WHAT IF THEY ARE WRONG?
Prophecy Whisperers, Armageddon Theology, and the Souls of American Soldiers
Michael Smith
WHAT IF THEY ARE WRONG?
There is a question that ought to be reverberating through every church, every seminary, every Pentagon briefing room, and every chamber of the United States Congress right now, and it is not being asked nearly loudly enough: What if they are wrong?
What if the men and women who have convinced themselves — and, far more dangerously, convinced the President of the United States and the commanders of the American military--that we are living inside the last chapters of the Book of Revelation--have simply gotten it catastrophically, irreversibly wrong?
The reports now surfacing in the aftermath of American and Israeli strikes against Iran are not merely troubling. They are, to anyone who takes both theology and democratic governance seriously, a five-alarm crisis. According to multiple accounts, American military commanders read to their troops on the eve of the attack a message framing their mission not in terms of national security, not in terms of international law, not even in terms of alliance obligations--but in terms of cosmic destiny. The soldiers cheered. They were told they were fighting a righteous battle to hasten the return of King Jesus.
Let that settle for a moment. The armed forces of the secular constitutional republic of the United States of America — a republic whose First Amendment was written precisely to prevent the entanglement of governmental power with religious conviction--went to war in the Middle East, at least in part because some of their leaders believe they are instruments of biblical prophecy.
The Prophecy Whisperers in the Oval Office
I have spent nearly four decades inside American evangelical Christianity. I know this world from the inside out--its extraordinary generosity, its genuine piety, its remarkable capacity for community and compassion. I also know its shadow side, and nowhere does that shadow fall more darkly than in the world of charismatic prophecy that has encircled Donald Trump since at least 2015.
There is a community of self-styled prophets--figures prominent in charismatic and New Apostolic Reformation circles--who have been whispering into Trump’s ear a narrative of singular destiny. Chief among them is Paula White-Cain, the televangelist prosperity gospel preacher who served as Trump’s official White House faith advisor and who has publicly declared that opposition to Trump is, in her words, opposition to God himself. White-Cain is not a fringe figure operating at the edges of this movement. She held a government title. She led prayer at his inauguration. She has functioned as Trump’s primary ecclesiastical interpreter, the person who translates the language of charismatic prophecy into terms a president can absorb and act upon. The narrative she and her fellow travelers have consistently pressed runs roughly as follows: God spared Donald Trump from assassination not once but twice because he is divinely chosen. He is a Cyrus figure, an instrument of God’s sovereign will, appointed to serve as the vehicle through which the prophetic clock of the end times is finally moved to midnight. The strikes against Iran are not geopolitical decisions. They are the opening movements of Armageddon — the gathering of the nations for the final battle, the very conflict that will compel the visible, physical return of Jesus Christ to the earth as conquering King.
I want to pause here and speak directly to those among my readers who hold dispensationalist convictions themselves--who have read Revelation through the premillennial grid, who find the Rapture a meaningful and scripturally grounded hope, and who may feel that what follows is an attack on their faith. It is not. Sincere, intelligent Christians have held versions of these prophetic views for generations, and the personal hope of Christ’s return is woven through the New Testament in ways no serious reader can dismiss. My concern is not with private eschatological belief. It is with something categorically different: the weaponization of that belief system as a justification for war, the use of prophetic language to override constitutional deliberation, and the subordination of democratic accountability to a theological timetable that no human being — not Paula White-Cain, not any self-appointed prophet — has the authority to set.
This is not a fringe interpretation whispered in obscure corners of the internet. It is being preached from prominent pulpits, broadcast across the largest Christian media networks in America, and — if the reports about pre-combat briefings are accurate — delivered to American troops in the field. The premillennial dispensationalist framework that underlies this thinking has been a staple of American popular Christianity since the publication of John Nelson Darby’s theology in the nineteenth century and its mass popularization through the Scofield Reference Bible and, later, Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth and Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series. Tens of millions of American Christians have absorbed this interpretive grid as though it were Scripture itself, when in fact it is a relatively recent theological invention with no consensus support in the history of Christian doctrine.
