American Holy War

The Iranian Mullahs, America's Christian Nationalists and Israel's Orthodox Jews are at war. They share an unerring faith in a punitive god. Let's hope they spare the rest of us

This is Who made our minds?, my Thursday essay probing the greatest, cruellest and most beautiful minds of the past 5,000 years, inspired by my book, The Soul: A History of the Human Mind and many more. Join our exploration of the human mind.

Next Thursday: ‘Nevertheless, she persisted…’

I HAD HOPED the American Theocratic Tendency would confine itself to Washington. Alas, it has spilled beyond American borders. By backing his war of choice in Iran, President Trump’s Christian Nationalist regime has ignited a wider threat to us all.

The funeral for the children of Minab Primary School for Girls who died when their school was bombed on 28 February 2026 by a US tomahawk missile. Photo: Morteza Akhondi, Tasnim News Agency (Creative Commons)

It is in the nature of those who claim to possess the truth about our species, who believe in open-ended prophecies and the interminable coming of messiahs, to wage war against religious rivals for the ownership of our souls.

If, in the name of their gods, America’s Christian Nationalists, Israel’s Orthodox Jews and the Iranian Mullahs are determined to bash each others’ brains out - and kill countless numbers of civilians, ruin the world economy and trash the post-WW2 order - surely it is beholden on them to prove they have a mandate from heaven to do so.

Because we share their earth too.

They can’t. Their only reply to irritating liberals and believers in democracy and pesky reporters who still think we inhabit a rational world is: ‘you wouldn’t understand; it’s all about faith.’ Faith begins where reason ends. If so, we’re in this war forever.

Trump is a tool of the American Theocratic Tendency, as Steve Bannon, the Maga guru, never wearies of telling us: the president is an ‘instrument’ of the Christian Right and loyal executor of their faith-based Project 2025.

Bannon is a seasonal isolationist but at heart he’s an orthodox Catholic neo-crusader who believes the Christian armies of the West are destined to fight the mother of all battles against the Islamic world. His words reveal a man aching to avenge Christianity for the Muslim siege of Vienna in 1529 and the loss of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453. He recently told the New Statesman magazine that Britain is ‘not a post-Christian nation, [but] a pre-Islamic’ one. He remains immensely influential in the Maga movement. His words matter.

In the summer of 2014 Bannon laid out his ‘global vision’ to a conference held by the Human Dignity Institute in the Vatican (Bannon is a Traditionalist Catholic and a Christian Zionist): ‘We’re now,’ he said, ‘at the beginning stages of a global war against Islamic fascism.’ It would be, he warned,

‘. . . a very brutal and bloody conflict, of which if the people in this room, the people in the church, do not bind together and really form what I feel is an aspect of the church militant to . . . fight for our beliefs against this new barbarity that’s starting, [it] will completely eradicate everything that we’ve been bequeathed over the last two thousand [or] two thousand five hundred years.’

And here we are. In the cross-hairs of Bannon’s prophecy. In the grip of a kind of ‘techno-Mediaevalism’ (with apologies to the Middle Ages, which were more complex and inquiring than my crude atavism suggests). At war with a viper’s nest of Shiite extremists (as the Christian Right insists on portraying most Persian people), who think in the same apocalyptic terms as America’s Christian Zionists, rejoice in the decline of the West and clamour for the kind of ‘holy war’ that America sounds eager to give them.

—

There is nothing Christian about nationalism. And nothing nationalist about Christianity. Those who call themselves ‘Christian Nationalists’ broadcast their perfect failure to understand the teaching of their nominal prophet, the crucified Nazarene.

Whatever else he was, Jesus was not a gun-toting American in a 10-gallon hat. He spoke of his love of all humankind (not only Americans), welcomed the outsider whom ICE is determined to imprison or kill, and distinguished between God and state (‘Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s’).

Nobody (except Maga extremists) thinks Trump is led by Christ or any kind of religious feeling. The American president, like Vladimir Putin, appears to have no faith, philosophy, conscience or guiding animus other than amassing pure power.

It is easy to dismiss Trump’s religious enablers as motivated by mere power and profit too. But the strain of Christianity that has suffused the body politic of the Maga movement is sincerely felt - witness those laying on of hands! - if unrecognisable from the religion proposed by Christ, the Apostles or even St Paul.

