“No War Is Holy” — Hegseth, the Pentagon, and America’s Unchristian Crusade in Iran

Military commanders are telling troops the Iran war is “God’s divine plan” for Armageddon. Thirty members of Congress want answers — and Catholic teaching has a verdict.

Dear friends —

I know it’s Friday night. I know you’re tired. I know Lent just started, and you might be looking for something lighter.

But I felt compelled to write this piece tonight because what is happening right now — in our name, with our tax dollars, under our flag — demands sober moral reflection.

Catholics and all people of goodwill should not look away from this.

If you’ve been thinking about subscribing, I hope this piece shows you why this community matters. Additionally, the door closes at midnight Pacific tonight to receive a free copy of Gerard O’Connell and Elisabetta Piqué’s The Election of Pope Leo XIV: The Last Surprise of Pope Francis — I posted about this giveaway on Wednesday.

Any yearly subscription received from that post or this one, or an equivalent donation, will be honored, and those who participate will receive the book on March 25. Now, the essay.

On Monday, a combat-unit commander stood before his troops and told them that the war in Iran is “all part of God’s divine plan” — that President Trump had been “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.”

He said it, according to one non-commissioned officer, with a big grin on his face.

He was not alone.

By Tuesday, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation had received more than 200 complaints from over 50 military installations across every branch of the armed forces — servicemembers reporting that their commanders were framing the Iran conflict as a biblically sanctioned holy war, a necessary step toward the Second Coming of Christ.

And at the top of the chain, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth — the man with a Jerusalem cross tattooed across his chest, a symbol of the medieval Crusades — stood at a Pentagon podium and called Iran a regime driven by “prophetic Islamic delusions” and dismissed its government as a “death cult.”

This from the same man who has introduced monthly Christian prayer services at the Pentagon and who has repeatedly invoked his evangelical Christian faith in describing America’s military mission.

On Thursday, thirty members of Congress — led by Representatives Jared Huffman, Jamie Raskin, and Chrissy Houlahan — demanded that the Department of Defense Inspector General open a formal investigation.

Their letter was direct: “At a time when billions of dollars and untold numbers of lives hang in the balance while the Trump administration wages a war of choice in Iran, the imperative of maintaining strict separation of church and state and protecting the religious freedom of our troops is especially critical.”

Let me be plain about what is happening here. The United States government is waging a war and framing it — from the Pentagon briefing room to the field — as a religious crusade.

Military commanders are invoking the Book of Revelation. The Secretary of Defense is mocking another religion’s sacred beliefs while wrapping his own in the machinery of the state. Troops of multiple faiths — Christians, Muslims, Jews — are being told they are fighting God’s battle.

This is not a Christian effort. It is an anti-Christian effort. And the Catholic tradition makes this unmistakably clear.

The Catholic Case Against This War

The Church’s just war tradition, developed over centuries from Augustine through Aquinas to the modern Catechism, establishes strict conditions under which the use of military force can be morally justified.

The criteria are demanding by design: a just cause rooted in defense against an aggressor, a legitimate authority acting for the common good, a reasonable chance of success, proportionality in the use of force, and — critically — that war must be a last resort after all peaceful alternatives have been exhausted.

This war fails on virtually every count.

No serious moral theologian — no bishop, no ethicist, no military chaplain acting in good conscience — can look at the facts on the ground and conclude that this conflict meets the Church’s threshold for justified force. The burden of proof lies with those who would unleash the horror of war, and that burden has not come close to being met.

The rationale has shifted from day to day — nuclear concerns, then regime change, then “retribution,” then vague invocations of historical grievance.

A war waged for retribution is not a war of defense. A war justified by shifting pretexts is not a war of last resort. And a war framed as the fulfillment of apocalyptic prophecy has abandoned any pretense of proportionality or rational moral reasoning.

But it is not only the classical just war criteria that condemn this conflict.

Pope Francis, in his 2020 encyclical Fratelli Tutti, went further than any modern pope in questioning whether the just war framework can even be credibly invoked in an age of weapons capable of uncontrollable destruction.

