Iran: The religious right’s new bugbear

[Ian David]

By Bill Berkowitz
Online Journal Guest Writer
Mar 23, 2007, 01:08

As the launching of the Iraq War marked its fourth anniversary on March 19, it is worth remembering that during the lead up to the invasion a number of conservative evangelicals voiced their support for the war: Richard Land, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission for the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, maintained that Bush’s action met criteria for a just war; the National Association of Evangelicals, which represents several dozen denominations encompassing more than 30 million American evangelical Christians, openly supported the war; Mike Evans, who heads the aggressively pro-Israeli Jerusalem Prayer Team, pointed out that war with Iraq could be a “dress rehearsal for Armageddon,” the fulfillment of biblical prophecy.

These days, while the Bush administration and beltway neoconservatives doggedly crank up the volume against Iran, they are again being joined by several notable conservative Christian evangelical leaders.

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Hagee leading the charge

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John Hagee, the pastor of the 18,000-member San Antonio, Texas-based Cornerstone Church and the head of a multi-million dollar evangelical enterprise, “seems to believe such a conflict is both inevitable and necessary,” The Jewish Week noted in early March.

Hagee, who founded Christians United for Israel (CUFI), a Christian Zionist lobbying group last year, is the author of a number of Christian-themed novels, as well as the recent “Jerusalem Countdown: A Warning to the World,” which maintains that biblical prophecy is currently playing itself out in the Middle East.

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