Essay: On the Reckless Arrogance of “Religious Men”
Mar 05, 2026
(Cindy: Such wise and worthy words.)
“In recent days, complaints have been filed by American service members through formal channels raising alarms about something that should make every sober citizen pause for a moment and draw a long breath before speaking again. Those complaints allege that within parts of the military chain of command, language invoking biblical apocalypse and the coming of Armageddon has been spoken in connection with the conflict now unfolding with Iran. The President of the United States of America has been anointed by Christ to bring the fire of Armageddon to Iran.
Whether those remarks were careless rhetoric, misplaced zeal, or something more troubling is almost beside the point. The mere presence of such language inside the machinery of the most powerful military force on Earth is enough to justify a serious and sober conversation. War is grave enough when it is argued in the language of strategy and security. When it is dressed up in the robes of prophecy it becomes something else entirely. Something older. Something darker. Something that history has warned us about for a very, very long time.
There is a simple truth that believers themselves should know.
There is no orthodox Christian doctrine that allows human beings to push the divine clock forward.
None.
If God is sovereign then the unfolding of history belongs to God. The great arc of redemption, judgment, restoration, or however one interprets the final chapters of the biblical story is not subject to congressional authorization, military planning committees, or the ambitions of men with flags on their lapels and power at their fingertips. Scripture itself warns against the arrogance of thinking we know the hour or the day. It warns against those who claim secret knowledge of God’s timetable. It warns against those who believe they can bend divine will to human urgency.
Armageddon, in the Christian imagination, is not something summoned like a storm. It is not a lever pulled by generals or secretaries of defense. It is not a strategy devised in war rooms. If the story means anything at all within Christian belief, it means precisely the opposite. It means that history unfolds under divine authority, not human engineering.
The moment a man begins to believe he can usher in God’s plan by force of arms, he has already departed from the doctrine he claims to defend.
What remains is not faith.
What remains is mythology.
And mythology in the hands of men with missiles is a dangerous goddamn thing.
Because once war is wrapped in sacred language, it stops looking like tragedy. It starts looking like destiny. The bombs begin to feel less like failure and more like fulfillment. The deaths of strangers begin to feel less like horror and more like necessary chapters in a cosmic script.
History and graves are filled with men who believed they were actors in sacred history. Kings who believed heaven had crowned them. Emperors who believed they carried the mandate of God. Generals who believed Providence rode beside them into battle. None of them set out thinking they were villains. Every one of them believed they were part of a higher cause.
But history has a habit of revealing how thin that line can be between devotion and delusion.
The danger is not just that someone literally believes they can trigger the end of the world tomorrow morning. The danger is more subtle than that. The danger is fatalism. The quiet belief that if catastrophe arrives, it must have been meant to arrive. The slow erosion of restraint that follows when men begin to see themselves not as stewards of life but as instruments of some imagined mythological unfolding.
Once war is sanctified, prudence becomes weakness. Doubt becomes betrayal. Diplomacy becomes compromise with evil. Every opponent becomes not merely wrong but wicked.
And wicked enemies, in the imagination of the self-righteous, deserve no mercy.
This is why every great tradition of Christian thought warned against the intoxication of apocalyptic speculation. Augustine warned against it. Aquinas warned against it. Luther warned against it. Even Calvin warned against it. They understood something about the human heart that modern politics too often forgets. They understood that when men believe they stand too close to God’s throne, they begin to treat other human beings as expendable.
Humility is the safeguard.
Not certainty.
Not prophecy charts.
Humility.
It is also why the founders of the American experiment insisted that the machinery of government remain separate from the machinery of religion. Not because faith was unwelcome, but because power has a way of corrupting even the most sincere belief. A government that believes it carries divine mandate is a government that begins to see dissent as heresy.
And heresy has never fared well in the company of power.
The United States military, for all its immense might, was not designed to be an instrument of prophecy. It was designed to defend a republic. Its officers swear an oath not to God’s timeline but to the Constitution. Its authority is grounded in law, in civilian oversight, in a system of checks and balances deliberately built to restrain the ambitions of any single individual who might begin to believe his will carries some sacred weight.
That structure matters. It is one of the reasons the world has not burned down already.
But architecture alone cannot save us from arrogance. Systems only function when the people inside them remember the limits of their own authority. When leaders forget that they are stewards rather than prophets, the guardrails begin to weaken.
This is why the complaints now being raised by service members matter.
Those men and women understand something essential about the profession of arms. War is not holy. It is not glorious. It is not a stage upon which men fulfill biblical drama. War is the last and ugliest tool available to human civilization when every other tool has failed.
It should only be approached with trembling hands.
The young soldiers filing those complaints understand that better than many of the men who send them into harm’s way. They understand that their lives, and the lives of countless civilians who will never appear on American television screens, hang in the balance when words like Armageddon are spoken lightly by those in authority.
They understand that rhetoric has consequences.
And so should we.
Because if there is one lesson that echoes across centuries of human history, it is this: the most dangerous men in the world are not the openly wicked ones. The wicked are easier to recognize. The most dangerous men are the righteous ones who have convinced themselves that heaven stands behind their decisions.
Those men rarely… if ever… doubt themselves.
And a man who no longer doubts himself is a man capable of terrible things.
If there is any wisdom left in our public life, it will be found in remembering a simple truth that every honest believer, every thoughtful citizen, and every responsible leader ought to recognize.
God does not need help from generals.
The end of the world is not a policy objective.
And the lives of millions of human beings should never be treated like pieces on a prophetic chessboard.
If history has taught us anything, anything at all, it is that when men begin to imagine themselves as agents of divine destiny, it is usually the innocent who pay the price.
So let us be very clear about something.
The world does not need more prophets with power.
It needs leaders with humility.
Leaders who understand that the weight of human life is heavier than any mythology we might build around ourselves. Leaders who know the difference between faith and arrogance. Leaders who remember that the purpose of power is not to fulfill prophecy but to protect people.
Because the moment we forget that truth, the moment we begin to believe that war can be sanctified and catastrophe justified in the name of destiny, we step onto a path that history has shown us many times before.
And it is a path that never ends where its travelers believe it will.
The future of humanity should never be left in the hands of men who believe they are writing the final chapter of the book of Revelation.
let us remind them that our future, our story… does not belong to them.”
Ever Devoted 