Welcome to STRONGWILLED, the multimedia project aimed at helping survivors of religious authoritarian parenting methods develop autonomy and find solidarity.
Today, we’re re-playing an episode from early 2024 about the origins of Christian Zionism — with an updated introduction (actually, two updated intros).
The series originally had three episodes, and you can go back and listen to the other two episodes: one episode with Josh P. Hill and one episode with Kelley Nikondeha.
Also, you can hear DL’s story about growing up with a mom who was constantly talking about end times prophecy in this episode titled DL’s Story
You can listen here or find STRONGWILLED wherever you normally get your podcasts.
As always, this is a survivor-led and survivor-supported publication. If you appreciate our work (and our ad-free podcast!) please consider supporting us financially or sharing about the podcast on your social media channels.
[Transcript has been lightly edited for clarity]
DL: Hey everyone, this is DL and just a few hours after Krispin and I recorded our intro to this episode on Christian Zionism Trump bombed Iran. So we were not aware of that as we were recording this, but as you'll listen, we were talking about how white evangelical men were calling on Trump to do this. So we don't address the actual bombing because it only happened a few hours after we, we recorded this.
I wish this episode wasn't as timely as it is. But, um, anyways, here we go.
//
DL: Hello. Welcome to the STRONGWILLED Podcast. We interrupt your regularly scheduled mini series to bring you another miniseries. This is inception level STRONGWILLED content. I, however, know why this makes sense to do this right now. Krispin, what about you?
Krispin: Um, yeah, I mean, this is the second time that we have interrupted our regular thing to talk about Zionism.
DL: Oh, geez, louise.
Krispin: Yes.
DL: Zionism. It's like the terminal illness that won't go away.
Krispin: Yeah.
DL: It’s the cancer in my bones.
Krispin: I mean, that's the depressing part. We talked about this a year and a half ago and it continues to be incredibly relevant.
DL: Yeah. I've been really worried about Christian Zionism for quite some time and we did a three part series on it 18 months ago. And it is honestly time to revisit it.
Krispin: Now are you sure that? It's not because it's timely but also because we just needed a break from the hunger games?
DL: How is this a break?
Krispin: Yeah, that's true.
DL: How is talking about Christian Zionism a break? Now what we're gonna do is we're gonna replay an episode we aired 18 months ago called Christian Zionism 101.
But first we're gonna do some updates. Because some stuff has happened in the past 18 months, and the reason why I believe in talking about Christian Zionism fits directly into STRONGWILLED. And that is because the story of Christian Zionism, for one, is about authoritarianism, right?
And for two, it's actually a story of Christian publishing. And how Christian books, and Christian media spread these quite fringe messages all across the United States and, and honestly around the world that ended up impacting global politics.
Krispin: Right. I've been thinking about holding both of these parts of it.One part being this has had genocidal implications which are devastating. But also the origins of it are ridiculously almost hilarious.
DL: John Smith level, right? Right. Yeah.
Krispin: Joseph Smith?
DL: Yeah. What did I say? John?
Krispin: Smith
DL: It’s so John Smith coded, honestly, Joseph Smith and John Smith are the same thing, right? Yeah. In my book.
Krispin: I think you regularly refer to Joseph Smith as John Smith.
DL: It's one of my quirks.
Krispin: Then I edit it out later.
DL: Speaking of editing it out, I do remember looking at the stats on our podcast listens and the Christian Zionism ones were some of the least downloaded and least listened to, which was honestly sad for me. But it's not a surprise. However, it's a topic that I'm like, we gotta talk about it y'all, because it really is impacting us. Things are heating up in the Middle East with all this is going down with Iran.
And we do need to do a few updates, just you and I chatting real quick before we get to the episode.
Krispin: Mm-hmm.
DL: But I just wanna say like, this can be a tough topic. I feel like we cover it with a little bit of humor, but it does impact you whether or not you wanna believe it or not.
Krispin: Right.
DL: So, for me, the episode we're gonna play is basically centered around the origins of Christians Zionism, and how deeply anti-Semitic it is.
In that episode, we don't talk too much about what was happening in Gaza, in Palestine. But you know, that is just this huge shadow over this entire project. The real-world ramifications of Christian Zionism has been the decimation of the Palestinian way of life, and of the Palestinian people.
Krispin: Mm-hmm.
DL: I don't even know how to really say this, but it's like all their libraries. All of their schools, all of their mosques, all of their hospitals, like it has been decimated. Right. As we speak, Israel is not allowing aid to people in Gaza, so they are being starved in front of the entire world.
Krispin: Mm-hmm. And it’s being upheld by the US .
DL: I mean Yes. So like the US, you know, acts as if Israel is our closest ally, and that's because of evangelical theology. So I just wanted to share a few updated statistics about the toll of the Israel / US genocide against Palestine.
These stats are from June 11th: Over 55,000 people have been murdered in Gaza. Half of those people are women and children, and over 120,000 people have been wounded. As I said, Israel's refusing to let aid into Gaza, so now what is left of the population is starving to death. And now Israel is bombing Iran and it is involving the US, you know, in another endless war.
Krispin: Mm-hmm.
DL: And the reason why that pertains to this project is because who are the people who are frothing at the mouth for Israel and the US to bomb Iran are . . . do you wanna take a guess?
Krispin: The Christian nationalists?
DL: Yeah, but let's get even more specific.
Krispin: The evangelicals?
DL: Yeah!
Krispin: Uhhuh.
DL: The Evangelicals.
Krispin: I was just reading this morning about Greg Laurie, who was heavily featured in the Jesus People documentary that we talked about, but is like a big, you know, mega church pastor talking about, yep. This is what the Bible said would happen.
DL: It's exciting to him. Yeah. They love to be proven right! Which is funny because they never are, but they're always ready for it. But do you know who the US ambassador is to Israel?
Krispin: Mike Huckabee.
DL: Mike Huckabee. So, you know, people are like, is Mike Huckabee the most influential Evangelical in the world right now? Well, if he is, that sucks for all of us because a few days ago, you know, he sent a text to President Trump.
I don't know if you've heard about this.
Krispin: Yeah.