—

To return to the war. A loathsome attribute of human nature is our willingness to wage war for god’s sake - to inflict hideous violence because a few zealots told their leaders that the mass conversion of the Jews and Armageddon and the Second Coming were imminent.

A thousand years ago, as they waded ankle-deep in Saracen blood, the Crusaders similarly assured themselves that ‘holy war’ would fast-track their souls to heaven. Instead, the crusaders achieved, if inadvertently, something remarkable. They proved that there is nothing ‘holy’ about war. Whether it’s waged in the name of God or Allah or Yahweh or Mammon, war is always the same: bloody, cruel and destructive - and containing not a wafer or unleavened loaf of ‘holiness’.

Today, a similar gang of fanatics are at war in Iran, the only difference being they’re armed with rockets and fighter jets and bunker-busting bombs, not swords and catapults.

The Iranian Mullahs and Maga Christians and Orthodox Jews share this: they believe in an oppressive god and they claim theirs is the only truth. They detest democracy, human rights, liberalism, women’s emancipation, empiricism and the freight-load of scientific and political advances associated with the Enlightenment. If their faith seems little removed from the 11th century, their weapons stink of the 21st. They’re willing to bomb us back to the stone age because their sacred texts told them to.

It’s disturbing to think that the forces ranged against each other in Iran are led by governments whose animating ‘philosophies’ - authoritarian, obscurantist, zealous, miraculous, cruel, anti-Enlightenment - are barely distinguishable.

—
Are we entering a new dark age of religious hysteria, then, of rule by theocrats?

When airborne carnage is launched in the name of God and Yahweh and Allah; when immensely powerful, allegedly sane men are free to massacre civilians, many of them children, in the name of a ghost they call ‘holy’; when a president is lauded by his Christian Zionist followers as the agent of Armageddon and the Second Coming . . . it seems we should at least take the question seriously.

Theocracy is the religious fanatic’s ideal form of government. Theocrats dream of living according to ‘the law of God’. In their ideal society, the government is the executive arm of their deity.

The theocrat despises the messy liberalism and humanity of Western democracy. He yearns to impose religious laws to curb what he sees as our revolting behaviour. The theocrat would compel everyone to live according to his sacred texts – which is why Christian Nationalists have more in common with Orthodox Jews and devout Muslims than with Western liberals.

In their traditional form, theocracies rule by decree, crush secular dissent, promote holy men (or politicians who’ll do their bidding) to positions of supreme political power, and subject those they identify as ‘anathema’ – sexual deviants, adulterers, atheists and so on – to hideous forms of punishment.

It is important to distinguish theocrats from humble and sincere churchgoers (and synagogue- and mosque-goers) who simply wish to pray in peace and not to punish the godless or impose their faith on others. Sadly, their numbers seem to be declining.

—

Recent history yields a surge of support for partial theocracies or autocratic societies who have tried or intend to impose religious laws. Let’s alight on a few.

Spain’s General Francisco Franco (1892–1975) built his Vatican-friendly post-war dictatorship on the myth of the Spanish crusade and the spirit of the Inquisition. He styled himself the defender of Catholic Spain against atheism, socialism and liberalism. His theocratic aspirations included a spy network that would have impressed the Grand Inquisitor himself, Torquemada.

—

A strip of Islam simmered in Kosovo, the residue of centuries of Ottoman Muslim occupation, as the Serbs portrayed it. The Kosovan Muslims were an affront to Serbian spiritual nationalism.

The Muslims should convert or die, ran Serbian feelings, echoing the sentiment of The Mountain Wreath, an 1847 play: ‘The Muslims have two choices: be baptized in water or in blood.’

This clash of uncompromising religious beliefs helped to incite the genocidal violence of the Balkan wars of 1992–95, a bloody chapter in the percussive mimesis of human conflict.

—

An absolute theocracy was the ‘Islamic State’, the ISIS caliphate and its offshoots that spread across Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere in the early twenty-first century. These jihadists aimed to imitate the theocracy established by Muhammad and his heirs in the seventh century CE.

