Holy War: How Evangelical Christianity Captured American Foreign Policy
From prayer services at the Pentagon to commanders telling troops God anointed Trump to start Armageddon — the infrastructure of a theological coup
On March 2, 2026, a non-commissioned officer in the United States military sat down and wrote an email to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. The email described a combat readiness briefing that had taken place earlier that morning — the kind of briefing that is supposed to prepare troops for operational deployment. Instead, the NCO reported, their commander had opened the briefing by urging the unit not to be “afraid” of what was happening in Iran. What followed was not a tactical assessment. It was a sermon.
The commander, the NCO wrote, “urged us to tell our troops that this was ‘all part of God’s divine plan’ and he specifically referenced numerous citations out of the Book of Revelation referring to Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus Christ.” The commander told the room that President Trump had been “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.”¹
He had a big grin on his face when he said it.²
The NCO described the commander as a “Christian First” supporter — someone whose religious identity had always been conspicuous but who had never before crossed this particular line. The briefing shocked troops in attendance. The NCO was writing on behalf of sixteen service members: eleven Christians, one Muslim, one Jew, and three whose faith was not specified.³ They were not objecting to Christianity. They were objecting to being told, in an official military briefing, that their war was a holy one.
They were not alone. By the following evening, the MRFF had received more than 110 similar complaints. Within days, the number exceeded 200. The complaints came from every branch of the military — Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, Space Force — spanning more than 40 units across at least 30 installations.⁴ Mikey Weinstein, the MRFF’s founder and a former Air Force officer, described the phenomenon as “unrestricted euphoria” among commanders who believed that the bombing of Iran represented the fulfilment of Christian prophecy.⁵
This was not one rogue officer having a bad morning. This was a pattern. And patterns do not emerge from nowhere.
To understand how a United States military officer could stand in front of his troops in 2026 and tell them — with a grin — that their president was divinely anointed to trigger the apocalypse, you have to understand the infrastructure that made that moment possible. You have to trace the theology, the money, the political alliances, and the decades of deliberate cultivation that turned a fringe eschatological belief into the operating system of American foreign policy.
That infrastructure has a name. Several names, actually. But the one that matters most is the one its architects would use themselves: Christian Zionism.
This is the story of how it captured the Pentagon.
1. The Pentagon’s Prayer Room
A note on sourcing before we proceed. The MRFF complaints are anonymised to protect service members from retaliation. No audio or video recordings of the briefings have surfaced. Snopes, in its investigation, left the claim “unrated” for this reason.⁶ What we do have is over 200 complaints from more than 40 units across 30 installations in every branch of the military, logged by an organisation with two decades of documented work on religious freedom in the armed forces. We have the specific, detailed language of the NCO’s email. And we have a context — a chain of events at the highest levels of the Department of Defense — that makes these complaints not just plausible but predictable.
That context begins with a prayer service.
In May 2025, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth held the first of what would become monthly Christian worship services in the Pentagon’s auditorium. The services were broadcast live on the Department’s internal television network.⁷ They were described as voluntary. Military.com reported that service members and defence contractors had raised concerns about feeling pressured to attend, with one contractor describing the services as “inherently discriminatory” because they provided Christians an opportunity to get face time with senior leadership that members of other faiths were denied. A retired Air Force brigadier general, speaking anonymously for fear of reprisal, told the outlet that contrary to the Pentagon’s assurances, roll call does take place — and that attendance functions as “a litmus-loyalty test for who’s in and who’s out,” with consequences for annual performance reports, promotion recommendations, and contract reviews.⁸ Mikey Weinstein of the MRFF put it more bluntly: service members were being “voluntold.”⁹
None of this surprises me. I worked with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations as an operative on their Joint Drug Enforcement Team, and I worked on base as a civilian for a number of years. I have had many officers and enlisted friends in my employment and social circles, and family members who have served across multiple branches. I know how signals travel down a chain of command, and how the boss’s preferences become the unit’s priorities. What the Pentagon calls voluntary, the rank and file experience as an expectation.
The first service was led by Brooks Potteiger, pastor of Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowship in Tennessee — Hegseth’s own church, and a congregation affiliated with Doug Wilson’s Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches.¹⁰ That detail matters: Wilson’s theological network was not introduced to the Pentagon as a later escalation. It was there from the first day. Subsequent services featured Southern Baptist pastors — Chris Durkin of Colts Neck Community Church in New Jersey, who had spurred Hegseth’s renewed interest in Christianity; Mark Dever of Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington; Garrett Kell of Del Ray Baptist Church in Virginia.¹⁰ Conservative, but within the broad mainstream of American Protestantism. What came next was not.
On February 17, 2026, Hegseth invited Doug Wilson to lead the Pentagon’s monthly worship service. Wilson is the founder of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, and the co-founder of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches — a network of over 150 churches internationally.¹¹ He runs Canon Press, a publishing house with national reach, and helped build the Association of Classical Christian Schools, a network of nearly 475 schools.¹² He is, in other words, not a fringe pastor shouting into a webcam. He is an institution builder with a decades-long project and a growing sphere of influence.
His beliefs are worth stating plainly, because they are not hidden. Wilson has publicly argued that women should not have the right to vote and should submit to their husbands.¹³ Women are barred from leadership positions in his church and cannot vote in congregational decisions. He believes homosexuality should be a crime. He has described Christian enslavers in the American South as being on “firm scriptural ground” — a position that multiple outlets, including Word & Way and Religion Unplugged, have characterised not as neutral historical observation but as an approving defence of the institution.¹⁴ He advocates for a Christian theocracy in which non-Christians — explicitly including Muslims — would be barred from public worship and public office, and in which the Apostle’s Creed would be incorporated into the United States Constitution.¹⁵ He opened a church in Washington, D.C. in 2025, telling reporters it was part of his plan to make America a Christian nation.¹⁶
This is the man Pete Hegseth calls a mentor.
Hegseth is a member of a CREC-affiliated church in Tennessee. He moved his family there specifically to send his children to a school in Wilson’s classical Christian network.¹⁷ The Pentagon confirmed that the Secretary “very much appreciates many of Mr. Wilson’s writings and teachings.”¹⁸ When Wilson stood at the Pentagon podium, Hegseth stood beside him, praying with his hand on Wilson’s shoulder. The Department of War’s rapid response account on X posted a photograph of the moment with the caption: “We have gathered at the Pentagon for our monthly worship service. We are One Nation Under God.”¹⁹
Hegseth does not hide what tradition he is claiming. Tattooed on one arm is the Latin phrase “Deus Vult” — “God wills it” — the battle cry of the First Crusade. On his chest is the Jerusalem Cross, the coat of arms of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, established in 1099 after Crusader armies massacred the city’s Muslim inhabitants and burned its Jews alive in their synagogue.²⁰ The man running the American military has branded himself, permanently and literally, with the insignia of medieval Christian holy war.
