Michael A. Smith Visits With The Empty Envelope: Three Words That Were Never Meant to Be Earned

 

The Empty Envelope:
Three Words That Were Never Meant to Be Earned

The terms were stated plainly, and the Cherokee met them

Beginning in the 1790s, under Washington and his Secretary of War Henry Knox, the United States adopted what it called a civilization policy. The offer was explicit and it was made in good faith by at least some of the men who made it. Take up settled agriculture. Learn letters. Accept the Christian religion. Govern yourselves by written law. Do these things, and you may remain where you are.

The Cherokee did them. Sequoyah completed his syllabary in the 1820s and a people became literate in their own language within a few years, which has few parallels anywhere. They founded a newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix, printed in two languages. They wrote a constitution in 1827, modeled deliberately on the American one, with a principal chief and a bicameral legislature and a supreme court. They built farms and mills and schools. Some of them owned slaves, which was itself part of the performance, because the planter was what the Southern states meant by a civilized man.

Then Georgia moved to seize their land anyway, and they did the most civilized thing available to a people under a constitutional government. They hired a lawyer and went to court.

They won. In Worcester v. Georgia, in 1832, the Supreme Court of the United States held that Georgia had no authority within the Cherokee Nation. Chief Justice Marshall wrote the opinion.

They were removed anyway. A treaty was signed in 1835 by a faction with no authority to sign it, and in 1838 the army came, and something on the order of four thousand people died on the road west.

Consider what had actually happened. A people had been given a set of conditions, had satisfied every one of them, had then satisfied the additional condition of using the legal system rather than the rifle, had won on the merits before the highest court in the country, and had been dispossessed regardless. There was no point at which they failed the test. There was no test.

And the terms kept moving after that. In 1879 Richard Henry Pratt opened the school at Carlisle, and civilization now required the child: haircut, language forbidden, name replaced, the whole program summarized in Pratt's own formula about killing the Indian to save the man. In 1887 the Dawes Act arrived, and civilization now required the dissolution of the common land itself into individual allotments, with the remainder declared surplus and opened to white purchase. Ninety million acres left Native hands under that statute. Each redefinition arrived at precisely the moment the previous one had been satisfied.

By the summer of 1893 the descendants of those people were on the Midway Plaisance at the Chicago world's fair, arranged by an anthropologist from Harvard along a graded strip that ran outward from the white neoclassical core, exhibited to a paying public as specimens of what civilization had overcome.

I want to be precise about what that is, because the ordinary words for it are all slightly wrong.

It is not hypocrisy. Hypocrisy requires a real standard that the hypocrite fails to keep. The standard remains intact and the man is measured against it and found wanting, which is why the charge of hypocrisy is survivable and why hypocrites reform.

It is not a lie, exactly, because many of the men who administered the civilization policy believed in it. Knox appears to have meant it. A good many missionaries meant it and some of them went to prison in Georgia over it, which is how Samuel Worcester's name ended up on the case.

What it is, is a word that carries the full moral weight of a standard while having no test attached to it. It sounds like a measure. It functions like a door. And because nothing is actually being measured, the word can never be satisfied. It can only be conceded, by whoever holds the authority to concede it, at whatever moment and on whatever grounds he chooses.

Call it an empty envelope. It has the weight and the seal and the official markings of a genuine document, and there is nothing inside it, and that is not a defect. That is the design. A real standard can be met, and a standard that can be met eventually must be honored. An empty one never has to be.

The mechanism was not confined to Indian policy. Mississippi wrote it into its constitution in 1890 with the understanding clause, which required a prospective voter to read a section of the state constitution, or to interpret it when read to him, to the satisfaction of the registrar. Note the final phrase, because it is the whole apparatus. The white applicant satisfied the registrar.

The Black applicant, whatever he knew, did not. The statute never mentioned race and never had to. It simply declined to say what interpreting meant and left the definition in the hands of the man behind the desk.

Every empty envelope works that way. The virtue named in it is real and worth having. The authority to certify it belongs to one party. And the certification is withheld from whoever was already unwelcome.

The second envelope is more recent and less bloody, and I have been on the receiving end of it in a corporate setting, from a supervisor who meant something other than what he said.

The charge was that I was not a critical thinker.

