Stephen

Thinking of a kind of woke guy who is like, "well, as an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation, it's Markwayne's right to think that"

This is kind of wild. I'm inclined to think that a lot of the US being an outlier comes from antisocial attitudes, propaganda about crime rates, gun culture, and car culture.

Dispensationalists generally believe that they can trigger the Rapture, not by starting wars, but by ensuring that every person on earth has clearly been invited to "have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ." It's titillating to believe otherwise, I guess, but that's their standard view.

And even the rubes generally don't think the wars are going to make Jesus cone back. World evangelization makes that happen, and the wars are just a sign that it's getting closer.

To follow up: The Guardian says they have viewed the one complaint that was described in detail, so there's apparently at least something that happened with one officer:

www.theguardian.com/world/2026/m...

The tricky thing about guys like Hagee is that they say this stuff every time someone sneezes in the entire Middle East. They then typically call people to "support Israel," remain aware of events, and pray, not to sign up for military service or try to make the apocalypse happen.

Among other things, this also misunderstands that they're typically Christian Zionists first and foremost, and they shape their "Bible prophecy" commentary on current events around whatever Likud or more radical factions want. Their politics is not mainly motivated by the eschatology itself.

It does to them what they themselves do to Muslims/Islam and Jews/Judaism. It elides their roles as human actors with human (if sometimes reprehensible) desires and opinions. If we fundamentally misunderstand them, that makes it more difficult to beat them in public discourse.

Over-focusing on their eschatology demonizes them--it turns them into something other than the human beings with very common base instincts that they are. It says that they're fundamentally other than you and I in a way that is outside the scope of common humanity.

My point isn't that they're good people with good intentions. It's that explanations of "they're doing war because they want the apocalypse" skip over so many things that are a far bigger factor in the religious warmongering: patriarchy, gun culture, Islamophobia, nationalism.

A lot of these people are bloodthirsty warmongers, and they even invoke religious reasons for being that way, but the wars aren't what brings the apocalypse closer, according to their beliefs. It's something else that you don't hear much about from their critics, oddly.

There's one thing that premillennial Dispensationalists generally believe they can do to hasten the return of Christ. They've invested billions of dollars and millions of workers in doing it. It has little to with war, although some fantasize about achieving parts of it in the wake of various wars.

Not really. Cornyn stood and waved to the crowd. He didn't say that he's trying to make the apocalypse happen through supporting the current war.

Pete Hegseth's mom is Marty Haugen's sister

Uhhhh

Global warming would not be happening if our grid operated off renewables and our transportation systems were electrified

I mean, I grew up believing this stuff, but the political implications didn't go beyond "support Israel," which people believe for plenty of other reasons. The Rapture stuff doesn't add much to it.

the parsimonious explanation for white evangelicals' attitudes here is less "it's their wacko esoteric 19th century eschatological doctrines" and more "white evangelicals are white right-wingers who -- like other white right-wingers -- are relatively untroubled by dropping bombs on brown people"

"This is happening because they believe in premillennial Dispensationalism" is a left-wing version of Soros-paid protestors: sometimes people do stuff because they want to and it aligns with a lot of different beliefs and associations they have, not because of a simplistic idea or conspiracy.

It's easy to conjure up conspiracies of irrational and demonic ayatollahs and mullahs or Christian nationalists and evangelicals, but the boring truth is that we're mostly seeing the acts of violent men who indulge in deadly sins, who appeal to religious ideas and emotions in unsophisticated ways.

Name one of these people and explain their views on wanting the apocalypse to happen.

Specifically, there's a thinly-sourced (one guy, representing one organization) story out there that sounds very plausible if you're primed for it but gets iffy when you do some critical thinking, and it's getting very widely shared on this site. Not saying it's false, but let's wait and see.

I'm especially unsure about claims that particular people or groups (whether Christian or Muslim) want to bring about the apocalypse. It's possible that some fools somewhere are making outlandish statements like that. But actual motivations have a tendency to be much more this-worldly than that.

The war is illegal and will likely have catastrophic consequences. Beyond that, I have very little confidence in our knowledge about either the future or even the present of what is happening. There's definitely misinformation and loosely sourced stories about religious aspects of the conflict.

They all tend to coincide with Christian Zionism, even though the "eschatology" in play is wildly different in each case.

I mean, sort of, but probably a lot more of this is a reading of Genesis 12:3's promise to Abram ("I will bless those who bless you...") as being about the Israeli state. For one thing, there is no single "evangelical eschatology," but Dispensationalism, covenant theology, various postmillenialisms.

NIMBYism literally gave Trump Electoral College votes, that is not an exaggeration

if you want to stop fascism you need to build affordable housing in dense urban areas

When people flee cities or states that aren't meeting housing demand, that gets characterized in reactionary terms as flight from "taxes" or "crime," when it mostly comes down to people who can't afford the rising price of limited housing supply in the game of musical chairs.

One awful piece is housing discourse is that people don't realize that with shrinking household sizes an area needs more housing units just to maintain the current population. Not building inevitably leads to a smaller population and fewer children.

One of the real tells here is that the split between premillenialist Dispensationalists and postmillenialist Dominioninists has done nothing to create a rift in their adherence to a shared ideology of extreme Christian Zionism. If anything, they agree on that more than anything else.

Yeah, there's just a whole lot of unnuanced "good guys = Israelis, bad guys = Muslims" stuff that explains so much more than any specific "End Times theology" or supposed attempt to precipitate the rapture (which you're absolutely right to call out as an almost non-existent thing).