“Brothers and sisters, this is our God: Jesus, King of Peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war. He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.”
– Pope Leo XIV
The Military Religious Freedom Foundation reports receiving hundreds of complaints from U.S. service members alleging commanders have framed current military operations in Iran in terms of Christian end-times prophecy, namely God’s plan for Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus. At a recent Pentagon service, the Secretary of Defense War prayed for overwhelming violence against those who deserve no mercy.
The United States is not the first to embrace apocalyptic theatre as a major driver of foreign policy, and as a former evangelical familiar with this worldview, it is deeply concerning. There’s a stark parallel to history we must take seriously.
For the first several hundred years, Christianity largely took a posture of mercy and martyrdom. The concept of a violent and militant Jesus probably had its origins in the medieval period. The idea was first formally codified at the Council of Nablus in 1120, where Canon 20 permitted a clergyman to take up arms in self-defense without bearing any guilt; this was during turbulent times when Christian pilgrims were often massacred by the hundreds along their journey, leaving their rotting corpses along the road from Jaffa into the Holy Land. This one concession, intended to be a temporary measure, seeded militant movements in Christianity starting with the Papal legitimization of the Templars movement (“God’s Holy Knights”) and their involvement in the Crusades, extremist groups such as Alfonso I’s Brotherhood of Belchite, the Pastoureaux, and eventually reached into modern day militant Christian ideals.
Modern evangelical end-times beliefs are just shy of 200 years old, and stand largely upon a populist theology called dispensational hermeneutics, which I’ve written about at length. This once fringe approach to Christian theology grew out of a small movement of aristocratic separatists in Ireland in the 1820s named the Plymouth Brethren, of which a lawyer named John Darby was a leader. Darby had a disdain for formalism and rejected all prior scholarship, including the work of the reformation, which he believed was markedly deficient. As an anti-cleric, his flavor of nuda scriptura Christianity called for strictly literal interpretation of all scripture, and in isolation from patristic authors (church fathers), historical writers, or other sources outside of the New Testament. Rejecting church doctrine established for more than a thousand years, Darby built his own theological belief system referred to today as dispensationalism, which fundamentally altered how the Bible was interpreted. This interpretive framework forces a very specific worldview that restructures much of the New Testament around a militant and advancing Christianity. Prior to Darby, the book of Revelation had been largely considered a book of hope relevant to the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD (the antichrist referring to Nero Caesar). Darby’s new theology forced Revelation to be interpreted as both literal and future prophecy. He also believed in a form of Christian exclusivity, considering his followers to be “pure” in an evil world, and the only true believers among an otherwise “ruined” church.
Darby’s fundamentalist theology gave birth to many of the concepts adopted in evangelical low churches today such as a secret rapture, a terrifying tribulation, and a third temple in Israel. These ideas were first preached in the United States in 1870, and fell upon the ears of Dwight Moody, who embraced it. With Moody and the help of his longtime friend Cyrus Scofield (notably also a lawyer), this tiny separatist group ultimately influenced Christianity in the Americas and helped create what most associate today with the Evangelical Church; the arm of the Christian church in America today largely claiming Christian nationalism. While strong modern evidence suggests Scofield fabricated a fake Doctor of Divinity degree, dispensationalism heightened in popularity around 1910-1915, with the publication of his Scofield Reference Bible which attempted to authoritatively indoctrinate Christianity with a dispensational interpretation. This following was positioned to gain appeal from events across the next several decades. As Kim Riddlebarger writes in A Case for Amillennialism, “Several important social and cultural factors made dispensationalism popular among American evangelicals, who had been overwhelmingly postmillennial just a generation earlier. The horrors of World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, and the tense Middle East situation can all be explained by the dispensational system. When people are uncertain about the future and afraid of what might come to pass, dispensationalists assure them that when things go from bad to worse, the church will be raptured from the earth and Christians will not be around to experience the great tribulation or the wrath of the Antichrist. In this way, dispensationalists offer comforting answers to painful questions.”
The 1918 Influenza breakout had killed millions and birthed a spiritual madness for seances and the occult. The more pessimistic society got, the more it was open to accepting a fiery, terrifying end of world theology. Common recurring themes in the world such as inflation, war, disease and genocide are seen by dispensational Christians as a concise sign of the end of the world, even though these concepts play out over and over again throughout history. Reinterpreting an end times to now be set in the modern day had obvious appeal. No one could blame society for being tempted to parallel the Antichrist to Hitler, or the sufferings of the Great Tribulation to the horrible sufferings of the Holocaust, especially with a relatively new form of theology circulating that fit with current events.