In Canada, Christian Bookstore Won't Stock Latest "Left Behind "

Christian Bookstore Won't Stock Latest Left Behind Book

By Douglas Todd
Religion News Service



Vancouver, Apr. 7--(RNS) One of the largest Christian bookstores in Canada has refused to stock the latest book in the most popular Christian fiction series of all time, saying it promotes a dangerous worldview that exacerbates global tensions.

Regent College Bookstore, which is affiliated with a world-renowned evangelical graduate school in Vancouver, won't be selling the 12th installment in the phenomenally popular "Left Behind" series, which was released Tuesday across North America to huge fanfare.
The authors of the series, which portrays Americans playing a central role in ushering in a cataclysm that destroys non-Christians, have surpassed mystery writer John Grisham as the best-selling writers of adult fiction in North America.

Although many Christian and mainstream bookstores in Canada have begun to sell the series' final book, "Glorious Appearing," a manager at Regent College Bookstore said the Christian books "mix a dangerous theology with politics--and we don't want to sell it." Ian Panth, whose Christian bookstore is a nonprofit arm of Regent College, on the University of British Columbia campus, said Tuesday: "The book is very American-centric. It suggests the United States is successful because it has supported the state of Israel. It portrays the Antichrist as a Romanian who has risen up to take over the United Nations. It also paints the European Union as entirely demonic."

<snip>

http://www.beliefnet.com/story/144/story_14412_1.html

it's nice to be reminded that not all Christians are doom-obsessed loons :)

too...

:toast: to them crazy librul Canadians!

I believe you put the book out there and let people decide, but "Left Behind" was one of the most simplistic, idiotic books I have read. I can't tell you how poorly written it was.

I'd rather eat my toenails than read that crap ever again!

I know that bookstores are free to decide what to sell. Borders doesn't carry out and out porn, for example.

However, people are responsible for their individual actions, not a book they read, the music they listen to or the movies they watch. I'm not a fundie, so I haven't read any of the "Left Behind" books, but they can't be all that objectionable. They can't be any worse than O'Reilly's attempt at fiction.

takes on a unique obligation, I think, to not distribute materials which are contrary to the proprietors' understanding of the tenets of that faith.

This bookstore decided the Left Behind series not only misrepresented Christianity, but dangerously so. Fundamentalist American pop eschatology is, I believe, nothing less than a heresy, offering up as "prophecy," a potentially self-fulfilling apocalyptic vision.

The store got it right. It's a menace.

If Borders or Barnes and Nobel have any branches up in Canada, then I'm quite sure those bookstores will stock this book. After all, these bookstores are in the fore-front of denouncing any attempt to censor books. SUrely they would not ban a book just because they happen to disagree with its content.

Or, if this book is not available in bookstores, then I am quite certain that the Canadian public library system will carry it.

And, if worse comes to worst, and the book is banned by both the private and the public sector in Canada, then I'm sure our Canadian friends will be able to cross the border into the USA and buy it here -- perhaps at a Barnes and Nobel or a Borders.

I hope that if Canadians feel that they need to come to the USA for their reading material that they have no trouble "smuggling" books banned in Canada into the Great White North.

or "The Turner Diaries"? I take it you're not familiar with the Left Behind series. It's pretty much "The Turner Diaries" on apocalyptic Christianity.

Mein Kampf is an important historical book.

I know the "Turner Diaries" is some crazy, militia type book that Timothy McVeigh was into. It's still just a book. Ideas aren't the problem, it's people acting on them that is.

I agree those books shouldn't be "banned"; I don't think any kind of information (except child porn and really violent adult porn) should be banned by the government. But I have no problem with private entities like bookstores using discretion about the quality and content of what they will carry.

materials, so I personally have better things to worry about. I don't see any catholic bookstores selling anticatholic literature, and I don't expect them to.

They could easily claim the book isn't Christian at all.

However, I don't deny anyone the right to buy and read it. I'd just pack a Self-Suicide kit with each copy so they can all go to meet their sick version of Jesus RIGHT AWAY.

how Catholics are also unsaved and the enemy.

I've got plenty of of my own beefs with the Catholic Church, but it's a constant, nagging annoyance that some fundies refuse to admit that the Pope is actually a Christian.

Zealots down through the ages have waited for the world to end in their lifetime. Their perverted sense of self fantasizes the world will end before their own death.

And in a strange way the world does end each time a paranoid dies. Leaving the rest of us "living in the world" to go on with our lives learning from living a life of full awareness.

Take off the blinders.

If only they weren't so psychopathic as to need to involve the rest of us...

Most of the evangelical Christians I know have moderate or even left-leaning political views, and don't approve of Ashcroft and Bush. (Like the lady on my street, who is a Holy Roller and went door-to-door, arthritis and all, to collect donations last year for emergency aid to Iraqi civilians.)

The Mennonite Central Committee organized the shipments. The United Church (equivalent to Methodists in the US) is the biggest Protestant denomination in the country, and they hosted many of the Peace Vigils. The Catholic, Anglican, and Baptist churches in my city sent large delegations to the peace marches.

