God is great. So is the other God. Also, the other one

We know Donald Trump wouldn't confess it, but if this is a war about nuclear weapons, it is only partly so. It is not a war about regional hegemony, oil pipelines, or the delicate anxieties of American bases that dot the Persian Gulf. Or Arabian Gulf, the way Sunni Arabs want to call it. No. This war is about God. Three of them, actually. Or perhaps the same one, depending on which angry man in robes you happen to be listening to on any given Tuesday.

Welcome to Operation Holy Mayhem, where primary casualties are reason, sanity, and approximately 2,000 targets inside Iran since the bombs started falling on February 28, already killing people in the thousands.

Let us start in Washington, DC, where piety is suddenly the hottest accessory. A remarkable scene unfolded in the Oval Office right when the dance of death and destruction began in Iran. President Donald Trump sat at the Resolute Desk, eyes closed, as over a dozen evangelical pastors surrounded him, placing their hands upon his shoulders and back in the ancient ritual known as "laying on of hands". The Reverend Samuel Rodriguez, reportedly moved to the very marrow of his evangelical soul, prayed fervently: "With gratitude and humility, we pray for President Trump. You assigned him, you appointed him, you anointed him for such a time as this." The Anointed One sat still, eyes shut. Outside, the drones were warming up.

The Anointed. Appointed. Assigned. Presumably by the Almighty Himself, who one imagines has a rather full schedule but still found time to hand-pick a thrice-married Manhattan real estate developer to be the instrument of divine will in the Middle East. One must admire the theological ambition.

And it did not stop there. According to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, complaints have poured in from over a hundred American service members across 40 different units spread across 30 military sites. Their commanders, it is alleged, told them that Trump "has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth". A non-commissioned officer wrote that his commanding officer "urged us to tell our troops that this was 'all part of God's divine plan' and he specifically referenced numerous citations out of the Book of Revelation referring to Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus Christ".

One pauses here. Breathes. Considers. American soldiers are apparently being briefed for combat the way a vicar prepares for Evensong, except the liturgy involves missile coordinates and the sermon ends with an airstrike. The Pentagon has weaponised the Book of Revelation. We have, in effect, achieved peak absurdity.

Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth, a man whose arms are adorned with Crusader tattoos, added his own theological flourish at a Pentagon press briefing. "Crazy regimes like Iran," he said, "hell-bent on prophetic Islamic delusions, cannot have nuclear weapons." Prophetic Islamic delusions. This from a man whose boss is receiving blessings from men who believe they are participating in the fulfilment of the Book of Revelation. The irony is not subtle. It is not even medium-subtle. It is irony wearing a neon sign whilst setting off fireworks.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, not to be outdone in the celestial sweepstakes, solemnly declared that Iran "is led by radical clerics who make decisions on the basis of their view of theology, which is an apocalyptic one". The apocalyptic theology of the other side, you understand. The commanders telling American troops about Armageddon and the second coming are presumably operating on perfectly sensible, secular, geopolitical grounds.

Then there is Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, a man who has elevated the art of biblical citation to a form of military communication. Standing at the site of an Iranian missile strike in Beit Shemesh, he looked into the cameras and pronounced with characteristic Old Testament economy: "We read in this week's Torah portion, 'Remember what Amalek did to you.' We remember, and we act." Amalek. Again. The ancient enemy of Israel, a tribe so thoroughly vanquished that God apparently commands eternal remembrance of the vanquishing.

Netanyahu has invoked Amalek so frequently, against so many different enemies, from Hamas to Hezbollah to now Iran, that one suspects he uses it the way a lesser politician might use "with all due respect", as a reliable signal that something rather extreme is about to follow.

His far-right Cabinet colleague Itamar Ben-Gvir, a man whose opinions make Netanyahu look like a moderate, simply posted on social media the Biblical verse: "Blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven; you shall not forget!" One notes that Amalek has, by this point, been blotted out so many times that its memory is the most persistently remembered thing in the entire ancient Near East.

And then there is the matter of the red heifer. God is in the details, and in this case, the details involve a small group of evangelical Christians from Texas who, convinced that the apocalypse requires proper bovine preparation, spent years searching American ranches for an unblemished red cow. Five red heifers were eventually shipped from Texas to Israel in 2021, classified as pets to circumvent export restrictions.

In July 2025, a practice ceremony was conducted on a remote Israeli hilltop, burning one of the animals, with organisers preparing the way for an official ritual on the Mount of Olives. "For me," declared Byron Stinson, the Texan who helped bring the cows to Israel, "The red heifer is red for the blood of Jesus Christ." The ceremony is meant to enable the purification required before a Third Jewish Temple can be built, which will in turn hasten the arrival of the Messiah. The Al-Aqsa Mosque currently stands where this temple is meant to be built, but one supposes the logistics are God's problem.

