Queensland Police and misunderstanding premillennialism

As a citizen of this country, I was shocked and profoundly disturbed by the murder of two police officers and an innocent civilian by the Trains in Wieambilla in December 2022. This was a heinous crime that should be condemned in the strongest possible terms.

As a Christian theologian, I was also startled to hear the Queensland Police describe this crime as “a religiously-motivated terrorist attack” on the basis that Nathaniel, Gareth, and Stacey Train subscribed to “a broad Christian fundamentalist belief system, known as premillennialism.”

Listening to last week’s press conference conducted by Deputy Police Commissioner Tracy Linford, it was hard to resist the impression that she was struggling to understand the belief system she had been tasked with explaining. For instance, she stated that “premillennialism” is the belief:

"that Christ will return to the earth for a thousand days and provide peace and prosperity, but it will be preceded by … a period of time of tribulation, widespread destruction and suffering."

1000 days? 

In the interests of accuracy, it is worth pointing out that premillennialism is simply the Christian doctrine (based on a literal interpretation of chapter 20 of the book of Revelation) that the physical return of Christ will usher in an age of peace that will last for one thousand years. 

The Deputy Commissioner may simply have misspoken when she referred to “a thousand days” rather than “a thousand years”; nevertheless, it failed to inspire confidence that the police have a firm grasp on what they have called a “Christian extremist ideology”. All Qld Police received an email to document all conversations on QPrime regarding views on religion. But how would a police officer not trained in theology know what is extreme?

While I myself do not hold this particular belief, and even though it represents what is historically a position within Christian theological tradition, premillennialism is nonetheless a belief that has been around for centuries. There is nothing inherently radical or extremist about it. 

Premillennialism revolves around a conviction about the timing of Christ’s return. It says nothing about how Christians are to act or what attitude Christians are to adopt toward civil authorities in the last days.

In what way, then, did their purported belief that Christ will return to Earth to usher in a new age of peace cause the Trains to engage in murderous violence against the police?

Political sociologist Josh Roose has argued that the link could be that premillennialists “who have become radicalised” consider “those deemed evil” as “legitimate targets for extreme violence and terror”. 

This would suggest that something more than premillennialism is required to convince individuals to take up arms and attack the police. Premillennialism might provide fertile soil in which apocalyptic terrorism might develop, but radicalisation is also required before a gun is aimed at a police officer.

It is important for law enforcement not to lose sight of this nuance. If premillennialism is itself an extremist ideology (as the Queensland Police have suggested), the implication is that thousands of church-going Australians who happen to hold premillennial beliefs must now be considered extremists — perhaps even potential cop killers. 

 

This is even though the vast majority of such people adhere to their premillennial beliefs while also accepting the biblical instruction that Christians must always “honour the emperor” and those in authority (1 Peter 2:13, 17) and that Christians are called to peace, not to murder, as Jesus’s teaching makes abundantly clear.

The Apostle Paul, moreover, wrote that “while living in the world, we do not wage war in a worldly way. Our weapons of war are not worldly but divinely powerful for ... destroying arguments” (2 Corinthians 10:3). 

Spiritual warfare is viewed as being conceptual and verbal, not kinetic or physical — hence the historical emphasis on persuasion, not coercion, within evangelical Christian communities.

Those who hold to premillennial beliefs — to say nothing of many other evangelical Christians — typically regard secular authorities as being, to varying degrees, in the thrall of the powers of darkness. 

This view is derived from the biblical teaching that the non-Christian world is under the influence of Satan; it is a view of the world powerfully expressed in the book of Revelation, where the main political enemy — a figure described as an “Antichrist” — is portrayed as a demonic beast (Revelation 13:1-8, 18).

In reality, the extent to which evangelical communities view the secular authorities as instruments of evil usually increases to the degree that such authorities are seen as being antagonistic towards Christianity. 

Such a negative view of the secular authorities can obviously become problematic in instances where it is not balanced with the traditional Christian teaching that the civil authorities are to be honoured and obeyed as much as possible. 

A lack of theological balance in this regard is, I suggest, the tipping point that can lead to radicalisation, where nonviolent premillennialism can drift into apocalyptic terrorism.

To prevent such radicalisation, Christians have a responsibility to prevent extremist views from taking hold within their communities by emphasising the traditional Christian values of peace and the eschewing of violence. 

When Jesus was being arrested in the garden of Gethsemane, the Apostle Peter drew his sword and struck one of the assailants, but Jesus told Peter to put his sword back in its sheath, “for all who have taken the sword will die by the sword” (John 18:10-11; Matthew 26:51-52). 

In this same vein, as Josh Roose argues, Christian leaders need to stand up and condemn “the violent potential of intolerance, racism, hate and extremism in all its forms” — which includes countering the influence of extremist right-wing views that are currently growing in popularity and influence in the United States, and from there filtering out to other countries.

That said, I find it concerning that the initial statement of the Queensland Police simply identified premillennialism as the primary motivation for the terrible crime committed by the Trains. 

• I would suggest that the important question for the police and counterterrorism bodies to answer is: what turned these pre-millennarians into murderous terrorists? 
• What, in particular, moved the Trains to translate their “warfare” in the spiritual realm into violence in the physical realm?

The fact that so many other Christians share the Trains’ pre-millennarian beliefs and yet live peacefully suggests that there were other factors at work here than just pre-millennialism.