Trump’s Holy Warriors Finally Got the Apocalypse They’ve Prayed For |
Last week, the United States and Israeli governments attacked Iran in a dramatic series of airstrikes dubbed Operation Epic Fury. One of the bombings took out Iran’s 86-year-old leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei; another killed an estimated 165 people at a girls’ school in the city of Minab. In the days that followed, the US and Israel continued their siege, and Iran retaliated with strikes across the Middle East. Every day offered new evidence that the conflict appears to be spreading beyond that region: On Thursday, Iran struck Azerbaijan.
The death toll of the conflict is already high: According to the New York Times, by late last week it had surpassed 1,000, including six members of the US military and around 11 Israeli civilians. World leaders have expressed alarm about the expanding conflict. French President Emanuel Macron warned of “serious consequences for peace and international security,” while Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez vowed that his country would not “be complicit in something that’s bad for the world.”
But a powerful subset of evangelical Christians sees something positive in the rapidly spreading violence. The so-called Christian Zionists, who believe Israel must vanquish its Muslim enemies to usher in the second coming of Jesus, consider the current war to be a prelude to the End Times. As I wrote last year:
Some evangelicals interpret passages from the Bible to mean the Messiah will reappear only when Jews who have scattered to the corners of the Earth return to Israel. Once Jesus comes back, those who accept him will be saved, and everyone else—including recalcitrant Jews—will perish and be damned to hell. “I don’t want to say [evangelicals with these beliefs] don’t care what happens to the Jews, but they understand that there are some things in their theology that are necessary for the salvation of the world,” Rabbi Jack Moline, president emeritus of the religious pluralism advocacy group Interfaith Alliance, told me. “You have to break the eggs to get the omelet.”
I reached out to Matthew Taylor, a scholar with the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies and the author of the 2024 book about Christian nationalism, The Violent Take It by Force, and he explains that this particular kind of Christian Zionist wants “to see Israel become a much more dominant force in the region.”
It’s not just members of the fundamentalist Christian fringe who embrace this theology—some of its most outspoken proponents, such as US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, are top leaders in the Trump administration. Matthew Boedy, a religion scholar at the University of North Georgia and the author of a new book on Christian nationalism, The Seven Mountains Mandate, sees Operation Epic Fury as an indication that these leaders are now in a........