Good Christian folk

All the classics are coming back: getting high on their own supply, becoming what they pretend to be, etc. etc.

Anybody who thinks they’re “not serious” hasn’t been paying attention.

These are people who LITERALLY believe in an imminent apocalypse, that will suddenly transport the righteous to a much more satisfactory ontological state, while leaving everybody else behind in a pure hellscape.

Until Trump took office, Ralph Drollinger’s Capitol Ministries, which organizes bible studies for political leaders (and, according to the organization’s Statement of Faith, teaches rapture theology), held group meetings in the Senate and House, but not the executive branch. With Trump in office, Drollinger saw an opening, starting a bible study for White House staff in March 2017 that a number of Trump’s Cabinet members have attended, including former Secretary of Labor Alex Acosta, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and former EPA head Scott Pruitt. The organization’s public list of sponsors includes Vice President Mike Pence (who has described himself as a “born-again, evangelical Catholic”), Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Housing Secretary Ben Carson, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, and Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue. David Jeremiah, the protégé of Tim LaHaye whose own series of nonfiction tomes attempt to present rapture theology in a more academic format, serves on Trump’s Evangelical Advisory Board (LaHaye himself served as the spiritual adviser to former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, but did not make it into the White House’s inner sanctum).

“Never have evangelicals had the access to the president that they have under President Trump,” Robert Jeffress, a prominent rapture theology pastor, told me in 2019. “He has made a unique effort to not just win their votes in 2016 but also to listen to them afterwards. If anything, [access] has increased. He has certainly made good on his promise to have an open-door policy.”