Many years ago the late
Molly Ivins wrote about the links between George W. Bush and a
certain fundamentalist sect in Southern Texas, about the 'end times'
and the rise of the growing influence of the evangelicals in the
conservative movement. Stephanie Mencimer has published an article
in Mother Jones updating the
movement and its adoption of Donald J. tRUMP as the instrument of the
lord. It is frightening.
As
a student in an evangelical Lutheran School, I sat and listened as my
schoolmasters preached much of this nonsense. I didn't know it at
the time, but what I was taught was merely the latest incarnation of
long held beliefs that the end is nigh. The principles change names
and faces, the Anti-Christ assumes various forms, according to the
telling, from Caesar, to Hitler, to Stalin, to the Pope...Magog is
located variously depending on the political winds, but the end is
never in question. Here is the latest incarnation as it makes its
way through the movement of the bowels. It is bat-shit crazy and,
accordingly, I am submitting the article in its entirety:
The
enemies of Israel have unleashed a massive air attack on
the Promised Land. Hundreds of fighter jets streak across the sky.
But before Israel can be destroyed, fire rains from the heavens and
the enemy jets explode in mid-air with no explanation. Hailstones the
size of golf balls follow the fire. The ground shakes. Birds pick
clean the bodies of the fallen attackers. The enemy is vanquished
without a single Israeli casualty, and the country is saved.
These
are some of the opening scenes of the bestselling 1995 book Left
Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days,
by Jerry B. Jenkins and the late evangelical minister Tim LaHaye. But
don’t mistake this scenario for a mere action sequence: It’s
based on the war of Gog and Magog, a biblical conflict prophesied in
the Book of Ezekiel. In the Bible, Gog is the leader of Magog, a
“place in the far north” that many evangelicals believe is
Russia. According to Ezekiel’s prophecy, Gog will join with
Persia—now Iran—and other Arab nations to attack a peaceful
Israel “like a cloud that covers the land.” LaHaye, like many
evangelicals, believed this battle would bring on the Rapture, the
End Times event when God spirits away the good Christians to heaven
before unleashing plagues, sickness, and other horrors on the
unbelievers remaining on Earth. Meanwhile, the Antichrist reigns
supreme.
The
story of Gog and Magog is central to the bloody eschatology long
embraced by millions of American evangelicals. In recent years, End
Times has gained special political currency as believers have seen
any number of Middle East conflagrations as fulfilling Ezekiel’s
prophecy, notably the US invasion of Iraq and the war in Syria. Gog
and Magog took on fresh relevance earlier this month, when the Trump
administration assassinated Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, the commander
of Iran’s elite Quds Force.
On
many levels, President Donald Trump’s self-created crisis in Iran
seems to have no relationship to any sort of coherent foreign policy
or geopolitical plan for the future. The assassination has yielded
few if any tangible rewards for the US. But there is an eager
constituency for Trump’s improvised policy toward the Middle East
and Iran in particular: the evangelical Christians who see it as a
means of ushering in the return of Christ. Lured by the promise of
conservative Supreme Court justices, anti-abortion measures, and a
commitment to Christian supremacy under the guise of religious
freedom, white evangelicals voted for Trump in higher numbers than
any other group—more than 80 percent.
He
desperately needs them if he’s going to be reelected. And while
some have expressed concern about the administration’s inching
toward war with Iran, many of those with what were once fringe
beliefs have cheered the killing of Soleimani. “Iran has this big
part to play in biblical history,” says religious historian Diana
Butler Bass, who grew up in the evangelical church, attended an
evangelical college and seminary, and wrote her Ph.D. thesis at Duke
University on American fundamentalism. “There are these particular
prophecies from Ezekiel, where there is talk of a war that will
happen at a very important moment in Israel’s history. And that war
is going to kick off the End Times. People in this prophetic
community believe Iran is going to be one of these aggressors.”
“When
Iran gets into the news, especially with anything to do with war,
it’s sort of a prophetic dog whistle to evangelicals.”
Bass
thinks this worldview may be central to understanding Trump’s
foreign policy. “When Iran gets into the news, especially with
anything to do with war, it’s sort of a prophetic dog whistle to
evangelicals. They will support anything that seems to edge the world
towards this conflagration,” she says. “They don’t necessarily
want violence, but they’re eager for Christ to return and they
think that this war with Iran and Israel has to happen for their
larger hope to pass.”
