Christian Nationalism as the Chaplaincy of Technofeudal War

Imagine being so devoted to Jesus but somehow you end up playing the Roman soldiers who crucified him. That dark irony captures a grim symmetry of the present moment. In early 2026, as the United States and Israel expanded their war against Iran, a civil‑rights group representing service members began receiving a flood of complaints from the ranks. More than a hundred troops across dozens of units and installations reported that their commanders were telling them the Iran war was “entirely about Armageddon,” that it was “God’s plan,” and that it was meant “to bring back Jesus.”

In their accounts, briefings about logistics and rules of engagement blurred into sermons drawn from the Book of Revelation. Officers assured soldiers that the conflict was part of a divinely scripted end‑times drama, that they had been chosen to play a role in the final battle between good and evil, and that fear was unnecessary because events were “foretold.” Some commanders, according to these complaints, went further, describing President Trump as “anointed” to light the spark in Iran that would trigger Armageddon and Christ’s return.

At the same time, the Pentagon under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced a sweeping overhaul of the military’s religious infrastructure. Hegseth promised to “make the Chaplain Corps great again,” scrap an Army spiritual‑fitness guide he derided as too secular, and “streamline” the list of officially recognized faith and belief codes—reducing more than 200 distinct categories to a smaller, more tightly curated set. The message was that chaplains should function as explicitly religious ministers serving a narrowed understanding of “acceptable” faith, not as multi‑faith counselors.

In my essay “Oil, Algorithms, and the End of Worlds: How the War on Iran Sustains a Collapsing Civilization,” I argue that the Iran war is not a tragic anomaly but a maintenance operation for a failing order. Industrial modernity has overshot the planet’s biophysical limits; elites are responding not by planning a just transition, but by building technofeudal fortresses—platform monopolies, surveillance systems, AI‑driven management—to preserve their own positions through a long decline. The war, in that frame, is about defending fossil‑fuel chokepoints and keeping the growth machine jolted alive a little longer.

The religious developments inside the military are the spiritual counterpart to that project. Christian nationalist end‑times theology offers a mythology in which endless conflict, ecological crisis, and social breakdown are not signs of a dying system but proof that God’s plan is unfolding. It is the chaplaincy of technofeudal managed decline.

Turning a War into a Prophecy

The core of the service‑member complaints is simple: commanders are explicitly telling troops that the Iran conflict is an Armageddon war, divinely ordained and necessary to bring about Christ’s return. That framing does specific political work.

It de‑politicizes the war. If the conflict is written into Scripture rather than into policy, it no longer appears as a contingent choice subject to debate, accountability, or reversal. Questions about oil routes, shipping insurance, and regional hegemony are displaced by a cosmic narrative in which the only real options are obedience or rebellion against God.

It moralizes the chain of command. Orders are no longer merely institutional; they are framed as expressions of divine will. A commander who opens a briefing by explaining that the mission is part of God’s plan positions dissent not just as insubordination but as spiritual failure. In that atmosphere, a soldier’s doubts about the justice or prudence of the war can feel, even to themselves, like a lack of faith.

It simplifies a complex geopolitical situation into a binary of the saved and the damned. The oil‑and‑algorithm machinery described in my essay—Gulf energy infrastructure, just‑in‑time tanker routes, global supply‑chain dependencies—drops out of view. In its place is a story of God’s chosen nations facing down God’s enemies. That story is emotionally potent and easy to sell in a culture already saturated with apocalyptic fiction and Christian Zionist preaching.

Finally, it absorbs anxiety about collapse into a reassuring teleology. For believers steeped in this theology, climate chaos, economic volatility, pandemics, and permanent war are no longer terrifying glitches in the system. They are evidence that the timetable is advancing as promised. The worse things get, the closer redemption feels.

For a ruling class presiding over a civilization in structural crisis, such a narrative is invaluable. It channels fear away from systemic critique and into eschatological excitement. It tells those at the sharp end of empire that the very signs of breakdown are reasons for hope.

Re‑Clericalizing the Military

The chaplain reforms push in the same direction. For years, military chaplains have existed in tension between two roles: pastors of particular traditions and quasi‑therapists serving a religiously plural, increasingly secular force. The recent shift is an explicit attempt to resolve that tension by privileging a narrower, more overtly confessional model.

When the Defense Secretary laments that an official spiritual‑fitness document mentions “God” only once but refers repeatedly to “feelings” and “playfulness,” he is not making a literary criticism. He is signaling that the institution should treat religion not as one dimension of well‑being among others, but as the primary axis of meaning and cohesion. Scrapping that document and commissioning a replacement anchored in explicitly theistic language elevates chaplains as guardians of a particular kind of faith.

