[Note: This lengthy essay will likely be my last for a while, since I traditionally take a few weeks off this time of year. But I offer you something to chew on this Xmas season, something you desperately need to understand about a very strange contingent of this country, a contingent I was once a part of.]

“For many conservative evangelicals, Jerusalem is not about politics. It is not about peace plans or Palestinians or two-state solutions. It is about prophecy. About the Bible. And, most certainly, it is about the end-times.”

—Dr. Diana Butler Bass, scholar specializing in American religion and culture

he presidential election of 2012 was held on November 6. Appearing once again that week on The New York Times Bestseller list for Paperback Trade Fiction—in the number one spot—was the book Fifty Shades of Grey. That book had been on the list for 32 weeks. The number two spot that election week was Fifty Shades Darker and number three was Fifty Shades Freed, completing the erotic trilogy about consensual BDSM written by E. L. James.

Obviously, some pious folks on the right considered the popular Fifty Shades trilogy, affectionately known as “Mommy Porn,” a sign of the decadent times, even if some of the decadent readers were ostensibly followers of the decadence-hating Lord:

Tragically, the fact that professing Christians are tearing these books off the shelves comes as no surprise to those watching the spiritual climate of the so-called “church” today. There has been a sad display of sexual atheism that has been plaguing the church for a long time.

Christians weren’t just “tearing” libidinous BDSM books off the shelves, however. That same New York Times bestseller list posted a few days before the 2012 presidential election featured a book in the number eight spot called The Harbinger. That book—which had been on the bestseller list at that point for 42 weeks—was written by a Jewish rabbi who, unlike most Jewish rabbis, was a Christian. His name is Jonathan Cahn.

And besides being a Jew who believes Jesus is his savior, Cahn is a strange cat.

The full title of Cahn’s book does not pull any punches: The Harbinger: The Ancient Mystery that Holds the Secret of America’s Future. I won’t go into the spooky details, but suffice it to say that Cahn believes that just as God allegedly judged and destroyed ancient Israel for its collective sins, so too will he judge and destroy the United States, if we don’t get our shit together. Cahn believes the 9/11 attacks and the Great Recession were part of God’s warning to us to straighten up or else:

Before God judges a nation, He sends warning. But America, like Israel, has not responded with repentance, but with defiance.

Part of our national defiance was that election of 2012. The voters defiantly and devilishly elected Barack Obama president for a second term. And according to Cahn, they otta notta done that. God was not pleased because Obama supported a woman’s right to choose, a right that some see as a usurpation of God’s authority to wantonly terminate pregnancies himself. And God was not pleased either, according to Cahn, when the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage in 2015 and Obama celebrated by lighting up the White’s House in a rainbow of colors. Cahn said:

Mr. President, by what authority did you take the sacred colors of God’s covenant, the colors of His throne, and the sign of His mercy in the face of judgment and turn them against the purposes of God and the Word of God on which you swore your oath?

Cahn wasn’t finished:

The city on the hill has grown darkened. It has forgotten the God of its foundation. The temples of its culture have been expunged of His presence and are now filled with idols in His place. It’s forgotten the warning that was embedded in the vision of the city on the hill. For it was also written and prophesied, “If our hearts shall turn away so we will not obey, but shall be seduced and worship other gods, our pleasures and our profits, and serve them, we shall surely perish.” In other words, we will stand at the precipice of judgment.

Now, you might think that only fringy people like Pat Robertson, Ray Comfort, Glenn Beck, and the folks at World Nut Daily buy into this embarrassing nonsense. Nope. Cahn said back in 2013:

The Harbinger is reaching Capitol Hill and we have gotten word that about fifteen Senators and members of Congress are reading The Harbinger, they are reading the book.

Jesus. Allah. Buddha. Say it ain’t so.

In any case, fast forward to today. Cahn has written another book. This one is called The Paradigm: The Ancient Blueprint That Holds the Mystery of Our Times. Yep. This book piggybacks on the last one, but with more details about who is who. The Amazon summary of the book includes this:

Prepare to be stunned, shocked, illuminated, and amazed. The Paradigm will reveal secrets and mysteries taking place all around you and show you what you never could have imagined.

