Jerry Jenkins

by Becky Garrison Issue #198, March/April 2005

Time to 'fess up. Our interview with Jerry B. Jenkins in the January/February 2004 issue of The Door was ... um ... a fake. Who woulda figured that the co-author of the stratospherically popular Left Behind series would actually agree to be interviewed by The Wittenburg Door? Especially after we've tweaked his co-author Tim LaHaye (sorry, but that whole super-secret Council for National Policy really gives us the creeps) so often. And let's face it, after this duo was ranked #42 on Entertainment Weekly's "Creative 50" list of the most powerful people in show business, we figured he was out of our league anyway.
However, not only did Mr. J. get a kick out of our fake interview—he "volunteered" to be interviewed. Never the one to turn down the chance to interview the "most famous writer no one's ever heard of" (he's penned more than 100 books), we ordered Senior Contributing (and sailing enthusiast) Editor Becky Garrison to cruise down to the New York Yacht Club in Manhattan (where else—you were expecting Denny's?) to interview da man hisownself.

THE WITTENBURG DOOR: What role did religion play in your life when you were growing up?
JERRY B. JENKINS: I was raised in a Christian home and, in fact, my mother led me to Christ as a youngster. I remember the Salmon painting of Jesus knocking at the door that hung in our house. She told me it was symbolic—that it's the door of your heart. There's no handle on the outside; you have to open the door from inside.
DOOR: Oh, now I see!
JENKINS: When you come to Christ as a real young person, I think when you become a teen-ager either you rebel or you search, doubt, and wonder. A lot of teen-agers have camp rededications, for instance, and the joke is they have them every year, but I had one that really took. I really got convicted about my life when I was about 15, and went back to public high school in suburban Chicago, a big public high school, where I carried my Bible, and shared my faith, and really made it a part of my life. I was raised as a Christian but the transaction has to be made by yourself—you and God—at some point.
DOOR: What was the impetus behind doing the Left Behind series?
JENKINS: I've always been fascinated by the rapture story, and was raised in that tradition. When I was a junior camp counselor and it was my job to tell the campers a bedtime story or devotional, I would tell them a rapture story. Imagine if the rapture happened during rush hour—planes crashing, cars crashing—never thinking that I would write it some day.
DOOR: How did you meet Tim LaHaye?
JENKINS: Our mutual agent introduced us. I was aware of Tim LaHaye, he was kind of a political animal, and much more outspoken about peripheral things than I would ever be, and yet I was taken by his evangelistic fervor. You see a public image of a hard-driving, very outspoken, opinionated, right wing guy, but I really sensed sensitivity in him, and caring for people's souls. It kind of surprised me.
DOOR: You're surprised?! We're speechless.
JENKINS: —
DOOR: So, y'all hit it right off the bat?
JENKINS: I put off writing the first Left Behind book for a year because I got invited to assist Billy Graham in his memoirs, and had we known what we were putting off for a year, we might not have put it off.
DOOR: How do the two of you work together?
JENKINS: Tim sends me a fairly ambitious workup in notebook form noting the passages we're going to cover and the chronology of the biblical events, and his commentaries on those things he's read and written. He just kind of talks them through, and then I get the fun part cause I get to make up the stories.
DOOR: Now that Christ has come back to earth in The Glorious Appearing why do you even need book thirteen (the prequel) and fourteen (the final judgment)?
JENKINS: Because people are curious about that, too. What will that look like? In the prequel we're going to tell about the characters before Left Behind, and the book would end with the rapture instead of start with the rapture like the first one did. We'll actually follow somebody to heaven because there are some stories that we haven't covered—like the marriage supper of the lamb, some of the judgments, but the real music of that one is to tell the background of the Antichrist.
DOOR: How do you view the Antichrist?
JENKINS: I actually haven't got it solidified in my head yet, but I suppose the best comparison is that the Antichrist would be like a kid who was raised in a Mafia family and doesn't realize this until maybe his late teens. Everybody else thinks that you're bad and your family is criminal, but it's your family so you're right and they're wrong. Read the Bible from this angle and Satan's a good guy.
DOOR: Who is the Antichrist?
JENKINS: It is funny to me how people say, "Do you think Saddam Hussein is the Antichrist or Osama Bin Laden?" Anybody who knows the story in the prophecy, the Antichrist is so attractive and deceptive, persuasive, that almost the entire world believes not only that he's a good guy, but that he's God himself. That's not going to be true of any president, as half the people in the United States are going to hate him. Or a dictator. So, I think people are looking in the wrong place when they look for villains.
DOOR: A lot of people like to take the Book of Revelation and claim that a major event such as World War II, the Cold War, or—more recently Sept. 11—is a sign that Armageddon is upon us.
