The ancient prophecy behind the Iran war is a modern invention

In the earliest days of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, it became clear this conflict has strong religious undertones. Whistleblower reports from the military detailed accounts of American commanders telling troops that the new war in the Middle East was part of a “divine plan” to bring about the battle of Armageddon and the return of Jesus Christ. President Donald Trump hosted a score of influential evangelical leaders in the Oval Office to lay hands upon him. This supposedly ancient prophecy, however, is of distinctly American origins and only about 200 years old, having arguably little relevance to the teachings of Jesus or modern warfare.

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation, a watchdog focused on inappropriate proselytization in the military, collected hundreds of reports from troops of commanders telling American soldiers that Trump’s new war was part of God’s plan for the end of days, as detailed in the Book of Revelation.

“President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth,” a commander said, according to one foundation report.

Commanders and commentators may reference ancient texts, such as the Book of Ezekiel, which prophesied a war against the biblical kingdom of Israel, or the Book of Revelation. However, the apocalyptic beliefs surrounding these books are far more recent.

Daniel Hummel is a historian, the director of the Lumen Center for the study of Christianity and Culture and the author of “The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle Over the End Times Shaped A Nation.” Hummel said in an interview with Salon that the ideas driving this religious view of the war actually date back to the 1830s in Britain, and a disaffected Anglican priest named John Nelson Darby who founded the Plymouth Brethren, a small Christian sect that continues to the modern day.

Darby’s most consequential idea in the context of the Iran war, however, is that of dispensationalism, which he helped popularize during his time in the United States in the 1860s and ‘70s, with influential evangelists like Dwight Moody adopting his ideas about the end times.

Dispensationalism is a complex system of beliefs that divides human history into a series of periods described by the Bible. The relevant innovation of dispensationalists for the current context, however, is that they believed that there was a role to play for ethnic Jews and the nation of Israel in the end of the world.

“The more specific dispensationalist teachings that Moody picked up were that there would be a rapture that would happen, which would take away the Christians and take them up to heaven to meet Jesus. And at the same time, they would kick off a very horrible series of wars and famines and other things on Earth that are called the Tribulation and also that there would be a future, or there would be a role for ethnic Jews, or the nation of Israel in this whole end-time scenario,” Hummel said. “That’s something Darby believed that made him unique in a way, in the 19th century. And then, more importantly, all the people around Moody began to believe as well.”

Prior to Darby, Christians generally did not believe that Jews or a contemporary nation state called Israel had any role to play in the end times. After Darby and the popularization of dispensationalism, however, American evangelical Christians in particular began to pick up the idea that both Jews and Christians had prophetic roles to play in bringing about the return of Jesus. Since the creation of the modern state of Israel in 1948, the notion that the country has a biblical role to play has become incredibly popular among evangelical Christians.

Specifically, many believe that in the end of days, evil forces opposed to the Christian God will wage war against Israel, with different interpretations suggesting different countries will join with these forces, such as Iran, Russia and China, as well as small countries like Libya and Ethiopia.

However, one version of events predicts that, when defeat is at hand for Israel, God will intervene to deliver victory to the nation. In some interpretations, this is also when the Rapture happens, and the true Christians miraculously disappear and join God in Heaven.

While the specific timeline of events is open to interpretation, and there are innumerable modern and historical interpretations of what is supposedly going to happen, Hummel stressed that the beliefs of the dispensationalists have “slipped the bonds of systematic theology or even the word dispensationalism” and have become very common in the milieu of American Christianity.

Hummel refers to the broader adoption of these eschatological ideas as “pop dispensationalism,” with books like the “Left Behind” series of novels or “The Late Great Planet Earth” entrenching these ideas in the minds of many Americans throughout the last century.

“If you scratch the surface, there wouldn’t be a very deep theology underneath it. It would be more fitting in, and mixing it with American cultural values, American foreign policy, where Israel is seen as an ally, and mixing all that together and coming out on the other end with a pro-Israel disposition that has some general sense of ‘God’s behind all this.’ But if you pin them down, they wouldn’t give you the same detail as a card-carrying dispensationalist,” Hummel said.

Today, religious leaders who espouse these sorts of eschatological beliefs include people who would call themselves dispensationalists, like pastors John Hagee and Robert Jeffress, as well as people who share similar apocalyptic beliefs, but would not call themselves dispensationalists, like Kenneth Copelan, Samuel Rodriguez and David Barton.

Many of these pastors are incredibly influential in their own right, with Barton, for example, having a close relationship with Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, while Hagee founded Christians United for Israel, the largest pro-Israel lobbying group by membership in the country.

