US Administration Says It’s Bringing on Second Coming of Christ with War on Iran

The US and Israel began their war of aggression on Iran on 28 February 2026, justified on a variety of grounds that don’t add up. But what hasn’t been used as a justification in the media but is definitely influencing key figures in the Trump administration, and in particular, US secretary of war Pete Hegeseth, is that this conflict is about bringing on the end times and the second coming of Christ.

The US Military Religious Freedoms Foundation has received complaints following the outbreak of war, as military commanders have been advising troops that the war on Iran is all about causing Armageddon and the “imminent return of Jesus Christ” as per the Bible’s Book of Revelations, so this is “all part of God’s plan” and US president Donald Trump has been anointed by God for this purpose.

As current head of the Pentagon, Hegseth has brought extremist Christian fundamentalism to the role. Not only does he consider he’s bringing on Jesus Christ, but he also believes he is in a holy war against Islam. The war secretary attends the Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowship, which is an evangelical church that advocates for Christian nationalism. And Hegseth is also a staunch Christian Zionist.

The idea of an Islamic ‘holy war’, via one interpretation of ‘jihad’, is just one of many popular tropes used to demonise Muslims in the west, yet the idea that the Christian religion wages holy war isn’t even mainstream. But Hegseth’s crusader tattoos tell a different story, as they hearken back to the Medieval European Christian crusaders that attempted to reclaim the Holy Lands from the Muslims.

The Trump administration is comprised of and funded by many Jewish and Christian Zionists. And while no one is too convinced that Trump himself believes these ideas, he has a hell of a lot of backers who do.

So, if the US-Israeli rush to war on Iran appears to have the potential to bring on a war like the planet has never seen before, well, that’s the purpose.

Who are the Christian Zionists?

Prior to the 7 October 2023 Hamas incursions into Israel and the subsequent invoking of the hell that is the ongoing Gaza genocide, most Australians weren’t familiar with the term Zionist. These days, however, it’s common parlance.

But for those who are still in the dark about it, Zionism is the late 1880s European political doctrine advocating for the creation of a Jewish state on historic Palestine.

This form of Zionism can more precisely be referred to as Jewish political Zionism, as there are forms of spiritual Zionism, including Jamacia’s Rastafarian religion’s own interpretation of the Bible and Zion. However, the type of Zionism that is driving the US war machine in the Islamic Republic of Iran right now is Christian Zionism.

Christian Zionism is a blend of spiritual and political Zionism. Also known as restorationism, Christian Zionism has its origins in the 16th century Protestant Reformation and more specifically British messianic Puritan groups, with their evolving belief that Jewish people must be returned to the Holy Land, as per God’s covenant, and only when this is achieved, will the end times and Christ come on.

Lord Ashley Cooper petitioned the British foreign minister in 1840 to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. This was half a century before Jewish Hungarian journalist Theodor Herzl first proposed Jewish Zionism. This too was prior to Lord Walter Rothschild successfully petitioning then British foreign minister Arthur Balfour to promise Palestine to Europe’s Jews in the 1917 Balfour Declaration.

Since the mid-20th century rise of evangelicalism in the US and the 1948 establishment of the Jewish state of Israel in historic Palestine, Christian Zionism has taken on new vigour. Today, there are more Christian Zionists in the US, than Jewish Zionists, and these Christian proponents have made up a broad part of Trump’s supporter base, during both the 2016 and 2024 presidential elections.

The ultimate goal of the Christian Zionist is to bring on the rapture, which is an 1830s idea that involves Christ returning to Earth and taking all his believers, including the deceased, to heaven. This only happens after the Jews are returned to the Holy Lands and biblical Israel is reestablished. But as the Jews don’t believe in Christ, God will smite them at the end times, along with all nonbelievers.

Fulfilling the covenant

Executive Council of Australian Jewry co-chief executive Alex Ryvchin explained on the ABC’s National Forum this week that “Zionism is simply the support for the belief in the right of the Jewish people to exercise national self-determination in some part of our ancestral lands. It makes no specific territorial demands. It’s not to the exclusion of other national movements.”

“And it derives from the Jewish people becoming a people in that land more than 3,000 years ago. We had a state there, with the capital of Jerusalem, 3,000 years ago. We repelled occupiers and great empires, and we fought them and eventually lost our land in the second century CE to the Romans. And ever since we lost our land, we’ve sought to return to it and become a people.”

But while this might sound poetically logical in the telling, the establishment of Israel in the mid-20th century appears rather more like a settler colonial project, similar to the British invasions of the landmasses known as the US and Australia.

At the beginning of the Israeli genocide on the Palestinians of Gaza, Israeli president Bejamin Netanyahu invoked the Israelites’ biblical enemy of Amalek to describe how Israeli troops should act in the Strip. In the Bible, God commands the Israelites to murder all Amalekites, the men, women and children, of which they do, and Netanyahu likened the Iranians to the Amalekites just weeks ago.

The “promised land” that God gave to the Israelites, according to an old book, is bigger than modern day Israel. It includes parts of neighbouring nations: Lebanon, Egypt, Syria and Jordan. Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders are increasingly more honest about their aim to acquire “Greater Israel”, the promised land of the Bible, and destabilising Iran is just one part in achieving this.

US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee caused a stir last month, when he told US commentator Tucker Carlson that “it would be fine” if Israel took “essentially, the entire Middle East”, because that’s what’s set out in the Bible. Then the US diplomat qualified that the Israelis aren’t actually after the entire “promised land”, as they’re just “asking to at least take the land that they now occupy”.

A war to end all wars

US secretary of state Marco Rubio told the press on 3 March 2026 that “Iran is run by lunatics – religious fanatic lunatics. They have an ambition to have nuclear weapons. They intend to develop those nuclear weapons behind a program of missiles and drones and terrorism that the world will not be able to touch them for fear of those things.”

The justification for the illegal war of aggression launched by the US and Israel a fortnight ago is not only false, but it’s a bit rich to be calling Iranians religious fanatics, when the Trump administration is pumped up on Christian holy war, and Iranian leader Ali Khamenei, who was assassinated by the US last week, had imposed a 1990s fatwa against Iran acquiring nuclear weapons.

Jihad is a concept in the Quran that stands for “striving” or “struggling” along the path to God, and this can mean both internal spiritual efforts or external acts, like leading a virtuous life or defending Islam and the Muslim community. But “jihadism” is a late 20th century term to describe the violent struggle of extremist Muslims to restore God’s rule on Earth, an Islamic state or a caliphate.

The truth of the matter is that all three Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, are open to both peaceful and more aggressive interpretations. And while some Americans and Israelis have been quick to label the war of aggression against Iran as some kind of Holy War, its less certain the leadership in Iran are viewing these military assaults upon their nation through a religious lens.

However, political analyst Jeffrey Sachs does tend to agree with Pete Hegseth’s interpretation of the war against Iran in some sense, as the US economist’s reading is that the globe has entered into the first phases of World War III, and while this take is through a scientific rationalist lens, rather than having anything to do with religion, both their analyses certainly do portend the end times.