CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Trump’s Crusade: Christian Nationalism and the Making of a Holy War

Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

“Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.” – Isaac Asimov

“Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.”

Israel and the United States are now at war with Iran, a conflict framed by both leaders through a stark and self-serving moral binary. In the words of Benjamin Netanyahu, it is cast as a “necessary fight between good and evil.” For Donald Trump, the illegality of the war is beside the point. It is waged instead in the ideological spirit and cruelty of the Crusades, fueled by religious fervor and animated by what David Smith writing in The Guardian, has called a celebration of the “capacity to inflict violence.” What this religious framing obscures is the political reality that this is, in large part, Netanyahu’s war, one he has long prepared by casting Iran in apocalyptic terms as a successor to Nazism. But as Fintan O’Toole suggests, something even more disturbing is at work: in Trump’s hands, the war is severed from any coherent political or moral rationale, reduced to a hollow spectacle of destruction, a language of power emptied of meaning itself. Yet this emptiness is not benign. It signals at once a profound political weakness and an unrestrained embrace of state violence, a politics of dispossession and a logic of disposability that, if left unchecked, points toward the reemergence of camps as instruments of governance, cloaked in the moral certainties of religious dogmatism.

 This fusion of war, spectacle, and religious zeal is not merely a rhetorical flourish. It signals a deeper transformation in how violence is imagined and justified. Trump’s Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, gives this worldview its most chilling expression. Speaking with a zeal that echoes the language of holy war, he declares that the mission of the U.S. military is “to unleash death and destruction from the sky all day long.” In such statements, war is stripped of the language of restraint, law, or even tragic necessity. It becomes an open affirmation of annihilation as virtue.

As Greg Jaffe observes in The New York Times, rhetoric of this kind signals a profound shift in the moral framework guiding American power. Instead of invoking justice or defense, it embraces vengeance. In this worldview, the enemy is not an opponent to be contained or negotiated with but a foe to be obliterated. War thus becomes not only an instrument of policy but a spectacle of righteous fury, a theater of domination in which violence is sanctified and the infliction of blood, suffering, and death is embraced as proof of strength. Yet the significance of this war culture extends far beyond the battlefield. Its logic does not remain confined to foreign policy; it migrates inward, reshaping the language, institutions, and pedagogical practices of domestic life.

War has long been the most brutal expression of state power, but in the political culture surrounding Donald Trump it has taken on an even darker significance. War is no longer simply a strategic instrument of foreign policy. What is emerging instead is a war culture in which violence, white Christian nationalism, and militarized spectacle function as a form of public pedagogy, instructing citizens not to question domination but to admire it.

In this register, Operation Epic Fury becomes barbarism refashioned as spectacle, draped in an aesthetic of impunity and moral annihilation. War is transformed into a form of public pedagogy, a daily lesson in domination delivered through media images, political rhetoric, and state policy, teaching that cruelty signals strength and that enemies, both foreign and domestic, are rendered disposable, unworthy of recognition or justice and instead subjected to humiliation, repression, and violence. Under such conditions, violence no longer hides behind the worn language of  necessity or o making the world safe for democracy. It exposes what it has long been in American foreign policy, a ruthless instrument of imperial power.

On the domestic front, this pedagogy operates not only through spectacles of military force but through laws, institutions, and cultural narratives that normalize authoritarian power. It works, as I and Will Paul have observed elsewhere, not simply through “tanks in the streets but through legislation that turns education into an arm of the security state.” Classrooms are redefined as sites of patriotic discipline, history is rewritten as nationalist myth, surveillance becomes a civic duty, and students learn that obedience is virtue while dissent marks them as suspect. In such conditions, education no longer nurtures critical judgment or democratic responsibility; it becomes a machinery for producing subjects who internalize the values of militarism, hierarchy, and unquestioned authority.

This war culture reflects what political theorist Achille Mbembe calls necropolitics, a form of power organized around the capacity to decide who may live and who must die. Within such a framework, violence ceases to be simply an instrument of policy and becomes a defining feature of political identity. What is particularly alarming is that this war is increasingly framed through the language of Christian nationalism. The imagery and rhetoric of the Crusades have reentered public life, symbolized not only by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s crusader-themed tattoo but also by his repeated claims that Trump has been ordained by God to wield military power against alleged infidels.

As David Smith reports, Doug Pagitt, a pastor and executive director of the progressive Christian group Vote Common Good, describes the theological logic shaping this worldview:

It seems to me that Pete Hegseth has a worldview which is contorted toward thinking that this administration has a particular divine calling. He believes, because he said it, that God has uniquely ordained Donald Trump and those that he chooses to accomplish very specific purposes in the world. Pete Hegseth’s own version of Christianity is built around a certain Christian advancement that comes through the domination of the governments of nations. He believes that not only is the military at his disposal to use for his purposes but that it is there to fulfill God’s agenda for the world.

It seems to me that Pete Hegseth has a worldview which is contorted toward thinking that this administration has a particular divine calling. He believes, because he said it, that God has uniquely ordained Donald Trump and those that he chooses to accomplish very specific purposes in the world. Pete Hegseth’s own version of Christianity is built around a certain Christian advancement that comes through the domination of the governments of nations. He believes that not only is the military at his disposal to use for his purposes but that it is there to fulfill God’s agenda for the world.

War is celebrated as proof of strength, enemies are stripped of their humanity, and the destruction of entire populations is reframed as the necessary price of restoring national greatness, often invoked through the slogan “America First.” In such a necropolitical order, the state derives legitimacy not from protecting life but from demonstrating its capacity to destroy it. Moreover, we live in an era under a fascist regime in which the annihilation of morality is in full bloom. Almost nothing is reported in the mainstream press regarding the fact that “Between 600,000 and 1 million Iranian households are now temporarily displaced inside Iran as a result of the ongoing conflict [a figure that represents] up to 3.2 million people.

The same moral callousness is on full display about Hegseth’s response to troop deaths in Iran. Trump’s initial response to the death of three troops was  “We have three, [and] we expect casualties, but in the end it’s going to be a great deal for the world.” For Trump death makes sense only as part of a cost-benefit analysis. He later said “there will likely be more [deaths] before it ends,” before adding: “That’s the way it is. Likely be more.” Hegseth responded by “criticizing the media for supposedly focusing too much on the dead soldiers in an effort to make Trump ‘look bad.’”

Militarism thus ceases to be an exception to politics and becomes one of its central organizing principles. Under such conditions, even the mass killing of civilians, including children, is absorbed into the brutal language and logic of national power and disappears behind the spectacle of military triumph. The devastation produced by the illegal Israeli-U.S. bombing campaign in Iran is rarely acknowledged with any moral seriousness. Airstrikes have struck targets........

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