Our God Is an Awesome Bomb

Growing Up in a Faith That Couldn't Wait for the World to End

I grew up singing Rich Mullins at the top of my lungs in a church with burnt orange carpet. “Our God is an awesome God, He reigns from heaven above, with wisdom, power, and love, our God is an awesome God.” It was one of those songs that made you feel like the ceiling might lift off the building. Like something holy was actually happening. I still love that song. But somewhere between that burnt orange carpet and adulthood, I started noticing that the God many evangelicals seemed to worship wasn’t quite the one Rich Mullins was singing about. This one was less interested in wisdom and love and more interested in geopolitical conflict, military dominance, and a very specific countdown clock to the apocalypse.

When the End Times Became a Foreign Policy

Dispensationalism didn’t start as a political movement. It started as a theological system developed in the 1830s by an Anglo-Irish preacher named John Nelson Darby, who divided all of human history into distinct “dispensations” or eras in …