I'm an Ordained SDA Minister. Here's What I Think About the War in Iran.
Let me say something that will probably frustrate everyone on both sides.
I'm not cheering.
Not for the bombs. Not for the regime. Not for the dispensationalist theology driving parts of this conflict. And not for the left-wing commentators who've tied themselves into knots defending the Ayatollah just to score points against Trump.
I'm not cheering. And I want to explain why.
The Predictable Culture War
The moment the bombs started falling, the internet did what the internet always does.
The right lit up with celebration. Finally. Long overdue. God bless America. America First. Some quarters went further—this is prophetic. This is God's hand. This is what had to happen.
The left responded with the usual counter-programming. And here's where it got weird. Some [edit: radical commentators]—in their desperation to oppose everything the current administration does—ended up in a bizarre rhetorical corner. Softening their language on the Iranian regime. Framing the Ayatollah as a victim of American aggression. Performing moral gymnastics to avoid saying anything that might sound like agreement with Trump.
Both sides did what they always do: used a complex geopolitical catastrophe as raw material for their pre-existing culture war.
What got lost in all of it is the one thing that's always lost in the noise.
Nuance.
You Don't Have to Pick a Side to Feel the Weight of This
We've been here before.
When the war in Gaza erupted, a similar pressure emerged. You were either pro-Israel or pro-Palestine. You either condemned Hamas or you condemned the IDF. If you mourned the children killed by airstrikes, some people assumed you were defending terrorism. If you named Hamas as evil, others assumed you didn't care about Palestinian lives.
But that was never the choice.
You don't have to defend Hamas to mourn the death of innocents. You can hold both. You can name wickedness and still weep over the bodies.
Iran is no different.
The Ayatollah's regime is brutal. That's not a political talking point—it's a documented reality. This is a government that has imprisoned, tortured, and murdered its own people for over four decades.1 A regime that has persecuted Christians within its own borders,2 executed political dissidents,3 and sponsored terrorism across the region.4 Tyrants like this often end their stories in blood and chaos. So no one should be shocked that this day came.
And yet.
None of that means I have to cheer for the bombs. None of that means I can't mourn the civilians—ordinary Persian men, women, and children—caught in the crossfire of something they didn't choose and couldn't stop.
The SDA apocalyptic framework has taught me something the political binary never could: how to mourn with complexity. How to hold conflicting grief at the same time. How to name evil without losing your capacity to weep over the suffering of the people caught under it.
If This Were Just Politics, I Wouldn't Be Writing This
Here's the thing.
Empires go to war. That's what they do. They always have. They always will. If every military conflict were cause for a blog post, I wouldn’t have time to do anything else. National security interests, oil, regime change, geopolitical chess—these are the normal mechanics of human civilization running its usual program.
If this were purely a political war, I would mourn the suffering. I would pray for the people of Iran. But I would probably not be writing this.
But this is not purely political.
And that changes everything.
The Part That Actually Alarms Me
Multiple credible reports have now surfaced—documented by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, covered by Military.com, Newsweek, The Intercept, and Baptist News Global—that servicemembers across every branch of the military have submitted over 200 complaints about commanders framing the Iran war in explicitly apocalyptic terms.5
One non-commissioned officer reported that his commander opened a combat readiness briefing by telling the unit not to be afraid of what was happening in Iran, because it was "God's divine plan."6
Another complaint described a commander declaring that President Trump had been "anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth."7
This isn't fringe internet chatter. These are official complaints filed with a military watchdog that has been operating for two decades, with representatives on nearly every military installation in the country.8
And it's not just happening at the unit level. Senior civilian officials have been framing this conflict in religious language from the beginning. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth declared from the Pentagon podium that Iran was "hell-bent on prophetic Islamic delusions."9 Ambassador Mike Huckabee told Tucker Carlson it would be "fine" if Israel took "essentially the entire Middle East" because the Bible promised it.10 The mixed messaging on why this war was launched—nuclear threat, regime change, retaliation for proxy violence—has been so incoherent that, as Mikey Weinstein of the MRFF observed, it opened the door to a new justification altogether: end times prophecy.11
The theological framework driving this is dispensationalism—a 19th century interpretive system popularized by Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth and later the Left Behind franchise. It maps ancient biblical prophecy onto modern nation-states, placing Iran (ancient Persia) as a central figure in a final cataclysm.12
Theologian and Baptist pastor Josh Olds summarized it plainly:
The irony is profound: A faith centered on loving enemies and making peace becomes a framework that welcomes and advocates violence. The result is not the advance of God’s kingdom but its irrevocable damage in the eyes of the world.13
Twenty-seven members of Congress have now formally requested a Department of Defense Inspector General investigation into whether military commanders are violating constitutional protections by invoking apocalyptic theology to justify combat operations.14
This. This is what changes my calculus.