Streamlining faith and belief codes serves the same goal. A coding system that recognized hundreds of beliefs—including small denominations, minority religions, and non‑belief—made room, at least on paper, for a genuinely pluralistic chaplaincy. Collapsing that list into a shorter one sweeps many of those identities off the ledger. Chaplains are nudged, by design, toward focusing on a presumed “core” faith, which in practice means conservative Christianity.

Overlay that structural change with a culture of high‑profile Bible studies and prayer breakfasts where attendance by senior officers, contractors, and political allies is treated as an informal sign of loyalty, and you get a soft but pervasive message: advancement is smoother for those who publicly align with the “right” faith. The chaplain becomes not just a spiritual caregiver but a gatekeeper of ideological conformity.

From the perspective of my technofeudal analysis, this is the spiritualization of platform governance. Just as private digital empires set the terms of access to communication, commerce, and visibility, a re‑engineered chaplaincy helps set the terms of access to belonging and advancement within the military. It polices the boundaries of acceptable belief in a way that meshes neatly with a broader project of narrowing dissent.

Technofeudalism’s Hunger for Myth

My earlier essay argues that industrial civilization is entering a phase of “managed decline.” The global economy depends on fossil‑fuel infrastructures in volatile regions, has built fragile, just‑in‑time supply chains, and is destabilizing the biosphere it rests on. In response, elites are not dismantling the machine, but retrofitting it: building digital fortresses that channel diminishing returns into private rents, using AI to automate oversight and reduce labor’s leverage, and tightening security apparatuses to handle unrest.

I describe this as technofeudalism: a regime in which the key levers of power are held by “cloud‑castles and data‑fiefs,” where corporations and states merge into mini‑polities that own not just factories and fields but the platforms through which life is coordinated. It is a system optimized not for shared flourishing but for preserving hierarchy in the face of contraction.

That system cannot run on spreadsheets alone. It needs stories.

• It needs a story about why the energy must keep flowing through vulnerable chokepoints, even if doing so risks war.

• It needs a story that explains why some people will be protected and others abandoned as climate shocks and resource shortages bite.

• It needs a story that tells those tasked with enforcing the order—soldiers, police, analysts—that their work is noble even when its effects are grim.

Christian nationalist Armageddon theology offers precisely such a story. It casts oil‑defense wars as divinely mandated showdowns. It turns triage into judgment, implying that those left in sacrifice zones are outside God’s favor. It tells enforcers that their obedience is not just patriotic but salvific.

In that sense, apocalyptic rhetoric in the ranks is not a random aberration. It is the mythic layer of technofeudal governance. Where my essay traces data flows, contract structures, and energy corridors, this layer traces angels and beasts, seals and trumpets. The two maps overlay.

Privatizing the Panopticon, Sacralizing the Stack

Another through‑line in my recent essays is the blurring of public and private power. Platform corporations operate like sovereigns: they control critical infrastructure, write their own codes of conduct, maintain security arms, and sometimes defy or dictate to states. States, in turn, outsource key functions to them: surveillance, content moderation, logistics, battlefield networking.

The result is what I call the “privatization of the panopticon”—a surveillance and control apparatus that is everywhere and nowhere, formally fragmented but functionally aligned.

Religious capture of the military nests neatly inside this architecture. As the war expands, technology firms sign contracts for satellite imagery analysis, AI‑driven targeting, and cyber‑operations. Social networks become the main theaters for shaping public perception, deciding which images of burning refineries or devastated neighborhoods trend and which vanish. Defense contractors and political patrons attend faith‑infused events where spiritual and material loyalties are braided together.

In this environment, Christian nationalist language becomes part of the user interface of empire. Soldiers are not just tracked and tasked by software; they are catechized into seeing those tasks as participation in sacred history. Citizens scrolling their feeds encounter not just propaganda but prophecy, with war framed as both necessary and holy.

Technofeudalism needs people to accept being watched, sorted, and governed by opaque systems. A theology that celebrates omniscience, predestination, and obedience can be repurposed to make that feel natural. When the all‑seeing corporate‑state apparatus is implicitly mapped onto an all‑seeing deity, resistance can start to feel not just futile but blasphemous.

Triage with a Halo

A central argument of my essay is that collapse is not an on/off switch but a gradient of worsening conditions, distributed unevenly. As resources tighten and climate impacts mount, some populations are shielded and others sacrificed. Zones of abandonment—downwind communities, sacrificed rural regions, refugee camps, disenfranchised inner cities—are already visible. In a managed‑decline scenario, those zones expand.

Christian nationalist eschatology can function as a moral gloss on that expansion. If history is understood as a story about a remnant saved from a wicked world, then the existence of large populations living and dying in precarity becomes easier to rationalize. They can be seen as outside the covenant, enemies of God, or simply props in a drama whose real protagonists live elsewhere.

