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In November 2002 Hagee addressed his congregation of four thousand, outlining a foreign policy weirdly similar to what Bush is pursuing from Washington. Joining Hagee at the pulpit was Republican House majority leader Tom DeLay. Benjamin Netanyahu had been scheduled to appear but canceled because of campaign obligations in Israel. Netanyahu has spoken at Cornerstone Church in the past. On this night he sent along a videotaped message and his apologies.

Netanyahu’s taped message mentioned the end piece to the policy Perle and Feith had written for him six years earlier. “The first order, the first duty, is to destroy the regime of Yasir Arafat,” the former prime minister of Israel said. “He is the same evil you will face with Saddam Hussein.” Hagee agreed and closed out the sermon by looking at evil in the camera’s eye. “Listen, Saddam,” Hagee warned, staring into the camera. “There’s a Texan in the White House, and he’s going to take you down.”

Maybe we’re overcome with premillennial-dispensationalism sensationalism, but it worries us when the secretary of defense and a reluctant secretary of state fall in line behind the likes of the Reverend James Hagee. Faith-based domestic policy is scary. Faith-based foreign policy is terrifying—in an apocalyptic way.

Hagee is part of a virulent strain of Christianity Michael Lind traces back to an Anglican priest who abandoned his church in 1820 to found his own sect. John Nelson Darby cooked up the premillennial-dispensationalism theory Hagee serves up to his local congregation and to a worldwide TV audience he claims includes 120 million homes. Israel is central to the theory. As Lind describes the theory in Made in Texas, Israel is re-created as a nation-state. God intervenes repeatedly to save Israel. Then Israel is destroyed in the battle of Armageddon, where an international confederation like the U.N. or the European Union is led by the Antichrist—probably an apostate Jew. Most Jews are killed, except for the 144,000 who convert to Christianity. Jesus returns to deal with the Antichrist. Then the Temple on the Mount is rebuilt (after they clear away one of Islam’s most sacred sites, the al-Aska Mosque). Once all that’s in place, Jesus establishes a theocratic world government and rules for one thousand years.

That’s it in a nutshell.

This “end times theology” requires Christians to cooperate with Israelis—to hasten along the events that must occur before the prophecies are fulfilled. It all has Hagee, Netanyahu, Perle, Bush, and Rove working for the same end—or at least the same temporal end.

If this is not end times, it’s at least strange times.

THERE IS ANOTHER, less visible war you won’t see on Fox or CNN. It’s the evangelical crusade Bush is waging against women. At home it’s most visible in his anti–abortion-rights appointments to the federal bench and in his support of laws restricting reproductive rights. As we report in Chapter 15 on foreign policy, when you pull all the bits and pieces together, Bush looks like a fanatic Christian warrior laying siege to the reproductive rights of women around the globe.

From the global gag rule to cutting funding for the U.N. Population Fund to sending a former Vatican negotiator and a woman from the National Right to Life Committee to represent our country at an international conference on reproductive-health issues, it just gets weirder and weirder.

In May 2002 Dubya dispatched Health and Human Services secretary Tommy Thompson to a U.N. session on children in New York. There Thompson and the U.S. delegation engaged in a brief moment of tactical and ecumenical solidarity with the Islamic world. We joined Iran, Syria, Libya, and Iraq in a fight against sex education for adolescents. The Vatican was the other Christian nation joining us in our campaign to deny sex education to adolescents, restrict contraceptive instruction for married couples, and ensure that abortion is not included in reproductive-health services connected to the U.N. The U.S. delegation