Washington loves a drama. This week, it had one of near-apocalyptic scale.
After an Easter weekend punctuated by alarmingly bloodthirsty rhetoric from the President — including a warning that “an entire civilization will die tonight” — a last-minute diplomatic agreement appears to have averted the destruction of Iran. No cities were flattened. No mass graves need digging.
In geopolitical terms, Iran emerges strengthened. Its reported ten-point proposal — apparently demanding sweeping concessions, from a full U.S. military withdrawal in the Middle East to the lifting of sanctions — was described by the President as a “reasonable basis” for negotiation. A fragile two-week ceasefire is now in action.
There was a global sigh of relief at the withhold of violence and death on Tuesday. But it would be a mistake to conclude that nothing of consequence occurred. Iranian civilians may have been spared, but something else has been damaged: the moral language of American public life.
In the days leading up to the bombing that never was, the President did not merely threaten a hostile regime. He spoke repeatedly of destroying an entire civilisation — its infrastructure, its history, its people. He promised to put Iranian people through “hell.” This was not the language of reluctant intervention or targeted force, but of intentional and gleeful obliteration.
Yet weren’t we also assured by the warmongers that a leading goal for this entire operation was to liberate poor citizens from an oppressive regime? Is it different if these people suffer at the hands of American weapons rather than Iranian?
Even when such threats from a leader go unrealised, they leave a residue. They shape what a nation is prepared to countenance, redrawing the boundaries of what is morally thinkable.
The long-term damage, in other words, is not just to Iran but to America.
In Washington, concerns about rhetoric are often dismissed as naïve. Words are cheap, we are told. What matters is what is actually done. This was all just “tactics”.
More troubling still is how, in large swathes of the MAGA movement, this rhetoric is being wrapped in religious cosplay
But that view misunderstands how political language works. Language is not merely descriptive, but formative. It teaches a nation what is normal and permissible. No missiles were launched this week, but a new moral baseline was laid.
More troubling still is how, in large swathes of the MAGA movement, this rhetoric is being wrapped in religious cosplay. What might once have been framed as a geopolitical conflict is instead cast as something larger: a civilisational or even sacred struggle. The Christian West against Islam. Righteousness against its enemies.
Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of War, has been a leading voice for this narrative. He has spoken of the U.S. military’s unmatched ability to rain “death and destruction from above” on its “apocalyptic” Iranian foes, while “the providence of our almighty God is there protecting those troops”. In his book “American Crusade” (2020), he justifies the “bloody” crusades of the past, “full of unspeakable tragedy”, as having been justifiable to protect the Christian West from Islam.
Within that religious framework, the temptation is obvious. The line between regime and civilians blurs. Enemies are no longer adversaries to be contained, but obstacles to a divine plan — obstacles to be removed. America is recast as the instrument of that plan, the self-appointed fist of God. Once war is absorbed into a religious narrative, it becomes easier to justify what would otherwise be unthinkable.
This thirst for destruction represents a new and reactive expression of Christianity. It is true that, in recent decades, parts of Western Christianity have erred too much in the opposite direction — becoming overly timid, therapeutic, feminised, even embarrassed by moral clarity. Faced with evil, too many preferred silence to confrontation.
But what we are seeing now is a severe over-correction of that weakness. A Christianity that once hesitated to speak has, in some quarters, become all too eager to strike — and to sanctify the striking.
In doing so, it forgets one of its central principles: the Imago Dei. The belief that every human being, regardless of nationality or religion, is made in the image of God. That belief does not rule out war in all circumstances, but it does impose limits — restraint, discrimination, and compassion for the innocents.
What is emerging in MAGA’s America is a distorted, muscular faith — one that confuses strength with domination, and righteousness with the capacity to inflict overwhelming force. That is not the Christianity that shaped the West.
Christ did not threaten civilians with destruction. He did not impose his will through geopolitical domination. He exercised power through sacrifice, not coercion. Strip this inversion away, and what remains is not Christianity, but a religious vocabulary pressed into the service of power.
For years, many Christians, myself included, defended Trump on pragmatic grounds. He was not a moral exemplar, we argued, but he served certain important ends for the public good. That argument depended on a distinction between flawed means and defensible goals. That distinction, when it comes to his bloodthirsty posts against Iranian civilians, is collapsing.
You cannot claim to defend Christian civilisation while abandoning the belief that underpins it.
This is not a holy war. It is, in every sense that matters, an unholy one. And the longer Christians pretend otherwise, the more they risk losing not just the argument but their moral credibility altogether.
