The End Time Chronicles

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." - Voltaire

America seems to have come into a peculiar kind of madness. Our soldiers are being told, in the sterile fluorescence of a combat readiness briefing, that the president has been “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran.” This is the kind of idiocy that the Founders, those hardheaded men who had watched Europe bleed itself white over centuries of religious warfare, specifically designed a Constitution to prevent. But they didn’t have tattoos on their chests like the American Lord of War, Pete Hegseth.

Since U.S. and Israeli forces began coordinated strikes against Iran in early March, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) has received hundreds of complaints from service members at more than fifty installations worldwide, alleging that military commanders are yoking the war to Christian eschatology, the theology of Last Things. Being frightened of combat and death has now been emotionally supplemented with the end of the world for American troops. Reports indicate at least one commander cited the Book of Revelation in a combat briefing, declaring that Armageddon was at hand and that the return of Jesus Christ was imminent. Another, according to an email shared by MRFF founder Mikey Weinstein, told troops not to worry, because “there’s a whole plan here” and Jesus is using Trump.

Weinstein is not an angry, anti-military curmudgeon. An Air Force Academy graduate and former JAG attorney, he is careful to note that the vast majority of his clients are themselves Christians, believers who feel, and this is his word, “brutalized” for failing to be sufficiently rapturous about the end of the world. When even the faithful find the theology alarming, it might be worth asking what exactly is going on.

The answer to that question, of course, is Christian Nationalism. The frightening religious movement has risen from the fever swamps of fringe internet theology into the Pentagon’s press briefings with surprising speed. Defense Secretary Hegseth, a man whose primary qualification for his position appears to be body art and facile tough talk, told his personally curated audience of reporters that “the providence of our almighty God” is protecting U.S. troops in Iran. At a dignified transfer ceremony for fallen soldiers, (until Trump showed up in a MAGA hat), Hegseth quoted Psalm 144 by declaring Jesus is “who trains my hands for war and my fingers for battle.”

The Pentagon and Hegseth, when asked to comment on the MRFF complaints, responded by linking reporters to a private X account called “Shadow of Ezra,” a QAnon conspiracy poster with zero credibility. The account shares a mix of pro-Trump political commentary, conspiracy theories, and sensationalized claims, including posts about figures like George Soros, Jay-Z, and others, often framed in conspiratorial terms. The Pentagon directing reporters to this anonymous account was widely seen as remarkable and controversial, given that Shadow of Ezra is an anonymous, unofficial account with roots in QAnon circles rather than any credible news or government source. Thirty Democratic members of Congress have written to the Pentagon’s inspector general demanding an investigation. No Republicans joined them.

To understand where this theology comes from, it helps to understand the concept of “the Rapture.” This is a mainstream Christian notion that true believers will be bodily whisked to heaven before a period of tribulation and Christ’s return. The delightful narrative of The End of Days was invented by a nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish preacher named John Nelson Darby. Before Darby, this was not mainstream Christian doctrine, and it remains, in the scope of Christian history, a theological novelty. As the late Christopher Hitchens observed with characteristic precision: “The Rapture is a belief held by millions of Americans, many of them armed, that they will be physically carried to heaven before an apocalyptic war cleanses the earth of the ungodly. The only difficulty is that this is demonstrably not what the relevant texts say, and demonstrably not what most Christians throughout history have believed.”

And now the Lord of War Hegseth has turned this fringe view into operational U.S. military doctrine.

The Book of Revelation, from which U.S. commanders drew their briefings, is one of the most contested documents in the biblical canon. Many early church fathers opposed its inclusion in scripture. You don’t have to dig far to discover even Martin Luther called it “neither apostolic nor prophetic.” Scholars have argued for centuries that it was almost certainly written during or just after the reign of the Roman Emperor Domitian, around 95 CE, as an elaborate coded protest against Roman imperial persecution of Christians. The “Beast” of Revelation, scholars like Elaine Pagels have suggested, almost certainly referred to Nero Caesar, whose very name excites the QAnon crowd because in Hebrew numerology it yields the infamous 666. The “Whore of Babylon” was Rome. The apocalyptic imagery was the language of resistance literature, the kind of coded dissent any occupied people uses when speaking plainly would get you killed.

