The Oxford Dictionary defines “ahistoric” as an adjective meaning the quality of disregarding, lacking concern for, or being uninfluenced by history, historical context, or traditional development. Google further categorizes how ahistoricity is utilized in different modes of thought:
- Literature/Philosophy: Interpreting a text without regard for its historical background.
- History/Archaeology: A failure to recognize the continuity or progression of cultures over time.
- Theology/Politics: Treating contemporary doctrines or events as timeless truths, ignoring the historical process of their development, which can result in faulty arguments.
- Ahistoricism: A related term referring to the absence of historical perspective or the belief that history is irrelevant to the present.
The Unutterable Utterance
Pastor Philip Anthony Mitchell of 2819 Church in Atlanta was recently on Ryan Miller’s “The Jesus People Podcast” to discuss a plethora of topics that made both speakers sound, and look, if you watched the episode on YouTube, less like qualified intellectuals discussing complex geopolitical events and theological issues and more like Armageddon-obsessed conspiracy theorists with a mic and a platform. Among these topics, Philip stated, without a reliable source, corresponding data, or credible evidence, that the greatest threat to the Church and the West is Islam, because Islam has taken over Asia, Africa, and Europe. And if Christians are not careful, Islam, with its tentacles of death, will reach American shores to pillage the last bastion of Western identity, the Christian United States of America. My words, of course.
Minister Mitchell goes into a low-toned, guttural spiel about the end times, where the mentions leaves falling from trees (an allusion to shifting seasons and signs of the times about the end times), and world events and how those events point to the imminent return of Jesus. “I personally believe that in both my prayer time and my study of God’s word, we are close to the end,” said Mitchell, without providing evidence to support his claim. Mind you, Mitchell is not the first, nor will he be the last, religious cleric to equate day-to-day global catastrophes as signs of the end of the world. Many have come before him, made predictions, sometimes dating Christ’s return to a specific year or date, and were resolutely humiliated when the time came and went without Jesus’ reappearance in the sky.
“I believe we are living in the final hour of the church. […] I don’t think we have that much time left. I just don’t believe it. I think the global headlines, the things we’re seeing forming in Europe, the things we’re seeing happening in the United States, the unfolding of 2 Timothy chapter 3, we’re feeling the winds of Matthew 24,” said Mitchell. “I mean, I don’t want to get into a deep escalogi-[stuttering] eschatological study here.“
No, Pastor Mitchell, please do go into your deep eschatological study so we can gain a better understanding of why you believe we are in the end times. Which eschatological tradition are you referring to when you mention global headlines, Europe, the USA, and New Testament passages as signs of the end of the world? Which global headlines are you referring to? Bitcoin price drop? Chinese robots doing backflips? Advancements made within cancer treatment research? Are we talking about Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum’s recent announcement about making healthcare accessible to all 130 million Mexican citizens? Are these the headlines ushering in the imminent return of Christ?
And what these “things” presently forming in Europe? Spain’s recognition of Palestine as a state? Or perhaps Viktor Orban’s use of American taxpayer dollars to keep his corrupt right-wing political career alive? Is it that Cristiano Ronaldo might miss the 2026 World Cup? What “things” in Europe are so pressing and cataclysmic that they will thrust us into irreversible end-times scenarios?
And what are you “seeing” in America that has you, and your deep eschatological understanding, which you do not expound on, convinced that we are close to “the final hour of the church”? Is it Trump’s presidency? The cost of gas? Inflation? Is it that Jerry Jones, the owner of the Dallas Cowboys, is still alive and well and still Super Bowl appearance-less since 1996? What, exactly, is leading Minister Mitchell to presume that one or several events in the United States of America are about to usher in the end times?
Biblical Illiteracy
Now, Mitchell proceeds to mention two Biblical passages in haste without providing context, background, literary understanding, or interpretive tools to explain the texts he cites. This is an age-old tactic of Christianized idiocy, where the mere mention of a passage from the Bible, nothing more, is enough to appease the already dull and unthinking masses in these religious circles. One need not dive into the text nor explore its meaning in community, reference materials, and open debate within that community to understand the meaning and message of such texts better; one need only make peripheral mention or allusions to such texts, and that is enough authority and evidence to elevate that person as an authority over said texts.
