BREAKING: U.S. Commanders Tell Troops the Iran War Is God's Final Battle And That They Are On A Mission To Usher In "Armageddon" For Jesus

American soldiers are being told they will die as martyrs for Christ and that Trump has been chosen by God to lead them into a Holy War to rule in the name of Jesus, with an iron fist.

By Dean Blundell | March 3, 2026

I grew up evangelical. Not by choice, and as soon as I got to University, I was out.

I never believed in the tenets of Eternal Salvation and could never understand why we had to hate gay people AND why a magic prayer gave me access to an exclusive club of assholes, nerds and hypocrites.

And I wasn’t in the “we go to church on Sundays” kind of faith. It was the extreme evangelical kind. The kind where you’re taught that every earthquake, every war, every famine is a sign. Where the Book of Revelation isn’t metaphor — it’s a playbook. Where Israel isn’t a country — it’s a prophetic trigger mechanism. Where the end of the world isn’t something to fear. It’s something to cheer for.

So when I read Jonathan Larsen’s reporting that a U.S. combat-unit commander told his NCOs that Donald Trump was “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth,” I didn’t gasp. I didn’t think it was hyperbole.

U.S. Troops Were Told Iran War Is for “Armageddon,” Return of Jesus

I thought: Yeah. That’s exactly what they believe.

And now they’re running the Pentagon. Or the Pentagon is using them to fight a war of oil and distraction. Either way, US Centcom commanders have told every soldier en route to Israel or Iran that they are helping Trump, chosen by God himself, to bring about the end times where Jesus and Evangelicals rule the world.

I shit you not.

What the Hell Are “End Times”?

For those of you who didn’t grow up in this, as I did, let me walk you through what tens of millions of Americans — including, apparently, a significant chunk of the U.S. military command structure — believe is about to happen. Right now. Because of Iran.

Evangelical eschatology — the theology of how the world ends — is built almost entirely on a specific, literalist reading of the Book of Revelation, Daniel, Ezekiel, and a handful of other biblical texts. Here’s the CliffsNotes version they preach in megachurches, Bible studies, and now, apparently, combat readiness briefings:

Step 1: Israel must exist and control its biblical territory. This is non-negotiable. Without Israel, the prophecy can’t trigger. This is why evangelical Christians are often more aggressively pro-Israel than many Jewish people — they don’t love Israel for Israelis. They need Israel as a detonator.

Step 2: A great conflict engulfs the Middle East. Ezekiel 38-39 describes “Gog and Magog” — forces from the north that attack Israel. Evangelicals have spent decades mapping this onto modern geopolitics. Iran (ancient Persia) is explicitly named. Russia is often cast as Gog. The war has to be massive. It has to be bloody. The bloodier the better, because…

Step 3: The blood is the point. Revelation 14:20 describes blood flowing “as high as a horse’s bridle” across a distance of about 300 kilometers. This isn’t a metaphor to these people. They need an unimaginable slaughter in the Middle East to validate their theology. When Larsen reports that commanders are “especially delighted with how graphic this battle will be, zeroing in on how bloody all of this must become,” that’s not insanity. It’s a suicidal cult doctrine.

Step 4: The Rapture. True believers get hoovered up to heaven before the worst of it. Everyone else — Muslims, Jews, Hindus, atheists, wrong-type Christians — gets left behind to suffer through the Tribulation. Seven years of hell on earth. Plagues. Famine. A one-world government run by the Antichrist. For the record, we’ve already had over 200 “Raptures” since the turn of the century, and ALL of the crazies are still here(Personally, I like to tweet at them all the day after the rapture, telling them it happened, but they didn’t make the cut).

BTW, this “rapture” has dead bodies coming out of the ground, urns on your fireplace housing your Evangelical grampa will float into the sky with cadavers (and the living) but ONLY if you are a born-again Christian who has said this magic prayer.

Step 5: Armageddon. Jesus returns with an army of angels, fights the final battle at Megiddo (in modern Israel, naturally), defeats Satan, and establishes a thousand-year reign on Earth. The evangelicals win. The sky opens up, Jesus, all the archangels and Benny Hill will descend from Heaven. Everyone else submits or perishes. Suck it.

Step 6: The Millennial Kingdom. Christ rules Earth for 1,000 years under — you guessed it — hardline Christian law. The same “Christian love” you’ve been watching in the streets of America for the past year: the book bans, the forced births, the anti-trans crusades, the theocratic courts, the executions, deportations and the beatings - all in the name of Jesus, of course. Except now it’s global. And permanent. And divinely mandated.

That’s the plan. That’s what your kids in uniform are being told is happening right now in Iran. If you want to see how it works, US Pastor Greg Laurie detailed the end times to his flock of morons yesterday.

"We know that...modern Iran plays a role in the End Times scenario... As far as I can see, the next event in the prophetic calendar will be the rapture of the church..."

(LOL. Man, this is every youth group/bullshit church service I was forced to attend. Just some dumb hillbilly rifling off religious fear porn from a pulpit about the end of man. Gleefully. Boringly. Why the fear porn? What better way to get a group of people who dedicate their lives on earth to a sky daddy they can’t see for an afterlife that they cannot prove exists, to force you to give them your money and agency?

Brilliant. I mean, you have to have the IQ of a hammer to beleive it, but it works. Especially when you need people to die for nothing.

How Is This Different From ISIS?

Short answer: it isn’t. Not in any way that matters. Christians (Jews) and Muslms all share the same culty origin story based on Abraham’s lineage. On one side, Christians and Jews, on the other, Muslims.

