You didn’t know how deep the rabbit hole really is did you? We now have Trump proclaiming that the people of Israel view him as the king of the Jews.
It really amazes me, this bizarre alliance between Israelis and the Evangelical right wing in the U.S. I’m sure the Israelis really don’t understand why they get so much support from the Evangelicals.
As someone who grew up in apocalyptic evangelicalism, it’s a familiar concept and sadly the logical conclusion of a narrative that’s been fermenting since the 1970’s.
A lot of this begins with Francis Schaeffer’s How Should We Then Live? which claimed liberalism was destroying society and Hal Lindsay’s The Late, Great Planet Earth which profited off pushing Book of Revelations hysteria.
The Christian Right embraced these ideas as a means to profit and get involved in the political sphere. It worked better than blatant segregation, this hinting at minorities as being agents of Satan, a lesson Jerry Falwell learned.
There’s a bunch of stuff too with Ronald Reagan being an occultist who believed himself to be an instrument of a benevolent god who was using him to fight Satan and bring a new kingdom of Heaven on Earth.
In the 1990’s Republicans pushed New World Order narratives embedded in apocalyptic evangelicalism to hurt Bill Clinton’s standing, thus creating a new narrative that liberals were working with evil forces to destroy America from within.
This narrative not only hurt Democrat’s, but inflamed white supremacist extremists who now believed they weren’t racists, they were fighting a war to save America, they were Christian patriots, a new army of God’s.
With Obama, the narrative changed. It grew into the idea that Obama was a foreign Manchurian candidate, possibly the very antichrist himself. The rumors were everywhere and evangelicals became convinced by Fox News and Glenn Beck the final battle was nigh.
So. If Obama is the antichrist, the head of the New World Order, the easy jump is to Trump, his opposite, being the messiah. It’s a giant, incomprehensible mess of narrative and myth and generational manipulation. And it’s as dangerous as it gets.
By the way, this is the key to understanding the QAnon nonsense. It’s written like a combination of Nostradamus and Revelation. It’s the incomprehensible narrative necessary to explain Trump as infallible and an otherworldly champion.
It is, in essence, a death cult. The people who believe this are looking for a fiery confrontation, an end to the actual world. His standing as an agent of chaos, as frightening as that is, actually excites the possibility of an End Times outcome for them.
This death cult mentality has driven US politics for years. They don’t want peace in the Middle East. They don’t want a drawdown of the military as they think it’s necessary for the literal Battle of Armageddon. Why invest in infrastructure and programs if we’re going to die?
I have a friend who is a loony tune apocalyptic Evangelical who constantly tells me about the end times. He describes the battle of Armageddon taking place in the middle east where Russia joins forces with the Muslims to attack Israel where 2/3 of the people in Israel die, and go to hell because they don’t accept Jesus, and then the Rapture happens. Don’t quote me on the precise details because between trying to stop myself from laughing out loud and thinking this is some real crazy shit, I might have a few details wrong.
My friend also tells me that he has read the Bible precisely and the signs are showing the Rapture is coming next spring. He’s been telling me this every year since the more than a decade that I’ve known him.
It’s just really beyond my understanding that the people of Israel would want to align themselves with people who can’t wait for Israel to be destroyed and for Israelis to go to hell so some apocalyptic fantasy can happen and end their own miserable existence on planet earth.