Mitchell mentions 2 Timothy 3 as evidence alongside his “global headlines…Europe…United States…” prophetic imagination, claiming these are enough to prove that we are closer than ever to the return of our King Jesus.
Godlessness in the Last Days
“1 You must understand this, that in the last days, distressing times will come. 2 For people will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, 3 unfeeling, implacable, slanderers, profligates, brutes, haters of good, 4 treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, 5 holding to the outward form of godliness but denying its power. Avoid them! 6 For among them are those who make their way into households and captivate immature women, overwhelmed by their sins and swayed by all kinds of desires, 7 who are always studying yet never able to recognize truth. 8 As Jannes and Jambres opposed Moses, so these people, of corrupt mind and counterfeit faith, also oppose the truth. 9 But they will not make much progress because, as in the case of those two men, their folly will become plain to everyone.
Paul’s Charge to Timothy
10 Now you have observed my teaching, my conduct, my aim in life, my faith, my patience, my love, my steadfastness, 11 my persecutions, and my sufferings, the things that happened to me in Antioch, Iconium, and Lystra. What persecutions I endured! Yet the Lord rescued me from all of them. 12 Indeed, all who want to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted. 13 But wicked people and impostors will go from bad to worse, deceiving others and being deceived. 14 But as for you, continue in what you have learned and firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it 15 and how from childhood you have known sacred writings that are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. 16 All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, 17 so that the person of God may be proficient, equipped for every good work.”
Alright, so right off the top, Mitchell runs into a tough spot. Apostle Paul lists a series of morally reprehensible habits that will proliferate in the end times; behaviors so dastardly unacceptable that they gain mention in the Holy Book. Now, if you are ahistorical, like Mitchell, you will have to believe that from the time Paul penned this letter to Timothy circa 64-65 C.E., and it was later circulated by church leaders throughout the Roman Empire for years before being canonized in the Council of Laodicea (c. 363), these reprehensible behaviors did not exist and were not performed by human beings, en masse, until 2026, when Mitchell witnessed the “unfolding” of these events after seeing global headlines, things in Europe, and things in America.
Lovers of self, lovers of money, boasters, arrogant, abusive, disobedient kids, ungrateful, unholy, unfeeling, implacable, slanderers, profligates, brutes, haters of good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasures rather than lovers of God did not, according to Mitchell, abound in world history from the moment Paul’s ink dried papyrus, until just recently. Therefore, now, today, in 2026, because we have, for the very first time in recorded human history, witnessed this abundance of morally reprehensible behaviors, according to Minister Mitchell, Jesus will return.
You must understand that ahistorical anti-intellectuals with a massive religious platform are dangerous blind guides leading the blind.
Mitchell believes Jesus’ apocalyptic end-times Olivet Discourse is fulfilling itself before our very eyes because of “the global headlines, the things we’re seeing forming in Europe, the things we’re seeing happening in the United States!”
I would love to divulge the entirety of Matthew 24 here, where Jesus begins his sermon with “Beware that no one leads you astray. For many will come in my name, saying, ‘I am the Messiah!’ and they will lead many astray. […] Then if anyone says to you, ‘Look! Here is the Messiah!’ or ‘There he is!’ do not believe it. For false messiahs and false prophets will appear and produce great signs and wonders, to lead astray, if possible, even the elect. Take note, I have told you beforehand. So, if they say to you, ‘Look! He is in the wilderness,’ do not go out. If they say, ‘Look! He is in the inner rooms,’ do not believe it.”
If only Mitchell himself had heeded these words. How revealing that prophets and anointed leaders will show up throughout the ages, claiming to be the messiah or forerunners of the Lord, pointing aimlessly here and there, proclaiming the Lord’s return, and failing miserably. Jesus warned us about these people. And I get it, nowhere does Mitchell claim to be a messiah, but he sure does the job of a false prophet well. He purports to know that the end is near, we are in the final hour, and this is it, because, again, “global headlines, the things we’re seeing forming in Europe, the things we’re seeing happening in the United States.” That’s his evidence.