Now, critical thinking is a real thing with a real literature. Dewey wrote about reflective thought in 1910. Bloom's taxonomy gave it a structure in 1956. Educators have spent a century specifying what it consists of: evidence weighed, sources examined and their reliability assessed, assumptions surfaced, alternative explanations entertained, conclusions held provisionally and revised when the evidence moves. Those are criteria. They can be taught, demonstrated, and assessed, and I have spent nearly forty years in college classrooms doing exactly that.

Observe, then, what is missing when the phrase is deployed as an accusation in a meeting. No evidence is cited. No reasoning is examined. No alternative account is offered. Nothing is measured at all, because measurement is not the purpose. The phrase in that setting means one thing, and everyone in the room understands it: you have reached a conclusion I did not want.

That is why the charge cannot be answered. A man accused of a factual error can produce the fact. A man accused of failing to think critically can only think harder, in public, in front of people who have already decided, and the harder he thinks the more he confirms that he is the sort of person about whom the question arises. The accusation is unfalsifiable, which is precisely what makes it useful, and the irony sits there unremarked: an appeal to rigorous thinking that is itself the least rigorous move available.

I did not understand at the time that I was watching a very old machine run. The vocabulary had been updated. Nothing else had.

The third envelope I will not define, because everyone reading knows the word, and because the argument does not require me to adjudicate it.

I will point out only what can be observed about how it operates. It began as ordinary language inside Black American speech, an instruction to pay attention to how things actually work. It was taken up broadly for a period. It is now used almost exclusively as an accusation, and it is used by people who do not accept the older meaning and would not use the word in any other sense.

Ask what it measures and you will find the familiar emptiness. There is no set of positions one can hold, or decline to hold, that reliably clears the charge. There is no argument that answers it, because it is not an argument. It attaches to a conclusion the speaker dislikes, and it attaches after the fact, and its function is to place the conclusion outside the boundary of serious opinion without the labor of engaging it. The authority to apply it belongs entirely to the accuser. It cannot be met. It can only be conceded.

Three words, then, across three centuries. Civilized in the nineteenth century. Critical thinker in the corporate twentieth. The third in our own. Each time the same architecture: a word naming a genuine virtue, the authority to certify it held by one party, and the certification redefined the instant someone unwelcome satisfies the terms.

Here is why this belongs in a religious argument rather than a political one.

A lawyer once asked Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life, and was sent back to the law, and answered correctly: love God, love your neighbor as yourself. He was told he had answered right. And then, Luke records, willing to justify himself, he asked one more question.

Who is my neighbor?

That is a request for an empty envelope, and it is worth seeing clearly what the man was after. He was not confused. He wanted a definition of neighbor that he already satisfied. He wanted a boundary drawn where he was standing, with the obligation stopping short of whoever he had in mind, and he wanted it certified by a rabbi so that he could go home justified. The question was not an inquiry. It was a request for a category he could pass.

He did not receive one. He received a story in which a man is beaten and left on a road, and two men with unimpeachable religious credentials pass by on the other side, and the man who stops is a Samaritan, which is to say a foreigner and a heretic, a member of the group whose religion the questioner considered a corruption of his own.

And then the question was taken from him and handed back inverted. Not who qualifies as my neighbor, but which of these three proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell among thieves.

He had come for a boundary and was given a road. He had come for a definition and left with an obligation. Every category he had brought into the conversation was dismantled in the telling, and the one thing the parable refuses to supply is the very thing he asked for.

This is worth sitting with, because it is the single clearest instance in Scripture of the mechanism I have been describing being confronted directly, and the confrontation is not gentle. The two men who pass by are not scoundrels. They are the men with the credentials. They are the ones who could have produced, on demand, a fully satisfactory account of what the law required. They knew what the words meant. They had the envelope, and they walked past the man on the road with it in their hands.

There is a word in current use for stopping on that road, and it is not a compliment.

I am not going to tell you what to conclude from that. Sheldon did not tell his congregation what to conclude either. He put a ruined printer at the front of a fashionable church and had him ask a single question, and then he let the people sit in it.

What would Jesus do?

#ChristianNationalism #ChurchHistory #FaithAndPolitics #AmericanHistory #PublicTheology

I'm always so grateful when I share and learn from this man... In this essay he forces us to think, doesn't he? So I wanted to support his words--you can listen or not to the videos I've added. It really is something that each of us must decide for themselves. Like the last video presenter, a retired Evangelical Pastor who got caught up in just how much has changed since his own group led the voting that got us where we are today... still trying to understand...

