CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

A War Against Children Cannot be a Christian War

There are moments when political language begins to sound like something older than politics.

A prayer inside the Pentagon recently asked God to bless the “overwhelming violence of action” and to ensure that “every round find its mark.” Scripture was woven into the cadence of military speech, as though divine presence could be made to converge with operational precision.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, speaking within a worship context tied to military life, drew from the Psalms: “I pursued my enemies and overtook them, and did not turn back till they were consumed.” In that setting, the words do not remain safely in the past. They are re-entered as invocation, carried from ancient text into the present tense of state power.

Days later, amid escalating tensions and reported threats on infrastructure in Iran—including bridges, power grids, and a train station—President Donald Trump warned that a “whole civilization will die tonight” if demands were not met.

Taken together, these moments disclose a familiar grammar in American political speech: violence rendered not as tragedy to be constrained, but as necessity to be affirmed. The enemy becomes total, and destruction begins to take on the tone of moral clarity.

This is not without precedent. The Hebrew Bible, as Hegseth made clear, contains narratives in which warfare is narrated in sweeping and uncompromising terms, where divine authorization and collective judgment sit uncomfortably close together. These are not marginal texts. They are part of the scriptural inheritance that has shaped Jewish and Christian moral imagination alike.

Biblical scholar Phyllis Trible once named such passages “texts of terror,” not to dismiss them, but to acknowledge their enduring capacity to unsettle. Read........

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