Holy + War = Antonyms

How cults of extreme beliefs are bringing our world to the brink.

As we continue to brace for impact in another illegal, immoral, and costly war, let’s stop pretending God has anything to do with it.

The trouble is: leaders in Iran, Israel, and the USA all claim the Divine is on their side.

While Pete Hegseth leads prayer meetings at the Pentagon, asking Jesus to “break the teeth of our enemies,” he and many white Christian Nationalists are gunning for the final conflagration—praying that this war will lead to Armageddon and the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.

William Blake, The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun (illustrating the Book of Revelations).

The Book of Revelation should not be used as a geopolitical roadmap.

The First Amendment’s separation of church and state—that much-needed “wall” our third president, Thomas Jefferson, helped establish in the Constitution—ideally protects both the church and the state from ideological cross-contamination.

It’s a good idea for many reasons, not only because such a demarcation would set the US apart from corrupt rulers who have used religion to mask authoritarian governments for millennia.

But Hegseth and untold numbers of fellow believers at every level of the Armed Forces seem to think differently, as evidenced by the numerous reports of Biblical language used to embolden our troops when the war began.

Beth Daly, editor of The Conversation, writes:

This war is not primarily about religion. But leaders on all sides have used religion to justify their actions. Not for decades have political leaders of all three major Abrahamic faith traditions invoked parts of their respective traditions to legitimise war in this way. The way faith and religious scripture and doctrine have been used by the US and Israel to justify launching their war in Iran is a worrying development, and one that highlights the growing relationship between religion and authoritarian nationalism.

The Islamic Republic of Iran has used extreme religious beliefs to fuel their cruel and autocratic rule since rising to power in 1979. Still, let’s not forget that the CIA and MI6 set the stage for the IRI to take over that once vibrant country by overthrowing the democratically elected Prime Minister Mossadegh and installing the Shah in 1953.

After the bombs took out their supreme leader Khomeini, the IRI’s calls for a “sacred defense of the homeland,” have been bolstered, as they cast Trump a logo-land loser:

By launching another ill-conceived war of choice, the United States and Israel have played into the hands of Islamic extremists: they’ve helped a repressive regime that brutally killed tens of thousands of peaceful protesters earlier this year, reinforce the mask of being Allah’s true defenders.

The US and Israeli bombings will no doubt fuel new waves of radicalization among militant Islamist groups. They will strengthen the narrative that western powers are waging war against Islam itself.

This belief is mirrored in the propaganda that all of Islam seeks the installation of Shaira law in the West, along with the destruction of Israel.

The reality is, while they make up more than 25% of the world’s population, the majority of the world’s two billion Muslims, like the majority of Jews and Christians, simply want to practice their religion in peace. (The proof? Were this not the case, believers would have annihilated each other several times over.)

War gives extremists groups great recruitment boosts. Religious propaganda is fueled by images of bombed schools and grieving families, bolstering claims that God calls the faithful to resist.

Righteous anger feeds violence.

But anger is not the only emotion at play here. There is also grief.

Grief for the journalists, medical workers and thousands of innocent children caught in the crosshairs. Grief for the Israeli families murdered on October 7th. Grief for Palestinians buried under the rubble of Gaza. Grief for scores of Ukrainian and Russian dead. Grief for US soldiers returning in flag-draped coffins.

Grief for endless war.

This is not the first time the United States ends up looking like the bad guy. From Vietnam to Iraq, from covert Cold War interventions to the catastrophic invasion of Iraq in 2003, we’ve repeatedly chosen military interventions over sustained, concerted diplomatic and humanitarian efforts.

Each time our politicians said the bombs were necessary. Each time we discover that wars are not so easily won.

Because war does not end when the bombs stop falling.

The trauma of war burrows into the psyche of a people. The wounds of one conflict all too often end up fueling the next.

The 20th century offers brutal examples. The Treaty of Versailles economically crippled Germany after World War I. Those wounds were exploited by Adolf Hitler, who weaponized them to build the genocidal machinery of the Holocaust.

The Middle East has its version of this tragic pattern. The creation of Israel addressed one of the greatest moral crimes in human history—the genocide of Europe’s Jews. But the geopolitical process by which Israel was established did not adequately safeguard the Palestinian people already living on that land. An atrocity was answered by another people’s displacement.

That unresolved injustice has festered for decades. Israeli hardliners point to violent Islamist rhetoric as proof that a two-state solution is impossible. Islamist militants point to occupation and bombardment as proof that coexistence is impossible.

And beneath it all lies a deeper delusion: the inability to recognize the humanity of the other. Once ideological belief—religious or national—becomes justification for undermining the human rights of entire populations, the sacred has been lost.

Much of what is called holy war is actually power dressed up as religion.

And let’s be honest: America’s long list of military interventions over the past seventy years has had more to do with economic and strategic interests than with the lofty ideals of liberty or democracy. So too, militant Islamist movements are not actually fighting for Allah. They are fighting for control.

So what’s the antidote?

By attacking religious freedom, we end up emboldening religious extremism.

We have to change the framework and tell a more compelling spiritual story. The most promising one humanity has developed so far is the idea of universal human rights.

It’s not a new idea: Cyrus hinted at it when he freed the slaves after conquering Babylon in 539 BC. Confucius and Islam contributed to it by calling for social responsibility and human dignity. The Magna Carta claimed that even kings were subject to the laws of the people.

Then, after 60 million people died in World War II, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted in 1948 at the United Nations.

Imagine where we’d be today had the US taken a fraction of the grotesque amounts of money spent on the Military Industrial Complex and, instead, used it to consistently uphold human rights around the world.

Every human life deserves dignity.

Not because they belong to a particular nation. Not because they belong to a particular race or religion. Simply because they are human.

Human right are considered “universal and inalienable; indivisible; interdependent and interrelated.” It’s worth reading the 30 core declarations here.

When more governments ensure their people have clean air, food, water, and access to education, healthcare, and the pursuit of happiness on a livable planet, extremism will eventually lose its attraction.

We all live on this one precious planet in a universe of uninhabitable ones— that’s miraculous enough.

The spiritual work of our time is to evolve beyond the ancient temptation to divide people into the “chosen” and the “other.”

To stop believing that if we win, God is on our side, and if we lose, God is punishing us. I believe that God created all of us and this wondrous planet. It’s time we protect the Earth and all of life, and to treat each other as children of God.

Now is the time to know

That all that you do is sacred.

Now, why not consider
A lasting truce with yourself and God.

Now is the time to understand
That all your ideas of right and wrong
Were just a child’s training wheels
To be laid aside
When you finally live
With veracity
And love.

~Haviz

If enough of us insist on our governments safeguarding human rights—across every border and in every religion—then perhaps the wreckage of so many unholy wars can be swept into the dustbin of history.

Then we may finally usher in, not a paradise or some otherworldly heaven on Earth, but a messy, complicated, wounded world spinning, relentlessly, towards the light.

A world where dignity, freedom, and the pursuit of happiness belongs to everyone.

The question we need to be asking is not how God could allow evil to exist but rather how men are allowed to do evil in the name of God.

I’ll see you on the streets tomorrow for No Kings.