When foreign policy turns into sacred history
What is taking shape in the United States is not a passing excess of rhetoric, nor the eccentric language of a few overexcited preachers. It is something far more serious: the gradual fusion of biblical literalism, nationalist politics and a vision of Israel not merely as an ally, but as the indispensable hinge of a providential drama. Once that fusion enters military culture and political decision-making, war is no longer presented as an instrument of national interest. It is elevated into a chapter of sacred history. That is the real danger.
The warning signs are no longer marginal. Since the beginning of March, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation has reportedly collected around two hundred complaints from members of the US armed forces concerning repeated use of apocalyptic language by officers during the war against Iran. One of the most detailed reports described combat briefings framed through references to Armageddon, the Book of Revelation and the imminent return of Christ, culminating in the claim that Donald Trump had been anointed by Jesus to unleash fire on Iran and trigger the final confrontation. What matters here is not only the extremism of the words. It is the fact that such words were used inside a chain of command, before soldiers preparing for war.
The old American matrix
To understand this phenomenon, one must go back to the origins of the American imagination. The first Protestant settlers did not see America as a mere land of opportunity. They saw it as a promised land. They interpreted their ocean crossing as a new Exodus and imagined themselves as a new Israel. In that founding myth, theology and politics were never separate. The nation was not simply to be built. It was to be fulfilled.
This biblical reading of history produced a long-lasting moral grammar. America was cast as a chosen community, burdened with mission, redemption and destiny. In such a framework, conflict easily becomes more than conflict. It becomes trial, purification, revelation. The adversary is no longer just an opponent with interests and calculations. He becomes the embodiment of disorder, evil or obstruction to providence. Once this mechanism takes hold, compromise starts to look like betrayal and diplomacy like weakness.
From faith to prophecy as strategy
The decisive turning point came with the spread of dispensationalism associated with John Nelson Darby. In this worldview, the restoration of Jewish power in the Holy Land, the control of Jerusalem and even the rebuilding of the Temple are not political developments among others. They are signs in a prophetic sequence leading to the end times. Before redemption comes catastrophe. Before salvation comes the great final battle. That battle needs a geography, a chronology and a cast of enemies. It is not difficult to see how such a vision can be projected onto the Middle East.
The crucial problem is that this way of thinking abolishes prudence. Classical religion leaves room for mystery. Ideological prophecy claims to know the timetable of history. It reads current events as coded confirmation of a script already written. In that mentality, bombs and military deployments can be interpreted less as tragic necessities than as instruments accelerating a divine plan. That is why theology, once politicized in this form, ceases to be private belief and becomes a strategic force.
The social base of the movement
For decades this current remained broad but politically unorganized. It existed in churches, local communities and popular biblical culture, but not yet as a disciplined electoral bloc. That changed in the social upheavals of the nineteen-sixties and then under Reagan. The cultural revolution, the abortion debate and the widening gap between secular America and conservative Protestant America created the conditions for political mobilization. Reagan’s strategists understood the scale of the reservoir before them: tens of millions of voters moved not simply by policy preferences, but by moral fear and prophetic certainty.
Television preachers, megachurch networks and the emerging religious right transformed that diffuse sensibility into a formidable machine. At that point, support for Israel became more than diplomatic alignment. It became an article of identity, almost a test of orthodoxy. The Republican Party, sections of the conservative establishment and powerful religious networks converged around a common language. They did not all share the same final aim, but they found common cause in the same emotional and symbolic battlefield.
Israel as symbol, America as instrument
This is where the matter becomes geopolitically explosive. For part of this American religious current, Israel is not simply a state. It is a sign. Jerusalem is not just a contested city. It is the axis of sacred geography. Military escalation in the region is not merely strategic. It is interpreted as confirmation. This helps explain why certain decisions that would otherwise appear reckless acquire, in some circles, an almost mystical legitimacy.
The result is a dangerous asymmetry. The Israeli state may act according to reasons of security, power, deterrence and domestic politics. But a significant part of its American support base reads those same actions through an apocalyptic lens. Thus an alliance of interests is reinforced by an alliance of myth. One side seeks strategic advantage; the other sees providential meaning. Together they generate a political climate in which restraint loses prestige and escalation gains moral glamour.
The speech quoted in the document is revealing not because it is isolated, but because it condenses the entire logic: Iran is not treated as a state with which one can negotiate, deter or contain. It is turned into a theological antagonist. Once that happens, the road to totalization is short. Every war becomes a final war. Every strike becomes an omen. Every casualty becomes collateral to revelation.
A theology of power, not a politics of responsibility
This is why the issue cannot be dismissed as folklore. When sacred language colonizes strategic thought, institutions begin to deform. The military is no longer asked only to obey civilian authority and defend national interests. It is encouraged, implicitly or explicitly, to think of itself as an executor of divine history. That is profoundly corrosive. It erodes professional neutrality, weakens pluralism inside the armed forces and transforms political leaders into quasi-messianic figures.
America has always mixed morality and power. But there is a difference between moral vocabulary and apocalyptic intoxication. The first can still coexist with realism. The second devours realism from within. It creates a world in which history is no longer open, adversaries are no longer human and prudence itself appears sinful.
That is the true monster now at work: not religion as such, but religion converted into a closed ideological machine, a machine that blesses force, sanctifies alliances and reads geopolitical fire as evidence that the end of history is finally on schedule.
Be First to Comment