Netanyahu’s Calculation
Benjamin Netanyahu is many things, but he is not a fool, and he is certainly not a premillennial dispensationalist. Polling consistently shows that approximately 93 percent of Israeli Jews identify as secular or only loosely religious. The eschatological dreams of American evangelicals--in which the Jewish people are finally converted to Christianity at the climax of the tribulation period — are, to put it gently, not a vision that most Israelis find flattering or compelling.
Netanyahu uses American evangelical theology the way a skilled contractor uses a borrowed tool: effectively, efficiently, and with no particular emotional attachment to the implement itself. What Netanyahu wants is American political cover, American weaponry, American diplomatic protection at the United Nations, and American acquiescence to Israeli regional ambitions. The evangelical prophecy machine provides the domestic political pressure that delivers those things. The transaction is cynical on one side and sincere on the other, which is precisely what makes it so durable and so dangerous.
Ambassador Huckabee and the Covenant He Did Not Read Carefully Enough
Which brings us to a moment of extraordinary theological carelessness that occurred this week on national television. Mike Huckabee — ordained Baptist minister, former governor of Arkansas, and current United States Ambassador to Israel — appeared on Sean Hannity’s program and declared that God’s covenant promise to Abraham in the book of Genesis establishes Israel’s divine right to possess all the land from the Mediterranean Sea to the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, encompassing much of present-day Iraq and Iran.
One would expect a man who has spent his adult life in the Christian ministry to have read Genesis with slightly more care.
Here is the problem with Huckabee’s interpretation, and it is not a minor exegetical quibble — it is a foundational error that unravels the entire argument. When God made the covenant promise recorded in Genesis 12, 15, and 17, Abraham had no children. None. Isaac, through whom the nation of Israel would descend by way of his son Jacob, had not yet been born. Neither had Ishmael, through whom the Arab nations would trace their lineage. Neither had the six sons Abraham would later father with his wife Keturah after Sarah’s death. The text of Genesis is unambiguous: the promise was made to Abraham’s seed--all of Abraham’s seed--before any of that seed existed.
By Huckabee’s own logic--that the land belongs to the descendants of Abraham--the Arabs have as legitimate a biblical claim to that territory as the Israelis do. Ishmael was Abraham’s firstborn son. The covenant was made before Isaac was conceived. An honest reading of the text does not support the exclusive territorial claim Huckabee asserted on national television. It supports, at minimum, a recognition that the children of Abraham are a far larger family than the Christian nationalist narrative conveniently acknowledges.
This is not merely an academic point. The United States Ambassador to Israel publicly invoked a misread biblical text to justify territorial claims that, if acted upon, would require the displacement or conquest of millions of people across multiple sovereign nations. The theological carelessness has geopolitical consequences of the gravest possible magnitude.
The Question That Must Be Asked
I want to speak now not as a political commentator but as someone who has read the New Testament carefully and takes its warnings seriously.
The same Bible that contains the prophetic passages these movements cite also contains repeated, emphatic warnings about false prophecy. Jesus himself warned, in the Olivet Discourse recorded in Matthew 24, that “false prophets will arise and perform great signs and wonders, so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect.” The Apostle Paul warned the church at Thessalonica against those who would generate a “strong delusion"-- a phrase with terrifying implications when one considers what kind of delusion could cause otherwise decent people to cheer for war in the name of bringing back Jesus.
The tradition of Christian theology has always maintained that not every spirit is the Holy Spirit. The First Epistle of John commands believers to “test the spirits” precisely because the landscape of religious experience is populated by spirits that are not holy, that do not speak truth, and that lead their followers toward destruction while wearing the costume of divine revelation. What are the fruits of this particular prophetic movement? Soldiers going to war with eschatological fervor rather than constitutional clarity. A president whose catastrophic decisions are validated by men claiming to speak for God. An ambassador rewriting Genesis on cable television. A democracy steadily subordinating its secular governance to a theological framework that most Christians throughout history--Catholic, Orthodox, mainline Protestant--have never accepted.
What if the prophecy whisperers are simply wrong? What if they are not hearing from God but from their own ambitions, their own fears, their own intoxication with proximity to power? What if the soldiers who cheered — young Americans who deserve leaders who will never send them into battle for anything less than a constitutionally legitimate cause--were misled by commanders who had themselves been misled by a theological system that has no more claim to biblical certainty than a hundred other interpretive frameworks that history has generated and discarded?
