Hail Commander Tung
Left Behind and the fantasies of sanctified Sinophobes
Towards the end of The Remnant, the tenth (!) book in Tim LaHaye’s and Jerry B. Jenkins’ bestselling Left Behind series, the authors offer readers a glimpse of China under the reign of the Antichrist. A young Christian woman named Ming Wong, disguised as a male member of the Satanic potentate’s “Global Community” death squads, witnesses a raid on a “small Muslim contingent” in the city of Zhengzhou. Defying the religion of the Antichrist, the suspiciously Transylvanian-sounding Nikolai Carpathia, the Muslims conduct their rituals “in caverns where the subways used to run.”
The Remnant, in other words, is mainly what one would expect from the exhausted imagination of white Evangelical propagandists, whose insatiable readership nearly outstripped their ability to churn out a book a year. Somewhat surprisingly for a book published in July 2002, though, the raid scene eschews 9/11-era stereotypes of suicide bombing martyrs. The real bloodthirst belongs to Tung, commander of Ming’s squad and a zealot of the Antichrist cult. (LaHaye and Jenkins seem to have limited their research of Chinese names to the ones ending in “-ng.”) In his own words, Tung plans to march the captives to the “beautiful, jade, life-size image of Supreme Potentate Carpathia,” where they will be forced to decide whether or not to bow: “Little do they know that regardless of their decision, they will be executed anyway.” Tung’s loyal troops burst into applause at this master plan.
Reader, I have not perused the tenth book of the Left Behind series, or most of any other book in the series, for that matter. I delved into summaries of this rabbit’s warren of hoary potboiler tropes and religious pornography earlier this year, during a first pass at this Revealer article. The editor ultimately found an intricate discussion of The Remnant’s Sinophobia too bizarre, which is saying something, considering that the final version of the article opens with a discussion of a megachurch pastor casually intimating that China is the Antichrist.
When the first Left Behind came out in sixth grade, my status as an adolescent Evangelical Calvinist, coupled with my budding literary taste, compelled me to read half the novel before abandoning it. Had I persisted in the series, I might have had an epiphany similar to the one Chinua Achebe had while reading Conrad in his teens: “I was not on Marlow’s boat steaming up the Congo in Heart of Darkness; rather, I was one of those unattractive beings jumping up and down the riverbank, making horrid faces.” To put things gently, Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins are not Joseph Conrad. (I know this because my budding literary taste was, in part, shaped by trying to make sense of Lord Jim.) Nonetheless, a comparable revelation awaits for the discerning reader within The Remnant’s Zhengzhou raid scene. Angelic strangers, who “did not appear Asian or Eastern,” miraculously Christianize most of the Muslim rebels before their executions. Ming, the one sympathetic Chinese character, is allowed to witness these conversions in a kind of blissful paralysis, but not actively accomplish them herself. Ultimately, Tung’s sadistic scheme comes to fruition, but with the formerly Muslim captives now bearing “the mark of the [Christian] believer.”
Having been raised on a steady diet of Hong Kong cinema, I never experienced quite the degree of ideological programming from which the adolescent Achebe eventually broke free. Still, it took me a long time to understand that the nationless, colorless (white) angels of The Remnant represent the analog to Conrad’s explorers, the intrepid heroes of the Evangelical psyche. Never has that been clearer to me than today, almost a year into trying to oppose the anti-Asian racism of 14 powerful Christian nationalists and their collaborators in the church. In the story that such politicians tell with distressing frequency, I might be Ming. I’m probably Tung.
A recent Foreign Policy article establishes the stakes of politicians pitching themselves as supernatural protagonists in the Southern Baptist version of Stephen King’s The Stand. In short, the China hawks in the GOP are obsessed with making their xenophobia the foundation of the party’s foreign policy. In addition to naming usual suspects like Marco Rubio (Roman Catholic/sometime Southern Baptist) Josh Hawley (Evangelical Presbyterian/sometime Anglican), and Tom Cotton (Methodist/constant liar), the article introduces a new member of the Beijing Busters: Catholic convert J.D. Vance, touted as part of a “vanguard” hoping to take sanctified Sinophobia to new, feverish heights.
I’ve been banging this drum for eleven months now, so forgive me if the theological roots of anti-Asian racism are old news to you. What I’m highlighting here is the way that these dudes strike postures not unlike the angelic strangers who come to the (spiritual, not physical) rescue of the Muslim rebels in The Remnant. It’s no secret that ideologues like Hawley and Rubio have seized on the Uyghur genocide as an opportunity to play white knight against the Yellow Peril. The feverish Islamophobia of the post-9/11 epoch has given way to pious concerns about religious liberty (though, of course, those concerns never translate into confronting right wing Christian Erik Prince, whose involvement in Xinjiang continues the Islamophobic crusade he began with his militia Blackwater). So cosmic is the threat posed by China that the demonized populations of another era now take on the cast of hapless victims.
The Foreign Policy article includes a quietly chilling harbinger of the endgame here. Writer Jack Detsch notes that the anti-Chinese fusion of economic nationalism and warmongering isn’t new:
The emerging economic plank points to a more traditional, mercantilist approach to U.S. trade policy that dates back to the 19th and early 20th centuries. And it’s an opportunity to clean up Trump’s scattershot rhetoric on trade. Vance also scored an endorsement from Robert Lighthizer, Trump’s former trade representative, suggesting the would-be senator would like to continue Trump’s full-on tariff war with China.
It’s been a while since I explored this particular era, but I have a vague sense that that “traditional, mercantilist approach” didn’t turn out so well in the early decades of the twentieth century. If antichrist is a spirit instead of a person, then it’s presently blowing through the hearts and minds of power brokers who are willfully ignorant of history, slavering for the opportunity to preside over the most roided-up military the planet has ever seen. Fixated on Commander Tung’s grinning spectre, our ruling class can only respond with belligerence, cloaked in pious concern for the wretched peoples who, in a parallel timeline, would elicit only indifference or active malice.
The Heathen Chinee are coming, and even the Muslims don’t hold a candle to the threat they pose. Caution, humility, a modicum of hesitancy about possibly ending civilization: these all must be left behind.