NBC’s ‘Revelations’ looking for ‘true believers’

In his wry review of the new NBC series “Revelations,” Paul Brownfield takes exception to its humorlessness and implausible details [“Sure, It’s the End of the World, but Do They Have to Play It This Heavy?” April 13]. I couldn’t agree more, but I think there is a more urgent reason to be critical of the show.

The series is based upon an interpretation of Revelation in the New Testament that has gained an astonishing following in the United States, largely due to the “Left Behind” series of books by Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye (a co-founder of the Moral Majority with Jerry Falwell). Having read the first in the series, I can report that the theory behind them is execrable.

The idea was originally promulgated in 1830 by a British preacher and has been dissected and discarded by biblical scholars ever since. It consists of the notion that when the End Time comes, true Christians will be saved and all others, being infidels, will suffer a series of plagues including boils, sores, locusts and frogs. Bound up in the belief is the idea that other religions, Islam in particular, are of the devil. The conflagration point will be the Middle East, Babylon in particular, which just happens to be in modern-day Iraq.

The ramifications are chilling. As Bill Moyers (a famously spiritual man) pointed out in a moving and disturbing essay in the New York Review of Books, since the basic End Time credo is that “the world cannot be saved,” it gives free rein to warmongers and to those who would despoil the Earth with impunity. Environmentalists, the United Nations and any institution or individual who preaches peace, tolerance and brotherhood are considered by End Timers to be tools of the Antichrist.

What the theory requires of its adherents is blind belief, unsullied by inquiry and thought. Scholars are by their nature suspect. In order to be saved, one must repudiate education as well as the intuitive instinct for solidarity with other human beings and cleave exclusively to those who know “the truth.”

The TV series’ writer, David Selzer, has added some flourishes, and he does not have the True Believers raptured into Heaven, at least not yet. But the series takes the End Time theory as its premise, and therein lies the problem. It is akin to taking the premise of the notorious anti-Semitic tract “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and basing a series on it. Just think of the promo: “A scholar and a nun team up to keep the Jews from taking over the world.”

It is irresponsible of NBC to give credence to these ideas. The show’s characterization of doctors as ghouls and the bashing of scientists are panderings to the extreme Right to Life contingent whose bizarre notions have been weaseling their way into our collective consciousness. Selzer may think he is being creative, but End Time is not fiction to LaHaye and the millions of others who subscribe to the theory.

Of course, we haven’t seen the rest of the series yet. It may turn out that it was all someone’s hallucination. Or perhaps the professor and the nun will succeed in averting Armageddon. This will hardly dissuade those who are prone to believing in the theory, however. In fact, what better way to prove it than to have Hollywood, an academic and an aggressive and scholarly female Catholic team up to prevent God’s will?

Since ratings are the point and America seems to be teeming with zealous Christians, as evidenced by the last election, it’s hard not to suspect that this show is the result of venality. But I’ll wait and see.

Unless the End Time comes before the final episode airs. Then I’ll be too preoccupied with boils, sores, locusts and frogs to find out what happens.