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PaperclipPerfector  20hr ago (text post)   2632 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 27, 2026

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To begin with, I don't know if you really want to be playing the "look at the sort of dumb people that exist on the other side" game, considering how much your side depends on the support of people who principally want Israel to exist so it can troll everyone and trigger a sequence of predetermined events that involves Jesus beaming them up into heaven before the UN institutes a one-world government under a Romanian dictator.

Bro, what? What on earth does this mean?

Bro, what? What on earth does this mean?

OP still remembers the top bestseller of the noughties. Now it is mercifully forgotten, but it was really big thing in halcyon times of Dubya's administration.

Thanks, I wasn't familiar.

It's the belief of a minority of American Evangelicals that supporting the state of Israel can bring about the events of the book of Apocalypse.

Most Evangelicals do not believe this, although they often believe that supporting a Jewish state on that particular plot of land is commanded by God and the country which does not do it will be punished for it, with no strong eschatological matrix for that belief.

It's very interesting to me that people never complain about evangelicals for interpreting Matthew 24:14 literally and always for supporting Israel. If the complaint was actually about "evangelicals trying to bring about the end of days" the complaint against evangelicals would be for evangelizing.

This is probably a reference to the Left Behind novels, using them as a synecdoche for the particularly American strain of Zionist Christianity notably prevalent in the Bush era, with its memes about support for the modern state of Israel being commanded by God, and the modern state of Israel being key to the fulfillment of various end-times prophecies relating to the second coming of Christ.

I might argue the prevalence of this memeplex in the present, but it has, regrettably, actually been a thing, and his description of it does not strike me as particularly uncharitable.

Thank you for the clarification.

The Dispensationalist view that (1) the Apocalypse of John was a coded prophecy about events in the near future and (2) the advent of events therein can be hastened by facilitating the events that are described therein was mainstream in American Protestantism since the early days of the Cold War, significantly carried support for Israel (under the idea that the events of the prophecy are set off by the reascendancy of Israel in its original location, followed by two nations called "Gog and Magog" waging a war of annihilation against it) and in particular re-peaked under the Bush administration. During the latter, the Left Behind series of books, which combined this theology with du jour political concerns of the US Right like opposition to the UN/international governance and socialism, was immensely popular, and random samplings of online protestant commentary from the era made it clear that plot points from the book (in particular, the ascendancy of a Romanian UN One World Government leader who is actually the antichrist) significantly coloured how pedestrian believers imagined the biblical apocalypse would play out in practice.

Thank you for the clarification.

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