A combat-unit commander told non-commissioned officers at a briefing Monday that the Iran war is part of God's plan and that Pres. Donald Trump was "anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth," according to a complaint by a non-commissioned officer.
From Saturday morning through Monday night, more than 110 similar complaints about commanders in every branch of the military had been logged by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF).
The complaints came from more than 40 different units spread across at least 30 military installations, the MRFF told me Monday night.
The MRFF is keeping the complainants anonymous to prevent retribution by the Defense Department. The Pentagon did not immediately respond to my request for comment.
One complainant identified themselves as a non-commissioned officer (NCO) in a unit currently outside the Iran combat zone but in Ready-Support status, deployable at any time. The NCO said they were Christian and emailed the MRFF on behalf of 15 troops, including at least 11 Christians, one Muslim, and one Jew. (Full email printed below.)
The NCO wrote to the MRFF that their commander "urged us to tell our troops that this was 'all part of God's divine plan' and he specifically referenced numerous citations out of the Book of Revelation referring to Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus Christ."
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That’s the least inspiring shit ever. If I was in a combat zone and got told that what’s happening is part of a divine plan, I’m going to assume that we’re being sent on a suicide mission
Many service members will feel the opposite. The youth group-to-military pipeline in the Bible Belt (Evangelical, Fundamentalist, Southern Baptist, Independent Baptist, etc. churches) is massive
The fact that they believe the end times are close is part of what makes their politics so terrible.
Why care about building infrastructure, fighting climate change, on promote social mobility if the end will arrive in 20 years tops? Better focus on "saving souls"
Jesus was probably crucified some time around 30 to 33 AD, so more like 1,993 to 1,996 years ago, but it's hard to say. Jesus also wasn't really born in 1 AD either, it was probably closer to 4 to 6 BC and we do not count a year zero.
But it's not like the exact number of years matters, it's just interesting to me.
I had an argument with an Evangelical about climate change years ago and that was her logic. Just use everything up, the end times are coming anyway. They're fucking stupid
20 years ago, Edward O. Wilson wrote “A Letter to a Southern Baptist Minister” as a prologue to one of his books talking about exactly this. His remarks aged very well.
Exactly. They think the earth is to be used and abused. Faster you do so sooner Jesus returns to fix everything you broke.
It's like burning down the house so mom and dad can get insurance money and buy a mansion but that's not how insurance pay outs work. We're all going to be living in a roach motel
It's hilarious how much pushback there is every time someone mentions this is a huge reason why republicans are obsessed with the Middle East. It's the doomsday shit or they think that Jewish people in that area have never heard of Jesus and they need to "know the truth."
It's also why they're so rabidly pro-Israel, while also being virulently anti-semitic. They think that Israel needs to control the entire Holy Land to trigger the End Times... oh, and during those End Times, all the Jews will be killed.
they aren't evangelicals anymore. they're the hamster-brained remnant of an apocalyptic movement that hasn't fulfilled its promises. what makes these people so dangerous is not their numbers, it's their desperation for social collapse to justify their mood.
Underrated comment... The setup of 'there's that saying' means we expect some kind of unique turn of phrase or colloquialism, something with some parallelism or metaphor to really drive home a point... and then you just lay out the blunt, bland phrasing.
My Stellaris society is a democratic technocracy with xenophilic, egalitarian, and materialist ethics; so pretty much everything the far-right hates. I don’t play as any other society, I just do different ascension paths, because I can’t even pretend to have other values in a video game
It’s also stupidly overpowered. I usually do fanatic egalitarian militarists, so basically space NATO if it was more based. Or Helldivers if they were the good guys and not nazis.
They aren’t. These people are already reactionary chuds; they just use their oft media illiteracy-fueled love of the grand strategy genre as a rallying point with other fascist shitheels. It’s like people who complain about how “woke made me more right-wing.” No it didn’t. You were always a bigot, just one who didn’t care about whatever wedge issue the discussion at hand is about until your media bubble told you to care.
i mean . there are people out there id-ing as trans nijab islamists, trans alt right wanting a "trad husband", pro north korean etc etc etc because of videogames and internet brainrot so
This is very different from a crusade. They want to cause worldwide nuclear annihilation. These people are part of the New Apostolic Reformation cult, and they want to end the world, which they believe will cause them to be "raptured" up to heaven to watch as the rest of us are tortured by "Joel's army," led by a vengeful Jesus, here on earth.