“It is very difficult nowadays to invoke the rational criteria elaborated in earlier centuries to speak of the possibility of a ‘just war,’” he wrote.

War, Francis declared, is “the negation of all rights and a dramatic assault on the environment.” He concluded that “we can no longer think of war as a solution, because its risks will probably always be greater than its supposed benefits.”

That was 2020. The world has not grown safer since.

No War Is Holy

But what disturbs me most deeply — what should disturb every Christian in America tonight — is not merely that this war is unjust. It is that it is being dressed in the language of our faith. The cross is being used as a war banner.

The Book of Revelation is being cited as a battle plan. The name of Jesus is being invoked to justify the destruction of a nation.

This is the oldest heresy in the book. It is the temptation Christ himself rejected in the desert — the temptation of earthly power, of dominion, of using divine authority to serve human ambition.

When Peter drew his sword in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus rebuked him: “Put your sword back into its place. For all who take the sword will perish by the sword” (Matthew 26:52).

Our pope knows this. Pope Leo XIV chose as his very first words to the world — spoken from the loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica on the night of his election — “Peace be with you.”

Peace has been the hallmark of his pontificate. In his message for the 2026 World Day of Peace, he called for an “unarmed and disarming” peace — not the peace of deterrence or mutual threat, but the peace willed by God, the peace that is a gift of the Holy Spirit.

Just yesterday, Pope Leo XIV prayed publicly for world leaders to “abandon projects of death, halt the arms race, and place the lives of the most vulnerable at the center.”

In his Angelus address last Sunday, he was even more direct: “Stability and peace are not achieved through mutual threats, nor through the use of weapons, which sow destruction, suffering, and death, but only through reasonable, sincere, and responsible dialogue.”

He made a heartfelt appeal to halt “the spiral of violence before it becomes an unbridgeable chasm.”

When Defense Secretary Hegseth mocks Iran’s “prophetic Islamic delusions” while his own commanders invoke the Book of Revelation to rally troops, what we are witnessing is not faith. It is blasphemy.

It is the instrumentalization of religion for the purposes of violence — precisely what the Gospel forbids, precisely what Catholic social teaching condemns, and precisely what our pope has spent his entire pontificate warning against.

As Mikey Weinstein of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation put it bluntly: “Whenever you merge religious fanaticism with the machinery of the state that conducts war, we do not end up with little babbling brooks...we end up with one thing: oceans and oceans of blood.”

A Lenten Examination of Conscience

It is the first Friday of Lent. Across the world tonight, Catholics are abstaining from meat, praying the Stations of the Cross, entering into the desert with Christ. Lent asks us to examine our consciences, to turn away from sin, and to draw closer to the God who is love.

Here is my Lenten examination of conscience for America tonight: We are waging a war of choice. We are doing it in God’s name. And we are lying to our own troops about why.

This is what our country is doing right now, in our name, with our resources, with our sons and daughters in uniform. The fifteen servicemembers who filed the original complaint — eleven of them Christians — saw the truth more clearly than many of us. They recognized that calling this war God’s plan is a perversion of their faith, not an expression of it.

Pope Leo has told us what is holy. Dialogue is holy. Mercy is holy. The courage to lay down the sword is holy. The choice of peace over retribution is holy.

If there is one thing the Catholic tradition teaches with absolute clarity, from Augustine to Aquinas to Fratelli Tutti to the first words of Pope Leo XIV, it is this: the way of Jesus is the way of peace.

Any voice that tells you otherwise — from the Pentagon podium or the commander’s briefing room — is not speaking for Christ. They are speaking for Caesar.

As Pope Leo XIV proclaimed from the Colosseum last October, standing before leaders of every creed: “War is never holy; only peace is holy, because it is willed by God!”

And in this holy season, we know which voice to follow.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with the millions of American Catholics — and countless others of goodwill — who believe that peace is not weakness, but the very will of God. In an era poisoned by cruelty and the drums of war, we remain rooted in a faith that refuses to bless violence or bow to the idols of empire.

We’re not bystanders to this moment. We’re building something that outlasts it.

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