Do Evangelicals Still Care to Make a Moral Case for War?
When President Bush invaded Iraq, evangelical leaders argued the war was justified morally. When Trump went to war with Iran, evangelical leaders simply cheered.
AFTER THE BOMBING OF IRAN COMMENCED, Donald Trump’s most ardent evangelical supporters cheered. Quoting from the Old Testament book of Nahum, Arizona megachurch pastor Mark Driscoll seemed to frame the attack as an act of divine retribution, the work of a God “filled with vengeance and rage” who “takes revenge on all who oppose him.” Hispanic evangelical leader Samuel Rodriguez turned to social media and announced, “Iran’s Ali Khamenei killed! This changes everything!” Notwithstanding their enthusiasm, neither Driscoll nor Rodriguez said anything about what these changes might look like or what should happen next.
California megachurch pastor Greg Laurie suggested that these events might be connected to biblical prophecy—in this case, the passage in Ezekiel 38 in which a coalition of nations (“Gog and the land of Magog”) launches an invasion against Israel presaging the End Times. Laurie urged his followers to “look up” and see how history aligned with scripture.
Evangelist Franklin Graham posted his approval, writing, “Thank you President @realDonaldTrump for giving the Iranian people a chance to be free.” He continued in a manner reminiscent of the president’s own remarks on the operation: “This regime has been killing Americans for years, and we haven’t had a president who had the guts to take them on. Thank you Mr. President for standing up to bring this evil empire to an end.”
Other evangelicals wielded news of the conflict abroad as a weapon in the culture wars raging at home. Radio host Todd Starnes, doubtless with Tucker Carlson or pro-Palestinian movements on university campuses in mind, used the death of Khamenei to mock “Jew-haters” in the United States. MAGA worship leader Sean Feucht called out the “woke Right and woke Left” who criticized the bombing. Christian Zionist Joel Rosenberg used a clip of former Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris reacting to news of the operation as an occasion to celebrate Trump’s 2024 election victory over her: “Thank God this woman did not win.”
What links these simultaneously resentful and celebratory responses is their almost complete lack of appeal to principle to justify Trump’s war. In fact, its goodness is assumed; they don’t really attempt to justify the war at all. And while the evangelical leaders and influencers cited here demonstrate very little knowledge about foreign policy, they stand to play a meaningful role in shaping the larger evangelical response to the Iran operation: Together they have well over 4 million followers on X and millions more on other platforms.
And then there is Pete Hegseth, the Reformed evangelical Christian who holds the post of secretary of defense and has been tasked with carrying out Trump’s war. As historian James Livingston wrote earlier this month after watching Hegseth conduct a press briefing, the secretary appears to take great pleasure in killing. As Livingston writes, Hegseth seems to believe that
winning is domination—it doesn’t mean a victory to be followed by binding up wounds, reconciling differences, and restoring equilibrium or articulating the conditions of a new one. . . . It means instead the annihilation of the other’s will to fight, to resist, to exist as a sentient, sovereign entity. It’s a zero-sum game: as Iran’s capabilities “evaporate,” those of America “accelerate.” Hegseth here fleshes out the perverse and yet enduring concept of freedom that has been the dark matter of American political thought, and that even now, as I write, organizes and galvanizes MAGA Nation.
Hegseth’s point of view on the operation he is overseeing does not extend much beyond this continuous reiteration of awesome American power and pronouncement of doom over its enemies. While the secretary has participated in six press briefings so far since the first bombs fell on Iran, the war’s larger strategic objectives remain unclear.
EVANGELICALS, ONE OF TRUMP’S MOST LOYAL constituencies to this day, have never prioritized foreign policy in their politics. In a seminal 2006 Foreign Affairs essay, Walter Russell Mead—a commentator who himself attends an evangelical church—characterized evangelicals’ approach to the world as having an “anti-intellectual cast,” something demonstrated in their reduction of foreign policy concerns to three major issues: Israel, religious liberty for their fellow Christians, and humanitarian aid. They are “quick to support efforts to address specific problems” such as “instances of human suffering or injustice,” he wrote, but they seem to have little interest in “grand designs”—such as would be required to justify a protracted military engagement, one might reasonably infer. In 2014, Mark Amstutz, a political scientist at the evangelical Wheaton College, made an argument similar to Mead’s, suggesting that evangelical leaders too often speak on global matters without “adequate competence and knowledge.”
Mead and Amstutz were both writing with the George W. Bush administration and its 2003 invasion of Iraq in mind. Bush sent American troops into Iraq to destroy and replace the country’s repressive regime while neutralizing what he described as the “grave and gathering danger” of its weapons of mass destruction. Back then, too, evangelicals cheered the successes of American soldiers in completing their missions.
Ultimately, Bush’s invasion turned out badly. There were no weapons of mass destruction to be found, and the occupation that followed the initial invasion was costly, with some estimates ranging as high as a trillion dollars. The occupation lasted until 2011, by which point roughly 4,500 American soldiers were dead and 32,000 others wounded. (Only 160 of the U.S. service members who died were killed during the initial campaign to take over the country.) And this is to say nothing of the enormous human toll on the Iraqi side, including hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths.
At first glance, it might seem that little has changed since 2003. But there is an important difference between evangelical responses to the Iraq invasion back then and the Iran war now: In 2003, evangelical leaders at least tried to bring religious and theological principles to bear in their public thinking and arguing about Bush’s war. Many of them tried to ground Bush’s policy of regime change using the centuries-old moral framework of just war theory.