Yes, you never could have imagined, for instance, that Bill and Hillary Clinton are actually in the Bible. But there they are, albeit in disguise. And so is Barack Obama. And, you might have guessed, so is Donald Tr-mp.

I shit you not.

Bill Clinton is King Ahab, the seventh monarch of Israel, who was, you might suspect, a bad hombre. Ahab brought wicked idolatry to the Israelites through the agency of his nasty little wife, Jezebel. Of course! Hillary is, Kahn says, our very own Jezebel, who may not have plotted to give pagan gods like Baal official status in God’s holy land, but did turn America into a New Age paradise, complete with seances that, of course, didn’t really happen. Again, I shit you not.

Next up is Barack Obama. His biblical role is Joram, the son of, uh, King Ahab and Jezebel (you figure that out). Joram also became King of Israel. According to Kahn, Joram had “a continuous hostility to God,” you know, just like Obama!

Okay. We’re just now getting to the good part. Enter the “warrior.” Or, the WARRIOR! That would obviously be none other than Mr. Two Corinthians himself, Donald J. Tr-mp, playing the part of Jehu, yet another king of Israel. Kahn describes the man God raised up:

He’s a warrior. He’s not even a politician…He’s a warrior. He’s a fighter. He fights with everybody…He’s zealous. He is not gentle at all. He is coarse. He’s a fighter. He’s fighting everybody and he begins this race to the throne…and the Bible describes the race to the throne as, the word is “crazy.” They said he was crazy. He drives crazy. The man drives furiously. It’s crazy. But he gets to the throne. Even though it’s a crazy race, he gets to the throne…The zeal is a crazy zeal, but he’s used by God, and he’s the most unlikely person.

Now, at this point Kahn gets to the denouement. He says Jehu the Tr-mper has “a showdown against the former queen,” Jezebel:

So, you have the former queen, and you have Hillary Clinton. You have the warrior, you have Donald Tr-mp.

Well, what did Tr-mp do to Hillary Clinton? Naturally, Kahn says, against the odds and the pollsters, he beat her in the last election:

So, he wins. He now heads to the capitol city. Jehu heads to the capitol city. Now, why does he head to the capitol city? To drain the swamp.

Once more, I shit you not. Kahn doesn’t tell us whether Jehu hired a bunch of Goldman Sachs swampers to drain the biblical swamp, but that’s an aside to this theological farce.

Perhaps now would be a good time to explain what the Bible says actually (allegedly actually) happened at the hands of Jehu. First, Jehu killed Obama, I mean Joram. Then he turned to Jezebel, I mean Hillary. Wikipedia has a nice summary of her gruesome fate at the hands of the Old Testament Tr-mp:

Knowing that he was coming, Jezebel put on make-up and a formal wig with adornments and looked out a window…Jehu ordered Jezebel’s servants to throw her from the window. Her blood splashed on the wall and horses, and Jehu’s horse trampled her corpse. He entered the palace where, after he ate and drank, he ordered Jezebel’s body to be taken for burial. His servants discovered only her skull, her feet, and the palms of her hands—her flesh had been eaten by stray dogs, just as the prophet Elijah had prophesied.

Compared to that fate, Hillary’s defeat last year doesn’t seem so bad now does it? The threats to “lock her up” seem preferable to being defenestrated, trampled in the street, and turned into Purina Dog Chow at the urging of a prophet of a very pissed off God. I wonder why I didn’t learn that story in Sunday School? Political correctness?

Weirdly, all of that drama takes us to Jerusalem and Tr-mp’s decision to, eventually, put our embassy there and, possibly, bring on the Last Days, the End Times, or maybe, the final installment of The Hunger Games.