I think we would have avoided this initial debacle if Mitchell had, in fact, gone into his deep eschatological understanding of these passages and end-times events, so that we would not have to take him at his word about “global headlines, the things we’re seeing forming in Europe, the things we’re seeing happening in the United States.”
He, as a consequence of not expounding on his eschatological understanding, plays the part of an end-times conspiracist with no understanding of the history of first-century Roman Palestine, the wars and skirmishes that happened then, and how certain aspects of Matthew 24 were fulfilled 30 to 40 years after Jesus uttered those words on the Mount of Olives. The destruction of Jerusalem in 70 C.E. and the catastrophic Jewish-Roman War, which left the Temple in ruins and scattered the Jewish population throughout the empire, were not random historical footnotes; they were the very events Jesus’ disciples were asking about when they posed their questions on the Mount of Olives. A historically literate reading of Matthew 24 is not a fringe academic exercise; it is the baseline requirement for anyone daring to use that text as a prophetic weather vane for 21st-century geopolitics. But again, such historical awareness and discussion is too much to decipher and expound upon with unthinking evangelical masses that use unthinking false prophets as their think tanks. The mere mention of one chapter from one epistle and one chapter taken out of context from a synoptic gospel is all modern anti-intellectual evangelical Christians need to suspend their critical thinking skills. They are incapable of determining whether someone is playing them for fools.
Mention the Bible. Spew nonsense. Gain a following. That is all it takes, and Mitchell displays the success of that very well.
Black Face Islamophobia & Closing Thoughts
Now, onto the Islamophobic rhetoric Mitchell offered. False prophets also have the keen ability to make their adherents hate other people. There has to be a us-vs-them binary for the fearmongering to take hold and work successfully.
Pastor Mitchell wonders, with the host of the show, Ryan, if he can be “fluid and transparent” with listeners. This is a disconcerting line of inquiry for a minister to make on a podcast that tens of thousands of faithful tune into daily or weekly. It is common knowledge that if you, the minister of a megachurch, agree to sit down with a podcast host whose platform has a massive social media following, you both will discuss religious things, which, to my understanding, does not require cloak-and-dagger, underhanded dealings to regulate language and topics. If you are a Christian cleric sitting down to discuss Christian things, namely, the end times and other matters, the expectation is that you will be transparent by default. The fluid aspect, however, can be kept to oneself. So, whenever someone entertains a semi-question or the rhetorical “I don’t know how fluid and transparent I can be,” to which the host states, “Go for it,” it sounds very much like “I don’t mean to sound racist,” or “I don’t mean to sound mean, rude, pompous,” yet here I go.
As a first-time listener, the next thing you expect to hear from a minister’s mouth, when he intends on being fluid and transparent after discussing his ideas about the end times and then shrinking from expanding on his eschatological understanding, is some heavenly-inspired, heart-wrenching, life-transforming revelation about Christian formation. But we are left with this disappointing line of argument.
“There is a radical ideology that is hostile towards Christianity, that is incompatible with Western fundamentals, that has swept through the East, that has swept through the continent of Africa, and has taken over all of Europe and has entered our shores. And if we don’t have an awakening in this hour, your children are going to suffer and so are mine,” said Mitchell, to which Ryan, the host, interjected.
“I believe you’re speaking about Islam?”
“Of course. The rise of Islam. Radical Islam. They’re very vocal on social media about their desire to take over America,” said Mitchell.
Now, at first, I sat with these words in disbelief. I do this a lot when I hear people of great influence utter some of the most idiotic statements ever spoken in public life. And then I thought to myself that Mitchell, the host of this podcast, the faithful listeners of this podcast, Mitchell’s church, and those who perceive him as an authoritative and credible Bible teacher are all, if not most, incredibly ahistorical people if they believe anything Mitchell just said.