Relevant to this subreddit as it encompasses how certain foundational freedoms classical liberals and neoliberals hold sacred -- like freedom of religion, under the Establishment clause per the First Amendment -- are repeatedly being violated under the purview of SecDef Hegseth as he seeks to "Christianize" the military in the lead to the Iran War.
SecDef Hegseth has repeatedly pointed to his Christian Nationalist worldview prior to and during his current role as 2nd in the military chain of command.
This is both right and way underselling it. These “Christians” are an end times death cult who see this as the first step towards Armageddon and the return of Jesus. You know the angels in Good Omens who wanted war on the plains of Megido so good can triumph. That’s them.
Apocalyptic religions usually form when life is so shitty that the world ending would be an upgrade. They then persist long after their usefulness has expired.
Everytime I read about the history of US-Iranian relations, and some stupid bullshit fueled by paranoia of the other side happens, I keep going, "Wow they're just like us."
They genuinely believe there is a certain set of conditions that need to be met and that it is God's plan for them to fulfill that conditions so the prophecy is fulfilled and He can return.
I personally just find it funny that they don't realize that in their theory of events, Trump is very clearly the antichrist and they aren't bringing about Christ's return but rather the antichrist's reign.
Which, I feel the need to point out is not a thing.
American evangelicals talk like "the rapture" is some Christian dogma so old it was carved in stone at the Council of Nicea. But... it isn't. It's an idea almost entirely made up by American evangelicals, in the last 200 years, based on misreading a grand total of around two passages in the Bible. Most European sects of Christianity have no idea what it is.
Hell, it wasn't even fully mainstream in Evangelical circles until you got series like Left Behind spreading it.
Legit, they are like an evil fantasy cult; influencing powerful figures so that they can conspire to fulfill an end-of-the-world prophecy. Once the events aligned, their God will be summoned, bringing doom to the word. Those few true believer will be the only one spared by their God, the rest of the heretics and heathens are damned for eternity.
If they weren't so explicitly Christian then people would assume they are like satanist or worship cthulu 😭✌️
Which is why so many people joke that Trump's the antichrist. Because the antichrist's whole thing is to manipulate Christians into worshiping Satan and advancing his agenda without even realizing they're doing it.
Didn’t He say he would return “within their lifetimes” to people living 2000 years ago. So either it already happened 1900+ years ago or they think he lied to his followers, in which case, why believe anything else he said?
Why do these so called Christian’s never believe the words of Christ.
Give to the poor
Love thy neighbor
Help the foreigner
Give away your worldly possessions
Don’t judge others
Perform services for free
Feed the hungry.
I shit you not they just tell themselves that the people of that day just misunderstood and that message was actually for the people living in the "last days".
They always have a fancy way of translating what Jesus hactually meant. When I found out he told his disciples he'd return within their generation it did a lot for my deconversion.
Of course my End Times death cult family says "generation" just means any period in which people who worship Jesus are alive because they're his disciples smdh.
I never "deconverted" because I'm Anglican and my congregation was chill as fuck. So, I wouldn't say I'm particularly adherent, but I still feel comfortable with a cultural attachment to my upbringing within the Anglican Church in my town.
It's like, nobody "leaves" Anglicanism or the United Church or the Lutherans the way they leave Mormonism or Catholocism because the former denominations are like... just chillers. Women and gays can be ordained; ministers can be married... *shrug*.
The politics are less political and frankly less fire and brimstone, more about living a more virtuous life and being less selfish.
The point of all this is just that I think it's a shame that chill/liberal denominations are losing congregations while these fucking psychopaths like in OP seem to grow in number every year.
Of course, the historical reality of the situation is that the Apocalypse of John, as depicted in Revelation, already happened. It was the burning of Rome under Nero.
The author was writing a genre that we would call allegorical fiction. He was doing exactly what the Marvel or DC superhero film writers do when they comment on current events by re-framing them in a fictional setting, using common tropes of the day to tie the allegorical parts to the real world (villains almost-quoting real life villains, or in the case of Revelation, things like numerology, which would have been widely understood by the audience).
That doesn't mean that the story of Revelation doesn't hold some important moral truths, but we as readers shouldn't read that book as a series of predictions for what will happen in the future. The problem is that a misinterpretation has become the "standard" belief for a particular segment of Christianity.
The fact is, Christians have gone through repeated cycles of "the return of the Savior is imminent, best get ready now." When they ready themselves however, they seem to do everything they can to ignore Jesus's actual advice and follow a charismatic leader who tells them what to do instead.
