During his February 7 sermon on “China in Biblical Prophecy,” pastor Phil Hotsenpiller of Orange County’s Influence Church shared his thoughts about the coronavirus and its relationship to the book of Revelation. “I call it the Chinese virus,” Hotsenpiller told his megachurch, as a giant graphic of an American flag loomed on the screen behind him. Hotsenpiller had already declared, for his online and in-person audience, that China would catalyze the apocalypse. Now, with his congregation’s rapt attention, he teased the topic for the following week’s sermon: by unleashing a pandemic,  China was “setting the  stage” for Armageddon. “We’re going to talk about whether it came out of a fish market or out of a laboratory,” Hotsenpiller promised. His casual prejudice came after an 84-year-old Thai grandfather was murdered in San Francisco, and during a surge of anti-Asian hostility unlike anything the country has seen in decades. He preached his racism in a county that is home to the third-largest Asian American population in America, where a Chinese family was recently so terrorized by racist teens that neighbors instituted an overnight watch to guard them. But the minister showed no signs that he cared about anti-Asian violence.

Those unfamiliar with Evangelical eschatology, the study of the last days and God’s ultimate plan for humanity, might be forgiven for wondering what xenophobic conspiracy theories have to do with “Biblical prophecy.” Yet framing the “Chinese virus” as a step toward Armageddon exemplifies a century-old hermeneutical instinct amongst Evangelicals, one that frames “the East” as integral to the anti-God forces that will, sometime soon, spark the end of the world. The revival of this “sanctified Sinophobia,” my term for Christian-inspired anti-Chinese hostility, has fueled the hatred now directed at Asians in America and around the globe.

In response to this anti-Asian hate, I authored an open letter condemning the bond between American Sinophobic politicians and their pastoral leaders. Without intervention, their synergism is empowering the arsons, beatings, and murders besieging Asians in America, often inflicted in the name of religious righteousness.

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It should come as no surprise to anyone observing the rise of Christian nationalism that Reverend Hotsenpiller’s xenophobic prophesying would find a ready audience. An ideology that sacralizes white America as the object of divine favor, Christian nationalism elevates white supremacy and patriarchal hierarchy as preconditions for maintaining God’s blessing on the nation. In their book Taking America Back For God, sociologists Samuel Perry and Andrew Whitehead show that Christian nationalists embrace “authoritarian measures . . . in service of realizing a more ‘Christian’ nation.” Thus, support for Trump’s border wall, as well as the belief that police shoot Black Americans more often than they do whites because of the former’s innate violent tendencies, define Christian nationalists as much as, if not more than, faith in Christ. So, too, do “fears about the moral decay of the nation, and belief that, following this decline into depravity, Jesus will literally whisk Christians into heaven.” Borders and blue lives must be defended precisely because, as history approaches its final chapter, they face a multiplying host of enemies.

More a political identity than a theological rallying point, Christian nationalism is hardly restricted to a fringe subculture. Perry and Whitehead distinguish between “accommodators,” who “lean towards accepting the Christian nation narrative” while not necessarily identifying as Christian nationalists, and “ambassadors,” those who display ardent enthusiasm for making America an avowedly Christian nation. In combination, they comprise some 52% of the entire American population. In a recent interview, Whitehead noted that this demographic even includes a not-insignificant amount of Americans who either adhere to a faith other than Christianity or hold no faith at all: while comparatively small in number, religiously unaffiliated ambassadors celebrate Christianity as upholding a “cultural framework of basically white, native-born, politically, maybe even religiously conservative Americans.” This contingent might not believe in a literal rapture, but their zealous support for Trump signals that they, too, see him as restraining an epic flood of moral pollution.

