This week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio characterized the leadership of Iran as “radical Shiite clerics” who make geopolitical decisions based on “pure theology.”
That’s deeply ironic because an American combat unit commander reportedly told officers at a briefing last Monday that the war with Iran was, in fact, part of God’s plan. President Donald Trump, the commander allegedly explained, had been “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.” Since the launch of Operation Epic Fury, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) has been inundated with dozens of similar complaints from service members across every branch of the military. The reports describe an “unrestricted euphoria” among commanders who believe they are not just fighting a war, but fulfilling the Book of Revelation itself.
One popular tweet circulating this week attempted to explain these End Times furies with a photo of the Left Behind book series beloved by American evangelicals: “I don’t think enough people realize how much Republican foreign policy is actually shaped by this fictional book series,” it read.
It’s a funny line. It’s also not quite right.
The Left Behind novels — the evangelical thriller series written in the 1990s by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins that became a series of poorly made films starring Kirk Cameron and (somehow) a Nicolas Cage reboot — didn’t invent the apocalyptic worldview resurfacing in today’s headlines. They merely dramatized and popularized it. For roughly half a century, a certain strain of American evangelical theology has taught millions of believers to read conflict in the Middle East not simply as geopolitics in action but as prophecy unfolding in real time.
The intellectual architecture of this worldview actually dates back to the nineteenth century. In the 1830s, Anglo-Irish preacher John Nelson Darby developed a system of biblical interpretation…
Auteur: Ryan Zickgraf
