Dear Friend,
At American Atheists, we know nonbelievers are not a monolith. I, for example, do not believe religion is the “root of all evil.” I know many believers who find comfort and community in their faith. And because they aren’t fanatics, I suspect many of my religious friends would readily acknowledge religion’s role in humanity’s worst atrocities.
The side effects of religious belief include empathy in some and hate in others. In Sacred Fury: Understanding Religious Violence, sociologist Charles Selengut explains “the history and scriptures of the world’s religions tell stories of violence and war even as they speak of peace and love.” Whether jihad refers to self-improvement or terrorism is a matter of interpretation. Whether the Bible condemns homosexuality depends on how you translate arsenokoitai.
In his 2020 book American Crusade, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wrote: “Jesus did tell us to turn the other cheek, but I’m pretty sure he wasn’t advising a secretary of defense at the time.” It was always a disturbing diatribe. Now that he controls the most powerful military on earth, Hegseth’s crusade is no longer fantasy. It’s foreign policy.
As the United States and Israel continue warring with Iran, political leaders are increasingly invoking religious rhetoric. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu referred to Iran as “Amalek,” an enemy with which the Torah commands confrontation. Mike Huckabee, the U.S. Ambassador to Israel, is a prominent Christian Zionist whose support for Israel is based largely on his — and millions of evangelical Christians’ — apocalyptic hope that bloodshed in the Middle East will trigger Christ’s return. And Speaker of the House Mike Johnson refused to condemn anti-Muslim comments from Reps. Andy Ogles and Randy Fine. Sen. Lindsey Graham characterized the conflict as a “religious war.”
Of course, supernatural language like “providence” and “manifest destiny” often disguises earthly motives like power and profit. I won’t pretend to know whether Christian nationalists genuinely believe in Revelation or if it’s a ruse. I do wonder if they see the irony in loudly campaigning against “Sharia law” while pursuing a sectarian agenda that would prefer we be called the Christian Republic of America. “United” is so woke, you know?
We are fortunate to live in a nation where it is the right of Huckabee, Johnson, Graham, and others to believe these things, just as it is my right (and yours) not to. But none of us has the right to impose our beliefs on everyone else via unpopular public policies or on the rest of the world via unauthorized wars. Doing so collapses the wall separating church and state and erases the line that distinguishes a theocracy where violence is sanctified by a supreme leader from a democracy where the law is king.
Back to Hegseth, the devout white Christian nationalist and self-styled crusader leading this charge against a nation he’s long called “America’s mortal enemy.” More recently, he has claimed “there’s no atheists in foxholes,” dismissed the deaths of U.S. soldiers, copy-edited cable news banners, and closed a Pentagon press briefing by reading scripture. In American Crusade, he argued that voting is insufficient and called for “Christians — alongside our Jewish friends and their remarkable army in Israel” to “pick up the sword of unapologetic Americanism” against “leftists” and “Islam.”
This week, Hegseth declared there will be “no quarter, no mercy for our enemies,” a clear violation of the Hague and Geneva Conventions. The purpose of the U.S. military, in his view, is not to serve the Constitution or the American people but to deliver “death and destruction” to enemies as defined by his beliefs.
But by entangling their theology with state power and military might, Christian nationalists sure resemble the religious regimes they oppose. As Martin Luther King, Jr., warned: “The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it.”
Consider the man who attacked a synagogue in Michigan this week. A week earlier, he learned an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon killed four of his family members. That tragedy does not excuse his reaction. But it illustrates the painful truth that this path does not lead to peace, just more grief, radicalization, retribution, and violence.
From the Crusades to modern extremist movements, the certainty that “God Almighty Himself hates with you, too,” as Kurt Vonnegut put it, has sanctified a lot of bloodshed. But to say “religion is the root of all evil” is an oversimplification. Belief (or nonbelief) alone does not determine human behavior. Political power, ethnic tensions, economic inequality, and historical grievances play a critical role, too.
Religion does, however, become dangerous when political leaders frame oppression at home and aggression overseas as holy inevitabilities, divine mandates, or sacred obligations. That is the real danger: not belief itself, but belief fused with state power and military might. Which is why American Atheists fights every day to keep church and state separate.
Vonnegut proposed our government appoint a Secretary of the Future, someone responsible for asking, before the bombs fall, how any of this benefits us all in the long run. Instead, the U.S. Mint quietly removed the olive branch from the dime’s new commemorative design, leaving only arrows. And our president has promised to end this war when he ‘feels it in his bones.’
I suppose we should pray he doesn’t confuse that sensation with the bone spurs.
In solidarity,
Melina Cohen
Director of Strategic Communications & Policy Engagement
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