They justified their vicious attacks on the West as ‘acts of God’. They prayed for the final clash of arms with the infidel that would herald the coming of a messianic figure and Armageddon.

Like all theocracies, the Islamic State unleashed waves of frenzied iconoclasm and book-burning, destroying the Buddhas of Bamiyan (2001), the mosques and shrines that offended Sunni or Shia Muslims (2014–16), the Christian churches as well as ancient Assyrian statues in Mosul, and statues in the ancient city of Palmyra. In 2014–15, Islamic State fighters burned 100,000 books and manuscripts in Iraq, described by UNESCO as ‘one of the most devastating acts of destruction of library collections in human history’.

—

In Afghanistan, after negotiating the departure of the United States and their allies in 2022, the Islamic theocracy of the Taliban returned to power. Soon enough, religious laws banned women from attending universities and starting careers, confining them to the veil and lives of mindless submission.

In March 2024, the Taliban vowed to resume publicly stoning women to death for adultery.

—

Hamas’s pogrom into Israel, on 7 October 2023, the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust, in which the terrorist group slaughtered some 1200 civilians – raping and torturing many before dispatching them – was the bloodiest recent burst of theocratic violence in the name of Islam.

If they ever succeed, Hamas and its more powerful ally in Lebanon, the Iranian-backed Hezbollah, seek to replace Israel with an Islamic theocracy.

—

Israel is itself a partial theocracy under the sway of Orthodox Jewish politicians who are determined to supplant the nation’s fragile experiment in Western democracy with an autocratic regime ruled by the laws of the Torah.

Such infusions of theocracy periodically tarnish the image Israel likes to project to the world, of a Western liberal democracy, and threaten to expose it as an apartheid state beholden to a few fanatics.

The very existence of Israel in the Orthodox Jewish mind is the fulfilment of God’s gift of the ‘Promised Land’ to Moses, as prophesied in the Torah. To them, the Jewish state’s raison d’être is to prepare the Jewish people for the coming of the Messiah. By this reading, Israeli democracy is a transit point on the way to becoming a full-blown theocracy.

Israel’s unrestrained destruction of Gaza – killing tens of thousands of people in reply to Hamas’s atrocities – expressed the will of the theocratic wing of the Israeli government. The extremists aimed to deracinate Palestine in Gaza and the West Bank and to postpone indefinitely the hope of a two-state solution in favour of a Jewish theocracy.

—

A dictator posing as a neo-crusader is Vladimir Putin, whose invasion of Ukraine received the spiritual blessing of Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, head of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Putin and Kirill share the American Christian nationalists’ loathing of Western democratic ideals of free speech, human rights, women’s rights and other social freedoms that, until recently, were considered irreversible.

Putin is no theocrat, of course: he is a ruthless autocrat in the Russian tradition. He understands and deploys Machiavelli’s advice, that a ruler who hopes to survive must seem to embrace religion (Trump has achieved the same impression, simply by welcoming Christian hands into the White House).

In Kirill’s theocratic fantasy, the invasion of Ukraine was a holy war that fulfilled the prophetic destiny of greater Russia, and the coming of Putin was a ‘miracle of God’. In fact, Kirill sanctified Russian nukes as sacred weapons in Moscow’s God-given arsenal.

This was not anomalous. On 15 August 2023, the influential chief of Putin’s Council on Foreign Policy and Defense, Sergey Karaganov, convened a roundtable meeting in Moscow of defence officials, a few foreigners and the Russian Orthodox Metropolitan for Africa to celebrate Russia’s military exhibition, Army 2023. The delegates solemnly agreed that the Russians were God’s chosen people and had the backing of the Almighty against ‘the West and its fellow travellers’ who sought to destroy Mother Russia.

In Putin’s Hobbesian horror show, he pictures himself standing firm against a modern ‘Mongol horde’, this time a Western-backed army of ‘Nazis’, gays, feminists and woke types, while pounding Ukraine back into the dreary autocracy of the Russkiy mir, the ‘greater Russian world’.

To this end, Patriarch Kirill offers himself as Putin’s ‘conscience’, informing his congregation on 6 March 2022, the eve of Orthodox Lent, that the Russians were fighting Ukraine in order to defend Russian Orthodox civilisation against Western decadence, the ‘leading symptom’ of which were expressions of gay pride. Napoleon, Hitler and the Cold War were unable to destroy Mother Russia, but the rainbow flag just might.

