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Last week, the United States and Israeli governments attacked Iran in a dramatic series of airstrikes dubbed Operation Epic Fury. One of the bombings took out Iran’s 86-year-old leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei; another killed an estimated 165 people at a girls’ school in the city of Minab. In the days that followed, the US and Israel continued their siege, and Iran retaliated with strikes across the Middle East. Every day offered new evidence that the conflict appears to be spreading beyond that region: On Thursday, Iran struck Azerbaijan.
The death toll of the conflict is already high: According to the New York Times, by late last week it had surpassed 1,000, including six members of the US military and around 11 Israeli civilians. World leaders have expressed alarm about the expanding conflict. French President Emanuel Macron warned of “serious consequences for peace and international security,” while Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez vowed that his country would not “be complicit in something that’s bad for the world.”
But a powerful subset of evangelical Christians sees something positive in the rapidly spreading violence. The so-called Christian Zionists, who believe Israel must vanquish its Muslim enemies to usher in the second coming of Jesus, consider the current war to be a prelude to the End Times. As I wrote last year:
Some evangelicals interpret passages from the Bible to mean the Messiah will reappear only when Jews who have scattered to the corners of the Earth return to Israel. Once Jesus comes back, those who accept him will be saved, and everyone else—including recalcitrant Jews—will perish and be damned to hell. “I don’t want to say [evangelicals with these beliefs] don’t care what happens to the Jews, but they understand that there are some things in their theology that are necessary for the salvation of the world,” Rabbi Jack Moline, president emeritus of the religious pluralism advocacy group Interfaith Alliance, told me. “You have to break the eggs to get the omelet.”
I reached out to Matthew Taylor, a scholar with the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies and the author of the 2024 book about Christian nationalism, The Violent Take It by Force, and he explains that this particular kind of Christian Zionist wants “to see Israel become a much more dominant force in the region.”
It’s not just members of the fundamentalist Christian fringe who embrace this theology—some of its most outspoken proponents, such as US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, are top leaders in the Trump administration. Matthew Boedy, a religion scholar at the University of North Georgia and the author of a new book on Christian nationalism, The Seven Mountains Mandate, sees Operation Epic Fury as an indication that these leaders are now in a position not only to espouse these views, but actually to attempt to accomplish them. The Trump “administration and its allies,” he says, “are trying to fulfill the prophecy on their own.”
Shortly after the first bombs fell in Iran last week, a chorus of prominent Christian Zionists cheered. In a broadcast of the evangelical show “FlashPoint,” Lance Wallnau, a Texas-based leader in a rapidly spreading charismatic Christian nationalist movement called the New Apostolic Reformation, declared that the war was evidence that “Jesus is back on the menu.” He theorized that the conflict’s timing to coincide with the Jewish holiday of Purim, which commemorates Queen Esther’s triumph over a wicked Persian king who had been persecuting the Jews, was no accident. “During their feast of Purim, when they had a reversal of a destructive threat, we’re watching that reversal happen again in our day,” he said. Greg Laurie, a California pastor who founded a popular charismatic event called the Harvest Crusades, predicted the likely trajectory of events on his show, “Once the first domino falls, the others will fall: the emergence of the Antichrist, the tribulation period, the battle of Armageddon, the second coming, the millennial reign of Christ.”
“Once the first domino falls, the others will fall: the emergence of the Antichrist, the tribulation period, the battle of Armageddon, the second coming, the millennial reign of Christ.”
The timing of the attack to coincide with the holiday of Purim also struck Sean Feucht as propitious. A Christian musician who has convened prayer rallies on the steps of state capitol buildings across the country, Feucht posted to his 209,000 followers on X about what he saw as the divine alignment taking place. “Purim is a yearly reminder that even when He seems silent, He is actively orchestrating redemption,” he wrote. “Today, Iran occupies the territory of ancient Persia. As threats against Israel rise again from that same region, the historical echo is sobering.”
Then there is John Hagee, head of the influential Christian Zionist group Christians United for Israel. His audience is massive: Christians United for Israel claims more than 10 million members. He posted on his YouTube channel a video titled “God’s Coming Operation ‘Epic Fury.’” In it, he thanked God for President Donald Trump, “whose wisdom and courage have crushed the enemies of Zion,” he said. “Today we rejoice in the prophetic scriptures of Ezekiel, revealing God’s operation fury for the enemies of Israel.”
Another powerful Christian Zionist group is the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, which says it has raised a staggering $3.6 billion for Israel and to support the Jewish people more generally since its founding in 1983. Though its leader, Yael Eckstein, is an orthodox Jew living in Israel, 92 percent of its donors are Christians, mostly in the United States.
