As Team Trump wage unceasing war on Iran, evangelical nationalists are destroying any moral world order we once had | Simon Tisdall
TThis old combative hymn, Onward the Christian Soldiers, is not heard much these days, although it was once a favorite of religious congregations and school assemblies. Written in 1865 by Sabine Baring-Gould, an English clergyman and religious scholar, its bellicose refrain exhorts the faithful to battle, victory and conquest: “Forward, Christian soldiers / March as to war / With the cross of Jesus / Go on! Its martial tone suited the Victorian zeitgeist, but it worried subsequent generations (although it was still sung in my primary school in the early 1960s). Today, this kind of triumphalism gives religion a bad name.
Pete Hegseth, US Secretary of Defense and prominent Christian soldier, would certainly disagree. He probably hums it on the way to work. At a recent Christian service at the Pentagon – an irregular event, given the constitution’s aversion to anything resembling a state religion – Hegseth, referring to Iran, prayed for “crushing violence against those who deserve no mercy.” Hegseth’s creed is to kill. He describes Iranians as “religious fanatics.” And he should know it. His intolerant evangelical Christian nationalism is extreme, even by American standards – and yet he enjoys the support of Donald Trump. Trump was Presbyterian until 2020, when he abruptly declared he was not. God knows what he is now.
The exploitation of Christian belief for political and military purposes is a long-established and shabby American practice. Yet there is a dark and unpleasant flip side. The official demonization and dehumanization of the Iranian nation implicitly implies fear and disgust of otherness, in this case Shiite Muslims. In one of his first acts as president in 2017, Trump banned immigrants from several Muslim-majority countries, and continued in this hateful vein.
For most practicing Christians, the misappropriation, distortion, and weaponization of the faith to justify death and destruction, sow division, excuse war crimes, and bomb Iran “to the Stone Age” is deeply saddening. Christians – who celebrate Easter on Sunday – believe that Jesus was crucified for the good of all humanity, for the forgiveness of sins, and not for vindictive revenge, pride and dominion. Pope Leo spoke on behalf of many beyond the Catholic Church at Palm Sunday Mass in Rome in forcefully rejecting attempts by fanatics such as Hegseth to enlist Christianity. “No one can use [Jesus] to justify war,” he said, quoting Isaiah. The prayers of the warmakers would go unanswered. “Your hands are full of blood.”
Not all Christians oppose the war chosen by Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu in Iran. Yet Leo’s outrage is shared in Britain, among others, by Rowan Williams, the former archbishop of Canterbury, and is echoed in the Islamic world and among Jews around the world. This reflects a much larger battle – about how today’s authoritarian leaders ignore international law and encourage and exploit the disintegration of the post-1945 “rules-based world order.” The cost of this failure is usually assessed in terms of geopolitical and economic disruption, fractured alliances, and unilateral acts of impunity, such as the invasion of Ukraine and the genocide in Gaza. But the brutalization and demoralization of the world order must also be considered an ethical issue. Its collapse constitutes a fundamental and universal moral crisis.
Perhaps more than ever, a world in conflict needs independent, apolitical voices willing and courageous enough to speak truth to power, stand up to autocratic tyrants, defend the weakest and most vulnerable, and speak out against injustice and state anarchy. When temporal leadership fails, when trust in secular governments and politicians is lacking, when belief in democracy fades, and when the basic security of citizens, physical and financial, is threatened by forces beyond their control, who then will challenge tyranny? With growing desperation, nailed to a cross of their own making, broken societies cry out for spiritual help.
In this global fight against chaos, all religions must play a role. Yet on Iran, its latest manifestation, the response has often seemed cautious and divided. In the United Kingdom, Sarah Mullally, named archbishop of Canterbury last month and head of the global Anglican communion, avoided war in her first sermon. In contrast, Guli Francis-Dehqani, the Iranian-born Bishop of Chelmsford, denounced it as illegal, neither moral nor just.
Israel’s assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, who was also a senior religious authority for Shiite Muslims around the world, was exceptionally provocative (and illegal). Yet regional reactions have divided along sectarian lines. In Syria, some Sunni Muslims celebrated his death. The war is popular among Israeli Jews, but a majority of Jewish Americans oppose it, with 77% saying Trump has no plan – according to a J Street poll. Similar divisions exist in Ukraine, where religious organizations linked to the slavishly pro-Putin and pro-war Russian Orthodox Church are banned by kyiv.
Such schisms and splits are not new. Yet in the face of global geopolitical collapse, Christian leaders of all stripes have a clear moral responsibility to unite in defense of a more militant, more voluble, specifically anti-war and pro-justice ecumenism. Truly, all religious leaders, not just Christians, could and should act together. Worshipers at mosques in Tehran, Beirut and Gaza, members of synagogues in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and north London, worshipers from Canterbury to Cincinnati and their children – children like those incinerated by a Tomahawk missile in Minab – all share a common interest in defending the basic human freedom to live, work and follow the god of their conscience without being blown up, terrorized, persecuted and cynically misled by politicians reckless.
Despite Trump’s apocalyptic rhetoric and sensational online talk about the “end times” and Armageddon, this extremely damaging, unjustified and shameful war could force Americans to reevaluate their moral relationship with the world. Is Trump the only one responsible? asks American columnist Lydia Polgreen. Or is he “the fulfillment of what America has always been: a self-satisfied nation, empowered by its myths of providence and exceptionalism to do as it pleases.” Trump’s presidency, she argued, “revealed a much older disease: America’s unwavering faith in its ability to shape the world as it pleases, indifferent to what others might want and supremely convinced that its plan is the right one. Beyond Trump, it is this disfiguring mentality that we Americans must confront.”
Pray that this Easter, Trump and his blasphemous minions will join in this welcome introspection – and end their crusade against Iran. And rub that old Victorian anthem too. Radical American evangelical nationalists are the modern equivalent of what religious education specialist Diana Dewar, in a memorable 1964 book, called “backward Christian soldiers.” As always, the religious right, like the right in general, is marching furiously in the wrong direction.