Two weeks earlier, at the National Prayer Breakfast on February 5, Hegseth had gone further. He declared that “America was founded as a Christian nation” and that “as public officials, we have a sacred duty 250 years on to glorify him” — pointing upward as he said it.²¹ He suggested that serving in the U.S. military was a form of Christian spiritual warfare, and that the soldier willing to “lay down his life for his unit, his country, and his creator — that warrior finds eternal life.”²¹
Read that again. The Secretary of War told service members that dying in combat earns them eternal life. This is not a figure of speech. This is not a rhetorical flourish at a fundraiser. This is the civilian head of the American military telling troops that their service has soteriological weight — that it contributes to their salvation.
And then the bombs fell on Iran. And commanders, having watched the Secretary of War spend nine months building the theological infrastructure from the top, did what officers in a hierarchical system always do: they followed the signal. Whether individual commanders watched those broadcasts or read those speeches is beside the point. In a hierarchical culture, the message travels down the chain whether or not every link is aware of its origin. They took the message Hegseth had been broadcasting — that America is a Christian nation, that military service is spiritual warfare, that God’s plan is being executed through American power — and they delivered it to their troops in the only language that was left. The language of Armageddon.
The 200 complaints were not an aberration. They were a harvest.
There is an irony here that should not pass without notice. For two decades, the machinery of the war on terror has projected onto Muslims the image of a hidden theological command structure — a mastermind who radicalises foot soldiers through religious ideology until they are ready to kill and die for the cause. That projection is now a mirror. The theological command structure described in this section is not hidden. It is broadcast on the Pentagon’s internal television network, posted on official social media accounts, and delivered from the podium of the National Prayer Breakfast. The foot soldiers are not radicalised in secret — they are radicalised in uniform, during duty hours, by their chain of command. The only difference is that when the theology is Christian and the foot soldiers are American, we do not call it what it is.
2. The Prophetic Clock
To understand what those commanders believed they were telling their troops, you have to understand a theology that most Americans have absorbed without ever learning its name. It is called dispensationalism, and it is the engine driving everything described in this article.
Dispensationalism is not Christianity. It is a specific interpretation of Christianity — a nineteenth-century invention that has, through a combination of publishing, broadcasting, and political organising, been branded to become the dominant eschatological framework for tens of millions of American evangelicals. Its core claim is that human history is divided into a series of “dispensations” — distinct eras in which God relates to humanity under different covenants. The current dispensation, in this framework, is approaching its end. And the end has a very specific sequence.
The theology was systematised by John Nelson Darby, a nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish preacher who developed a reading of biblical prophecy called premillennialism.²² Darby’s ideas crossed the Atlantic and found fertile ground among American evangelicals, amplified by figures like Dwight Moody and James Brookes.²³ But the real accelerant was a book — the Scofield Reference Bible, published in 1909, which embedded Darby’s dispensationalist framework directly into the margins of scripture.²⁴ For millions of readers, the interpretive notes became inseparable from the biblical text itself. The theology appeared to be what the Bible actually said.
The sequence goes like this: The Jews must return to the land of Israel. The state of Israel must be established. The Temple in Jerusalem must be rebuilt. A period of tribulation will follow, culminating in the battle of Armageddon — a literal military conflict in the Middle East. And then Christ will return.
Every step must happen in order. And every step that advances the sequence is, in this framework, doing God’s work.
This is not metaphorical for the people who hold it. A 2017 LifeWay Research poll found that 80 percent of evangelical Christians in the United States believe that the rebirth of Israel in 1948 was a fulfilment of biblical prophecy — and 73 percent said events in Israel are part of the prophecies in the Book of Revelation.²⁵ Eighty percent. That is not a fringe belief. That is a supermajority within a community that constitutes roughly a quarter of the American electorate.²⁶
The political implications are staggering. If you believe — truly believe, as an article of faith — that the state of Israel is God’s prophetic clock, then supporting Israel is not a foreign policy position. It is a religious obligation. Opposing Israeli expansion is not a strategic disagreement. It is an act of defiance against God’s plan. And war in the Middle East is not a catastrophe to be avoided. It is a prophecy to be fulfilled.
Hal Lindsey understood this before almost anyone in the modern media landscape. His 1970 book The Late, Great Planet Earth — a copy of which I was encouraged to read during my time in the Assemblies of God church — translated dispensationalist theology into popular language, selling tens of millions of copies — some estimates claim up to 35 million, including later editions — and becoming the bestselling nonfiction book of the 1970s.²⁷ It told ordinary Americans that the geopolitical events unfolding in the Middle East were the literal fulfilment of biblical prophecy — and that they were living in the last days. Pat Robertson’s 700 Club, launched in 1966 and still broadcasting six decades later — having outlived its founder, who died in 2023 — carried the same message into American living rooms five days a week for decades, reaching a peak audience of millions and building a media empire — the Christian Broadcasting Network — that became the launchpad for Robertson’s own presidential campaign in 1988.²⁸
Robertson understood that theology without political organisation was just talk. In 1989, he founded the Christian Coalition, installing Ralph Reed as its first executive director.²⁹ The Coalition built a grassroots political machine that, at its peak, claimed 1.7 million members and distributed 45 million voter guides in the 1996 election cycle alone.³⁰ It did not merely support candidates. It trained them, organised them, and placed them at every level of government from school boards to Congress. Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, founded a decade earlier in 1979, had already demonstrated the model: take the theology out of the sanctuary and into the voting booth.³¹ The Christian Coalition refined it into a permanent political infrastructure.
This is where the theology of the prophetic clock meets the machinery of American power. Dispensationalism tells you what must happen. Organisations like the Christian Coalition, the Moral Majority, and the 700 Club tell you how to make it happen. And the Israeli government — as we will see — tells you who to call.
I know this theology from the inside. I grew up in an evangelical community in southern Illinois where the leader taught this exact eschatological framework — that Muslim nations were the “dark forces of Satan” surrounding Israel, that the End Times were imminent, and that believers had a duty to prepare. I went on to spend years in the Assemblies of God church and other evangelical congregations, and the teaching was the same everywhere. The theology described in this section is not something I encountered in a book. I absorbed it across multiple churches over many years before I left as an adult. When I hear commanders telling troops that bombing Iran is God’s divine plan, I recognise the language. I grew up in it.
The Ground Level: Toxic Christianity
Before this theology reaches the Pentagon briefing room or the halls of Congress, it lives in the pews. And before it becomes a matter of foreign policy, it starts in the pews not as concern for saving souls and trying to convince them of the best values they espouse as believers in the “God of Love,” but as contempt for other people and other religions.
