Tim LaHaye’s career shows a direct line of descent within creationist thinking, from Reagan-era anti-Communism, through a more diffuse blanket opposition to humanist thinking, to American exceptionalism and the impulses that would later express themselves in 21st-century Christian Nationalism.
LaHaye gives us a bridge between traditional morality, anti-Communism and Reaganism, and present-day Christian Conservatism, with humanism having taken the place of Communism. His claim that evil humanists had successfully conspired to take over the American power structure is echoed in today’s denunciation of the “deep state,” the end-of-the world thinking of his highly successful Left Behind novels underlies much of the religion-linked opposition to action on climate change, and his rejection as satanic of every idea that he regards as unbiblical now surfaces as anti-wokeism, along with opposition to examining America’s racist past and to the teaching of evolution.
Add to this his lamenting a morally superior past, his claim that American exceptionalism is biblical, along with capitalism, and his appeal to moral patriotic Americans (he repeatedly links those adjectives in his writing) to take back the country from the forces of evil, and we have a direct link to the doctrines of evangelical Trumpism. His claims that the US constitution is Bible-based, that the US “was founded on a basic consensus of Christian principles – more so than any nation in history,” and that the division of powers was inspired by a biblical awareness of the fallen nature of man, fall short of more recent assertions that the constitution itself was divinely inspired, but nonetheless point the way to the explicit Christian Nationalism now about to assume power.
LaHaye graduated in 1950 from Bob Jones University, then as now strictly six-day creationist and socially conservative, and later became pastor of Scott Memorial Baptist Church (a.k.a. Shadow Mountain), in the suburbs of San Diego. Here he served for 25 years, developing the church into a megachurch, while embarking with his wife on a broadcasting career, offering family advice from their socially conservative Christian perspective. In the 1960s he committed himself to anti-communism, joining the John Birch Society. He was also powerfully influenced, as were many other creationists in his generation, by the philosopher Francis Schaeffer, who regarded faith as absolute, Genesis 1 – 11 as foundational to our knowledge of space and time, and all secular thinking that ignored this foundation as misguided.
LaHaye’s denunciation of communism merged with opposition to humanism and what he saw as moral decay, and in alliance with Ronald Reagan, then candidate for the California governorship, he helped launch the California League Enlisting Action Now (CLEAN), opposing pornography and sex education. His 1966 book, The Spirit-Controlled Temperament, advocating a Christian approach to family life, was a bestseller. When, in 1962, the US Supreme Court pronounced prayer in the publicly funded school system unconstitutional, LaHaye was a pioneer in setting up a separate Christian school system.