Socialism hasn't meant "godless" socialism.

Many prominent figures in the NDP - Tommy Douglas, Stanley Knowles, Bill Blaikie - have been ordained ministers. And the very progressive United Church of Canada has been called "the NDP at prayer."

... that at the peace rallies, we can pretty much pass our banners back and forth for assistance with carrying!


p.s. "the NDP at prayer" -- I admit I hadn't heard that one! -- I'll bring it out at our next riding association meeting (two of the executive are lay ministers ...)

The Church of England has long been called "the Tory party at prayer" (although that isn't quite so true these days). I was raised United Church and transitioned rapidly to the NDP (and beyond, of course).

Google tells me that it was Pierre Berton's originally. Great minds. ;) Maybe he wasn't even the first. I remember when I asked "brother, can you paradigm?" ... and then years later, google told me that several thousand people had also asked it. And when I made up an economist joke for my ecologist boyfriend who was constantly taunted with ecologist jokes by the economists at work (How many economists does it take to change a lightbulb? None; they all went for a beer and let the invisible hand take care of it) ... and then found it on the big website of economist jokes, in many more sophisticated forms too.

Anyhow, speaking of Bill Blaikie, I always like to recommend his treatise on the relationship between religion and politics, focusing on the right-wing politics and "conservative" Christianity of the former leader of the right-wing party in Canada.

http://www.punditmag.com/articles/blaikie.html

My point here is that, in large part, it would appear that by his own way of describing his belief system, a great many of Day's public policy positions emanate from his adoption of conservatism rather than Christianity. There are things he appears to believe as a Christian, presumably his beliefs on abortion, sexual orientation, independent schools, etc., and things he believes in as a conservative, presumably his beliefs in the flat tax, in a decentralized Canada with a very limited federal government, etc. It also needs to be said, of course, that there are Christians and conservatives who would disagree with him as to whether these are the positions on these issues that should be drawn from Christianity and conservatism, respectively.

... It could be argued, instead, that what we see in Mr. Day is a very small subset of issues that are faith-based, and a very large subset of issues that are shaped by his beliefs as a conservative, or, as I also believe to be the case, by his beliefs as a political strategist.

As a Christian on the left I would want to argue, for instance, that there is a vast realm called ‘the economy', and all the values and practices that it explicitly and implicitly reinforces, that should be judged, in the Christian mind, by whether or not it conforms to the teachings of Jesus Christ, whether any false gods, like the market, are worshipped therein, whether the poor and the oppressed are given priority, and whether, environmentally speaking, creation is being looked after.

... Like almost everyone on the religious right, Day has already privatized or removed from the public realm the possibility of religion being a true source of spiritual and intellectual inspiration when it comes to thinking about the economy. The secular right worships the market, and the religious right has a totally non-prophetic stance towards this idolatry.

Recently, I was struck by just how entrenched this non-prophetic stance is when I attended a talk by Richard John Neuhaus, intellectual guru of the religious right. Mr. Neuhaus authored a book called The Naked Public Square, which laments the absence or removal of Christian values from American culture and civil society. There will be no sequel called ‘The Naked Marketplace'. For him, much to my shock, the economy is a variable something like the weather - a given, rather than an object of human freedom and ethical reflection. ...

:yourock:

NDP, of course. We have a long tradition of social gospellers and Christian Socialists. Woodsworth and Douglas were both Christian Socialists.

I wonder if they will carry this one

will backfire and now make the book more popular?

Another bookstore said it would no longer stock Tom Clancy's books because they may give terrorists suggestions on ways to attack Western countries. The manager said, " These books are very American-centric. They suggest that America is successful because it has a large military budget."

Censorship sucks. If people want to read it, let them buy it. By not carrying the books, it reinforces the notion that they are being persecuted for their beliefs, increasing their conviction that they are following God.

Welcome to DU!! :toast:

the PNAC agenda. LaHaye is in on it like the other religious con men, Graham, Robertson, Foulwell, Moon. They are all part of the master plan of PNAC.

PNAC fits right in with Christian Reconstructionism. LaHay, Falwell, Robertson, Wildmon, et al are all Christian Reconstructionists. they want the US to be ruled by biblical law - reinstitute the old testiment punishments for certain "crimes" (adultery, disobedient children, homosexuality, etc.). You want your eyes open, go to some of the religious message boards and read these guys' posts. It'll blow you away.

Every book in the series is blatantly like that. Even movies(Michael York) have done that and much more with nothing left to the imagination or rationality or Christian values.

No, it is only obvious blowback from customers who see a dangerous fantasy being enacted bloodily across the border in a arrogant giant they never trusted completely. It isn't Aslan stalking the corridors of the White House.

Normal Cristian's and Churches should openly disavow this wordily heresy and bluntly point out its dangerous and hypocritical forced application on pulp fiction propagandized masses. Also the source of these 'books" should be very critically examined, because the author's "Christian" profile says a lot about true purposes of this drivel.

I love that book.

unfortunately its on the bookselves at B&N in my city.