Scroll through evangelical social media on any given day and you will find posts from organisations like “Operation Heal America” declaring that Allah is a “fake” god — a deity separate from and opposed to the God of Abraham.³² It is not that it is a constructive criticism of the Islamic faith, but that this claim is theologically illiterate. “Allah” is the Arabic word for God. Arab Christians — millions of them — use the word in their liturgy, their prayers, their Bibles. It is the same God. The same Abrahamic tradition. The same root.
But theological literacy is not the point. The claim is part of a pattern of theological projection that runs through this entire article — a movement that accuses Islam of holy war while tattooing Crusader holy warrior insignia on the chest of its Secretary of War, that accuses Muslims of world domination and destruction while broadcasting sermons of sparking Armageddon to troops on the Pentagon’s internal network, and that accuses Islam of hostility towards all Jews while its own history includes burning Jews alive in their synagogues and whose theology envisions that all Jews who do not accept Christ will perish in the very Armageddon they are working to bring about.
The point is not truth. The point is the construction of an enemy. And once the enemy is constructed, the rest follows: the contempt becomes policy, the policy becomes war, and the war becomes God’s will.
A movement that claims to “heal America” by slandering a fellow Abrahamic faith — one that believes in the virgin birth of Jesus, his messiahship, his ascension to heaven, and his second coming to establish God’s kingdom — is not engaged in evangelism. It is not fulfilling the Great Commission. You cannot bring people to Christ through contempt. What it is doing is something more useful to the project described in this article: it is building, at the congregational level, the same hostility toward Islam that its political allies exploit at the policy level, including the foreign nation state of Israel.
The theology of contempt scales. The social media post that calls Allah a fake god and the combat briefing that calls the Iran war God’s divine plan are not different phenomena. They are the same phenomenon at different altitudes. The post teaches the congregation that Muslims worship a false god. The briefing teaches the troops that bombing Muslims is God’s will. The distance between the two is shorter than anyone wants to admit.
3. The Strategic Alliance
The theology described in the previous section would be a curiosity — an eccentric feature of American religious life — if it had remained in the sanctuary. It did not remain in the sanctuary because it was invited out. And the invitation came from West Jerusalem.
The Israeli government’s cultivation of American Christian Zionism as a strategic asset is not a conspiracy theory. It is documented history, openly acknowledged by Israeli political figures, and in many cases celebrated by both parties to the alliance.
It began in earnest with Menachem Begin. When the Likud leader became Prime Minister of Israel in 1977, he recognised something that his Labour predecessors had not fully appreciated: American evangelicals were a vast, politically organised constituency whose theology made them unconditional supporters of the Jewish state. Begin established a special liaison for evangelical Christians and cultivated personal relationships with American religious leaders — most notably Jerry Falwell, who became one of Israel’s most vocal advocates in the United States.³³
The alliance was built on a pragmatic bargain that both sides understood without stating openly. Danny Ayalon, a former Israeli ambassador to the United States, described an agreement between Begin and Pat Robertson: “We are both waiting for the Messiah. When the Messiah comes, we will ask him. And according to his answer we will know who is right.”³⁴ The eschatological disagreement — evangelicals believe Jesus will return; Jews do not — was set aside because the short-term political interests aligned perfectly. Evangelicals wanted Israel supported, defended, and expanded. The Israeli right wanted American political cover, military aid, and unconditional diplomatic backing. The deal was struck.
Ronald Reagan brought Christian Zionists into the White House with enthusiasm, hosting discussion groups that gave figures like Falwell, Robertson, and Hal Lindsey direct access to Congressional and national leaders.³⁵ The relationship cooled somewhat under George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, but the structural alliance remained intact — maintained by organisations like AIPAC that understood the value of the evangelical voting bloc even when the president himself was less receptive.
The decisive moment came in 1995, at AIPAC’s annual policy conference. Until that point, many evangelicals had been wary of Jewish organisations, and the feeling was mutual. But at that conference, AIPAC invited Ralph Reed — the executive director of Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition — to join the proceedings. The two movements discovered they could reach a concurrence of views on the basis of promoting the welfare of Israel.³⁶ Robertson, who had previously publicly decried Jewish influence in America, declared he would stand with Israel and oppose the creation of a Palestinian state. The alliance between the pro-Israel lobby and the evangelical right was formalised, and it has only deepened since.
The numbers tell the story. Christians United for Israel, founded by San Antonio megachurch pastor John Hagee in 2006, now claims over 10 million members.³⁷ That is nearly double the entire American Jewish adult population of approximately 5.8 million.³⁸ The largest Zionist organisation in the United States is not Jewish. It is evangelical Christian. CUFI’s annual summits draw thousands of attendees and feature direct addresses from Israeli political leaders. At CUFI’s 2017 conference, Benjamin Netanyahu declared that evangelical Christians were “one of Israel’s greatest allies.”³⁹
Evangelical Christians now constitute roughly a third of the Republican Party base.⁴⁰ Christian Zionism has become a central plank of the Republican platform — not because Republican strategists are dispensationalists, but because dispensationalists are reliable voters whose single-issue loyalty to Israel aligns with the party’s broader geopolitical commitments. The theology provides the passion. The party provides the power. And Israel provides the strategic direction.
This brings us to February 2026, and a moment that crystallised the entire arrangement in a single exchange.
Mike Huckabee — former Arkansas governor, former Baptist minister, and the United States Ambassador to Israel — sat down for a podcast interview with Tucker Carlson. Carlson asked Huckabee about a Bible verse in which God promises Abraham that his descendants will receive land stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates — a territory encompassing modern-day Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq. Carlson pointed out that this was, in effect, “basically the entire Middle East.”
Huckabee’s response: “It would be fine if they took it all.”⁴¹
He later attempted to walk the statement back, calling it “somewhat of a hyperbolic statement.”⁴² But the damage — or, from the perspective of the project, the signal — was sent. Saudi Arabia’s foreign ministry described the remarks as “extremist rhetoric.” Egypt called them a “flagrant breach” of international law. The State Department declined to comment.⁴³
The Israeli right and American evangelicals are running the same play from different playbooks. One reads the Torah, the other the Book of Revelation. Both arrive at the same conclusion: the land is promised, the borders must expand, and anyone in the way is an obstacle to prophecy.
Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich — who gave a speech in 2023 at a podium displaying a map that showed Jordan as part of Israel — appeared to welcome Huckabee’s remarks.⁴⁴ This is the convergence in action: the theological claim and the territorial ambition reinforcing each other, each providing the other with legitimacy it could not sustain alone.
Huckabee was not freelancing. The Likud Party — Netanyahu’s own party, Israel’s governing party — has stated since its founding platform in 1977 that “between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.”⁴⁵ The platform has never been rescinded. When Palestinians use the phrase “from the river to the sea” — a phrase that for many describes freedom from occupation, however contested its interpretation — they are censured, expelled from universities, and accused of calling for genocide. When Likud puts the same territorial claim in its founding charter, it is called policy — and underwritten with American tax dollars.
