Orthodox Reflections

By Nicholas – member of the Western Rite Vicariate, a part of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese in America

My grandpa grew up as a drunken ruffian and day laborer in the late 1800s and early 1900s. He left school early, and had a reputation as the kind of man no one wanted to mess with. Trouble was sure to follow wherever grandpa went. When he and his brothers showed up at a barn dance, the fiddle players would pack up and leave ahead of the fight that was inevitably going to break out.

The family story goes that grandpa got saved at a Pentecostal tent revival. Soon after, he got “called to preach” by the Holy Spirit. It turned out that grandpa was a naturally good orator. Highly charismatic and engaging, he quickly discovered he had a knack for working a crowd. He was also pig-ignorant and barely able to read. Grandpa wouldn’t have known systematic theology if it had bitten him in the butt. However, in the early 20th Century, ignorance and lack of education were not barriers to becoming a rural preacher. High school diplomas were few and far between. Bible College degrees were even rarer. Given the low educational level of most of the farmers in the congregation, the bar the pastor had to clear was set really, really low.

Grandpa had the same problem as all the other uneducated preachers at the time. How can you sound educated when you aren’t? How can you explicate the Christian Faith when you don’t understand it yourself? He needed a theological framework in which to operate. Something to guide him when preparing for Sunday morning worship and week night revivals. Otherwise, he would end up continuously shouting essentially the same sermon over and over again. Even the most charismatic preacher will eventually exhaust his audience, if all he can speak about is “getting saved” and “being filled with the Holy Spirit.” His congregants, as simple as they were, wanted more than that.

The solution to this problem, for grandpa and most of his generation of Pentecostal preachers, was the Scofield Reference Bible and the Dispensational framework taught therein. Widely available, the Bible came with handy references that explained everything a pastor needed to make sense of the scriptures. Well, so they thought. It was a comprehensive system that even a barely literate man, with enough effort and maybe a little help from colleagues, could understand well enough to preach it.

According to grandpa, all he was doing was preaching the Bible. Dispensationalism was nothing more than the plain literal meaning of the scriptures. It was all he knew, and all he wanted to know. Dispensationalism, of course, is not “just the Bible.” Dispensationalism is, in fact, a framework for interpreting scripture that was only a few decades older than grandpa himself at the start of his ministry. But how was he supposed to know that? How were any of the “old timey” preachers supposed to know that? They had nothing to compare Dispensationalism to. Grandpa and many of his fellow preachers struggled with the basics of American history. Of Church history, they knew absolutely nothing. Anything that happened after the close of the Book of Acts was a complete mystery to them. Grandpa wouldn’t have known Justin Martyr from Alexander Hamilton from John Nelson Darby (the founder of Dispensationalism). Church Council? You mean the Camp Meeting near Mobile? They had never been exposed to any historical liturgy. Nor any iconography, which is really just theological concepts rendered in a visual language. They had no ties to any educated hierarchy of any kind that could guide and correct them. The only source of knowledge available was Dispensationalism, handily laid out in a Bible version they all had access to.

This is a key point for understanding how such a new, novel theology spread so quickly. Dispensationalism did not take root in rural America because it won some kind of academic debate. There was no debate. Dispensationalism was enthusiastically accepted by ignorant people who simply never had any reason to question what they were taught. For the average rural Christian, Dispensationalism was not a system for understanding the Bible. It literally was the Bible.

Grandpa’s was just one of thousands of Pentecostal ministries that came to dominate small towns in the 20’s through the 60’s. Grandpa would get an opportunity to go into a farming community somewhere in the South or Midwest. There he would start a little church, and work a secular job to support his family while it grew. I have read that Zionist money was prevalent in the founding and growth of Dispensationalism. That may well have been the case some places and for some preachers. Maybe Scofield’s Bible itself was funded by Zionists? Zionist money definitely came later in the 70’s. Back at the beginning? Maybe someone was getting paid, but grandpa certainly wasn’t. Grandpa was never motivated by money. He hardly ever had more than two nickels to rub together. Farmers were often poor and the money in the offering plate was usually little more than pocket change. My dad often reminisced that the farmers paid grandpa more in food than in cash, so at least the kids never went hungry. When grandpa died, my dad had to chip in for funeral expenses. Grandpa left this world the same way he had come into it. With nothing. 