—

The United States is unlikely to become a full-blown theocracy, but the insinuation of Biblical laws into American society by Maga evangelicals and Christian Zionists has alerted many Americans to the gradual fusion of God and state.

Few in the corporate press openly identify this as a struggle between theocrats and democrats - they tend to stick to the old divides of Right v Left or Liberal v Fascist - because they think (or hope) they’re still living in world governed by reason and ‘Enlightenment values’.

They’re not. The architects of the 2025 Project openly mean to create a ‘theocratic state’ if not a full-blown theocracy, by framing their policies according to the will of God and not the needs of the American people.

—

The origin of the theocratic tendency in America is traceable to the Calvinist philosopher Rousas John Rushdoony (1916–2001). No religious conservative worked harder to Christianise the political right in America than Rushdoony, the New York–born son of Armenian Christians who fled Turkish genocide in 1915.

Rushdoony declared that, given the power, he would have executed homosexuals, idolators, witches, adulterers, blasphemers and those guilty of incestuous or bestial relations. His preferred form of government was a ‘theonomy’ – that is, a society ruled by divine laws, notably those of the Old Testament.

Rushdoony’s thoughts have had a profound influence on the evangelical Protestant movement in America, which in turn has irrevocably shaped the Republican Party in both its moderate and extreme forms.

In Rushdoony’s ideal society, Christians would exercise dominion over the Earth and all its inhabitants, as the Bible instructs. Notions of ‘climate change’ and other existential threats identified by scientists would cease to exist, as only God has the power to end the world. Men would obey a spiritual aristocracy of right-thinking Christian leaders and women would subordinate themselves to men, as the Bible teaches.

Today’s Christian Nationalists act accordingly. They routinely attack public policy in favour of Biblical law. They believe climate change is godless junk science spread by secular socialists, vaccines against pandemics are the Devil’s work, and the right to possess firearms a part of God’s plan.

—

Trump was hailed by the ‘Christian Zionist movement’ as an emissary from Heaven when he relocated America’s Israeli embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in 2018. They welcomed this as a prophetic sign that the mass conversion of the Jews to Christianity was nigh, heralding the Second Coming and Judgement Day.

It played well for Trump in the polls, since 40 per cent of adult Americans reckon Jesus Christ is ‘definitely or probably’ going to return to Earth by 2050, according to the Pew Research Center.

America’s Christian Zionists express the same sentiment in supporting Trump’s war of choice in Iran: here is a golden moment for the president to reveal himself as their Heaven-sent angel of the Apocalypse. If their god exists, god help them.

Next Thursday, 19th March 2026: ‘Nevertheless, she persisted . . .’

Selected sources and further reading:

Alberta, T. (2023) The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism, New York: Harper.

Anzulovic, B. (1999) Heavenly Serbia: From Myth to Genocide, New York: NYU Press.

Bahnsen, G.L. No Other Standard: Theonomy and Its Critics, Tyler TX: Institute for Christian Economics.

Barnard, A. (26 February 2015) ‘ISIS Onslaught Engulfs Assyrian Christians As Militants Destroy Ancient Art’, The New York Times.

Biemann, A.D. (May 2021) ‘The Nation As Imperative: Cooperative Nationalism and the Idea of the State in Martin Buber and Hermann Cohen’, Modern Judaism – A Journal of Jewish Ideas and Experience, 41(2), pp.162–93.

Biondich, M. (2005) ‘Religion and Nation in Wartime Croatia: Reflections on the Ustaša Policy of Forced Religious Conversions, 1941–1942’, The Slavonic and East European Review, 83(1), pp. 71–116.

Bryanski, G. (8 February 2012) ‘Russian Patriarch Calls Putin Era “Miracle of God”’, Reuters.

Clemens, W. (8 September 2023) ‘Putin’s Brain Trust – Praise the Lord and Pass the Nukes’, The Center for European Policy Analysis CEPA.