ISIS (extremist Muslims) believed they were fighting a divinely ordained apocalyptic battle. They believed the final confrontation between good and evil would take place in a specific location in the Middle East (Dabiq, Syria). They believed their god commanded the slaughter. They believed dying in the fight was martyrdom that guaranteed paradise. They believed everyone who didn’t share their theology deserved subjugation or death. They recruited on this theology. They used it to justify every atrocity.

Now read that paragraph again, but swap in “evangelical Christian commanders in the United States military.”

A combat-unit commander told his troops that Trump was anointed by Jesus to start Armageddon. More than 110 similar complaints from over 40 units across 30 installations in 48 hours. Commanders describing “unrestricted euphoria” about a war they believe is biblically sanctioned. Soldiers being told to embrace the bloodshed because it’s God’s plan.

The only difference? ISIS had Toyota Hiluxes and AK-47s. These guys have the most powerful military in human history, a $900-billion budget, and nuclear weapons.

The United States military — the institution that swears an oath to the Constitution, not to Christ — now has commanders across every branch who are openly framing a war of aggression as a holy crusade. And the Secretary of Defense is hosting monthly prayer meetings in the Pentagon featuring far-right Christian nationalists.

When ISIS did this, we called it radicalization. We called it extremism. We spent $8 trillion and 20 years trying to bomb it out of existence.

When Americans do it in dress uniforms with stars on their shoulders, we call it... what? Faith? Leadership? “Exactly where we need to be as a nation”?

That last quote is from Pete Hegseth himself.

The Grift Behind the Gospel

Here’s where it gets truly diabolical, and I mean that in the non-theological sense.

While commanders are telling soldiers they’re fighting the final battle between God and Satan — while young men and women in uniform are being psychologically primed to view their potential deaths as divine martyrdom — what’s actually happening?

Donald Trump is collecting oil fields. He’s redrawing maps. He’s handing territory to allies. He’s building a new world order that has nothing to do with Jesus and everything to do with resource extraction, real estate, and the consolidation of autocratic power. Oh, and to hide his pedophilia/rape accounts in the Epstein files. How very Christ-like. Some ‘Chosen One’.

The End Times theology is the cover story. It’s the most effective propaganda framework ever devised, because it makes the marks grateful to be used. You can’t question a war that God ordained. You can’t oppose a president that Jesus anointed. You can’t grieve the dead when they’re “martyrs for the Kingdom.”

And while every camera, every headline, every ounce of public attention is focused on Iran — on the bombs, on the biblical prophecy, on the geopolitical chess match — what’s disappearing from the conversation?

The Epstein files. The trafficking networks. The names. The evidence.

Funny how that works. Every single time we get close to the rot at the center of American power, something biblical happens in the Middle East. Every time the Epstein files threaten to surface names that would end careers and start prosecutions, there’s a new holy war to cover the news cycle.

In the name of Jesus and End Times, of course. Why do they do this “in the name of Jesus? Same reason Muslims do it in the name of Allah: What better way to fight a war than with psychos who beleive that their eternal salvation is tied to fighting and dying for their “God?”

There’s a reason every Major war ever fought came with a pretext of the divine duty everyone had to die for people who simply don’t give a shit about human life.

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The NCO Who Spoke Up

Read the email that the unnamed NCO sent to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. Read it carefully.

This is a Christian soldier — writing on behalf of 15 troops, at least 11 of them also Christian — saying that their commander’s invocation of Armageddon theology in a combat readiness briefing was “toxic and over the line.” That it “destroys morale and unit cohesion.” That it violates “the oaths we swore to support the Constitution.”

This NCO isn’t an atheist with a grudge. This is a believer saying: this is not what my faith is for, and this is not what my uniform is for.

There are 110 more complaints like this one. From every branch. In 48 hours.

These are the people holding the line between a constitutional republic and a theocratic war machine. And they have no backup. The Pentagon is run by a man who hosts fundamentalist prayer meetings. The White House Bible study preaches that God curses Israel’s enemies. The commander-in-chief thinks he was anointed.

The guardrails aren’t just gone. They’ve been replaced with altar rails.

What Happens Now

I don’t have a hopeful ending for this one.

Mikey Weinstein and the MRFF will fight. They always do. But Weinstein himself says the Trump administration is “openly disdainful of military norms and law.” The people who would normally investigate these complaints are the same people hosting the prayer meetings.

The troops who filed complaints have requested anonymity because they fear retribution from the Department of Defense. Think about that. American soldiers are afraid of their own military for reporting constitutional violations.

Meanwhile, Hegseth is trying to prosecute a U.S. Senator under the UCMJ for telling military members not to obey illegal orders.

We are watching, in real time, the transformation of the most powerful military in history into a faith-based fighting force. Soldiers are being told that their war is God’s war. That their president is God’s instrument. That the blood they spill is holy, necessary, and prophetically ordained.

That’s not a military. That’s a crusade full of low-IQ “warriors” who run headfirst into a frag grenade if “the Chosen One” told them to.

And if history has taught us one goddamn thing, it’s that holy wars don’t end when the true believers say they will. They end when there’s nothing left to burn.

Dean

PS: I’ll save the uplifting “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” stuff for a different post. LOLZ.

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This piece draws on the extraordinary reporting of Jonathan Larsen. If you’re not reading his work, start now. This story should be everywhere. The fact that it isn’t tells you everything about where we are.

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