• Dolores [love/loves]
    ·
    7 months ago

    milennarianism requires the twinge of new developments to get the ball rolling, but once it starts 'you can't expect god to do all the work' and 'we need to prepare' apocalyptic ideology start mixing together & spawning actual activist tendencies. this is where you get people selling all their belongings, long distance pilgrimage/migration, novel social organization, and for people with state power, an exercise of it (usually on vulnerable people).

    so in this case evangelicals haven't been constantly on an israel apocalypse fever for the 200 or so years whereever you wana peg 'evangelicalism', but it springs from the simple existence of israel which checks one of the prophetic boxes in their interpretation, and then right now they're having a war & spiked the interest because they think there's a bigger opportunity. a couple years ago in the slow apartheid stage of the conflict, evangelicals didn't have the same excitement. unless Lindsey Graham was banging a proliferation drum for the past decade, his statement demonstrates this.