I want to tackle each of Mitchell’s statements to direct followers of Jesus away from anti-intellectual, seeker-friendly, cultural supremacist, racially charged, and xenophobic centers of attraction like this one, because these people and these places tend to, as designed, diminish and distort the Imago Dei of God’s creation, and in the process, turn the followers of Jesus into monsters who claim to speak for Jesus but in fact do the work of the devil by dehumanizing and denigrating people who are different from them.
1. There is a radical ideology that is hostile towards Christianity.
Historically, there have been hundreds, if not thousands, of radical ideologies that have been hostile towards Christians, collectively, and Christianity as a whole. If you consider the first and second-century hostilities against the church, you will find that Christians endured extreme persecution by the Romans, Greek religious mobs, and Jewish fundamentalists. As Christianity expanded into Africa, Asia, and Europe, it continued to face, endure, and survive numerous radical ideologies. And to this day, there still exist many radical or mainstream ideologies that are hostile to Christianity in particular and to faith and theological creeds of any sort. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is hostile to Christianity, not only because it is the religious tradition of the nations that invaded and attacked it in the past, namely, the United States and adjacent allied nations, but also because North Korea operates within an atheistic materialist worldview. They are hostile to all forms of non-materialistic understandings of history.
Yet Mitchell makes no mention of the lovely and yet subjugated masses of the DPRK. A 2014 United Nations Commission of Inquiry found, through its investigative work, that the DPRK has systemically enacted genocidal efforts against Christians in North Korea. The same reports state that out of the 200,000 to 400,000 Christians presently in North Korea, 70,000 are imprisoned, starved, tortured, and worked to death for no other reason than that they profess faith in Jesus Christ. And those are 2014 numbers. The number of incarcerated Christians may have ballooned since then, or dropped drastically because the DPRK government may have killed them off.
But who gives a damn about Christians in North Korea? We are worried about Islam and Islam in the West.
2. Islam is incompatible with Western fundamentals.
Mitchell’s ahistoricity rears its ugly and deformed head once more.
Muslim scholars transmitted Hindu-Arabic numerals to Europe. If your phone or computer’s keyboard has the digits 0 through 9 on it, thank a Muslim. It is by God’s grace that we are not counting our time with capitalized letters. “What time is it, dear?” “O, it is just V past X:XXX, dearest.”
The names of celestial bodies, namely, astronomical masses, are named after Arabic peoples: Aldebaran, Betelgeuse, Rigel, Vega, Deneb, Fomalhaut, Altair, and others. Ibn Sina wrote the Canon of Medicine, which was used in European universities from the 12th to the 17th century. Muslim physicist Ibn al-Haytham established the scientific study of light, vision, and the camera obscura. We have been blessed by Muslim philosophers, philologists, chemists, architects, instrumentalists, musicians, linguistic experts, and mathematicians whose life’s work has influenced and catapulted human civilizations into the future. Without Muslim people, it is fair to say, the world would look, speak, and engage with language, numbers, and reality in an extremely different way.
Mitchell is ahistorical; therefore, he pinpoints a fictitious understanding of Islam as the standard understanding of Islam and places it in direct conflict with what he and his host perceive as Western fundamentals.
I nearly tore my hair out when Mitchell attempted to protect the sanctity of Western fundamentals but failed to define what Western fundamentals actually are.
What aspect of Western fundamentals are we here to defend? The formation of capitalism? The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade? The genocide of the Amero-Indian peoples? Perhaps it is the rush for American lands, land theft, devastation, murder, pillage, epistemicide, and religious oppression that is worth defending here. Oh, right, perhaps it is democracy. Not an inherently Western concept, by the way. So maybe he is defending the concept of race and racism, which are definitely Western constructs. Maybe he means the perpetual subjugation and second-class status of women. This is not only a Western concept, but it is certainly sacralized in Western societies.
But Mitchell, as is his modus operandi, a Western term, utters a thing and believes, therefore, that the thing uttered is so; and in doing so, he fumbles the opportunity to define that which he claims to believe and identify that which he accuses of being hostile toward it. He does not understand the meaning of Western, the foundations of the fundamentals of Western civilization, and he understands even less about Islam.
3. [Islam] has swept through the East, swept through the continent of Africa, taken over all of Europe, and entered our shores.