DL: He was basically like, God spared you in Pennsylvania when that person shot you just so you could have this moment, right? To do what God tells you. Don't do what I tell you, listen to God. And I know you'll do what is right, which he means, to bomb Iran. So I just think that's kind of scary. Guess who else is super into a war with Iran?
Krispin: Who?
DL: Well, how do I say his name? I kind of wanna mispronounce it.
Krispin: I was gonna say Ray Comfort, but you know how to pronounce Ray Comfort.
DL: John Hagee. Oh, okay. John Hague, who we mentioned in this episode from 18 months ago, he's super into this.
He's very excited. And you know what he's sort of like? He has basically been telling Trump that the reason Trump won is because of Evangelicals. And he was like, there's 52 million evangelicals in the United States. We are all pro Israel. There is no negotiating with terrorists. Not even an ounce of that.
You have to support Israel fully. If you don't, you're betraying the very people who elected you. So he's trying to put that pressure on. So he says 52 million, right?
Krispin: Yeah. So he's doing a Dobson thing. Dobson did this in 2004 with Bush, where he's like, I represent the Evangelicals, and if you don't do what we want, then we won't vote for you in the future.We won't support you in the future. Right?
DL: Yeah, yeah. So, John Hagee's organization, um, guess how many people are a part of it? His little Zionist organization.
Krispin: Oh, got it. Like people that are part of this like club. Yeah. Um I have no idea. I wanna 30
DL: million.
Krispin: I was gonna say a hundred thousand. I was way off.
DL: I mean, I don't know, none of these people are very reputable, so that's fine. Oh, wait, wait, wait. John Hagee's organization, Christians United for Israel has 10 million members. Okay, so what, what are we talking about?
Krispin: And does that mean people that are on the email list?
DL: Oh, friends of Zion has 30 million members. Okay. Okay. So: how many Jewish people are there worldwide?
Krispin: Um, I wanna say, oh, like, like Jewish and ethnicity? Like, I don't know how to define it . . . uh, 60 million?
DL: 15 million.
Krispin: Okay. So you're asking me all these number questions and I . . .
DL: Right. You're the audience proxy. Now you're supposed to be shocked. So be shocked!
Krispin: I am shocked. I mean so what you're saying is there are twice as many people allegedly part of this organization.
DL: Friends of Zion.
Krispin: Yes. Then there are Jewish people in the world.
DL: Yeah. And if there's 52 million evangelicals who are proudly Zionists, that is at least three times the number of actual Jewish people. And now again, not all Jewish people are Zionists, so that's kind of wild. Guess who else is super into us bombing Iran.
Krispin: Kirk Cameron,
DL: No the grandson of the guy that you're never supposed to talk shit about, even though he was really shitty, uh, from Wheaton.
Krispin: Billy Graham. What?
DL: Billy Graham's grandson. Who's always being shitty
Krispin: grandson or son? Franklin. Graham.
DL: Oh it's his son. Sorry.
Krispin: I was like lost
DL: You were lost because, yes, I lost it for you. I'm sorry. Okay. Billy Graham's son, Franklin Graham. Franklin Graham, is basically like Iran is full of terrorists, and we have to attack them.
So that's what he tweeted, um, on June 14th. So, great. All of these super cool men are really into this. Now, if you support, you know, John Haggy, how do you get involved? How do you support what's going on in Israel? Well. For the low, low, low price of $150, you can donate to his organization and get a Pray for Israel package, which will explain to you why Christians must support Israel, how you can pray for them, how you can be loud and proud in your support for Israel.
Only $150 does seem like a deal.
Krispin: Mm-hmm.
DL: I mean, especially if the end of the world is coming. Right. You should just spend your money. Right. Because that's what this all is about. They think the end of the world is going to come because of this, and we'll get into that in the episode. So there's all my updates. These men are still going strong. Um, these men have a lot of power and they are hurdling us into
Krispin: A very large scale conflict. I think that's the thing is like, I think what's wild is growing up evangelical, you have this sense of like, I'm part of a niche community be cause in a lot of ways you are, oh, we're the
DL: Persecuted minority, right?
Krispin: But I mean there is this sense of like in broader culture, you feel like an outsider. And, and I mean, there's so many different dynamics to that. Yeah. Right. Like we can see clearly that dominant culture is so impacted by evangelical values of heteronormativity, authoritarianism, et cetera. But there is this feeling of like, you know, sort of like being where this podcast started, where we're like, we don't know that many people that listened to Adventures in Odyssey growing up, right? Like it feels, you know, niche. So it's wild to have these quote unquote, niche theologies be what is driving national foreign policy.
DL: Yeah, it sucks. It super sucks. That's why I'm saying, I know why people didn't listen to this podcast when we first aired it, this episode, this whole series. But it's really important stuff. Um, you know, we have no control over Mike Huckabee, over Franklin Graham. But if you have family members who are Christian Zionists, you can stand up to them, right? You can interrupt their misinformation, you can call it out, you know?. Uh, supposedly my mom changed her mind and is no longer a Christian Zionist. I'm not sure if that's true, but you know, these things can happen.
They can change and, and you can also like, instead of just laughing this off or being terrified, just kind of see these threads. And for me, the main thread is Christian publishing and grifters. So keep that in mind as you listen to this episode, and we'll see you on the other side.
//
DL: hey, happy New Year! It's 2024. It's January 1st. That's when we're recording this, obviously. Israel is in the midst of this brutal conflict against the Palestinian people, and we're watching them be eradicated, and this is something that has been a part of Christian theology for a really long time, which is why I think it's so important to talk about today.
But, as we're here, at the beginning of 2024, I just want to say that at this point in Gaza there have been almost 22,000 people killed. Almost 9,000 of those people are children. There's 7,000 people still missing, presumed dead. And almost 60,000 people have been injured in Gaza.
Not only that, but the entire infrastructure of that part of Palestine has now been just decimated. Destroyed. So that's kind of important to talk about what's happening right now because all of this has been sort of foretold by Christian Zionists, and this has always been their end goal.
And I think that's a really sobering fact that we need to keep in mind as we talk about some of these pop cultural artifacts and milestones that people might have heard of before, I just want to couch it in this pretty devastating reality. So there we go.