The ancient history of Jerusalem is as murky as it could be. No need to go deep into the complex of competing claims and the bloody history of the place. True-believing Jews believe King David conquered the city 3000 years ago and made it theirs. Bible-thumping Christians believe Jesus was buried there, until he wasn’t. Virgin-loving Muslims believe Muhammad was beamed up to, well, the Land of Virgins. The bottom line is this: the decision to move the embassy was designed to appease people like Jonathan Cahn and other wild-eyed evangelicals (and some equally wild-eyed Orthodox Jews) who believe Tr-mp is anointed by God to be his divine instrument, apparently a fitful fiddler fiddling with the fate of all of us. Speaking with once disgraced and still disgraceful televangelist Jim Bakker, Cahn said:

Jerusalem is the center of biblical prophecy, everything is centering on it, that’s the end game, that’s the final goal—Jerusalem.

Why? Because unless the “Jews return to Israel…and rebuild the third Temple of Solomon on the hilltop the Jews call the Temple Mount and Muslims call the Noble Sanctuary,” Jesus ain’t coming back anytime soon and there won’t be any End Times in which countless numbers of folks will be slaughtered. Thus, in order to hasten his return and start the carnage, shit has to start happening. And what better way to make shit happen than bringing in a shit storm named Tr-mp?

Jesus is supposed to “return to Jerusalem to rule the world from his throne on the Temple Mount,” says Pastor Mike Bickle, once associated with former Texas governor Rick Oops Perry, who is now Secretary of the Department of an Agency to be Remembered Later. I personally could think of better digs than the Temple Mount from which to rule the world, like a white sand beach in the tropics, but then I didn’t write the Bible.

In any case, the indispensable Right Wing Watch informs us:

Over the past decade in particular, Religious Right political gatherings frequently included Israeli flags, the blowing of shofars, and harsh denunciations of the Obama administration for supposedly having betrayed Israel. Religious Right leaders and allied politicians who have warned that God would send natural disasters and otherwise punish the U.S. for insufficiently supporting Israel or pressuring it to give up land in a peace deal include Liberty Counsel’s Mat Staver, “historian” and political operative David Barton and Texas Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert.

During the presidential campaign, some of Trump’s boosters declared that he was anointed by God, like the biblical Persian King Cyrus, who had freed Jews in his kingdom to return to Jerusalem. Likud Knesset member Yehuda Glick, who came to D.C. for Trump’s inauguration, which he called a “miracle,” said that if Trump moved the embassy, he would be “the latter-day Cyrus!” At a POTUS Shield gathering in March, a speaker suggested that if Trump fully embraced Israel, he could be famous for thousands of years just like Cyrus. And this week, after the policy change, Christian Zionist leader John Hagee returned to that theme, saying that Trump “will be remembered for thousands of years.”

Ah, Pastor John Hagee. When you see or hear his name, you know more crezzy shit is coming, like telling Tr-mp that people will remember him thousands of years from now. Personally, I wouldn’t want to live in a distant time and place where the folks had nothing better to do than remember a man whose pubescent intellect pokes through the cable glory hole every morning and is masturbated by the IQ assassins on Fox & Friends. But that’s just me.

Just yesterday Hagee, a big-time televangelist with a big-ass church in San Antonio, was on CBN News bragging a little bit:

What President Trump is doing is one of the most courageous political things that’s been done in Washington in a long time…President Trump, when I spoke to him in the White House about this several weeks ago, he said this very emphatically. He said, ‘Other presidents have failed you, but I will not disappoint the Christian community in this issue. I will stand with Israel, and we will at some point in time, move the embassy.”

Now that we know Hagee has Tr-mp’s itching ear, it’s time to get really technical and talk about the Jubilee, found in the OT. Hagee said he told Tr-mp,

that God measures everything in modules of 50 years. And I said this is a principle that’s carried out in Leviticus, the 25th chapter. I said, “If you look at 1917, it was a Jubilee Year, and the Balfour Amendment came, and then in 50 years, it was 1967, and Jerusalem was reconnected to Israel, And you add 50 to 1967, and you’re in 2017.” I said, “This is the year to move the embassy and make that declaration because it is a biblical timing of absolute precision.” Thank God, he’s going to do exactly that.

