The US-Israel war on Iran is shaped by religion as much as strategy

The United States–Israeli war on Iran is as much a collision of competing religious ideologies as it is a clash of strategic interests. To understand it purely through a secular realist lens is to miss half the story.

After the March 2 Pentagon press briefing, US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth declared that “crazy regimes like Iran hell-bent on prophetic Islamist delusions cannot have nuclear weapons”. Separately, Secretary of State Marco Rubio described Iran’s rulers as “religious fanatic lunatics”.

To understand why these remarks matter and why this war cannot be understood through a purely strategic lens, one must first understand what has been happening inside Western Christian societies.

For decades, Western systems have operated on a secular premise: religion belongs strictly in private life; the state is neutral. While Muslims have mostly maintained religion as the organising principle of family, law and public affairs, large parts of the Christian West either abandoned religious practice altogether or confined it to the margins of private devotion.

The consequences, in the view of conservative Christians, have been severe: the erosion of the traditional family, declining birth rates, the advance of ultra-liberal sexual politics and the general retreat of faith from public and moral life. These, notably, are precisely the areas where conservative Christians and Muslims are likely to find common ground.

But within the conservative coalition there is a harder, more troubling current. Christian nationalism, as distinct from mainstream religious conservatism, seeks the subordination of all other religions and cultural systems to Christian supremacy across every domain of political, legal and social existence. This ideology correlates strongly with white nationalism, racism, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.

Pete Hegseth exemplifies this hard-right current. Associated with Christian Reconstructionism, a movement that rejects the secular separation of church and state, he treats the Pentagon as an instrument of holy war. He has described his tattoos, the Jerusalem Cross and Deus Vult (“God wills it”), as emblems of the “modern-day American Christian crusade”. He also bears the Arabic word kafir (“infidel”) — a deliberate anti-Muslim provocation.

Thanks to him, this Crusader framing has migrated from the fringe voices into operational military culture.

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation reports being inundated with more than 110 complaints from US service members stationed across the Middle East, including one non-commissioned officer who reported that his commander told troops this war was “all part of God’s divine plan,” citing the Book of Revelation and declaring that “President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon”.

Robert P Jones, president of the Public Religion Research Institute, captured the logic of this worldview plainly, saying: “It’s not just a glorification of violence but a glorification of violence in the name of Christianity and civilisation … It takes it out of the realm of politics and casts it as a holy war of a supposedly Christian nation against a Muslim nation.”

Among the most influential elements within this tendency are Christian Zionists and evangelical dispensationalists who believe that rebuilding the Third Temple on the site of Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem is a theological prerequisite for the Second Coming of Christ.

US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee – a self-described unapologetic Christian Zionist who denies the existence of a Palestinian people and supports their expulsion through Israeli colonial settlement in the West Bank – recently stated in an interview that “it would be fine if they took it all,” referring to Israel potentially controlling much of the Middle East under a biblical interpretation of its borders.

To such extreme Zionist ideologues, Iran represents a spiritual barrier to the conditions required for the Third Temple’s creation and therefore must be militarily neutered to fulfil biblical prophecy.

How does Iran have “Islamist prophetic delusions,” according to Hegseth and co?

Iran’s state ideology — Welayat al-Faqih, the Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist — holds that in the absence of the Twelfth Imam (leader), who is in occultation (ghaybah, or in hiding), supreme authority must rest with a qualified Islamic jurist governing on his behalf.

Moreover, factions within Iran’s clerical and military establishment went further, transforming the theological expectation of the Mahdi’s return into an operational political doctrine.

 The Iranian leadership has institutionalised the idea that unrelenting struggle against oppressive powers is a sacred obligation. Under this framework, strategic retreat or diplomatic accommodation would be tantamount to prophetic betrayal.

During the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, Tehran galvanised the masses by transforming Shi’ism into a “sacred defense,” casting the struggle as a modern-day stand at Karbala. This theological framing later justified “forward defence“—a strategy of exporting the revolution to forge proxy networks throughout the region. By engaging adversaries in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, or Gaza, the Islamic Republic aimed to confront threats at their source, keeping military confrontation far from Iranian soil.

The US-Israel war against Iran can therefore be interpreted as religious just as much as strategic.

In religious terms, two civilisational ideologies are in direct structural conflict, each regarding the other’s existence in its maximalist form as an obstacle to a divinely sanctioned outcome.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other officials have explicitly invoked this framing, referring to Hamas and Iran as the biblical Amalekites, drawing on passages in Exodus, Deuteronomy and 1 Samuel that mandate the complete eradication of Amalek, commanding the killing of all men, women, infants and livestock.

The conflict has, in this sense, mutated into a zero-sum collision of competing messianic frameworks, one in which conventional diplomacy is structurally difficult because both sides believe, in their maximalist iterations, that they are executing a divine mandate.

Finally, Washington’s shifting justifications for the war — moving between regime change, military disarmament and nuclear enrichment prevention — actually reflect the constituencies its campaign is serving.

Among those constituencies, one whose objectives look a lot less ambiguous is Netanyahu and his Zionist and evangelical allies in the US. Their only favourable war outcome would be a regime change or a dismembered and fragmented Iran stripped of all its military, security and policing capabilities so that it becomes structurally too weakened to challenge Israeli hegemony.

This is a conflict that Netanyahu said he has been waiting 40 years for. Israel will do all it can to utilise this moment and destroy Iran’s economic, policing, and military infrastructure, even if it can’t change the regime.

Likewise, Iran has also prepared for exactly this moment and understands Israeli ambitions. It has been strategically expanding and escalating the war, targeting American military bases and installations in the region as well as Arab countries’ economic infrastructure: to highlight how the American military presence in Arab countries is a source of insecurity, not deterrence; to expose dependence on a power whose primary interest is to protect its favourite ally; and, if this disillusionment works, to ultimately drive the US out of the Gulf region.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.