KINGSPORT, Tenn. — On Wednesday, the Arby’s Army, as the half-dozen men camped out in the corner booths styled themselves, was considering Iran. This had not been a regular topic here, particularly during the recent weeks of N.C.A.A. basketball.
But earlier that day, Tennessee’s junior United States senator, Bob Corker, had appeared before a local Rotary Club to discuss the Obama administration’s recently announced with Iran on its . As the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Mr. Corker, a Republican, is in the struggle between the executive branch and Congress over any final deal.
Only a couple of members of the Arby’s Army had attended Mr. Corker’s speech, but the group was unified in its conclusion: “This president is either naïve or not supportive of America,” said David Price, 61, who moved here from California. With that, the conversation quickly left Iran for more familiar ground: the awfulness of President Obama.
Inside the Beltway, there are few issues more urgent than the negotiations with Iran, with experts parsing the of the framework and political insiders counting votes to see whether Congress over a final agreement. Here in eastern Tennessee, the conversation may indeed get to foreign policy and Iran — but only after domestic politics, statehouse news, local economic trends and basketball.
That said, for many people here, particularly evangelical Christians, the issue has enormous resonance, tied up in a deep sense of the historic importance of Israel and even in biblical prophecies. So, for many, the subject has both an instinctive relevance and a too-distant, too-complicated quality.
“I’m sure people are following it,” said Warren Gooch, the mayor of Oak Ridge, a city two hours southwest of Kingsport that was created as part of the Manhattan Project and, through its , has a considerable history with nuclear proliferation. “But as far as my own discussions with people, it’s not a top-of-mind issue.”
Still, Mr. Gooch suggested this might change as Mr. Corker goes from city to city explaining the situation, as he has been doing this week. The speeches are more descriptive than polemical, with Mr. Corker sketching out a brief history of Iran’s , laying out some of the current options and encouraging listeners to pay attention.
“The details of this are very, very, very important,” Mr. Corker said to the breakfast crowd here on Wednesday morning. “They’re important to you in Kingsport.”
As Mr. Corker made his tour of banquet halls and meeting rooms, fielding calls from the president and other senators along the way, those who came to see him revealed a broad spectrum of thinking. An investment adviser in Chattanooga asked him if any involvement in the Middle East would not be futile. A man in Kingsport asked if it was even possible to strike a deal with a country as hostile to the United States and its allies as Iran.
The pastor of a small church outside Chattanooga, who did not ask Mr. Corker any questions, said he saw in recent foreign policy developments the fulfillment of the biblical prophecies of Ezekiel and Zechariah, presaging the final days.
“The Scriptures are very clear that the nations that distress Israel, God is going to bring judgment on those nations,” said the pastor, the Rev. Darrell Rose. “There are all these clues that Bible-believing Christians see as warnings from God.”
With an opposite view, an Iranian-born nuclear engineer in Knoxville, H. M. Hashemian, urged Mr. Corker to reach out to more Iranians, lamenting afterward that Americans were getting a deeply skewed picture of Iran from the news media.
“If you just watch Fox News, you’re going to hate Iran,” said Dr. Hashemian, who left Iran in 1974 and graduated from the University of Tennessee.
Knoxville is a university town, home to the Howard H. Baker Center for Public Policy at the University of Tennessee and its think tank, the . But even there, said Brandon Prins, a political science professor, the Iran negotiations are “not something that people are talking much about.”
“I think it’s still too abstract,” said Professor Prins, who teaches a course on nuclear nonproliferation. “The details are not easy to comprehend.”
The most-repeated questions for Mr. Corker were expressions of deep frustration with the Obama administration. Bill Kelly, a former Navy intelligence official in Kingsport, acknowledged that this was how people here tended to discuss Iran, on the rare occasions the subject was raised at all. “In many cases, Iran just comes up in an anti-Obama situation,” he said.
Chief among the complaints about the president were his insistence that an agreement would not be subject to congressional approval and, most keenly, a general sense that he was moving away from Israel.
“The majority of Chattanoogans are Christians, and we have our Judeo-Christian ethics and worldview,” said the Rev. Tony Walliser, who leads Chattanooga’s Silverdale Baptist Church, a congregation of about 5,000 people. “We see Israel as something like spiritual brethren.”
“You hear Netanyahu, and he says this is going to be terrible for national security,” Pastor Walliser said of the nuclear framework agreement, referring to the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. “And you see our one ally in the Middle East, and you say, ‘What is that all about?’ ”
Still, even in Chattanooga, which the American Bible Society named the country’s in 2014, there were some who saw hope in the nuclear talks.
“I see some conversations happening among and between folks that probably should have been happening all along,” said Carol Berz, a Chattanooga city councilwoman and the owner of a dispute resolution service.
Ms. Berz did not attend Mr. Corker’s speech to the local Rotary Club. But she said she saw in his efforts to build a bipartisan coalition in the Senate a reflection of what Secretary of State John Kerry was trying to accomplish in the negotiations with Iran. “I wish here in this country, Republicans and Democrats could sit at the table like they’re doing over in Switzerland,” she said.
Like nearly everyone else interviewed, Ms. Berz said Iran almost never came up in conversation, with people far more attuned to local crime and the various developments in the state legislature, like a bill to allow guns in parks. This is in part because all politics is local, she said, but she also suggested that the stakes in Iran were so serious that people might prefer, for their own peace of mind, to focus on matters closer at hand.
This sentiment was not uncommon: that while people might not be talking much about Iran’s nuclear program, they nonetheless saw it as an issue of profound, even existential, consequence.
“Iran is important from two standpoints,” said Mr. Price of the Arby’s Army. “Not only the secular, strategic threat, but also the theological component.”
By “the theological component,” Mr. Price, who described himself as an evangelical, was referring both to Iran’s involvement in Islamic terrorism and to circumstances, such as threats to Israel, that he saw as fulfillments of biblical prophecy.
“In eschatological terms,” Mr. Price said, to murmurs of assent, “I think a lot of people think this is the end times.”