Christian Nationalists in US Government Push Attacks on Iran as Holy War

How Christian clergy talk about Jesus this Easter Sunday will tell you a lot about their politics. While parishioners in the U.S. are likely to be greeted by the traditional refrain, “He is risen,” at their April 5 Easter service, they’re just as likely to be met with the phrase, “Christ is King.” This rhetoric replaces the traditional understanding of Easter as a celebration of Jesus’s sacrifice and resurrection with a more aggressive vision of a warrior Jesus that resonates strongly with Donald Trump-aligned white Christian nationalists.

The phrase “Christ is King” isn’t new — it’s sometimes used by Christians to refer to the belief that Jesus’s divine rule goes beyond that of earthly leaders. But the phrase has recently become “a kind of rallying cry for Christian supremacy,” historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez, author of Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, told Truthout.

Over the last few years, the slogan has spread from far right provocateurs like Nick Fuentes to Trump’s cabinet and the military. In February, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth used the phrase at a convention of the National Religious Broadcasters, galvanizing Christian nationalists’ thirst for authoritarian rulers whose Jesus is defined by militant masculinity — more like a crusader or cowboy than the peace-loving, “sacrificial lamb” celebrated on Easter, who was executed for challenging the hierarchies of empire.

Along the way, the phrase has become a dog whistle for antisemitism, and it’s often combined with other Christian nationalist “holy war” rhetoric that has been spiking since the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran on February 28.

Popular Christian Zionist preachers like John Hagee came out of the gate praising Operation Epic Fury in a sermon from March 10. On March 23, Rep. Andy Ogles posted an AI-generated video of himself, Pete Hegseth, and Marco Rubio dressed as crusaders with the caption: “This is a battle of good vs evil. We must reaffirm that our nation was built on Christian principles.” Their language and iconography distract from the fact that the U.S. and Israel’s attacks on Iran were launched without congressional approval, are unpopular, and have killed more than 1,500 people.

Saddle Up Your Horses

Christian nationalists like Hegseth, Hagee, and Ogles have fashioned a messiah to look like the kind of earthly leader they desire, one who will uphold what Du Mez calls their ideology of “militant masculinity.” It’s a paradigm that “enshrines patriarchal authority and condones the callous display of power, at home and abroad,” she writes in Jesus and John Wayne.

Du Mez says: “Christian nationalists tend not to talk about Jesus very much. They’ll talk about biblical law, righteousness, or social issues. But if you really start talking about Jesus in the Bible, then you get into things that arguably undercut many of their core values.”

Christian nationalists conveniently ignore the passages where Jesus commands his followers to serve the poor and love thy neighbor. Instead, figures like the disgraced evangelical pastor Mark Driscoll promote militant masculinity through podcasts streams like “Built for War” and an Instagram account full of bull-wrestling cowboys.

The frontiersman protector of faith and “family values” hailed by Driscoll’s podcast saturates white evangelical culture. Even in the ’90s, this was theprimary message about masculinity I heard on Christian radio from chart-topping Christian music artists like Michael W. Smith and Steven Curtis Chapman. Both had cowboy-themed albums in the early 1990s: Smith’s “Go West Young Man” and Chapman’s “The Great Adventure” with the chorus, “Saddle up your horses, we’ve got a trail to blaze.” Smith remains a popular entertainer within the MAGA circle and played at the National Prayer Breakfast on February 5.

“It’s tied to empire building,” says Du Mez. Whether these men fashion themselves as crusaders or cowboys, they imagine that they’re protecting their families and their country from threats, foreign and domestic. From Cold War imperialism to the rise of Islamophobia following September 11, “the language of perpetual threat against America and American Christians was used to justify preemptive violence. I think that’s key to understanding a lot of evangelical preferences when it comes to foreign policy. In the Iraq War we saw that evangelicals were far more likely than other Americans to support war and preemptive war in general.”

Onward, Christian Soldiers

About 70 percent of active-duty military personnel identify as Christian, slightly higher than the national average. Military service is an area where white Christian nationalists can increasingly find their beliefs reinforced. As Du Mez writes, “In the age of the War on Terror, pastors weren’t necessarily the most effective purveyors of Christian manhood. The military was where boys became men, and where men matured in the Christian faith. Military men, then, could serve as guides for civilian men, and for the church as a whole.”

With Hegseth leading the Department of Defense, the line separating church and state is increasingly blurred. In February, he invited Christian nationalist pastor Doug Wilson to a prayer service at the Pentagon and has been holding these monthly prayer services since last May. The group Americans United for Separation of Church and State (AU) filed a lawsuit over the meetings to “determine whether the departments are upholding their obligation to remain neutral about religious matters and respect the religious freedom of federal workers.”