JENKINS: Revelation talks about armies from the north. So you could say that could be Russia, but it could be anybody from the north because we don't know when this is going to happen. It could be a hundred years; it could be a thousand years. It's sometimes fun for people to speculate but I had to kind of dance around all the conspiracy theories. My job, I think, is to put realistic, fictitious characters in the way of a biblical event and see what happens to them. So if this happened tomorrow or ten years from now, here's what it would look like. But I carefully avoid date-setting. Jesus tells his disciples that He doesn't even know when He's coming back. It would be folly for us to try to pretend, and to LaHaye's credit, he's maybe more of a conspiracy theorist or some of that type—but he's not a date-setter.
DOOR: How do you account for the series' phenomenal success?
JENKINS: I think that there is a God-hunger—whether people would call it that or not. People buy books by the Pope, the Dali Lama, gurus and the eastern mystics because of the times that we live in. People are scared to death and they're looking for something beyond themselves. They hear about fiction based on prophecy, and that intrigues them and, hopefully, the fiction does work on some elemental level. People want to find out what happens to the characters, and want to keep reading, and turning the pages. If these were just sermons disguised as novels they might sell because of the subject matter—but not in the tens of millions. So that's gratifying.
DOOR: So, what does a Christian do so he doesn't become like Captain Rayford?
JENKINS: Maybe listen to their wife.
DOOR: Dang. There just went all of our subscribers at Promise Keepers.
JENKINS: I can't tell you the number of letters we've gotten from people saying, "I was Rayford." It's moving. Our goal was to inspire people to believe the way we do and to persuade people who didn't. We've heard from more than three thousand people who tell us they've actually become believers, and we assume there are a lot more. But there are a lot of people who think they're in because they're good people, or working hard, or going to church.
DOOR: What would you say to the biblical scholars who say that the Book of Revelation is a myth akin to Genesis; that it's a compilation of Greek myths, and not actual biblical prophecy of what's going to happen?
JENKINS: I'd say, "Friends, I respect that you've studied this with an open mind; you come to a conclusion that's different than mine. You may be right, you may be wrong. Obviously, we believe our way is right. For one thing, the prophesies of the Old Testament were literally fulfilled by Jesus, so why wouldn't the prophesies of the New Testament be literally fulfilled? To me it makes sense."
We believe that prophecy is history written in events. We take this literal approach and say, "Where you can take it literally—take it literally." I have friends and loved ones on the other side of this issue, and sometimes they'll say, "He has bad theology." Well, can't we just disagree? We've had twelve books and a million words to put our thoughts out there, and I say that somebody else can do the same with theirs. The only time it really bothers me is when our motives are questioned.
DOOR: Um, this is, after all, a multimillion-dollar empire here.
JENKINS: Had we known it was going to be lucrative, I guess we'd have done it earlier, but the fact is I got halfway through writing the first book and realized I only covered two weeks of the deciding years. That's when I knew it was going to be a series.
DOOR: Some people that believe in the rapture seem to delight in damning those that disagree with them to hell.
JENKINS: I'm sure that's true. My biggest fear with people who call themselves evangelicals sometimes is that there is smugness. The sad fact is that's true. There are people who are not going to heaven, and who are going to hell. If I'm a true evangelical, that shouldn't make me gloat at all. It should break my heart.
DOOR: How would you respond to criticism the books might be anti-Semitic because of its treatment of the Jews?
JENKINS: Seriously, every criticism I've heard about what these books say about Jewish people is from people who haven't read it. I don't want to be blind or close-minded on this. Our whole faith is based on Judaism. Our Savior was Jewish, the disciples were Jewish, and our faith was based on the prophesy of the Old Testament, which is Jewish. The Bible says that the plan of God is for the chosen people, and we believe that Jews are the chosen people. They'll say, "Oh this says that Christians have to convert so many Jews before Jesus can come back." It's not in there. It's not in the Bible. And it's not in our books. The prophecies say that there will be 144,000 Jewish evangelists in the end times, and it says there will be exactly 12,000 from each of the twelve tribes. To me, that clearly means if that's true, then it's a supernatural event. We're not going out and saying, "Oops, we've already got 12,000 from the tribe of Benjamin, we can't have any more." God clearly makes this happen. Then He's got 144,000 Apostle Pauls spreading the gospel around the world. We believe that's what it says, and that's what it means, but I don't see how that's anti-Semitic.
DOOR: This belief does maintain that a Jew must convert to Christianity in order to be saved.
