By Harry T. Cook

We were on our way to the airport and spotted this bumper sticker on the car ahead of us:

“IF VEHICLE IS UNMANNED, THE RAPTURE HAS BEGUN.” I was asked what that meant.

Typically, I explained in more detail than my companion seemed to want or need. I told her about pre-millennial dispensationalism and how it was spelled out in lurid terms by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins in their blockbuster series of books, Left Behind.

Now, pay attention to the “s” words: The idea is that only those who have been “saved” through their belief in Jesus Christ as their personal savior will be caught up to heaven in safety upon Jesus’ return to Earth. The LaHaye-Jenkins books are fiction, depicting airliners suddenly missing crew and passengers, automobiles driverless in an instant with others – you guessed it – left behind.

My companion appeared still to be listening, so I went on to say, “It’s the same kind of tactic you’ll see when we get to the airport and run the gantlet of the security check. The goals of the Left Behind series and the Transportation Safety Administration are one and the same: to frighten you and to keep you in a perpetual state of fear.”

That is not to say security at airports is not important. It is, however, to say that airline passengers have paid a price for the failure of the nation’s intelligence apparatus in not figuring out 9/11 before it happened. But it was a grand gift, 9/11 was, to an Administration that wanted to frighten people into supporting a long-planned, pre-emptive war against a nation that had nothing to do with 9/11.

While Franklin D. Roosevelt 75 years ago this month was speaking of the deprivations of the Great Depression, his deservedly famous words The only thing we have to fear is fear itself could well be uttered about current events by anyone of the three presidential candidates in the current campaign with no fear of being accused of plagiarism.

The American people may be so inured to fear (and Hillary Clinton was no help on that score with her ” 3 a.m. red-phone” infomercial) that even a cheery Barack Obama might be unable to use the statement to full effect. It was fear, though, that drove the 2004 re-election of George W. Bush – the ever-present reminder that the whole Muslim world is out to get us and that fear itself in some convoluted way will save us.

Thus, the “f” word: Fear drove Congress’ predictable failure to override President Bush’s veto of a bill that allows the continuation of the water-boarding type of torture – fear not only of what untortured terrorists might do, but fear on the part of politicians of what supposedly fearful voters will do to them if they do not traffic in fear in order to be re-elected.

Fear is the strategy of the pre-millennial dispensationalist cults to full their pews and coffers. The Left Behind series is one of the true phenomena of the American publishing world. Millions printed. Millions sold.

QED: Fear pays. It pays politically. It pays religiously. Fear engenders dependence and paranoia. It’s how Adolf Hitler and his accomplices turned otherwise normal people into Jew haters. It’s how the Nazis turned Germans against one another. It’s how the late Joe McCarthy turned large parts of America into psycho wards in the 1950s.

Under a terrorist threat of Roman persecution, a very early Christian wrote these brave words: There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. The writer meant that non-possessive regard (perfect love) fills the dark places in human relationships, leaving no room for the onset and metastasis of fear – rather, sending it back to the fetid cave from which it oozed.

If Election 2008 is truly to be the beginning of a new era, fear is the first emotion that has to be cast out. American voters very much need and deserve to hear at least one of their presidential candidates say just that – and mean it.

© Copyright 2008, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.

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