Part II of an interview with Dr. Clifford Kiracofe, Jr. author of Dark Crusade: The Israel Lobby and Christian Zionism<\/em><\/strong>. <\/em>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n By Michele Steinberg<\/strong> \u2013<\/em><\/p>\n Part I of this interview<\/em><\/a> was published on July 22, 2026. We discussed how the Founding Fathers were absolutely opposed to any sort of government-imposed official religion and rejected any discrimination against disfavored religions. These principles were written into the 1787 United States Constitution. In the first part of his interview, Dr. Kiracofe reported that Christian Zionism, in contrast, was an alien religious ideology that actually was invented in England in the 1820s and \u201830s and came into the United States from England. In Part II, we elaborate these points.<\/em><\/p>\n In the Introduction to his book, Dr. Kiracofe writes:<\/p>\n We must recover the vision of the Founding Fathers for local self-government and for constitutional government of this federal republic. We must also recover the sound values and principles that informed the foreign policy of the Founding Fathers. The Declaration of Independence, George Washington\u2019s Farewell Address, and the Federalist Papers are a good place to begin. As for our ship of state Thomas Jefferson once said, \u201cI steer my bark with Hope in the head, leaving Fear astern.\u201d Indeed, it can be said that Faith, Hope, and Charity are fundamental to the American character.\u00a0 <\/em><\/strong>(from Dark Crusade: The Israel Lobby and Christian Zionism)<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Michele Steinberg for (ASN<\/strong>):\u00a0 You have referred to Christian Zionism as an \u201calien\u201d religion that has penetrated the body politic in the United States, particularly in the military.\u00a0 \u00a0How does it undermine the idea of a republic?<\/p>\n Cliff Kiracofe (CK<\/strong>): Basically, the way you could view it as in the ancient Roman Republic where you had an alien cult \u2013 the Mithra cult \u2014 becoming quite active in the army, military of ancient Rome.\u00a0 This alien cult was a factor in the fall of the republic and transition to an empire.<\/p>\n Here in the United States, I see it as an almost exact repetition or parallel between the use by the British Empire of Christian Zionism in the early 19th century, and the use by the Trump administration, grabbing on to Christian Zionism as a \u201cMake America Great Again\u201d justification for imperialism, for the U.S. Empire. That\u2019s exactly the parallel that one can make.<\/p>\n ASN:<\/strong> You trace Christian Zionism in the U.S. to John Nelson Darby and his British co-thinkers almost a century before the declaration of a State of Israel.\u00a0 And you note that there are some Christians who are Zionists in support of Israel who do not have the Darbyite theology.\u00a0 So how did Darby\u2019s religion come to the United States and how does it differ from traditional Christians?<\/p>\n CK:<\/strong>\u00a0 This particular alien ideology of Christian Zionism was invented by a group of people in the 1820s and 30s in study circle in England\u2014the Albury Circle, named for London banker Henry Drummond, Jr.\u2019s estate, and a couple of other groups of people that were studying prophecy and religious stuff. They were eccentric people and cultic, actually.<\/p>\n Drummond\u2019s own book, published in 1828, Dialogues on Prophecy, maintained that the last days were imminent and that God was about to judge the visible church and return the Jewish people to Palestine. \u00a0(<\/em><\/strong>from Dark Crusade: The Israel Lobby and Christian Zionism)<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n And one of the participants of these cultic meetings in England was John Nelson Darby, who formed his own religious offshoot called the Plymouth Brethren, and it espoused Christian Zionism. He had been a clergyman in the Irish Protestant church but was defrocked. He was run out of the church by his superiors for whatever. But Darby invented or distilled, let\u2019s put it that way, the musings of these cult groups that he belonged to into a system, a system of Christian Zionism.<\/p>\n And according to Darby\u2019s belief system, there, for example, seven epochs in the world\u2014seven dispensations\u2014and the believers are called dispensationalists<\/em>. According to them, we\u2019re entering the Eighth Dispensation<\/em>, we\u2019re entering the End Times, the end of history. The battle of Armageddon will come, and that will bring the return of Jesus, who will then reign for 1000 years.<\/p>\n Now, that\u2019s nowhere in the Bible. That\u2019s nowhere in any Orthodox Christian denomination or traditional denomination. It\u2019s not in the Roman Catholic Church; it\u2019s viewed as a heresy. It\u2019s not in the Orthodox Russian or any of the Orthodox churches; it\u2019s viewed as a heresy. It\u2019s not in the Coptic Church in Egypt; it\u2019s been denounced as a heresy in Egypt. It\u2019s not in any normal Protestant church in the United States, Episcopalian, Presbyterian.<\/p>\n However, it is in the churches associated with the Southern Baptist Convention and the Protestant churches associated with the National Evangelical Association. They are dispensationalist in their eschatology, that is to say their belief in the End Times, the belief in how things are going to unfold based on their interpretation of the Bible.<\/p>\n But it is not in the Bible. It was invented by Mr. Darby.<\/p>\n Now, Mr. Hegseth [the Secretary of Defense], who you mentioned earlier, is a zealot within this weird cultic world of Christian Zionism, biblical Christian Zionism, dispensationalism. So that, and what you reported about the commander instructing his troops [Armageddon and the Iran war] is Hegseth\u2019s point of view<\/a>, and it\u2019s exactly the Darby cultic view.<\/p>\n That alien ideology was brought to the United States from Britain by Darby in the late 1850s and 1860s, when he visited North America\u2014Canada and the United States\u2013\u2013and held meetings with many ministers, Protestant ministers and conferences.<\/p>\n So, after the American Civil War, during the 1870s, 80s, 90s, this cult spread through various Bible schools that were established and various Protestant ministries, which as I said, were not the traditional ones, but offshoots, so we had a very large base of active ministers and churches in the late 19th century in the United States, which still exist today.<\/p>\n So, it\u2019s grown from the post-Civil War period of our history to now. And I have no idea of the size; no one really does. The Christian Zionist ministers claim that 25 million to maybe 50 million Americans believe in their cultic ideology, let\u2019s say 10% of the American people, let\u2019s just say 35 million Americans believe this fake ideology.<\/p>\n<\/a>
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