Not
all or even most evangelicals believe in the literal truth of
these sorts of prophecies, though nearly 60 percent of white
evangelicals, according to one
2010 poll, believe Jesus
is definitely or probably going to return by the year 2050. But those
who do subscribe to this apocalyptic world view seem to be
overrepresented among Trump’s religious supporters and advisers. In
October, a host of influential evangelical pastors came
to the White House to
pray with Trump to protect him from impeachment. Among those who laid
hands on the president as he stood, head bowed, in the Oval Office,
was repeat visitor Greg Laurie, pastor of a California megachurch. A
few days after the killing of Soleimani, Laurie made a YouTube
video with Don Stewart,
author of 25 Signs We Are Near the End,
to discuss Iran and the End Times. “The scenario that the Bible
predicted, seemingly so impossible,” Stewart promised, “is now
falling into place.”
From
the outset, Trump
has surrounded himself with people who hail from the fringes of the
evangelical community that is steeped in the language of biblical
prophecy, and his administration regularly reflects that language
back to them in its messaging. In March 2017, for instance, Trump
issued an official White House statement recognizing the Persian New
Year in which he misattributed
a quote to Cyrus the Great,
the libertine pagan leader of the ancient Persian empire who was
anointed by God to free Jews in Babylon. Ordinary Americans probably
wouldn’t have even noticed the announcement, but evangelicals knew
that Trump was speaking their language. Many of them believe Trump is
like Cyrus, a flawed nonbeliever who nonetheless is chosen by God to
work his miracles on Earth.
Secretary
of State Mike Pompeo, who was reportedly instrumental in pushing for
the killing of Soleimani, is also a master of such messaging. In
March, during an interview
in Jerusalem
with the Christian Broadcasting Network (founded by another
apocalyptic preacher, Pat Robertson), Pompeo showed his familiarity
with another Iran-centric Bible story popular with End Times
evangelicals. In the story, a Persian king is urged to slaughter the
Jews in his kingdom at the urging of the evil adviser Haman. But his
Jewish Queen Esther convinces him not to and saves her people. Asked
whether he thought Trump could be a modern-day Esther, saving the
Jews from Iran, Pompeo replied, “As a Christian, I certainly
believe that’s possible.” The secretary of state’s End Times
beliefs made headlines again after the Soleimani killing, as
meme-makers circulated a quote from a speech he made in
a Kansas church
in 2015. A few days after the Supreme Court legalized same-sex
marriage, Pompeo said: “We will continue to fight these battles. It
is a never-ending struggle. … until the Rapture.”
The
State Department did not respond to questions about how Pompeo’s
religious views may affect his foreign policy decisions. But it’s
not hard to see how apocalyptic evangelicalism might be influencing
the Trump administration as it seeks to mobilize the millions of
evangelicals reached by televangelists and megachurch pastors
preaching the End Times. The most blatant appeal to this constituency
came when Trump made the controversial decision to move the American
embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a long-desired goal of
evangelicals who see it as fulfilling
a biblical prophecy
necessary in securing the Second Coming. What may be less obvious is
how Trump’s disdain for international governing bodies like NATO
also dovetails almost perfectly with End Times theology, whether he
realizes it or not.
Matthew
Avery Sutton, a Washington State University history professor and
author of American
Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism,
says evangelicals who believe the end is near have always been
hostile to any sort of international organizations. That’s because
they believe biblical prophecies that say that in the last days, a
world leader who preaches peace will emerge and move toward a
one-world government. In fact, the prophecy goes, that leader will be
the Antichrist who will force the world to accept a false religion
and persecute people who don’t accept him as a Messiah. (In Left
Behind, the
Antichrist is a Romanian UN secretary-general.) Evangelicals love
Trump’s talk of pulling out of NATO, his attacks on the UN, and his
trashing of the Paris climate change accord. “They hate the UN,”
Sutton says. “Trump’s unilateralism is also music to their ears.”
Trump
is not the first president
to surround himself with evangelical Christians with an apocalyptic
bent. Ronald Reagan was advised by Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell,
and personally
believed in the End Times
and the coming apocalypse, writing about it in his journals. He
appointed people like Interior Secretary James Watt, a Pentecostal
fundamentalist whose disdain for environmental conservation seemed to
be informed by his belief that the end of the world was nigh. In an
appearance before Congress, he told
stunned lawmakers,
“I do not know how many future generations we can count on before
the Lord returns.”
Apparently
George W. Bush was also part of this apocalypse-now group. When Bush
was trying to convince French president Jacques Chirac to support an
invasion of Iran in 2003, he reportedly
told Chirac: “Gog
and Magog are at work in the Middle East. Biblical prophecies are
being fulfilled.” Chirac had no idea what Bush was talking about
and had to consult a biblical scholar.