4. The Convergence Point
There is a place where all of this converges — where dispensationalist theology, Israeli territorial ambition, American evangelical money, and global geopolitical risk meet on a single hilltop in Jerusalem. It is called the Temple Mount by Jews, Haram al-Sharif — the Noble Sanctuary — by Muslims. And it may be the most dangerous thirty-five acres on Earth.
For dispensationalists, the prophetic sequence requires a Third Temple to be built in Jerusalem before the Tribulation can begin. The first two temples — Solomon’s, destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BCE, and Herod’s, destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE — stood on what some believe is, though no archaeological verification has proven, the same site where the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock have stood for over a thousand years. Al-Aqsa is the third holiest site in Islam, the place from which the Prophet Muhammad is believed to have ascended to heaven. Nearly 2 billion Muslims understand any threat to it as an existential provocation.
The Third Temple movement is not hypothetical. It is organised, funded, and politically connected.
The Temple Institute, based in Jerusalem, has spent decades preparing for the construction of a Third Temple — fabricating priestly garments, recreating ritual vessels, and training descendants of the priestly caste in sacrificial procedures.⁴⁶ Boneh Israel, an evangelical Christian organisation, has imported red heifers from Texas to Israel and raised them under strict ritual conditions required for a purification ceremony that is considered a prerequisite for Temple construction. Israel’s Ministry of Jerusalem Affairs and Heritage has funded development of the site where the ceremony is planned.⁴⁷
There is an irony here that Christian theology cannot easily absorb. The central claim of Christianity is that Christ’s sacrifice on the cross was the final sacrifice — the one that rendered all animal sacrifice obsolete. Evangelical organisations funding the restoration of Temple sacrifice are financing the reversal of the very act their faith considers the most important event in human history.
Yehuda Glick, a former Likud member of the Knesset, has led a growing movement calling for Jewish prayer rights on the Temple Mount — a direct challenge to the status quo that has governed the site since Israel captured East Jerusalem in 1967. Under that arrangement, Israel controls access to the compound but the Islamic Waqf administers the religious sites. The movement to erode this arrangement has gained momentum, with increasing numbers of Jewish visitors ascending the Mount under police escort.⁴⁸
Christian Zionist organisations provide both financial and political support for these efforts. The alliance between dispensationalist evangelicals and Orthodox Jewish Temple activists is, like the broader Christian Zionist alliance, built on a shared short-term objective concealing incompatible long-term theologies. The evangelicals want the Temple built because it triggers Armageddon and the return of Christ. The Orthodox activists want it built because it inaugurates the Messianic Age. Both sides know the other’s endgame. Both sides have decided it doesn’t matter yet.
Hamas understood the explosive power of this convergence. When it launched its attack on October 7, 2023, it named the operation “Al-Aqsa Storm” — and explicitly cited the increasing Jewish incursions into the compound as a provocation.⁴⁹ Whatever else October 7 was, it was a reminder that the Temple Mount is not an abstraction. It is a detonator. And the people who are most actively working to set it off believe the resulting explosion is not a risk to be managed but a prophecy to be fulfilled.
This is the point that most Western commentary misses entirely. When American evangelicals send money to Temple preparation organisations, when Israeli politicians campaign on Jewish sovereignty over the Mount, when red heifers are raised in the Judean hills according to ancient ritual specifications — these are not curiosities. They are operational steps in a project whose architects believe they are building toward the end of the world. And they have the political connections, the financial resources, and the theological conviction to keep building.
The question is not whether they will succeed in constructing a Third Temple. The question is how much damage the attempt will cause — to the Middle East, to interfaith relations, and to the hundreds of millions of people who will interpret any move against Al-Aqsa as a declaration of civilisational war.
There is a theological problem at the heart of this project that its architects never address. Prophecy, by definition, is God’s work. If it requires political lobbying, congressional funding, and cattle breeding programmes to advance, it is not prophecy — it is a construction project with a biblical veneer. To engineer the fulfilment of God’s plan is to declare, in practice, that God cannot or will not fulfil it himself. That is not faith. It is its opposite. And the Christians driving this project might consider a warning from the teacher they claim to follow: “Not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven. Many will say to me on that day, Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name? And I will tell them plainly, I never knew you. Away from me.” The full theological case against self-fulfilling prophecy — and what the Christian tradition’s own texts say about those who appoint themselves as God’s architects — is a subject that deserves its own treatment, and will receive it.
5. From 9/11 to Iran
The evangelical capture of American foreign policy did not begin on September 11, 2001. But 9/11 was the accelerant that turned a slow-burning theological project into a five-alarm fire.
Within hours of the attacks, a framing was available — the “clash of civilizations,” borrowed from Samuel Huntington’s 1996 thesis and already embedded in the evangelical worldview.⁵⁰ Five days later, President Bush used the word “crusade” in remarks to the press, then retracted it.⁵¹ But the retraction was for the press. In a 2003 meeting with Palestinian leaders, Bush reportedly told them: “I’m driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan. And I did. And then God would tell me, George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq. And I did.”⁵² The White House denied it. The Palestinian foreign minister who was present stood by the account. The framing had already been received by the audience that mattered most: the tens of millions of Americans who already believed that Islam was a prophetic enemy and that conflict with the Muslim world was both inevitable and divinely ordained.
The Iraq War was the proving ground. But it is worth remembering what came before it. During the Soviet war in Afghanistan, American evangelicals were enthusiastic supporters of the mujahideen — on the grounds that they were God-fearing fighters resisting godless communism, a system of the devil. Muslims were allies when the enemy was atheism. They became prophetic enemies the moment the Cold War ended and a new narrative was required. The underlying dispensationalist hostility toward Islam had always been there — but during the Cold War it took a back seat to the greater enemy of godless communism. Back then, Allah was not a “fake god.” Back then, Muslims who believed in the God of Abraham were useful. Once that enemy fell, Islam moved from ally to adversary almost overnight, and the God that Muslims had always worshipped became, conveniently, a false one. The 9/11 attacks — carried out by men from the same broader movement the West had armed, funded, and then abandoned in Afghanistan after the Soviets withdrew — only reinforced the new narrative. The blowback became the justification.
The Iraq war had no connection to 9/11 — a fact that was established at the time and has been confirmed exhaustively since — but it had the support of the evangelical base because it advanced the broader project: reshaping the Middle East in ways that served both American strategic interests and the dispensationalist prophetic timeline. Evangelical leaders provided moral cover for a war of choice. Congregations provided the political base that made the war sustainable even as public support eroded. The alliance between the national security establishment and the evangelical right, forged in the Reagan years, was battle-tested in Iraq and found reliable.
