Photo by Nycholas Benaia, Unsplash
Photo by Nycholas Benaia, Unsplash
MAGA Christians' gaze is so laser-focused on the afterlife that this life is almost irrelevant, as is the suffering of people in the here and now.
Republished with permission from John Pavlovitz
It’s easy to believe that this is all a blatant and shameful effort by Republicans to distract from the Epstein files, shift focus from ICE’s domestic terrorism, seize another massive cache of global oil production, and fuel the cancellation of an upcoming election reckoning.
These would all be correct assessments, at least from Trump’s self-serving, narcissistic point of view, but there’s another, more alarming motivation for religious Conservatives dragging the planet into a self-destructive, full-scale bomb-a-thon: the second coming of Christ.
Substack journalist Jonathan Larsen is reporting that the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) claims to have received over 100 complaints from service members across 40 units, claiming that Military leadership is telling them that this is essentially a righteous Right-Wing holy war designed to hasten the end of the world.
Larsen quotes one of the testimonies as detailing that our troops are being told, “President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth”.
And while independent new sources have yet to corroborate Larsen’s claims, to someone who has spent nearly 30 years as a local church pastor, much of that in largely white churches in the South, I’ve heard this sermon before.
This planetary annihilation has been the white Christian nationalist plan for decades. Their entire nihilistic Revelation-based theological worldview rests on the destruction of this world so that God can send back his son to do his righteous renovation. This helps understand why the most deeply indoctrinated of MAGA Christians have no interest in Jesus’ instructions about loving their neighbors, feeding the poor, healing the sick, and welcoming the stranger. Their gaze is so laser-focused on the afterlife that this life is almost irrelevant, as is the suffering of people in the here and now.
To the violent Evangelical zealots and brimstone-breathing fundamentalists who have permeated the Trump regime and our nation’s military, war isn’t hell, it’s “Hello, Jesus!”
Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, takes a weekly Sabbath from ignoring the Constitution and disregarding its amendments, to pretend he cares about the Bible, spending Sundays at a DC church whose lineage connects directly to world-renowned woman-hating, woke-allergic prophet of disaster, pastor Doug Wilson.
There, Hegseth is undoubtedly hearing the same wild, unhinged, rapture-hastening diatribes that Trump’s Cabinet and its MAGA rank-and-file foot soldiers are being inundated with by their preachers and podcasters: If we blow the whole thing up, our white, straight American Republican Christian Daddy will come back and finally perfect the gated community of self-appointed saints they’ve been working tirelessly to build here.
These self-righteous disciples of a vengeful Conservative God are a tiny but dangerous minority because of their proximity to power and the depth and breadth of their infiltration in our nation’s Congressional chambers, courthouses, and Military leadership.
It is going to take the rest of us as a unified, focused, and unrelenting coalition of anti-Armageddonists, who, through grassroots activism, persistent protest, organized opposition, poll presence, and legal challenge, will make sure that Christian fundamentalists and Republican politicians don’t get to sacrifice the planet and humanity on the altar of their violent Evangelical fever dream.
We cannot allow them to bomb us into the afterlife. We have to fight together to keep this life sacred.
John Pavlovitz is a writer, pastor, and activist from Wake Forest, North Carolina. A 25-year veteran in the trenches of local church ministry, John is committed to equality, diversity, and justice—both inside and outside faith communities. When not actively working for a more compassionate planet, John enjoys spending time with his family, exercising, cooking, and having time in nature. He is the author of A Bigger Table, Hope and Other Superpowers, Low, and Stuff That Needs to Be Said.
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