Certain platforms estimate that Christians make up 31% of the planet’s population, with 2.38 billion people swearing allegiance to Jesus. Muslims are in the runner-up position; 24 to 25% of Earth’s people, between 1.9 and 2 billion, and growing, have sworn allegiance to Allah and Muhammad, his prophet.
If we are to use Mitchell’s posturing, then because a faith expands geographically, he must condemn Christianity for its expansion over the same areas and regions he claims Islam has taken. Christianity has swept through the “East” for centuries. Christianity made its claim in Africa long before it became a state religion in Rome. And it burned through Europe faster than the Black Plague. Christianity’s missional impact is unquestioned and undeniable. Initially, it spread through word of mouth and transformative kingdom ethics, namely, social reform and care for widows, orphans, the poor, the diseased, the outcast, the foreigner, and others. Christians led the ethical conversation so well that many sought to integrate Christian ethics into pagan European societies, which, in time, also capitulated to the Christianization of their respective societies.
The problem, as history shows, is that at several points, Christian people allowed the faith to be co-opted by civic powers to expand throughout the world through violence and terror.
Does Mitchell think that the Indigenous peoples of the Americas came to hear about Jesus through love and mercy? Or were they forced into Christian culture by totalizing force? History shows that European Christians were so effective in sharing their modes of European Christianity with Indigenous peoples that those peoples, native to these lands, nearly went extinct. European Christianity, which has birthed American Christianity, a perfected version of totalitarian Christianity, has killed more Christians and Indigenous peoples than Muslims have in Islam’s entire history. Mind you, when Muslim do become radicalized and violent, the brunt of violence is enacted against fellow Muslims; not Christians. European colonialism, an extension of Christian theological land acquisition theory developed in 15th-century Europe, killed somewhere between 55 and 130 million Indigenous peoples between the 1490s and 1900.
Now, I am not diminishing the devastating reach and consequences of Islamic conquest throughout history. Islamic sultans and clerics were both great and good and great and evil. Many of them hunted down Jews, Christians, and Muslim heretics alike for ages. Millions died as a result of religious conquest on the part of Muslim expansionist political ventures into the Asian, African, and European worlds. No one doubts the history and legacy of Muslim conquests. The scale of Christian colonial death, however, dwarfs it by orders of magnitude, and that fact alone should give any historically literate Christian pause before pointing a finger at 1.9 billion Muslims as the primary menace to Western civilization.
But Mitchell believes that historic Islamic violence is the only danger to Western civilization. Mind you, he says this as a Black man whose ancestors were forced onto American shores by Christian colonizers to work the land until they died because of the color of their skin. Mitchell, a Black man, a descendant of slaves, claims Muslims are the greatest threat to Western fundamentals while sitting in a state and residing in a nation built on the bones of murdered Indigenous peoples; people murdered by Christians.
Mitchell cannot consider the data that native nationals in Europe, America, Africa, and beyond commit crimes at a much higher rate than immigrants. There is data, the world over, to support this claim. But he does not dare reference these statistics to combat the Christian xenophobic and Islamophobic ideologues whose shoulders he brushes on a day-to-day basis. Muslims throughout the world want peace, tranquility, the right to flourish, and access to resources so that they and their families and communities can thrive. Whether they attain those things in Asia, Europe, Africa, or the United States of America does not make them dangerous, and their presence and visibility in white-majority countries do not make them terrorists. Mitchell is once again capitulating to the white European Christian fearmongering rhetoric that, because one holds a different faith, one must therefore be a threat to Christendom.
Mitchell fails to recognize that Christendom itself is a threat to Christians the world over. The very thing he fears from Muslims today, white European and American Christians have done and accomplished here, in the West for centuries.
4. And if we don’t have an awakening in this hour, your children are going to suffer, and so are mine.
Mitchell is ahistorical and extremely self-focused; something Apostle Paul condemned in 2 Timothy 3.