Gabby

Latest Essay from Michael A. Smith - Tried by Augustine: The Iran War and the Theology It Betrays

 

Tried by Augustine:  The Iran War  and the Theology It Betrays Michael A. Smith Saint Augustine of Hippo spent his career warning the church about a particular and recurring temptation: the use of God’s name to sanctify what God has not sanctioned. In The City of God, written as Rome collapsed around him, Augustine drew a stark line between the earthly city, which pursues power in the name of justice, and the City of God, which pursues justice even at the cost of power. Sixteen centuries later, the distinction has never felt more urgent. The United States is at war with Iran, and the men directing that war have repeatedly invoked divine endorsement.  Augustine, who gave Western civilization its first coherent framework for evaluating the morality of war, would not be impressed. He would be appalled. The Framework and the Facts Augustine’s just war theory rests on several interlocking criteria. A war must be declared by legitimate authority. It must be pursued for a just cause. It must reflect right intention, meaning the purpose must serve the common good rather than private ambition. It must be conducted with proportionality and restraint. And the moral responsibility of those who fight must be clearly defined and honestly owned. These are not suggestions. For Augustine, they are the theological gatekeepers between a justified use of force and what he called libido dominandi, the lust for domination that he regarded as the root sickness of fallen civilization. Let us apply each criterion to what actually happened. Legitimate Authority Augustine was unequivocal: only duly constituted authority may declare war. The purpose of this requirement was precisely to prevent powerful individuals from laundering personal ambition through institutional office. It demanded transparent process, accountable governance, and the consent of the body politic through its legitimate representatives. The 2026 strikes on Iran were launched without congressional authorization. Multiple legal scholars have concluded that the Trump administration bypassed the constitutional war powers framework. The administration’s own Secretary of State Marco Rubio acknowledged questions about the War Powers Resolution while simultaneously questioning whether it was legally binding. Legal experts have further distinguished these strikes from prior unauthorized military actions by noting that the justification offered was, in the words of one analysis, “speculative and pre-emptive” in a way that comparatively weakened any prior domestic legal rationale. This was not legitimate authority acting through established process. It was executive will asserting itself above the framework designed to constrain it. Augustine would have recognized the pattern immediately. He had watched Rome do exactly this for decades. Just Cause A just cause, in Augustine’s formulation, must aim at punishing wrongdoing, protecting the innocent, or restoring peace. Critically, it cannot serve “selfish ambitions.” The cause must be singular, coherent, and honestly stated. The rationale for the Iran war has been none of those things. Investigators and analysts have documented that the Trump administration offered shifting and contradictory explanations in the weeks surrounding the strikes: to prevent an imminent Iranian threat, to preempt Iranian retaliation after an expected Israeli attack, to destroy missile capabilities, to prevent nuclear acquisition, to seize Iran’s oil resources, and to achieve regime change. These explanations are not merely inconsistent. Several of them directly contradict one another. An “imminent threat” and a “speculative pre-emptive strike” cannot simultaneously be the justification for the same action. A just cause, by Augustine’s definition, does not require a rotating menu of rationales. When the stated cause changes depending on the audience, the cause itself has become a performance rather than a principle. The strikes were also launched during active negotiations between Iran and the United States. International legal scholars have noted that initiating military action during ongoing diplomatic talks violates the good faith principles embedded in the UN Charter. The bishop of Hippo, who argued that war must be a last resort undertaken only when peace has genuinely failed, would have had a great deal to say about that timing. Right Intention Here the analysis becomes theologically explosive. Augustine insisted that the purpose of war must align with God’s will, with justice and moral order rather than personal gain. He was particularly contemptuous of the performance of piety in service of power, the use of the divine name to bless what the divine law condemns. On April 6, 2026, President Trump asserted that God supports the American and Israeli war on Iran “because God is good, and God wants to see people taken care of.” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth went further, describing the conflict in terms of a holy war and, in a moment that strains credulity, likening a military rescue operation conducted on Easter Sunday to the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu invoked the biblical command to exterminate the Amalekites as theological authorization for striking Iran. Augustine specifically condemned the manipulation of sacred language to mask the libido dominandi. He argued that cloaking conquest in divine rhetoric was not piety. It was blasphemy. A war entered for mixed, contradictory, and self-interested reasons does not become just, simply because someone prays before launching it. The invocation of God’s endorsement is not evidence of right intention. In Augustine’s framework, it is the single most dangerous form of self-deception available to the powerful, because it forecloses the capacity for moral examination at