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If you haven’t spent a ton of time at strip-mall bookstores with doves in their logos, you probably don’t know the name Jerry B. Jenkins.

He’s a wildly successful Christian author who sold tens of millions of novels during the presidency of George W. Bush, offering American evangelicals a fictionalized account of the end of the world. His “Left Behind” series extended the hallucinogenic prophecies of John of Patmos, the final book of the Christian Bible, into something resembling an action thriller.

Across 16 books – not counting the 40 novellas in the young adult spin-off – Jenkins and millenarian pastor Tim LaHaye offered an interpretation of the end of days that morphed the esoteric images of the Book of Revelation into a thuddingly literal page-turner. Jenkins and LaHaye’s vision gave ascendant evangelicals more than an easy-to-read, entertaining take on the apocalypse. It gave them a final chance to be right.

The “Left Behind” books open with the Rapture, when Christian believers are supposedly spirited into heaven ahead of a seven-year-period of suffering and calamity. The series allows faithful readers to delight in the belief that they’ll get to skip over the nastiness of the apocalypse, showing famines, wars and pestilence that they’ll miss out on in lurid detail. Additionally, it entertains them with the story of the remarkably competent post-Rapture Christian converts, who take up the cause of Jesus and fight the forces of an Antichrist who appears on Earth.

Centered on an airline pilot named Rayford Steele, this saga of the end of days plays out in the style of Hollywood’s “capable dad” thrillers (think Liam Neeson’s “Taken” or Owen Wilson’s “No Escape”). Considering that the overall narrative is supposed to recount the final triumph of good over evil, these novels are remarkably obsessed with far-right, turn-of-the-millennium bugbears: the dangerous globalism of the United Nations, the supposed overreach of state power.

This strain of right-wing evangelical belief was everywhere during the Bush era, encouraged by the evangelical in the White House. In an oft-shared but unconfirmed anecdote from biblical scholar Thomas Römer, Bush reportedly tried to sell French President Jaques Chirac on the Iraq War by claiming it was the culmination of thousands of years of prophecy.

“Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East,” he supposedly told Chirac in a 2003 phone call. “Biblical prophecies are being fulfilled.” The French leader, a barely observant Catholic, was unimpressed.

Evangelical triumphalism seemed to cool a bit over the last decade as Donald Trump rose to power. Conservative Christians remained reliable Republican voters, but quietly molded themselves to support a twice-divorced former casino owner as the Middle Eastern wars launched by Bush-era neoconservatives wound down.

But their smug conviction that bringing about the end of life on Earth would be a net positive for true believers never went away. According to reports shared with investigative reporter Jonathan Larsen by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, just this week U.S. military commanders revived the Christian end-times prophesizing as Trump kicked off yet another overseas conflict.

One military officer reported that his commander had told troops that Trump was “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth” and described the airstrikes on Iran as “part of God’s divine plan” with “numerous citations out of the Book of Revelation.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has called for an “American crusade” against the forces of leftism and Islam, says he expects the war in Iran to wrap up quickly. But we doubt he’d be overly worried about another long war in the Middle East if it gave him the opportunity to say, “I told you so.”

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