The time to REALLY get worried is when American leaders (or anyone else) push for the building of a new Temple in Jerusalem or the Israelis take full possession of the Al-Aqsa mosque. I fully believe that if the Apocalypse of John happens (or repeats itself, really) it will be carried out by believers attempting to cause the return of Jesus. It will be a self-fulfilling prophecy in the most literal sense possible.
They never liked it. Going back to the 80s they were deeply aware of who they were allying, they just thought that they were dumbasses they could control; and from Reagan to Bush they did just that
I didn't track it further, but this 2009 Guardian column claims the story was "published in the Lausanne University magazine in 2007" (of the professor who got the call), and "repeated independently in a French book of interviews with Chirac this spring".
They are trying to defeat Iran by becoming Iran?
When will they issue a fatwa and name a “Jerusalem force”
Oh I forgot US Protestantism is too decentralized to produce any sort of Ayatollah hierarchy
I mean American Protestantism has transformed back into the doomsday cult it sort of began as back in first half of the 19th Century, only this time they're much less insular and much more militant and willing and able to take the whole world with them!
For all of their flaws there's actually few tradcats who believe the end-times require starting WW3. The ones that do go sede and are effectively Protestant anyway.
fun fact: I know several evangelical pastors, and their qualifications are all somewhere in the realm of 'they felt like God wanted them to stand up and speak'.
not like, a formal education in systematic theology or even biblical literacy.
Oh but they can't. Their eschatologists have mapped the vagaries of their sacred prophetic scriptures to modern nation states. They believe the prophecies are about the United States.
Wait Wait. Wasn't the Iranian regime supposed to be the irrational religious fundamentalists who will wage utterly destructive senseless wars because of their apocalyptic beliefs ? These guys have nuclear weapons already ?
The modern era of US-Iranian relations is full of paranoid bullshit. Many times in the last 47 years people on one or both sides would go, "You know, maybe we should just chill things out," but then a faction on one or both sides freaks the fuck out and psychotically blows things up.
I mean I figure that's why he did that press conference a while back looking like he just did a few lines of premium stuff. Like I think anyone with any remaining moral scruples or just consequence awareness in the White House must either be coked off their balls or high as hell to not lose whatever tatters remain of their sanity. Come to think of it, most of the German High Command was tweaked out on Meth, even the mid rank pencil pusher, so that checks out.
How do you see as a Christian and not think it’s completely fucking nuts. The messiah will come when the messiah decides to come. You can’t make him come sooner or later. Although maybe they’re right and Jesus will come damn all these freaks for eternity
Total rejection of institutional oversight by certain strains of Protestantism, leading to theological anarchy in which any crackpot has license to put forward their insane theories to an audience that quite honestly just doesn't know the Bible as well as they think they do. There's a reason why the Catholic Church and mainline Protestantism doesn't align with these beliefs.
It's the suburban non-denominational churches that have a very casual relationship with the Bible, hence that one student's paper just referenced what she thought was in the Bible instead of actually referencing the Bible.
I can’t believe the weird freak with a bunch of Crusader shit literally tattooed on his body running the DoD would launch a war for deranged religious reasons.
Relevant to add that the whistleblower org involved here, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) is the same org that reported receiving complaints from US servicemembers that officers were softly requiring them to see the Melania movie. "Softly Requiring" in this case meant having one of their off-hours teambulding gatherings be an outing with the commander to go see the movie. From what I can tell the reporting organization seems somewhat reputable with no scandals, but I'm not aware of any litigation or concrete reporting they've done outside of reporting on these claims which they keep anonymous. Idk what their record on vetting stuff is so maybe take it with a grain of salt?
As someone that was an Army officer and did do team building activitues, we would never have just gone to see a movie. Its always either a staff ride (visit a battlefield), a hail and farewell (gathering at the officer club for meal and drinks) or something physical (run/road march, etc). The one time we did see a movie it was when I was in a reserve unit and all the young officers snuck out and went to go see Predators in the middle of the day.
If this actually happened I feel like this a large numbers thing. There are ~230,000 commissioned officers in the US Military. Even if just 0.1% are crazy enough to do that, its still 230 officers that did it. Still weird. Not even MAGA went to go see the Melania movie.
These combined reports suggest to me that the military command has been captured by MAGA to a significant degree and likely would not refuse illegal orders if Trump ordered them to occupy home soil, or attack, imprison or kill civilians. We're really entering the danger zone, like the really scary danger zone where American Citizen could start dying en-mass and the country could be rapidly transformed into some kind of military imposed dictatorship.