Krispin: Yeah. Which is why we're talking about it now. Why we are interrupting our regularly scheduled programming. It's just super important.
DL: Yeah. Okay. Krispin. What do you know about Christian Zionism? Or were you raised with Zionism? Or can you, tell us what Zionism is? I just want to put you on the spot.
Krispin: I know. I know a little bit about it. I know sort of this idea that something about Israel and the end times and Israel returning to their land. And, so it's just sort of in the water, you know? I feel like it's part of the Left Behind series. I remember something about 144,000. I wasn't quite clear on what that was.
But I knew that there was a lot of – in my mind it was sort of lore. I know that sounds weird. But because I actually was in communities where some people took it very seriously and they were like, this is the third awakening, which means this is going to happen, that's going to happen. And then I also had people in my life that were like, this is just weird old theology that someone came up with 200 years ago, that isn't really true. And so I did have a little bit of distance from it because of that.
DL: Okay. That makes sense. So it was just sort of in the water, you don't have a lot of awareness of it.
Krispin: Right. Uh huh.
DL: So I was raised by a Christian Zionist mom, and she was super into it, super into the end times. She had a lot of issues going on. My dad was an evangelical pastor. Both of them were really into – well, maybe not my dad so much, but he was sort of in like that Jesus movement in the 1970s in California, which we've talked about on this podcast before. And the Jesus movement was really into this book called The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsay, which was published in 1970. My mom was super into that. Okay.
Krispin: I did not know that was a Jesus People connection. The Jesus movement.
DL: Well, they sort of adopted it. So Hal Lindsay is the person who popularized the idea that the end times is coming soon. And so 1970 he said that. But before we get to all that, we have to kind of back up and talk about somebody named John Nelson Darby, basically the father of what they call dispensationalism.
Krispin: Which, dispensationalism, I do remember that from Bible college. We talked about it often.
DL: Okay. That is also what I remember. So Krispin and I met at a bible college here in Portland, Oregon called Multnomah Bible College. And I remember being taught a lot about dispensationalism and in fact, I sent you a document if you want to look at it, Krispin.
Krispin: I can open it now.
DL: Do any of these images about dispensationalism look familiar in any way, shape, or form to you? You might want to scroll down a little bit.
Krispin: Oh, let see. Uh huh. I like that you made a little document.
DL: Look at that. That's the one I remember. The seven dispensations sort of thing.
Krispin: Oh yeah. Mm-hmm. The top one also looks fairly familiar, but yes. Definitely.
DL: Right. Okay, so, Krispin, what do you remember about dispensationalism as taught at our Podunk little Bible college?
Krispin: The way that it was described to me, Israel really screwed up. They forsook the blessing of God to be the chosen people. And therefore it was bestowed on the church. I like that I fit so many religious words.
DL: I know, I was like, should we have a tally?
Krispin: Right. But I remember being like, that is really messed up, that God is like, I offer these assurances over and over in, throughout the Hebrew Bible that I will never forsake you. And then it's like, just kidding, you screwed up so bad that I am giving this to the church now. The Christian church.
DL: Yeah, I mean, trigger warnings galore. Dispensationalism at its core is so deeply antisemitic. I don't think we've even wrapped our heads around it. But that's what I want to talk about today. Because modern day Christian Zionists believe that they are very pro- the Jewish people, or at least right now, they're the ones that are supposedly very upset about antisemitism happening on college campuses.
But really they're upset about people being pro-Palestine. So because at their core, Christian Zionists believe that all Jewish people who do not convert to Christianity will be the ones to experience all of God's wrath. You know what I mean?
Krispin: Right. Slow that down for a minute.
DL: Oh, I will go back to that. Don't worry, I'm just previewing. Okay. So Darby was this guy, and he's sort of interesting, he became a curate in Ireland and he helped convert some Roman Catholic peasants to the Church of England. But then the head bishop guy was like, well, all these converts have to now say that they'll follow the king of England.
And Darby was like, well that sucks. Why do they have to do that? They're Irish. And so he left. When he was 26 years old he fell off his horse and had this horrible accident and he hit his head and I think he broke his leg. And then that's when he started getting all these revelations from God.
Krispin: So he had a traumatic brain injury.
DL: He had a traumatic brain injury and sat down and read the Bible, specifically the books of prophecy. And he was like, oh, God's telling me all this stuff. So God told him a lot of stuff.
Krispin: So all this dispensationalism ,which is so common in evangelical circles came from this guy that fell off his horse and read the Bible.
DL: Yep. Right. And actually there's a bit of controversy around like, where did he get this idea of Christians being raptured out before the tribulation? So that's kind of what makes him different. So up until John Darby, everybody's like, Christians will be raptured at the exact same time that Jesus comes back for the second coming. And then of course there's all this stuff about the tribulation and the end times and the last apocalyptic battle.
But it's unclear, where this idea came that the Christians are going to be taken up out of the world and then it's going to be, this going to sound so bad, it's going to be the Jewish people who are left in Israel to receive the tribulations of the end times, and die. So that's actually where the word tribulation comes from. Because I heard that growing up. The tribulation is like the great suffering and all of that. And that's about it being on the Jewish people.
Krispin: Mm. Okay. I did not know that.
DL: Isn't that upsetting?
Krispin: Yes.
DL: So, here's another weird aside, I found some great articles unpacking the antisemitism in John Darby's beliefs and what has happened in Christian publishing in the last a hundred years, especially around these ideas by this guy Hank Hanegraaff.
DL: Is that how you say his name?
Krispin: Sure!
DL: He was the Bible answer man, which I didn't grow up with him, but I think a lot of evangelicals did. Well, he actually left Evangelicalism converted to.
Krispin: Eastern Orthodoxy.
DL: Eastern Orthodoxy.
Krispin: Which I just know because you told me,
DL: But he actually has some great articles that I will link in our show notes. And he basically is like, Darby's whole consensus, his whole, what dispensationalism can be kind of boiled down to because there's seven different dispensations, and Christians make it really complicated. But this is actually what he said: God has had two distinct peoples with two distinct plans and two distinct destinies.
