The United States and Israel’s war against Iran is both a clash of strategic interests and a clash of competing religious ideologies. To understand it through the lens of purely secular realism is to miss half the story.
After a March 2nd Pentagon press conference, U.S. Army Secretary Pete Hegseth declared, “A mad regime like Iran, obsessed with the prophetic delusions of Islamism, cannot have nuclear weapons.” Separately, Secretary of State Marco Rubio described Iran’s rulers as “religious fanatics.”
To understand why these statements matter, and why this war cannot be understood through a purely strategic lens, we first need to understand what is going on within Western Christian society.
For decades, Western institutions have operated on secular assumptions. Religion belongs only to private life. The state is neutral. While the majority of Muslims have maintained religion as an organizing principle of family, law, and public affairs, most Christian Western countries have either abandoned religious practice entirely or confined it to the sphere of personal faith.
In the view of conservative Christians, the consequences were severe. The decline of the traditional family, the decline in birth rates, the advancement of ultra-liberal sexual politics, and the general retreat of faith from public and moral life. Above all, these are precisely the areas where conservative Christians and Muslims are likely to find common ground.
But there are more difficult and worrying currents within the conservative coalition. Christian nationalism, unlike mainstream religious conservatism, seeks to subordinate all other religious and cultural systems to the primacy of Christianity in all areas of political, legal, and social existence. This ideology has strong correlations with white nationalism, racism, anti-Semitism, and Islamophobia.
Pete Hegseth embodies this far-right trend. In conjunction with Christian Reconstructionism, a movement that rejects the secular separation of church and state, he treats the Pentagon as an instrument of holy war. He described his tattoos, a Jerusalem cross and a deus walt (“God’s will”), as symbols of “the modern American Christian crusade.” He also bears the Arabic word kafir (“infidel”), which means a deliberate anti-Muslim provocation.
Thanks to him, the framework of this crusade has shifted from a marginal voice to an operational military culture.
The Military Religious Freedom Foundation has reported more than 110 complaints from U.S. service members stationed across the Middle East, including a non-commissioned officer who reported that his commander told his troops that the war was “all part of God’s divine plan,” and quoted the Book of Revelation to declare that “President Trump was anointed by Jesus to raise the alarm that will cause Armageddon in Iran.”
Robert P. Jones, director of the Public Religion Research Institute, clearly captured the logic of this worldview when he said: “This is not just a glorification of violence, but a glorification of violence in the name of Christianity and civilization…It takes it out of the realm of politics and casts it as a holy war of supposedly Christian states against Islamic states.”
Among the most influential elements in this trend are Christian Zionists and evangelical dispensationalists who believe that rebuilding the Third Temple on the site of the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem is a theological prerequisite for the Second Coming of Christ.
U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, a self-described unapologetic Christian Zionist who denies the existence of Palestinians and supports their expulsion through Israeli settlements in the West Bank, recently noted in an interview that under the Bible’s interpretation of borders, Israel could control much of the Middle East, saying, “I don’t care if they take everything.”
For these extreme Zionist ideologues, Iran is a spiritual barrier to the conditions necessary for the creation of the Third Temple, and therefore must be militarily castrated to fulfill Biblical prophecy.
How does Iran have “Islamist prophetic delusions” according to Hegseth and others?
Iran’s state ideology, Welayat al-Fakih, Guardianship of Islamic Jurists, stipulates that in the absence of the 12th Imam (leader) in the occult (Ghaiba, or hidden), the supreme power must have a qualified Islamic jurist rule in his place.
Moreover, factions within Iran’s clerical and military establishment went further and turned theological expectations of the Mahdi’s return into practical political doctrine.
The Iranian leadership has institutionalized the idea that constant struggle against oppressive power is a sacred duty. Under this framework, strategic withdrawal or diplomatic accommodation would amount to prophetic betrayal.
During the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, the Iranian government inspired the masses by turning Shiism into a “sacred defense” and positioning the struggle as a modern-day Karbala position. This theological framework later justified the strategy of “forward defense,” or exporting the revolution to build proxy networks throughout the region. By engaging its enemies in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Gaza, the Islamic Republic sought to confront the source of the threat and move military conflict away from mainland Iran.
Therefore, the war between the United States and Israel against Iran can be interpreted as both strategic and religious.
From a religious perspective, the two civilizational ideologies are in direct structural opposition, each seeing the existence of the other in its maximalist form as an obstacle to a divinely sanctioned outcome.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other officials have explicitly invoked this framework, referring to Hamas and Iran as the Biblical Amalekites and citing passages in Exodus, Deuteronomy, and Samuel that command the complete extermination of the Amalekites and command the killing of all men, women, infants, and livestock.
In this sense, the conflict has turned into a zero-sum clash of competing messianic frameworks, making conventional diplomacy structurally difficult as both sides believe they are carrying out a divine mission in a maximalist iteration.
Finally, the shift in Washington’s war justifications, which oscillate between regime change, disarmament, and prevention of nuclear enrichment, actually reflects the constituency that the campaign is targeting.
Among these constituencies, it is Prime Minister Netanyahu and his Zionist and evangelical allies in the United States whose objectives appear less ambiguous. The only favorable war outcome for them would be regime change or Iran stripped of all military, security, and police capabilities, weakened structurally and challenging Israeli hegemony.
This is a conflict that Netanyahu has said he has been waiting for for 40 years. Even if Israel cannot change the regime, it will use this moment to do everything in its power to destroy Iran’s economic, police, and military infrastructure.
Similarly, Iran is preparing for this very moment and understands Israel’s ambitions. It has strategically expanded and escalated the war by targeting U.S. military bases and facilities in the region, as well as the economic infrastructure of Arab countries. This is to emphasize how the US military presence in Arab countries is not a deterrent but a source of anxiety. To expose dependence on great powers whose main interest is to protect their favorite allies. And if this disillusionment is successful, it will eventually drive the United States out of the Gulf region.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.
