Every accusation is a confession.
American officials routinely accuse Iran of being run by Islamic “lunatics” driven by religious ideology. Yet the loudest religious extremism shaping this conflict is coming from Washington itself.
“Crazy regimes like Iran, hellbent on prophetic Islamist delusions, cannot have nuclear weapons,” declared U.S. Secretary of War and American Crusade author Pete Hegseth, who has a Crusader cross tattooed across his chest and a Crusader battle cry widely used by far-right and white supremacist groups tattooed on his bicep.
After attacking Iran unprovoked last month, senior U.S. officials offered a series of ever-changing justifications: eliminating a nuclear threat, dismantling Iran’s missile capabilities, preempting an Iranian strike, encouraging regime change and even the familiar claim of “liberating” Iranians.
But beyond these flimsy rationales, another explanation has surfaced: the belief that America is fighting a religious war for Christianity to usher in the end times apocalypse and herald the second coming of Jesus Christ.
Even as the profit motives for the conflict are clear, and the project to establish Israel’s regional dominance becomes more and more obvious, it would be a mistake to ignore the reality that extremist Christian eschatology is increasingly influencing U.S. foreign policy.
The religious rhetoric driving war
“This is a religious war,” declared U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham, a close Trump ally who reportedly spent months pushing the president to authorize strikes on Iran.
“Who wins it at the end of the day?” Graham said. “Do the radical Islamist terrorists who want to kill all the Jews because God told them to, who want to kill me because I’m an infidel, who want to purify Islam to reject moderation and make everyone a jihadist?”
Graham is hardly alone.
U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson has said of Iran: “We’re the Great Satan in their analogy in their misguided religion and there was no way to appease them.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio similarly declared Iran is run by “religious fanatic lunatics” whose leaders cannot be trusted with nuclear weapons.
This rhetoric has also filtered into the military.
The Military Religious Freedom Foundation, a nonprofit focused on preserving church-state separation in the armed forces, says it has received over 200 complaints alleging that military commanders have used extremist Christian rhetoric to justify the Iran war to troops as a divinely-sanctioned, messianic holy war, according to reporting by independent journalist Jonathan Larsen.
One noncommissioned officer reported that their commander “specifically referenced numerous citations out of the Book of Revelation referring to Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus Christ,” and that “President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.”
He “had a big grin on his face when he said all of this which made his message seem even more crazy,” the complainant noted.
The rise of Christian Zionism in U.S. foreign policy
Religious fervor has often colored American wars in the Middle East. But the open, explicit nature of this rhetoric — in a country that prides itself on religious freedom — should alarm every American.
This rhetoric is the result of a powerful political alliance between Trump and the evangelical right.
After surviving an assassination attempt during his 2024 presidential campaign, Trump said he believed God had spared him so he could “save America.” Instead, he has launched wars of aggression that threaten to harm the United States economically, politically and socially.
Only 27% of Americans approve of the Iran war, according to a Reuters poll.
Despite his campaign promises to end wars, Trump has waged more wars than any other recent U.S. president. The hypocrisy is striking.
For years, U.S. leaders have warned that Iran’s religious leadership is irrational and dangerous. Yet Senator Graham, who always sat on the far-right of U.S. politics, has previously suggested the United States should use nuclear weapons on Gaza. Meanwhile, Iran’s religious leader Ali Khameni — whom the U.S. and Israel assassinated last month — has long maintained a religious edict forbidding nuclear weapons on the grounds that they are immoral and indiscriminate.
Even so, Western officials continue to portray Iran as the greatest nuclear threat facing humanity — despite a lack of evidence that the country is actively developing a nuclear weapon.
Every few years, Americans are told Iran poses an imminent threat because its leaders chant “Death to America” or label the United States the “Great Satan.”
But these slogans exist within a historical context: decades of inhumane U.S. sanctions against the country, America and Israel’s assassinations of its scientists and military leaders outside of any conventional war, and a long record of U.S. foreign interference in Iran’s domestic politics.