Insurrectionists carrying a cross to the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

A disturbingly large segment of America, then, entered the coronavirus era primed to perceive China as the source of that flood. It was against this backdrop that Trump’s loyal crusaders in the GOP immediately took cues from his choice to racialize the virus. Arizona representative and “proud Catholic” Paul Gosar practically invented use of the term “Wuhan coronavirus” on Twitter on March 8, 2020, an accomplishment he underscored by featuring the term three times on one subpage of his website. A day later, California representative and Southern Baptist Kevin McCarthy referred to COVID-19 as the “Chinese Coronavirus,” subsequently calling it a “China borne disease” in a defiant non-apology. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a fervently evangelical Presbyterian, incited an “800 percent increase in [the online use of] the phrase [‘Wuhan coronavirus’]” after deploying it on March 20, 2020; he then unsuccessfully tried to strong arm the G7 into using the phrase. In the same month, Southern Baptist Senator Ted Cruz defended Trump against charges of mishandling the pandemic, quipping on his podcast that “at least [Trump] wasn’t serving bat soup in the Wuhan province.” Cruz had no quip a few days later, when a Hmong family in his state was stabbed, in the words of the perpetrator, for “looking Chinese.”

To the untrained eye, the relationship between these politicians’ Christianity and their racism might appear incidental, even irrelevant. The multiple studies that demonstrate the link between political rhetoric and increased anti-Asian sentiment do not foreground Christian nationalism. Nonetheless, while some politicians submerge that link in their language, others, like Methodist Senator Tom Cotton, have highlighted it proudly. “Do your part to arrest the spread of the China virus. And God bless our brave docs and nurses,” Cotton tweeted in late March. Praising Trump’s disaster declaration in response to tornadoes in Tennessee, Bill Hagerty wrote in early April, “Our local communities will now have more sources of federal funding to fight the Wuhan coronavirus. Thank you, Pres. Trump, for keeping TN in your thoughts — you are in our prayers during this difficult time!” In a campaign ad that Marjorie Taylor-Greene posted later that month, Taylor-Greene decried “fines for drive-in church” as manifestations of “Chinese-style socialism,” over images of a Chinese Communist Party meeting hall that prominently feature Chinese writing.

The calls for God to bless “our” doctors in the face of a foreign disease, the promises to offer “our” prayers for the “Wuhan coronavirus”-fighting President, the suggestions that China is persecuting American churchgoers via the Democratic party: these messages demonstrate how some government officials encourage hatred because of their faith, not in spite of it. Specifically, they subscribe to a faith that casts “godless Communist China” as a leviathan-sized menace to the God-fearing American heartland. In doing so, they speak to millions of believers whose apocalyptic proclivities have been enflamed by COVID-19. As social anthropologist Simon Dein has recently written, the pandemic inspired an efflorescence of fascination with the Book of Revelation, particularly the plagues promised at the end of times. Such doomsday enthusiasts are avidly listening to politicians who sermonize about the titanic battle between God’s elect and their Marx-worshipping, disease-spreading persecutors in Beijing.

The fevered homiletics about China and Armageddon from the past year have left their mark. An October 2020 study found that support of Christian nationalism strongly predicted “finding nothing racist about calling COVID-19 the ‘China Virus’.” That these defenders of God and country are translating resentment into action, particularly the whites who constitute 90 percent of all anti-Asian assailants, is evident from several incidents reported to Stop AAPI Hate. One Internet commenter exclaimed “God bless Mr. Truman” in the course of insinuating that America should drop a bomb on China. An ongoing rash of vandalized Buddhist temples, including one perpetrator spraypainting “Jesus” onto a statue and another claiming that he acted in obedience to the Bible, further confirms the extent to which reactionary faith has supercharged anti-Asian hate.

To be sure, not all of those who commit hate crimes do so because they believe the Rapture is scheduled for next week. If pressed, they might not be sure what doctrinal position they hold at all. As Whitehead and Perry muse in their book, many American Christians hold incoherent beliefs about the End Times, with little regard for sorting out the contradictions. Yet Christian nationalism’s vision of a climactic contest between Good and Evil, which the “Yellow Peril” has accelerated, generates subliminal suggestions as much as it does direct motivation.

Indeed, throughout the rallies and news sites patronized by the Right, sanctified Sinophobia reaches its audience through the politicians who provide sound bites for those venues. Their status as highly public tithers means that those politicians are unlikely to meet resistance from ministries grateful for cash and proximity to power. Left unimpeded, the drumbeat of paranoid prejudice rings constantly in the ears of countless angry bigots, who may never fully understand their own reasons for lashing out.

