Steven Davi­son on modern-day echos of bib­li­cal apoc­a­lyp­tic move­ments:

Yet, times like this pro­vide unusu­al oppor­tu­ni­ty. The ancient Israelites were in fact returned to their home­land, though the redemp­tion was incom­plete and came with a cost. The Mac­cabees won their revolt and threw the Seleu­cids out, though the sys­tem they set up was itself cor­rupt and they were con­quered again a cen­tu­ry lat­er by the Romans. The Chris­tians sur­vived Dio­clet­ian only to betray Jesus’ gospel by estab­lish­ing an impe­r­i­al church. The apoc­a­lyp­tic dream is nev­er ful­ly defeat­ed and nev­er ful­ly real­ized. We lurch for­ward, fall back, lurch for­ward again.

I recent­ly read a book review by Jodi Eichler-Levine on a sim­i­lar sub­ject, Why Chris­t­ian nation­al­ists think Trump is heaven-sent.  The reviewed book’s author, Kather­ine Stew­art, has inter­est­ing obser­va­tions about the psy­cho­log­i­cal world­view of today’s polit­i­cal Evangelicals.

Some of the peo­ple I know who fall into this cat­e­go­ry are very nice, well-meaning peo­ple. Char­i­ta­ble, kind. They’re just try­ing to be good peo­ple. They want to like God, they want to like life. They’re just not con­nect­ing the dots to see how they’re being used to pro­mote an agen­da that’s not at all God­ly. The most inter­est­ing part of the review (and pre­sum­ably Stewart’s book) was the obser­va­tion that the Bible has a very monar­chist world­view that con­tributes to cur­rent Evan­gel­i­cal pol­i­tics. The con­cept of the Old Tes­ta­ment “imper­fect ves­sel” sto­ries lets vot­ers write off atro­cious per­son­al behav­iors (Trump, Brett Kavanaugh).