Christianity . Essays . Opinion . Politics

On March 8, 2026 by Jonathan Zdziarski

This past week, several reports have come out about US military commanders operating, at least partially, under Christian prophetic principles. Over 200 complaints from troops have been reported to have been told by their commanders that the war in Iran is “all part of God’s divine plan”, and have been invoking Christian end-times in citing from the book of Revelation. This is deeply concerning, but not in the least shocking. The United States is not the first to embrace an apocalyptic belief system as a major driver of foreign policy. There’s a stark parallel to history to be seriously considered here.

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 rather new approach to Christian interpretation grew out of a small movement of fundamentalist separatists in Ireland in the 1800s going by the name of The Plymouth Brethren, of which John Darby was a member. Darby had a disdain for prior scholarship, including the work of the reformation, which he believed was markedly deficient. His flavor of Christianity was 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, 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.

Dispensationalism heightened in popularity around 1910-1915, with the publication of the Scofield Reference Bible, and was well positioned to appeal to 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.

As historian David Redles points out in Hitler’s Millennial Reich: Apocalyptic Belief and the Search for Salvation, many apocalyptic movements begin with a chaotic destabilization of society, “the multiplicity of causality, the convergence of cataclysmic events, creates rapid, sudden, and irrevocable change in society and change within the psyches of those who experience it.” Between the 1920s to 1940s, many in the west were speculating that Hitler was the Antichrist, while those within his ranks believed he was the messiah returned. Dietrich Eckart, a mentor to Hitler to whom he later dedicated Mein Kampf, painted the Jewish race as the Antichrist, reinterpreting the Old Testament and writing an antisemitic exegesis on the book of Revelation. Hitler’s speeches, fully embracing his fiction, attempted to convince the Germans that the Jewish intended to use the hyperinflation of that period to enslave them through famine, “for the second revolution under the Star of David”.

Nazism’s rise was ultimately fueled by its apocalyptic components of a “millennial Reich”. Redles points out, “the Nazi conception of the tausendjährige Reich, literally millennial kingdom, was taken to be a perfect world, one cleansed of racial degeneracy, among other things.” He goes on, describing the appeal as, “the message of that piercing voice was one of impending apocalypse, with salvation possible only through Nazism. Nazi rhetoric struck a chord with the millenarian longings of many hopeless and frustrated Germans.” While the Nazi apocalyptic diverged far from a Judeo-Christian interpretation of Revelation, “Nazi messianism and apocalypticism were central to the Nazi construction of reality”.

It was recognizable enough to the Catholic Church, and when the Third Reich failed to establish a thousand-year reign on the Earth, the Vatican in 1944 issued a statement that millennialism cannot be safely taught. It cannot be understated how central Nazi apocalyptic eschatology was to the racist motivations of the regime. Historian Mary Fulbrook wrote of Nazism and Christianity, “it seems that, for many Germans, adherence to the Christian faith proved compatible with at least passive acquiescence in, if not active support for, the Nazi dictatorship.”

The often innocuous-seeming end-times ideals of American evangelical Christianity stem from the same apocalyptic worldview as the dangerously similar apocalypticism of the early 1900s, even if much of the American church has no idea of its roots. When mixed with hate and prejudice, this simply incorrect theology has shown historically to have created monsters. One must be very cautious with the authority one gives to those who would claim to be able to interpret ancient scripture. Splinter sects of extreme evangelical churches continue to advance the idea that we are at the precipice of some form of apocalypse, and seek to bring about the eschaton by fulfilling such prophecy.

As I said at the onset, the fact that this US military – run by an administration largely put into power by the evangelical church – would use the end-times as a rationale for war is not surprising. It is, however, a sobering reality that should give us pause to seriously consider just how close our country is to falling into the dark abyss that engendered so many atrocities in the Nazi regime.

Further reading:

Christianity’s End-Times Conspiracy Theories