“I can tell you that the more that I’ve studied church history, the more that I’ve studied the scriptures, i’m—it’s pretty safe to say that I’ve left behind, Left Behind.”
In a recent podcast appearance, Kirk Cameron, who starred in the early 2000s “Left Behind” film series, said that he has “left behind” the film series in terms of the biblical end times and second coming of Jesus.
Host Kylee Griswold asked, “I’d love to know how your personal eschatological views have changed since your Left Behind days?” The Left Behind series came out in the early 2000s, featuring Cameron as the leading character, and centers around the Christian idea of the rapture.
Cameron said, “Eschatology is another one of those fascinating topics. I never thought there was another position beside pre-millennial dispensationalism, Left Behind, you know, in simple terms. That everybody’s going to vanish, and Christians are going to disappear, and planes, trains, automobiles are going to be crashing with clothes left on the floor, just like you saw in the movies or read in the book.”
“But then you discover, oh, wow, there’s a whole different position called amillennialism. There is classic pre-millennialism, and then there’s dispensationalism. There’s also post-millennialism, there’s partial preterism, there’s full preterism. There’s all sorts of positions about the tribulation, pre-trib, mid-trib, post-trib, pre-wrath. There’s all these things.
“And you think, wow, how could this be so confusing? And this is all within the church. This isn’t even like the atheist position that says it’s all a fairy tale, right? So I find it fascinating. I love these in-house conversations. What I don’t like is when people start to divide and call one another heretics over topics like, you know, what is the nature of the Second Coming, and what is the timing of the Second Coming, and how does that relate to different aspects of people who have died before us, and people who will die in the future? I think Scripture gives us a lot of clues, but there is still some mystery there.”
He later added, “I can tell you that the more that I’ve studied church history, the more that I’ve studied the scriptures, I’m—it’s pretty safe to say that I’ve left behind, ‘Left Behind’.”
Griswold noted how “there are things that matter much more than our views on eschatology, but I do think there are flare ups of this that bring it into a little bit of sharper focus,” noting an example of the US’s foreign police as it relates to Israel “and when that is shaped by our views of dispensationalism or not.”
Cameron replied, “I think you’re so right. And to be honest, I never even connected the dots and saw the implications of our view about end times, because it’s a book, it’s a movie, it’s a fiction book, right? And we say, well, that’s really going to happen, because that’s what the Bible says. But that really informs our view of Israel. And Israel is all in the news. Israel is, you know, is involved in wars, and the United States politically, is tied in and militarily and financially. And so you go, ‘Wow, could this actually result in people going to war, the Left Behind movies or not?’ And, and it’s very interesting, if you really do a deep dive into it, you it’s not conspiracy tin, you know, tin foil hat stuff. This is like real and it really does impact foreign policy.”