"President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.”

These are not the words of a deranged street-corner preacher babbling about the end-times. These are the words of a U.S. military commander speaking to a gathering of military officers two days after the U.S. began its criminal bombing of Iran. 

This is from a complaint filed by an anonymous "non-commissioned officer" (NCO) to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) (NCOs are military officers like sergeants who have direct responsibility to lead troops in combat): 

This morning our commander opened up the combat readiness status briefing by urging us to not be “afraid” as to what is happening with our combat operations in Iran right now. He urged us to tell our troops that this was “all part of God’s divine plan” and he specifically referenced numerous citations out of the Book of Revelation referring to Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus Christ.... He had a big grin on his face when he said all of this which made his message seem even more crazy.

MRFF president and founder Mikey Weinstein said that they've been “inundated” with at least 200 other similar complaints:

These calls have one damn thing in freaking common; our MRFF clients [service members who seek MRFF aid] report the unrestricted euphoria of their commanders and command chains as to how this new “biblically-sanctioned” war is clearly the undeniable sign of the expeditious approach of the fundamentalist Christian “End Times" as vividly described in the New Testament Book of Revelation.

Many of their commanders are especially delighted with how graphic this battle will be zeroing in on how bloody all of this must become in order to fulfill and be in 100% accordance with fundamentalist Christian end of the world [beliefs].

In the Bible, Armageddon is supposed to be the “final battle” between god’s army and the forces of evil, bringing about the end of planet Earth with the “true believers” in Jesus Christ ascending to heaven! This is complete lunacy. But just think about American soldiers dropping massive bombs on thousands of "targets" in the majority Muslim Iran, being primed to think they are bringing about the second coming of Jesus Christ! 

This is not just a recipe for unthinking violence and death, without mercy. In a situation that holds the danger of spiraling out into nuclear annihilation, this is dangerous madness and represents the accelerated consolidation of an all-out Christian fascist America. 

Christian Fascism: A Driving Force of American Fascism

Christian fascism has been a driving force of what has congealed in the MAGA fascist movement: Millions who think they are on a mission from god to "reclaim" America as a white Christian nation purged of uppity women who don't "know their place," LGBT people seen as a fundamental challenge to "traditional" patriarchal gender-norms, non-English speaking "foreigners," and Black people demanding equality and an end to oppression. 

This is not the same as Christianity in general, but a crazed anti-scientific political and ideological movement actively seeking to remake all of American society.

Over decades, these Christian fascist forces have been building up strength, organization and influence in the U.S. military in particular. As far back as 1998, revolutionary leader Bob Avakian said it was important to recognize that

within the armed forces there has been, for some time now, the development and cultivation of a situation in which the outlook of the fundamentalist reactionaries occupies a prominent place, including among higher level officers. (See “The Truth About Right-Wing Conspiracy… And Why Clinton and the Democrats Are No Answer”)

Before Trump, the official ideology of the U.S. military was secular and nonsectarian (not promoting religious belief as a whole, and not supporting any one religious group over any other). Military personnel took an oath to the Constitution, not to some “god.” This was in keeping with what is supposed to be protected by the Constitution’s separation of church and state—a separation which the fascists have been working to obliterate in the schools and public life generally.

Forging a Christian Fascist Military

The U.S. military has always been a machinery of war crimes and crimes against humanity—a force which has brought down genocidal slaughter and terror on the people of the world. In the U.S. war on Vietnam, the legitimacy of the military itself came under such a challenge, with widespread disobedience and disintegration of discipline within the U.S. military, that at a certain point they were not able to reliably field sections of their army. There were a number of factors feeding into this, including the U.S. suffering real defeats at the hands of the Vietnamese, mass societal opposition to what was so clearly a criminal war, and massive upheaval against racial discrimination inside (and outside) the ranks of the military itself. In the years that followed, in part to recover its legitimacy, the military sought to play its role in enforcing this system of capitalism-imperialism with the pretense of legality while making some gestures at mitigating open discrimination. Trump—giving backing to his "Secretary of War" Pete Hegseth—is seeking to rip off that cover and remake this as a fascist fighting force. In Hegseth's words: "maximum lethality, not tepid legality."

A key part of this is the white supremacy and Christian fascism being celebrated openly inside the U.S. military. Over the last decades, in response to larger changes in society, there have been moves on the part of the U.S. military toward “multiculturalism,” with some attempt to diversify the mostly white and male officer corps. The military is almost half Black and Latino, with less than 20 percent of the officer corps Black or Latino, and while women make up 17 percent of the soldiers, only 7 percent of the officers are women. These disparities caused concern for some mainstream imperialists who sought to cohere the military with "pride in its diversity and adherence to the Constitution." 

