From a recent Zizek article:
'Take the literary bestsellers of U.S. Christian fundamentalism, Tim F. LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins’s “Left Behind” series of 12 novels on the upcoming end of the world that have sold more than 60 million copies. The Left Behind story begins with the sudden, inexplicable disappearance of millions of people—the saved souls whom God calls to himself in order to spare them the horrors of Armageddon. The Anti-Christ then appears, a young, slick and charismatic Romanian politician named Nicolae Carpathia, who, after being elected general secretary of the United Nations, moves U.N. headquarters to Babylon where he imposes an anti-American world government that disarms all nation-states. This ridiculous plot unfolds until the final battle when all non-Christians—Jews, Muslims, et al—are consumed in a cataclysmic fire. Imagine the outcry in the Western liberal media if a similar story written from the Muslim standpoint had become a bestseller in the Arab countries! It is not the poverty and primitivism of these novels that is breathtaking, but rather the strange overlap between the “serious” religious message and the trashiest conventions of pop culture commercialism.'
Exactly this: the combination of the modern culture industry, dominant at the level of form, and the utterly retrogade contents enclosed by such forms, consumerist trash and myopic religious literalism. Only superficially is this a 'contradiction'. The strange magnetism that these two things exert upon one another, or rather their ultimate identity, is what needs to be understood.
Or does the alchemic arithmetic of consumerist democracy simply dictate that so many millions can't be wrong?
Some interesting, critical remarks on Zizek's essay, here.