The men and women who go to war carrying the conviction that God has personally appointed their mission do not doubt. They cannot afford to doubt. Doubt is not compatible with the certainty required to pull a trigger. But the rest of us--those of us watching from a distance, those of us who are not in the grip of an eschatological timetable--have not only the right but the obligation to ask the question they cannot ask themselves.
The Responsibility of the Rest of Us
I am aware that my readers grow weary of this subject. I understand the fatigue. There is only so much alarm a person can sustain before alarm itself becomes noise. But I am asking you to resist that fatigue for a few moments longer, because what is happening right now is not a recycled argument about the separation of church and state. It is something qualitatively different and substantially more dangerous.
American military power is being directed, at least in part, by a theology. That theology rests on a specific interpretation of biblical prophecy that is contested, relatively recent, and not universally held even within evangelical Christianity. It is being promoted by self-styled prophets whose credentials are self-issued and whose track record of fulfilled predictions is, to put it charitably, unimpressive. It is being carried into combat by soldiers who were told, on the eve of battle, that they were warriors of the Apocalypse.
History has seen this before. It does not end well. The Crusades were launched on similar convictions, prosecuted with similar certainty, and left a trail of devastation across centuries and cultures that the Christian church is still reckoning with today. The difference is that the Crusaders did not have stealth aircraft, precision munitions, and the capacity to trigger a regional conflict involving nuclear-armed states.
The American republic was built on a foundational principle: that no man, no movement, and no theological system has the right to govern the conscience or direct the sword of a free people by claiming divine authority. That principle is not under slow erosion. It is under direct assault by people who are entirely sincere, often genuinely devout, and catastrophically, dangerously wrong.
We owe it to those soldiers--and to every citizen of the republic they serve--to keep asking the question: What if they are wrong? And to keep asking it until someone in a position of authority is finally compelled to answer.
___
Dr. Michael A. Smith is a historian, scholar, and independent writer with nearly four decades of pastoral ministry experience. He is the author of From Christian Fundamentalism to Christian Nationalism: A Primer Detailing the Danger to America (2024) and is completing a doctoral dissertation at Liberty University. He has published in The Christian Century and Christian Daily International.
Thank you Dr. Mike for sharing this important response to major actions by our Secretary of War, et al...
The reports now surfacing in the aftermath of American and Israeli strikes against Iran are not merely troubling. They are, to anyone who takes both theology and democratic governance seriously, a five-alarm crisis. According to multiple accounts, American military commanders read to their troops on the eve of the attack a message framing their mission not in terms of national security, not in terms of international law, not even in terms of alliance obligations--but in terms of cosmic destiny. The soldiers cheered. They were told they were fighting a righteous battle to hasten the return of King Jesus.
Let that settle for a moment. The armed forces of the secular constitutional republic of the United States of America — a republic whose First Amendment was written precisely to prevent the entanglement of governmental power with religious conviction--went to war in the Middle East, at least in part because some of their leaders believe they are instruments of biblical prophecy.
The Prophecy Whisperers in the Oval Office
I have spent nearly four decades inside American evangelical Christianity. I know this world from the inside out--its extraordinary generosity, its genuine piety, its remarkable capacity for community and compassion. I also know its shadow side, and nowhere does that shadow fall more darkly than in the world of charismatic prophecy that has encircled Donald Trump since at least 2015.
There is a community of self-styled prophets--figures prominent in charismatic and New Apostolic Reformation circles--who have been whispering into Trump’s ear a narrative of singular destiny. Chief among them is Paula White-Cain, the televangelist prosperity gospel preacher who served as Trump’s official White House faith advisor and who has publicly declared that opposition to Trump is, in her words, opposition to God himself. White-Cain is not a fringe figure operating at the edges of this movement. She held a government title. She led prayer at his inauguration. She has functioned as Trump’s primary ecclesiastical interpreter, the person who translates the language of charismatic prophecy into terms a president can absorb and act upon. The narrative she and her fellow travelers have consistently pressed runs roughly as follows: God spared Donald Trump from assassination not once but twice because he is divinely chosen. He is a Cyrus figure, an instrument of God’s sovereign will, appointed to serve as the vehicle through which the prophetic clock of the end times is finally moved to midnight. The strikes against Iran are not geopolitical decisions. They are the opening movements of Armageddon — the gathering of the nations for the final battle, the very conflict that will compel the visible, physical return of Jesus Christ to the earth as conquering King.
