The United States-Israeli war over Iran is as much a clash of competing religious ideologies as it is a clash of strategic interests. To understand it entirely through a secular realist lens is to miss half the story.
After a March 2 Pentagon press conference, US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth declared that “crazy regimes like Iran cannot afford to have nuclear weapons in their prophetic Islamist delusions.” Separately, Secretary of State Marco Rubio described Iran’s rulers as “religiously fanatical lunatics.”
To understand why these criticisms are important and why this war cannot be understood through a purely strategic lens, one must first understand what is going on in Western Christian societies.
For decades, Western systems have operated on a secular basis: religion belongs strictly to private life; The state is neutral. While Muslims largely maintained religion as the organizing principle of family, legal, and public affairs, much of the Christian West eschewed religious practice altogether or confined it to the fringes of private devotion.
In the eyes of conservative Christians, the consequences have been severe: the erosion of the traditional family, declining birth rates, the advancement of ultra-liberal sex politics, and a general retreat of faith from public and moral life. These are, notably, areas where conservative Christians and Muslims are likely to find common ground.
But there is a stronger, more troubling current within the conservative coalition. Christian nationalism, unlike mainstream religious conservatism, demands the subjugation of all other religions and cultural systems to Christian supremacy across every domain of political, legal, and social existence. This ideology is strongly associated with white nationalism, racism, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.
Pete Hegseth exemplifies this hard-right current. Associated with Christian Reconstructionism, a movement that rejects the secular separation of church and state, he views the Pentagon as an instrument of holy war. He described his tattoos, the Jerusalem cross and Deus Vult (“God willing”), emblems of the “modern-day American Christian crusade”. They also have the Arabic word kafir (“infidel”) – a deliberate anti-Muslim incitement.
Thanks to him, this crusader framing migrated from fringe voices to operational military culture.
The Military Religious Freedom Foundation reported that it was inundated with more than 110 complaints from US service members stationed across the Middle East, whose commander told his troops that the war was “all part of God’s divine plan,” according to an official who reported. Armageddon”.
Robert P. Jones, president of the Public Religion Research Institute, captures the logic of this worldview simply: “It is not just the glorification of violence but the glorification of violence in the name of Christianity and civilization…it takes it out of the political arena and becomes a holy war of a Christian nation against a Muslim nation.”
Among the most influential elements within this trend are Christian Zionists and evangelical dispensationalists who believe that the rebuilding of the Third Temple on the site of the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem is a theological prerequisite for the Second Coming of Christ.
US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee – a self-described apologetic Christian Zionist who denies the existence of the Palestinian people and supports their expulsion through Israeli colonial settlements in the West Bank – recently said in an interview that “it would be fine if they took everything.”
For such extreme Zionist ideologues, Iran represents a spiritual barrier to the conditions necessary for the creation of the Third Temple and must therefore be militarily neutered to fulfill biblical prophecy.
How does Iran harbor “Islamist prophetic delusions” according to Hegseth et al.
Iran’s state doctrine – guardianship of Islamic jurist velayat al-faqih – states that in the absence of a mysterious (ghaiba, or hidden) twelfth imam (leader), supreme authority should rest with a qualified Islamic jurist ruling on his behalf.
Moreover, factions within Iran’s clerical and military establishment further developed, turning the theological expectation of the Mahdi’s return into an operational political ideology.
Iran’s leadership has institutionalized the idea that relentless struggle against oppressive forces is a sacred obligation. Under this framework, strategic retreat or diplomatic accommodation amounts to prophetic betrayal.
During the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, Tehran motivated the masses by turning Shi’ism into a “sacred defense”, casting the struggle as a modern-day stand-off at Karbala. This theological framework later justified “forward defense”—a strategy of exporting the revolution to form proxy networks across the region. By engaging adversaries in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, or Gaza, the Islamic Republic aims to deal with threats at their source, keeping military confrontation away from Iranian soil.
So the US-Israeli war against Iran can be understood as religious as much as strategic.
In religious terms, the two civilizational ideologies are in direct structural conflict, each regarding the existence of the other in its maximal form as an obstacle to a divinely sanctioned outcome.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other officials have referred to Hamas and Iran as the biblical Amalekites, drawing on passages from Exodus, Deuteronomy and 1 Samuel, mandating the complete extermination of Amalek, ordering the killing of all men, women and infants.
The conflict is, in this sense, transformed into a zero-sum clash of competing messianic frameworks in which traditional diplomacy is structurally difficult because both sides believe, in their maximalist iterations, that they are executing a divine mandate.
Finally, Washington’s shifting justifications for war — moving between regime change, military disarmament, and the prevention of nuclear enrichment — actually reflect the areas in which its propaganda is operating.
In those areas, Netanyahu and his Zionist and evangelical allies in the U.S. see their intentions less ambiguous. Their only favorable war outcome is regime change or a fractured and fragmented Iran stripped of all its military, security and policing capabilities, thereby becoming structurally too weak to challenge Israeli hegemony.
This is the conflict that Netanyahu has been waiting for for 40 years. Israel will do everything it can to seize the moment and destroy Iran’s economic, policing and military infrastructure, even if it cannot change the regime.
Likewise, Iran has also prepared for precisely this moment and understands Israeli ambitions. It is strategically expanding and escalating the war, targeting American military bases and installations in the region and the economic infrastructure of Arab countries: how America’s military presence in Arab countries is a source of insecurity, not deterrence; to reveal dependence on a power whose primary interest is to protect its favorite ally; And, if this disillusionment works, to eventually drive the US out of the Gulf region.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.
(tags to translate) Opinions
