(One of the books coming out in October is an updated edition of As It Was in the Days of Noah: Warnings From Bible Prophecy About the Coming Global Storm from 2014.) According to Paul Djupe, a political scientist at Denison University, evangelicals were primed to buy into QAnon’s theories because they drew on the pattern of end-times theologizing they were used to. These theories are similar to premillennial dispensationalist beliefs that portend Jesus facing off against the forces of Satan in the final battle. The QAnon theories often showcase a messianic figure (Trump) assembling an army of brave Christian followers to take on scheming demonic forces and ultimately win in one great triumphant battle (“the Storm”).
It’s hard to ignore how aligned this framing is with QAnon conspiracy theories, which place Trump and good Christians at odds with the blood-drinking, child-trafficking, Satan-worshiping elites running the country. “It’s all about fighting one world government and the coming dominance of the Antichrist so we can stand against evil,” Sutton said. Trump didn’t frame his isolationist America First policies or his anti-FBI rants as a fight against the Antichrist, but his distrust of European governments and of his own intelligence and security agencies maps onto these cultural tropes and other long-held evangelical suspicions about the threat of satanic forces. Matthew Avery Sutton, a history professor at Washington State University and author of American Apocalypse, noted that Donald Trump, knowingly or not, tapped into a century of end-times beliefs by quarreling with NATO and criticizing the FBI and the “deep state.” In the Left Behind book series, which was published in the ’90s and early 2000s and which has had an enormous impact on how many Christians conceptualize the apocalypse, the Antichrist turns out to be a politically savvy secretary-general of the United Nations, which is then converted into a single world government. Secularism within the government and in public life, he said, has led to anarchy-and the “stolen” 2020 elections are the proof. But he said the pandemic had nothing to do with these beliefs. As someone who hosts the major annual conference debating these apocalyptic prophecies, he understands their perspective. Others, though, are eager to believe that Bible prophecies are already being fulfilled. We are living in the last days of the “church age,” he believes, but are not yet in the time of tribulation. Ice believes we live in unholy times and looks forward to the Second Coming. Ice is an evangelical and personally believes in a coming rapture, but he isn’t as eager as many other Christians to read the signs of its work in motion.
Tommy Ice, a retired theology professor and the executive director of the Pre-Trib Research Center, hosts an annual conference discussing the pretribulational rapture, which refers to a rapture-or disappearance of-the faithful, an event that in his belief will occur before a seven-year period of hellish events on earth. Why, at this moment, when the Christian right should be feeling more empowered, would the end of the world be so trendy? But it seems an odd time for doomsday fervor, given the ascendancy of the religious right in American politics and the current makeup of the Supreme Court.
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