The very last thing I expected when Donald Trump came down the escalator to announce his run for the presidency on June 16, 2015, was the red pill I unknowingly swallowed that would eventually lead me to embracing postmillennialism. In case you don’t know what postmillennialism (PM) is, don’t feel bad. Until a few months ago I didn’t either, but the massive paradigm shifts I’ve undergone in the last seven years have brought much that was unexpected, not least to my eschatology.

Up to late summer I had no clue my understanding of “the end times” would be another unexpected revelation. I’m writing a book about these last seven years and the many revelations I’ve experience, which is thrilling because I’m not really sure where it will end up. I didn’t realize how our theology of “end times” determines how we interpret everything about the times in which we live, whether negatively or positively.

I’ve posted two videos below about PM, and I encourage you to watch/listen as an introduction to the topic. If you don’t agree with this eschatological position, at least you’ll have some knowledge of what you don’t agree with. That’s more than I can say when I was on that side of things. Before I get there, I’ll explain, briefly, why I rejected PM out of hand while knowing absolutely nothing about it, and how my mind became open. Once opened, I discovered it makes perfect biblical sense.

I rejected PM because I thought it was embraced by 19th and early 20th century Christians because of cultural conditioning of the Western concept of “progress.” The hubris that came out of Enlightenment rationalism and the explosion of scientific knowledge led people to assume progress as linear, like an arrow shot to ever more wonderful human accomplishment. I thought Christians uncritically bought into this as their eschatology. This included my theological heroes, the great Princeton theologians Charles Hodge and B.B. Warfield. Apparently they were great in all things theological, except when it came to eschatology.

For most of my Christian life I was a “pan-millennialist”; it will all pan out in the end. It seemed like trying to understand “end times” was endless speculation and trying to figure it all out was a fool’s errand. Then in 2014 I discovered amillennialism through a teaching series by Dr. Kim Riddlebarger.  It blew my mind, and I decided it was an eschatological position I could embrace. Until a few months ago. I’ll share very briefly why, and suggest you watch/listen to these to videos so you can see why I’ve embraced PM, and see if you want to as well.

This is where Donald Trump comes in. In addition to being an uncouth billionaire New Yorker who rubs a lot of people the wrong way, his policies were a threat to both political parties, or the Uniparty. Everyone, including me, thought his candidacy was a joke, until it wasn’t. Then TDS really kicked in. I had it initially, but his critics were so over the top I thought, nobody can be that bad. Then there was three years of Trump-Russia “collusion,” and then covid, stolen election, and the cherry on the top was the J6 “insurrection.”

You would think all this would all depress me given I’d become full on MAGA, even “Ultra Maga,” and I was, but then I found Steve Bannon’s War Room, and became one of the Posse. I can’t explain it all here, but he turned me into an optimist with his affirmation of human agency (we can change things), especially in the context of the United States of America. That leads to his now famous rallying cry, action, action, action!

Earlier this year I decided to write a book of hope based on all these revelations I’d been going through since Trump, and realized I needed theological justification for my optimism. Initially, I thought it lay in the revelation of God in creation a la Paul in Romans 1:20, that “God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made . . . .” In other words, God’s revelation in creation, and human knowledge is part of his creation. We now know things we wouldn’t have known before Trump, or before Einstein, or before America’s Founding, or before Newton, Luther, Aquinas, you get the picture. All this knowledge is in some way a revelation of God’s “eternal power and divine nature.”

I still believe this, but when PM came along, I sensed it might be the answer I was looking for. Then in a conversation about PM in a YouTube video, Doug Wilson said, “Now you have a theological justification for optimism.” That’s it! The feeling at that moment reminded me of A Charlie Brown Christmas When Charlie goes to Lucy for “Psychiatric Help” so he can find out why he’s so depressed. She thinks it might be fear, so goes through various phobias. Finally, she asks about a phobia that means fear of everything, and Charlie yells out, “That’s it!” And Lucy flips backward cartoon like several times. I felt like Charlie. It was thrilling.

You’ll have to learn more about PM yourself to understand why I felt and still feel this way. Here are the promised videos:

James White went through a similar journey to me, from Pan-Mill, to A-Mill, to PM.

This is a documentary of various interviews. The host when through the same journey.

Share This