The influence of this version of American Christian eschatological belief was on full display when a score of American evangelical Christian leaders — including Jeffress, Rodriguez and Barton — gathered in the Oval Office to lay hands on Trump in early March, with Tom Mullins, the founding pastor of Christ Leadership church in south Florida, leading a prayer asking for God to protect Trump and American soldiers.

“I pray for your grace and your protection over him. I pray for your grace and your protection over our troops and all of our men and women serving in our armed forces. And father we just pray you continue to give our president the strength that he needs to lead our nation as we come back to one nation under God,” Mullins said.

However, these ideas are also highly influential among Republican officials, and have been for decades. Both former presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were allegedly influenced by these beliefs and today some Republican officials clearly are as well. In Trump’s first term, adviser Michael Flynn and retired Lt. Gen. William “Jerry” Boykin were apparent adherents to these apocalyptic beliefs. Today, Trump’s ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, espouses dispensationalist beliefs, which, in part, explain his endorsement of “greater Israel,” a plan for Israel to occupy swaths of land including Lebanon, Syria and parts of Iraq and Egypt. Huckabee has, however, attempted to walk this view back.

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American evangelical Christians are not the only group whose religious beliefs influence political leaders, of course. Iran’s government is an explicit theocracy with the ayatollah, the supreme leader, maintaining both a religious and political role. And in Israel, far-right Jewish extremists are part of the governing coalition and other influential groups are preparing for their own end times scenarios.

What this Christian eschatology does pose, however, is an acute problem for the American military. Michael Weinstein, an Air Force veteran who founded the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, told Salon that the recent whistleblower reports are indicative of a takeover of the Department of Defense by Christian fundamentalists who have little to no regard for either the separation of church and state or the military’s code of conduct.

“We started getting calls from military members, because there are so many Christian nationalists [in the military] — and by Christian nationalists I mean fundamentalist Christians on steroids — and they follow the lead of [Defense Secretary] Pete Hegseth as the ‘Secretary of War,’” Weinstein said. “On his right bicep, he has tattooed ‘deus vult’ which means ‘God wills it’ and he holds these monthly Jesus prayer services in the Pentagon’s largest auditorium and he broadcasts them on channel 2 throughout the Pentagon.”

Deus vult is widely understood to be a white nationalist symbol. Weinstein said that the message being sent to military members is clear: “The best type of military person has four characteristics: straight, white, fundamentalist Christian and male.”

“Why would anybody be surprised that down the chain, you have so many others striving to get ahead, that when they see that we’ve attacked Iran, this triggers their warped version of Christian end times eschatology,” Weinstein said.

Lynn Gottlieb, a Rabbi in the Jewish renewal movement, also pointed out that, in her assessment, many of these eschatological beliefs have an anti-semitic core to them, which sees Jews as a tool for the realization of end times prophecy.

“What is scary now to me — and I think to many Jewish people — is the fact that the State of Israel is in partnership with people who hold these beliefs. And when you’re in partnership with people who hold such profoundly anti-semitic ideas, that Jews serve no other purpose than to be an instrument of the Apocalypse and the reestablishment of the Christian kingdom in the Holy Land, there is no intrinsic value that is placed on the Jewish tradition or people as worthy of its own expression,” Gottlieb said. “Israel is exploiting this theology for its own purposes and the partnership between Christian Zionism and Jewish Zionism has resulted in the genocide of the Palestinian people and the killing of people as part of the project of conquest that’s being exported to Lebanon and Iran in this moment.”

This exists in tandem with a uniquely evangelical religious philo-semitism, which can stray into anti-semitic tropes, according to Hummel, who pointed to one illustrative incident in the 1980s when Jerry Falwell, an evangelical dispensationalist, infamously said Jews “can make more money accidentally than you can on purpose.” Falwell later said that he was only making a joke.

Gottlieb, who has been a vocal critic of American support for Israel and its war on Gaza, said that she sees the current war as an extension of an American and Israeli settler colonialism ideology, which helped fuel the American conquest of the continent, the genocide of Indigenous people and is currently helping fuel expansionist ambitions in Israel.

What concerns her the most about the religious eschatological beliefs and their influence in the current war, however, is what she believes people are willing to do if they believe their military victory is necessary to realize biblical prophecy.

“There is no doubt in my mind that if Iran continues to resist U.S. imperialism, Israel or the United States will go nuclear,” Gottlieb said. “This has to be said because this isn’t just a conversation about ideas. This is a conversation about when ideas like this impact the policy of people who hold the most deadly weapons and have no limit. We could be looking at the reintroduction of nuclear weapons as part of this war. People should be very frightened, because apocalyptic thinking has no problem using nuclear weapons.”

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