The Evangelicals Who Think Iran's Protests Mean Jesus Is Returning
(Mother Jones) In Iran, millions of protesters have taken to the streets to protest the repressive religious regime that has ruled the country for more than four decades. The response of the government, led by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has been swift and brutal, with thousands of protesters reportedly killed. All over the world, onlookers are cheering the courage of the Iranian people who are risking their lives to fight for their freedom. In a video posted on X, Reza Pahlavi, the son of the shah who led the country for 38 years until he was ousted by the current regime in 1979, vowed, “We will completely bring the Islamic Republic and its worn-out, fragile apparatus of repression to its knees.” In a Tuesday post on Truth Social, President Donald Trump encouraged the Iranian people to “KEEP PROTESTING—TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!!”
But for some Christians, the Iranian protests are more than just a popular uprising; they are the fulfillment of ancient Biblical prophecies that foretell the second coming of the Messiah. Last June, shortly after the United States bombed Iran, I wrote about the US evangelicals who were cheering that move:
Broadly speaking—though there are certainly exceptions—many of the most ardent supporters of Trump’s decision to bomb Iran identify as Christian Zionists, a group that believes that Israel and the Jewish people will play a key role in bringing about the second coming of the Messiah. As Christians, they are called to hasten this scenario, says Matthew Taylor, a senior scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies in Baltimore and author of The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy. “The mission, so to speak, is to get the Jews back to Israel and to establish themselves within Israel,” he says. “Then you fulfill the preconditions, or one of the preconditions, for the second coming.”
The dark side of this theology, Taylor added, is that in this version of the end times, once the Messiah comes, the Jews will either convert to Christianity or perish.
Ben Lorber, a senior research associate with the far-right monitoring group Political Research Associates, explained via email this week that for Christian Zionists, Iran is “an embodiment of the satanic force of fundamentalist Islam, arrayed in a ‘clash of civilizations’ against the Judeo-Christian West, represented by America and Israel.” The uprising, therefore, is a good thing—but not only because of liberation from an oppressive regime. “An apocalyptic war between these players is often seen as a precondition and sure sign of the End Times,” and by extension, the second coming. ..................(more)
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/01/the-evangelicals-who-think-irans-protests-mean-jesus-is-returning/
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To the evangelicals, a cold day in Canada is a sure sign of the apocalypse.
Or identical twins.
2. It's so easy to juxtapose his blabbering on protest scenes in the U.S.