It is God's War
They Told the Troops It Was God’s War
The bombs were still falling on Tehran when a U.S. commander looked his soldiers in the eye and told them why they were really there.
Editor’s note, March 8, 2026: After this piece was published, Hemant Mehta at Friendly Atheist raised serious sourcing concerns I want to address directly. Mehta spoke with Mikey Weinstein and confirmed that the “200+ complaints” figure referenced in this article- and widely reported elsewhere- covered religious pressure in the military broadly, not this specific Armageddon commander. That is a meaningful distinction I did not make clearly enough. Mehta also noted that MRFF edits complaint emails before publishing them, and that all published MRFF complaints follow a nearly identical structure- raising legitimate questions about how much the published versions reflect the original words of complainants. The core claim of this article- that a single NCO filed a complaint reporting a commander made these specific statements- remains what it was: one anonymous complaint, passed through one organization, unverified by independent reporters. The broader documented context (Hegseth’s prayer services, Huckabee’s interview, the pattern of Christian nationalist pressure in the military) stands on its own. But I should have drawn a harder line between “the MRFF received a complaint claiming this happened” and “this happened.” I didn’t. I’m correcting that here. Read Mehta’s full piece here.
The complaint email as published by journalist Jonathan Larsen and the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. The sender’s identity has been withheld to protect them from Pentagon retribution.
It’s been less than two weeks since the United States and Israel launched joint airstrikes on Iran, killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and setting the Middle East on fire. The official reasons are familiar by now: nuclear proliferation, national security, regime change dressed up in the language of peace. But inside at least one military briefing room on the morning of March 2nd, according to a single anonymous complaint filed with the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, the stated reason was something else entirely.
“President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.”
That sentence- reported by independent journalist Jonathan Larsen based on the MRFF complaint- didn’t come from a street preacher or a fringe podcast. It allegedly came from a commanding officer. At a combat readiness briefing. To the people we are asking to fight and possibly die.
The NCO who filed the complaint wrote on behalf of fifteen other troops. Of those sixteen people, eleven are Christian. One is Muslim. One is Jewish.
The MRFF logged more than 200 complaints about religious pressure in the military in the days following the strikes- across more than 40 units and at least 30 military installations, spanning every branch of service. Those complaints cover a range of incidents, not all of them related to this specific commander or these specific statements. The pattern of Christian nationalist pressure inside the military they represent, however, is not new and is not in dispute.
The complaint about this specific commander describes him urging soldiers not to be afraid, telling them this was “all part of God’s divine plan,” and pulling chapter and verse from the Book of Revelation. Armageddon. The Second Coming. The return of Christ. If it happened as described, this is the frame being placed around a live shooting war where American service members are dying.
One detail in the complaint I can’t stop thinking about: the commander “had a big grin on his face when he said all of this.” That grin is what keeps me up. Not the theology- people believe what they believe- but the grin. The glee of someone who thinks the apocalypse is finally here and they’ve got front-row seats.
None of this happened in a vacuum- and the broader context doesn’t depend on any single anonymous complaint to verify.
Since May 2025, Pete Hegseth has been holding monthly Christian prayer services inside the Pentagon- during working hours, broadcast on the building’s internal network, with the DOD seal on the program. At the first one, his personal pastor prayed that Trump had been “sovereignly appointed” by God. At a press briefing on March 2nd, Hegseth described Iran as “hell-bent on prophetic Islamic delusions.” And about ten days before the strikes began, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee sat down with Tucker Carlson and, when asked whether Israel had a biblical right to land spanning from the Nile to the Euphrates, said: “It would be fine if they took it all.”
This is the rhetorical environment our military is operating in. When the people at the top talk like this publicly, what exactly do we expect from commanders down the chain?
I want to be honest about what this story is and isn’t.
We have one anonymous complaint, routed through one organization, about one specific commander. We don’t have the original email. We don’t have audio or video. We don’t have the commander’s name. The DoD has not responded — which is its own kind of answer, but not proof. Hemant Mehta at Friendly Atheist has noted that MRFF complaint emails follow a suspiciously uniform structure across years of cases, and that Weinstein edits them before publishing. Those are legitimate concerns that should make anyone- including me- more careful.
What we do have, documented and on the record: a Secretary of Defense running religious services at the Pentagon. An ambassador describing a biblical mandate for territorial expansion. A pattern of service members reporting religious pressure to the MRFF going back years. A war in the Middle East that powerful people with end-times beliefs have been anticipating for decades.
The specific complaint may or may not be exactly what it appears to be. The environment that would make it entirely plausible is real, documented, and not going away.
I keep coming back to a question without a clean answer: What does it do to a person to be told that the war they’re fighting is the last war? That it’s not about strategy or policy or even survival, but prophecy? That the bombs and the blood and the bodies are just stage-setting for something that’s been written since the beginning of time?
I think about the Muslim soldier allegedly in that room. The Jewish one. I think about what it must have felt like to sit through that briefing- if it happened as described- and hear that the God of their commanding officer has chosen this moment, this war, and this president to end the world.
That’s not a morale-booster. That’s a threat wearing a sermon.
The question isn’t whether one commander said one thing in one briefing. The question is what kind of military we’ve built, and who’s been building it.
That question doesn’t need a single anonymous email to answer.
The bombs are still falling. The complaints keep coming in. And the environment that makes all of this possible is documented, public, and getting louder.
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Sources: Jonathan Larsen / Substack; Military Religious Freedom Foundation; Hemant Mehta / Friendly Atheist; Snopes; Military.com; Newsweek; Al Jazeera