To take one especially grotesque example, Evangelical eschatology and its attendant debasing of Asian people lurks in the background of the Atlanta spa massacre. Supposedly motivated by a need to purge his self-described “sex addiction,” the devout Christian killer imbibed a steady diet of apocalyptically tinged antipathy towards Asians and Asian culture at the church where he participated in ministry, Crabapple First Baptist. A February 2, 2021 sermon found Crabapple pastor Jerry Dockery describing Beirut, Singapore, and Beijing as places where he felt “not at home”; in his telling, these places’ putative hostility towards Americans represents “the world’s hostility towards people of Christian faith.” The next week, Dockery referred to China as an example of an authoritarian government, whom true believers, in the fashion of the martyrs who stoically endured Caesar’s persecution, must obey. Buddha and Confucius made cameo appearances alongside Muhammad in Dockery’s August 16, 2020 sermon on the Second Coming, as false teachers who will fail to offer salvation on Judgment Day. In the November 8, 2020 sermon, an associate pastor prayed for “the almost one billion Hindus” who are “going to hell if they don’t repent.”

These caricatures are only compounded by the racial politics of the Southern Baptist Convention, Crabapple’s denomination. Founded by slave owners, the SBC recently courted backlash when its leaders released a statement denouncing “critical race theory” as “unbiblical.” Such anti-anti-racist stances are precisely why Cruz and McCarthy, like a slew of other Republicans, consider the SBC their home. Seen in this context, then, the killer’s action do not merely originate in a repressive approach to sex. Dockery’s preoccupation with the final judgment, his cartoonish portrayals of Asia, the SBC’s rejection of racial progress, and the clout of deep-pocketed Southern Baptists like Cruz and McCarthy worked together to ensure that, from the killer’s perspective, Asian sex workers required nothing short of “elimination.”

In the last sermon preached at Crabapple before the massacre, Reverend Dockery unwittingly egged on that elimination by expounding on what the Second Coming would entail. Using language that would take on chilling overtones after the shootings, Dockery painted the returning Christ “as a military leader, upon a white horse, ready to wage war on all who have blasphemed his name.” Raised in a religious milieu dominated by xenophobia and apocalypticism, the killer heard no countervailing reflections on God’s love for all ethnicities, no commentary on the less-than-Christlike tenor of Cruz’s “bat soup” quip or McCarthy’s insistence on “Chinese coronavirus.” It was in the absence of any such influence that the killer decided to “wage war” on Asian women in a preview of his Messiah’s bloody return.

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Ever since the 19th century, clergy and congressmen have amplified each other’s fears that Chinese emigrants to the West might annihilate Christian civilization, if not the world. Despite the protestations of sympathetic ministers in the late 19th century, pious nativists like the Jesuit Father Buchard ultimately won lawmakers to their side: denouncing the Chinese in San Francisco, Buchard called them “pagan . . . vicious . . . immoral creatures . . . incapable of rising to the virtue that is inculcated by the religion of Jesus Christ, the World’s Redeemer.” It was to preserve white America from a tsunami of spiritual corruption, not merely from competition for jobs, that the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act banned Chinese laborers from immigrating.

In the twentieth century, the Cold War intensified the clerical impulse to depict “the Chinese” as harbingers of Biblical doom. As Paul Boyer documents in his book When Time Shall Be No More, painting China as a key player in fulfilling the Book of Revelation would characterize preachers and Bible study leaders throughout the 1970s and 1980s. With increasing specificity, a host of self-designated prophets mapped visions of “a huge Oriental army” and “an invasion of Asiatics” onto Revelation’s images of locusts, soldiers on horseback, and consuming fire. Amongst such jeremiads, evangelist Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth, published in 1970, offered the most popular account of a Satanically empowered China. In this bestselling interpretation of Revelation, Lindsey includes a chapter literally titled “The Yellow Peril,” which identifies China with Revelation 16:12’s “kings of the East.” A faction whose bellicosity triggers Armageddon, the “kings of the East” command an army of 200 million (Rev. 9:16). This same number, Lindsey breathlessly reports, was cited in the 1966 documentary The Voice of the Dragon, as part of a “boast of the Chinese themselves” concerning the size of their “people’s army.” In prose that would be read by “Jesus people” in coffeehouses and communes throughout the 1970s, Lindsey concludes, “China alone will have the capacity to destroy one-third of the world’s population just as John predicted.”