Now. Here is where it gets truly spectacular. Because if you thought only one side of this conflagration was taking holy instruction from its scriptures, you have been paying insufficient attention to Tehran.

The Islamic Republic of Iran has been, since 1979, the world's only government constitutionally structured around the expectation of a messiah who has been missing since the ninth century. The Twelfth Imam, al-Mahdi, is believed by Iran's ruling Twelver Shia clergy to have gone into a state of divine occultation in the year of the lord 874 AD. He is, according to doctrine, still alive, patiently biding his time somewhere unspecified, and will return to lead the faithful in an apocalyptic showdown that will establish divine justice upon the entire earth. The Supreme Leader of Iran rules, constitutionally, as the Mahdi's deputy. Iran's IRGC considers itself, in its own doctrine, the Mahdi's army-in-waiting.

Former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad once told a conference that "I have no doubt that the people of the Islamic Republic are preparing for the return of the Ghayab Imam, and if God wills, we will see his appearance soon." At the United Nations, he reportedly sensed the Mahdi's presence and felt an aura of light surrounding him as he spoke. The UN has, of course, witnessed many strange performances over the decades, but this one has a particular distinction.

A leading IRGC cleric, Hojatoleslam Ali Saeedi, described the Revolutionary Guards as "one of the tools for paving the way for the emergence of the Imam of the Age in the field of a regional and international awakening". Another cleric, Mehdi Taeb, instructed IRGC members to "remove the obstacles to the emergence of the Imam of the Age, the most important of which is the existence of the usurper regime of Israel". The destruction of Israel is not, in this framework, merely a geopolitical objective. It is a religious obligation. A sacred preparatory step. A form of theological housekeeping before the Mahdi's arrival.

The Shia tradition of Moharram, the annual mourning rituals in which millions beat their chests and weep and march through streets in memory of the martyred Imam Hussain at Karbala 14 centuries ago, provides the emotional grammar of this ideology. Martyrdom is not defeat. Martyrdom is the point. A regime that sanctifies suffering, that has built its entire civilisational identity around a 1,400-year-old act of tragic sacrifice at a place called Karbala, is not deterred by the prospect of casualties. It is, in a deeply troubling theological sense, encouraged by them.

So here we are. On one side, a president anointed by Jesus to ignite the apocalyptic signal fire, advised by men who burned red cows imported from Texas to prepare for the Messiah's arrival, supported by a Secretary of Defence tattooed with Crusader iconography who accuses the enemy of prophetic delusions. On the other, a regime constitutionally governed by a missing ninth-century Imam's deputy, whose military sees itself as a divine vanguard tasked with destroying Israel to hasten the return of the Mahdi, who will then conquer the world for Islam.

As the professor of religion at Durham University, Jolyon Mitchell, observed with academic restraint: "Many on both sides of this conflict believe that they have God on their side. God is enlisted in this conflict, as with many others, to support acts of violence."

Wars, as one scholar noted, are difficult to justify in technical strategic language. Geopolitics is dry. Theology is electrifying. Casting a complicated regional confrontation as "civilisation versus fanaticism", or "biblical good versus ancient evil", transforms the matter into a moral drama that ordinary audiences can grasp and rally behind. The problem, of course, is that when both sides are performing the same drama from different scripts, both casting the other as the demonic force destined to be defeated by their own particular messiah, you no longer have a war with a political solution. You have a production of Armageddon, with live ammunition, running simultaneously in two theatres.

The missiles do not care whose God is realer. The children in the elementary school struck in Minab in Iran do not care. The nine Israelis killed in Beit Shemesh do not care. The dead, one observes, have a great levelling quality about them. They are ecumenical in their silence.

One longs for the reassuring simplicity of purely cynical wars fought by purely cynical men for oil and money and power, where at least the hypocrisy is honest. Instead, we have been given the worst of all possible wars: one fought by true believers, each utterly convinced that history, destiny, and the Almighty Himself are on their side, each delighted to report that the enemy's apocalyptic delusions are dangerous while their own are merely scripture.

God is great, says one side. God is great, agrees the other. The bombs fall either way. Gandhiji would have said Sabko Sanmati De Bhagwan! But then it is in God's name that they are fighting. In their heads. They are dying. Zombie, zombie, zombie apocalypse is here, if not World War III.

- Ends

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