“Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?’
And I said, ‘Here am I. SEND ME!’”
— Isaiah 6:8
Frankly, this is a shocking association of the US military with religion. I've warned here that the US is in the thick of an Administration that features individuals in it who who hold minoritarian Evangelical views well outside the mainstream of Christianity, and further that were introduced rather late in Christian history. Unfortunately, the United States, which is a Protestant country, is basically the epicenter of such views and many Protestants don't realize their views are not held by most of the globes Christians, most of whom are Apostolic Christians.
Included in that set of views, for some, is the concept that Christians can help bring about the Second Coming and, in some quarters, that the United States is a nation directly charged with a Devine Mission.
The military is definitely suffering right now, with some elements of the Navy having morale problems and a war going on which the administration repeatedly claims we've won, but which drags on. The current hope is that economic sanctions will bring Iran to its knees but none of the predictions about the war have proven correct so far.
Not one.
One way to definitely end the war would be to commit ground troops. It'd also be a bloody mess.
These recruiting blurbs do not indicate a commitment to inserting ground troops, but they do demonstrate a frightening mix of religion with foreign policy. We are not Crusaders and frankly Crusaders would have regarded American Evangelicals as weird heretics. The fact that the government sends out a message like this should be alarming, and it should be offensive to Christians, Muslims and Jews, all of whom regard Isaiah as a prophet.
Indeed, when Isaiah spoke those words, he wasn't asking to be sent into combat. He was being sent as a prophet.
The military should never be committed to an immoral cause, but we should not imagine that every time it has been committed the commitment met Christian standards. None of the military actions taken during the Second Trump Administration do. They most particularly do not under the reconsideration of the Just War Theory made by Pope Leo.
What Parnell did here is wrong on so many levels. Christians should be horrified.
I've been saying for awhile, and statements like this really demonstrate it:
It looks like President Trump has a better understanding of what the Bible teaches than the Pope.
Robert Jeffress, senior pastor of the 14,000-member First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas on Fox News.
That comment was stupid. But then, he's called Catholicism a cult.
The Catholic Church is an Apostolic Church. It was founded by Christ. John Smyth, an Englishman, founded the Baptists in 1609.
Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus is a Catholic doctrine. There is no salvation outside the Church. None the less, the Church holds that those who did not come to Christ innocently, or those who did not come to the Church innocently, can be saved, which operates again through the Church. You can't be held responsible for what you innocently didn't know.
But what about here?
We're in the death throws of the reformation. Things Smyth could get away with believing in 1609 there's no excuse to believe now, other than invincible ignorance.
Being a pastor of a 14,000 member church puts a pretty heavy burden on you and your soul for remaining ignorant.
Smyth is also a Fox News contributor, which really figures.
As an irony here, although one he will not be capable, right now, of appreciating, Smyth has gone after Mormons, Jews, and Muslims as well. In normal times, he would not have a national television audience. He would have a local Dallas one as Texas is part of the former Confederacy and the Baptist rose in the wake of the Southern defeat in 1865, replacing the Episcopal Church in the South as the dominant religion culturally. Nationally, however, picking on Jews, Muslims, Catholics and Mormons would get you booted off of television.
Religious aspects of this aside, this brings up a political one I've warned about here repeatedly.
Catholics voting for MAGA candidates are voting for a group that not only doesn't regard the Church highly, they don't believe it's a Christian religion at all. People like Lyin' Chuck Gray, Reid Rasner and Megan Degenfelder, who are Catholics who run as MAGA are making a political bargain that will cause them, as it seems to have already for Lyin' Chuck to decide between their faiths, and their political fortunes. Degenfelder has signs up all over which say "Endorsed by President Trump".
They should say "Endorsed by Blasphemous Donald Trump".
And this isn't merely esoteric. We're in the same position now that Catholic Germans were in the 1932 German election (and the Catholics in fact went for Hitler much less than German protestants did). There's really going to be no good "um, well, the other guy . . . " excuse here. The far right Evangelical edge of the Trump coalition isn't even pretending not to hate Catholics much anymore.
And what about Mormons?
Mormons include a heavy MAGA contingent, although the only really devout Mormons I know here locally right now are heavy duty Never Trumpers, and openly so. But then you have guys like Deseret Mike Lee who come pretty close to viewing Trump positively in some sort of creepy religious terms. Deep in the Jello Belt it's always been the case that there was a sort of ignorant conservatism in some quarters, and in the last 16 years, in spite of guys like Mitt Romney, it's really come out.
Trump and Islam is simply laughable as a joke. In the last election Trump drew a fair amount of Islamic support because Muslims were so mad about Joe Biden's support of Israel. Well, they got what the should have expected. The only person Trump loves more than Putin (and of course Trump) is Benjamin Netanyahu and as a result we've supported genocide in Gaza, a war in Lebanon and we helped Israel attack Iran and we can't get out of it. I suspect that most Muslims are voting for the Democrats next go around, just like most Hispanics will be (and in both instances, this really gives the Democrats a chance to evolve away from their sea of blood positions).
And this sort of thing should even be a revelation for Jews of all stripes, although I think they're more awake to what MAGA is than most. The strong Trump support for Netanyahu comes in part because Netanyahu is good at playing Trump, much like Putin is. But it also comes from people like Hegseth or Huckabee, who have a radical Protestant view of Israel and want to bring about the Second Coming of Christ basically by force, which they see current events as an opportunity in which to do so. Put another way, do you really want to get in the car with somebody who wants to drive you to a giant gun fight?
Donald Trump, of course, is sort of beyond all of this. Trump isn't any sort of serious Christian and we don't really know if he has any religious beliefs at all. Most of his life has been spent chasing cash through real estate development and his hobbies have been golf and chasing tail. Christians are just a convenient vehicle for him. If the Sultan of Oman offered him a bigger better airplane tomorrow if he'd convert to Islam, and remind him that Muslims can have more than one wife, it wouldn't surprise me a bit if he signed on. His personal conduct actually squares better with Islam than Christianity, which is after all a religion focused on the poor and duty.
In the end, all of this is going to fall apart.
Christians who aligned with Trump, just like Muslims and Mormons who did, are going to have to pay the cost. It'll be different for each. For Muslims, well their fellows are playing through blood right now. Jews will pay by the backlash that's already started.
For Christians, it'll be different, depending upon where their allegiance lay. For the ignorant members of the American Civil Religion, and for the hardcore Evangelical right, this will be the beginning of an end of an era that started in April 1865, when the South fell and the Evangelical far right stepped into its own. For the Protestant world in general, this will accelerate the death of the Reformation.
For the Catholic and Orthodox Christians who supported Trump, how could you be so blind?
Nonetheless, this will be a good thing for the Catholic and Orthodox. A delusion that started in 1960 that you could be fully American and fully Catholic, or Orthodox, has ended. National Conservatism will end with it.
Alexander Mosaic, House of the Faun, Pompeii. Alexander the Great fighting the Persians.
You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom.
Matthew, Chapter 24.
Give me the money that has been spent in war, and I will purchase every foot of land upon the globe. I will clothe every man, woman, and child in an attire that kings and queens would be proud of; I will build a school-house upon every valley over the whole habitable earth; I will supply that school house with a competent teacher; I will build an academy in every town, and endow it; a college in every state, and fill it with able Professors; I will crown every hill with a church consecrated to the promulgation of the gospel of peace; I will support in its pulpit an able teacher of righteousness, so that on every Sabbath morning the chime on one hill should answer to the chime on another, around the earth's broad circumference; and the voice of prayer and the song of praise should ascend like a universal holocaust to heaven.
Charles Sumner, c.1840
Quand les riches font la guerre, ce sont les pauvres qui meurent.
Jean Paul Sartre
March 2, 2026
The US and Israel v. Iran War.
Even before the weekend news show hits, the Administration and its GOP proxies were trying to form a theory of why the US, in concert with Israel, had attacked Iran.
Why Israel did it is fairly clear. The Islamic Republic of Iran is a mortal enemy of Israel and an existential threat. The fact that the US was going to war with Iran gave it a great opportunity. And not just Israel, according to some information that seems fairly credible, at least Saudi Arabia saw things the exact same way, sort of.
In both instances, those conflicts were religious in nature, at least form Iran's prospective. Iran sees the world in apocalyptic terms and a struggle against Israel is a part of that weltanschauung. Iran sees Saudi Arabia as representing Sunni Islam, and a virulent variant of it at that. In fact, Saudi Arabia was in fact allied internally with Wahhabism, although that's long ceased to be the case. Be that as it may, Sunni Islam and Shia Islam depart from each other radically and have been enemies since the latter first formed. For that matter, Persia and the Arabs have been enemies for ever. Persia was a major civilized empire before Islam, and it knows it. Persia, Iran, could be a great nation without Islam, and it knows that.
But what about the United States?
According to the befuddled Donald Trump we attacked Iran, because, well it was a big honking monster threat to us. The thing is, that dog didn't really hunt.
Two Salukis, Persian hounds, painted by the Xuande Emperor of China (1399–1435)
They were going to have a nuclear weapons, Donny told us, with in the next two weeks. But then, it was realized, that would mean the befuddled Donny, dressed like a toddler in his trucker's cap, had been wrong when he told us that we'd bombed Iran back to the nuclear stone age in what is now being called the Twelve Day War.
Oops.
Well, explanations for that being wrong, other than Trump Is Always Wrong, needed to be found, as the GOP mantra worships Trump almost as much as Trump worships Trump.
They were fibbing in negotiations over the nuclear weapons program we destroyed was tried next, was the next thing.
They were going to have missiles that could hit the US was tried, but it was pretty quickly revealed that at some point they might, but it would be years from now, plenty of time to go to Congress and ask for a declaration of war. Well, they were going to have missiles that could hit Europe, which is much more credible, but the problem is that the Europeans, whom we've been telling need to fend for themselves, have had a "m'eh" reaction to that. The country that really can hit Europe with missiles, and has a demonstrated ability to do it, Russia, which Trump has a crush on so large that it probably looms larger in his nighttime dreams than Melania, who of course is mostly in New York, helicoptering over Barron, whom we might note will not be joining the Armed Forces to serve in this war, putting him in good company with the ancestral Trumps. Since Frederick Trump first set foot in the United States, the Trumps have missed the Spanish American War, the Philippine Insurrection, World War One, World War Two, the Korean war and the Vietnam War, a record few American families could match, including my own.*
Anyhow, that dog wasn't going to hunt either, so a new one had to be developed.
Neapolitan Mastiff. Indeed, the modern foundational Neapolitan Mastiff. Mastiffs are war dogs, of the "let slip the dog's of war" type. The only one I've been personally familiar with was enormously cowardly.
Finally, the "they've been at war with us for forty seven years" thesis was come up with.
Well, I'll give whoever came up with that some credit. There's really something to it. Iran's Shia clerical state has been at war with the rest of the world for more or less something like forty years.
Which raises this point. Up until now it was just our strategy to wait that out. . . and it was working pretty well.
Cleary, things had not reached a point where all of a sudden we needed to go to war on an emergency basis with Iran. And under the U.S. Constitution, this excuse is complete horseshit. In order to deploy force like this, in this way, we would have had to have been suddenly attacked.
We weren't.
This was completely illegal.
Not only that, it was highly ill advised. If Iran has been plotting against us for 47 years, it's had plenty of time to prepare for this day, and so far, it's been fighting back pretty well. Our burn rate of high tech munitions is unsustainable. It's burn rate on missiles might frankly not be. And its allied, for all practical purposes, with Russia. We're allied with Israel, which frankly depends on us for military support.
This was not smart.
We're going to be hit domestically. Iran is capable of waging an asymmetric war and will. It may have started that, in Austin, today. It's believed that it has targeted Trump in the past. If so, it will now, and there's no reason to believe it'll only target Trump.
The irony is, of course, that its likely not Trump who causes this to occur. While not meaning this to sound the way it might, Israel, knowing that Trump is a demented fool, may very well have played the sad bloated corpse of the once playboy, now hoping for redemption and to be remembered, twit. Saudi Arabia may very well have as well. And then there's Pete Hegseth and Mike Huckabee, holding variant of Christian beliefs that Apostolic Christians, back during the Crusades, would have regarded as heretical. They may have thrown us into a holy war that we'll pay for, for decades.
At least it will be an American Evangelical Protestant Crusade. Due to the Black Legends, a common Protestant, and then atheist, argument stopper has been "what about the Crusades".
Well, MAGA, now you are the Crusader you imagined we were, even though we were never that.
At the end of the day, nobody publicly knows why we attacked Iran. The best guess is that it's a combination of Neo Conservatives (Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz), foreign influence (Israel and Saudi Arabia) and far right Evangelicals trying to being about the end of the world (Huckabee and Hegseth).