To take this document as a literal roadmap for twenty-first century geopolitics is, plainly, nutso. Consider the absurdity of reading a first-century Jewish-Christian resistance pamphlet as a Pentagon planning document. Richard Dawkins, noted atheist, scholar, researcher, author and intellect, has pointed out that it is “a case study in motivated reasoning so pure that it would be fascinating if it weren’t so dangerous.” The Bible, Dawkins has argued, “was written by humans who didn’t know about germ theory, didn’t know that the earth went around the sun, and didn’t have access to the accumulated knowledge of two millennia of human inquiry. To take it literally is not faith, it is a failure of imagination.”

And yet, here is Texas, the state government is still mandating the display of the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms. A number of districts have sued to block the rule and local courts have upheld their claims of constitutional violation but the governor insists that the school districts not involved in the lawsuits must continue to comply, or, you know, lose their funding. We have already banned hundreds of books our legislators found theologically or politically inconvenient.

Meanwhile, much of Christian culture in Texas is also embracing a growing movement of Christian Nationalists operating under the banner of “Seven Mountain Dominionism,” which is the noxious belief that Christians must “reclaim” seven spheres of social influence: family, religion, education, media, entertainment, business, and government. And no, that is not a metaphor. It is an explicit organizational strategy employed by influential figures close to the current administration that envisions a United States governed by biblical law.

Sam Harris, neuroscientist and author, has called this movement “Christian Sharia,” and the label is more than mere provocation, especially in a state where the governor expresses fears Texas is being overtaken by Islamists. “The desire to govern other people’s lives on the basis of ancient texts,” Harris has written, “is not limited to Islam. It is a feature of all religious conservatism, and the only thing preventing it from manifesting fully in the United States is the Constitution, which certain people are working very hard to erode.”

They are not working quietly, either. They are working through state legislatures, school boards, judicial appointments, and now, apparently, combat readiness briefings.

The Founders were not subtle about this. Thomas Jefferson called the doctrine of the Trinity “mere Abracadabra.” James Madison, the principal architect of the Constitution, wrote that “the number, the industry, and the morality of the priesthood, and the devotion of the people have been manifestly increased by the total separation of the church from the state.” John Adams was blunter still, signing the Treaty of Tripoli, which declared explicitly that “the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”

These were men who had watched the Thirty Years War kill a fifth of Central Europe’s population. They had read their history and knew what happened when the sacred and the secular fused. They built a wall between church and state not out of hostility to religion, but out of hard-won, blood-soaked wisdom about what religion does to governments and governments do to religion when the two are allowed to merge. That wall is now being dismantled brick by brick, in school classrooms and military briefing rooms and Cabinet press conferences, by people who believe, with disturbing sincerity and terrifying confidence that they are doing God’s work.

There is one more inconvenient fact lurking beneath all of this, which is that the historical existence of Jesus of Nazareth as a divine figure is supported by essentially no contemporary evidence. The Roman historians Tacitus and Pliny the Younger mention Christians, not Christ. Josephus’s famous passage is widely regarded by scholars as a later interpolation. No Roman census record, no legal document, no contemporary account places a miraculous Jewish preacher at the center of first-century Judean life. This does not settle the question, obviously, because absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but it does suggest a certain epistemological humility might be appropriate before one arranges a nuclear military’s war strategy around that figure’s imminent personal return.

And let me throw in a for fukk’s sake here, just for emphasis.

Mikey Weinstein, who is Jewish, has spent decades fighting for the religious freedom of U.S. service members, including and especially Christians who don’t want their faith weaponized. He describes several commanders using a specific phrase to tell troops that “Jesus is using Trump to light the signal lamp.” The soldiers who complained to him, he says, fear retribution for speaking out. They are fighting a war while also, apparently, fighting a theology.

Citizens doing their civic duty are, as someone with considerably more sense than most of Washington recently put it, the immune system of our body politic. This strain of American life, the fusion of military power, apocalyptic theology, and authoritarian politics, which threatens the wider world, has already been rejected at ballot boxes across the country, including in the congressional district of its principal champion.

The question is whether the immune system will respond quickly enough. The Book of Revelation, whatever its original intent, is a document about the end of things. If it were real and viable, most of us would not be around to appreciate the exquisite historical irony when the people most obsessed with its prophecies were the ones to make them come true.