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........

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