Only one of those peoples, the Jews, would suffer tribulation. The other, the church, would be removed from the world in secret coming seven years prior to the second coming of Christ. So that's just the baseline of how you can say, this is what dispensationalism is. here's two groups of chosen people.
By the only one, true God. One of them is not going to be around for the apocalypse and will be privileged and prioritized and saved for all eternity. The other is not. Well, I mean, what do you think of this Krispin? Is that what you got at our Bible college? Is that what they said Dispensationalism was?
Krispin: No. Well, I would say it didn't focus on the Jewish people at all. It just was in a sense sort of like, oh, well the Jewish people, like we are carrying on their legacy. Without recognizing that, that the Jewish people continued to exist.
DL: Yeah, so I think what's interesting is for us being like 18, 19 year olds at a Bible college, that actually comes from a very long line of dispensationalist thinking…because, if you want to tell the folks listening, Krispin, what were all the theology books we were required to read? Where did they all come from?
Krispin: Dallas Theological Seminary.
DL: Dallas Theological Seminary in Dallas, Texas is basically the premier dispensationalist group. And so John Darby, the reason all this got popular is because, well, okay, I’ve got to go back. It might not just be him falling off of his horse and bonking his head because four years later he went to this sort of Bible conference and he heard this guy speak.
The guy was talking about this teenager named Margaret McDonald who went into a two hour trance at one of his revival meetings. Because he was like, one of the signs, well, the Second Great Awakening was happening and they were like, this is one of the signs that the end times is going to happen is all the gifts of the spirit are going to come back.
And so all these people started speaking in tongues and offering prophetic utterances. Well, this teenager went into this two hour trance and she was like, all these end times things are happening. You know, all the things we've heard in prophecies. But she was like, God's going to rapture his church, Jesus is going to rapture his church before the tribulation actually happens.
And so either John Darby had this idea when he fell off his horse, or he heard it four years later from a teenager and was like, I like that. And then he started incorporating that. So either way…
Krispin: Right. And what I found when you were giving me a little rundown of this beforehand, what I thought was so interesting is then he publishes books and it just takes off, right? It just takes one person to hear one story of a teenager, and then they publish a book.
DL: Yeah. And so basically how it got popular in America was in the early 1900s, his work and his sort of understanding of the book of Revelation and his idea of these dispensations of God, obviously prioritizing Christians way above Jewish people, all of that was put into the Scofield Study Bible, which became a very, very popular Bible in the United States in the early 1900s.
And so that's kind of how it just sort of disseminated throughout the culture. Now when looking at the history, the next big thing that happens is not only were all these fundamentalist Christians reading these study bibles with Darby's dispensationalist beliefs, then in 1970 is when we get back to The Late Great Planet Earth.
So Hal Lindsay was this Southern California guy, a Campus Crusade for Christ guy, and he was really impacted by the creation of the nation state of Israel in 1948, which anybody who loves dispensationalism, who loves Darby, who was a fundamentalist, was so into the creation of the nation state of Israel, because they believe that that legitimized all their beliefs.
They were like, this proves Darby was right. This proves everything because a part of these beliefs are– It's so hard to say this! It's hard. It's just hard. So this is what dispensationalism believes, again, this is Hank Hanegraaff, summing it up. So he's saying in the 21st century Christian beliefs had changed.
Krispin: In the 20th or 21st?
DL: In the 21st, so in the century we were born in. Due in part to The Late Great Planet Earth and the Left Behind novels, people are convinced that Jesus will come back secretly and silently to rapture his church. Not long after the church's glorious rapture, however, a multitude of Jews who have been systematically herded back into Palestine will be slaughtered in a bloodbath, vastly exceeding the horrors of the Holocaust.
So I think what we heard at our Bible college is, a lot of people believe the creation of Israel in 1948 was like, okay, Jewish people from around the world are coming back to the holy land. They are going to take over the land. They are going to make Jerusalem the place, and basically all Jewish people in the world will find their way back there.
What we weren't told as explicitly in our Bible college is, and then Christians will be raptured the heck out of the world, which is getting worse and worse and more and more bloody and more and more violent. And the Jewish people who are all congregated in Israel, the vast majority of them will be killed in this epic bloody battle.
Krispin: Yeah.
DL: Maybe 144,000 of them will convert to Christianity and then be saved for eternity.
Krispin: Saved for eternity. For eternity, not from…
DL: Not from the bloodbath.
Krispin: Right. And you said, sorry if I'm getting ahead, but you said that there were people even sort of calculating how much blood would be needed.
DL: Oh my God. You don't want to go down the rabbit hole of Christian Zionists who are into this theology because they, yeah, they go into the book of Revelation, then they calculate, like it talks about these rivers of blood flowing through the lands of Israel. And they're like, and this means, this is how many Jewish and Arabic people will die and their blood will be running.
And Christians are super into this because they're like, well, it's not me. It's not going to happen to me. God's coming for me before all this happens. So I think it's just such a sobering and such a disturbing and such a violent view of the world that, the way I characterize it is that people like my mom and Hal Lindsay and John Darby, they've basically been dreaming of genocide in front of all of us, over and over and over again, without being called out for it, and so that's kind of what I want to do here.
Again, I just think it's wild that people like Hal Lindsay had no problem with saying, yeah, what's coming for Jewish people is going to be way worse than the Holocaust, and this is from God, it's not us, you know, it's not my deal.
I don't know if you want me to kind of go into all of the antisemitism of dispensationalism at this point?
Krispin: Yes.
DL: So people who liked this kind of thing, which again was just sort of the bread and butter of conservative Christianity in the United States and in England, people who like dispensationalism, they tend to like other really antisemitic texts. Like, oh no, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which I'm not going to get into, which is this horrific conspiracy theory that still proliferates on the internet today. But places like Moody Bible Institute, Dallas Theological Seminary, they loved that book. You know?
Krispin: Mm-hmm. Hmm.
DL: They praised it. I can't – I don't want to say all of this stuff. But I just want to make it clear that dispensational Christians, evangelical Christians, they basically view Jewish people not just as pawns in God's great genocidal plan, but they view them as people inherently deserving of God's wrath and of total annihilation.
