Taming Tehran: Evangelical Christians and the Iranian Threat to Israel
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Hostile relations between Israel and Iran since the Iranian Revolution have only intensified since the 2005 election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. His strong statements imagining a ‘‘world without Zionism’’ and threats to destroy Israel, combined with an active nuclear program, have many observers concerned about the Iranian threat to Israel. We can include American evangelical Christians among this group. But given the intensity of their eschatological emphasis, we might wonder why evangelical Christians have raised such a passionate voice concerning the Iranian threat to Israel, in what kinds of ways, and what it can tell us about contemporary evangelicalism and the relationship between religion and politics. This paper examines two cases of prominent, premillennialist, evangelical Christian Zionists and their different approaches to the Iranian threat to Israel, in order to understand not only why believers in a doomed world might engage in the political sphere, but also what kinds of rhetoric they use to make sense of that engagement.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".