Meanwhile, a new infrastructure was being built — one that bridged the gap between evangelical theology and national security policy. Organisations like Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy, Brigitte Gabriel’s ACT for America, and Daniel Pipes’ Middle East Forum built a counter-Islamism network that translated theological hostility toward Islam into the language of threat assessment and national security.⁵³ These were not evangelical organisations in the traditional sense. They were policy shops. But they served the same function: they provided a secular-sounding justification for the civilisational conflict that dispensationalist theology had already declared.
The pattern continued through the Obama years — when evangelical opposition to the Iran nuclear deal was ferocious and theologically motivated — and accelerated dramatically under Trump. From the moment he was elected in 2016, evangelical leaders christened Trump as “God’s anointed” — a vulgar, thrice-married casino mogul who could not name a favourite Bible verse, recast as a divine instrument chosen to restore Christian America.⁵⁴ The embassy move to Jerusalem in 2018 was celebrated by evangelical leaders as prophecy fulfilled. Netanyahu himself compared Trump to Cyrus the Great — the Persian king who freed the Jews from Babylonian exile and enabled the rebuilding of the Temple.⁵⁵ Banners appeared in Israel proclaiming “Cyrus the Great is alive!” The comparison was not casual. It positioned Trump within the prophetic narrative as a divinely appointed instrument — a non-believer chosen by God to advance the Jewish return, just as Cyrus had been.
The Abraham Accords of 2020 normalised relations between Israel and several Arab states while bypassing the Palestinian question entirely — a restructuring of the regional order that served both American and Israeli strategic interests and that evangelical leaders embraced as further evidence of prophetic momentum.
Then came the wars. The June 2025 strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities — the 12-Day War — established the precedent: the United States would use military force against Iran. The March 2026 full-scale joint operation with Israel, which killed Supreme Leader Khamenei and launched sustained bombing campaigns across Iranian territory, was the culmination.⁵⁶
Each step looks like geopolitics from the outside. The intelligence assessments, the diplomatic cables, the military planning — all of it conducted in the language of national security, threat assessment, and strategic necessity. But among the people in the room when these decisions are made are men and women who believe, with absolute sincerity, that serving God’s timeline is serving America’s national interest — that Armageddon is in America’s interest, that Christ’s return and all the death and destruction that must precede it is in America’s interest, that innocent lives lost are a means to an end that serves America’s interests, and that any war that advances the prophetic sequence is not a cost to be weighed but a duty to be fulfilled. The language of security is the vehicle. The theology is the driver.
When Pete Hegseth stood at the National Prayer Breakfast and told military personnel that the warrior who lays down his life “finds eternal life,” he was not speaking metaphorically. When commanders across thirty installations told their troops that Trump was anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire for Armageddon, they were not freelancing. They were delivering, in explicit terms, the message that the Secretary of War had been transmitting either behind closed doors or in coded terms for nine months.
The capture is complete. The question is what to do about it.
6. The Constitutional Betrayal
The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States begins with ten words: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” The Establishment Clause. It is the first freedom named in the first amendment — the thing the founders considered so important that they put it before speech, before the press, before assembly, before the right to petition the government.
What Pete Hegseth has built at the Pentagon — monthly Christian worship services broadcast on the Department’s internal network, led by a pastor who advocates theocracy, attended by service members in a hierarchical culture where the boss’s invitation carries the weight of an order — is not a celebration of religious freedom. It is the establishment of a de facto state religion within the most powerful military on Earth.
Fred Wellman, a twenty-year Army combat veteran, called it “an unconstitutional and extreme attack on the 1st Amendment going completely unchecked by Congress.” He wrote: “Hegseth is using his official position to make his religion the official one of the Department of Defense using official facilities, communications channels and personnel.”⁵⁷
Consider who serves in that military. Roughly 20 percent of the U.S. armed forces identify as Catholic.⁵⁸ Doug Wilson — the man Hegseth invited to preach at the Pentagon — has described the Catholic Mass as “idolatry” and Catholic devotion to Mary as “Mariolatry.” In his vision of a Christian America, Catholic public processions would be outlawed as “public displays of idolatry.”⁵⁹ A fifth of the force Hegseth commands practices a faith that his personal pastor considers heretical and would suppress by law.
Then there are the Muslim service members. The Jewish service members. The Buddhists, the Hindus, the atheists, the agnostics — all of them watching their chain of command declare, from the podium of the Pentagon, that this is a Christian nation waging a Christian war.
The Myth of the Christian Founding
When defenders of this arrangement invoke “Judeo-Christian values” as the foundation of the American republic, they are telling a story that the founders themselves rejected.
The founders were not Christians in any sense Pete Hegseth or Doug Wilson would recognise. Thomas Jefferson took a razor to the Bible, physically cutting out every miracle, every supernatural claim, every reference to the divinity of Christ — producing what is now known as the Jefferson Bible, held today by the Smithsonian Institution.⁶⁰ Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, and George Washington were Deists at best, ambiguous on orthodox Christianity at a minimum. The Constitution does not mention God. Not once. The First Amendment explicitly prohibits the establishment of religion. These are not obscure historical footnotes. They are the foundational documents of the nation Hegseth claims to be defending.
And then there is the Treaty of Tripoli. Drafted under George Washington, signed by John Adams, ratified unanimously by the United States Senate in 1797. Article 11 states, in plain English: “The Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”⁶¹ Unanimously. Not a dissenting vote. The founders were explicit.
When Hegseth declares that “America was founded as a Christian nation,” he is not offering an interpretation of history. He is contradicting the founders in their own words, ratified by their own Senate, in a treaty they wrote themselves.
The United States may be a nation populated by Christians, but it was founded as a nation for everyone equally, regardless of the religious make-up of the country. That is what the founders intended. That is what they wrote into law. The demographic composition of the population does not override the constitutional framework that governs it.
What “Christian Morality” Built
But let us take the claim on its own terms for a moment. Suppose we accept the premise that Christian morality shaped the American project. What did it build?
It built a country on the graves of indigenous peoples. Sand Creek. Wounded Knee. The Trail of Tears. The systematic destruction of nations that had inhabited this continent for millennia, justified by a theological doctrine — the Doctrine of Discovery — that was explicitly Christian.
The papal bull Inter Caetera, issued by Pope Alexander VI in 1493, granted European Christian powers the right to claim lands inhabited by non-Christians — a doctrine that drove the colonisation of the Americas for three centuries before the United States existed. The papal bull carried no authority in the Protestant republic that eventually emerged — but the legal principle it established did. In 1823, the Supreme Court adopted the Doctrine of Discovery as the foundation of American land title in Johnson v. M’Intosh, ruling that indigenous peoples held rights of occupancy but not ownership because Christian discovery took precedence.⁶² That ruling has never been fully overturned. Protestant America rejected the Pope’s theology but embraced his permission to take the land.
The Vatican did not formally repudiate the Doctrine of Discovery until March 2023.⁶³ It took five hundred and thirty years to say it was wrong.
