Clash of Messianisms

 The Wall Street Journal ran a piece yesterday about how the U.S.-Israeli assassinations of Iran's senior leadership appear to have succeeded only in bringing a more hardline, fundamentalist faction to power. 

Specifically, the new generation of Iran's leadership—left behind from the first wave of the illegal U.S.-Israeli bombings and assassinations—subscribes to a belief in the imminent arrival of the Mahdi: a Messiah-like figure in Shia Islam. Believers in this theological doctrine apparently welcome the present war with the U.S. as the beginning of an apocalyptic scenario that will bring about the end of the world. 

This is bad—since it means the present generation of Iranian leaders will have little if any incentive to bring the war to a close. (The Journal piece notes that belief in the imminent arrival of the Mahdi forms a central part of the training of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard—the primary shock troops of the Iranian theocratic regime.)

What's even worse is that the U.S. leadership appears to hold the same belief in reverse. Pete Hegseth, a fundamentalist Christian who belongs to an extreme nationalist congregation, has praised the medieval crusades against the Muslim world and repeatedly insisted that God is fighting on the side of the U.S. Apocalyptic imagery features regularly in the rhetoric of Trump's evangelical defenders. 

As for Trump, he seems to have moved on from asserting merely that Christ is on his side—to saying that he is Christ himself. Earlier this week, he posted a now-infamous meme that appears to depict him in flowing Jesus robes, bestowing miraculous cures upon the sick and bed-bound. After tremendous pushback, Trump took it down—only to replace it later in the week with a picture of Trump and Jesus enjoying a bro-hug. 

Plainly, a significant body of fundamentalist Americans believe that Trump's war is going to hasten the apocalypse too. 

Unfortunately, this is not an entirely new problem in American history. Back during the Bush years, the American weirdo right was full of prophetic conviction that the Iraq war had some sort of scriptural mandate. And during Ronald Reagan's long flirtation with the Christian Right, he appears to have entertained some millenarian beliefs of his own. 

Hunter S. Thompson reports a possibly apocryphal story about a set of correspondence between Reagan and Frank Sinatra, in his book Hey Rube. "They both believed very deeply in the book of Revelation," Thompson writes. "Reagan even went so far as to say to his buddy, 'We are screwed, Frankie. We are the ones who will have to face the end of the World.'" 

This is the sort of belief—much like Mahdism or the Trump-Hegseth administration's apparent belief in the imminent coming of the Antichrist—that have a tendency to become self-fulfilling. The U.S. president is one of the few people on the face of the Earth who not only might believe the end of the world is at hand—but who has the actual power to end it himself, if he is so inclined. 

Indeed, the people running our country appear "hell bent on a self fulfilling prophecy," as a character in a William Gaddis novel (Carpenter's Gothic) described the apocalyptic Christian Right in the 1980s, with their belief in an imminent Armageddon. Even if their theology is wrong, they seemed to be doing all in their power to bring about the end times that they are so often warning us to expect. 

All we can do, in the face of such threats, is to repeat Louis MacNeice's prayer on behalf of the unborn: "O hear me, / Let not the man who is beast or who thinks he is God / Come near me!"