By Bob Allen
A leading evangelical voice for nuclear disarmament criticized politicians for comparing a widely debated nuclear deal between the U.S. and Iran to the Holocaust and saying it fulfills End Times prophecy in the Bible.
In an interview with the Christian Post, Tyler Wigg-Stevenson, chair of the Global Task Force on Nuclear Weapons for the World Evangelical Alliance, chastised GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee for depicting President Obama as “marching Israelis to the door of the oven.”
“I think that kind of rhetoric is pretty outrageous,” said Wigg-Stevenson, founder of the Two Futures Project and author of books including The World Is Not Ours to Save. “The Holocaust is a living memory, and I think that because it was Christian Europe that perpetrated the Holocaust on Jews, Christians have an ethical responsibility forever to take seriously future existential threats to the Jewish people.”
Wigg-Stevenson, an ordained Baptist minister currently seeking ordination in the Anglican church and pursuing doctoral studies in Canada, said “I don’t even know what to say” to suggestions by former Minnesota Rep. Michelle Bachmann that Obama’s support for marriage equality and nuclear negotiations with Iran portend the Second Coming of Jesus Christ and Rapture of the church.
“People have for hundreds and hundreds of years been pointing to current events as sure indicators that the End Times are upon us,” he said, and have up to this point never turned out to be correct. He said that ultimately the deal bars Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, “so how that brings about the End Times is beyond me.”
Originally formed in 1846, the World Evangelical Alliance is a network of churches in 129 nations and over 100 international organizations representing 600 million evangelical Christians worldwide. The Global Task Force on Nuclear Weapons is one of a number of areas of engagement, along with others like human trafficking, religious liberty and creation care.
A graduate of Yale Divinity School and former member of First Baptist Church in Nashville, Tenn., Wigg-Stevenson is now a doctoral student at the University of Toronto and a postulant for Anglican orders in the Diocese of Toronto, serving as an associate pastor at a downtown parish.
In April he joined Baptist leaders including Roy Medley of American Baptist Churches USA, Suzii Paynter of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and LeDayne McLeese Polaski of the Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America in endorsing a full-page newspaper ad placed by Sojourners supporting the framework agreement of the Iran nuclear plan.