When Peace in the Middle East Was a Sign of the End Times

How modern prophecy flipped the script on who the Antichrist is supposed to be.

In popular American evangelical teaching, a key “sign” of the Antichrist is a leader who seems to deliver peace in the Middle East — often framed as a covenant with Israel drawn from Daniel 9:27 and repeated in prophecy media and novels.

That idea was systematized in modern dispensational theology and then popularized by Hal Lindsey and the Left Behind franchise, where the Antichrist brokers a seven-year deal with Israel. Yet when President Trump brokered a huge ceasefire deal in Gaza, seeing the release of hostages, most white evangelicals didn’t apply their own Antichrist rubric to him at all. They wanted him to get the Nobel Peace Prize and were outraged he didn’t.

President Jimmy Carter, by contrast, was sometimes cast by the Christian right as “kind of the antichrist” after the Camp David peace breakthrough. The inconsistency speaks for itself.