It built a country on the backs of enslaved Africans — kidnapped, transported, sold, beaten, worked to death, and bred like livestock for generations. And here is a fact that the “Christian nation” narrative systematically erases: scholars estimate that between 15 and 30 percent of enslaved Africans brought to the Americas were Muslim.⁶⁴ They carried their faith with them in chains. They prayed in secret. They built this country — its agriculture, its infrastructure, its wealth — in bondage. When Wilson and Hegseth declare America a Christian nation, they are not merely wrong constitutionally. They are erasing the forced labour of Muslim people from the nation’s founding story.
The first Muslims in America did not arrive as immigrants or refugees. They arrived as property. And slaveholding was not a contradiction of Christian values at the time — it was entirely consistent with them, defended from the pulpit, justified with scripture, and practised by the faithful for centuries. It took a civil war that killed over 600,000 Americans to change that theology. The values evolved. But they did not evolve on their own.
The defenders of Christian civilisation would do well to read the history they claim to own — in order.
When Omar ibn al-Khattab conquered Jerusalem for Islam in 637, the Christian Patriarch invited him to pray inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Omar refused — not out of contempt, but out of respect: he feared that if a caliph prayed there, future Muslims would claim it as a mosque. He prayed outside instead. The mosque built on that spot still stands, across from the church he chose to protect.
When the Crusaders took Jerusalem in 1099, they burned Jews alive in their synagogue and massacred the Muslim inhabitants until, by the accounts of their own chroniclers, blood ran through the streets.
The Crusaders did not limit their violence to Muslims and Jews. The Fourth Crusade of 1204 never reached the Holy Land at all — instead, the armies sacked Constantinople, the greatest Christian city in the world, looting its churches, destroying its relics, and massacring its Christian inhabitants. Fellow believers were plundered when they stood in the way of the project. That pattern has not changed. Today, Doug Wilson calls the Catholic Mass idolatry. Hegseth’s Pentagon services exclude non-evangelical Christians from the vision of the nation they serve. The new Crusade, like the old ones, devours its own.
When Saladin retook the city in 1187, he spared the Christian population, kept the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Christian hands, and invited the Jews to return — earning comparisons, in the Jewish world, to Cyrus the Great.
The Ottoman Empire governed Jerusalem for four hundred years, and throughout that period Christian holy sites were preserved under a system of religious governance that guaranteed their protection.
Today, under Israeli governance, Christian clergy are spat on and pepper-sprayed in the streets of Jerusalem, churches are vandalised, and Arab Christians have had their homes and land destroyed and confiscated. The Christian population of Jerusalem has fallen from 25 percent a century ago to less than one percent.⁶⁵
David J. Wasserstein, Professor of Jewish Studies at Vanderbilt University, wrote in the Jewish Chronicle: “Islam saved Jewry. This is an unpopular, discomforting claim in the modern world. But it is a historical truth.”⁶⁶ His words, not mine. The history they tell people to read is the history that refutes them.
The line from the Crusades to the Pentagon prayer service is shorter than most people realise, because it was never broken. Between 1096 and 1272, nine Crusades sent Christian armies to conquer the Holy Land, massacre its inhabitants, and establish kingdoms in the name of God. The battle cry was “Deus Vult” — God wills it. The symbol was the Jerusalem Cross. Nearly two centuries of holy war, launched by popes and sustained by the doctrine that killing for Christ earned salvation. The motivation was not merely territorial. The Crusaders believed that Christ would not return until the Holy Land was under Christian control — that the Second Coming required Jerusalem in Christian hands. The theology driving the original Crusades was, at its core, the same eschatology that drives the dispensationalist project today: take the land, fulfil the conditions, trigger the return.
When the formal Crusades ended, the project did not. It continued through the Doctrine of Discovery, which extended the Crusader logic to the entire non-Christian world. It continued through the colonisation of the Americas, Africa, and Asia. It continued through forced conversions, residential schools where indigenous children were taken from their families and forced to adopt Christianity, and the theological architecture of empire. And it continues now — in the Pentagon prayer services, in the Secretary of War’s Crusader tattoos, in the commanders telling troops that bombing Iran is God’s divine plan.
If the nine traditional Crusades ended in 1272, what Hegseth and the Christian nationalist movement are building is the tenth. Though it might be more accurate to say the Crusades never ended. They just changed uniforms. If the current wave began with the establishment of Israel in 1948 — the event dispensationalists treat as the prophetic starting gun — then we are nearly eighty years into the tenth.
7. What This Means for What Comes Next
This article has traced a line from a nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish preacher to a twenty-first-century Pentagon prayer service. From John Nelson Darby’s dispensations to Pete Hegseth’s hand on Doug Wilson’s shoulder. From the Scofield Reference Bible to over 200 complaints filed by service members who were told their war was God’s plan.
The line is not metaphorical. It is institutional. It runs through specific organisations — the Moral Majority, the Christian Coalition, the 700 Club, Christians United for Israel — and specific alliances: Begin and Falwell, Reed and AIPAC, Huckabee and Netanyahu. It runs through specific moments: the 1995 conference where evangelicals and the pro-Israel lobby formalised their partnership, the 2018 embassy move that was celebrated as prophecy, the February 2026 prayer service where a pastor who would bar Muslims from public life preached to the most powerful military on Earth.
And it runs through Iran. Through the 12-Day War of June 2025 and the full-scale operation of March 2026. Through the strikes that killed a head of state, the bombing campaigns that continue as this article is published, and the commanders who told their troops — in official briefings, in every branch of the military, across thirty installations — that all of it was God’s divine plan.
This is not an article about one rogue officer, or one controversial pastor, or one overzealous Secretary of War. This is an article about a capture so complete that the people inside it no longer recognise it as capture. They think it is faith. They think it is patriotism. They think it is destiny.
The Iran war is not only a moral failure. It is a legal one. Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter prohibits the use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state. Article 51 permits military action only in self-defence against an armed attack — not as a preventive strike, not as a theological project, and not because a movement believes God requires it. The United States ratified the UN Charter in 1945, and under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution, ratified treaties are the supreme law of the land. The Geneva Conventions, which the United States also ratified, govern the conduct of war and the treatment of prisoners and civilians. These are not aspirational documents. They are binding American law. The Iran war violates them.
And it is not the first time. Vietnam — where villages were burned and civilians massacred at My Lai. The Bay of Pigs. Iraq — launched on fabricated evidence, producing Abu Ghraib, where American soldiers tortured and sexually humiliated prisoners in a war their president said God told him to fight. Guantánamo, where men were held without charge and subjected to interrogation techniques that the Red Cross called torture. Afghanistan — where prisoners were stuffed into shipping containers and left to suffocate while soldiers watched. Libya. Syria. In conflict after conflict, the United States has waged wars that violate the laws it signed and the values it claims — and in war after war, religious conviction has provided the moral cover for a secular republic to behave as though the law does not apply to it.
