Did Commanders Tell US Troops Iran War is “Part of God’s Divine Plan?”

To usher in the return of Jesus Christ?

Licensed by the author

I took an oath to the Constitution. Not to the Book of Revelation.

I remember the exact words.

“I, Wes O’Donnell, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic…”

I took that oath twice, actually. Once when I joined the Army. Once when I joined the Air Force. I meant them both times.

Which is why what’s being reported this week from inside US military units deserves your full attention, not as a partisan culture war grenade, but as a readiness and constitutional fidelity issue.

Let me be clear about what I am not saying. I’m a Christian (raised Catholic, now nondenominational). I have no problem with faith in the foxhole. I have witnessed firsthand how profoundly faith sustains service members under impossible conditions.

Chaplains exist for exactly that reason, and they do sacred work.

What I’m about to describe is something different entirely.

According to reporting by independent journalist Jonathan Larsen, citing complaints filed with the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, a combat-unit commander told non-commissioned officers at a briefing that the US strikes on Iran were part of God’s divine plan, and that President Trump had been “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.”

Any former American servicemember who just read that quote should understand how unusual that is.

Now, before we go further, let’s be honest about the evidentiary situation. The MRFF complaints are anonymous. No recordings exist. Snopes reviewed the claim and left it unrated pending DoD comment.

What I can confirm is this: by the morning of March 3, the MRFF had logged around 200 complaints about commanders invoking Christian messaging to describe US action in Iran, coming from more than 40 different units spread across at least 30 military installations, spanning EVERY branch of the military.

200 complaints. Every branch. 30 installations.

You don’t manufacture that kind of signal from noise. This strongly implies a unified message coming from the Pentagon.

Every US military branch is its own closed kingdom with its own traditions, histories, SOPs, and more. It is extremely rare to have anything unified except for the oath of enlistment and the UCMJ or Uniform Code of Military Justice. (Actually, the Navy and Marines are pretty closely tied because they’re both Department of the Navy.)

This appears to have come from the top.

What the UCMJ Actually Says

There is no single UCMJ article that explicitly names religious proselytizing as a standalone offense. But that’s a bit like saying there’s no specific law against a commander ordering troops to do push-ups until someone dies.

The UCMJ is broad by design.

DoD policy states that components will accommodate individual expressions of sincerely held beliefs which do not have an adverse impact on military readiness, unit cohesion, good order and discipline, or health and safety.

That phrase “unit cohesion” is doing a lot of work right now.

The NCO who filed the original complaint with the MRFF put it plainly: the commander’s remarks “destroyed morale and unit cohesion.”

That NCO, by the way, identified as a Christian. So did 11 of the 15 fellow troops on whose behalf the complaint was filed. The remaining troops included one Muslim and one Jew.

Think about that for a moment.

You’re a Jewish soldier or a Muslim soldier in an American ready-support unit, potentially deployable at any moment into an active war zone. Your commanding officer has just told you, in an official operational briefing, that this war is God’s plan, that your Commander-in-Chief was anointed by Jesus Christ, and that the whole enterprise is designed to trigger the biblical apocalypse.

What exactly is your place in that mission, from your commander’s theological framework?

Are you a participant in God’s plan, or an obstacle to it?

That question does not stay theoretical when rounds start moving downrange.

Former Air Force Chief of Staff General Norton Schwartz once sent a memo to all commanders stating that leaders at all levels must balance constitutional protections for an individual’s free exercise of religion and its prohibition against governmental establishment of religion, and that they must avoid the actual or apparent use of their position to promote their personal religious beliefs to their subordinates.

The potential result of failing to do so, Schwartz wrote, is a degradation of the unit’s morale, good order, and discipline.

The SECDEF Problem

Leadership creates permission structures. Culture flows downhill. And the culture Hegseth has been building at the Pentagon deserves scrutiny on its own terms.

Hegseth invited pastor Doug Wilson, a self-described Christian nationalist, to lead a worship service at the Pentagon, broadcast live on the department’s internal TV network.

This was not a one-time event. Hegseth instituted monthly Christian prayer services starting in May 2025, with his pastor in Tennessee leading the first one.

Wilson is not a generic evangelical pastor. Among his professed beliefs: homosexuality should be a crime, women should submit to their husbands, the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote should be repealed, and Christians who owned slaves in the South were right on “firm scriptural ground.”

That man preached in the Pentagon’s auditorium. To troops. On the Department of Defense’s internal television network.

Military.com reported hearing complaints from service members and military contractors who fear that failing to go along with Hegseth’s religious activities could cost them professionally.

“You don’t actually need evidence of retribution to find fault with the leader of a government agency inviting his employees for a prayer service. It’s inherently discriminatory,” said one contractor.

“It provides an opportunity for Christians to get face time and be in the room with higher-ups, perhaps interacting on a social level. Jews, Muslims and other non-Christians are not provided this opportunity.”

That is a readiness problem.

That is a retention problem.

And in a volunteer military that desperately needs qualified people of every background, it is a recruitment problem.

Unless, that is, your plan is to recruit only white Christians…

The Deliberate Politicization of Your Military

Let’s zoom out, because what I’m about to say is the biggest threat the US military has faced since the Civil War. What’s happening at the Pentagon doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It is part of a documented, openly stated effort to remake the US military as a culturally conservative Christian-only institution.