I want to pause here and speak directly to those among my readers who hold dispensationalist convictions themselves--who have read Revelation through the premillennial grid, who find the Rapture a meaningful and scripturally grounded hope, and who may feel that what follows is an attack on their faith. It is not. Sincere, intelligent Christians have held versions of these prophetic views for generations, and the personal hope of Christ’s return is woven through the New Testament in ways no serious reader can dismiss. My concern is not with private eschatological belief. It is with something categorically different: the weaponization of that belief system as a justification for war, the use of prophetic language to override constitutional deliberation, and the subordination of democratic accountability to a theological timetable that no human being — not Paula White-Cain, not any self-appointed prophet — has the authority to set.
This is not a fringe interpretation whispered in obscure corners of the internet. It is being preached from prominent pulpits, broadcast across the largest Christian media networks in America, and — if the reports about pre-combat briefings are accurate — delivered to American troops in the field. The premillennial dispensationalist framework that underlies this thinking has been a staple of American popular Christianity since the publication of John Nelson Darby’s theology in the nineteenth century and its mass popularization through the Scofield Reference Bible and, later, Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth and Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series. Tens of millions of American Christians have absorbed this interpretive grid as though it were Scripture itself, when in fact it is a relatively recent theological invention with no consensus support in the history of Christian doctrine.
Netanyahu’s Calculation
Benjamin Netanyahu is many things, but he is not a fool, and he is certainly not a premillennial dispensationalist. Polling consistently shows that approximately 93 percent of Israeli Jews identify as secular or only loosely religious. The eschatological dreams of American evangelicals--in which the Jewish people are finally converted to Christianity at the climax of the tribulation period — are, to put it gently, not a vision that most Israelis find flattering or compelling.
Netanyahu uses American evangelical theology the way a skilled contractor uses a borrowed tool: effectively, efficiently, and with no particular emotional attachment to the implement itself. What Netanyahu wants is American political cover, American weaponry, American diplomatic protection at the United Nations, and American acquiescence to Israeli regional ambitions. The evangelical prophecy machine provides the domestic political pressure that delivers those things. The transaction is cynical on one side and sincere on the other, which is precisely what makes it so durable and so dangerous.
Ambassador Huckabee and the Covenant He Did Not Read Carefully Enough
Which brings us to a moment of extraordinary theological carelessness that occurred this week on national television. Mike Huckabee — ordained Baptist minister, former governor of Arkansas, and current United States Ambassador to Israel — appeared on Sean Hannity’s program and declared that God’s covenant promise to Abraham in the book of Genesis establishes Israel’s divine right to possess all the land from the Mediterranean Sea to the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, encompassing much of present-day Iraq and Iran.
One would expect a man who has spent his adult life in the Christian ministry to have read Genesis with slightly more care.
Here is the problem with Huckabee’s interpretation, and it is not a minor exegetical quibble — it is a foundational error that unravels the entire argument. When God made the covenant promise recorded in Genesis 12, 15, and 17, Abraham had no children. None. Isaac, through whom the nation of Israel would descend by way of his son Jacob, had not yet been born. Neither had Ishmael, through whom the Arab nations would trace their lineage. Neither had the six sons Abraham would later father with his wife Keturah after Sarah’s death. The text of Genesis is unambiguous: the promise was made to Abraham’s seed--all of Abraham’s seed--before any of that seed existed.
By Huckabee’s own logic--that the land belongs to the descendants of Abraham--the Arabs have as legitimate a biblical claim to that territory as the Israelis do. Ishmael was Abraham’s firstborn son. The covenant was made before Isaac was conceived. An honest reading of the text does not support the exclusive territorial claim Huckabee asserted on national television. It supports, at minimum, a recognition that the children of Abraham are a far larger family than the Christian nationalist narrative conveniently acknowledges.
