What if two mortal enemies both wanted a cataclysmic, world-ending battle, at roughly the same time, in roughly the same place?

Can you say “self-fulfilling prophecy”?

As Americans become better acquainted with the apocalyptic beliefs of the Islamic State, thanks to a spate of recent presentations of them, it’s worth noting that there are end-timers on our side as well: over three-quarters of U.S. evangelicals believe we’re living in the End Times right now. And while evangelical millennialists are not calling the military shots at the moment, their prophecies align in potentially terrifying ways with those of our enemy.

ISIS, as Graeme Wood unveiled in The Atlantic recently, is an apocalyptic death cult. It is Aum Shinrikyu and the Branch Davidians, but with machine guns, brutality, and a swath of territory with 8 million people living in it.

(Many have criticized Wood’s article, but only that it does not emphasize enough that there are many other streams of Islam, that ISIS’s brand is on the fringe, and that there are alternatives to Wood’s literalistic reading of the Koran. Which is fine—and says nothing about his analysis of ISIS itself.)

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