Now, the US military, at least in my experience, has always leaned center right. This is mostly because traditional conservative politicians like Bush or Reagan were more open to military funding (and servicemembers will usually vote in their best interests).

But there’s a difference between fiscal conservative and social conservative.

Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s 900-page administrative wishlist, dedicates some serious real estate to the Department of Defense WAR.

The vision is to purge “woke” ideology, restructure civilian oversight to reward political loyalty, and reorient military culture around explicitly conservative social values. Many of its authors now hold senior positions inside the building they were writing about.

Hegseth arrived at the Pentagon having already published a book arguing the military had been corrupted by diversity and progressive ideology.

Really? That “corrupted” and “progressive” military just went into Venezuela and Iran with a high-level of professionalism and lethality. In fact, it’s worth lingering on this point for a moment… The current US military is still the honorable military of yesteryear, despite recent attempts to radicalize it.

So, before anyone in the current administration tries to take credit for its success, remember, this is the military that Bush and Obama built.

By the way, that same book spoke of an American crusade to retake the Middle East from Muslim interlopers.

The current SECDEF didn’t arrive with an open mind and a learning agenda. He arrived with a to-do list. And he’s been working through it: senior officers removed, diversity programs dismantled, and a religiously inflected institutional culture cultivated with the same deliberate energy you’d expect from a man who invites Christian nationalist pastors to preach on the DoD’s internal television network.

The United States military has operated for 250 years on a principle genuinely rare in human history: the armed forces serve a document, not whichever party currently occupies the White House.

That’s kind of insane when you think about it.

That principle is the single structural feature that separates a constitutional republic from every banana republic that has ever collapsed under the weight of its own armed forces.

When you reshape military culture, promotions, and institutional identity around the values of one political or religious tribe, you’re not building a “stronger, more lethal” military.

You’re building a praetorian guard.

And if you paid attention in history class, or, like me, just spent your time playing Warhammer 40K, you know exactly how the praetorian guard story ends: not great for the republic.

I’ll say the uncomfortable thing plainly: a military that answers to a party rather than a constitution can be turned.

Turned against political opponents. Turned against institutions. Turned inward.

The founders understood this, which is why they were obsessive about civilian control and deeply suspicious of standing armies in the first place.

I want to be fair here. Democratic administrations have played politics with military leadership too. This is not a sin exclusive to one side of the aisle.

But what is happening now is different in kind, not just degree. When the people dismantling nonpartisan military norms are simultaneously publishing manifestos explaining exactly why they intend to do it, you don’t need anonymous sources. You just need to read.

The US military has enjoyed nearly complete bipartisan support as one of the nation’s most trusted institutions since the days of Teddy Roosevelt; albeit, with a small hiccup during Vietnam.

The moment it becomes a Republican military or a Democratic military; it stops being your military.

I’m not arguing that Christians don’t belong in the military. They absolutely do, and they serve with extraordinary distinction.

I’m not arguing that Hegseth can’t be a Christian, attend church, or pray. He can, and those are protected rights that have nothing to do with his fitness for office.

What I’m arguing is simpler and older than any of this noise: the Oath of Enlistment runs to the Constitution of the United States. Not to any one president. Not to any religion. Not to any theological interpretation of geopolitical events.

When a commander steps to a podium in an operational briefing and tells troops that a war is God’s apocalyptic plan, that commander has introduced a variable into the kill chain that has absolutely no business being there.

Not because God is offensive.

But because a soldier who believes they are participating in a divinely ordained end-times event may make decisions in the field that a soldier operating under secular military law would not.

That’s not a theological debate. That’s a battlefield liability.

I also find myself thinking about the non-Christian troops sitting in those briefings. The Muslim service members. The Jewish service members. The atheists, the agnostics, the Sikhs, the Buddhists… all of whom have raised their right hand and sworn the same oath I did.

What message does it send to those service members when their chain of command frames a military operation through an explicitly Christian eschatological lens?

What does it do to their sense of belonging in an institution they chose to serve?

Unit cohesion is not a fucking bumper sticker. It is the single most important variable in whether a small unit survives contact with the enemy and goes home to see their kids.

Anything that fractures it is a threat to the mission. Full stop.

Licensed by the author

The DoD had not responded to press inquiries about the MRFF complaints at the time of this writing. Given the current posture of the Hegseth Pentagon toward military norms and accountability, I’m not holding my breath.

The MRFF has a long history of successfully intervening in cases involving overt Christian displays and messaging, but Mikey Weinstein noted that before the Trump administration, the Pentagon was responsive to MRFF complaints; and that is no longer the case.

So, the foundation has shifted to a public pressure strategy it describes as “Chronicle, Expose, Intervene, and [legally] Attack.”

That tells you everything about the current institutional environment.

Here is what I would want to ask Pete Hegseth directly, as a fellow veteran: Do you believe that a commander framing a combat operation as a biblically mandated end-times event is consistent with good order and discipline?

Do you believe that a Jewish soldier, a Muslim soldier, an atheist soldier hearing that message in an operational briefing is fully included in the unit you’re asking them to fight and potentially die for?

I still wear my dog tags; I’m not sure why. Maybe habit? Maybe to make a paramedic’s job easier if I’m in an accident? My dog tags still say the word “Christian” right next to my blood type.

But I also still remember my oath. Every word of it.

It didn’t mention Revelation.

Stay frosty.

W