When I asked Eckstein last year whether she thought Christian Zionists were right about the role of Jews like her in their end-times scenario, she shrugged. “Everyone’s entitled to have their own beliefs, their own philosophy, their own theology,” she said. “We’ll have to wait and see.”
In the meantime, Eckstein continues to embrace Christian Zionist beliefs in her appeals to IFCJ supporters. “We know how this ends,” she said on IFCJ’s YouTube channel in a broadcast from Israel last week. “All of the evil that Iran has been exporting, all of the slogans that they’ve been yelling, ‘Death to Israel, Death to America,’ all the times that they’ve burned the American flag on the parliament floors—everything turns around for the good.”
In another broadcast a few days later, Eckstein told her viewers that “the holiday of Purim right now during this war is more relevant than ever before” because “the wicked leaders of Iran, right now, from ancient Persia, are still trying to kill the Jews.” Purim, explained Eckstein, is a time when “we have the ability to go into the kingdom, to go into the inner chambers of God’s kingdom, and to ask for anything we want, to ask for peace, to ask for blessings!”
Eckstein’s remarks echo another prominent theme in Christian Zionism: focusing on Genesis 12:3 in which God tells Abraham about the children of Israel, “I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on Earth will be blessed through you.” The idea that God will reward those who “bless Israel” with material wealth is a common refrain among Christian Zionist pastors. In a sermon last year, for example, Hagee proclaimed, “When gentiles start doing practical things to bless the Jewish people, God goes way out of his way to answer your prayer and to bring special blessings to you.” In a Facebook post, Terri Copeland Pearsons, daughter of the televangelist titan Kenneth Copeland, told her followers, “Standing with Israel isn’t just a choice; it’s a biblical principle that releases God’s favor and protection!” As I wrote last year:
The message that Christian Zionist leaders are giving their followers is simple: Their donations are part of a divine plan. As Florida pastor and Latino Coalition for Israel head Mario Bramnick put it at an event in Jerusalem earlier this year, “I literally feel God is giving Israel a blank check.”
Christian Zionists include not only powerful pastors and religious influencers but also leaders at the highest levels of the Trump administration. As I wrote last year, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, and House Speaker Mike Johnson have all embraced the rhetoric of Christian Zionists. Johnson has defended Israeli settlement expansion as being events that had been foretold in Scripture. Hegseth, a devout Christian who has also visited Israel frequently, sports a tattoo of a Jerusalem cross, a symbol from the coat of arms of the ancient kingdom of Jerusalem associated with the Crusades.
Johnson and Huckabee have framed the geopolitical situation in Iran in overtly religious terms. Huckabee, who is also a Baptist minister as well the ambassedor, says he has visited Israel 100 times. On a podcast last year, he described himself as an “unapologetic, unreformed Zionist,” adding, “there really isn’t such a thing” as Palestine. Days before the US and Israel began their most recent bombing campaign, when right wing broadcaster Tucker Carlson asked Huckabee if he believed that Israel’s right to land in the Middle East was divinely ordained, Huckabee responded, “It would be fine if they took it all.” (He quickly clarified that he meant simply that Israel has a right to the land currently within its borders.) At a press conference last week, Johnson serenely referred to Iranians’ “misguided religion”—an example of the Islamophobia that often accompanies Christian Zionism.
In a contrast that reveals some of the fissures within the Christian nationalist movement, Hegseth has not made explicitly religious statements about the military action in Iran—and that could be because his current flavor of Christianity does not espouse Christian Zionism. Hegseth, who used to be a Baptist, is now an acolyte of Doug Wilson, a self-proclaimed Christian nationalist pastor in Moscow, Idaho, who is the unofficial patriarch of the ascendant TheoBros movement. Unlike more mainstream evangelicals, TheoBros generally discount the importance of Israel and the Jewish people in ushering in the second coming of Jesus. Since the Hamas attacks on Israel of October 7, 2023, tensions over Israel have divided the MAGA movement, says Taylor. “On a deeper level, it’s also about this America-first kind of anti-interventionism, blood and soil, white Christian nationalism versus this more global, populist, authoritarian imperialist vision that is deeply Christian Zionist and pro-Israel.”
It is too soon to say how that deepening rift will influence the outcome of the war, but so far Operation Epic Fury still has broad Republican support. When the US House of Representatives had an opportunity to vote to stop the war, it instead voted to reassert Trump’s expansive powers; the Senate did the same. After the House vote, House Speaker Johnson issued a triumphant press release. “Peace is secured through strength,” he wrote. “That’s what this administration is demonstrating, and that is why America is the last great superpower on the planet, and all freedom-loving people around the world are grateful to God for that.”
