After the United States and Israel began bombing Iran, killing some of the government’s top leaders — including its supreme leader, Ali Khamenei — some of U.S. President Donald Trump’s most loyal evangelical supporters quickly framed the war as a religious battle.

On the morning the attacks started, American evangelist Franklin Graham, president of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and founder of Samaritan’s Purse, posted on X: “Pray for our military in the operation against Iran, for President @realDonaldTrump, and that the people of Iran will be set free from the bondage of Islam.”

More than 1,000 civilians have been killed in Iran.

In my book, American Evangelicals for Trump. Dominion, Spiritual Warfare and the End Times, I explain how one of the contemporary interpretations of the “end times,” premillennial dispensationalism, remains widely influential among U.S. evangelicals.

Dispensations are seen as distinct periods in history, believed to be appointed by God to govern and organize the affairs of the world. Dispensationalism functions both as a method for interpreting the Bible and as a framework for understanding its history.

It teaches that Christ will return before the end times and inaugurate a thousand-year reign of peace and justice on Earth, commonly referred to as the Millennium

Since the U.S. attack on Iran, Greg Laurie, founder and pastor of Harvest Christian Fellowship in California, has done a series of videos promoting his dispensational reading of current events. For Laurie, the next event on “God’s calendar” is known as the Rapture of the Church, when “born-again” believers are taken up to heaven.

In some readings of biblical prophecy, the Rapture is followed by the Great Tribulation, a........

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