precisely the moment when that examination is most necessary. Proportionality and Restraint Augustine was explicit: excessive cruelty, the lust for revenge, and the targeting of those who cannot harm you are moral disqualifications regardless of how just the original cause might otherwise be. Force must be calibrated to correct evil and restore peace. It must not become an expression of the will to dominate or destroy. President Trump threatened to destroy all of Iran’s bridges and power plants and warned that “a whole civilization will die” if Iran refused his terms. Military and legal experts noted that targeting civilian electrical infrastructure would compromise hospitals, clean water access, and the civilian population’s basic survival. A professor of military law told PBS that such rhetoric, if carried out, would constitute measures of intimidation against a civilian population, which is prohibited under United States law. International criminal law scholars have characterized the broader military campaign as a war of aggression. The founding chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court drew a direct comparison between this conflict and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Augustine, who condemned not only unjust wars but the spirit in which wars are fought, would have found no cover in the performance of restraint. The threats themselves matter morally. The intention to annihilate civilian infrastructure is a violation of just war ethics whether or not the infrastructure is ultimately destroyed. The soul of the commander, Augustine would remind us, is judged by what it is willing to contemplate. The Augustinian Who Stood Up Which brings us to the irony that Augustine’s ghost would find most instructive. When Pope Leo XIV, the first American-born pontiff and a scholar formed in the Augustinian tradition, spoke out against the Iran war on grounds of conscience, Gospel, and the Church’s historic commitment to human dignity, the response from Washington was immediate and contemptuous. The President of the United States called the Pope “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy.” He falsely accused Leo of supporting Iranian nuclear weapons. He suggested, with characteristic indifference to the boundaries between the sacred and the political, that Leo owed his election partly to Trump’s own influence. Vice President Vance, himself a Catholic, counseled the Pope to “be careful when he talks about matters of theology.” Let that sentence sit for a moment. A politician who has described a military operation as analogous to the resurrection of Christ, who serves an administration that has framed a war as divinely endorsed, advised the successor of Peter to be careful about theology. Pope Leo XIV responded with the composure that Augustine himself commended: “I have no fear of neither the Trump administration nor of speaking out loudly about the message in the Gospel.” He was applying, with precision and courage, the very framework that Augustine built: that the Church’s role is not to consecrate the wars of earthly rulers but to hold them accountable to a standard of justice that transcends national interest. This is the deepest Augustinian irony of this entire episode. The man most schooled in Augustine’s thought, the man most equipped to apply his framework to the present crisis, was attacked as weak and uninformed by the very administration that has been most aggressive in using religious language to justify its conduct. Augustine understood this dynamic as well. In the Confessions, he observed that those who misuse God’s name are rarely able to tolerate those who use it honestly. The Verdict Saint Augustine did not formulate just war theory to make war easier to conduct. He formulated it to make war harder to justify. The criteria are demanding by design. They require honesty about motivation, transparency about authority, coherence about cause, restraint in conduct, and genuine alignment between stated purpose and actual intent. The 2026 Iran war fails each test in sequence. The authority was contested. The cause was incoherent. The intention was performed rather than genuine. The rhetoric surrounding the conflict embraced the language of annihilation. And the one voice that applied Augustine’s own principles with theological precision was denounced by those who claimed to be fighting in God’s name. Augustine spent the last years of his life watching the Vandals besiege his city. He died with the walls under siege. He understood, from the inside, what it looks like when civilizations convince themselves that their violence is holy. He left us a framework to resist that conviction. The question is not whether the administration has invoked God. The question is whether what they have done can bear the weight of that invocation. Augustine’s answer, applied to the evidence at hand, is unambiguous. It cannot. Dr. Michael A. Smith is an independent historian, theologian, and PhD candidate at Liberty University, where he is completing an intellectual biography of Nobel Laureate Dr. Charles H. Townes. He has taught at the college level for nearly four decades and served in pastoral ministry for more than forty years. He is the author of From Christian Fundamentalism to Christian Nationalism: A Primer Detailing the Danger to America (2024). I had to add this...When those who try to claim something that is not true, as factual (see pic on video above) it reveals either supreme ignorance, or a conman who lies for his own benefit. But learning that a Godly Black man's race was changed??? That, too, just like this superb essay by Dr. Smith reveals! Choose carefully the path you will follow Gabby

What If They Are Wrong? Prophecy Whisperers, Armageddon Theology and the Souls of American Soldiers by Michael A. Smith, Ongoing Contributor

 

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...

Gabby