This is the final betrayal, and it is not constitutional but theological. The movement that has captured American foreign policy does not merely violate the laws of the republic it claims to defend. It violates the demands of the faith it claims to follow. The Sermon on the Mount says “Blessed are the peacemakers.” The Geneva Conventions say protect the wounded and the prisoner. The UN Charter says do not attack a nation that has not attacked you. The Constitution says do not establish a state religion. This movement has broken every one of those commitments — secular and sacred alike — and called it obedience to God. In any other context, a movement that had infiltrated the highest levels of a nation’s military and intelligence apparatus, that operated in service of an ideology its own government’s laws prohibited, and that directed foreign policy toward objectives incompatible with the national interest, would be called what it is: a fifth column.
They have the most powerful military on Earth at their disposal. They have a theology that interprets every escalation as progress toward salvation. They have a political infrastructure that has been decades in the making and is now more deeply embedded in the machinery of American power than at any point in the nation’s history.
And they have one more thing: the absolute, sincere, unshakeable conviction that they are right. That God is with them. That the fire they are lighting in the Middle East is the signal fire for the return of Christ.
The rest of us — Christians, Muslims, Jews, and everyone else who will live with the consequences of this conviction — do not have the luxury of treating this as someone else’s problem. The evangelical capture of American foreign policy is not a culture war story. It is not a religious liberty debate. It is a national security crisis dressed in vestments.
And unless it is named, understood, and confronted with the same seriousness its architects bring to the project, it will not stop with Iran.
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James S. Coates writes about geopolitics, international law, and the decline of civilisational accountability. His books include A Signal Through Time, The Threshold, The Road to Khurasan, the memoir God and Country (published under pen name Will Prentiss) and his forthcoming Neither Gods Nor Monsters. He publishes regularly on Fireline Press and The Signal Dispatch, and his academic work appears on PhilPapers. He lives in the UK, with his family and dog who has no interest in any of this.
© 2026 James S. Coates All Rights Reserved. Fireline Press · fireline.press
Banner image: DOW Rapid Response (@DOWResponse), X/Twitter, February 17, 2026
Endnotes
¹ Jonathan Larsen, “U.S. Troops Were Told Iran War Is for ‘Armageddon,’ Return of Jesus,” Substack, March 2, 2026. Original NCO complaint email reproduced in full.
² Ibid. The NCO’s exact words: “He had a big grin on his face when he said all of this which made his message seem even more crazy.”
³ Ibid. The NCO specified writing “on behalf of 15 fellow troops” plus themselves. The Mirror US (March 5, 2026) reported the breakdown as including 11 Christians, one Muslim, and one Jew.
⁴ Middle East Eye, “US troops told Iran war is ‘anointed by Jesus’ to bring on Armageddon, watchdog says,” March 4, 2026. The MRFF reported over 200 complaints. Military.com confirmed the figures independently (March 3, 2026).
⁵ “US commander said Trump ‘anointed by Jesus’ to attack Iran: Report,” Newsweek, March 4, 2026. Weinstein’s “unrestricted euphoria” characterisation.
⁶ Snopes, “Investigating claim US troops were told Iran war is for ‘Armageddon,’ return of Jesus,” March 3, 2026. Left “unrated” due to anonymity of complainants and absence of audio/video evidence.
⁷ Reuters, “US Defense Chief Hegseth Leads Christian Prayer Service at Pentagon,” May 21, 2025.
⁸ Military.com, “Defense Contractors Report Invite to Pentagon’s Christian Prayer Service,” January 2026. Contractor described services as “inherently discriminatory”; retired Air Force brigadier general confirmed roll call and described attendance as “a litmus-loyalty test.”
⁹ Mikey Weinstein, Military Religious Freedom Foundation, quoted in The Spokesman-Review, December 2025. “Voluntold” characterisation of Pentagon prayer service attendance.
¹⁰ Baptist News Global, “Hegseth promotes Christian America at Pentagon and NRB,” February 27, 2026. Lists the pastors who led prior services.
¹¹ CNN, “Hegseth invited pastor who calls for Christian theocracy to lead Pentagon prayer service,” February 19, 2026.
¹² Baptist News Global, op. cit. Reports Wilson’s network includes nearly 475 schools through the Association of Classical Christian Schools.
¹³ The Wall Street Journal, September 2025 profile of Wilson (cited in MSNBC coverage). Wilson endorses repealing the 19th Amendment and supports a patriarchal society.
¹⁴ The Hill, “Hegseth invited controversial Christian nationalist to preach at Pentagon,” February 19, 2026. Wilson’s published position on slavery.
¹⁵ People For the American Way / Right Wing Watch, “Hegseth Invites Christian Nationalist Extremist Doug Wilson to Lead Pentagon Worship Service,” February 2026. Details Wilson’s theocratic vision.
¹⁶ Associated Press report cited in MSNBC, February 2026. Wilson’s D.C. church planted in 2025.
¹⁷ The Spokesman-Review, “Hegseth invites controversial Idaho pastor and self-described Christian nationalist to lead Pentagon’s monthly prayer meeting,” February 18, 2026.
¹⁸ Pentagon press secretary statement, reported by Military Times, February 20, 2026.
¹⁹ DOW Rapid Response (@DOWResponse), X/Twitter, February 17, 2026.
²⁰ Hegseth’s tattoos documented by Religion Unplugged, Word & Way, and National Catholic Reporter. “Deus Vult” on his arm; Jerusalem Cross on his chest.
²¹ Baptist News Global, op. cit. Hegseth’s National Prayer Breakfast remarks, February 5, 2026. Also reported by People For the American Way.
²² Britannica, “Christian Zionism.” Darby’s development of dispensationalism and its transmission to America.
²³ The Impact of Christian Zionism on American Policy, by William N. Dale, American Diplomacy journal. Notes Darby’s influence on Moody and Brookes.
²⁴ The Scofield Reference Bible (1909) is widely documented as the primary vehicle for popularising dispensationalism in America. See also Timothy Weber, On the Road to Armageddon: How Evangelicals Became Israel’s Best Friend (Baker Academic, 2004).
²⁵ LifeWay Research, 2017 poll. Reported in multiple sources including the LSE Undergraduate Political Review, “The Politics of Apocalypse: The Rise of American Evangelical Zionism,” February 2025.
²⁶ Evangelical share of the American electorate estimated at roughly 25 percent. Pew Research Center data.
²⁷ Hal Lindsey, The Late, Great Planet Earth (Zondervan, 1970). Sales figures widely documented; named the bestselling nonfiction book of the 1970s by the New York Times.
²⁸ The 700 Club premiered in 1966. Christian Broadcasting Network audience and reach documented in multiple media profiles.