George
W. Bush: “Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East. Biblical
prophecies are being fulfilled.”
Trump,
who seems unable
to distinguish
between the New and Old Testaments, doesn’t seem particularly
fluent in the prophecies of Ezekiel. But he has brought into the
White House a host of people who are. Quite a few also hail from what
Bass delicately describes as the “not respectable charlatan wing”
of evangelical Christianity. They’re the prosperity preachers and
prophets of the sort depicted by Sinclair Lewis in Elmer
Gantry.
“I have no doubt at all that those people are sitting right next to
[Trump], giving him these Bible verses, telling him about these
prophecies,” Bass says, “which means that they are kind of egging
him on, [telling him] that he’s part of God’s prophetic
fulfillment for these last days.”
Many
of those who have become White House regulars are associated with
something known as the New Apostolic Reformation, what Christianity
Today
describes
as “a loosely connected group of Pentecostals and Charismatics.”
They’re the ones who speak in tongues, scour the news for clues to
biblical prophecies, engage in faith healing, and preach prosperity
gospel—the notion that faith in God (or, usually, the preacher)
will make people wealthy (or at least enrich the preacher). These
apostles tend to embrace “dominionist” theology that implores
Christians to take over of all levels of government, media, and
education as a way of preparing for the End Times and return of
Christ. Influential
politicians
like former Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), who has made several
visits to the Trump White House, former vice presidential candidate
Sarah Palin, and former Trump Energy Secretary Rick Perry fall into
this camp.
Peter
Montgomery, a senior fellow at the liberal nonprofit People for the
American Way who has tracked the religious right for many years, says
that the network of preachers who come from NAR and Pentecostal media
operations “are telling people over and over again that Trump was
‘chosen,’ that God intervened in the election. Some of them say
very explicitly that Trump is playing a role in God’s End Time
plans to bring about the return of Christ.”
One
of the most prominent representatives of the Left Behind wing of the
evangelical movement is San Antonio televangelist John Hagee, who has
been calling
for a war with Iran
for more than a 15 years. In 2005, Hagee wrote a best-selling book,
Jerusalem
Countdown,
that claimed the Bible predicted a war with Iran. (In 2011, it was
turned
into a movie
of the same title, starring Bionic Man Lee Majors and Randy Travis.)
Shortly after the book was published, Hagee created Christians
United for Israel,
a Christian Zionist organization that now claims to have 8 million
members. It lobbies for support for Israeli settlements, military aid
to Israel, and for the US to join with Israel to launch a preemptive
strike on Iran.
He
has said that gays caused Hurricane Katrina, referred to the Catholic
Church as the “great whore,” called Hitler a “half-breed”
Jew, and said that Hitler was part of God’s plan to get the Jews
back to Israel.
Hagee,
now 79, had once been popular with powerful Republicans during the
George W. Bush administration, despite some of his more controversial
statements. Among other things, he has said that gays
caused Hurricane Katrina,
referred to the Catholic Church as the
“great whore,”
called Hitler a “half-breed”
Jew, and said that Hitler was part of God’s plan to get the Jews
back to Israel. His star began to fall in 2008 after he endorsed Sen.
John McCain for the GOP presidential nomination. McCain rejected his
support, calling Hagee’s views “crazy and unacceptable.”
The
election of Barack Obama consigned Hagee to his megachurch in San
Antonio. But Trump has restored
him to the corridors of power
in Washington. Hagee endorsed Trump early in 2016. Once Trump was
elected, Hagee met with the new president for two hours in 2017 to
discuss moving the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
Foreign policy experts feared the embassy relocation would
destabilize the region and hamper peace talks, but Trump moved it
anyway in May 2018. Israeli troops killed more than 50 people in the
protests that followed.
Hagee
attended the opening ceremony alongside notables such as Ivanka Trump
and husband Jared Kushner, and he gave
the closing benediction.
“Let every Islamic terrorist hear this message: Israel lives,” he
announced. “Let it echo down the marble halls of the presidential
palace in Iran: Israel lives.” He later told
the Texas
Observer
that he was looking forward to Trump confronting Iran, explaining,
“The sum of Iran’s evil is greater than the whole of its parts.”