If grandpa was running a Zionist-funded grift, it was a stunningly unsuccessful one. The truth is, grandpa truly believed and that belief drove him into the pulpit every chance he got. He believed in God and His plan of salvation as explained by Dispensationalism. He believed that modern Jews were the blood descendants of Abraham, dispersed into the world but still retaining their own covenant with God. He believed the founding of the modern State of Israel was a prophetic event, heralding the imminent Rapture of the saints into Heaven. A blessed event that would occur comfortably before the Great Tribulation at the time of the anti-Christ. He believed in a literal 1,000 year reign of Christ from Jerusalem, and then the final coming of the eternal kingdom. Well, more or less. Dispensationalism tended to wobble a bit here and there in its specific teachings. The basics always stayed the same. However, such things as the timing of the Rapture, and the specifics around the identity of the anti-Christ, got updated regularly according to the headlines of the day. Grandpa, like the rest of them, did his best to keep up.

Maybe if grandpa had been a bit more educated, he wouldn’t have kept losing his congregations. Over and over again, grandpa built his little mission churches into thriving concerns that eventually attracted larger numbers and some of the well-to-do plantation owners, merchants, bankers, and local politicians in town. When they showed up, so did the real cash in the offering plate. However, every time a certain threshold of respectability was reached, the church folk would vote grandpa out as pastor. Out went the poorly educated founder, in came a Bible College graduate. Same Dispensationalism preached from the pulpit, just explained more eloquently with bigger words. Grandpa would then leave for a secular job, usually as a heavy equipment mechanic. He would also run the occasional revival. My parents actually met at one of those. Eventually an opportunity to start a church would come along, and the whole cycle would start over. Rinse and repeat for 45 years.

Grandpa’s story, and the stories of men like him, usually don’t get told very often. When discussing Dispensationalism, most narratives go straight from Darby to Scofield’s Bible to various Bible Institutes to 70’s writers and televangelists to John Hagee. That summary skips over the essential role revivalists and pastors, many with no formal education at all, had in turning Dispensationalism into the default religion of major areas of the country. Their hard work is why the later arriving Bible College grads found themselves happily preaching Dispensationalism to congregations who were already staunch believers.

Typical timeline of Dispensationalism that completely omits the rural revivalists / pastors who spread the Dispensationalist Gospel in places most seminary graduates at the time had no interest in visiting – much less living. 

Building on the earlier work of the country preachers, writers, filmmakers, and televangelists attracted more people to Dispensationalism in the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s. Multiple TV personalities founded physical megachurches in tandem with their books and commercial broadcasts. Many of these churches grew in the kind of shiny, upscale urban areas my grandpa never even visited, much less pastored a church in. Men, and sometimes women, in expensive clothes and full make-up became the face of Dispensationalism. Even the small town pastors of the time did their best to mimic the slick productions as seen on TV.

The members in the pews, and watching on TV, scanned the skies looking for the Rapture, read every headline as confirmation that Jesus’ return was truly imminent, bought all the books, saw all the movies, sent in hundreds of millions in donations, and reliably voted for Zionist political candidates. Mostly Republicans from the early 80’s onward, but a few Democrats here and there. The Dispensationalist leaders were, as we say in the South, “in high cotton.” The big time preachers got rich, and since they could deliver a reliable block of votes, they also got a seat at the table of power.

Thus did Dispensationalism “work” for decades.

And now it doesn’t. Dispensationalism is actually collapsing, even as the Trump Administration has made it the de facto “official religion” of the United States. How can I say this with such assurance? Because the Zionists who rely on Dispensationalism as their base of support have recognized its collapse, and are desperate to replace it before Americans fully turn against supporting Israel. An example is the article We Need a New Defense of Christian Zionism by Mark Tooley, president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy and, unsurprisingly, an eight-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency. Excerpts below:

Christian Zionism in America is becoming an exhausted force of mostly older white people on one side of the political spectrum relying on 50-year-old arguments that no longer have wide traction.

But given what is replacing it, we will miss it when it is gone.

Twentieth-century Christian Zionism, whatever its faults, was an accessible framework for Christian friendship with Israel and with Jews.

It was a shelter against antisemitism, which is not just hateful in itself, but is poisonous to society. With this form of Christian Zionism receding, ugly spirits are emerging that are hostile both to the nation of Israel and to Jews in general.

America is not ready for the consequences.

Though Christian Zionism in its various forms dates back centuries, the modern movement mostly emerged from the Dispensationalism popularized by Hal Lindsey’s 1970 book, The Late Great Planet Earth. Then in the 1970s and ’80s came evangelical television (especially Pat Robertson’s 700 Club), the religious right’s rise with the Moral Majority, the tacit embrace by leaders like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, the Left Behind literature of the 1990s and early 2000s, the 2006 creation of Christians United for Israel, and the displacement of Mainline Protestantism with generic evangelicalism.

