Rapture, Revelation, and the End Times - Conscious Evolution TV

14robin-bobin Rapture, Revelation, and the End Timeswho “entered politics with a vengeance during the 1970s and1980s.” They “created the New Religious Right and havemade conservative evangelical support so important for theRepublican Party since the campaigns of Ronald Reagan.” 14Some of LaHaye’s forays into politics, however, have not gonewell. Controversy arose when it was revealed that LaHayehad accepted funds from the Reverend Sun Myung Moon andserved on the boards of two of his organizations. He alsoresigned as co-chairman of Jack Kemp’s 1988 presidentialcampaign after press accounts reported that LaHaye hadcalled Roman Catholicism a “false religion” and had, on oneoccasion, asserted that Jews were responsible for the death ofJesus. 15In addition to these causes, LaHaye is a passionate advocate of“dispensational premillennialism,” also called “premillennial dispensationalism”or simply “dispensationalism,” a specific endtimes viewpoint that arose in the 1830s. (See chapter 2 for a fullerdescription of the belief system and its history.) Dispensationalpremillennialism is the interpretation that underlies the LeftBehind books, expecting a rapture, followed by a seven-yearperiod of tribulation, concluding with a “glorious appearing” byChrist who will defeat Satan and inaugurate a thousand-yearreign on the earth. In 1973 LaHaye argued for such views in acommentary on the biblical book of Revelation, and in the 1990she published at least three more books about prophecy and theend times, including a volume entitled Rapture under Attack. 16He is a co-founder of the Pre-Trib Research Center, “establishedfor the express purpose of exposing ministers to teachings ofgood Bible prophecy” and to keep people from “being deceivedas we approach the end of the age,” exposing “false prophets andtheir harmful teaching.”Because of LaHaye’s wide-ranging career, Larry Eskridge ofthe Evangelical Studies Bulletin wrote an essay in 2001 claimingthat Tim LaHaye has been the most influential American evangelicalof the last twenty-five years. Eskridge would name BillyGraham the most influential American evangelical of therobin-bobin