And to be clear, they think that about Palestinians and Arabs as well. There's no winners in the modern Christian Zionist mind except them.
Krispin: Is that because, in their mind, Jewish people rejected God and rejected Jesus?
DL: Yeah. Totally.
Krispin: And so there's this element of, it's worse than someone who had never come into contact with God.
DL: Yeah. Well let's get back to The Late Great Planet Earth. Hal Lindsay wrote this book partly because of the creation of the State of Israel, plus this huge war that had happened in 1967. And so he’s like, it's all happening guys, it's all happening.
Here's something he said about – I'm sorry, I’m not laughing, I'm just so horrified. But Hal Lindsay told people, other Christians, not long after their glorious rapture, a numberless multitude of Jews would be slaughtered in a bloodbath that would exceed the horrors of the Holocaust.
And he went on to predict that the brutality of the Beast, the Antichrist, would make the Nazi butchers look like Girl Scouts weaving a daisy chain.
Krispin: Oh my gosh.
DL: It's not him saying that! It's not him wishing that! It's just God. It's just God. So Hal Lindsay, this is where he's coming from with his book. The Late Great Planet Earth was supposed to be him just unpacking biblical prophecy, being like, hey guys, it's going to happen in five years. The end of the world is coming in five years.
It was really popular. So then it got picked up by a non-Christian publisher and they started selling it in the science fiction section of bookstores, and it became a bestseller, like a New York Times bestseller because everybody in the seventies was like, what's going on?
And like things are getting wild. And so conservative Christians loved it, hippy dippy Christians loved it. People who were just interested in the New Age and Tarot and all these things were interested in it. And the New York Times ended up calling it the book of the 1970s, like the bestselling book of that entire decade.
Krispin: I did not know that. I thought it was niche, Christian.
DL: Yeah. So if you have a Boomer in your life, there's a good chance they read this book. My mom was into it, and that I believe shaped the trajectory of her life and therefore mine. Because she ended up homeschooling me and my two sisters because of fears of the liberals and because the world was ending anyway.
She needed to make sure we were Christians and she just was obsessed with the end of the world happening, which is funny, since The Late Great Planet Earth was published in 1970. Did the world end in five years?
Krispin: No. I was going to ask what happened after five years.
DL: I was born 14 years later! But the thing about these Christians. Something always comes up and they're like, I wasn't wrong. I just didn't have all the information. And so now really the countdown is happening to the end of the world.
Krispin: It's like, recalculating, recalculating.
DL: Recalculating. And actually there are websites still up to this day. I remember when the internet first came into my home, my mom was on all these sites and there are these sites called Rapture Ready. I'm going to Google right now. raptureready.com. How close do we think we are to the end times? I want you to guess before I click on it.
Krispin: Okay. Uh, well, I mean, currently, yeah, I want to say within a year.
DL: Within a year? Well, I'm going to tell you. Sometimes these people are slippery, you know, they're like, I can't say. Huhh! We're two minutes away! Two minutes away. The hour is 2358. At 2400, the world is ending. I don’t know what that means, but that's what it says. We're nearing midnight. We're nearing midnight.
Krispin: That's a non-moving image.
DL: I bet it's always two minutes to midnight.
Krispin: Yes. I do.
DL: I’m sure it was two minutes to midnight in the early 1990s when my mom was really obsessed with that this is going to happen.
Krispin: It definitely was two minutes to midnight in 1999 at the end of the night.
DL: Well speaking of 1999 and Y2K, which again my mom was a huge believer in, and it turned, you know?
Krispin: Mm-hmm. Right.
DL: Maybe I shouldn't trust her. I'm starting to wonder about that.
Krispin: I just think God wouldn't be that obvious. You would think.
DL: But what's funny is humans do like to think about things like the end of a millennia. And so even in the 1970s they were like, what's going to happen in 2000? And they were pretty pessimistic. That's the other thing. John Darby Nelson was very pessimistic and that all fits into this. Everybody thinks the world's going to get worse and worse and worse and worse and worse. Christians will be raptured out. Huge blood bath. It all ends.
So back to 1999. By 1999, 35 million copies of The Late Great Planet Earth have been sold. So it continues to sell. It continued to sell, all the time. Here's something: Publishers Weekly did this, to my mind, sort of scathing writeup about Hal Lindsay in 1977. They said, “Hal Lindsay is an advent and apocalypse evangelist who sports a Porsche racing jacket and tools around Los Angeles in a Mercedes 450 SI. And even though his bestselling books of Bible prophecy warned that the end is near, Lindsay maintains a suite of offices and a posh Santa Monica high-rise for the personal management firm that sinks his royalties into long term real estate investments.”
DL: He’s a grifter, he's just a grifter. He sunk all of his royalties into long term real estate investments.
Krispin: Hey. I mean, he's just covering all his bases. He's like, either I get raptured or I retire.
DL: Love it. I love that this is the person who scared my mom's shitless and scared a lot of other people's shitless.
Krispin: Oh my gosh.
DL: And I think that's just kind of what the point was in a way, because when you're scared, you're a lot easier to control. When you're scared you work hard to maintain what you think will keep you safe. So there’s all that.
Krispin: I mean, what I'm really wondering is, and I don't think you have the answer to this, but how much is this still active? And then the other part is like, how much is this floating in the water? Obviously this was so popular in the seventies. I feel like the Left Behind craze has sort of passed.
DL: Passed?!
Krispin: That's my vibe. But maybe I'm just not in those circles. So listeners, please let us know. Where are things? What are you hearing from your Boomer parents? How deep is this? But I also want to say like I am sure that it is still in the water of evangelicalism.
DL: Yeah. I think if I asked my mom about The Late Great Planet Earth, she'd be like, oh, it's just about prophecies, about the end of the world. She wouldn't say, oh, it's about all the Jewish people are going to die a bloody death while the Christians get the blessings of God. But that's totally a part of it. And what's also weird about white evangelical Christians, there's also this huge movement of appropriating Jewish culture. I don't know if you went to a Passover Seder ever.
Krispin: I did not, but I know about this.