This strand of Christian Zionism asserts that modern Israel fulfills biblical prophecy, that the Jewish state is central in the End Times, and that God will bless Israel’s friends while cursing its enemies. It was populist, patriotic, and paradoxically optimistic despite its doomsday prophecies. Its chief proponents were confident religious entrepreneurs, like Robertson and Jerry Falwell, who lived out the American dream, and regular people, not just theologians, could readily understand it.

Everything that fueled contemporary Christian Zionism is now receding: Seminaries no longer teach Dispensationalism. And few Christians under age 50 believe in it. The Left Behind literature has run its course. There are no Robertsons (who died in 2023) or John Hagees with a national platform. Christian institutions have lost influence to online influencers.

There are no simple answers, of course, but we should start by admitting this reality. Late 20^th-century Christian Zionism cannot rebut the strong trends in America against Israel and toward antisemitism. Christian Zionism still includes millions of politically influential and wealthy older people, with the veneer of long-term vitality. But it’s an aging, non-replicating demographic, operating on outdated theological and political premises.

Late 20^th-century Christian Zionism—after 50 years of shaping American politics and, by extension, the world—is now concluding. A new form of Christian Zionism or some equivalent will have to be crafted and propagated successfully to replace it. Otherwise, the dark forces that are now faint will become bolder and dominant. This work may take years, if not decades, but it needs to start now, before it is too late.

So the con is up, and even the former CIA agent admits that fact. Now comes the search for a replacement political religion that can motivate Americans to keep funding the Israeli and American war machines. For a nation drowning in debt, a 1.5 trillion dollar Defense budget and billions in aid to Israel are hard to justify. Without a direct commandment of God to rely on, policy makers aren’t sure they can find a way to shore up support for all that borrowed money at time when millions of Americans are sleeping in their cars.

A shocking aspect of the modern American economy is homelessness affecting fully-employed workers whose wages have not kept up with the skyrocketing cost of living. 

So what happened? How did Dispensationalism go into a death spiral? The Internet happened, and it is impossible to make it unhappen.

For decades, Dispensationalist believers thought their pastors’ teachings were that of the Apostles. No one talked about Darby or Scofield. I grew up in the Dispensationalist movement, and never heard those names until my early 30’s. No one talked about Church history. It simply didn’t exist. The pastors drew a straight line from the New Testament to the Pentecostal movements of the early 20th Century. Dispensationalism was simply traditional Christianity, the “old timey” religion of the Apostle Paul. The people in the pews really believed that was the case.

My maternal grandma lived and died a Dispensationalist in a small town where practically everyone she knew was too. She lived her whole life in a Dispensationalist bubble. Just as an example of how effective her programming was, at my Orthodox baptism she complained that she couldn’t understand where the Orthodox Church got all this “new fangled stuff.” For her, speaking in tongues, being slain in the spirit, praise and worship bands, and grape juice were traditional Christianity. A baptismal service dating back close to 2,000 years was “new fangled.” Back in the 90’s when I was baptized, grandma’s reaction was common place.

But then along came the Internet and smart phones. No matter how small your town, you could now carry a connection to the wider world in your pocket. Suddenly, Pastor Elmer was not the only source of information. It is impossible to overstate the effect that access to unfiltered information has had on many Dispensationalists. Dispensationalism isn’t ancient. It’s modern. Very modern. Anyone can find that out in seconds just using Google. The writings of the Church Fathers, the councils of the Church, the traditional interpretations of scriptures twisted by Dispensationalism, the historical teaching on salvation, the traditional view of the Apocalypse, and the teaching that the Church is Israel are all also there online just waiting to be discovered.

This is why it is so common to get this response when asking inquirers from an Evangelical (usually Dispensationalist) background why they are visiting the Orthodox Church: “Well, I was curious about the early Christian Church, so I started researching online and came across Orthodoxy….” 

Dispensationalism required ignorance to spread and take root. Knowledge of the true Christian Faith shreds its credibility and drives younger, less brainwashed, Dispensationalists out the door into apostasy or conversion. Their departure is destroying the reliable voting base Zionists rely on. Hence the panicked search for a replacement ideology.