JENKINS: People say, "You think the Jews have to be converted." Everybody has to be converted. Jesus said He was the only way to God, and we believe Jesus is the Messiah that the Jews are seeking. I know a Jewish person who is devout, and he knows where I stand. I share my faith, and they reject it. I don't put them down or hate them or shun them. I would still associate with them, I would still pray for them; I would still admire and respect them. But as an evangelical, I say that to inform, not to offend. What they do with it is up to them and God.
DOOR: Do you think the criticism about the book being offensive to Catholics is also in the same vein?
JENKINS: It wasn't my intention to pick on the Catholics. We say that in the beginning—that the former Catholic bishop in the book is a villain. He comes to the wrong Pope, and the Pope in our book disappears, and he's gone. So, we're saying obviously that Catholics can be saved if they believe in Christ. My point was, and I'm sure Dr. LaHaye's as well, is that we're trying to make the case for salvation by grace and faith alone. I do believe that anybody who thinks they're earning their salvation is in trouble. I think scripture is clear on that. It doesn't make any difference if they're Catholic, Lutheran, or Baptist, In fact, one of the main characters is an evangelical pastor who is left behind. We didn't get a bunch of letters from evangelicals saying, "How dare you say that an evangelical will be left behind?" We do get that from the Catholics and so my response to them usually is, "Are you saying that every Catholic is a true devout believer in Christ?"
DOOR: How did the events of 9/11 shape the series?
JENKINS: I had been speculating about what would happen if plagues, and judgments from heaven happened in America. How would we react to shutting the whole country down? Well, 9/11 shut the whole country down. So it did give some reality to it. I do think there was a scene later in the books where I talk about finding a Muslim cell that's still opposing the Antichrist.
DOOR: How would you respond to anybody that tries to read a political agenda into the book?
JENKINS: I think it's asinine—and they do all the time. Yes, a lot of it's set in Iraq, and that was sort of serendipitous because a lot of the prophecy is centered in Baghdad, Babylon and all that. Then right while I'm writing that book, more Iraqis come and you see those maps on the television, and it's like, "This is bizarre!" Yet again, our series is set in the future, and America is decimated by the coming of the end times. America has done something wrong between now and the fulfilling of prophecy because we don't see America in the prophecies at all.
DOOR: Some people even say they view the United Nations as the Antichrist.
JENKINS: I'm really glad you asked that because it was Wesley Clark who said these books have made the U.N. the Anti-Christ. Read the books! There's nothing in the books about the U.N. being the Antichrist. I used the U.N. as a fictitious construct because of the structure. The Antichrist is going to rule the world. What structure is he going to use to do it quickly? There is not one negative word about the U.N. itself. Why would we abandon the U.N.?
DOOR: Your co-author Tim LaHaye seems to despise this institution.
JENKINS: Whether it's working or not, or even if LaHaye is right and there's something wrong with it, it's (still) a valid idea. We're trying to work together for peace, I wouldn't abandon the U.N.—even though I can't say I'm a big fan of the U.N. I think that it works.
DOOR: In Barbara Rossing's book The Rapture Exposed, she seems to think that Tim LaHaye is trying to influence American politics, especially in the Middle East.
JENKINS: She hasn't read the books. It's just silly; there is nothing in the books that's political.
DOOR: Where do you think she's coming from?
JENKINS: I don't know. She may have even read some of LaHaye's old non-fiction stuff. Those views are not representative of the Left Behind series. I suppose anything with his name on it, they can say they know where he comes from, but it's simply not in the Left Behind books.
DOOR: Tim LaHaye puts politics and biblical prophecy together sometimes with his non-fiction books.
JENKINS: It's not in the Left Behind books.
DOOR: Hmmm ... sensing a trend here. Do you get involved with any of his organizations?
JENKINS: No.
DOOR: So whatever he does is his own little thing?
JENKINS: Yes. We get together, I see him three or four times a year, and we're friends, and we work well together but I'm not involved in his activities.
DOOR: What about the Left Behind merchandise? You got the T-shirts, the board games, the key chains and so on and so forth?
JENKINS: Our feeling is if the subsidiary product carries the message, then we're all for it. If it expands the market—the audience, albeit the kids' version, the comics book version, a devotional, or something like that, but not something that is cryptic, like a name on the side of a can. We have really fought to keep the Left Behind trend out of the marketplace, and we've lost control of that. I won't even look at the board game. They want me to sign it, and I won't sign it.
DOOR: What's your take on the Left Behind movie?
JENKINS: So often people have said, "Well, it's good for a Christian movie." That's not what you want to hear when you're trying to compete in the marketplace. My son and I had a film company in Hollywood, and our goal is not to curse Hollywood. We're acknowledging they make the best movies on the planet whether we agree with their message or not, and that's what we're trying to compete with.

If you've felt a little bit "left behind" after this interview, log on to www.jerryjenkins.com for your latest Jerry fix.

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