When
Christians United for Israel held its annual DC confab and lobbying
day last summer, Trump sent no fewer than five top administration
officials to address attendees, including Pompeo and Vice President
Mike Pence (both evangelicals themselves), then–national security
adviser John Bolton, a special envoy to the Middle East, and the US
Ambassador to Israel David Friedman. Pompeo opened the speech by
telling
the crowd
of more than 5,000 people, “This is what it must have looked like
to be part of the crowd for the fishes and the loaves. What a miracle
that was.” Once more the story of Queen Esther came in handy, this
time as Pompeo compared it to modern-day Iran.
Hagee
is one of the most prominent of
Trump’s evangelical supporters who see a war with Iran as a
necessary step towards the End Times, but he’s far from the only
one. The White House has hosted a steady stream of dominionists and
NAR apostles since Trump took office, including Lance Wallnau, author
of God’s
Chaos President.
An evangelical leader with a consulting business in Dallas, Wallnau
has become famous as one of the few evangelicals who accurately
prophesied Trump’s election after receiving divine inspiration to
read chapter 45 of the Book of Isaiah. That’s the story of King
Cyrus, whom Wallnau and many other evangelicals think Trump
resembles. (For $45, Wallnau and ex-con televangelist Jim Bakker now
sell
a Trump/Cyrus coin
that people can use to pray for Trump’s reelection.) Dr. Lance, as
he’s known, has made several visits to the White House, including
for a private
briefing
on Jared Kushner’s Middle East peace plan.
Facilitating
many of these visits is Paula White-Cain, the controversial
televangelist associated with the Trinity Broadcasting Network who
became Trump’s spiritual adviser after he saw her preach on TV in
the early aughts. White led a 20,000-strong megachurch in Tampa that
was investigated by Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) in 2007 for lavish
spending on private jets and big houses and possible violations of
its tax-exempt status. His
report
did not find any wrongdoing—church leaders refused to cooperate
with the investigation—but in 2012, White’s church declared
bankruptcy. She went on to lead a mostly African American church in
Florida where she remained until last spring, when her son took over
the ministry.
Now
on her third marriage, White has long been at odds with more elite,
mainstream evangelicals because of her particular self-help brand of
prosperity gospel. Southern Baptist leader Russell
Moore called White
a “charlatan” and “heretic.” Nonetheless, in late October,
Trump installed her in an official post at the White House office of
public liaison to do outreach to evangelicals, formalizing access for
some of the more extreme members of that group. She has referred to
Trump as a modern-day Esther and called his enemies “demonic.”
Bass
says that evangelical elites of the sort who associated with
President George W. Bush have long looked down their noses at
populist preachers like White and her crowd, but Trump has elevated
them to positions of power. It’s a win-win situation. The
evangelicals are at last in the influential positions those who
disparaged them once held. And Trump’s narcissism is receiving
special nourishment by their insistence that he was chosen by God. “I
think that Trump likes it when people think he’s close to God—he
called himself the ‘chosen one’—and to think that all of this
has some sort of divine backing,” Bass says. “I don’t think
there’s ever been a president who was quite influenced by this
stream of evangelicalism as Trump has been.”
Naturally,
there are political benefits to all of this. The administration has
struggled to provide evidence of any imminent threats from Soleimani,
but the timing for the assassination was certainly fortuitous for
someone looking to mobilize evangelicals. Not only was Trump
embroiled in impeachment hearings, he was still chaffing from a
recent
editorial
in the evangelical publication Christianity
Today,
founded by Billy Graham, calling for him to be removed from office on
moral grounds. Trump announced the killing of Soleimani just hours
before appearing at the launch of his campaign’s Evangelicals
for Trump coalition in Miami.
That
event took place at a Pentacostal Latino church headed by Guillermo
Maldonado, who speaks in tongues and hosts a TV show called “The
Supernatural Now.”
He’s the founder of the King Jesus International Ministry, a Miami
megachurch with upwards of 20,000 members and a large TV and radio
presence. Maldonado is also another regular White House visitor who
has preached that Trump has a role in God’s plans for the End
Times. At the 2019 Global Prophetic Summit, he claimed
that God told him,
“America, I have prepared this time, I have raised somebody in
office to open the doors for my gospels.”
André
Gagné, a theology professor at Concordia University in Montreal,
says the apocalyptic worldview is concerning at such high levels of
power, because believers may be rather sanguine about the possibility
that assassinating an Iranian general might spur an even bigger war
or nuclear confrontation in the Middle East. “If it brings the end
of the world, it brings the end of the world,” Gagné says.
“They’re ready. They can’t wait for the Rapture to happen. For
them it’s the ultimate reunion with God.” (1)
This
is what happens when reason has deserted us, we have suspended disbelief and learned to worship
kings.
An
Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh
Convict
and Imprison
________________
