When most people contemplate the future of America’s conflict with Iran, they hunt for clues in grainy satellite photos, statements from military analysts and President Trump’s social media posts.
But when scholar Diana Butler Bass considers what could happen next, her thoughts turn toward another group she says is now thinking more about prophecy than politics.
She recalls warnings from her childhood about the rise of an Antichrist, stories about weeping mothers clutching their empty blankets after their babies were suddenly “Raptured” to heaven and paintings of an angry Jesus leading armies of angels to an Armageddon-like, final battle in modern-day Israel.
Those stories terrified and thrilled Bass when she heard them growing up in a White evangelical church in the 1970s. It was a time when the end always seemed near, and books like the bestseller “The Late Great Planet Earth” warned Christians to gird their loins for a period of Great Tribulation and prepare for Jesus’ triumphant return to Jerusalem.
Bass, a prominent, progressive religious author who hosts a popular Substack newsletter called “The Cottage,” no longer believes those stories. Yet when she considers why the US struck three nuclear facilities in Iran this month and what could happen next, she now offers a prophecy of her own: Bombing Iran will reinforce Trump’s status as God’s “Chosen One” and Israel as His chosen nation among many of the President’s White evangelical supporters.
Many of these supporters dismiss the dangers of a larger war, she tells CNN, because such a clash would mean the world is approaching the “end times” — a series of cataclysmic events ushering in the Second Coming of Christ and the rise of Israel as the fulfillment of biblical prophecies.
“There’s almost a kind of spiritual eagerness for a war in the Middle East,” says Bass, describing attitudes among some White evangelicals. “They believe a war is going to set off a series of events that will result in Jesus returning.”
Trump’s decision to bomb Iran has so far been examined almost exclusively through the lens of politics or military strategy. Yet there is a religious dimension to his decision – and what could happen next – that’s been underexplored.
Hellbound and Down 