A military watchdog group reports receiving over 200 complaints from service members alleging that numerous U.S. military commanders are framing the conflict with Iran as a religious war to fulfill Christian end-times prophecy. These complaints reveal a disturbing trend of extremist, messianic rhetoric within parts of the military leadership, which has been linked to the influence of evangelical Christian nationalist figures like War Secretary Pete Hegseth.
While this religious extremism is a significant and alarming factor, the article argues the broader reasons for U.S. aggression are multifaceted and include Israeli territorial ambitions, presidential narcissism, bipartisan support for hegemony, and a longstanding framework of civilizational clash. The current situation is portrayed as an intensification of these existing drivers, where earlier justifications like democracy promotion have been stripped away to reveal more overt and extreme ideologies.
The main topics covered are: reports of religious extremism within the U.S. military command regarding Iran; the influence of Christian nationalism in military leadership; and the complex, multi-causal analysis of U.S. foreign policy motives in the Middle East.
The United States is waging a religious war. This is, at least, how dozens of fanatical U.S. military commanders understand President Donald Trump’s illegal assault on Iran: a messianic battle to bring about Jesus Christ’s return.
“President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth,” one military commander told his combat unit, which could be deployed to fight in Iran “at any moment,” according to a complaint reportedly filed by one of the unit’s officers to a military watchdog group.
The Military Religious Freedom Foundation says it has been “inundated” with more than 200 calls across dozens of military installations, including 110 complaints filed between Saturday morning and Monday evening, from service members reporting their commanders have invoked similar extremist rhetoric of Christian Zionist messianism when justifying the unprovoked war on Iran.
The complaints, which were first reported by independent journalist Jonathan Larsen and have garnered international media attention, offer disturbing insight into the eschatology driving this murderous operation for a significant number of military leaders. Perhaps this is unsurprising, given that U.S. War Secretary Pete Hegseth is an open evangelical Christian nationalist who has remade military leadership to align with his extremist worldview.
It would be a mistake, though, to take these chilling end times invocations as some skeleton key to understanding the foundational, undergirding reason behind Trump’s reckless death-dealing in Iran. The U.S. and Israel-led decimation of the Middle East region is overdetermined; too many causes, all reprehensible, account for Trump’s waging war. To properly understand Trumpian fascism is to not reduce one cause to another, but to appreciate how they function in a chaotic constellation. Factors at play include: annihilatory Christian Zionism; Israel’s genocidal Zionist project of territorial dominance; the American president’s unrestrained and irrepressible narcissism and drive to be a Great Man of history, idiocy, and miscalculation; and the continuity of bipartisan willingness to shed Arab and Muslim blood in the service of flailing U.S. hegemony.
All of these factors have played a part in previous illegal U.S. assaults on the Middle East, albeit to different degrees. As Larsen, the journalist, noted, President George W. Bush “referred to the American ‘crusade’ against terrorism” to justify his forever wars. Still, the open Christian extremism of Hegseth’s military leadership marks a certain shift. So, too, does the extremity of Trump’s derangement and self-regard. But Islamophobic blood lust, the framework of civilizational clash between Judeo-Christian forces and Islamist threats, and an arrogant and foolish U.S. leadership are not new, even if the worst elements are now heightened and unvarnished by earlier myths of spreading democracy and nation-building.
Political and military leaders do not need to share in apocalyptic theological commitments to enable and enact end times. The U.S. and its allies have been willing to unleash apocalyptic destruction without a driving religious belief in Jesus’s imminent return. With bipartisan support, and under the leadership of a Democratic president, U.S.-backed Israeli forces reduced Gaza to a wasteland. We can hardly place blame for the U.S. role in that genocide on American Christian Zionists alone.
I’m not saying that nothing is new here: It is a genuinely disturbing development that so many service members have described, according to the watchdog, their commanders speak with “unrestricted euphoria” about “how bloody all of this must become in order to fulfill and be in 100% accordance with fundamentalist Christian end of the world eschatology.”
Authors Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor described the far-right ideology of Trump and his followers as one of “end times fascism.” Klein and Taylor note that European 20th-century fascism may have had what philosopher Umberto Eco called an Armageddon complex, “a fixation on vanquishing enemies in a grand final battle,” but these earlier fascist movements had a “vision for a future golden age after the bloodbath that, for its in-group, would be peaceful, pastoral and purified.” According to Klein and Taylor, Trumpian fascism is marked instead by an orientation only to destruction.
In one sense, Trump’s Iran war confirms this hypothesis. It is obliteration without vision or any appreciation for consequences. But what the bombardment really shows is not the way Trumpian fascism embodies some new embrace of apocalypticism. It is, like Trump’s regime and its adherents, a gruesome pastiche of American fascistic tendencies old and new, including white nationalism, evangelical Christianity, Zionism, imperialism, authoritarian techno-capitalism, and genocidal war. As ever, the actual end times will be reserved for the whole civilian lifeworlds wiped out by our war machines.
IT’S EVEN WORSE THAN WE THOUGHT.
What we’re seeing right now from Donald Trump is a full-on authoritarian takeover of the U.S. government.
This is not hyperbole.
Court orders are being ignored. MAGA loyalists have been put in charge of the military and federal law enforcement agencies. The Department of Government Efficiency has stripped Congress of its power of the purse. News outlets that challenge Trump have been banished or put under investigation.
Yet far too many are still covering Trump’s assault on democracy like politics as usual, with flattering headlines describing Trump as “unconventional,” “testing the boundaries,” and “aggressively flexing power.”
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IT’S BEEN A DEVASTATING year for journalism — the worst in modern U.S. history.
We have a president with utter contempt for truth aggressively using the government’s full powers to dismantle the free press. Corporate news outlets have cowered, becoming accessories in Trump’s project to create a post-truth America. Right-wing billionaires have pounced, buying up media organizations and rebuilding the information environment to their liking.
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I’M BEN MUESSIG, The Intercept’s editor-in-chief. It’s been a devastating year for journalism — the worst in modern U.S. history.
We have a president with utter contempt for truth aggressively using the government’s full powers to dismantle the free press. Corporate news outlets have cowered, becoming accessories in Trump’s project to create a post-truth America. Right-wing billionaires have pounced, buying up media organizations and rebuilding the information environment to their liking.
In this most perilous moment for democracy, The Intercept is fighting back. But to do so effectively, we need to grow.
That’s where you come in. Will you help us expand our reporting capacity in time to hit the ground running in 2026?
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