For years now, evangelicals have not been keeping up appearances with their prophecies. Gone are the exciting days when a big-name pastor could mangle basic astronomy and bellow about the SUPER BLOOD WOLF MOON, or play Bible anagrams to predict the RAPTURE for sure this time. Their predictions for 2025 were no less disappointing. Today, let’s check them out—and see why the practice seems to have lost its luster for the crowd that made them famous in the first place.
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SITUATION REPORT: 2025 prophecies abounded, mostly from evangelicals hedging their bets
Gone, gone are the days when a John Hagee could make his way to a microphone and declare bad astronomy as PROOF YES PROOF that the Rapture was coming on some specific date. Most of those self-proclaimed prophets are dead now anyway: Jack Van Impe, Hal Lindsey, Chuck Smith, Harold Camping, and a host of others. The ranks of heaven swell with the numbers of failed prophets, but the skies there echo even more with the sheer number of their failed prophecies. They tended to revise their dates once a prophecy failed and reissue it, thus ensuring another failure.
But still, the prophecy urge runs strong in evangelicals. If their god is real and really does stuff in the real world, goes their obvious logic, then of course he’ll tell them secrets about the future. In more earthly terms, prophecy is a great way to get attention—and from there, more followers, money, and power. We saw that happen just last year with Joshua Mhlakela, who predicted a September 23rd Rapture date.
Besides Mhlakela’s prediction, Jeremiah Johnson is still creating prophecies for Daystar Television Network. Normies can be excused for having zero clue who he is, but he’s been doing this for a few years now in the more bombastic flavors of evangelicalism. In 2024, he released a supposedly-prophetic “dream” he claimed he had about the downfall of Mike Bickle. (Bickle was a very big name in that end of evangelicalism. At the end of 2023, Bickle finally lost his position through an alleged long-term pattern of various kinds of abuse.)
For 2025, Johnson issued a series of prophecies that mostly don’t even qualify as predictions. They’re the same fact-free assurances, void of all concrete details, that I heard almost weekly as a Pentecostal: Yahweh is sending angels to watch over his favorite followers! He’s super mad about sexual immorality! And Satan is gonna be extra mean this year, so stay fervent!
Ray Comfort, a particularly inept apologist and evangelist, also issued 2025 prophecies in similar vein. His one semi-solid prediction involved the destruction of Damascus. Unfortunately for Comfort, Damascus was not destroyed in 2025. It suffered some airstrikes, of course, and its government is in a transitional state. But it’s very much still a standing city. His funniest “signs of the end of the age” involve people “running to and fro” and “scoffers mock[ing] the promise of his coming” just as the Bible says! (OMG, people really do run to and fro nowadays. That’s the level of Comfort’s prophetic skill.)
And 2025 prophecies from literal whos
Aside from those middling names, the literal whos felt a bit freer in their predictions. A guy on Reddit issued a “7-Year Prophetic Timeline” beginning in January 2025. Of course, this “creative thought experiment rooted in literal interpretations of biblical prophecy” was posted in June 2025, so none of the early-2025 predictions were hard to derive just based on headlines. However, nothing he suggested from late 2025 to the current time panned out at all. The world saw no Third Temple reopening in Jerusalem, no big show of Judeo-Islamic-Christian unity, and certainly no Antichrist arising to broker world peace.
Leslie Chua graced us with another round of prophecies for 2025, too. This time, he assured his followers that 2025 would be a year of prosperity. Yahweh would even return any wealth they’d lost! In addition, he’d vindicate them. You’ll doubtless be impressed by Chua’s assurance in the very same post that Yahweh himself confirmed these prophecies! (Circular reasoning? No, don’t be silly!)
And these aren’t actually prophecies per se, but they were funny all the same. Jan Markell, a minor figure in evangelicalism, issued a year-in-review post on her site, Olive Tree Views. The funny thing is that the URL there is now dead. You can see the (shortened) URL in her Facebook post to her page, but it’s no longer live on her site. It returns a 404 now. Whoever retired the URL clearly didn’t know about the site’s PDF newsletters, so it’s still there. As well, a number of evangelical sites mirrored the URL itself.
So we know that Jan Markell, like Ray Comfort and the Reddit guy, also intently focused on Syria and saw peace negotiations as the key to the Endtimes:
The question on the mind of prophecy watchers is this: With the new Trump administration, is a new level of peace negotiations in that region on the horizon? And could this lead to the ultimate peace deal of Daniel 9:27? If the church were to be removed in the rapture, would it not be timely for the Antichrist to arise and heal the Middle East—and then the world?
The collapse of the Syrian government and the end of Bashar al-Assad’s regime is not only a geo-political turning point, but could be a moment of profound prophetic significance in light of Isaiah 17.
Her “if” in that last sentence is doing some supremely heavy lifting. The Reddit guy didn’t even speculate about the removal of “the church.” Nor did he need to. For that matter, Markell doesn’t even try to couch her scaremongering as prophecy. Thankfully, her audience knows to take such hints in exactly that way. (And Isaiah 17 is a post-event “prophecy” concerning stuff that had clearly already happened. It’s not a prophecy about the Endtimes, however hard evangelicals insist it is. And oh boy, they definitely do!)
The disappointing nature of 2025 prophecies
The 2025 prophecies are all “pretty much of a muchness,” as the old saying goes. They’re issued by people who are either protected by their own lack of notoriety or insulated very well by their followers and target audiences. When their words venture into the wider normie world, we find them hedged about with protective charms like careful wording and refusal to use the actual term “prophecy” for them. That removes all divine responsibility for them—unless they do by chance come true, of course.
There’s a reason for it, of course. There always is.
When prophecies failed in the past, prophets generally sailed through any blowback. Their followers easily forgave and forgot past failures. Of the old-school prophets, I remember only Edgar Whisenant retreating in ignominy after his “88 Reasons” Rapture predictions finally lost their luster (around 1989, after about two years of attempts; local archive of the book’s PDF). And he probably retreated only because he was an amateur prophet. Thus, he had none of the emotional and practical armor that actual professional prophets develop as a matter of course.
It’s a lot harder for failed prophets now. John Hagee is still a popular figure in evangelicalism, but he doesn’t even make a squeak about Endtimes prophecies now. Joshua Mhlakela himself was a lower-status outsider in the evangelical system, so he’s faded into the background since his dramatically-failed prediction. Even other nobodies who kept updating old predictions with new dates, like one guy I found in 2018, seem to have let their websites die.
Without good institutional backing, like Jeremiah Johnson enjoys from Daystar, the mockery these modern failed prophets earn seems to be too much for them. I’ve noticed for a long time that dysfunctional authoritarians really dislike mockery.
Worse, this mockery isn’t just directed at them but at their entire end of Christianity. Their prophetic failures aren’t just a reflection on them, but on the entire concept of prophecy itself—and at the notion that a god tells anyone anything. If this god apparently gave them bad intel this time about the end of the world, what’s stopping him from doing it with everything else? Or for them to be mistaking (or knowingly presenting) their own imaginations as prophecy at all?
It’s like we talked about last time: One mistruth or error opens the door to many. So as true believers double down and rationalize away these 2025 prophecies’ failures, more and more less-committed followers peel away.
For these newer attention-seekers, the old techniques of prophecy have given way to political grandstanding and social-media ragebaiting. I’m 90% sure that almost all the worst-offender Twitter evangelicals fall into these categories. They’re obviously farming outrage for clicks.
At least this behavior is a lot easier for their followers to defend and love, and there are no messy refutations by reality to bother anyone!
NEXT UP: John Loftus’ Outsider Test for Faith, 2026 Edition. See you soon! <3
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