DL: I went to multiple ones. I learned how to dance. And it's just kind of even more disturbing to think about how Christians, even in our church services, especially Pentecostal ones who believe in end times stuff, they use the chauffeur horns. They take all these elements of Jewish culture while believing in their core that Jewish people are destined to die horrific violent deaths in the State of Israel. So that's another important thing, all Jewish people should eventually move back to Israel, where the majority of them will be killed.
Krispin: Right. So it's not about the establishment and protection of place where Jewish people are safe.
DL: No!
Krispin: You were so upset, you just – this is what I like about our new setup. I just saw you hit your glasses on the microphone.
DL: It's so upsetting. And so when I think about for one thing, Jewish people are not on a monolith. American Christians I guess are not a monolith, but at the same time, there are elements of western white-centric Christianity where this theology truly is baked into it. So not all Jewish people are Zionists. Not all Christians are Zionists, but if you don't take the time to actually think through, what is this all about, I think you're probably going to just sort of be on the Zionist side of things. And it's important to say for Christian Zionists – I'm not talking about Jewish Zionists here – for Christian Zionists, it is at its core a genocidal belief.
Krispin: Masquerading as the opposite in a sense.
DL: And it is truly about, this will usher in the end times. And so when I think about people who are in some of our highest forms of governance who are evangelical Christians who are pro-supporting Israel at whatever cost, they think this is ushering in the end of the world. And those are the people in charge of our government and they think the end is coming soon. So I just think maybe those people shouldn't be the ones leading us all.
Are we ready to talk about Left Behind?
Krispin: Yes.
DL: I always said I was never going to talk about Left Behind on this podcast.
Krispin: Right. Do you want to explain why?
DL: You explain why.
Krispin: Because you had childhood religious trauma around the end times.
DL: Yeah. I don't really like talking about it. Because it was so impactful to me.
Krispin: It is really sad and tragic. We'll just throw that out there.
DL: I'm going to sum it up. My mom was obsessed with the end times. My mom probably was a very depressed person. So she told me that the Antichrist was going to come before I was 16. She took me to these prophetic conferences where everybody always prophesied I would die a martyr before 16. I believed it. I was undiagnosed autistic. The only people in my life were charismatic Christians who believed in this stuff. They were all very excited about Jesus coming back.
Krispin: I mean, imagine this, this is like, you being a middle schooler.
DL: Or younger. Sometimes it was younger.
Krispin: Right.
DL: Because it kind of started when I was eight. This obsession. And so my two sisters were sort of like, I don't think this is real. I think our mom's kind of crazy. And I was not like that. I was like, Mom says God talks to her and I believe her. I had to believe her. She's my caregiver. And so I had no sense of my future. And this continued on right because I was a junior in high school when Y2K happened, and my mom believed that.
So I didn't apply to any colleges. I didn't get my driver's license. I was living in this panic state of the end times where the adults around me were like, yay, I don't want to be alive anymore, so I'm so excited the end is coming. I was not like that. So it was basically – I don't know. I don't know what a similar experience would be for people. There's that thing when parents get really into their kid having an illness. So that they get attention.
Krispin: That's true! Yeah.
DL: Yeah. Maybe that's sort of similar to how I was raised, but my mom, you know, was sort of into the Left Behind books. Although this all came kind of later, like I'd already lived through all this in my mind for years and years and years at this point. But I did read the Left Behind books for kids. Which is disturbing that they made these into books for kids.
Krispin: Yeah. Uh-huh.
DL: And yeah, people in my world were like, yeah, this is all true. This is all true. This is not just fiction, this is real theology. What was your sense of the Left Behind books?
Krispin: I remember being like, oh, this is true. Actually, I remember being really terrified. Really scared that I was going to get left behind. And then also having people in my life that were like, well, that's not really true theology. So I had a little bit of connection to reality, if we want to call it that.
DL: Yeah. And I think, again, what people kind of miss – because Nicholas Cage was in the main Left Behind.
Krispin: Right! I forgot about that. I thought it was just Kurt Cameron.
DL: No, there was a Nicholas Cage version and Chad Michael Murray.
Krispin: Oh my God.
DL: So this was extremely popular. I don't even know how many millions of copies these books sold. They sold a lot. Do you want to know what Tim Lahaye–
Krispin: Who was a therapist! Tim Lahaye was a marriage therapist.
DL: What does Tim Lahaye’s say about Jewish people?
Krispin: Do I want to know?
DL: And what do they say happens to Jewish people at the end of that 14 book series or however many books it is? Do you want to know?
Krispin: Yeah. Yes and no.
DL: “Tim Lahaye,” doctor, psychologist “Tim Lahaye uses biblical monikers such as the day of Israel's calamity to codify what he eerily described as the Antichrist final solution to the Jewish problem.”
Krispin: He used those words.
DL: Yes. “Like Lindsay,” – Hal Lindsay – “he's convinced that this time of national suffering for Jews will be far worse than the Spanish Inquisition of the 16th century or even the Holocaust of Adolf Hitler in the 20th century.
“According to Lahaye, the time of Jewish tribulation will be nightmarish reality beyond imagination. Take the horror of every war since time began. Throw in every natural disaster in recorded history and cast off all restraints so that the unspeakable cruelty, and hatred, and injustice of man toward his fellow man can fully mature, and compress all that into a period of seven years.
“Even if you could imagine such a horror, it wouldn't approach the mind-boggling, terror, and turmoil of the tribulation.”
Krispin: Wow.
DL: That's bad.
Krispin: Uh huh.
DL: Again in his view it’s Christians out. And it will be the Jewish people who receive the brunt of it.
Krispin: And this is this is the ideology that is running this 14 book series that is selling millions of copies worldwide.
DL: Yeah. And then there's also some horrid stuff in there about like, if Jewish people want to get out of some of this suffering or be in the millennia, they have to become Christians. Here's something in one of the books, one of the Left Behind books called Armageddon: The Cosmic Battle for the Ages. A person is talking to a Jewish person in the book and says,
“When Jewish people such as yourself come to see that Jesus is your long sought Messiah, you are not converted from one religion to another, no matter what anyone tells you. You have found your Messiah. That is all.”
