ABSTRACT
The Left Behind series (LBS) has become extraordinarily popular in the United States, attracting an audience of Christians and, although considerably fewer in number, non-Christians alike. This chapter focuses at a number of factors regarding the proliferation of the Left Behind material. Evangelical literature has enjoyed considerable success over the years. Sales facts and figures are impressive. Estimates suggest that from the Left Behind catalogue, over 58 million units have been sold, the first book selling over 8 million of those. Quentin Schultze makes a number of pertinent observations regarding narrative in his paper Television Drama as a Sacred Text. He writes that the capacity for storytelling is one of the most widely overlooked and underexamined aspects of human nature. The LBS enterprise can be seen to act very much along the same lines as the mass broadcasting industry, which Gerbner suggests, is concentrated, homogenised, and globalized.
