On 1 March, the day after the United States killed more than a hundred young girls in an Iranian school, veteran preacher John Hagee took to the pulpit at his Texas megachurch to make sense of what he called “God’s Operation Fury”, a play on Donald Trump’s hyperbolic name for his war, “Operation Epic Fury“.
After praising the American and Israeli forces that had launched the surprise attack, Hagee urged his followers to stay focused on the bigger picture: God was pulling the strings, and the war with Iran was the trigger for a series of events that would lead to the End Times. Hagee looked up at his congregation (and the thousands watching his livestream) and smiled: “Prophetically, we’re right on cue.”
You might assume that Hagee is a peripheral figure in American life; in fact, he’s been a fixture in Washington politics for more than 20 years as the leader of the Christian Zionist movement, which encompasses more than 20 million Americans.
Christian Zionists fervently support Israel because they expect it to play a key role in the fulfilment of Bible prophecy. Based on a strenuous but tenuous reading of Daniel, Ezekiel, Isaiah and (of course) the Book of Revelation, they’ve convinced themselves that the world is on the brink of the End of Days, when the Antichrist will take over the world before the epic final battle of Armageddon and the return of Jesus Christ.
I first wrote about Christian Zionists nearly two decades ago, just after Hagee had founded Christians United for Israel (Cufi) to pressure Congress to give unconditional support to the Israeli government. In the 20 years since, Cufi has become one of the largest Christian lobbying groups in America, with an annual summit in Washington DC attended by leading conservative politicians like Senator Ted Cruz, former secretary of state Mike Pompeo and vice president Mike Pence – who addressed the 2017 summit soon after being sworn in as Trump’s vice president.
Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, has made several appearances. In 2019, he thanked Christian Zionists for their “enduring and tremendous support” and chatted with Hagee about the need to “stand up to Iran’s aggression”. Hagee and Netanyahu have been urging American presidents to attack Iran since the 1990s; in the past few weeks, Trump has made their dreams come true.
In what has become an annual ritual, evangelical leaders gathered around Trump in the Oval Office on 5 March and prayed over him, this year adding a plea for US success in the war against IranWhile Trump’s private life and public demeanour seem a poor fit for their expansive moralising, Christian conservatives have always been a vital part of his Maga coalition. He has kept them on side by advancing their two priorities: the abolition of federal abortion rights, which Trump’s nominees on the Supreme Court delivered in 2022; and unlimited support for Israel, manifested through Trump’s relocation of the US embassy to Jerusalem, his unapologetic backing for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and now his war on Iran.
Just days into this latest war, nearly two dozen evangelical leaders posed for an astonishing photo in the Oval Office: as they laid their hands on the President, he sat with his eyes tightly closed in prayer, the Fifa Club World Cup trophy proudly perched on the edge of his desk. This improbable juxtaposition of the sacred and the profane has been a hallmark of Trump’s political career.
Apocalyptic Christianity, meanwhile, has long appealed to religious conservatives in the United States. A generation ago, the Left Behind books – a series of breathless thrillers combining Bible prophecy with Tom Clancy-style characters and plotlines – became a cultural phenomenon, selling tens of millions of copies, spawning a series of children’s books about teenagers toughing out the End Times, and culminating in a truly terrible film starring a cash-strapped Nic Cage.
A member of the Westboro Baptist Church, a group with an apocalyptic worldview, holds a religious sign in front of a skirmish line of police outside the Oscars this week (Photo: Blake Fagan/AFP/Getty)But fascination with the apocalypse used to be a spectator sport: Christian Zionists would obsessively follow every detail of the news and try to map world events onto obscure Bible verses. They didn’t form political action committees, try to influence congressional elections or lobby America’s leaders to bomb Iran. Hagee and Christians United for Israel have taken the most far-out ideas in American culture and bundled them into the mainstream of American politics.
Key members of Trump’s administration have openly embraced Christian Zionism. Pete Hegseth, self-styled “Secretary of War”, has invoked Bible prophecy and promoted the rebuilding of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem on the site of the third-holiest mosque in Islam. (The rebuilding of the temple is a key moment in the End Times sequence.) Mike Huckabee, Trump’s ambassador to Israel and a longtime Cufi supporter, let slip in an interview last month that “it would be fine” if Israel seized “essentially the entire Middle East”, since God had given the region to the Jewish people in the Bible.
Military insiders even reported that a US commander in the Iran war told his unit that Trump “has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth”. While many people have criticised Trump for starting this war without a clear strategy or goal, plenty of his followers – and perhaps even some of his officials – have no doubt where things are headed: towards Armageddon and the second coming of Christ.
If Hagee and his followers are right about Bible prophecy, you have a little time to get your affairs in order. They expect the attack on Iran to lead to a wider war in which Russia decides to invade Israel. Inconveniently, their reading of prophecy suggests that Israel will have to fight that war alone – without American support – but that God will humble the “armies of the north” with an earthquake that will ravage their forces. At that point, the Antichrist will emerge, unite the nations of the Earth under a single, sinister government and seven years of suffering and chaos – the so-called Tribulation – will end with the literal reappearance of Jesus Christ among us. Israelis (and all others) who fail to recognise Christ as their saviour will be destroyed, but on the upside, the return of Christ will bring about 1,000 years of peace and happiness.
If Hagee and his followers are wrong about Bible prophecy, their zealotry could bring about the end of the world much more quickly. Since former president George W. Bush made Iran one of the three members of the “Axis of Evil” back in 2002 (along with Iraq and North Korea), analysts within and beyond the US Government have warned of the dangers of a military confrontation with the Iranian regime.
In 2015, former president Barack Obama negotiated an agreement that eased sanctions in return for inspections of Iran’s nuclear programme. Trump tore up that agreement on entering the White House in 2017, and the pressure from Netanyahu, pro-Israel lobbyists and Christian Zionists for the US to attack Iran has been building ever since. With the Middle East now in flames, and with the Iranian regime even likelier to pursue a nuclear weapon after the sneak attack by the US and Israel, we’re flirting with a different vision of apocalypse. The political influence of Christian Zionists could easily culminate in an Armageddon that has nothing to do with God – a self-fulfilling prophecy, not a Biblical one.
As Trump’s Maga coalition fractures around the war on Iran and millions of American conservatives question whether their president is putting the interests of Israel ahead of his campaign commitment to “America First”, Christian Zionists are poised to play an even greater role in US politics. Their commitment to Israel is rooted not in a respect for Judaism or Jewish people but in a fanatical conviction that the Jewish state will play a starring role in the End Times drama – a role that will lead to the destruction of Israel and slaughter of every Jewish person who rejects Christianity. In a political moment when extreme views have become commonplace, and in which the collapse of traditional media has allowed misinformation and conspiracy thinking to thrive, Christian Zionism is perfectly at home.
A cynic might wonder if those of us who have sounded the alarm about apocalyptic Christians have imbibed some of the logic we’re critiquing: I’ve been warning about the dangers of Christian Zionism for 20 years, after all, and the world hasn’t ended yet. But during that time, Hagee and Christians United for Israel have played a crucial role in sustaining Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories, and excusing its frequent wars with its neighbours.
It’s surreal to hear American politicians denounce the religious extremism of Iran when religious extremists play such a central role in US policymaking in the Middle East. Now that they’ve started a regional war that threatens to upend the entire planet, the only question is whether their grip on American politics can be broken before they make the End Times a terrible reality.
Nicholas Guyatt teaches American history at Cambridge. He is the author of six books, including Have a Nice Doomsday: Why Millions of Americans are Looking Forward to the End of the World.
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