Well, yes. Thank you.
First of all, I'd like to say it's somewhat gratifying to see that other than academics are concerned with the problem of politicized religions, and to see papers like that one in The Atlantic or in The New York Times is something of a novelty.
For those of us who have been looking at the sources of terrorism, the recent waves of terrorism, most of the analogies are made with medieval, apocalyptic movements that believed they were going to transform the entire world by introducing, basically, new realities that were taken from the Book of Revelation. In the Islamic world there are equivalent symbolisms to what we're probably more familiar with.
That Atlantic article, I thought, was actually quite accurate. It's also something that many of the more radicalized Salafist Muslims think they can actually bring about. They can bring about the Mahdi coming out of what is now Afghanistan and Iran to undertake a final Armageddon-like battle, in all places, in Jerusalem, where Jesus is going to help them. These are exactly millennial fantasies in our common-sense world, but they motivate many of these people. It's something that academics have known for a long time, and it's really quite gratifying to see this making it into wider media distribution.