From the beginning of President Donald Trump’s muddy war of choice against Iran, his and his top officials’ motivations have been a bit unclear. There was some reporting early on that the U.S. had essentially been pushed into it by Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, a claim that Secretary of State Marco Rubio seemed to have confirmed before attempting to walk it back.
Trump has talked at various points about dislodging the Iranian regime (whose supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed in the first strikes); about bringing democracy to Iran; destroying its capacity to engage in long-range missile strikes or develop a nuclear weapon; taking the nation’s oil; and reopening the Strait of Hormuz, which of course only became an issue after the war began. The explanations and the strategy seem to shift with each day – a longtime aspect of government under Trump, a president who is easily distracted and functionally illiterate on the mechanics of government and policy.
There is one throughline to the conflict, though, that has shown up mainly among Trump’s underlings in a way that has gotten less public attention: the concept of this being some kind of holy war, favored or ordered by higher powers. Its most prominent promoter is Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who just yesterday morning, in a news conference laying out a tentative ceasefire deal, said that “God deserves all the glory. Tens of thousands of sorties, refuelings and strikes, carried out under the protection of divine providence. A massive effort with miraculous protection.”
This goes way beyond the run-of-the mill “God bless our troops”-type language that we’ve all heard before, and is part of a pattern of Hegseth couching the actions of the world’s most potent military in the rhetoric of divine action. It’s hard to read it as anything other than the assertion that this was a conflict carried out not by political and military leaders but by a god, specifically the Christian God, or more specifically the Reform Evangelical God that Hegseth believes in.
I’ve been thinking a decent amount lately about the role of not just religion but religiosity and religious practice in public life and government, which seem to be on the rise across the board in the United States. There’s been a public fascination lately with the idea that, after decades of decline, younger people are returning to religious life. A supposed resurgence of Catholicism in particular among Gen Z is seen as part and parcel of the growing influence of “trad” aesthetics and mores more broadly. The data is not as clear cut as this narrative suggests, but it does seem like the influence of these religious identities has grown even if the raw numbers have not increased all that much.
Some of this phenomenon’s most prominent avatars are MAGA operators in Trump’s orbit (though notably not Trump himself, a man who once said “Two Corinthians” when trying to cite a Bible verse). That includes Vice President JD Vance, who has a memoir coming out about his own conversion to Catholicism and how that shapes his political identity and approach to government. It’s an identity that seems especially salient given that Vance is seen as the closest thing Trump has to a plausible successor (whether Vance or anyone else could actually hold together Trump’s bizarre coalition is a fascinating question, and one for another time).
On the other end of things, though, the Catholic church and other organized religions in the United States, including the Episcopal Church and organizations of rabbis along with others, have been one of the most salient and aggressive forces in pushing back against some Trump administration efforts, even as many other institutions have folded or receded before the authoritarian onslaught. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops late last year issued a rare “special message” as a collective condemning Trump’s immigration enforcement push, and have backed this up with actions like showing up to immigration courts with priests in tow, actively disrupting arrests. Atop the Catholic hierarchy, Pope Leo XIV, originally of Chicago, has emerged as a prominent critic of Trump’s policies, from immigration to the war in Iran. (It should be noted, however, that the Catholic infrastructure is more supportive of other Trump policies around abortion and gender identity, for example.)
In the aftermath of the killing of Renee Good by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, a New Hampshire Episcopal bishop made headlines for telling his clergy to get their affairs in order and prepare for the possibility of martyrdom in defense of immigrants and protesters who were being set upon by federal agents. Religious leaders had formed a vanguard of opposition during Trump’s first term, too, but what has struck me lately is the extent to which these institutions have been one of the remaining institutional pillars to hold as other civil society mainstays like law firms, universities, media outlets, arts organizations and even some civil rights nonprofits have in many cases treaded cautiously or rolled over entirely.
That’s not to say that there has ever really been a stiff line between religious identity and politics in the United States, obviously. Last fall, I spent a few days in Salt Lake City for a magazine feature I wrote on Utah’s somewhat unique political culture around immigration. (I encourage you to read it, but the basic thesis is that Utah is a deeply conservative state that is nonetheless generally pro-immigration and especially pro-refugee. This is in large part because of the dominance of the Mormon faith, which sees its own genesis as refugees and has grown to have missions and missionaries from and in countries all around the world.)
The links between government and religion in the state are much clearer and more obvious than most anywhere else in the country and have been for so long that people don’t really perceive it or think of it as unusual. In researching the piece, I was floored to learn that as of 2021, over 90% of that state’s legislature and all statewide elected officials were Mormon. Yet the church itself seems a bit uncomfortable with this public affiliation, often downplaying its level of influence, even if everybody knows it. Parts of the South have a similar deal with Evangelicals, the Catholics have Boston and chunks of the Northeast, and so on.
What I think is different now is that there is growing comfort with specifically tying political action to religious belief and imperative, or perhaps a return to that. It would have been unimaginable for a secretary of defense or any high-level official to say something like what Hegseth now says routinely.
It’s a bizarre situation where two sides of the same religious coin now form both the spearhead and the defense against a rising tide of authoritarianism and anti-liberalism in this country. As someone who was never particularly enmeshed in religious community, I don’t know what to make of it. But at the very least, I know which side I’d be standing with; if we’re going to have a resurgence of religious practice, best that it be the kind that values life and peace over holy war.