Cox Richardson, H. ‘Letters from an American’ (16 March 2022, 17 April 2022, 5 April 2023, 17 April 2023, 29 October 2023, 1 November 2023, 9 November 2023, 6 December 2023), Substack.

Douglas, C. (27 December 2021) ‘Revenge Is a Genre Best Served Old: Apocalypse in Christian Right Literature and Politics’, Religions, 13(1).

Fadhil, M. (26 February 2015) ‘Isis Destroys Thousands of Books and Manuscripts in Mosul Libraries’, The Guardian.

French, D. (1 October 2023) ‘One Reason the Trump Fever Won’t Break’, The New York Times.

Friedman, T. (25 October 2023) ‘Israel: From the Six-Day War to the Six-Front War’, The New York Times.

Gonzales, R. (14 June 2018) ‘Sessions Cites the Bible to Justify Immigrant Family Separations’, NPR.

Ham, P. (2019) New Jerusalem: The Short Life and Terrible Death of Christendom’s Most Defiant Sect, Sydney: Penguin Random House.

Heing, B. (2017) Cultural Destruction by Isis, Berkeley Heights NJ: Enslow Publishing.

Hollander, D. (2006) ‘Buber, Cohen, Rosenzweig, and the Politics of Cultural Affirmation’, Jewish Studies Quarterly, 13(1), pp. 87–103.

Horowitz, J. (22 May 2022) ‘The Russian Orthodox Leader at the Core of Putin’s Ambitions’, The New York Times.

Jacobs, B. (15 June 2018) ‘Sanders Uses Bible to Defend Trump’s Separation of Children from Families at Border’, The Guardian.

Johnson, T. (2024) Evangelicals – From Faith to Power (documentary), PBS.

Kilgore, E. (5 June 2019) ‘Josh Hawley Could Be the Face of the Post-Trump Right’, Intelligencer – New York Magazine.

Kingsley, P. (29 January 2021) ‘He Is Israel’s “Prince of Torah”. But to Some, He Is the King of Covid’, The New York Times.

Kristoff, N. (23 August 2023) ‘America Is Losing Religious Faith’, The New York Times.

Moore, R. (2023) Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America, New York: Penguin Random House.

Pakašius, J. (9 November 2022) ‘The Russian Nuclear Shield or Hammer: Russia’s Nuclear Weapons, As a Spiritual and Physical Tool to Defend the Russian Civilization’, The History of the End Times, Columbia University.

Payne, D.P. (Autumn 2010) ‘Spiritual Security, the Russian Orthodox Church, and the Russian Foreign Ministry: Collaboration or Cooptation?’, Journal of Church and State, 52(4), pp. 712–27.

Phillips, K. (2007) American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century, New York: Penguin Books.

Podhorzer, M. (29 October 2023) ‘Hiding in Plain Sight: The Sources of MAGA Madness and Congressional Kakistocracy: How White Christian Political Might Made the Republican Party Hard Right, in 8 Charts’, Weekend Reading.

Popov, N. and Drinka, G. (eds.) (1999) The Road to War in Serbia: Trauma and Catharsis, Budapest: Central European University Press.

Putin, V. (12 July 2021) ‘On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians’, Office of the President of Russia.

Rushdooney, R.J. (1973) The Institutes of Biblical Law, Phillipsburg NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co.

Sells, M.A. (1998) The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia, Oakland CA: University of California Press.

Stewart, K. (3 March 2020) ‘A Founder of American Religious Nationalism’, History News Network.

Stewart, K. (2020) The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, London: Bloomsbury.

Stewart, K. (11 January 2021) ‘The Roots of Josh Hawley’s Rage’, The New York Times.

Stoeckl, K. (October 2017) ‘The Russian Orthodox Church’s Conservative Crusade, Current History, 116(792), Russia and Eurasia, pp. 271–6.

Stone, P. (22 December 2023) ‘House Speaker’s Christian Nationalist Ties Spark First Amendment Fears’, The Guardian.

The Bible (New King James Version), Exodus 23:31, Romans 13.

Williams, R. (16 March 2022) ‘Putin Believes He Is Defending Orthodox Christianity from the Godless West’, The New Statesman.

Žižek, S. (13 October 2023) ‘The Real Dividing Line in Israel-Palestine’, Project Syndicate.