TWO news clips during the Holy Week gave me goosebumps:
– US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, in a news briefing at the Pentagon, prayed for US troops in the region. “May God watch over all of them each day and each night. May His almighty and eternal arms of providence stretch over them and protect them and bring them peace in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.” Just the other day, he asked the American people to pray “every day, on bended knee” for a military victory in the Middle East “in the name of Jesus Christ.”
– As a Khorramshahr long-range missile lifts off to kill people in Tel Aviv, there is shouting in the background, “Allahu Akbar! This is an Arabic phrase meaning “Allah is the Greatest” — He will kill Muslims’ enemies.
In a similar vein, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has often invoked biblical imagery to justify his nation’s genocide of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, at one time telling his soldiers to ‘remember what Amalek has done to you’ — a reference to a biblical passage in which Israel is commanded to destroy its enemy without mercy.
It is ironic that the barbaric invasion of Iran by two nations whose religions see the Old Testament as the word of God himself coincided with the Holy Week, during which Christianity re-indoctrinates its faithful to worship the God of Love, and adhere to the ancient but preposterous idea of a single man-God saving billions and billions of humanity dead and living today or in the future.
Religion is often presented as humanity’s moral foundation, the source of compassion, charity and meaning. That is only half the story. The other half, less comfortably acknowledged, is that religion has also been one of the most effective instruments of the ruling class for legitimizing power and exploitation of the masses, and for having its people kill other people in wars, for reasons they cannot comprehend, for benefits they will not enjoy.
Wars require religions in order to persuade ordinary men to kill strangers and to risk dying themselves. Across history, religion has repeatedly supplied that belief. It has not usually been the root cause of war, but it has consistently made wars easier to fight, easier to justify, and harder to question.
The Crusades against Muslim rulers to conquer Jerusalem and the Middle East, called by Pope Urban II in 1095, are most emblematic of this. It was at that time called an “armed pilgrimage” or “taking the cross” (crux) to the Holy Land ruled “by infidels.” The truth is that, among other factors, what drove the European nobility class as well as the papacy was greed for land and wealth in the Middle East, control of trade routes, and plunder.
Ruling elite
Control of resources, security fears and territory have been the main reasons nations have gone to war. It is a nation’s ruling elite that calls for war, but it is the masses who do the actual fighting, to kill or be killed. For that, something more is needed. Religion provided it.
This was evident even in the most destructive conflict of the 20th century. World War II was not a religious war; it was driven by expansion, ideology and nations’ survival. Yet all major powers drew on religious or quasi-religious frameworks to sustain it. American President Roosevelt led the nation in prayer on the eve of D-Day, asking God to “give strength to their arms” and to guide Allied forces.
In Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler invoked “Providence” to present his actions as aligned with divine will, while the regime fused racial ideology with quasi-religious symbolism. Many of the executioners of the 7 million Jews viewed them as responsible for lobbying for Jesus’ execution by the Romans. Even the ordinary German soldier carried this fusion of war and divine sanction quite literally: the standard Wehrmacht belt buckle bore the inscription “Gott mit uns”— “God is with us.”
Imperial Japan provided yet another variation. Japan’s state religion Shinto elevated the emperor to divine status, turning loyalty into a sacred obligation. War became a mission, not merely a strategy, and death in battle was presented as a noble sacrifice in the service of a higher order. The fear of death was replaced by a sense of spiritual duty.
These cases from different societies reveal a common pattern. Even in a war fought for power and survival, each side reached for religion or its equivalent — not to start the war, but to make it feel justified, necessary and morally defensible. Religion functions as a force multiplier for power. It amplifies existing conflicts, deepens divisions, and sustains the willingness of individuals to participate in violence. It provides the moral certainty that makes difficult actions easier to take.
In the current US-Israeli war on Iran, strategic concerns — for these two, limiting the militant Muslim state’s capabilities, maintaining regional dominance, deterring rivals — are real and central. But the language surrounding the conflict increasingly draws on religious imagery and belief, transforming policy into purpose and conflict into something that appears morally necessary.
In the US, this transformation is closely tied to the political movement around Donald Trump. The MAGA coalition is not formally religious, but it draws heavily on evangelical Christianity, which supplies much of its moral vocabulary and mobilizing energy. Political leaders are described as “anointed,” conflicts are framed as battles between good and evil, and foreign policy positions are justified in terms that echo biblical themes.
This framing is reinforced by influential figures. Trump’s former secretary of state Mike Pompeo suggested that contemporary events may unfold according to God’s plan. Trump worshiper Sen. Ted Cruz has argued that support for Israel is a biblical obligation. Another Trump supporter, popular televangelist John Hagee, founder and head of the Christians United for Israel, has long presented the Middle East conflict as part of a prophetic sequence leading to Armageddon. These narratives do not create policy, but they shape how policy is understood, reducing hesitation and strengthening support.
Parallel dynamic
A parallel dynamic is visible in Israel. Its Prime Minister Netanyahu uses the biblical terms of “forces of light, and forces of darkness” to refer to Israel and the Muslim world.
In the Islamic world, from its Koranic meaning of an inner “moral struggle,” the Arabic word jihad has come to mean a holy war against Western, mainly US and Israeli aggression. When Palestinians, Iranians, and other Muslims are killed by Americans and Jews, they are “martyred.”
What is worrying is viral internet-based commentator Jiang Xueqin’s argument that the US-Israeli war on Iran is a convergence of different eschatologies, or religions’ narratives of the end of times, that a decisive final, decisive conflict will signal the coming of the World Savior: the “Second Coming” of Jesus Christ for Christian fundamentalists, the Messiah for Jews, and Mahdi (“The Guided One”) for Muslims. It would be only after such destruction that a divinely ordered order for humanity will emerge.
These eschatologies are no longer operating separately but are beginning to align, according to Jiang. In the United States, strands of evangelical Christianity interpret the Middle East conflict as part of a prophetic path toward Armageddon. In Israel, religious-nationalist currents link contemporary war to biblical history and redemption. In parts of the Islamic world, eschatological traditions likewise anticipate a final confrontation centered in the same geography. These belief systems do not agree with one another, but they converge in trajectory, each pointing toward war in the same region under a sense of historical inevitability.
This is worrying. When actions are justified as part of a divine plan, they become harder to question. When suffering is framed as meaningful, it becomes easier to accept. When enemies are cast in absolute terms, the limits on violence are dismantled. War becomes harder to end — with the nations’ elites and their masses believing that the Deity will be coming to earth anyway after all the bloodshed, maybe even after nuclear Armageddon.
Religion certainly has given humanity a sense of meaning (authentic or not), morality, psychological crutches and social cohesion. But the wars it has justified have resulted in countless deaths, immeasurable suffering for millions, massive destruction, and, to this day, a justification for the exploitation of the masses.
After controlling the minds of 56 percent of men for two centuries, it is time to junk the God of the Book, the biggest and harmful scam foisted on pre-scientific mankind. There are models to follow: Most people in China and Japan — 20 percent of the world population — don’t believe in a Deity. Yet, their societies are much, much better than say, ours, where 98 percent believe in a God, where three days of the Holy Week are even official holidays, which only reduce the income of the poorest sector of the working class, the no-work, no-pay daily workers.
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