The story: Cameron "Buck" Williams, former star reporter for Global Weekly and an original member of the Tribulation Force, has just witnessed the apparent assassination in Jerusalem of Nicolae Carpathia, the ruler of the one-world government, People's Sexiest Man Alive, and, according to the prophecy scholars, the Antichrist. Buck's young wife Chloe, on leave from Stanford, is back at the safe house in Chicago, taking care of Kenny, their 14-month-old baby, and waiting for word of her husband. With her is Tsion Ben-Judah, the Israeli rabbi whose globally televised acceptance of Jesus as the Messiah led to the murder of his family, and whose Internet ministry for Christ now reaches a worldwide audience of more than a billion. And fleeing the scene of the assassination, disguised in a robe and turban, is Rayford Steele, former 747 pilot, father of Chloe, and Trib Force member, who fired the shot that killed Carpathia--or did he?

And, the glorious return of Jesus Christ is still three and a half long years away!

You may have heard about the blockbuster series of supernatural novels that has sold over 20 million copies and whose latest installment debuted this summer at #1 on the New York Times fiction bestseller list. No, I don't mean that pagan juggernaut Harry Potter. I mean the Left Behind series, the Christian thrillers written by Dr. Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins based on the biblical prophecies of the Apocalypse. The Indwelling, the seventh and latest book in the series, with an initial print run of two million copies, spent four weeks atop the Times list, even though the Times survey leaves out many of the Christian retailers where the books sell like samizdat Potters. (At the Evangel Store on north Aurora, where I bought my copy, the Left Behind books occupied four of the ten slots on their bestseller shelf.) Book eight, The Mark: The Beast Rules the World, is already #35 at Amazon.com even though it's not due out until November. Left Behind, the movie, starring Kirk Cameron of TV's Growing Pains as Buck Williams, is set for a February opening.

Clearly, this is a huge (Kirk Cameron!) phenomenon, but one representing a subculture that doesn't mix much with mine (except to serve as my bogeyman, just as I am their secular humanist nightmare). So, like Tipper Gore slipping The Marshall Mathers LP into her MP3 player before her morning jog, I set out to see what my bogeyman is up to by reading The Indwelling (and also the first book of the series, Left Behind).

What I learned, first of all, is that we are living in the end times, as prophesied in the Book of Revelation. All signs point to the coming Apocalypse: the rise of the state of Israel, the increase in global communication, the power of the United Nations, the corruption of our sin-cursed world. First will come the Rapture, the moment when God raises his believers (and the innocent children, born and unborn) into heaven, followed by seven years of Tribulations, and then by the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. The heroes of the Left Behind books are a few poor souls who failed to embrace Jesus in time to get Raptured, but who, after seeing the words of prophecy fulfilled, repent and form the underdog Tribulation Force to do battle against the Antichrist while they wait for Jesus to come back for the stragglers. (This belief that nonbelievers will get a second chance is an unorthodox one among Christians. It's a handy setup, though, for readers of The Stranger, who I assume won't make the first cut.)

The Tribulations, happily, are full of action, and the novels are modeled after the secular thrillers of Clancy and Ludlum (and are written in the same dull airport patter). The real tension, though, is in wondering who will receive Christ into their hearts. In The Indwelling, it's (spoiler alert!) Dr. Chaim Rosenzweig, the former Global Weekly Newsmaker of the Year for his discovery of a chemical formula that allowed the Israeli desert to become a flourishing garden, whose inevitable conversion extends over hundreds of hand-wringing pages.

There's a mild, multicultural sheen to the books: The believers of the Trib Force include Chinese, Jordanians, Greeks, and tons of Israelis. But of course it's the sort of on-our-terms multiculturalism that will accept anybody as long as they humble themselves to the triumphalism of narrow-path belief. This is all-out religious war, after all. As one character says about the Bible in a fan-favorite line from book six, Assassins: "Read the book--we win." It's hard to root for so-called underdogs as smug as that.