Crazed American Fundamentalist Leaders Chant 'Death To Iran,' Launch Holy War
Launching Armageddon to bring about the return of Christ is not subject to the War Powers Act.
In one of the weirder wrinkles of America’s brand new war on Iran, some US military commanders are exhorting The Troops to see the war not only as a great patriotic campaign, but as a very literal part of God’s plan for the End Times. One fundamentalist combat unit commander briefed non-commissioned officers Monday on how 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 from an NCO who had to attend the sermon/briefing.
The Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) reports that it has received more than 100 complaints about commanders telling their units that God is fully on board with Trump’s bombing campaign, because it’ll help bring the Second Coming and the end of the world, like we all want.
The MRFF says the complaints came from more than 40 different units in every branch of the military. It’s keeping the complaints anonymous to protect the service members from possible retribution.
Golly, maybe it’s not a good thing that Pete Hegseth is a close pal of Christian nationalist wackaloons like Idaho preacher Doug Wilson. For the moment, Wilson just wants to get fellow fundamentalists in position of power, but his eventual goal is to make America like the Republic of Gilead, a theocratic state where women are denied the vote (they would be counted as one of the votes on their husband’s “family ballot,” or if single, as one of their father’s votes) and only Christians — the Right kind of Christians — can hold office.
So it’s hardly a surprise to hear reports of commanders explaining that we aren’t just bombing Iran to wipe out the nuclear program we already obliterated, or to cause regime change by magic (we’ll let Iranians die for that cause), or to keep Israel and Saudi Arabia happy. We’ve got us a Second Coming to spark, and the US military is the shield and vibrator of the Lord.
In what we sure hope is the most insane example, but we fear might not be, an NCO described in an email to the MRFF a “combat readiness status briefing” held Monday in which the unit’s commander told a group of noncommissioned officers that they shouldn’t be “afraid” of the war against Iran, and instructed them to tell their own troops that it’s “all part of God’s divine plan.” The unit is located outside the Iran war zone, but is in a “Ready-Support” role, and could be deployed at any time if the war expands.
No, US military commanders aren’t supposed to tell The Troops that they’re part of a religious crusade. Remember how George W got in trouble for using that C word? Things are different now, of course.
The commander, said the complainant, “specifically referenced numerous citations out of the Book of Revelation referring to Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus Christ.” He said that “President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.”
Once again, this was allegedly a military briefing, not a sermon at some storefront nondenominational church named after some obscure place in the Bible.
Just like my idiot adopted brother would do when he talked about Jebus and broke my very Catholic mother’s heart, the commander “had a big grin on his face when he said all of this which made his message seem even more crazy.” The NCO said that the unit commander had always been like that and “makes it clear that he desires all of us under him to become just like him as a Christian,” but said the briefing Monday was over the top even for him.
The writer said they were reaching out to the MRFF on behalf of 15 fellow service members who were equally weirded out by their commander’s actions, which they said “destroy morale and unit cohesion and are in violation of the oaths we swore to support the constitution.”
Mikey Weinstein, the founder and president of MRFF, told blogger Jonathan Larsen that over the first weekend of the bombing campaign, his group has been “inundated” with complaints from service members about the “unrestricted euphoria of their commanders and command chains as to how this new ‘biblically-sanctioned’ war is clearly the undeniable sign” of the imminent End Times, complete with graphic talk about how the coming battle will be a bloody culmination of biblical prophesy.
Weinstein added that MRFF gets similar waves of complaints about fundamentalist officers insisting the End of Days is nigh “whenever this shit blows up with Israel in the Middle East.”
So far, we haven’t seen any mainstream journalism outlets reporting on these Tent Revivals in the form of briefings, but it sure seems like something that oughta be investigated.
Ever since Trump — acting on advice from the Almighty, no doubt — chose him to become Defense secretary, Pete Hegseth has pushed fundamentalism in the military and insisted that “godless leftists” must be purged from US institutions so that America can finally be the Christian nation Jesus wants it to be. He happily insists that his huge freaking tattoo of a cross means he’s a Crusader, not a white nationalist (and please do not think too much about the overlap of those tropes), and the Pentagon has taken to insisting in propaganda videos that “We Are One Nation Under God” over jump-cut images of war stuff in a desert place — paratroopers, jets, armored personnel carriers, cruise missiles — overlaid with text from Psalm 18:37: “I pursued my enemies and overtook them: I did not turn back till they were destroyed.”
Just last month, at a Christian media convention in Nashville, Hegseth blathered about how there’s “a direct through line from the Old and New Testament Christian gospels to the development of Western civilization and the United States of America,” and how the US military is now in line with the “Western Christian ethic.”
Hegseth got a standing ovation when he said that now the Pentagon “trains our troops, we no longer trans our troops,” which everyone agreed was both a brilliant bit of wordplay and a much needed change from when Joe Biden forced service members to become transgender.
“Gone is godless and divisive DEI, gone is gender-bending quotas, gone is climate change worship of a false god,” said Hegseth. “We are not in woke we trust, we are in God we trust.”
“The other side is fueled by godless and toxic ideologies, foreign to the Western way of life, with intolerant hearts filled with rage and hate,” he said.
He also explained that the administration’s ethnic cleansing agenda, even when not supplemented by military troops in American cities, is “not political, it’s biblical,” in keeping with that time when Jesus said “when I was a nearly blind stranger you dropped me off outside a closed Tim Hortons miles from my home and left me to wander in freezing weather for five days until I died.”
So yeah, things are going just as god wants, is what we’re saying.
[Jonathan Larsen’s Substack / Idaho Capital Sun / Tennessee Lookout / Guardian]
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We're gonna have to go through the military with a fine toothed comb, but we'll save a ton on pensions.
Another rapture?
This is getting tedious.