That history includes the 1953 coup in which the United States and the United Kingdom helped overthrow Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, after he attempted to nationalize the country’s oil industry.
And when Iran makes threats, nothing actually happens. They don’t have intercontinental missiles; they don’t have a nuclear bomb; they haven’t attacked another country in 200 years. Meanwhile, the United States has waged wars across the Middle East, supported brutal dictatorships and repeatedly violated international law — including through its unconditional political and military backing for Israel’s war in Gaza.
Christian Zionism has played a major role in that project as well.
“Israel is a land that God gave through Abraham to a people that he chose … it would be fine if they took it all,” Mike Huckabee, U.S. ambassador to Israel, told Tucker Carlson in a recent interview.
At the start of Israel’s war on Gaza, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu invoked the Biblical story of “Amalek” to justify his genocide.
“You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember,” Netanyahu said, referencing a passage in the first Book of Samuel in the Old Testament that describes God commanding King Saul to kill every person in Amalek, a rival nation to ancient Israel and its staunch enemy.
It reads: “This is what the Lord Almighty says. ‘I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.’”
Netanyahu invoked the same passage at the start of the Iran war. “We read in this week’s Torah portion, ‘Remember what Amalek did to you.’ We remember and we act.” Netanyahu is widely known to be a secular Jew, yet has no problem using biblical passages to justify his violent political motives.
War framed as a Biblical mission
Killing innocent civilians while invoking scripture to justify it is morally indefensible — the very behavior Western governments have spent two decades condemning when carried out by Muslim extremists who commit terrorism.
Yet today, Christian and Jewish leaders of nuclear-armed states are doing exactly that, invoking religious texts to justify mass violence.
Why is Western media and commentariat largely silent about this religious fanaticism?
U.S. Secretary of War Hegseth, an ultra-conservative figure who has been described as the Pentagon’s “holy warrior,” preaches loyalty to Israel and claims God blesses Israel’s allies and curses its enemies. He attends a weekly White House Bible study group led by a preacher who believes God commands America to support Israel.
He has also openly reveled in the destruction caused by American and Israeli attacks.
In a recent media briefing, Hegseth said U.S. fighter jets will bring “death and destruction from the sky, all day long.”
He praised the sinking of an unarmed Iranian naval vessel miles away from the combat zone during a U.S. military operation, describing it as “a quiet death” and celebrating it as the first torpedo sinking of an enemy ship since World War II.
At times, the administration’s rhetoric seems indistinguishable from entertainment.
The White Houser recently posted a social media video mixing footage American strikes on Iran with scenes from the video game Call of Duty. Another video blended movie scenes with footage of their attacks under the title “JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY.”
War is trivialized and glamorized, reduced to spectacle, propaganda and nostalgia for World War II. They have learned the wrong lessons from it and forgotten the horrors and bloodshed of some of the darkest times in human history.
In his 2020 book American Crusade, Hegseth falsely claims that Islam “is not a religion of peace,” and that all Muslim countries are no-go zones for Christians and Jews. He has tattooed the word “kafir,” an Arabic term for disbeliever, on his arm as a mockery of Islam.
In 2018, he also suggested that rebuilding the Jewish temple on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount was possible — a position aligned with hardline religious nationalists in Israel.
Right-wing American journalist Tucker Carlson, who has been opposing America’s recent military crimes, warned that Israel could use the Iran war as cover to destroy the Dome of the Rock, one of Islam’s holiest sites, and build a Jewish temple over it — an act that could ignite a religious war.
This ideology of Christian Zionist nationalism is increasingly driving much of U.S. foreign policy today. American leaders believe they are waging a war for the end times to herald the return of Jesus Christ.
This extreme ideology is risking a global catastrophe.
At least 15 countries are already entangled in the Iran war, which some analysts fear could become the opening phase of a third world war. The conflict has already killed more than 1,300 Iranians, including around 200 children, and threatens to engulf the entire region.
We can only imagine how Jesus would react if he saw the blood America had shed in his name to herald his coming.