So, at the word of a grifting televangelist who is using a Bronze Age book as his guide, Tr-mp decides to make God’s train to Annihilation Station run on time. Ok. But all this complicated and self-serving ciphering has made me dizzy. But I’m not as dizzy as Pat Robertson’s son, Gordon, who said:

I believe at this point in time, Israel is God’s stopwatch for everything that happens to every nation, including America, from now until the Rapture of the Church and beyond.

Rapture? Did someone say rapture? Yippee! It’s about time we got to some madness made in America! The rapture is distinctively a home turf invention, an interpretation of scripture arising in the early third of the 19th century, with a man named John Nelson Darby doing the heavy lifting. According to End Time Ministries, the rapture is a magical escape plan:

At the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, all born again Christians will be caught up in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air (1 Thessalonians 4:13-18). At the sound of the “last trumpet,” the dead who were born again during their lifetime will be resurrected from the dead. At the same time, those who are born again and still alive on earth will be transformed instantly, from mortal beings to immortal beings. Romans 8:11 tells us that our mortal bodies will be made alive if we have God’s spirit living in us.

These flying Christians will, no doubt, cause quite a traffic jam, both up there and down here. But the rapture theory, the version of it that sees Christians rescued before all the bloody fun starts, is an important part of the whole nightmare. It allows many evangelicals to talk tough about the future, believing they will be hanging out at the Cloud Nine Sports Bar when the Last Game, the Super Bowl of Wrath, comes on.

One popular evangelical site says of that awful day:

The Final Holocaust is so terrifying, so deadly, so inescapable that God personally steps in to stop it lest not one human be left alive!

Ah! What a merciful monster! Praise be to him for that compassionate gesture!

The author goes on with his rapturous description:

In the Great Tribulation 2 ½ million die every day for 42 months. In Auschwitz less than a thousand died each day. That means 2500x as many people die every day. Or to put it in Auschwitz terms—the number of people that died every day at Auschwitz will die every 30 seconds in the Great Tribulation! Or in other terms living on earth will be like living in an Auschwitz death camp—and in death toll there will be the equivalent of an Auschwitz Holocaust twice a day for 42 months!

Oh, but that’s only halftime! There’s more:

One out of every two people will die during the Tribulation (see Rev. 6:8 and onward), some through the ravages of war, others by starvation, and amazingly many others by the ‘beasts of the earth’. So, whether by death that comes instantly and thus less dreaded or a slow and painful death that is lingering and agonizing-50 percent of all people will die. The world’s population was 6,415,574,176 yesterday, so that means at least 3,207,500,000 will die.

All of our trees, “everything green will be destroyed,” these strange Christians say. The sun and moon will grow dark, “as  nature goes into revolt.” Hell will let loose “hordes of locusts, the size of horses,” which “will be allowed to sting men like scorpions.” These “men will beg God to let them die but they will not die,” says the defender of the all-merciful Almighty.

One must keep in mind that these weird true-believers are actually looking for ways to speed up this scenario. Sometimes they get a little giddy contemplating the possibilities. The Christian Broadcasting Network’s Sr. International Correspondent, Gary Lane, called Tr-mp’s decision a “bold step” and “very historic.” Then he told us of its biblical implications:

For prophecy, many Christians believe that those steps will lead to a highway from Egypt through Syria, from Cairo to Demascus and through Jordan and Israel. It would be almost like a triangle there. The other significant thing is it may be setting the stage for the biblical battle of Gog and Magog—not the End Times as far as Armageddon is concerned, but the first steps before Armageddon….Very historic times and I think we’re going to see the best is yet to come.

Yikes. Tone it down, big fella. Your inner Tr-mp is showing.

All of this you can escape, presumably, if you’ll just send a seed-faith gift (start with $100; don’t try to cheap your way into heaven!) to the first telepreacher you see (or if you can’t find one, send the dough to me; I’ll make sure the Lord gets it). Oh, and don’t forget to vote for Roy Moore on Tuesday! The WARRIOR Donald Jehu Tr-mp needs him for his swamp-cleaning agenda in D.C.!

