Tim LaHaye
Theologian, author of the Left Behind series, and co-founder of the Council for National Policy. Helped popularize the end-times and culture-war framework of Christian nationalist politics.
View in the interactive map →Tim LaHaye operated on two tracks simultaneously. Publicly, his Left Behind novels (co-written with Jerry Jenkins) sold 65+ million copies and embedded a specific end-times theology — premillennial dispensationalism — into evangelical mass culture. This theology positioned America as a uniquely blessed nation in God's plan, and cast geopolitical conflict in apocalyptic terms. Privately, LaHaye co-founded the Council for National Policy (1981) — a secretive coalition of right-wing donors, politicians, and religious leaders that coordinated strategy away from public view. LaHaye's wife Beverly ran Concerned Women for America, which claimed to be the nation's largest women's public policy organization and was built explicitly to counter feminism.
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Connections from Tim LaHaye
- founded → Council for National Policy (1981) — LaHaye co-founded the CNP to create a private coordination infrastructure for the Christian right.
- promoted → Concerned Women for America (1981) — Tim LaHaye's co-founding of the Council for National Policy in 1981 directly linked Beverly's grassroots CWA to the elite strategic coordination infrastructure of the Religious Right. Through Tim LaHaye, CWA was connected to the CNP's private coordination network — making it, critics argue, both a genuine grassroots organization and a channel for elite strategy.
Sources
- Jesus and John Wayne — Kristin Kobes Du Mez (2020), pp. 122-140