Mike Pompeo Talks About the Rapture Inside the CIA

Secretary of State nominee Mike Pompeo has talked about “the Rapture” inside the CIA, in public settings, and views politics as a “struggle” mankind must endure until the Rapture comes. Currently the CIA Director, Pompeo’s nomination was almost sidelined Monday night as one Republican member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was absent. After some begging by the Republican chairman Pompeo’s nomination was narrowly reported out as approved.

“Pompeo’s specific brand of evangelical Christianity, with its insistence on seeing Muslim-Christian relations as an apocalyptic holy war, makes him an unnerving choice for such a senior foreign policy position,” Vox reported last month.

“During his tenure as CIA director, and before that as a member of the House of Representatives, Pompeo has consistently used language that casts the war on terrorism as a cosmic divine battle of good and evil. He’s referred to Islamic terrorists as destined to ‘continue to press against us until we make sure that we pray and stand and fight and make sure that we know that Jesus Christ is our savior is truly the only solution for our world.'”

(For those unfamiliar with the Rapture, Vox offers this brief explanation: “The rapture is a distinctively American fringe theology that says Christians will be taken up, or “raptured,” into heaven at the onset of the end times.”)

“Sources inside the CIA told Foreign Policy that Pompeo’s speeches within the CIA are no less loaded with explicitly religious language,” Vox added.

There’s more.

Slate’s Michelle Goldberg in January described Pompeo as “a man who appears to view American foreign policy as a vehicle for holy war.”

“To worship our lord and celebrate our nation at the same place is not only our right, it is our duty,” Pompeo told parishioners in 2015, as Goldberg reported.

She continues: “Pompeo’s speech was a mishmash of domestic culture war callouts and dark warnings about the danger of radical Islam. He cited an inflammatory prayer that a pastor named the Rev. Joe Wright once delivered before the Kansas State Legislature: ‘America had worshipped other Gods and called it multiculturalism. We’d endorsed perversion and called it an alternative lifestyle.’ He lamented government efforts to ‘rip faith from our schools’ and then segued immediately into a discussion of the jihadi threat: ‘This evil is all around us.’ Pompeo concluded by describing politics as “a never-ending struggle … until the rapture.'”

Let’s look at that last part again.

Politics is “a never-ending struggle … until the rapture.”

Here’s a short clip of that remark:

How exactly would a Secretary of State Pompeo be perceived in non-Christian majority nations, or in nations that don’t believe in placing church over state?

And according to Ken Klippenstein at the TYT Network, Pompeo does not keep his extremist religious beliefs to himself in the workplace.

Pompeo, Klippenstein wrote on Monday, “allegedly has brought Rapture theology into the CIA. Michael Weinstein, founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation—a watchdog group on issues of religious freedom in the military and intelligence community—told TYT that Pompeo has talked about the Rapture at the CIA during his tenure as director there.”

Weinstein told TYT his group has received complaints from CIA personnel about Pompeo’s introduction of overtly religious behavior into the workplace, including Rapture references. “He is intolerant of anyone who isn’t a fundamentalist Christian,” Weinstein said. “The people that worked under him at the CIA that came to us were never confused—they never had time to be confused. They were shocked and then they were scared shitless.” The CIA did not respond to a request for comment from Pompeo.

That is the mindset of the man about to become America’s chief diplomat and representative to the world.