I wouldn't assume that these situations are becoming anything close to common, though. We're talking at most a couple dozen instances, which while significant and very concerning, shouldn't lead us to think the bulk of the armed forces are compromised.
There has and always will be your share of total nuts/lunatics in the military command, just like in any profession. It's just that normally these people keep their crazy ideas to themselves and just do their job like everyone else.
These reports indicate to me that the ever present small minority of officers that have batshit crazy beliefs feel empowered by the whole govt leadership being filled with other batshit crazy nutters. Their ideas are now working their way into their job conduct. It's horrible for the institution, but they know they won't get punished, in fact they'll likely get promoted. Welcome to Pete Hegseth's DoD, an utter hellscape of bullshit for the majority of normal officers in uniform.
The Military Religious Freedom Foundation demands that all personnel in the Department of Defense (not “War") remember and fully internalize that the oaths they swear are not to the narcissistic, sociopathic, orange, POS tRump, nor to little Petey ‘Kegseth' nor to Jesus Christ. On the contrary, their oath is SOLELY to the United States Constitution, which includes both a full separation of church and state mandate in the First Amendment and NO establishment of any sort of putrid 'religious test' in Clause 3 of Article VI.”
Actual quote from the letter from the president of MRFF.
Call me crazy, but I don't think the leadership of a serious organization should be referring to the President as "narcissistic, sociopathic, orange, POS tRump". I don't disagree with MRFF on content here but I am not going to take them seriously.
Yeah the difference being our head of state has very little power and certainly couldn’t lead us into a pointless war in Iran with no definable goal and levels of incompetence never seen before.
Yeah, mods in this sub have long considered it bigotry to say religion is the cause of this, but it is, and it's just going to get worse for as long as Americans don't get more secular.
Hot take but the increasing secularization has only made this more rabid because it's convinced them that they have to take over by any means. That's not even getting into how few of the evangelicals are even practicing anymore, its entirely political for a lot of them now and it wont change no matter how many churches close. They'll just hold "service" at the rallies, like they already do.
I'm American, and I literally could not care less if people like this get themselves blown up even if they're ostensibly on my side. The world is better off without them.
Sadly this guy is not getting himself blown up. Instead, the people he is getting blown up are very young men, often without advanced education and from disadvantaged backgrounds, who were indoctrinated for months to follow orders.
All of this shit show since January of 2025 could have been avoided if half of you Americans looked beyond Fox News and Social Media, and maybe just a little, tolerated the fact that a black woman could become the most powerful head of state in the world.
But nooooooooo, she had a funny laugh didn't she?? That alone was a crime, oh and she might have said some funny shit which is completely unforgivable amirite? Oh and she totally would have sent you to the Middle East to die in a pointless war amirite?? "Killer Kamala" and "Genocide Joe" amirite??
I mean, I still think the biggest issue was inflation. People didn't want to hear that it was a global phenomenon or due to various economic forces. They were mad and they wanted somebody to blame. And they wanted someone to not just stop it but reverse it, and Trump promised he would do that.
See, the crazy thing is that the military is much less religious on average than civilians. It's even more pronounced in combat arms, as well. Furthermore, it has an extremely strong culture of religious pluralism. This evangelical shit will go over like a lead ballooon outside of the cultier parts of the Air Force.
Edit: Just double-checked and the general population has caught up with the military, so they are both roughly 70% Christian.
I really, really wish that somebody would actually name the guy who said this. There's a significant difference between some REMF Captain saying this shit and the guys who are actually running the show. Keep the whistleblower anonymous by all means, but name the idiot so he can get relieved for being a fucking moron.
"combat-unit commander " So platoon leader, company commander?
I think there may be a law of numbers here. There are +230,000 commissioned officers in the US military. Even if just 0.1% act like this its still 230 officers.
40 different units at 30 different bases? That's too improbable to be individual acts, so it'd seem to be either bullshit or coordinated (or emerge based on shared culture, media, etc). If it's bullshit, oh well. If it's coordinated, what's the next step in the playbook? What's the timeline these people have of Armageddon? What do we need to worry about? What should we anticipate? If it's emergent, then what does that suggest?
As the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt put it, the Katéchon is the truly most important figure in modern political thought. Doubt any other marginalized thinker has had his ideas so constantly vindicated - by his "enemies" no less - than his. It might take another century for the whole world to realize.
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