The Geopolitics of the Chosen People's Apocalypse

The Los Angeles Jews for Jesus and the Judeo-Christian Tradition

Abstract

Jews for Jesus (JFJ) is an aggressive American Christian Zionist missionary organization. Their particular worldview is both Jewish and Christian by faith whilst bridging American and Israeli national identities. Through critical discourse analysis of a key text, as well as a series of interviews, this article explores the apocalyptic geopolitics of members of the JFJ’s Los Angeles branch and compares these views with a book on the apocalypse written by the JFJ Executive Director, David Brickner. This article shows that discourse analysis of apocalyptic social movements alone often misses the everyday and discordant discourses surrounding their theo-political imaginations. The three interviews examined show vast deviations in understanding and motivation that are unaccounted for in previous scholarship on religious geopolitics. This article concludes that these everyday discourses have influence on the cultural conceptualizations of both Christian and Jewish apocalypses and on many text-based academic findings concerning evangelicals and Messianic Jews.