The Internet also spread awareness of the true nature of Rabbinic Jews themselves. It was easy for my grandpa to wax poetic about the noble Jews, the seed of Abraham. He didn’t know any. He had no idea what the Talmud said about Jesus boiling in excrement. In truth, I am not even sure he knew the Talmud existed. Grandpa, and his fellow preachers, often railed against leftist commies undermining America. It is highly doubtful that any of them recognized that Rabbinic Jews were frequently at the forefront of Hollywood, feminism, LGBTQ rights, sexual liberation, birth control, pornography, socialism, mass immigration, the introduction of various “new age” religious movements, and other root causes of American societal decay. These days, it is impossible for younger Americans to avoid learning about Jewish bad behavior and anti-Christian beliefs. The idea of a “Judeo-Christian” alliance standing against increasing debauchery and secularization is now absolutely laughable. Just browsing YouTube will bring you up to speed, even if you never choose to never read a book or an article.

Further, the Internet introduced Americans to Palestinian Christians, and their persecution by Rabbinic Jews during the Nakhba and up until today. The only real way to excuse what is happening is to fall back on Jewish Supremacy – it is okay for Jewish settlers to burn Christian villages and bomb Christian Churches because God loves them more than he does these so-called “Arab Christians.” Even worse is the real-time broadcasting of the genocide of Palestinian women and children. Grandpa was pro-life. He raged often against abortion, as does the current crop of Dispensationalist pastors. Apparently, however, only American unborn babies have a right to life. The deaths of Palestinians, Christian and Muslim alike, are deemed acceptable as necessary sacrifices for the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy. This kind of murderous language makes quite a few church members, especially the younger ones, profoundly uncomfortable.

Dispensationalists, of course, will often respond to their wavering members’ discomfort over supporting and funding genocide with quotes from the Old Testament. Because God gave Joshua instructions over 3,000 years ago to slaughter the Canaanites, so say Dispensationalist pastors, shut up and support the Jews doing God’s will to slaughter the Palestinians. Most Americans, even those steeped in Dispensationalism, intuitively feel that something is off about that. So they Google it, and low and behold, here is what they find from an Orthodox perspective concerning the OT commands to the Israelites:

Thus Saint Paul writes that before Christ came, Israel was confined under the Law, so that the Law was Israel’s custodian, taking care of them like a tutor cares for a young child (Galatians 3:23-4:3). The Law with its provisions was never meant to be God’s final word to His people. It was a stage through which they had to pass on their way to mature adulthood in Christ. It suited them then and was necessary for their development at the stage they were once at, but it was never meant to be the goal of their national life. That goal, that end (Greek telos) was Christ (Romans 10:4).

The Law with its provisions was given to Israel as it became a nation after the Exodus at the foot of Mount Sinai. We say this and affirm that Israel was God’s nation, but often do not stop to reflect on what this nationhood necessarily involved. In a word, it involved Israel beginning its national existence with military combat, fighting for its existence and for a place to live in the same way and using the same methods that everyone else used at that time. That is where all the hard parts of the Book of Joshua come in. For Israel to survive as a nation, there was no other way. All Canaan was occupied by peoples bigger, stronger, better-armed, and crueler than they. Peaceful co-existence was not on anyone’s agenda back then. The options available to Israel as an infant nation entering Canaan they way they did, were either to conquer to retain their identity, or to be assimilated to the other nations, or be annihilated by them. There was ultimately no other happy option, and the provisions of the Law presuppose their existence in this hard and cruel world. Those laws—with commands to conquer, and kill, and to build altars and sacrifice animals, to circumcise the young, to keep certain food laws—were not the final goal of the nation’s existence. Christ was the final goal. The Old Testament is the divine record of how God worked with His people until Christ came. The God of Joshua did transition to the Father of Jesus Christ. Israel did prepare the way for the divine power of the Cross. The Old Testament, with all its hard parts, was part of that preparation.   

— Fr. Lawrence Farley of the Orthodox Church in America 

Anyone feeling uneasy about his church supporting genocide merely has to go online to find out that he is not wrong to feel that way. He will quickly discover, however, that he is definitely in the wrong church. Which is usually really a relief, because who really wants to believe in a god that values the lives of his “chosen people” (who have rejected His own Son) so highly that he gives them a divine license to mass murder innocent men, women, and children in His name?

In addition, Dispensationalism is also now crashing head-first into growing American patriotism. The control exerted by Israel over our government has become too blatantly obvious to ignore. AIPAC openly buys our elections and brags about it. Israel orders America into wars that Americans don’t want to fight, solely to benefit its own geopolitical agenda. The cost in American blood and treasure be damned. That didn’t, by the way, start with Iran. A fact more and more Americans are waking up to. We’ve been fighting wars for Israel for decades now. Israelis openly treat us as a vassal state whose sole reason for existence is to provide them with dollars, weapons, and soldiers. The toll it has taken on America has been ruinous.