Needless to say, this is all nuts. But the gullible don’t think so. And the gullible vote. That is why we had the election of Tr-mp and why we are on the eve of possibly sending a theocrat in Alabama, with a penchant for pedophilia, to Washington D.C. The same people who believe in Bible prophecy, who believe when the time is right that an angry and vengeful God will send horse-size locusts to sting us, kill millions upon millions of us, make rivers overflow with our blood—just after he teleports born-again Christians into bliss—these same folks, at least many of them, believe that all of Tr-mp’s and Moore’s female accusers are lying, as part of a plot to thwart God’s redemptive plan. Whew.

While it is true that an overwhelming number of evangelicals—we’re talking about mostly white folks here—voted for Tr-mp, most of them didn’t do so because they expected Tr-mp to move our embassy to Jerusalem and hasten The End. There were many different reasons for their vote. But cultural grievances and fear—fear of dying, fear of God’s wrath, fear of facing hell—is always mixed in the electoral soup. The preachers who bank (literally) on these grievances and fear are out in full force these days. Their black-and-white sermons and public pronouncements; their insistence that Christian America is under an unholy threat, both from within and without; their framing politics as a good-versus-evil zero-sum game, has a profound effect, especially when the message is reinforced on Fox “News” and on talk radio and online. After all, if it weren’t for white evangelicals, Tr-mp would likely be in Moscow right now interviewing pee-shooting hookers for jobs at his yet-to-be-completed hotel there.

As for the Roy Moore-Doug Jones race ending tomorrow, a Pew study indicates that about one-half—one-half!—of Alabamians are white evangelicals. These folks are frequently bombarded with religious propaganda emanating from some very strange teachers. It is no wonder that Tr-mp seems like a persecuted hero to them, or that a gun-toting, teen-loving theocrat gets the benefit of their divinely derived doubt. As I said, that propaganda is rooted in grievance and fear, powerful motivators to believe the unbelievable—and powerful motivators to vote.

From the start I believed that the Democrat Doug Jones had no better than a two in ten chance to win in Alabama. Perhaps his odds are better now. Perhaps he will win, but I still have my serious doubts. I hope I’m wrong and people in Alabama surprise me. But no matter what happens tomorrow, this is bigger than just this one race. We still have the spooky specter of an evangelical-fueled Tr-mpism running and ruining the country, possibly the world.

The truth is that Tr-mp is using evangelicals, and evangelicals, mostly white, are using Tr-mp. He needs their votes and they need his judicial appointments, who will stop reproductive rights and gay marriage, two issues that to these zealots demonstrate our decadence even more than the success of mommy porn a few years ago. But there are some freakish evangelical extremists who are also looking to accelerate what they believe is taking way too long to actualize (for God’s sake, Hal Lindsey has been preaching this the-end-is-near hokum for almost 50 years and still going): a series of events involving Israel and her geographical and spiritual enemies that will lead to unspeakable destruction and the death of countless people—particularly and oddly, countless numbers of Jews.

So, we have Tr-mp’s plan to move our embassy to Jerusalem, seen by evangelicals as a pleasure-enhancing, Israel-affirming act that will, they believe, lead to the outpouring of God’s wrath on, of all people, the people of Israel. If Fifty Shades of Grey represented cultural degeneracy related to “the boundaries of pain and pleasure,” surely this strange evangelical eschatology represents something much, much worse. Because there is something disturbingly sadistic about people championing a foreign policy that they believe culminates in inexpressible suffering, while those raptured rapturous champions watch it all from the clouds.

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For your education or for your pleasure, your choice, I am posting two videos. The first one is the source of many of the quotes I used from Rabbi Jonathan Cahn. You really should watch the entire presentation, which has been viewed 1.2 million times. Marvel at the fast talk, the dreadful hermeneutics and theology, the slick sales pitch. And look at that audience, as the light goes off in their heads.

The second video is from this past weekend. It features two of my favorite peeps, Joy Reid and Frank Schaeffer, discussing the whole End Times nonsense. Enjoy!