He claims Christians are spiritually asleep and morally bankrupt because they refuse to join the Islamophobic bandwagon. Christians are very much awake when they denounce violence and anti-immigrant hatred. Christians are most awake when they stand between the state and the people the state wants to eradicate. I think of the Confessing Church German minister and dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who used his faith to stand against Nazi Germany’s attempt to eradicate European Jews and enemies of the German state. Bonhoeffer was arrested, tortured, and executed weeks before the end of the war. Mitchell would have denounced Bonhoeffer as morally compromised and spiritualy asleep. What Mitchell cannot see, and will not acknowledge, is that he himself represents state violence and historically reckless, xenophobic, incendiary rhetoric that has cost the lives of millions. Mitchell prefers to denounce the actual and potential victims of state violence rather than denouncing the state violence itself. Language precedes violence.
And here Mitchell brings Ryan and their children into the mix.
The promise of Christendom is an earthly kingdom where our children and we reign through the violent conscription of Christ’s words. Mitchell wants an earthly kingdom not inherited through love and mercy, but through genocide and epistemicide; through ethnocentric tendencies and American supremacism.
As of today, there are children in Gaza, Nigeria, and Iran being bombed by “Christian” nations. American government representatives, some of whom claim to follow Jesus, have prayed over, and some have signed, American bombs that were eventually used to pulverize Black and brown children on the other side of the planet.
But Mitchell does not give a damn about non-Western, non-American, non-Christian children.
Their suffering and death under Christian world powers are irrelevant. The pain, devastation, and death they experience daily will not usher nor expedite the return of Christ because the people dying are not like him, do not live within his immediate geography, and do not share in his binary of Western and Eastern traditions of thought. They are nameless, faceless, and disposable; pulverized as a consequence of “global headlines.” They mean nothing. They are nothing. They do not factor into his deep eschatological musings which he never divulges.
The only children of value to Mitchell’s imperial Jesus are Christian babies and infants who will one day inherit his American evangelical industrial complex, populist prosperity gospel kingdom on earth.
5. The rise of Islam. Radical Islam. They’re very vocal on social media about their desire to take over America.
Again, Mitchell is very good at spewing words that have no foundation in reality. “The rise of Islam,” as if Islam showed up yesterday, as if nearly 2 billion people on this planet constitute a singular, coordinated danger to the rest of us as of Mitchell’s declaration of their ascension to global visibility. If that were the case, we would already be finished. But because it is not, and because Mitchell simply parrots Islamophobic talking points for social media clout, the rest of us can live peaceful lives knowing that Muslims, by and large, do not have us in their crosshairs.
Radical Islam is as much a danger to Christians as radical Christianity, recently identified under the banners of Christian nationalism and white supremacy. But Mitchell does not have the capacity to engage this historically verifiable fact. He prefers to find an enemy in the “other” while turning a blind eye to the radicalization of Christianity in his own backyard; worse yet, the radicalization of Christianity in his own church.
He then posits that “they,” the radical Islamists, are “very vocal on social media,” without providing any sources as to who “they” are and what “they” have said on which social media platform. This is sinister behavior on the part of a pastor, and even more so from a pastor with a following in the thousands, a reach into the tens of thousands, and influence stretching into the millions. He is bearing false witness at worst and playing the fool at best; both reprehensible habits Apostle Paul would have condemned in the first-century church at Ephesus.
Lastly, Mitchell claims Muslims share a “desire to take over America.”
Ahistoricism and anti-intellectualism have prepared the soil for Mitchell to utter such vacuous statements.
Christians, and men and women of prominent status in Europe and in America, mostly if not entirely white, have accomplished just that, in the name of Jesus. They did it through violent overthrow, sabotage, torture, murder, family separation, sexual violence, subterfuge, land theft, contract annulments, dishonored treaties, race-based chattel slavery, lynchings, and historic support for white supremacist economic, apartheid, political, religious, social, and national efforts and tactics the world over.
All in the name of Jesus.
Mitchell has either lost the plot, capitulating to the status quo of white evangelical modes of thinking, which are inherently anti-intellectual and superstitious, or, sadly, he is just plain ignorant and extremely famous as a natural consequence.
Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves; ensure justice for those being crushed. – Proverbs 31:8 NLT
Olivet Theory 