The New Crusaders

The New Crusaders                                  BY: Jacob Fronczak

The New Christian Right has its own dark, self-serving plans for the throne of David.

This April, I attended the conference put on by Right Response, Christ Is King: How to Defeat Trashworld!, to see what the “New Christian Right” (their term, not mine) was up to.

I had heard of Joel Webbon. I knew he wanted to erase Jews and Judaism from the face of the earth. But I figured there must be more to his theology than that. I thought perhaps there was some overriding concern, some theological backbone from which his anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism emerged like some kind of spare rib, a mere corollary.

I’m not sure anymore.

All of us at First Fruits of Zion have been tossing around John Harrigan’s statement, “Eschatology drives discipleship,” like a bunch of college students with a hacky sack. If you grew up with an apocalyptic worldview—for example, if you are or have been a premillennial dispensationalist—then you are already aware of the impact of eschatology on your life choices to some degree.

The fact that the world is ending colors your perceptions and your priorities. While we are not dispensationalists at First Fruits of Zion, we are premillennial; we believe that the Messiah will come again after a period of suffering—which the rabbis, our Master included, analogized to the birth pangs preceding the miraculous delivery of a child—and that he will reign over the earth in an unprecedented period of peace and prosperity.

If this is your theological and eschatological heritage, you know that you cannot invest all your time, effort, and talent into the things of this world because all the world’s political structures, all the great monuments and works of infrastructure, all the nations and all of their possessions will be destroyed in an end-times tribulation—the end of the age, the drastic and final humbling of man.

Your knowledge of the coming apocalypse keeps you—or should keep you—from becoming the kind of person who spends a lifetime building some kind of empire. You know that “you can’t take it with you.” You know that the only treasure that matters is the treasure you store up in heaven.

Apocalyptic eschatology gives us a sense of urgency, a sense of the evanescent nature of the present, a sense that this era is nothing more than the waiting room before the main event, when Messiah will inaugurate his kingdom, and when we will all be rewarded for our suffering and recompensed for our loss for his sake in this life.

If this is your background, if this is the theology you grew up with, then it’s entirely possible that you haven’t heard of what the radical postmillennialists (Webbon and his ideological allies) have been up to.

They’re trying to inaugurate a thousand-year Reich.