Fred “Slacktivist” Clark has been reading and dissecting the Left Behind series on Fridays — he refers to it as “Pretrib Porno,” after the nutbird faction of Christianity these books represent.

Among the literary failings he’s uncovered is a staggering lack of imagination. The world of LB involves a sudden, literal rapture — meaning that every true-blue Christian and child below the age of accountability was suddenly and bodily whisked away to heaven. By Fred’s reckoning (which he freely admits may be off, as he doesn’t agree with what Jenkins and LeHaye clearly think of as “real” Christianity), literally billions (Fred figures 37% of us) of people have suddenly vanished, including everyone on earth who orders from the kid’s menu. The scale of such an event is hard to internalize or understand, sure, but when you’re reading a book about such an event, you sort of expect the author not to suffer this sort of failure of imagination — but J & L fail here miserably. He’s got a character in a hotel trying to relax with CNN on, but he makes no mention of what’s on CNN. Fred puts it this way:

Whatever the precise figure of the disappeared, however, we can safely assume that it included hundred of thousands, if not millions of young, attractive white women. Buck is watching CNN. Think of it: Millions of missing white women, all at the same time. What would CNN do? Would they cover them all? Or maybe just the blonde ones?