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Media Coverage of Left Behind: Eternal Forces -- Just the Beginning
We can reasonably expect to see a lot of media coverage of the convert-or-kill-New Yorkers themed video game Left Behind: Eternal Forces over the next few months. The latest article to appear is currently running on Alternet. Alternet's story, by Zack Pelta-Heller is quite comprehensive, and will no doubt inspire further reporting on the game and its forthcoming release. The story features Talk to Action's Jonathan Hutson and his dramatic series of stories that showed, among other things, how the game, based on Tim LaHaye's controversial series of novels, and intended for children as young as 13, is an indoctrination program that teaches that in the End Times, Christian militias will roam the streets of New York, requiring people to convert or be killed. (But when the Religion News Service wrote about the game recently, they left some things out.)
The tremendous controversy and conversation that Hutson's series generated all over the blogosphere prefigures what will likely be a national and international controversy in the run-up to the official release of the game in October. |
The Purpose Driven Life Takers (Part 1)
Violent Video Marketed Through Mega-Churches (Part 2)
Revelation and Resignation (Part 3)
Christian Cadre's Layman: 'A Whopper of Being Wrong' (Part 4)
Apocalypse, Now a Lawsuit (Part 5)
Who's Watching the Boys? (Part 6)
Conservative Christian Culture Warriors Cut and Run (Part 7)
Meanwhile, by way of background, Chip Berlet is publishing a series on the ideology of Tim LaHaye, whose conspiratorial and hate-based ideas are key to the novels and the game.
In the Left Behind video game and book series, who is really behind the gigantic global end times conspiracy against Christians? It's a trilateral plot by liberals, secular humanists, and the devil! And don't forget the allies of the troika of terror.
According to LaHaye, the devil installed President Roosevelt to assist the takeover of America by a conspiracy of Godless secular humanists (who now control the media, the courts, the universities, and the entertainment industry) plotting to turn the "American constitution upside down" and "use our freedoms to promote pornography, homosexuality, immorality, and a host of evils characteristic of the last days."
In response to the video game, Berlet wondered:
When White supremacists post websites demonizing Jews and gay people, they are condemned for the hatemongers they are.
When leaders of the armed citizens militias and their allies in the Patriot Movement in the 1990s urged their followers to form anti-government underground cells and battle global cooperation and the United Nations, they were condemned as dangerous guerrillas spreading divisive conspiracy theories.
When Timothy LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins write the Left Behind series of novels containing the same type of bigotry, they sell 70 million books and are interviewed by clueless journalists who use a double standard by not confronting LaHaye and Jenkins for spreading hate and conspiracism as well as promoting religious violence as a heroic duty.
To help reporters do thier job in recognizing and reporting on hate-based entertainment products for Christian children, Berlet has been posting a series here at Talk to Action:
The World According to Tim LaHaye
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Jonathan's series on Left Behind: Eternal Forces, and and Chip's series on the ideology of Tim LaHaye will become standard sources as reporters and commentators across the religious and political spectrum come to grips with this story. |
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