Check out Gary Burge's article "Christian Zionism, Evangelicals and Israel", at
http://www.hcef.org/hcef/index.cfm/ID/159 Also check out the attempts to assure a Third Temple (on top of the 'Temple Mount' site already occupied by the Al Aqsa Mosque). These guys really do want to set off Armageddon in order to make sure there is a Third Temple in place where the antichrist is to sit in the last days...
Grace Halsell has written about this 'dispensationalism' in her book "Forcing God's Hand" also. She was an LBJ speechwriter who got turned off by this brand of Christianity.
Furthermore, PBS's website shows that these people are seriously setting up, with liturgical implements and instruments and even the 'red heifer', to reinstitute the Third Temple sacrificial system.
This is why, and I don't mean to sound 'tinfoil hat' material here, that interest in the Ark of the Covenant and the Knights Templar are of interest in the final analysis of this strange situation: The KT as shown in Graham Hancock's book "The Sign and The Seal" have located the Ark of the Covenant, which is a requirement if a Third Temple is to be built (in order to house the Ark as it was in the past).
But, as Burge's article points out, God doesn't want a location-based religion...and the real temples are people's own bodies !
(St. Paul asked in 1 Corinthians: “Don’t you know that you are a temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?” and “Don’t you know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit which is in you, which you have from God?” In 2 Corinthians he comes right out and says it plainly: “We are a temple of the living God; even as God said, ‘I will dwell in them, and walk in them; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.’”
The disciple John hints at this when he recounts in his gospel an event when Jesus was in the great temple in Jerusalem and was asked to show the people a sign. “Jesus answered them, ‘Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.’ The people at the temple said, ‘Forty-six years was this temple in building, and will you raise it up in three days?’ But he spoke of the temple of his body.”)
Which is why this is soooo strange. Tim LaHaye "Left Behind" afficionados are encouraging actually a speed up of the antichrist's arrival. They either don't care about anyone else or feel the rapture absolves them of much responsibility.
The political implications of fomenting turmoil in the Middle East may also be something these types derive reward from: "Their beliefs are bonkers, but they are at the heart of power: US Christian fundamentalists are driving Bush's Middle East policy" by George Monbiot, Tuesday April 20, 2004 The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4905411-103677,00.html"In the United States, several million people have succumbed to an extraordinary delusion. In the 19th century, two immigrant preachers cobbled together a series of unrelated passages from the Bible to create what appears to be a consistent narrative: Jesus will return to Earth when certain preconditions have been met. The first of these was the establishment of a state of Israel. The next involves Israel's occupation of the rest of its "biblical lands" (most of the Middle East), and the rebuilding of the Third Temple on the site now occupied by the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa mosques. The legions of the antichrist will then be deployed against Israel, and their war will lead to a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon. The Jews will either burn or convert to Christianity, and the Messiah will return to Earth.
What makes the story so appealing to Christian fundamentalists is that before the big battle begins, all "true believers" (ie those who believe what they believe) will be lifted out of their clothes and wafted up to heaven during an event called the Rapture. Not only do the worthy get to sit at the right hand of God, but they will be able to watch, from the best seats, their political and religious opponents being devoured by boils, sores, locusts and frogs, during the seven years of Tribulation which follow.
The true believers are now seeking to bring all this about. This means staging confrontations at the old temple site (in 2000, three US Christians were deported for trying to blow up the mosques there), sponsoring Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, demanding ever more US support for Israel, and seeking to provoke a final battle with the Muslim world/Axis of Evil/United Nations/ European Union/France or whoever the legions of the antichrist turn out to be.
The believers are convinced that they will soon be rewarded for their efforts. The antichrist is apparently walking among us, in the guise of Kofi Annan, Javier Solana, Yasser Arafat or, more plausibly, Silvio Berlusconi. The Wal-Mart corporation is also a candidate (in my view a very good one), because it wants to radio-tag its stock, thereby exposing humankind to the Mark of the Beast...
So here we have a major political constituency - representing much of the current president's core vote - in the most powerful nation on Earth, which is actively seeking to provoke a new world war. Its members see the invasion of Iraq as a warm-up act, as Revelation (9:14-15) maintains that four angels "which are bound in the great river Euphrates" will be released "to slay the third part of men". They batter down the doors of the White House as soon as its support for Israel wavers: when Bush asked Ariel Sharon to pull his tanks out of Jenin in 2002, he received 100,000 angry emails from Christian fundamentalists, and never mentioned the matter again.
The electoral calculation, crazy as it appears, works like this. Governments stand or fall on domestic issues. For 85% of the US electorate, the Middle East is a foreign issue, and therefore of secondary interest when they enter the polling booth. For 15% of the electorate, the Middle East is not just a domestic matter, it's a personal one: if the president fails to start a conflagration there, his core voters don't get to sit at the right hand of God. Bush, in other words, stands to lose fewer votes by encouraging Israeli aggression than he stands to lose by restraining it. He would be mad to listen to these people. He would also be mad not to. "