By now you could mention the name John Hagee and immediately most people would quickly associate it with the term “great whore.” The reference, of course, is to Hagee’s now-notorious exposition on the Book of Revelation in which he describes the institution of the Catholic Church as a lascivious woman astride a horse in the biblical story on the end of the world.

Like all Hagee sermons, this one hardly serves as a model for scholarly exegesis. As he bumbled around, straining to fit the Biblical text into an elaborately illustrated historical timeline, Hagee let his animus towards what he calls “the apostate church” show.

But the emphasis on Hagee’s clumsy diatribe misses a larger point: that Hagee was describing the Book of Revelation in terms that demonstrate how he thinks it is a real description of church history, a real forecast of the end of the world, and, as a result, a template for U.S. foreign policy.

Most frighteningly of all, despite all of this, he and his Christians United for Israel (CUFI) are treated as a legitimate foreign policy voice in Washington by the Bush Administration, John McCain, and many other members and former members of Congress, including Joe Lieberman, who likened him to Moses, and even the Catholic Rick Santorum. Santorum told me last year that although he doesn’t share Hagee’s beliefs on the end-times, he appreciates his – er, foreign policy views. Trouble is, though, those two things can’t really be extricated from each other.

In his book, Jerusalem Countdown, and in many other books and sermons over the years, Hagee describes how biblical prophecy should dictate U.S. policy, and how such policy will lead to the Second Coming of Christ. Hagee is popular in some Jewish circles because his view that God’s will prohibits any land concessions by the Israelis to the Palestinians is supposedly “supportive” of Israel. His views can only be deemed to be supportive of Israel, of course, if you think it should be embroiled in years of bloody war which culminate in the conversion or death of all the Jews.

Hagee protests that he wants peace in Israel, but that peace will only happen when Christ comes again – after God decimates a Muslim army and a giant earthquake swallows the Dome of the Rock. For everyone whose feet are firmly planted in reality, however, his thirst for this bloody ending to the world as we know it defies his claim that he’s a peace-seeker. As Jeremy Ben-Ami, executive director of J Street, which brings a sane new voice to the Middle East policy debate in Washington, recently, Hagee “look[s] at the trade-offs that Israel must make to achieve peace — and hope[s] to thwart them.”

Like his friend Rod Parsley, who also endorsed McCain, Hagee believes Islam is satanic. Here’s how he described that view at the late Jerry Falwell’s church last fall:

Satan wants Jerusalem for his messiah, the Antichrist. God has promised it to King David that his seed, Jesus Christ, shall rule over it forever and forever. People ask why can’t the Arabs and the Jews get together over this city? Listen to me: it is not about the two-state solution. It is not about money. It is not about land. It is about theology. . . . Muhammed taught a theology of triumphalism . . . .for Islam to rule the earth. The problem is that sitting in the throat of Islamic nations in the Middle East is Israel, who has an unconditional blood covenant with the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob that the land shall be theirs forever and forever. God did not loan the land to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. He gave it to them by blood covenant, and the Book of Genesis and that covenant still stands. It is there regardless of what the United Nations wants. It is there regardless of what the U.S. State Department thinks. It is there in spite of what the Arab nations want. It belongs to Israel. . . . I am telling you there will be no lasting peace in the Middle East until the Prince of Peace, Jesus Christ, returns to that sacred city and sets up his eternal kingdom.

I’ve been writing about Hagee’s mad view that a war with Iran is presaged in the Bible for a couple of years now, and have written a new book, God’s Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters, exposing Hagee’s (and other televangelists’) controversial prosperity gospel doctrine, bizarre views on Israel and the end-times, and cozy relationship with the Republican Party. His obsession with money, Armageddon, and the spiritual warfare that animates daily life are the core of his preaching week after week, not screeds against the Catholic Church.

The fact that his anti-Catholicism became the centerpiece of media coverage of McCain’s “pastor problem” caused the press and the public to take their eyes off this ball. (Thanks, Bill Donohue!) The focus on Hagee’s disdain for the Catholic Church has eclipsed the fact that Hagee thinks that the roadmap for peace in the Middle East is against God’s will (and will bring God’s wrath on America in the form of hurricanes, floods, and even terrorist nuclear attacks) and that the Bible provides the real roadmap for U.S. policy. Hagee’s colossally illogical extension of this view is that diplomacy equals appeasement and war is the only answer. Sound familiar? If you’re wondering whether Hagee has had any impact on Bush, I’ve laid out how Bush’s appeasement speech comes straight out of the Hagee playbook. No accident: Hagee’s relationship with Bush dates back to his days as Governor of Texas; Hagee later endorsed Bush’s presidential candidacy in a book, God’s Candidate for America, and in 2003 proclaimed that God “raised up” Bush to “crush Saddam Hussein.”

Let’s not let the Catholic League’s Donohue – who himself has issued anti-Semitic, anti-gay, and other derogatory slurs – dictate the terms of a vital conversation we all need to have about Hagee’s role in McCain’s campaign. Of course it makes for eye-popping video that Hagee used the term “great whore” and elsewhere suggested Adolf Hitler learned his anti-Semitism at Catholic school. Certainly if Hagee does think the Catholic Church should be blamed for the Holocaust, he should have to explain himself – something he tried to do last week, an effort that was clearly aimed at helping repair McCain’s image with Catholic voters.

But Hagee’s fixation with Armageddon, and his ability to virally market that fixation to the shock troops through his daily television program and multi-million dollar ministry, has had a catastrophic impact on our Middle East policy. With a possible McCain presidency promising to be a third Bush term, none of us can afford to overlook that.