Driven by the conviction that “to whom much is given, much is required,” leaders like Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) and Charles Colson of Prison Fellowship argued that the righteous use of the “sword” was a duty of legitimate government that was given to it by God. Land, as president of the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC), was a primary architect of this defense. He asserted that armed conflict was “the price human beings must periodically pay for the right to live in a moral universe.” And Colson offered his readers this admonition: “Christians should never talk about war with bravado—only with reluctance, weeping, and with prayer and fasting.”
Drawing from the work of twentieth-century public theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, Mark Galli, then managing editor of Christianity Today, proposed a course of “tragic courage” that required the United States to risk its “moral purity” to root out evil while maintaining a sense of “humility,” “patience,” and “sadness” regarding the evil buried in one’s own heart, but also “serenity” owing to God’s grace amid the uncertainty. In a December 2002 item for the magazine, Colson even framed a preemptive strike against Iraq as an act Christians should support for reasons of both principle and deep religious feeling: “Out of love of neighbor . . . Christians can and should support a preemptive strike, if ordered by the appropriate magistrate to prevent an imminent attack.”
Michael Gerson, a key Bush speechwriter and a graduate of Wheaton College, provided the theological heft for this strain of evangelical thinking about the use of American power abroad—what we might call “compassionate internationalism.” He believed that the liberation of millions in Iraq was a clear moral good, and the state had a mandate to use the sword to advance peace.
In addition to shaping the public case for the invasion, evangelicals also sought to influence the administration’s understanding of it. In an October 2002 letter to President Bush written on ERLC letterhead, Land, Colson, campus minister Bill Bright, and Ft. Lauderdale televangelist D. James Kennedy declared that the administration’s policies were “prudent and fall well within the time-honored criteria of just war theory,” characterizing the potential invasion of Iraq as a “last resort” after a decade of Saddam Hussein’s refusal to comply with U.N. demands to end his nuclear program. Land argued that the cause was just because the objective was not to conquer Iraq but to “liberate” it while defending the United States from a leader who provided safe harbor to terrorists. This letter ended up on the desk of Bush political adviser Karl Rove, who scribbled a note to Tim Goeglein, the White House’s deputy director of the office of public liaison: “Let’s make certain this is appropriately replied to.”
IN ALL OF THIS, we see a prominent recurring theme for evangelical leaders during the Bush era: the attempt to make a theological case for American power, both to the public and to those who directly wielded it. We can debate whether these and other representative evangelical figures made a good case—many contemporaneous evangelicals, from former president Jimmy Carter to prominent left-leaning evangelical pastor Tony Campolo, certainly did not think so—but they did make thoughtful attempts.
The situation today has changed drastically in this regard. No more do conservative evangelicals attempt to reason publicly about the justness of the use of American power—and no longer do American political leaders pay serious attention to their moral perspectives on major military operations. (Breathless celebrations from celebrity pastors don’t count.)
And while Bush-era evangelicals who advocated the just war framework to support the Iraq invasion engaged the public through longstanding evangelical institutions such as churches and magazines, Trump-era evangelical influencers have primarily engaged in foreign policy riffing through social media. The diminished substance has gone along with a more callous, even crueler tone—and conspicuous silences when the reality of armed conflict has broken out of the facile framing of Old Testament proof texts.
For example, evangelical leaders have said very little about the strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab. Hit in broad daylight while school was in session, the attack killed at least 165 people, with Iranian officials saying at least 175 people died in the attack. The horrific incident appears to have resulted from outdated intelligence misidentifying the building as a target for a U.S. strike. The shocking loss of civilian life is exactly the kind of tragedy that earlier evangelical figures had in mind when counseling Americans to think of war with “sadness and humility.”
Today’s evangelical leaders reacted somewhat differently: Their response to the school strike on the first day of the Iran operation was a collective Christian nationalist shrug. Of the celebrity evangelical pastors and other leaders mentioned above who posted their approval of Trump’s Iran operation initially, not a single one has made any kind of statement about the elementary school bombing—save Feucht, who repeatedly dismissed early reports of the school strike as “propaganda” before going silent on the matter. “Striking a school full of children is sure to be recorded as one of the most devastating single military errors in recent decades,” New York Times reporters wrote in a story about the strike that carried five bylines.
The evangelical leaders and celebrity pastors who support Donald Trump do not appear to have a strong interest in building a moral world order through international coalitions and a foreign policy rooted in what the Christian tradition teaches about war, peace, and human dignity, as their forebears who supported Bush did. Instead, they seem guided by a desire to punish their enemies now, rejoice in the victory, and worry about the rest later. While the evangelical response to the prospect of war in Iraq in the early 2000s served to reinforce the legitimacy of a deeply flawed military undertaking, the attempts on the part of that era’s evangelical leaders to publicly reason about the war from principle had an ennobling function. War is a serious matter that requires careful and prayerful thinking: In retrospect, this is one of the most important points not made but assumed by participants in the evangelical discourse in the leadup to the Iraq invasion.
Their arguments had other important implications. Arguing from principles such as those expressed in just war theory not only sets limits around what sorts of actions may be ethically undertaken by both politicians and service members; it also opposes the kind of unthinking nationalistic enthusiasm that feeds jingoism and similarly degrading responses to the use of military power on the part of civilians back home. Bush-era evangelicals recognized the importance of attempting to impose ethical reason’s restraints on militaristic passion.
By giving up their responsibility to justify their support for a war of choice, today’s evangelical leaders who broadcast cavalier support for Trump’s unilateral war suggest that such things are simply not important either to them or the communities they serve. And we are all worse off for that.
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