So this is not about converting Jewish people. It's like, you're just doing what you were supposed to do all along. And this is how Christians view themselves. And this is how Christians view Jewish people as a whole if they come from these backgrounds of dispensationalism and end times apocalyptic theology. So what does that mean for today, Krispin? What does that mean for today?
Well. What is your sense of what white evangelicals in particular think about the conflict happening in between Israel and Palestine right now? I say conflict – that's not how I view it.
Krispin: Right. Yeah. We know. When I say we know, I'm like, yeah, it is so clear to so many people that this is a genocide.
DL: Yes. So how does this fit into white evangelicals?
Krispin: Right. Well, it it's not about the experience of these particular people. It's about these cosmic political events, right? And that's all that matters.
DL: Yeah. And so actually, the disputes over the land in Palestine are extremely important to Christian Zionists. Now I've been quoting a lot from Hank Hanegraaff, and again, I really recommend his writings about this. And there's a bunch of like sort of old white dudes who have been writing and saying this stuff is bad, Christian Zionism is bad for everybody and it's not biblical, it comes from John Darby and all these people are sort of extra-Biblical ideas.
And so there's this really interesting article that was published in 2007, by this guy named Charles Veenstra. And he's a conservative Christian, but he kind of goes through how things like the Left Behind novels really have popularized this idea of Christian Zionism for so many people in America and how that impacts our politics.
So I just want to say, here are the five like core tenets of Christian Zionism that he writes about. And this comes from a guy named Gary Burge. One is about the covenant. God does have this covenant with Israel, and then the church – God has always had a plan of redemption for Israel, yet when Israel failed to follow Jesus, the church was born as an afterthought, a parentheses, okay? So we're the new chosen people. It wasn't supposed to be like that, but it's kind of the Jewish people's fault.
Number three is the blessing of modern Israel, and so this is what Christian Zionists believe, that we must take Genesis 12 three literally and apply it to modern Israel. I'm going to say Genesis 12:3. You tell me if you heard this growing up, okay? “I will bless those who bless you. And curse those who curse you.” Did you grow up hearing that?
Krispin: Yes. Uh-huh.
DL: Oh my God. All the time. So that one of the main backbones of Christian Zionism. We, the church, need to uphold that so we will be blessed by God. So we take that to mean America. And we take that to mean the State of Israel. And we curse those who curse you, which means we are–
Krispin: –enemies with those who are your political enemies.
DL: And especially Arab nations. So to fail to bless Israel will result in divine judgment. And by that they mean the nation state of Israel. And then the fourth tenet is prophecy. The prophetic books of the Bible are describing events of today and not just events of history. And then modern Israel and eschatology, the modern State of Israel is a catalyst for the prophetic countdown.
If these are the last days, then we should expect an unraveling of civilization, the rise of evil, the loss of international peace and equilibrium, a coming Antichrist, and tests of faithfulness to Israel. Above all political alignments today will determine our position on the fateful day of Armageddon.
Since the crisis of 911 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, it has been easy to persuade the public that history is unraveling precisely as dispensationalism predicted. Now, obviously we've seen a huge uptick of that in the Trump years. Because I don't know if you remember Christian Zionists were super into getting the embassy moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
Krispin: Oh, right. Mm-hmm.
DL: So that happened. But now obviously this war that Israel's waging on Gaza and even sort of the international response to it, Christians in America are viewing this as, this proves everything to them. These are the last days.
So if you have someone in your life who maybe read The Late Great Planet Earth or Left Behind, they might be truly thinking we are in the last days right now. The sad thing is, and the thing, I feel like we just have to camp out over and over and over again, and this is what this guy, Charles Veenstra says,
“Most Zionists,” and by that he means Christian Zionists, “are more concerned with Israel claiming the land than they are that Jews become converted to Christ.”
So some people will be like, well, we care about Israel, we care about Jewish people and we care that the original chosen people become grafted back into it. But if you actually look at the theology and you look at how that plays out politically, it doesn't matter. People do not care about Jewish people converting to Christianity and being saved. All they care about is that Jewish people claim Israel and do not give up a square inch of it to anybody else, because if there's a two state solution in Palestine that undermines all of dispensationalism, all of end times theology.
Krispin: Wow.
DL: And so Christian Zionists have been the most intense people to be against a two state solution. And it's kind of, I mean, I can't go into all the history of how at every turn they have tried to say like, no, we cannot support this. And it's people like Gary Bauer, John Hagee, is that how you say it?
Krispin: Not sure.
DL: Jerry Falwell, you know, all these people, right?
Krispin: Mm-hmm. Of course. Well, and it fits, too, with hell and heaven theology. Christians are very accustomed to being like, yeah, there are huge groups of people that are going to suffer. And that's just the way it is, because that's the way God works. And so, I don't know, just as you're talking, I'm like, oh yeah, this. It just all makes sense. It just fits with the philosophy.
DL: So Gary Bauer, in 2003, said at this big conference,
“We believe God owns the land and he has deeded it to the Jewish people. A deed that cannot be canceled today and cannot be amended. This God has spoken clearly.”
Then he says, I will bless those who bless you. And again, in 2003, a group of 24 prominent Christian Zionists sent a letter to the president, and this is what said,
“Mr. President, it would be morally reprehensible for the United States to be even-handed between Democratic Israel, a reliable friend and ally that shares our values, and the terrorists-infested Palestinian infrastructure that refuses to accept the right of Israel to exist at all.”
Pat Robertson called the establishment of a Palestinian state Satan's plan. And Robertson went on to praise Israel saying the Zionist state was a part of God's plan for the end of time, and a precedent to the second advent of Jesus Christ.
Krispin: Okay. What is wild, before you go further, is this, I mean, it obviously sounds like religious conspiracy stuff. So what's so distressing is that this has played such a large hand in US international policy.
DL: Yes. And so all these people, so people like Pat Robertson had his show on the 700 Club. All these groups started really organizing in the past several decades, right? They're well funded, well organized. There's tens of millions of people who identify as Christian Zionists in the United States, more so than there are like Jewish people in America. And the primary aims of these groups was lobbying the American government to support Israel and providing financial support for, I'm quoting here, “for the settlers in the occupied territories in the West Bank, and including money to pay for Jews to immigrate to Israel.”