This is not merely an academic point. The United States Ambassador to Israel publicly invoked a misread biblical text to justify territorial claims that, if acted upon, would require the displacement or conquest of millions of people across multiple sovereign nations. The theological carelessness has geopolitical consequences of the gravest possible magnitude.
The Question That Must Be Asked
I want to speak now not as a political commentator but as someone who has read the New Testament carefully and takes its warnings seriously.
The same Bible that contains the prophetic passages these movements cite also contains repeated, emphatic warnings about false prophecy. Jesus himself warned, in the Olivet Discourse recorded in Matthew 24, that “false prophets will arise and perform great signs and wonders, so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect.” The Apostle Paul warned the church at Thessalonica against those who would generate a “strong delusion"-- a phrase with terrifying implications when one considers what kind of delusion could cause otherwise decent people to cheer for war in the name of bringing back Jesus.
The tradition of Christian theology has always maintained that not every spirit is the Holy Spirit. The First Epistle of John commands believers to “test the spirits” precisely because the landscape of religious experience is populated by spirits that are not holy, that do not speak truth, and that lead their followers toward destruction while wearing the costume of divine revelation. What are the fruits of this particular prophetic movement? Soldiers going to war with eschatological fervor rather than constitutional clarity. A president whose catastrophic decisions are validated by men claiming to speak for God. An ambassador rewriting Genesis on cable television. A democracy steadily subordinating its secular governance to a theological framework that most Christians throughout history--Catholic, Orthodox, mainline Protestant--have never accepted.
What if the prophecy whisperers are simply wrong? What if they are not hearing from God but from their own ambitions, their own fears, their own intoxication with proximity to power? What if the soldiers who cheered — young Americans who deserve leaders who will never send them into battle for anything less than a constitutionally legitimate cause--were misled by commanders who had themselves been misled by a theological system that has no more claim to biblical certainty than a hundred other interpretive frameworks that history has generated and discarded?
The men and women who go to war carrying the conviction that God has personally appointed their mission do not doubt. They cannot afford to doubt. Doubt is not compatible with the certainty required to pull a trigger. But the rest of us--those of us watching from a distance, those of us who are not in the grip of an eschatological timetable--have not only the right but the obligation to ask the question they cannot ask themselves.
The Responsibility of the Rest of Us
I am aware that my readers grow weary of this subject. I understand the fatigue. There is only so much alarm a person can sustain before alarm itself becomes noise. But I am asking you to resist that fatigue for a few moments longer, because what is happening right now is not a recycled argument about the separation of church and state. It is something qualitatively different and substantially more dangerous.
American military power is being directed, at least in part, by a theology. That theology rests on a specific interpretation of biblical prophecy that is contested, relatively recent, and not universally held even within evangelical Christianity. It is being promoted by self-styled prophets whose credentials are self-issued and whose track record of fulfilled predictions is, to put it charitably, unimpressive. It is being carried into combat by soldiers who were told, on the eve of battle, that they were warriors of the Apocalypse.
History has seen this before. It does not end well. The Crusades were launched on similar convictions, prosecuted with similar certainty, and left a trail of devastation across centuries and cultures that the Christian church is still reckoning with today. The difference is that the Crusaders did not have stealth aircraft, precision munitions, and the capacity to trigger a regional conflict involving nuclear-armed states.
The American republic was built on a foundational principle: that no man, no movement, and no theological system has the right to govern the conscience or direct the sword of a free people by claiming divine authority. That principle is not under slow erosion. It is under direct assault by people who are entirely sincere, often genuinely devout, and catastrophically, dangerously wrong.
We owe it to those soldiers--and to every citizen of the republic they serve--to keep asking the question: What if they are wrong? And to keep asking it until someone in a position of authority is finally compelled to answer.
___
Dr. Michael A. Smith is a historian, scholar, and independent writer with nearly four decades of pastoral ministry experience. He is the author of From Christian Fundamentalism to Christian Nationalism: A Primer Detailing the Danger to America (2024) and is completing a doctoral dissertation at Liberty University. He has published in The Christian Century and Christian Daily International.
Thank you Dr. Mike for sharing this important response to major actions by our Secretary of War, et al...
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