This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca!
Transcript:
Last week I saw a news story going viral on social media: “U.S. Troops Were Told Iran War Is for “Armageddon,” Return of Jesus”! And I thought, yep. Obviously. I was an adult for the previous go-round in 2001 when the exact same language was used to get all of America really pumped up to send soldiers to the Middle East to murder a bunch of brown people: their evil Muslims! They hate our “Judeo-Christian” values! Onward, Christian soldier!
Not only did I see this happen before, but I also made a video waaaay back in 2021, two and half years before the October 7th Hamas attacks, about this very topic: one major reason that the United States gives so much money to Israel is because MILLIONS of Americans, including our politicians and billionaires and broadcasters and other influential people, genuinely believe that in order for Jesus to return to Earth, Russia and Iran needed to team up to attack Israel, at which point God would smite those countries, rapture up all the good Christians, send the world into a burning fascist nightmare, and then finally send Jesus to back to Earth and send all the Jews to Hell.
That’s actually what they believe. I know, because I grew up in a church that preached that. It scared the living shit out of me. But I grew up understanding that this is the big myth at the heart of much of America’s Islamophobia and constant warmongering in the Middle East: they genuinely want the war that they believe will lead to the End Times.
So I pretty much immediately forgot about those posts because they were so obviously true, until a short time later when I saw MORE social media posts warning people to stop sharing those previous posts because actually that is FAKE NEWS. Okay, now I’m interested. Let’s dig in.
Many mainstream media news sources repeated the claim that troops were told this latest war on Iran is meant to usher in Armageddon, like the Guardian and USA Today and MSN, it all focused on one report from journalist Jonathan Larsen’s Substack. Larsen himself was reporting on the word of one man: Mikey Weinstein, founder and president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, a group focused on protecting the wall separating Church and State when it comes to the US military. Here’s Weinstein in an interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!.
So, with all this mainstream press reporting on this issue, why should we not trust Weinstein when he says that his organization has received so many reports from so many different troops that this is happening?
For that, let’s turn to Hemant Mehta, the Friendly Atheist. On HIS Substack (by the way guys can we all just leave Substack finally? Because of the Nazis? No? Okay, I’ll move on…) On Mehta’s Substack, he points out some reasons why Weinstein is not a trustworth source: for a start, he wonders why all these soldiers chose to share their stories with one “relatively obscure” organization as opposed to mainstream reporters. Also, Weinstein never names any of the militarly leaders who made these comments, and the letters he posts from soldiers all sound suspiciously the same. Mehta reprints several examples from MRFF’s website and, yeah, they do all sound like they were written by the exact same person. When Mehta raised these points to Weinstein, Weinstein insisted that he had to protect the anonymity of the soldiers reporting to him and refused to verify any of the details.
And that is pretty suspicious! If no reporter, not even Jonathan Larsen it seems, has been able to verify that these complaints are real and are coming from real soldiers, we can’t just assume that it’s true, even if it does match up with what we’ve seen happen in the past.
So, where do I fall on all this? I’m taking the easy way out: I think everyone is right. And also wrong.
I absolutely 100% believe that some military leaders are using Evangelical Christian end times prophesy to generate excitement for troops to go into battle. That’s been happening for years, and they need it now more than ever considering that the past few wars in the Middle East were actually popular, while this one is not. Even the average red-blooded flag-waving Fox News viewer knows that this is Israel’s war, that Iran posed no threat to Americans, and that all of our lives are about to get worse because of it. “Go die in a desert because Zionists paid a pedophile to start an unnecessary war” isn’t exactly the stuff of Patton. Why not tell the poor saps that they’re going on a Holy crusade to put down the infidels and hasten the return of Jesus Christ?
Mehta argues that such an argument wouldn’t “make sense” theologically, because Pete Hegseth, who runs the “Department of War,” and his pastor “rarely, if ever, make the same theological argument that this commander made.” Mehta asserts without evidence that Hegseth does not believe it. I have zero idea of where he got this idea, but Hegseth is a member of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, which was formed in the late ‘90s and includes Presbyterian, Continental Reformed, and Reformed Baptist members. I grew up in a pretty standard Baptist church. I was taught, and fully believed, this End Times prophecy. There’s really no theological reason why Hegseth wouldn’t believe it, too, but that’s actually besides the point. Donald Trump runs the entire military and doesn’t believe in anything at all except for money and bigotry. Does that mean no one who works for him is an Evangelical Christian? Tough to argue.
Mehta goes on to write, “Among the people who believe that nonsense, conquering Iran isn’t usually part of the narrative.” Again, no reference but I can tell you without a doubt that that is 100% wrong. I didn’t randomly pick Iran (and Russia) as the Big Bads in my 2021 post: I named those countries because they are the countries that the majority of evangelicals believe will be pitted against Israel in the final war. Let’s go with the classic King James Version of the Bible, Ezekiel Chapter 38, in which the Lord says that Persia, Ethiopia, and Libya shall join with Magog of the North to bring war to Israel, at which point the Lord will fuck them up. I’m paraphrasing.
So Mehta is simply wrong on those points, which just leaves the shady nature of Weinstein himself as reason to doubt the accounts. But when I consider that our historical knowledge that this End Times prophecy has helped drive support for past wars in the Middle East, and the fact that other people ARE reporting separate but similar accounts as Weinstein, I kind of have to say it’s likely true. For instance, Mike Prysner is the Executive Director of the Center on Conscience and War, a group that dates back to 1940 and has served as an important resource for conscientious objectors in the US military. Prysner claimed that he spoke to the mother of a service member who was allowed one final call home before being shipped off, and that member reported that “his commander said they were doing this to bring about the second coming of Christ.”
Is it possible Prysner, or the mother, or her son, made that up? Sure. It’s fourth hand, after all. But this administration is absolutely infested with evangelicals who believe in this prophesy, like Trump’s advisor Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham, who I got to see at a stadium show once with the rest of my End Times Evangelical youth group. It’s hardly an extraordinary claim that these guys are trying to motivate young soldiers to go die in Iran using religious arguments.
All that said, I do appreciate Mehta pointing out how shady Mikey Weinstein is. He also linked to this bio where Weinstein calls himself “the undisputed leader of the national movement to restore the obliterated wall separating church and state” and brags about being officially nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize EIGHT times! That’s also how I learned that MRFF’s website is absolutely flooded with AI slop–always a red flag, waved by a tiny kitten with giant cartoon eyes flying on a fighter jet for some reason.
So yeah, I appreciate the warning to maybe think before platforming Weinstein himself. That said, I’m not too twisted up about anyone spreading the news that our murderous and pointless war, undertaken alongside our trusted ally of Israel, is being propped up by Evangelical Christians who fervently hope that this will lead to the horrific deaths and eternal damnation of all Muslims and Jews on Earth. So godly.
