There has been much much to lament about our president’s current war in Iran, from the 175 civilians, many of them children, killed by an American missile strike near an Iranian elementary school, to the seven American soldiers who have died thus far in this conflict. But last week brought a disturbing issue to light regarding the justification given for this war.
Journalist Jonathan Larsen reported in his substack,
A combat-unit commander told non-commissioned officers at a briefing Monday that the Iran war is part of God’s plan and that Pres. Donald Trump was “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth,” according to a complaint by a non-commissioned officer.
From Saturday morning through Monday night, more than 110 similar complaints about commanders in every branch of the military had been logged by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF).
The complaints came from more than 40 different units spread across at least 30 military installations, the MRFF told me Monday night.
The MRFF is keeping the complainants anonymous to prevent retribution by the Defense Department. The Pentagon did not immediately respond to my request for comment.
One complainant identified themselves as a non-commissioned officer (NCO) in a unit currently outside the Iran combat zone but in Ready-Support status, deployable at any time. The NCO said they were Christian and emailed the MRFF on behalf of 15 troops, including at least 11 Christians, one Muslim, and one Jew. (Full email printed below.)
The NCO wrote to the MRFF that their commander “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 fact-checking website Snopes reported that they could neither confirm nor deny this claim, as it is their policy not to rely on anonymous sources. However, thirty Congressional representatives, including House Armed Services Subcommittee on Military Personnel ranking member Chrissy Houlahan (PA-06) and Congressional Freethought Caucus Co-Chairs Jared Huffman (CA-02) and Jamie Raskin (MD-08), have signed onto a letter to U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) Inspector General Platte B. Moring III requesting an investigation into these reports. This letter reads in part,
At a time when billions of dollars and untold numbers of lives hang in the balance while the Trump administration wages a war of choice in Iran, the imperative of maintaining strict separation of church and state and protecting the religious freedom of our troops is especially critical. We must ensure that military operations are guided by facts and the law, not end-times prophecy and extreme religious beliefs. . . These allegations are also part of a broader political climate in which Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and senior civilian officials have publicly framed Middle East policy in explicitly religious terms.
Secretary Hegseth and these unnamed military commanders are of course free to believe anything that they like regarding the Bible, the endtimes, and alleged prophecies involving war in the Middle East–that is guaranteed by the First Amendment‘s assurances of religious freedom. They are also free to share those beliefs, in personal conversations, religious services, or Bible studies. However, it violates the Establishment Clause of that same First Amendment when they impose those beliefs upon others–which is certainly the case when a commanding officer cites those beliefs in a briefing to his subordinates, or when the Secretary “invites” military personnel to religious services and Bible studies at the Pentagon, conducted by “multiple pastors from the Christian nationalist CREC [Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches] denomination — during working hours, broadcast on the department’s internal TV network, with invitations sent from the Secretary’s office bearing a cross.”
Last month, [Sec. Hegseth] personally invited Doug Wilson — a self-described Christian nationalist and “paleo-Confederate” who co-authored a pamphlet arguing American slavery was “far more benign in practice,” than abolitionists claimed, called the 19th Amendment “a bad idea,” and described his goal as a “Christian republic” in which Congress would publicly confess that Jesus rose from the dead — to preach to an auditorium of military personnel in uniform.
Wilson called the prayer meeting a potential “black swan revival” for American Christianity — the kind of awakening he believes could ultimately bring the nation under Christian governance.
Hegseth thanked him from the stage: “Thank you for your leadership, your mentorship, for the things you’ve started, the truth you’ve told, the willingness to be bold. It’s the type of thing we are trying to exercise here.”
Quite apart from these legitimate concerns about religious freedom, I must also say as a Bible Guy that there is absolutely NO biblical warrant for this obscene justification for the war in Iran. For the record, Iran is never mentioned in the book of Revelation–or, for that matter, in any of the texts typically trotted out as alleged predictions of the end-time. There is nothing anywhere in the Bible about a “signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark [Jesus’] return to Earth.” That gap, however, is the least of the reasons for questioning this misreading of Scripture.
While advocated today by Evangelical ministers such as our current ambassador to Israel, Rev. Mike Huckabee, and given popular expression in the best-selling “Left Behind” series of novels by Jerry B. Jenkins (based on the notes of Tim LeHaye), the current strain of end-time expectation in American churches owes most of its assumptions and imagery to Hal Lindsey’s 1970 book The Late Great Planet Earth. The many predictions in the New Testament that the end of the world would come soon (for example, Mk 13:30; 1 Cor 7:29-31; Rev 22:12, 20) were not mistaken, Lindsey claimed–rather, they were intended for our time. With the re-establishment of the state of Israel, sealed by its “miraculous” victory in the Six Day War, God’s long-paused “prophetic clock” had resumed ticking. We were now, officially, in the last days. The countdown to the Rapture, Armageddon, and the Second Coming of Christ had begun.
As I have posted before, as a young Christian, I was among Mr. Lindsey’s most passionate devotees. I do not quite know how to convey my absolute certitude that the world was about to end. I never thought that I would grow up, get married, have a family or a career. I knew–I knew–that at any moment, the sky could roll back like a scroll, as Jesus summoned me and other true believers out of this world and into glory. I was wrong. And I must say, I have been delighted to have been wrong!
Yet strangely, neither Mr. Lindsey nor many his followers ever acknowledged that they had been wrong. With the resumption of God’s prophetic timetable, the end of the world was supposed to come soon: certainly within a generation–say, 40 years. Taking the re-establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 as a starting point, the world should have ended in 1988. Even if we start the prophetic clock with the Six-Day War in 1967, the end should have come by 2007. In either case, we are well past the date Lindsey and his followers originally predicted. The current political state of Israel did not, after all, mark the beginning of the end of time.
But the biggest difficulty with our obsession with alleged prophecies of the end-times is that it has warped our reading of the remainder of the Bible. Bible scholar J. Richard Middleton writes regarding this pithy cartoon, “I got Man Martin’s permission to use one of his cartoons in my recent book Abraham’s Silence. This one would work well with my earlier book on biblical eschatology, especially on the link between eschatology and ethics.” And that is precisely the problem.
Russell Moore, the editor-in-chief of Christianity Today magazine, has related a disturbing anecdote
of having multiple pastors tell me, essentially, the same story about quoting the Sermon on the Mount, parenthetically, in their preaching — “turn the other cheek” — [and] to have someone come up after to say, “Where did you get those liberal talking points?” And what was alarming to me is that in most of these scenarios, when the pastor would say, “I’m literally quoting Jesus Christ,” the response would not be, “I apologize.” The response would be, “Yes, but that doesn’t work anymore. That’s weak.” And when we get to the point where the teachings of Jesus himself are seen as subversive to us, then we’re in a crisis.
Once we have substituted a macho warrior Second-coming Christ for the humble servant Jesus of the Bible, we need no longer listen to the words of Jesus in the Gospels. Since we are about to leave this world anyway, we can without a qualm forsake our God-given responsibility to care for the earth (Genesis 1:26-28). If we believe that Israel must be re-established out to its ancient borders so that Jesus can come back, we can justify any violence in the region toward that end, whether in Iran, or Lebanon, or Gaza, or the West Bank, ignoring cries for justice (Exod 22:21-24; Lev 19:33-34; Deut 10:18-19) even from Palestinian Christians. Because the One World Church will be the tool of the Antichrist, we can ignore the plain teaching of Scripture that Christ’s church is called to be one (John 17:20-23), and withdraw into our own private sects. In short, the approach to the Bible represented by those military commanders cited by the MRFF winds up rejecting the very Bible it claims to revere.