Crazy religion mistakes mythic imagery for physical history. The most dangerous form of crazy religion currently comes out of the Pentagon and the White House. It believes war and destruction are “God’s divine plan.” Leaders believing in crazy religion project their unresolved inner struggles into the Bible and then use biblical imagery to wage holy war on people outside. With a nuclear arsenal at their disposal, the tendency of Christian Nationalist leaders to play God in this way is extremely dangerous to humanity.
Based on Jonathan Larsen’s research, Democracy Now reports that the “Military Religious Freedom Foundation [MRFF] says it has been inundated with over 200 calls from members of the U.S. military regarding religious comments made by U.S. commanders about the war in Iran. One combat unit commander reportedly said that the war is ‘part of God’s divine plan’ and that ‘President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.’”
“They are promised a 200-mile-long river that is four-and-a-half feet deep filled with nothing but the blood that their weaponized version of Jesus will spill at the Battle of Armageddon,” Mikey Weinstein, founder and president of MRFF, told the Huffington Post. “That’s a lot of blood.” This “promise” reads apocalyptic imagery about such a river of blood in the last book of the Bible, Revelation 14:20, physically literal. Such literal thinking, however, is not what the Bible means. Such literal thinking is instead inspired, for instance, by the popular end-times book series Left Behind.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is a Christian Nationalist who believes literally in the endtimes. Tom Hill, executive director of the Center for Peace and Diplomacy (CPD), says, “Hegseth’s Christian nationalism, rooted in fundamentalist Christianity, is key to understanding his perspective on Israel.” Hegseth asserts, “For us as American crusaders, Israel embodies the soul of our American crusade – the ‘why’ to our ‘what’.” Leading the war against Iran in coordination with Israel’s Netanyahu is thus understood by Hegseth as his participation in bringing about the return of Christ.
Hegseth’s theology is shaped by pastor Doug Wilson, cofounder of a conservative Reformed theological network, the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC). Wilson has argued that women should not be allowed to vote and that slavery was mutually beneficial for slaves and masters.
Now Hegseth puts his blood-soaked theology into practice by vowing to rain down on Iran “death and destruction from the sky. All day long.” “Once air supremacy is established, the US will begin dropping 500-, 1000- and 2000-pound precision bombs, of which the US has a nearly unlimited stockpile,” said Hegseth, according to the Israel Times.
This is crazy religion at its most dangerous: wedded to nearly unlimited military power. The crazy part is taking symbols that are similar to dream images in nightmares and treating them as literal instructions for murderous behavior. This crazy religion is currently used to justify the death of thousands in Iran. This crazy, psychotic religion treats humans like vermin to be exterminated.
If any individual were threatening to attack their neighbors in the name of such a crazy religion, they would be involuntarily admitted to a psychiatric hospital. Humanity should put such safeguards in place against leaders acting on crazy religion.
What does Armageddon really mean?
Armageddon has nothing to do with a battle to usher in the literal end of the physical world or of a return of a physical figure of “Jesus Christ.” All of this is symbolic talk. It has to be understood similarly to how we understand poetry or a movie.
In the apocalyptic vision of the biblical book of Revelation (16:16), Armageddon is a spiritual mythic or poetic image that symbolizes when a person’s false life comes crashing down as they go through the excruciating struggle of becoming the real person they never allowed themselves to be but actually are in God’s loving, absolutely affirming eyes.
The spiritual battle of good and evil is not a moral one. It is an existential one. It is the battle between seeing oneself as a human being due to one’s limitations, one’s mortality, as either
- something to be ashamed of, as something “bad,” that is: not valuable, and then trying to compensate for that badness by pretending that one is more than one is, spiritually: by playing God (symbolized by the “demonic” in the story),or
- as something not to be ashamed of, as something “good,” that is: valuable despite one’s limitations (symbolized by being “clothed” and not “exposed to shame” in the story), because one believes that absolute Love, God, will “wipe” away every tear one sheds over being merely human, limited, and mortal.
From a scarcity to an abundance perspective
Armageddon symbolizes the destruction of every view in us that sees us and the world as bad because of our mortality. It is a step on the way to seeing the whole world, the highs and the lows, heaven and earth, as a “new heaven and a new earth.” It is the inner battle over no longer seeing the world in its limitations with the eyes of scarcity and strife, but with the eyes of abundance, for oneself and others, and peace.
That shift in perspective in each human being then also changes the way we structure the external world. We can then change the world into a place of peace and sharing where, as Revelation puts it, the “home of God is among mortals. God will dwell with them” (21:3). “Death will be no more” (21:4) means that our life will no longer be defined by our limitations, by our finite nature. This reference to death, too, is not about physical death. It is about that “death” in our life will no longer rule us and our interactions with each other.
An Antichristian Perspective Posing as Christian
It is clear that the vision of Armageddon in Revelation is diametrically opposed to the end-times vision of Trump, the Pentagon, Pete Hegseth, and their chief court prophet, Doug Wilson. They seek to rule the world by bringing death and strife to it while they play God. They perpetuate the old world of war and scarcity, but do so by perversely invoking the name of “Christ.”
They totally miss the point that Jesus took the idea of the “Messiah,” which is what the name “Christ” actually means, and interpreted it exactly in the opposite way than his fellow Jewish believers at the time had expected: they had expected Jesus to rise up like a new King David, with external power.
Jesus instead did no such thing. He did not claim such external power. He was nonviolent. He resisted the pull of earthly power and the fear it is based on. With that, he changed the entire view of God forever, too: the God of Jesus is not one who lords it over but rather someone who seeks people who feel lost and helps them find themselves again, as he portrayed in many parables and lived in healing encounters with people. That is the power of the “Christ.” It has absolutely nothing to do with the big, powerful narcissist that Christian Nationalists make out to be the Christ.
Christian Nationalist leaders and politicians need to look inside to resolve their own power struggles with inferiority and inadequacy (which they see as evil) instead of projecting them outside and killing what they see outside as inferior and inadequate (evil).
Violent Christian Nationalism could not be further from the vision of peace Jesus summed up in the Sermon on the Mount or from the inner battle toward a “new heaven and earth” described symbolically in the book of Revelation.
True Peace
To conclude, spiritual battles are never physical battles. Spiritual battles mean confronting what is false in us, the inner enemy, nonviolently (as Erik Erikson put it in his book Gandhi’s Truth).
Spiritual peace does not come through physical war. Nor does real, lasting peace come through physical war. Peace comes from seeing oneself, others, and the world through the lens of abundance despite its limitations. This calms the fears that fuel shame and war. As Jesus says in John 14:27 while facing death, “My peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives.”
If only Hegseth, Trump, and the whole gang caught up in crazy religion would listen.
To read all of Dr. Matthias Beier’s reflections on today’s world, subscribe to his Substack, Religion and Society on the Couch.
Leave a Reply