THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

So you have an imaginary friend who talks to you when you want to justify your next move. Now picture using that imaginary friend 'helping' you make life or death decisions that affect millions of people. You too could be Mike Pompeo. Our Secretary of State, who works for a man who has no clue about foreign policy, makes no bones about being guided by the imaginary invisible sky demon of an ancient, small and disgruntled tribe of shepherds in the Middle East.

An evangelical Christian, Mr. Pompeo had just returned from tours of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, built on the ground where Jesus is said to have been crucified and buried, and of tunnels beneath the Western Wall, by the holiest site in Judaism. The interviewer posed a question around a biblical tale about a queen who saved Jews from slaughter by a Persian official: Did Mr. Pompeo think President Trump had been “raised for such a time as this, just like Queen Esther, to help save the Jewish people from the Iranian menace?”

“As a Christian, I certainly believe that’s possible,” Mr. Pompeo said. “It was remarkable — so we were down in the tunnels where we could see 3,000 years ago, and 2,000 years ago, if I have the history just right — to see the remarkable history of the faith in this place, and the work that our administration’s done, to make sure that this democracy in the Middle East, that this Jewish state, remains. I am confident that the Lord is at work here.”

White evangelical Christians are a powerful force in the Republican Party. Vice President Mike Pence is a staunch believer and former President George W. Bush is an adherent, too.

But no secretary of state in recent decades has been as open and fervent as Mr. Pompeo about discussing Christianity and foreign policy in the same breath. That has increasingly raised questions about the extent to which evangelical beliefs are influencing American diplomacy.

On Monday, in a speech at the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the pro-Israel group, Mr. Pompeo told an anecdote about Tibor Baranski, a Christian who saved 3,000 Jews in Hungary during World War II. Then he said, “As secretary of state and as a Christian, I’m proud to lead American diplomacy to support Israel’s right to defend itself.”

The next day, Mr. Pompeo announced an expansion of Trump administration anti-abortion policies, saying the United States would stop funding foreign organizations that support other groups that perform abortions. It is a policy popular with conservatives, Catholics and evangelical Christians.

Though Mr. Trump is secular, white evangelicals are a big part of his voter base, and some of his major foreign policy moves, planned or supported by Mr. Pompeo, are intended to shore up political support.

Studies show that white evangelicals are much more likely than other Americans to believe that Israel fulfills a biblical prophecy. Known as Christian Zionists, they believe God promised the land to the Jews, and that the gathering of Jews in Israel is foretold in the prophecy of the rapture — the ascent of Christians into the kingdom of God.

Mr. Pompeo talks about the rapture. “We will continue to fight these battles,” he said at a “God and Country Rally” in 2015, because there is a “never-ending struggle” until “the rapture.”

“Be part of it,” he said at the meeting, at the Summit church in Wichita, Kan. “Be in the fight.”

All these rapture-ready evangelicals cherish the Jews because they are a necessary sacrifice for The Rapture. The Rapture is the end of the world base don The Book of Revelations, a series of hallucinogenic trips probably induced by low level ergot poisoning or perhaps brain damage in the writer. Regardless, someone heard voices in their head, wrote them down and in one of the great catastrophes of the world, got it included in the books of the New Testament. And the result is a president who iss't smart enough to stop a Secretary of State who believes if he kills of the Jews the world will end and the voice in his head will lift him up to Heaven. If anything goes anywhere after death, Mike ain't going up.