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Posted on July 23, 2008

To be perfectly honest, I knew all about Pastor John Hagee. His Cornerstone Church was one of the reasons I’d come to San Antonio in the first place. Hagee was one of the most influential evangelical preachers in the country, not because his ministry was so very large, but because of his near-absolute conquest of a very trendy niche in the market: Christian Zionism. Not exactly a new idea, Christian Zionism in simplest terms describes Christians who believe in supporting, politically or otherwise, the state of Israel. It has risen as a force in international politics primarily because of two factors. The first is a rise in America in belief in dispensationalist Christianity—i.e. end of times prophecies; the belief that Armageddon is coming and that with it, the true believers will be whisked up to heaven by God, while the nonbelievers stay on earth and generally suffer various tortures.

The enormous success of the Left Behind books and movies (which depict the earth during Armageddon as a delicious chaos with airplanes suddenly stripped of their believer pilots, busses flying off highways, blood-soaked atheists realizing their tragic mistake far too late) helped spread these beliefs, so much so that dispensationalism is now more or less the default doctrine of most Southern Baptists. If you enter a megachurch practically anywhere in America these days, you can expect that much of the congregation will be actively awaiting the end of the world.

But you can’t have Armageddon without certain preconditions, and most important among those is a final battle that the prophet Ezekiel predicted will take place between a satanic army (in most interpretations, a force of Arabs led by Russia) and God’s chosen people, Israel. Most end timers believe the key alliance here will be between Russia and Iran and that only following a savage military confrontation between those states and Israel, probably of a catastrophic nuclear nature, will Christ reappear and begin his glorious second reign.

Thus the whole idea behind Christian Zionism is to align America with the nation of Israel so as to “hurry God up” in his efforts to bring about this key showdown.

Practically speaking, this manifests itself in the form of American evangelical Christians endorsing pro-Israel policies. Support that Israel has been happy to receive despite the fact that church doctrine also envisions the mass conversion of all Jews to Christianity after the final battle—with dire consequences for those who don’t. I wonder exactly how most Israelis would feel about the sudden warmth being shown to them by American evangelicals if they knew for instance that ardent end timer Hal Lindsey had predicted the “mother of all holocausts” for those Jews who refused to convert at the second coming.

Pastor Hagee, that drawling, white-haired-barrel-organ voiced Texan with the kindly smile, who gives such powerful ministry on TV, is one of America’s chief pitchmen for Christian Zionism. He founded a group called Christians United for Israel, whose mission is to rally Christians to Israel’s cause. According to the Washington Post, Hagee has regular access to the White House and many followers among George Bush’s staff.

When I first started reading about Hagee and about the felicitous alliance between the American religious right and the hard-liners in the Israeli government, my first reaction was to applaud it as a brilliantly cynical piece of international politics. Whether it was conceived in the corridors of Mossad headquarters or in some dreary archcapitalist think thank funded by the Smith Richardson Foundation (and I’m guessing it was probably some combination of both) I had no idea. But it was unmistakably an ingenious solution to the problem of how to rally southern conservative Christians a few generations removed from their cross-burning Klan days to the cause of Israel. And if it turned out it was dreamed up by the same guy who figured out how to get laid off Midwestern factory workers to whoop for free-trade Republicanism by plastering the airwaves with French kissing men, I have to say that guy deserves some kind of special medal—a Triple Order of Satan, or something like that.

But during the election season, I started to wonder if this kind of thing might eventually backfire on the people who concocted these ideas, if indeed they were dreamed up from on high. As a temporary electoral gambit designed to garner support for Israel, it’s brilliant, but lets not forget that it doesn’t work unless you get tens of millions of people really believing that the world is about to end.

I wonder sometimes if the cynics in Washington think that they can get away with just bending the yokels’ ears once every four years, cashing in on election day, and then going back to the grimy you-scratch-my-back money politics that dominates everyday life in the beltway. I think those people forget that after every election day, even after they’ve been forgotten by Washington, those yokels are still out there, thinking, waiting, watching. Their minds change. And if their needs are not tended to, they drift away. And if you’ve gotten used to making political decisions based on the Book of Revelations, you can drift pretty far. I wanted to see how far—I was going to join the church.

From: “The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics & Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire” by Matt Taibbi. Available at bookstores everywhere.

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