This study of the history and effect of the apocalyptic Left Behind novels takes the temperature of the contemporary religious right and the evangelical movement with its conservative ideologies dressed up in eschatology and the right wing politics of anti-modernism. The author traces the genre, and its earlier phases in the seventies, and its first success in Hal Lindsay's The Late Great Planet Earth. The unexpected success of the Left Behind series, reaching seventy million books sold, suggests commercial exploitation as much as spiritual fervor, and the portrait of the evangelicalism in its current incarnation seems a far cry from Wesleyanism, going a long way toward explaining the cultural depth or tenacity of this new major pawn in the political landscape.