This is in 2007, this guy writing said, “A cursory examination of websites reveal that many sample letters to government officials, as well as appeals for funds for settlers. They also sponsor many trips to Israel.”
Woo! Thinking about all the different layers of this, like not only are Christian Zionists advocating for the US to fund Israel, but they want them to fund having Jewish people move back to Israel. They have resisted the two state solution. If you are wondering why is it so complicated in the Middle East? Why is there no two state solution? Well, I have the answer for you. It's Christian Zionists. It's American Christian Zionists who believe that the end times are imminent. This is really what is happening.
Krispin: So wild.
DL: And I think what I feel the saddest for is for Jewish people who want to be safe, have taken on as their allies Christian Zionists, without fully understanding the genocidal aims and beliefs that they have. They do not want all Jewish people to relocate to Israel to be safe. They do not believe that will ever happen. They think things will get worse and worse and worse until Christians finally are raptured and then the Jewish people are going to be left surrounded and be killed.
Krispin: Which is why – you brought something up as we were talking about this that I found really important to point out, which is, as we are looking at this conflict, we are looking at casualties, we're looking at human lives, we're looking at all these equations, and they're like, yeah, it's the end times. Of course people are going to die. So many people are going to die. It doesn't matter.
DL: Exactly. This has been foretold.
Krispin: It doesn't matter who dies. It matters that the State of Israel keeps its borders so that Jesus can come back, which is such a different way of computing what makes a war or military action good or not.
DL: Yeah. And so as a kid raised with this theology, I can just say the God of white evangelicals is a genocidal monster, and I reject it fully. It ruined my mom's life and mental health. It ruined my life in a lot of ways. It's literally ruining people's lives right this second. And I don't think we can talk about this enough.
And so the next two episodes we're going to be talking about these specific Christian romance novels that try to popularize this kind of thinking for white women who read books in the United States and get them to identify with this theology in a new way.
So, I don't know. Krispin, my tummy hurts just after talking about all this. But if you were raised white evangelical like us, this kind of theology and this kind of view of the world is in there. And it's time to take a good, hard look at what it is. I'm grateful to the Christians who have been calling out Christian Zionism and, you know, they use arguments like it's not actually biblical, and that's not my vibe anymore. There's some of this shit in the Bible. Does that make sense? Like there are parts of the New Testament that seem very antisemitic to me!
Krispin: Yes. It’s true. I'm just going to throw this in here because there's still a little bit of Bible theology nerd in me, but the new perspective on Paul folks, this is their thing, I think it is anti-dispensationalist. Basically they're saying the idea that God's covenant with Israel and all of God's promises are nil, does not make sense. So we need to somehow make sense of Christianity in a way that also honors the experience of the Jewish people with God, which I think is great.
DL: Yeah. The one thing that, about this last article that I was talking about, this guy's really big onto like the listening project. Like how can we tell if people are listening or not? And he's basically like, we can tell that Christian Zionists are not good at listening because they ignore three groups of people, over and over and over again.
One of the groups of people they ignore are non-Zionist Jewish people, which there's a lot of Jewish folks around the world who are not Zionists. Christian Zionists ignore them completely. Another group they ignore are Christians in Palestine, Palestinians in general.
I think we all know that. Especially Muslims. Of course, they're going to ignore Muslims, but they ignore Christian Palestinians and they always have. The third group that they ignore are non-Zionist Christians. And so you know, that's who you and I used to be. And I just think this is like a good framework.
If you have friends and family members who are part of this, they're in a cult. They're in a genocidal, end times cult, and they're not going to listen to you. And it's time to do what you can to minimize the violence of those beliefs and those toxic ways of being, and move on. And I would say start putting your energy into people who have a much nicer view of the world, what's coming.
Queer communities, people of color, they're focused on survival and survival for all. And that's who I want to partner with going forward. And I'm done, I'm done trying to talk to these groups that have shown over and over again that they do not listen. They don't listen. And if they aren't going to listen to these really important groups of people, especially during a genocide, I think we’ve got to let them be miserable old people who believe the end of the world is coming.
Krispin: I'm down.
DL: I don't know. That's just my thought and I'm determined. The best thing I can do, I think, to resist Christian Zionism and just the trauma of growing up with an end times mom, is to commit to live, is to live this life and to be here every day and to commit to doing less harm and to saying everybody in the world flourish.
I know that seems like really out there, but that's how I'm going to do it. That's going to be my rebellion, is to live and to actually envision a future that there's less war. The anti-apocalypse, as it were.
Krispin: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
DL: So that's kinda what I got.
Krispin: Yeah. I'm just so glad that you took the time to break all of this down. There's so many things here that I was exposed to in some ways. But, yeah, showing what was going on behind the scenes and how it's impacting now I think is so important. I'm so glad that we're setting this up because I'm excited for your conversations with other folks that are coming up as well. I just think that this was a really good start, a primer on like, how did we get here and how did white evangelicalism get here?
DL: And what's the root of the deeply antisemitic genocidal beliefs of Christian Zionists. So thanks for listening everyone. I know this is an intense one,
Krispin: right?
DL: Get ready for some romance books.
Krispin: You, you hit play expecting us to talk about The Good Place.
DL: Whoops!
Krispin: And instead we are talking about antisemitic theology.
DL: A dude who fell off his horse and change global politics forever.
Krispin: Well, welcome to 2024, y'all. Welcome to 2024.
DL: That about sums it up. Thanks for listening. We'll be back soon. You can always support us on Patreon if you appreciate the work that we're doing. You can follow me at my newsletter, Healing is my Special Interest. And Krispin is working on blogs. He’s got blogs going.
Krispin: Yep. And you can find us on Instagram as well. Take care y'all.
This has been an episode of the Prophetic Imagination Station Podcast. You can become a Patreon supporter and get extra episodes and a long backlog discussing evangelical artifacts like Brio Magazine, the Wow Music Series and more. Follow us on Instagram and find more information at our website, propheticimaginationstation.com.
Thanks for listening.
Share this post