Donald Trump has often praised William McKinley, a White House predecessor who shared the current president’s love of tariffs and territorial expansion. A pious man, McKinley claimed he had divine sanction for the 1898 US annexation of the Philippines in the wake of the Spanish-American War. According to McKinley’s account, he was tormented by what to do with the former Spanish colonies when he “went down on my knees and prayed to Almighty God for light and guidance.” Then he was struck by a divine insight: that the United States had a mission to “to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them.”

It’s impossible to imagine Trump, for all his stated admiration of McKinley, going down on his knees and seeking heavenly council. While Trump is the head of a political coalition whose largest element is evangelical Christians, his own personal faith seems, at best, a cynical and barely disguised performance. In 2015, at the start of his political career, he said he had never asked God for forgiveness. When asked if he preferred the Old or the New Testament, he said, “Probably equal. I think it’s just incredible.”

Yet, in a curious way, Trump has managed to reinvent McKinley’s fusion of imperialism and piety—and never more so than in his current war on Iran. There was only a cursory effort to prepare the public for the conflict; as The New Yorker tartly observed, this is a “no-explanation war.” Since it started last Saturday, the White House has offered a plethora of conflicting justifications, including regime change, pressure from the Israeli government, fear of an imminent attack by Iran, fear of Iran getting nuclear weapons, and a desire to pressure Iran in negotiations.

This puzzling kaleidoscope of excuses has created an opportunity for the religious right to recast the war in its image. Since there is no coherent, agreed-upon talking point coming out of the White House, the MAGA movement is free to explain the war with its own pet theories.

As my Nation colleague Chris Lehmann pointed out last year during the so-called 12-day war between Israel and Iran, Pentecostal pastors such as John Hagee are quick to exploit any turmoil in the Middle East as proof the long-promised Apocalypse is at hand, a consummation devoutly desired as a fulfillment of God’s plan, even if it means the end of the world.

Under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who styles himself the “secretary of war,” this apocalyptic Christianity has sanction from the commanding heights of the Pentagon. In a Substack post, journalist Jonathan Larsen reports,

Hegseth has enshrined evangelical Christianity at the uppermost levels of the U.S. military, airing monthly prayer meetings throughout the Pentagon. Last year, the Pentagon confirmed to me that Hegseth attends a weekly White House Bible study. It’s led by a preacher who says God commands America to support Israel.

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Quoting complaints made to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), Larsen has provided startling evidence that Hegseth’s theocratic militarism now saturates the military. On Monday, one commander allegedly told troops that Trump was “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.” MRFF claims to have received at least 110 similar complaints from more than 40 units.

These military commanders are echoing language that is pervasive in political life, especially in the last week. On Thursday, Senator Lindsey Graham said, “This is a religious war, and we will determine the course of the Middle East for a thousand years.” House Speaker Mike Johnson asserts that Iranians have a “misguided religion.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio claims that the war is necessary because Iran is “run by lunatics—religious fanatic lunatics.” In a news briefing, Hegseth said, “Crazy regimes like Iran, hell-bent on prophetic Islamic delusions, cannot have nuclear weapons.” The White House got in on the act on Thursday, releasing Oval Office footage of a group of evangelical pastors laying hands on Trump and praying for his success in the war.

This language of religious abuse is shared by leaders in Israel, the chief US ally in the conflict. Benjamin Netanyahu has compared Iran to the Amalekites, a biblical people associated with pure evil whom God commands the Israelites to utterly annihilate.

There is, of course, a long history of apocalyptic religious language being used in war. Armies like to think they fight not just with weapons but also with the support of God. Religious language provides an illusory moral clarity that allows violence to be justified.

Ibrahim Abusharif, an associate professor at Northwestern University in Qatar, told Al Jazeera that religious framing “carries risks: once a war is cast in sacred language, political compromise becomes harder, expectations become higher, and the global perception of the conflict can shift in ways that complicate diplomacy.”

Even George W. Bush, hardly a paragon of diplomatic tactfulness, was capable of understanding, after a little tutoring, the danger of apocalyptic language. After the 9/11 terrorist attack, he talked about the need for a “crusade.” When it was explained to Bush that evoking the crusades would make Muslims think he wanted to wage a holy war of conquest, he refrained from using that word again.

One way to describe Trump’s Iran attack is that it is Bush’s bellicose foreign policy waged without even a minimum of diplomatic effort or persuasive skill. Noting the rise of religious language by US politicians, Vali Nasr, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, argues, “This may be an act of desperation to explain a war plan gone wrong to Americans, but the more [the] US casts this as a holy war and another crusade, the more it is making it a regional conflict, enraging Muslims far beyond the region.” This is the real danger: that Trumpist rhetoric of a holy war might convince the broader Islamic world that the Christian West is the enemy. If that happens, what is already a large regional conflict will truly spiral out of control into a new era of global strife.