In 1971, Ronald Reagan reportedly told California State Senator James Mills that the “fire and brimstone” mentioned in Revelations referred to the nuclear weapons that would destroy Russia, who played the role of “enemies of God” at the time. It also came up repeatedly during his 1984 reelection campaign, when he said on television that America had plans to fight and prevail in a nuclear war with Russia.

So, if you’re keeping score at home, that’s a former two-term president who not only believed that he was a key figure in an impending apocalypse that would usher in the return of Jesus, but also that he’d live to see it all happen. … And Reagan wasn’t just some doom-obsessed anomaly. George W. Bush, who you might remember actually started a couple wars in his day, has even dedicated a good portion of his post-power years to trying to get Jesus to come back, speaking at fundraisers for the Messianic Jewish Bible Institute, a group dedicated to converting Jews to Christianity. Why? Because Jews converting to Christianity in huge numbers is one of the things that has to happen before we can get on with the End Times. That’s what that group does. They convert Jews to Christianity in the hope that it will someday lead to Armageddon. There are also Evangelical Christian groups who spend millions of dollars to pay for Jews to immigrate to Israel, because some interpretations of Biblical prophecy say half the world’s Jews have to be there before Jesus can return. These people do not see a cataclysmic war in the Middle East as a bad thing. It is the end game of their entire belief system. Making sure it happens is what they feel like they’ve been put on Earth to do.

Evangelical Christians are nothing new, nor is their desire to run this country, but what makes their line of thinking particularly scary is that, in ISIS, we now have an “enemy of God” with an almost identical vision for the end of the world. As Robert Evans touched on in his brilliant examination of the official ISIS magazine, Dabiq, the group views war with the United States as inevitable, and that war is meant to play out almost exactly as it does in the Bible. Dabiq is the town in Syria where the apocalyptic conflict is supposed to start.

From there, a drawn-out war with the West ensues, culminating in the return of Jesus. That’s right, ISIS is also banking on Jesus being the one who comes back to fix things in the end; they just disagree over who he’ll be coming back to save. What both sides agree on, though, is that they definitely want this war to happen.

Realistic Reasons WWIII Could Start Anytime Now