But these moves—in a military enforcing a system of capitalism-imperialism, with white supremacy and patriarchal oppression woven into its foundation—have called forth vengeful outrage on the part of the fascists who see their interests bound up with enforcing this oppression openly and violently.  

Bob Avakian dug into the deeper causes of the rise of fascism in the world in his 2017 speech which provides a comprehensive overview of Trump fascism. In an excerpt titled The “Unholy Alliance” Between Trump and Fundamentalist Christian Fascists, Avakian said:

While the Constitution does establish the separation of church and state—and the Christian Fascists are wrong, or simply lying, when they insist that the founding documents of this country established it as a “Christian nation”—the reality is that Christianity has all along been the unofficial state religion of this country, and the country’s identity, throughout its history, has been as a “white Christian nation,” grounded in male supremacy as well as white supremacy and driven by a “manifest destiny” to dominate not only the continent of North America but ultimately the world as a whole. All this has been brought into question, and has become the focus of intense struggle, going back to the 1960s and, in some important ways, back to the Civil War. And while developments internationally, including the demise of the Soviet Union, have given further impetus to the globalization of the capitalist world economy, this very heightened globalization has propelled changes that have sharpened contradictions within the U.S. as well as on the world level, particularly with an emerging capitalist China mounting a challenge to U.S. global economic dominance, at the same time as this heightened globalization, under conditions of western imperialist domination, has wreaked havoc in countries throughout the Third World, including the Middle East (and other places where Islam is the prevailing religion), adding fuel to a virulent Islamic fundamentalism that has declared war on the “decadent West” and on “infidels” and others oriented toward the West and facilitating its imperial domination.

Hegseth: Dark Ages American Crusader

Pete Hegseth is a hardcore Christian fascist. He upholds the Crusades from the 11th century when Christians fought holy wars slaughtering tens of thousands of Muslims and Jewish people. In his 2020 book American Crusade, he calls for a modern-day crusade against leftists, and threatens: “Our American Crusade is not about literal swords, and our fight is not with guns. Yet.” (Emphasis is Hegseth's.)

Hegseth has been actively reshaping the U.S. military into this fully fascist force. Early on he organized monthly Christian prayer meetings at the Pentagon, which were live-streamed on the Pentagon’s internal network. Hegseth also attends weekly prayer meetings at the White House which Trump too sometimes attends. 

These meetings have been hosted by a range of fascists, including Doug Wilson, the head of Hegseth’s church, who believes that women should not have the right to vote, justifies slavery, condemns LGBT people, and says that God commands America to support Israel. Wilson says, “I would like to see this nation being a Christian nation, and I would like this world to be a Christian world.”

This is not just within the military. Lindsey Graham, a Senator and influential Trump loyalist, said last week that the war with Iran “is a religious war, and we will determine the course of the Middle East for a thousand years.” That same day Trump held a prayer event with Christian fascist pastors “laying hands” on him to pray for god to guide him in leading the Iran war. 

Utterly Unhinged and Extremely Dangerous

The fact that this is completely unhinged makes it all the more dangerous. Cohering the largest killing machine in the world around this kind of fanaticism will mean more ruthless violence, atrocities and war crimes in the name of “god.” And the open dominance of Christian fascist thought will have the effect of “winnowing out” soldiers who think critically and have some qualms about senseless and lawless violence, and will “welcome in” people who are already fascist, and looking for an “outlet” for their hatred of nonwhites, Muslims, LGBT people and women. Think about ISIS and the trail of cruelty and torture it spread across the Middle East—but magnified by a million.

And as we referenced earlier, a fully Christian fascist military will be much more open to potentially world-destroying nuclear war because in their eyes, this will bring about the return of Jesus and their ascension to “heaven.” 

It is also the case that promoting the U.S./Israel war on Iran as a holy war is basically an invitation to religious warfare throughout the region and perhaps on a worldwide scale.

In short: the most blood-soaked, civilian-killing, environment-destroying army in the world has now become even more so. 

Every person of conscience must oppose this—NOW! And every person of conscience needs to ask the deeper questions about why—in 2026—do these dark-ages lunatics have their hands on the levers of power? And what it would require to not just defeat this fascism, but get rid of the system that's given rise to this fascism, and so many other horrors?