The United States–Israeli war against Iran is being interpreted not merely as a collision of strategic interests, but as a profound clash of competing religious ideologies. At a recent Pentagon press briefing, US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth declared that “crazy regimes like Iran hell-bent on prophetic Islamist delusions cannot have nuclear weapons.” Separately, Secretary of State Marco Rubio described Iran’s rulers as “religious fanatic lunatics.” These remarks underscore that the conflict cannot be fully understood through a purely secular realist lens, revealing deep theological undercurrents.
For decades, Western systems have operated on a premise of strict secular separation between state and religion, while conservative Christians and Muslims share common ground in upholding traditional values, family structures, and religious principles in public affairs. However, within the conservative coalition, a harder current exists—Christian nationalism, which seeks to subordinate all other religions and cultural systems to Christian supremacy across every domain of political, legal, and social existence. Pete Hegseth exemplifies this hard-right tendency, with his “Deus Vult” (“God wills it”) and “kafir” (“infidel”) tattoos interpreted as emblems of a “modern-day American Christian crusade.”
The Military Religious Freedom Foundation reports being inundated with over 110 complaints from US service members stationed across the Middle East, including one non-commissioned officer who stated that his commander told troops this war was “all part of God’s divine plan,” citing the Book of Revelation and claiming that “President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon.” Robert P. Jones, president of the Public Religion Research Institute, captured this worldview’s logic: “It’s 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 a supposedly Christian nation against a Muslim nation.”
On the Iranian side, the state ideology—Wilayat al-Faqih (Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist)—holds that in the absence of the Twelfth Imam, who is in occultation, supreme authority must rest with a qualified Islamic jurist. The Iranian leadership has institutionalized the idea that unrelenting struggle against oppressive powers is a sacred obligation. During the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, Tehran galvanized the masses by transforming Shi’ism into a “sacred defense,” framing the conflict as a modern-day stand at Karbala. This theological framework later justified a strategy of “forward defense”—exporting the revolution to forge proxy networks throughout the region.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other officials have explicitly invoked this framing, referring to Hamas and Iran as the biblical Amalekites, drawing on passages that mandate their complete eradication. The conflict has, in this sense, mutated into a zero-sum collision of competing messianic frameworks, where conventional diplomacy is structurally difficult because both sides believe, in their maximalist iterations, that they are executing a divine mandate. Netanyahu has stated he has been waiting 40 years for this conflict, and Israel will do all it can to destroy Iran’s economic, policing, and military infrastructure, even if it cannot change the government.
Source: www.aljazeera.com