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The tendency of the media to connect any major Middle East event to biblical prophecy has itself become predictable. Since the first bombs began falling in Baghdad, journalists working the end-of-the-world beat have been calling evangelicals for comment.

"War in Babylon has evangelicals seeing Earth's final days," says the San Francisco Chronicle. "Direst of predictions for war in Iraq," a Washington Post headline reads. Even Connecticut's Norwich Bulletin says, "Are these the last days? Some Christians say so."

Do many evangelicals really see end times indicators in this second U.S. invasion of Iraq?

To find out, Christianity Today assistant online editor Todd Hertz interviewed two representatives of disspensationalism, a movement known for speculating about end-times prophecy: Dr. Mark Bailey, president of Dallas Theological Seminary, and Todd Strandberg, the founder of the online Rapture Index.

In 1995 Strandberg founded the online Rapture Index, a Dow Jones-type measuring tool of biblical prophecy. He and 12 employees now run fourteen end-times sites, including RaptureReady.com and RaptureMe.com. The combined sites attract more than 250,000 visitors each month. He also cowrote a book due this summer titled Are You Rapture Ready? (E.P. Dutton).

The Rapture Index monitors 45 categories of various indicators prophesized in the Bible. The categories are ranked one to five based on whether they are rising or falling and include: earthquakes, mark of the beast technology, and date setting. A higher cumulative number indicates the world is moving faster toward the end times, Strandberg says.

As of this week, the index is at 174. According to the site, anything over 145 means "Fasten your seat belts." Yet the current index is still lower than the all-time high of 182 following September 11, 2001.

Are there many evangelicals connecting biblical prophecy with this war with Iraq?

I am not seeing that much. There was a big surge in my site traffic when Bush made the 48-hour ultimatum. From there, everything leveled off. We were doing about 7,000 visitors a day, and it bumped up to 10,000 when Bush gave the 48-hour notification. As the fighting began, the hits have been rather tame.

I think people are anticipating a rerun of 1991. When we went in that time, we were anticipating a major loss of life and we lost very few. Some envisioned it as a major event in prophecy. So now, most of us think that this won't be a major event either.

The Bible predicts that things get so bad in the end times that if Christ doesn't come back, there will be no flesh saved. It will obviously get much worse than this before the end. We [prophecy] watchers tend to be pessimistic about the future. If the Bible says things are going to get bad, we feel we are just being realistic.

Why is the index already higher now (174) than it was in Desert Storm (163)?

There are only a few things that relate to the war itself. It can only affect economic factors and global turmoil. The peace process in Israel, drought, famine, and earthquakes are not affected by this war.

The current war has thus far had limited economic impact. The stock market rallied last week during the first attack, whereas in 1991 it went down big time until the ground war broke out. Economically this doesn't seem to be anything out of the ordinary.

Then why is the Rapture Index so high right now?

Several categories have reached the point where they cannot go higher. The categories such as ecumenicalism and globalism are at their full state of development. In addition, the "Beast government" category, which pertains to Europe's revival of the Roman Empire, is as high as it can go.

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March (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47