Reports of US marines being ‘demoralised’ due to difficulties posed by clogged toilets and long waiting queues aboard the largest aircraft carrier the USS Gerald R Ford, as the warship joined the US-Israel war on Iran, released a stinging stench of botched upkeep.
And before the stink could diffuse, a Guardian report citing claims by a religious rights watchdog of receiving complaints from over 200 troops alleging military ‘superiors using extremist Christian rhetoric, like ushering in the return of Jesus to justify the Iran war,’ transported even the most ridiculous claims surrounding the war on Iran to unprecedented heights.
According to the US-based Military Religious Freedom Foundation, US military commanders have been invoking extremist Christian rhetoric about biblical “end times” to justify to troops, their involvement in the Iran war. The Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) says it has received more than 200 such complaints from service members across all branches of the armed forces, including the marines, air force and space force.
A non-commissioned officer in a unit told MRFF in a complaint, also viewed by the Guardian: “our commander had urged us to tell our troops that this was all part of God’s divine plan 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’.
Notwithstanding the absurdity of the claim, the US Constitution’s First Amendment mandates separation of religion from state and that church and politics be kept separate. And yet, this is not the first time that pulpit and patriotism were mixed to justify geopolitical misadventures.
Historically, during wars or military confrontations, US presidents and senior leadership are known to have invoked religious doctrines and the Bible, but this kind of contorted conviction, as having directly received communication from the prophets is delusional and deceptive par excellence, though not new.
US veterans are quoted saying that Hegseth’s religiosity, rubbing off in new biblically inspired recruitment ads and official Department of War social media, is dividing the ranks and damaging the future of US military
In April 2003, startling US press reports revealed that George W Bush, an evangelical Protestant, believed that “Operation Iraqi Freedom” was willed by God and that the overthrow of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was part of a divine plan.
Invoking guidance from “the loving God” and notifying Americans that “we are in a conflict between good and evil,” Bush is known to have told the then Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas during a meeting in Egypt in June 2003, months after the invasion: “God told me to strike at Al-Qaeda and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did”.
This genre of religious nationalism might put to shame the repugnant religious extremism and indoctrination practised in our part of the world. Imagine if we in Pakistan were to link recent operations against terrorist hideouts in Afghanistan to some divine calling, tying their destruction and elimination to the arrival of Hazrat Isa or Imam Mehdi, or claim that our armed forces have been chosen by God to facilitate the arrival of some divine messiah through attacking other countries; how much delusional would it be, even by our, rather high, religious nationalist standards.
This irony gets intenser when while Speaking to the media on Tuesday this week, US secretary of State Marco Rubio, in fact, castigated Iran for being extremist and religiously fanatical. “Iran is run by lunatics, religious fanatic lunatics. They have an ambition to have nuclear weapons.”
A day earlier, in a Pentagon news briefing, US Secretary of Defence also accused Iran of being prophetic and delusional. “Crazy regimes like Iran, hell-bent on prophetic Islamic delusions, cannot have nuclear weapons,” he lashed out.
One may question the moral authority with which US officials are accusing Iran of something that the US is so blatantly guilty of doing itself for a very long time.
According to statistics, the average American soldier is, much better educated than the US civilian population in general. “As a whole, the US military is far better educated than the American population it defends, as over 93.6% of enlisted military personnel are known to have at least a high school diploma, compared to 59.5 percent of the rest of America. And between 10% and 22% of active-duty recruits have at least one semester of college, while Army Reserve recruits boast 15%–40% college experience.”
As more educated and, perhaps, also enlightened than the rest of the society, being fed with illusory hogwash of this level must feel like it was mocking at the intellect of most personnel, appealing only to the gullible and naive among them.
But even George Bush was not original in his prophetic war reasoning or rhetoric. Rather, his sense of holy military might and divine justification was merely a perpetuation of conservative fundamentalism and its cultural influence on the armed forces and the history of war in America.
The Ohio State University 2012 research on the subject perpetuates this as it states that religious nationalism is a “significant predictor of certain attitudes toward U.S. military intervention abroad.”
The report points out that religious nationalists are more likely to think military service should be required of all males and to think the Iraq War was not a mistake; nor “to defend the US oil supply, destroy terror camps abroad, attack Iran if it had nuclear weapons, and spread democracy,” were ever mistakes, as legitimate goals are paired with illegitimate ones.
The report adds that religious nationalists are increasingly xenophobic, ’anti-immigrant and nativist’, adopting an “aggressive isolationism” toward foreign policy and that the American clergy, referred to as the “black-robed regiment” helps “transform secular, enlightenment-era ideas into a divine mandate.”
Another Illinois Wesleyan University research titled Conservative Christianity, the Military, and American War Culture, states that fundamentalist groups and the military also share a commonality in the reasons for male membership and patriarchy. “The men’s religious movement was about men supporting men, camaraderie, the distancing from femininity, and the joining together to fight for a common cause.
US Defence Secretary, Pete Hegseth is known for his intensely Christian nationalistic views. He previously endorsed the doctrine of “sphere sovereignty”, a worldview derived from the extremist beliefs of Christian reconstructionism.
In August 2025, Hegseth, the ultra-conservative former Fox and Friends host, reposted a CNN segment on X focusing on pastor Doug Wilson, a Christian nationalist who co-founded the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches.
In the segment, Wilson airs misogynistic views saying that women should not hold leadership positions in the military or be able to fill high-profile combat roles. The philosophy calls for strictly patriarchal families and churches and advocates capital punishment for homosexuality.
The Guardian quotes US veterans as saying that Hegseth’s religiosity, rubbing off in new biblically inspired recruitment ads and official US Department of War’s social media activities, is “dividing the ranks and damaging the future of US military.” Hegseth is also on record for saying that border and immigration policies are biblical.
An American United article on the separation of church and state captioned, Armed, Angry and Apocalyptic: Christian Nationalism and the U.S Military, reveals that of those assaulting the US Capitol on Jan 6, 2021, more than half were active or retired military service members. A lot were also collectively affiliated with militant, Christian nationalist-oriented, white supremacist groups.
“On the American democracy’s darkest day in modern history, the attack was led by U.S. military service persons, whether active or veterans,” says the article. “Marines, active and veteran combined, are the most represented military branch among those arrested.”
Michael Weinstein, founder Military Religious Freedom Foundation, is a 1977 honours graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy and a former Air Force judge advocate. Weinstein says that in 2005, he founded the MRFF “after concluding that religious coercion, particularly forms of militant Christian nationalism, had taken root inside the armed forces.” Since then, MRFF has represented more than 100,000 service members, many seeking help because they feel marginalized for not conforming to a particular ideological or theological mould.
With the US and Israel framing their war on Iran as a religious war, the Council on American-Islamic Relations has condemned the use of this rhetoric, calling it “dangerous” and “anti-Muslim”. CAIR’s statement added that every American should be “deeply disturbed by the ‘holy war’ rhetoric” being spread by the US military, Hegseth and Netanyahu to justify the war on Iran.
Modern wars are not theological; they are geopolitical, geostrategic, even geoeconomic, but the language and ideology used to justify them increasingly draws on religious rhetoric and narratives. These wars that have violated all international laws and uprooted the embedded world order are anything but holy.