²⁹ The Christian Coalition was founded in 1989 by Pat Robertson with Ralph Reed as executive director. See Ralph Reed, Active Faith: How Christians Are Changing the Soul of American Politics (Free Press, 1996).
³⁰ Christian Coalition voter guide distribution figures from contemporaneous reporting and Reed’s own accounts.
³¹ Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority in 1979. Disbanded 1989. See Susan Friend Harding, The Book of Jerry Falwell (Princeton University Press, 2000).
³² Operation Heal America (@OperHealAmerica), X/Twitter posts. July 25, 2025: “Allah is NOT the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” (230K views). March 12, 2026: “Allah, the fake monotheistic god of the Koran, is NOT the same as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” September 29, 2025: “Don’t be fooled! Allah, the fake ‘god,’ is not the same as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” Screenshots held by author.
³³ Foreign Policy, “The Fall of Netanyahu Costs American Christian Zionists Their Greatest Ally in Israel,” July 19, 2021. Details Begin’s cultivation of evangelical leaders.
³⁴ Ibid. Danny Ayalon’s account of the Begin-Robertson agreement.
³⁵ William N. Dale, “The Impact of Christian Zionism on American Policy,” American Diplomacy. Reagan’s hosting of Christian Zionist leaders.
³⁶ Ibid. The 1995 AIPAC conference and Ralph Reed’s invitation.
³⁷ Christians United for Israel membership figures from CUFI’s own public statements and multiple media reports. LSE analysis (February 2025) confirms 10 million+.
³⁸ American Jewish adult population figure from Pew Research Center, “Jewish Americans in 2020.”
³⁹ Netanyahu’s remarks at CUFI’s 2017 conference, reported by LSE Undergraduate Political Review, op. cit.
⁴⁰ Evangelical share of the Republican base from Britannica’s Christian Zionism entry and Pew Research data.
⁴¹ NBC News, “Outcry after Ambassador Mike Huckabee suggests Israel has God-given right to Middle East land,” February 22, 2026. Video of the Tucker Carlson interview.
⁴² Ibid. Huckabee’s subsequent characterisation of the statement as “somewhat of a hyperbolic statement.”
⁴³ Ibid. Saudi and Egyptian reactions. State Department non-response confirmed by Al Jazeera, February 22, 2026.
⁴⁴ Al Jazeera, “What is Greater Israel, and how popular is it among Israelis?” February 26, 2026. Smotrich’s 2023 map incident and response to Huckabee.
⁴⁵ Likud Party original platform, 1977: “Between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.” Documented via Jewish Virtual Library, Wikipedia, Responsible Statecraft, The Nation, and NPR.
⁴⁶ Al Jazeera, “What do Texan red heifers have to do with Al-Aqsa and a Jewish temple?” April 9, 2024. Details Temple Institute preparations.
⁴⁷ Ibid. Boneh Israel’s role and Israeli government funding.
⁴⁸ The Daily Beast, “A Christian Group Is Building a Movement That Could Destabilize Jerusalem’s Most Explosive Holy Site,” September 2024. Yehuda Glick and the movement for Jewish prayer rights.
⁴⁹ Hamas named the October 7, 2023 operation “Al-Aqsa Storm.” Ayin Press, “What are we praying for?: Reimagining the Third Temple in Jewish Thought and Politics,” February 2024, documents the connection between Temple Mount incursions and Palestinian responses.
⁵⁰ Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (Simon & Schuster, 1996).
⁵¹ President George W. Bush used the word “crusade” on September 16, 2001. The White House subsequently walked back the language.
⁵² Nabil Shaath, former Palestinian Foreign Minister, quoted in BBC documentary Elusive Peace: Israel and the Arabs, broadcast October 2005. Bush’s remarks at June 2003 meeting with Palestinian leaders. Corroborated by Palestinian minutes reported in Haaretz.
⁵³ The Center for Security Policy (Frank Gaffney), ACT for America (Brigitte Gabriel), and the Middle East Forum (Daniel Pipes) are documented in multiple investigations of the counter-Islamism network, including the Center for American Progress report “Fear, Inc.” (2011) and subsequent reporting.
⁵⁴ Lance Wallnau declared Trump “God’s anointed” using Isaiah 45/Cyrus parallel, 2015-2016. CBS News, Charisma magazine. Pat Robertson, Franklin Graham, and Rick Perry used similar “ordained by God” language. Pew Research found roughly a third of white evangelicals believed Trump’s election reflected God’s will.
⁵⁵ Netanyahu compared Trump to Cyrus at multiple public events beginning in 2018. See also CounterPunch, “Biblical Bloodlust: Huckabee, Cyrus, and the Zionist Greater Israel Fantasy Fueling the Iran War,” March 6, 2026.
⁵⁶ The Mirror US, “US commanders tell troops Trump ‘anointed by Jesus’ to start Iran war,” March 5, 2026. Timeline of the June 2025 12-Day War and March 2026 operations.
⁵⁷ Fred Wellman’s statement posted on X/Twitter and reported by The Hill, February 19, 2026.
⁵⁸ Catholic share of U.S. military estimated at approximately 20 percent. 2019 DoD data reported by Congressional Research Service; also cited in Letters from Leo, “Pete Hegseth’s Pastor Wants to Ban Catholic Processions in America,” March 2026.
⁵⁹ Ibid. Wilson’s characterisation of the Mass as “idolatry” and his vision for outlawing Catholic public processions.
⁶⁰ The Jefferson Bible (formally The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth) is held by the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.
⁶¹ Treaty of Tripoli, Article 11, ratified unanimously by the United States Senate, June 7, 1797. Signed by President John Adams.
⁶² The Doctrine of Discovery, based on papal bulls including Inter Caetera (1493), influenced American law through Johnson v. M’Intosh (1823) and subsequent rulings. See Robert J. Miller, Native America, Discovered and Conquered: Thomas Jefferson, Lewis & Clark, and Manifest Destiny (Praeger, 2006).
⁶³ The Vatican formally repudiated the Doctrine of Discovery on March 30, 2023.
⁶⁴ Estimates of the Muslim proportion of enslaved Africans brought to the Americas vary. Sylviane Diouf, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas (NYU Press, 1998), is the standard academic reference. Estimates range from 15 to 30 percent depending on region and period.
⁶⁵ Rossing Center Jerusalem, 2024 report: 111 documented anti-Christian incidents. Jerusalem Story, National Catholic Reporter, Arab News, and Armenian Weekly have reported attacks on Christian clergy. Christian population statistics from multiple demographic sources.
⁶⁶ David J. Wasserstein, “So, what did the Muslims do for the Jews?” Jewish Chronicle, May 24, 2012.
Tags: Christian Zionism, evangelical foreign policy, church and state, Pete Hegseth, Iran war, Third Temple, dispensationalism, Greater Israel, Pentagon, religious nationalism