White House Press Secretary Tony Snow held a quick gaggle with reporters in Crawford yesterday, when an interesting subject came up.
Q: Tony, earlier this year the President brought in some advisors to talk about the war in Iraq, some outsiders — outside experts. Is he doing anything similar, or are any senior officials doing anything similar with respect to the Middle East? Are you bringing in any outside experts or —
Snow: Yes.
Q: — perhaps Jewish or Christian or Muslim —
Snow: There have been meetings of that sort in recent days.
Q: What can you tell us about them?
Snow: You know what, I’ll see what I’m cleared to tell you about.
Asked what “types of people” have offered the White House advice on the Middle East, Snow said, “Again, at this point, I really don’t want to do it.” Asked if “religious leaders” have been part of these meetings, Snow said, “Again, I’m just not going to go any further.”
Why all the secrecy? Maybe it has something to do with the fact that White House recently invited a Christian apocalyptic fiction writer to chat about biblical prophecy.
The Washington Post’s Dan Froomkin spoke with Joel C. Rosenberg — who recently told CNN that the rapture may be near and it’d be a good idea for people to start taking care of unfinished business — who explained that he was invited last year to “speak to a ‘couple dozen’ White House aides in the Old Executive Office Building — and has stayed in touch with several of them since.”
Rosenberg wouldn’t say exactly what was discussed. “The meeting itself was off the record, as you could imagine,” he said. He declined to name the staffer he said invited him or describe the attendees in any way other than to say that the president was not among them. “I can’t imagine they’d want to talk about it,” he said.
“I can’t tell you that the people that I spoke with agree with me, or believe that prophecy can really help you understand what will happen next in the Middle East, but I’m not surprised that they’re intrigued.”
The White House press office wasn’t able to confirm the visit for me, but there have been previous reports about White House Bible study groups inviting Christian authors to come speak.
Rosenberg — like Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, the authors of the phenomenally popular “Left Behind” series — writes fiction inspired by biblical prophecy about the apocalypse. The consistent theme is that certain current events presage the end times, the Rapture, and the return of Jesus Christ. Rosenberg’s particular pitch to journalists is that his books come true.
Rosenberg told Froomkin that a White House staffer contacted him and said, “A lot of people over here [in the White House] are reading your novels, and they’re intrigued that these things keep on happening…. Your novels keep foreshadowing actual coming events…. And so we’re curious, how are you doing it? What’s the secret? Why don’t you come over and walk us through the story behind these novels?”
Rosenberg, of course, is welcome to believe whatever he wishes. It’s when the White House asks him to come in for a discussion that I start getting nervous.
I can only hope Rosenberg was exaggerating and that Snow’s reluctance to talk about “advisors” brought in to the White House to chat about the Middle East had nothing to do with writers of apocalyptic fiction.