Although Mike Huckabee backer Tim LaHaye is best-known of late for his Left Behind fiction series, he was one of the early mover and shakers of the Christian right. Until jumping on board with Huckabee a couple of weeks ago, he hadn't been that visible on the political scene for a while. But as I recently watched a recording of his October 17 appearance on the Trinity Broadcasting Network's Praise the Lord program, hosted that night by Grassley target Benny Hinn, I saw that he was laying the groundwork for jumping back in to the 2008 campaign. For LaHaye, his apocalyptic fiction is no fairy tale -- it is very real. "There is nothing in prophecy that has to be fulfilled before Jesus comes," LaHaye told Hinn. "He [Jesus] could come right now. So I am anticipating it." To LaHaye, the world is a black and white place of of believers and those who will need to "fall on [their] knees and call out the name of the Lord" so as to escape the horrors of the tribulation. He predicted that "everything is going to be better for the believer in the millennium," referring to the thousand-year reign of Christ he says will follow the battle at Armageddon. Believers will wear crowns, he said, because "garbage collectors don't wear crowns. Kings and queens and rulers wear crowns . . . . There are two kinds of people. Either you have been saved or you haven't." So much for Huckabee's religious tolerance talk circa last week.
