BROOKE GLADSTONE: On April 8th the 11th installment in the best-selling series of Left Behind novels by evangelist Tim LaHaye and writer Jerry Jenkins will appear in stores. It's expected to debut as number one on best seller lists as have each of the last four Left Behind books. So far the series has been read by an estimated 40 million people. The entire series is actually one story, tracing the experiences of characters who are left behind when God takes committed Christians into heaven to spare them the ordeals that culminate in Armageddon. Fundamentalist Christians have long had an interest in the Middle East. Now while war rages in what was once Babylon, many believe the end time is near. Melanie McAlister teaches at George Washington University. Recently she wrote in the Washington Post about the potential ramifications of the Left Behind series. Professor McAlister, welcome to the show.

MELANI McALISTER: Thanks. It's a pleasure to be here.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Tell me what this latest and very timely installment of Left Behind is all about.

MELANI McALISTER: Well the new book is called Armageddon, and Armageddon is, as we all know, the great battle at the end of time. In the writers' interpretation it's the battle between Israel and her allies and the rest of the world led by the anti-Christ who has his capital in New Babylon, Iraq.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So this is a kind of classic comic book version of what is actually going on in the Middle East right now.

MELANI McALISTER:It's been the contention of a lot of this strain of fundamentalist Christian thinkers that events in the Middle East are the signal that God gives them that the end of times is happening and that in fact LaHaye has said over and over again that the founding of Israel in '47 and the taking over of Jerusalem in '67 were in fact what he calls "the super sign" of the coming of the end of times, and then the rest of the events which are supposed to unfold in Iraq and Israel are more indications that God is about to act in history. So these books speak very much to contemporary Middle East politics and quite consciously.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:I think it's fair to say that the Left Behind series is astonishingly popular and sort of goes under the radar of much of the media. Are there any precedents?

MELANI McALISTER: Hal Lindsay's book, The Late Great Planet Earth, was a non-fiction exposition of the interpretation that LaHaye and others also subscribe to, and that book was the best selling non-fiction book of the entire decade of the 1970s. There's also a whole industry of videos: Pat Robertson has written a novel -- there's really a prophecy industry that until now has been mostly popular amongst evangelicals, but every indication is that the Left Behind series has a much larger audience than that.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Let's talk about the political vision of the Left Behind series. There's a, there's a quote from your article. You say "LaHaye and Jenkins join a chorus of fundamentalist commentators who, despite their protestations to the contrary, have expressed a perverse enthusiasm for the spilled blood and millions of dead that will signal the second coming." Now that's a bit hard, don't you think?

MELANI McALISTER: Well actually I don't think it is, and in fact I'm not the only person to say this. A lot of Protestant theologians who aren't evangelicals have bemoaned what they see as a real kind of enthusiasm for the horrors that are to come which are very vivid in the books. I mean the books are-- exciting when the demon locusts come in and start biting everybody and making them suffer for five months and all but the Christians are going to go through terrible torment; nothing can relieve them. But it's all happening in the context of something quite exciting, and it is all evidence of God's action.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:You said that Europe's literature of the horrors of war has fostered pacificism and wariness of war there, so these novels must be influencing the American view of war today. I presume by that you mean not just those who are already converted but those that may not be.

MELANI McALISTER: The authors and the publisher say that about half of the readers are not Christian, by which I think they mean not evangelical Christian, and for those folks in particular, the novels might provide a sense that war is, though horrific, maybe not so much to be decried because of the way it fits into this larger plan. Now I should be clear here that not all evangelicals subscribe to this kind of prophecy interpretation and certainly not this particular strain, but there is a large number of people who do believe that the kind of wars that will come at the end of time are something to be looked at with both horror and a kind of anticipation in the sense that they lead to something else.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: How many people do you think that is, roughly?

MELANI McALISTER:Well we know that, from recent polls, that about 40 percent of all Christians are evangelicals and since most Americans are Christian, about 80 percent, that means that about 32 percent of Americans are evangelical Christian. But even more interesting, a recent Time poll found that 59 percent of Americans said they believed that the events predicted in Revelation will come true. That is, they believe that some version of a prophecy of end of times is actually going to happen. That's 59 percent. So how many of them actually think that this war is the war that's going to prepare the way from Armageddon -- it's hard to know. But I do know that the Left Behind books would encourage that view and that the Left Behind web site and other places actually explicitly talk about the real possibility that this war is one of the events to lead up to the second coming of Christ.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well thank you very much.

MELANI McALISTER: My pleasure.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Melani McAlister is an associate professor of American Studies at George Washington University and author of Epic Encounters: Culture, Media and U.S. Interest in the Middle East -- 1945 to 2000. [MUSIC]