The U.S. president’s unilateral decision in December 2017 to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel understandably precipitated a storm of protest in the world of Realpolitik, and was immediately condemned almost unanimously by the United Nations General Assembly. Pundits attuned to the looking-glass world of Trump’s Phantasiepolitik astutely pointed out that this characteristically jaw-dropping decision (if we have any jaws left to drop) was not to be seen primarily as an expression of his support for the hard right of Israeli politics. Rather it signalled a concession to, or even more disturbingly, some level of actual belief in the eschatological, apocalyptic grand récit which conditions the way history is interpreted and experienced as a living reality by certain ultra-conservative evangelical Christians in America. This peculiarly theocentric lens has been shaped, not by the Enlightenment, by capitalism, or by the American Dream, but by a nineteenth-century form of Protestant fundamentalism known as dispensationalism (because it divides eras of history into discrete, divinely ordained dispensations within a 7,000 year-long narrative). From within the mindset it fosters, the secular vision of liberal humanism with its open-ended and undogmatic perception of the evolution of history is dismissed as the heresy of infidels.

It is questionable whether Trump himself agonizes much over the distinction between the “premillennarian,” “postmillennarian,” and “amillennarian” positions* that can be adopted as to the precise moment of the Messiah’s re-entry into secular time. But his decision to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv inevitably reinforced the blithe fanaticism and macabre expectancy of one of his key constituencies of electoral support: the (self-)appointed elect who await the Rapture with a certainty of predestined resurrection and personal immortality intensified by every catastrophe, natural or otherwise, that befalls “mankind,” gruesome enough to become part of the daily diet of rolling news headlines. They can only feel a mixture of self-righteousness and Schadenfreude for the vast majority of the world’s population who will be “left behind” to face the Armageddon that they feel they are witnessing unfold in slow motion.

For such modern U.S. citizens who host the zealotry of the early Christians, the Israeli state’s continued occupation of conquered territories and the prospect of the Holy City becoming once again its capital are crucial components of a prophesied and long-awaited scenario. A confluence of apparently contingent, but for them strictly providential events, will lead to the rebuilding of the Second Temple destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD/CE in retribution for the Jewish insurrection which broke out four years earlier and which culminated in the mass suicide of rebels on the rock of Masada three years later. Its rebuilding announces the onset of the Last Days, the beginning of the Tribulation, the first act in the cosmic drama of the Millennium: it means Apocalypse really is Now.

All this is presumably well known to the readers of Sightings. But there is another religious aspect to Trump’s announcement that has received less attention, and that is the role played in his decision by the assumption that the inner world of the believer provides the unique authoritative source of higher knowledge and revelation. One of the most fundamental historical transformations of a major religion occurred when Protestantism relocated the locus of Christian authority for interpreting scriptural truth away from the Vatican and the priesthood and to the conscience and intuitive moral voice of the individual, as the dramas of salvation and damnation, sin and redemption, painfully work themselves out in his or her soul. One (in social and humanistic terms) benign outcome of this shift of emphasis was the development of ritual practices by the Quakers to facilitate each believer’s access to the “Inward Light” received and acted on in a spirit of love. A corollary of this was that, unless epiphanic moments of illumination and deeper understanding broke through the cloud of unknowing, prompting spontaneous utterances, total silence reigned in their gatherings.

However, in the context of a living religion, the abandonment of rigid hierarchical authority, of strictly choreographed rituals, and of formulaic creeds known “by heart” for spontaneous moments of revelation has its dark side. Precursors of modern dispensationalists were the millennarian Anabaptists, who created their own apocalyptic interpretation of contemporary history based on an idiosyncratic reading of the New Testament, especially the Book of Revelation. When Jan Beukelszoon (John Bockelson), who entered history books as John of Leiden, convinced himself that his mission was to turn the German city of Münster into Jerusalem in preparation for the imminent Second Coming of the Messiah, his certainty was not that of the biblical scholar, but of the prophet, the shaman, the visionary.

A series of revelations purportedly made to him in dreams led to his self-appointment as king of Jerusalem, in which capacity he instituted the abolition of private property, the right of men to unrestricted polygamy and promiscuity, and the violent persecution and purging of “unbelievers.” He convinced his followers that the army of Catholic bishops, who now represented the Antichrist to them, would be miraculously defeated when they attacked the city. What ensued was the annihilation of the Anabaptists of Münster and the gruesome execution of Bockelson and two of his commanders, but not before the erection of a terror state which was ruled through a series of dictates which Bockelson claimed had been communicated to him in an ecstatic state from a higher realm beyond human scrutiny or challenge. Münster soon came to resemble Raqqa in the dying days of the Caliphate more than pious fantasies of a New Jerusalem.

Trump’s telegraphic tweets, inscrutable pronouncements on world events, and cryptic policy statements seemingly emanate from the same unexamined, delusional, egomaniacal depths of the subconscious as Bockelson’s. Many shamanic religious leaders in the Age of Religion and charismatic leaders in the Age of Politics have operated the same Führerprinzip on the basis of intuitive certainties. Such despots are not guided by the “Inward Light” patiently awaited by the Religious Society of Friends in humility and silence, but by a will to power. They believe they have a direct communication with a transcendent, unmediated truth that paradoxically comes from within, and thus need no counsel, rules, or constitutions to restrain them, arrogantly identifying their own impulses and gut reactions with a celestial mandate. They would thus be unable to hear the warning implicit in the words of Luke’s gospel (chapter eleven):

Your eye is the lamp of your body. When your vision is clear, your whole body also is full of light. But when it is poor, your body is full of darkness. Be careful, then, that the light within you is not darkness. So if your whole body is full of light, and no part of it in darkness, you will be radiant, as though a lamp were shining on you.

Unfortunately for the U.S. and the world, it would seem that so far the only beam of light that shines on the president emanates from a sunlamp.

* all of which really should be spelled with a double “n” since they derive from the Latin annus (year) and not anus (anus)

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Author, Roger Griffin, is professor in modern history at Oxford Brookes University.

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Sightings is edited by Brett Colasacco (AB’07, MDiv’10), a PhD candidate in religion, literature, and visual culture at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Sign up here to receive Sightings via email. You can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter.