Armageddon is the word used to describe the final battle between good and evil at the end of the world as described in the Book of Revelation in the Bible. As the US and Israel continue their catastrophic war on Iran, the word has surfaced in the rhetoric around US President Donald Trump and among some military commanders in what is always described in American popular culture as “the world’s greatest army”.

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation in the US has received hundreds of complaints about some of its commanders suggesting that this is a biblically sanctioned war that is leading to the end times—invoking a set of beliefs in the Bible that claim the world ends before God establishes a new divine order. The US President has also ensured that the world sees images of various pastors praying for his victory in the war.

US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who comes across as an action figure from an animation strip, is a Christian fundamentalist. The former host of a show on Fox TV brings his interpretation of Christianity to the Pentagon, reads prayers in office, invokes biblical imagery to showcase war, and uses insults to describe Iran.

But so does the US President, who also said that he may bomb Kharg Island “just for fun”. Hegseth’s appointment is not without design in the Trump administration and is reflective of the ongoing culture wars in the US. Defence arms have been removing transgender personnel and shutting down diversity initiatives. Critics worry that the boundaries between church and state are being blurred in the US military and this could also impact the nature of new recruits to the services. One of the preachers whose videos Hegseth has shared believes women should not join the workplace. All this is grotesquely ironical given that one of the stated missions of the US bombing of Afghanistan and now Iran was to “rescue” their women.

Search for an external enemy

The right-wing, male chauvinist, Christian fundamentalist energy of these figures has now been channelised in search of external enemies. This could have become all the more pressing once the Epstein files were released. We are therefore back to the familiar clash of a civilisational war with “big bad evil Muslim fanatics” as the current enemy of the US.

Ironically, Iran is an Islamic state, but it has deliberately and repeatedly stated that the war is being run by the “Epstein Gang”, a phrase it seeks to frame beyond paedophilia to refer to an elite cabal of capitalist forces seeking to colonise the region and the world. From the beginning of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the narrative of US companies toppling and installing regimes in oil-rich Iran has existed in rhetoric, and since then it refers to the US as Shaitan (Satan), a word familiar to many Indians.

On March 16, Iran’s top security official, Ali Larijani, released a statement saying that Iran was subjected to deceptive American-Zionist aggression during negotiations, the goal of which was to dismantle the country. The nation, he said, continues on the path of resistance against the Great Satan (the US) and Little Satan (Israel); he called for greater unity among Muslim states. He also noted that “no Islamic government had stood alongside the people of Iran except in rare cases and limited to political positions”.

On March 17, Israel announced that Larijani had been “eliminated” in a strike on Tehran. Israel, the strategist behind this war, is founded on the basis of biblical prophecies about a chosen people and a promised land. It is a democracy but a state that prioritises Jewish people, with the original settlers, Muslim and Christian Palestinians, not given equal rights. Israel has always used religious imagery, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu frequently using the phrase “Amalek”, or perennial enemy, in language drawn from the Hebrew Bible.

There is also the Greater Israel project, which refers to the idea that the Jewish state should extend over a much larger territory. This draws from passages in the Hebrew Bible that speak of a divinely promised land to the descendants of Abraham. For some Zionist settlers, this is a religiously ordained project.

Across the world, political ideologies draw from religious identities. Hindutva, for example, positions itself as a Hindu-first construct that is inimical to Muslims. Its followers have an ideological affinity with Israel because it has displaced, bulldozed, and killed thousands of Muslims (and some Christian Palestinians) in a manner that has been labelled genocidal.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi took a calculated risk by visiting Israel and showering effusive praise on Netanyahu just days before the attack on Iran. It is entirely plausible that beyond the fact of the Adani group’s investments in Israel’s Haifa port, there were more pressing psychological and ideological factors at work.

First, it can be argued that the Indian Prime Minister was misled by whosoever advised him, including the Israelis, whose surveillance and intelligence systems are now deeply embedded. But whatever counsel he received, at some point the leader did choose to step away from multilateralism and stand by a side whose ideological arc fits well with Hindutva, one that forms a compact with Zionist and Christian fundamentalists.

Second, that the war is being waged against a Muslim nation would appeal to cadres of the BJP/RSS. Third, there are other psychological factors that could have contributed to Modi’s trust in Netanyahu and inability to stand up to Trump’s bullying. The Indian Prime Minister is from Gujarat, a State where the upwardly mobile view the US as the ultimate destination in life, which they seek to enter legally or illegally, even at risk to life. Modi’s ideological roots in the RSS also suggest that it is unlikely he will have any organic understanding of India’s civilisational links with Persia (Iran) that Jawaharlal Nehru wrote about eloquently.

During Modi’s visit, Netanyahu declared that Israel plans to build a network of allied nations in or around West Asia to stand against what he called “radical adversaries”. The intention, he said, was to create an axis of nations to stand against both “the radical Shia axis” and the “emerging radical Sunni axis”. The Indian Prime Minister seemed enthusiastic about everything the Israeli Prime Minister said then. Now that this has not turned out to be a quick war and we are running short of essential fuels, India is doing some recalibration.

We are therefore in the midst of a war where postures suggest that the destruction of a Muslim nation is a religious crusade. The invocation of biblical narratives and promised lands, of ancient enemies and divine justice, adds a theological layer to what is fundamentally a war for territory, oil, security, and world power. Or should we say this war is about nothing beyond the whims of a President and the strategies deployed by a Prime Minister?

Interestingly, the compact between Zionist and Christian fundamentalists does not hold beyond the end times. At the level of theology, in many interpretations, once the prophecy is fulfilled, the alliance collapses and each side seeks the ultimate triumph of its own faith and the annihilation or subjugation of the other.

Saba Naqvi is a Delhi-based journalist and author of four books who writes on politics and identity issues.

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