Graduation Year

2018

Document Type

Campus Only Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Religious Studies

Second Department

Politics and International Relations

Reader 1

Thomas Kim

Reader 2

Jamel Velji

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Terms of Use for work posted in Scholarship@Claremont.

Rights Information

© 2017 Deena A. Woloshin

Abstract

The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was signed in 2015 by President Obama and began a political and religious battle that ensued for months in the United States Congress. Two of the main actors in the fight against JCPOA were Christians United for Israel (CUFI), a Christian-Zionist lobby[1], and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), one of the most prominent pro-Israel lobbies founded and largely supported by Zionist-Jewish Americans[2]. Both organizations deployed tactics of religious and apocalyptic-religious rhetoric to encourage their large and influential constituencies to join them in the fight against the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, motivating U.S. citizens otherwise unaware and uninvolved of nuclear proliferation policy to become heavily involved in the process of the political debates surrounding the deal.

This paper will seek to answer the questions: How is apocalyptic rhetoric typically conveyed through religious outlets? What then, does the deployment of this tactic say about religion in America in the public sphere?

[1] Cohn-Sherbok, Dan. The Politics of the Apocalypse. Oneworld Publications Ltd., Oxford. 2006, pp. 165-166.

[2] Waxman, Dov. Trouble in the Tribe. Princeton University Press. Princeton. 2016, pp.4.

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