Lindsey’s Sinophobia left an impression on Ronald Reagan, who invited the author to speak at the Pentagon. Former Naval intelligence officer George E. Lowe claims, based on his research, that Reagan read Lindsey’s book during its initial run in 1970; that timeline would provide context to his 1971 comment that the “Red Chinese” were a “bunch of murdering bums.” Biographer Lou Cannon recounts a 1989 conversation in which Reagan, famously obsessed with Armageddon, ventriloquized Lindsey’s exegesis by describing “an invading army from the Orient, 200 million strong.” The spectre of that Oriental army likely underpinned his resistance to his Secretary of State’s push for a “strategic association” with China, not to mention his first term’s belligerence towards Japan. Stephen O. Leary, a late scholar of apocalypticism in media, asserted that “every single one of Lindsey’s proposals for domestic and foreign policy was part of Reagan’s campaign platform.”

Today, almost half a century after Lindsey’s visions helped fuel the rise of the Religious Right, pastors and politicians echo each other’s fulminations against the Yellow Peril with ever-increasing fervor. Reviving Lindsey’s “200 million Chinese army” canard, Phil Hotsenpiller’s sermons on China exemplified this escalation: not content with granting “the kings of the East” a major role in the Armageddon scenario, as Lindsey did, Hotsenpiller implied that China is the Antichrist in collective form, the “man of peace” who unites the world under a false gospel before obliterating it. The solution, of course, is to support Christian soldiers who defend the true gospel. His news aggregator site, American Faith, juxtaposes fearmongering about China with headlines lauding Cotton, Cruz, and other anti-immigration hardliners.

Ted Cruz’s own belligerence towards China reflects the way that Christian nationalist politicians reciprocate pastors’ endorsements by acting out their theological fantasies. The senator’s father, Rafael Cruz, is a preacher who has called for Christians to occupy every branch of American government. Cruz Sr. argues that this occupation will culminate in the last days, when the faithful “transfer wealth” from the “wicked” to the “righteous.” He has also decried America’s current loss of resources to China. Seen in this light, Ted’s determination to hold China financially liable for all coronavirus deaths worldwide, as well as his desire to pass bills targeting “Chinese spies” for their alleged theft of American intellectual property, makes a kind of theological sense: he wants to reverse the flow of riches from Christians to Communists to hasten the economic restoration prophesied by his father.

These examples of clerical influence are disturbing. Yet the subtler manifestations of the collaboration between pastoral and political power are arguably more insidious. Sinophobic politicians proudly list their affiliated churches and pastors on their congressional websites; in turn, their spiritual advisors hold fawning interviews with them, defend them in print, or merely offer cover for bigotry through silence. Meanwhile, the same pastors rail against the coming creation of a “one world government,” as Ted Cruz’s pastor Gregg Matte recently did, leaving congregants to speculate about where this imminent global autocracy might originate. (Reverend Matte offered one clue by naming “China under Mao” as a notable forerunner of the Antichrist’s regime.)

To reduce the likelihood that those under Christian nationalism’s spell will strike out at its designated scapegoats, my open letter calls for politicians’ affiliated churches and denominations to urge them to repent for anti-Asian racism immediately. It also demands that those churches take disciplinary action in the absence of said repentance, up to and including excommunication. Signed by 600+ signatories, the letter calls for solidarity from members of these churches, including the withdrawal of material support for institutions that fail to take action. With such measures, we hope to delegitimize the venomous religiosity that reigns in America’s pulpits and congressional chambers.

Interrupting that reign might seem far-fetched, given the extent of damage that Christian nationalism has wreaked already. But if there’s one thing I’ve gleaned from sermons about the Day of Judgment, which comes “like a thief in the night,” it’s the value of expecting the unexpected.

Lucas Kwong is a writer, musician, and professor of English at CUNY. You can sign his open letter on anti-Asian racism and Christian nationalism at againstchristianxenophobia.com.