This is not how all Christians think, of course. Many of the troops filing complaints explicitly identify as believers horrified by what they are being told. They recognize that weaponizing their faith to celebrate war and justify devastation is a betrayal of its core. But the theology being pushed from above is not the red‑letter Jesus of the Gospels—the one who blesses peacemakers and warns the rich. It is a red‑hat Jesus tailored to the needs of a ruling class intent on holding onto its yachts and data centers for as long as possible.

When technofeudal elites choose to let some regions burn, some supply chains fail, some communities flood or starve, they are making political choices. Wrapping those choices in prophecy—insisting that they are simply signs of the end times—helps them evade both blame and reform.

Rome’s Priests, Redux

The comparison to Rome is not accidental. In the first century, imperial power and religious authority worked hand in hand. The temple and the palace may have had different façades, but they shared an interest in suppressing movements that threatened order. Jesus was executed as an insurgent against both.

Today, the robes are different, but the alignment rhymes. A modern priestly caste—chaplains constrained by policy, celebrity pastors with media platforms, institutional religious leaders with access to power—often finds itself pulled into the orbit of empire. Blessings are offered at inaugurations and weapons factories; invocations are made at rallies calling for more war; theological arguments are deployed against refugees, protesters, and whistleblowers.

The Iran war’s Armageddon talk is one more iteration of that pattern. A priestly class aligns with an imperial project to defend a crumbling order. In doing so, it risks becoming exactly what it was once taught to resist: chaplains to Caesar.

My technofeudalism essay ends with a refusal. I wrote that “technofeudalism is not destiny.” The same is true of red‑hat Jesus. Neither the economic regime nor the theology that currently lubricates it is inevitable. They are responses—choices made by frightened elites trying to ride down the curve of industrial civilization without losing their grip.

Other Stories Are Possible

If there is a way out of the trap we see before us—a way to face biophysical limits without authoritarian retrenchment, to navigate decline without mass abandonment—it will require more than policy tweaks. It will require different infrastructures, different institutions, and also different stories.

Those stories may come from secular traditions: socialism, anarchism, human rights, ecological thinking. They may also come from religious sources: liberation theologies, indigenous cosmologies, red‑letter Christianity that remembers which side of empire its founding figure died on.

What the current moment makes clear is that stories will be told. In the absence of conscious effort, the default stories will be the ones that serve the people already in charge: endless growth, necessary sacrifice zones, holy wars for oil, an algorithmic kingdom come.

The clash between technofeudalism and its alternatives will be fought with budgets and strikes and blockades, but also with sermons and memes and whispered conversations in barracks. The question is whether the faith that circulates in those spaces will continue to sanctify a gated, surveilled decline—or whether it can be turned, once again, against Rome.

Reference List

Asia Times. 2026. “US Troops Were Told Iran War Is for ‘Armageddon,’ Return of Jesus.” March 2, 2026. https://asiatimes.com/2026/03/us-troops-were-told-iran-war-is-for-armageddon-return-of-jesus/

Common Dreams. 2026. “US Commanders Want to Make War With Iran as ‘Bloody’ as Possible, Advocacy Group Warns.” March 2, 2026. https://www.commondreams.org/news/iran-armageddon-military

Esquire. 2026. “The Iran War Is God’s Plan, Say U.S. Military Leaders (Who Believe They’re Doing His Will).” March 2, 2026. https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a70590863/jesus-trump-military-iran-war/

Hegseth, Pete. 2025. “We Are Going to Make the Chaplain Corps Great Again.” Speech, Department of Defense, December 15, 2025. (Video.) https://www.facebook.com/SecWar/videos/we-are-going-to-make-the-chaplain-corps-great-again/921466543875201/

Military Religious Freedom Foundation. 2026. “MRFF Receives Over 110 Complaints about Commanders Pushing Armageddon Narrative on Iran War.” Statement, March 3, 2026. https://www.militaryreligiousfreedom.org

Military Times. 2025. “Hegseth Orders Overhaul of Chaplain Corps.” December 16, 2025. https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2025/12/17/hegseth-orders-overhaul-of-chaplain-corps/

Raw Story. 2026. “Military Group Deluged in Complaints as Armageddon Views Pushed on Troops.” March 3, 2026. https://www.rawstory.com/military-leaders-pushing-armageddon-views/

Stars and Stripes. 2025. “Hegseth to Overhaul Chaplain Corps, Toss ‘Unacceptable and Unserious’ Spiritual Fitness Guide.” December 16, 2025. https://www.stripes.com/branches/army/2025-12-17/hegseth-military-chaplains-20119952.html

U.S. Department of War. 2025. “Statement on the Department’s Strengthening of the Chaplain Corps.” Press release, December 17, 2025. https://www.justice.gov/opa/blog/statement-department-wars-strengthening-chaplain-corps