by ANNA PIELA
The war with Iran is not just a geopolitical conflict. We see religious rhetoric used to cast strategic interests as a moral or sacred matter.
U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson described Iran’s majority faith tradition, Shiite Islam, as a “misguided religion” while discussing the ongoing U.S. strikes against Iran on March 4, 2026. A complaint made to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation alleged that same month that an unnamed military commander had said that “President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.” In the Book of Revelation, Armageddon represents the final battle between good and evil, associated with the second coming of Jesus Christ.
Soon after the U.S. attack on Iran, right-wing pastor Andrew Sedra commented that “Trump is going after the head of the snake, which is Islam.” He added that “God is using President Trump in a prophetic moment of time to execute judgment on evil and wicked civilizations.”
In part, such religious rhetoric draws on older narratives about Islam in Christian thought. In medieval times, Islam was often portrayed as a violent and extremist faith. Over the past few decades, many American politicians and Christian clergy have disparaged Islam and its believers. My research shows that these earlier portrayals remain recognizable in the rhetoric today.
Hostile depictions
Early Christian theologians began to designate Islam as a theological rival soon after its emergence in 610 C.E. In the eighth century, the monk John of Damascus described Islam as a “heresy” in his work “The ‘Heresy of the Ishmaelites.’” This is widely considered the earliest documented critique of Islamic doctrine.
In his 2002 book, “Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination,” historian John Tolan writes that medieval Christian writers disseminated “crude insults to the Prophet, gross caricatures of Muslim ritual [and] deliberate deformation of passages of the Koran.” They portrayed Muslims as “libidinous, gluttonous semi-human barbarians,” he adds.
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