Further, the financial cost of Israeli-first policies has finally gotten personal. Once upon a time it was relatively easy to sell Americans on giving billions to Israel to get “blessings.” Back when middle class Americans had money in the bank and gas in the tank, what’s a billion dollars or four to make God happy? Times, however, have changed. Americans are now broke, angry, and despondent. Economically hard-pressed Americans increasingly demand that American money stay in America to address American problems, not be sent abroad to Israel to buy “blessings.”

If the Israeli dominance of our government were not so extreme, more people would be willing to sit in the pews passively listening to Dispensationalist preachers telling them it is God’s will that we always put Israel first. But it is that extreme, and the impact of our foreign colonization has now hit Dispensationalist congregants in two places too vital for them to overlook  – their wounded American patriotic pride and their rapidly emptying wallets.

Seeking alternatives, millions of American Christians have gone online only to learn that historic Christianity does not require believers to be subservient to any foreign nation. In fact, a healthy sense of patriotic pride is encouraged in real Christianity. God loves Americans just as much as he does Israelis. You can put America First, and still be a good Christian. Once that sinks in, Americans have a very difficult time sitting through sermons by John Hagee clones about how no sacrifice is too great to bear for Israel.

It was also way easier to think about the end of the world if you thought the Rapture was going to keep you from experiencing it. As more people find out the Rapture is a made-up doctrine of the 19th Century, cheering on Armageddon becomes a whole lot less attractive. Zionist wars threaten to turn into global catastrophes, and without the Rapture as an escape hatch, that means all of us will have the privilege of suffering together through whatever comes next. Once you come to believe the Rapture is a heretical fairy tale, Dispensationalism starts to look an awful lot like an insane death cult.

Probably one of the biggest factors in the die off of Dispensationalism is the transparent grift of the Dispensationalist leaders. Grandpa lived a humble life among the people he served. His sincere belief, no matter how wrong it might have been, impressed people. Now? Dispensationalism can be one Hell of a cash cow. Pastors fly off to all-expense paid junkets to Israel. They get invited to the White House for photos with the president. They rake in millions from questionable Zionist sources that they spend on luxurious lifestyles. Further, far too many Dispensationalist pastors have intelligence backgrounds, and ongoing intelligence connections, for it to just be a coincidence. For a lot of Americans – if it looks like a well-funded PSYOP and quacks like a well-funded PSYOP, then it’s a PSYOP. Who wants to worship in a church that is little more than a CIA propaganda operation run by a trained operative weaponizing your religion to control you? All of it combined raises a serious question in the minds of many: do any of these guys actually believe what they are selling, or are they just in it for the money and power? Frankly, the whole thing just screams “fake and ghey.”

December 2025 — Friends of Zion Ambassador Summit sponsored by Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and attended by more than 1,000 American pastors, youth leaders, educators, and social media influencers. Meanwhile, their congregants back home suffer stagnant wages and job losses. 

So Dispensationalism, despite its current control over our society, is actually in its death throes. As former CIA agent Tooley, and any other honest observer, is forced to admit. The Zionists need a new method of manufacturing consent. Only a political religion can suffice, as there is no rational way to convince skeptical Americans to keep sacrificing their physical and economic lives for a foreign nation (with collateral benefits to Epstein billionaires, the MIC, oil companies, corrupt pastors, the National Security complex, etc.) The only way to override the American national instinct for self-preservation is to convince enough of us that God demands our national suicide.

Finding a replacement for Dispensationalism is unlikely to happen. As Tooley lamented in his article, there are no likely candidates. Something would need to be cooked up from scratch. In the Internet Age, good luck with that. What is more likely to happen is increasing censorship to silence opposition to Dispensationalism, and a greater effort (see TPUSA’s plunge into elementary schools) to propagandize Americans at younger and younger ages. Again, good luck with that. The Internet is a big place to censor, anti-Zionists already have huge followings, Americans are quite attached to their freedom of speech, trust in “official” sources has never been lower, and Apostolic Churches (Orthodox and Roman Catholic) are already filling up with new converts.

Regardless of what the Zionists try, they will never manage to reverse the decline of Dispensationalism. Without it they can censor. They can bully. They can coerce. They can even jail. But they cannot persuade. Without a religion capable of persuading millions of Americans to support Israel over their own nation, Zionism is doomed. Glory to God for that!