iraqi army was subjected to
meticulous examination, the military suppressed any precise count of enemy
casualties, giving a 50% margin of error to a total estimate of 100,000
Iraqi dead, a margin that, in the words of Margot Norris, "reduces the
dead to phantoms of speculation" (242). Operation Desert Storm, celebrated
as an overwhelming victory for the United States and its allies, concluded
with the mass incineration of retreating Iraqi troops on what has become
known as the Highway of Death. In a single month, a greater tonnage of
bombs was dropped on Iraq than were used during all of World War II, while
scarcely a photo of its human cost appeared in the U.S. media. The Western
riposte to Islamist suicide attacks is to massacre from long range, using
weaponry such as depleted uranium shells, which cause long-term
environmental damage and physiological harm in the form of cancer, birth
defects, and poisoned ground-water. 


36. Frailty makes explicit the inherent fantasy in the derealization of
mass Arab casualties in its depiction of victims who, in spite of their
normal, everyday appearance, fully deserve to be slaughtered. Because it
lacks the essentially programmatic nature of Left Behind, which cannot but
provoke in the nonfundamentalist reader the grotesque and suffocating
sensation of being directly confronted by another's obscene fantasy,
Frailty renders with greater degrees of concreteness the ideological
equivalent of a theology of visible salvation in the realm of politics. It
baldly takes at his word the fatuous, Manichean utterances of the current
President Bush (America's enemies "hate" freedom; Americans value
"innocent life") in portraying a pair of serial killers who insist that
they do value "innocent life." Yet the film's over-identification with
post-9/11 militaristic moralizing is constrained by certain ideological
limitations. Aside from its Gnostic revision of the Abraham story, Frailty
fails to unsettle the belief of the "God's Hands" that the victims of
their jihad are anything but irredeemably depraved. The film in this sense
falls in line with a president who self-righteously condemns the nations
he considers hostile to his administration's interests as "evil." The
skeptical viewer will no doubt be tempted to look with irony upon the
final revelation that the calling received by the "God's Hands" is true
and divinely inspired. But an ironic interpretation remains wholly
external to the narrative--nothing within the storyline authorizes such a
stance. Instead, Frailty anticipates a "fundamentalist" reading by evoking
the genre of the "superhero," a comparison drawn by the young Adam ("we're
a family of superheroes that are going to help save the world") when his
father first shares the revelation of his own personal "war against evil." 


37. One thing that has changed after 9/11, now recognized by the Left as a
"missed opportunity" for the United States to confront and reevaluate its
role in the world, is the acceptance of ideas formerly associated with the
religious fringe by the mainstream media. Time magazine's cover story of
23 June 2002 on the popularity of the Left Behind series commended the
novels for exemplifying American optimism in the face of tragedy and took
pains to mute the criticisms offered by various religious scholars and
theologians. As mentioned earlier, Jerry Jenkins, the more avuncular of
Left Behind's co-authors, declaimed in somber, almost melancholic tones on
ABC's UpClose that their work is not fiction, although he stated that he
personally wishes that it were. As further evidence of how their
exterminist eschatology is no longer regarded as a fringe phenomenon, his
interviewer failed to pose any probing questions about a doctrine with a
questionable basis in the Bible that bears more than passing resemblance
to the cosmology of the Heaven's Gate cult, which committed mass suicide
near San Diego in March 1997. Yet, even as the Christian fundamentalist
fantasy ideology of the apocalypse serves to endorse for many the blindly
destructive policies of the United States in the Middle East, its suicidal
nature reveals that it cannot entirely extinguish the critical force of
the genre to which it belongs. For insofar as the apocalyptic evokes the
sweeping and total transformation of things as they are, the
millenarianism of the Christian Right comprises its own unconscious
indictment. The prophecies of the Bible, with their rage against arrogant
empires and unjust authorities, have served as a source of hope for the
dispossessed and disenfranchised--that is, for those who are in a position
to appreciate the metaphoric dimension of the imagery of the apocalyptic.
In the hands of the fundamentalists for whom such symbols appear emptied
of any metaphoric resonance, the prophecies, especially that of the
Rapture, have become a kind of time bomb set against the providential
history of the United States itself. "We live after the failure of
peoples," writes Giorgio Agamben, implying that the entry of a people or
nation into post-history is marked by their taking up the task of
reckoning with their crimes and complicity in terror (142). It might very
well be that the apocalypticism of this new millennium is a kind of last
obstacle--a final, almost but not quite nakedly nihilistic outburst
seeking to give American manifest destiny a moral justification--before
Americans, too, begin to realize their place alongside all the other
peoples of the world. Until then, we are all subject to the risk that this
apocalyptic will perpetrate further atrocities in the course of
discrediting itself, so that we may have to live through yet more
tragedies before we recognize how we were already bankrupt. 



Department of French, Italian, and Comparative Literature
University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee
pypaik@uwm.edu 




Copyright (c) 2003 Peter Yoonsuk Paik NOTE: Readers may use portions of
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Notes 

1. The interview took place on ABC News show UpClose on 5 August 2002. 

2. Accounting for the scarcity of attention accorded to the persecution of
Christians in pagan literature, Sorel notes that "no ideology was ever
more remote from the facts than that of the early Christians" (211). 

3. Nicholas Veliotes, former assistant secretary of state for the Near
East and South Asia, relates that then-President Reagan himself explained
to him the basis for conservative Christian support for Israel in biblical
prophecy: "in order for Armageddon to occur, Israel had to exist so that
it could be destroyed. Hence, any possible threat to the Jewish state has
to be opposed. In this view, the peace process itself is a threat that
must be opposed" (15). See Veliotes. 


Works Cited 

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