All brought about illegally and through influence on a very weak mind, that being Donald Trump's.
Oh, 150 Iranian school girls were murdered for this.
May the perpetual light shine upon them. Some of them were probably Christian.
Pete Hegseth, cultural warrior.
Heavily tatted Pete Hegseth, emblazed with Crusader images, but whom the Catholics of the Crusades, and the Orthodox through whose lands the Crusaders traveled would have regarded as a weird heretic, was busy, just before Donny launched a war against Iran, in the Culture Wars.
First, he engaged in a skirmish with wokeism and the Boy Scouts.
We're not completely unsympathetic with this. We've noted this cultural zeitgeist before.
It does seem to us, quite frankly, that the Boy Scouts, which we have very little personal connection, have evolved into being somewhat less than it was. It's less manly, it seems. And it definitely isn't the example of Muscular Christianity it once was. However, it seems to be an odd thing for Hegseth, who doesn't seem to have a sports coat that fits, to be engaged in so close in time to a major war being launched. Indeed, it seems a bit odd for the Secretary of Defense to care about this at all, but maybe Boy Scout interactions with the military are greater than I suppose. I'd have had to have been a Boy Scout near a military post to know, I suppose. I know a friend of mine, who was a Scout growing up in an Air Force family in the 70s related to me that all of their leaders were Air Force members and they always had Air Force tentage when they were camping.
On a related matter, Hegseth clearly wants women out of combat roles. This war, given as its a real one, gives him the opportunity to do that. It's going to be his last opportunity as well. The political tides are shifting. In November, the opportunity will be gone.
Somebody seemed to back Hegseth down, after which he went on to picking on the Ivy League.
I frankly didn't realize that Pete's an Ivy League graduate himself. Princeton. It really surprises me.
Which brings me to this. I think, that MAGA hates education in general. They Wyoming Freedom Caucus seems to. And if Hegseth, Cruz, Trump and Chuck Gray can come out of such vaunted schools and still be so blistering ignorant as they seem to be, it really backs up my long held opinion that the Ivy League and associated schools are a dumpster fire, but not for the reason that Pete and company would hold it.
Rather, they just aren't doing a good job of educating. Look at Trump and Hegseth. It's hard to believe they have more than 5th grade education. Or Chuck Gray. He comes across like a 7th grade brat.
Diverting
Back on Trump, while I completely discounted it for a long time, it's getting hard to ignore that the US is getting into more and more grave matters as the Epstein files begin to hit closer and closer to home. The thesis that some hold that Trump is creating diversions is getting a little hard to ignore.
People keep saying, even now, that there's nothing "to implicate" Trump. Oh bull, there most certainly is. There's apparently direct testimony of his "abusing", which means screwing, a teenage girl. No, I'm not saying he did it, but the information we already have about who he hung around with is pretty damming. And his conduct with adult women has been less than admirable. Even that gets ignored, however, for no good reason. There's no reason to believe that Carol Alt is lying about being groped by Trump, for example, but people ignore it.
We've dealt with it before, but if Trump didn't have his hands in the underaged cookie jar it would have been an act of restraint for a guy who otherwise has shown no restraint. It might be time to start really looking at these claims vis a vis Epstein.
But then there's a war going on.
Speaking of underaged girls, one of the first things that happened in the war against Iran was a school was hit and 150 girls were killed.
There's always collateral damage in war, to be sure, but this war wasn't legally launched. Killing those girls, therefore, is something akin to manslaughter, if the US did it. It'll go unpunished however.
Noblis Oblige
Theodore Roosevelt's sons served in World War One, and World War Two, one winning the Congressional Medal of Honor. FDR's sons served in the Second World War. Beau Biden served in Iraq.
This war gives the Trumps to finally serve the nation. They sure haven't done so, so far. At least Eric, Tiffany and Barron are young enough to serve.
They should.
They won't.
Americans have already died in the war. Nobody who dies will be a Trump.
It's probably fairly safe to assume that most of the children of those who visited Epstein Island won't be serving in harms way.
Footnotes:
*My father served in the Korean War. One of my mother's cousins served in Vietnam and he wasn't even an American citizen. I have uncles who served in World War Two and great uncles who served in World War One, albeit in the Canadian Army. One of my Canadian uncles served in World War Two as well.
