A sign celebrates U.S. President Donald Trump and Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee in central Jerusalem on May 7. Photo by Ahmad Gharabli/AFP via Getty Images
“There has been much flirting with the apocalypse lately,” the French historian François Hartog wrote recently. In the latest evolution of that trend, Israel’s recent attack on Iran has some Christian Zionists chomping at the bit with apocalyptic anticipation.
That was made obvious in a message that Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel and perhaps the world’s most powerful Christian Zionist, sent President Donald Trump earlier this week, which Trump then posted in full on social media.
After “God spared you in Butler, PA,” Huckabee wrote, Trump now found himself in the shoes of President Harry “Truman in 1945”, when the U.S. dropped two nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “I believe you will hear from heaven and that voice is far more important than mine or ANYONE else’s,” Huckabee added.
This isn’t the first time that Trump’s evangelical supporters have framed him as the recipient of a providential decree when it comes to Iran. In his first term, they compared him to Queen Esther; in 2019, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo suggested Trump had been “raised for such a time as this, just like Queen Esther, to help save the Jewish people from the Iranian menace.”
Some also compared him to King Cyrus, the Persian instrument of God who freed the Jews.
The thinking goes that God used Cyrus and Esther to help Jews to fight back against oppression, and then a decree of genocide, in what is now modern-day Iran — and now, Trump is being tasked with a similar biblical mandate. But unlike Cyrus and Esther, Trump’s mandate as envisioned by Huckabee isn’t to save the Jews. Rather, it’s to bring about an imminent Rapture, during which all true believers will be lifted into auditorium seats in Heaven to watch Christ defeat the Antichrist’s armies at Tel Megiddo.
In this fable, most Jews die, save for a few that convert to Christianity.
Another Esther?
Queen Esther’s name has already helped define Trump’s second term, as the namesake of the Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther, a plan developed primarily by evangelical leaders to combat antisemitism.
That plan deals largely with domestic antisemitism; it mentions Iran only once, in context of allegations that former President Joe Biden’s administration was not sufficiently pro-Israel. But its entire framing is influenced by the belief that the U.S. must wholeheartedly support Israel in order to help bring about the End Times.
That belief structured Huckabee’s message, which not-so-subtly urges Trump to join in Israel’s attacks on Iran. Huckabee’s belief that this Israel-Iran conflict was foretold in the Bible is on full display: “You did not seek this moment,” he wrote,”This moment sought YOU!”
The specific Christian theology to which Huckabee subscribes, known as dispensational premillennialism, promotes a narrative that the whole of history, past and future, is already written. Rather conspiratorially, it suggests that elect believers have the knowledge to interpret future history by claiming to read the Bible literally.
What this means: Despite their infallible belief that the future is foretold, Christian Zionists grant themselves some agency by claiming their actions were guided by God. If Trump chooses to act as another Esther, in this framework, he is doing so as part of the pre-established chain of actions that will lead to the Rapture.
To Christian Zionists with dispensationalist beliefs, this theological loophole essentially depoliticises any culpability they might have for their actions — including donating millions to West Bank settlements and the IDF, fueled by a belief that the Jewish state must cover the land between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea, erasing the Palestinian territories, as part of the process leading up to the End Times. Seen through this framework,, even the horrors in Gaza are guided by God’s hand.
An apocalyptic vision of Iran
During the Cold War, Iran played a bit-part in dispensational geopolitics. Then, in the dispensational evangelical mindset, the USSR figured as the central Antichrist antagonist — largely because of Hal Lindsey’s book The Late Great Planet Earth, which was the bestselling nonfiction book of the 1970s.
Lindsey’s ideas were so deeply embedded that, after the Cold War ended, Paul Boyer — the great historian of apocalyptic Christianity in the U.S. — said that the last group of people to admit the Cold War was over would be dispensational premillennialists.
When they did, they transferred their idea of how the Antichrist was embodied on Earth from the Soviet Union to the Islamic states of the Middle East.
This narrative was first advanced by the dispensationalist author Mark Hitchcock in 1993, with his book The Silver Kingdom.
In it, Hitchcock writes that “all of the names mentioned in Ezekiel 38-39″ — the nations to be led to the prophesied great battle by Satan’s representatives, Gog and Magog — “are presently within the geographical boundaries of Islamic nations…The Soviet Union has fallen, and Islam seems to be moving in to fill the vacuum”.
The communism of the Soviet Union was a “constraint on fundamentalist, radical Islam,” Hitchcock argued, and therefore a constraint on prophecy fulfillment. With the Soviet Union’s dissolution, and the end of its grip on the Middle East, the long path to the End Times was once more clear.
Hitchcock’s revision has since become canon in evangelical circles — so much so that, in 2002, Lindsey himself said that Armageddon “will begin with a coordinated attack against Israel by the Iranian led Muslim forces.”
The Christian Zionist end game — and Trump’s?
In the past, such prophecies could be dismissed as racist geopolitical fables. But now, Christian Zionists with a documented belief in such fables have entered the halls of power — including Huckabee and Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth.
With their influence at work on Trump, a highly suggestable opportunist, the risks that Christian Zionist thought will lead the U.S. into a hasty clash with Iran are newly high.
Prognostication concerning the outcome of the Israel-Iran conflict is a fool’s game, although I would not be the first to note that Trump’s provocative, impulsive, emotional and transactional decision-making makes him a uniquely unpredictable force in international relations. I do take some solace in Trump’s statement that he’s after “an end, a real end, not a ceasefire” — not, necessarily the End.
It’s worth noting that there’s a deeper meaning of Huckabee’s invocation of Truman’s name in implicitly urging Trump to take action toward that one, final End — one that was likely lost on its author.
Truman recognized the state of Israel only minutes after Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion declared its establishment in 1948. Scholars usually link Truman’s domestic interest in supporting a Jewish state to his desire to win Jewish votes in New York, and, geopolitically, his wish to prevent the spread of communism.
But historian Michael Cohen suggests Truman’s evangelical beliefs may also have contributed to his decision. Truman apparently boasted that he had read the Bible twice before the age of 12. “For Truman, the Bible was neither legend nor myth, but literally the story of everyday, God fearing people,” Cohen wrote.
In other words, Truman’s evangelical outlook might have been an influence in facilitating the global acceptance of Israel as a state — a decision with ramifications that are still shaping the world today. Presidents influenced by evangelical thought have played this game before; we know, from history, that it’s unlikely to end simply, or cleanly.