Alessandro Terenzoni is the vice president of public policy at AU. He told Truthout that the Trump administration is “playing this long game” to “Christianize the federal workforce,” including the military, through measures like the executive order on “Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias” and the Religious Liberty Commission.

The December meeting of the Religious Liberty Commission that focused on the military was led by Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick with a roster of members and speakers that Terenzoni says looked “like a commercial for the organizations who are pushing this sort of Christian nationalist agenda: the Heritage Foundation, First Liberty Institute, the Alliance Defending Freedom who represent Christian nationalist plaintiffs in all these lawsuits.” Terenzoni says the meeting contradicted the mandate that the government not “single out one faith to privilege above others or turn the military into a mission field.”

White Christian nationalist messaging isn’t coming from Hegseth alone. In March, Trump appointed Turning Point USA’s Erika Kirk to an advisory role for the Air Force Academy. She replaces her late husband, Charlie Kirk, who, in the one board meeting he attended in August 2025, insisted the academy finish repairing an on-site chapel because its closure has had a “depressing effect on the psyche of the cadets.”

Charlie Kirk also asked for confirmation that the Air Force Academy isn’t teaching critical race theory, saying, “We need to educate the cadets towards being something, towards being a warrior but for what. We want them after four years to be able to articulate and feel in their soul American exceptionalism.”

I asked Mikey Weinstein, a Jewish graduate of the Air Force Academy and founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, what he thought of the appointment of Erika Kirk. He said, “It’s abominable. Tommy Tuberville is on [the board] along with Markwayne Mullin, two major Christian nationalists right there. What background does Erika Kirk have in regard to the academy? But my school has been ground zero for Christian nationalism for a very, very, very long time.”

Terenzoni warns that the leaders of the Religious Liberty Commission are promoting a persecution narrative in order to legitimize their work. At the December meeting, the owner of a store in Texas that makes jewelry embossed with Bible verses and military insignia spoke about his successful lawsuit against the Department of Defense for revoking the company’s license to use official military logos. “Here’s this man literally crying about how the government victimized him and he’s being given this platform upon which to weep about this anti-Christian bias that he experienced at the hands of the federal government,” explains Terenzoni. Meanwhile, a “Hindu soldier who talked about horrific discrimination that he experienced at the hands of his leadership” was dismissed by the committee.

Du Mez also warns that Christians’ sense of embattlement is what’s behind their support of “preemptive” war. “With somebody like Hegseth, who in his own books, talks about setting aside the rules of warfare because that’s only for weak men. This kind of preemptive attack, aggression is always justified, because they’re going to come for you, so you need to get out in front of that,” says Du Mez. In their worldview, they’re the victims, not the civilians in Iran whom the U.S. and Israel are bombing, or the Palestinians whose genocide is funded by the U.S. government.

Wounded Masculinity

Generations of Christian nationalist men were raised on militant masculinity and its faux nostalgia, glorification of rugged individualism, and delusions of persecution. That’s part of what made Trump’s “Make America Great Again” vision so appealing to them — Black and Brown men are conspicuously left out. “Masculine power is dangerous if it isn’t in the hands of white Christian men,” says Du Mez. “In the run-up to the 2024 election, Trump campaigned on the threat of immigrants. That was really their bread and butter.”

The MAGA movement has also been swift at marshaling militant masculinity to pass anti-LGBTQ policies. “This administration is really fixated on gender. We knew during the campaign that the vilification of transgender Americans was a big piece of what they were doing,” says Terenzoni.

“One of the things that’s different now is that there seem to be very few guardrails anymore,” says Du Mez. “In many ways, the rhetoric doesn’t actually feel all that different. But their access to power is. The fact that now our Secretary of Defense has been steeped in this militant evangelicalism and has wholly embraced these ideas of militant Christian manhood and has absolutely thumbed his nose at the rules of warfare and, one might argue, human decency.”

Hegseth’s prayer services at the Pentagon are a sign the guard rails are shrinking. On March 25, he prayed for “overwhelming violence” using carefully selected passages from the Bible to justify an unjust war. Head bowed, Hegseth intoned: “Pour out your wrath upon those who plot vain things and blow them away like chaff before the wind…. Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation…. Let justice be executed swiftly and without remorse so that evil may be driven back.”

The prayer prompted a rebuttal from Pope Leo XIV, who wrote on social media that Jesus “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war.” But such a rebuke is not likely to satisfy the warmongers in the U.S. government, making AU’s lawsuit over these Christian nationalist services even more urgent.