Putting on Jesus as a Costume
This is what I'm protesting.
Not empires empiring. Not military conflict. Not even the death of a brutal regime that had this coming.
What I'm protesting is this: one empire, in particular, dressing up its geopolitical ambitions in the costume of Jesus Christ.
That's different.
Because when Jesus gets recruited for an empire's war, the damage isn't just political. It's theological. It poisons the well. It makes the name of Jesus synonymous with bombs and bloodshed in the minds of millions of people who might otherwise be open to the actual gospel. It takes the Prince of Peace and turns him into a poster boy for Armageddon tourism.
This is exactly what Adventism warned about.
Not secular globalists imposing godlessness from the top. But religious populism—a movement of believers who weaponize sacred language to sanctify power. Ellen White described a time when Protestants, in their pursuit of control, would trample liberty in the name of morality. She described a church that, in its hunger for dominance, would unite with the state and in doing so "separate herself from God."15
We are watching that script play out in real time.
And some Adventists—who should know better—are cheering for it because at least the "secular globalists" are getting theirs.
That's a colonized Adventism. And it has no prophetic authority.
So Here's Where I Stand
Let me be unequivocal.
The Iranian regime is evil. It has oppressed the Persian people for over forty years. It has murdered, tortured, and jailed its own citizens—including women who refused to wear the hijab,16 Christians who dared to gather in Jesus' name,17 and anyone who had the audacity to ask for freedom.18 The Bible is clear that those who live by the sword die by it. This regime's day of reckoning was overdue.
I say this without qualification.
And.
I will not cheer for the chaos and bloodshed currently unfolding. I will not celebrate the dispensationalist theology that is fueling aspects of this conflict. I will not pretend that mourning civilian casualties is the same as endorsing the Ayatollah. In the same way I could mourn the children in Gaza killed by IDF airstrikes while naming the wickedness of Hamas—I can mourn the civilians in Iran killed by American bombs while naming the wickedness of a regime that has held its people in terror for decades.
Both things are true.
Both griefs are legitimate.
And anyone who tells you that nuance is weakness has never actually sat with the complexity of what it means to love people in a broken world.
What I Don't Expect From Politics
I'm not waiting for politics to be the place where love and righteousness prevail.
It never has been. It never will be.
Politics—empire—does not run on love. It runs on subterfuge, leverage, espionage, force, and self-interest. I'm not surprised when I see it doing what it was designed to do. Empires empire. That's the whole thing.
What I do protest is when Jesus gets conscripted into that machinery.
Because the kingdom of God has no terrestrial ally. It has no geopolitical home. It is not an American kingdom, not an Israeli kingdom, not a Republican or a Democratic kingdom. It is wholly other. It is the stone cut without hands that will grind every human empire into powder (Daniel 2.)19
What I Actually Hope For
Here's where I land.
I don't hope politics will fix this. It won't.
But I do have a hope. A specific one.
I hope the war ends. I hope the dying stops. And I hope that somehow, on the other side of all of this, the people of Iran find freedom. Real freedom. The kind that lets a woman pastor her church without fear of imprisonment, rape, or death at the hands of the state.20 The kind that lets a Persian Christian lift the name of Jesus openly—not the Jesus with an American flag and a rifle, but the Jesus of the New Testament, whose kingdom is not of this world, whose power is love, whose throne is a cross.
That Jesus.
The upside-down one. The one who called his followers to lose their lives to find them. The one whose kingdom will outlast every empire that has ever tried to co-opt his name.
Ellen White wrote that "the last message of mercy to be given to the world is a revelation of His character of love." (Christ's Object Lessons, p. 415)21
If that's true—and I believe it is—then Adventism's job in this moment isn't to pick a side in the culture war. It isn't to cheer for bombs or cry for the Ayatollah.
It's to flood the world with a picture of a God who looks nothing like what either side is projecting.
Because the people of Iran—and honestly, the people of everywhere—desperately need to see that Jesus.
Footnotes
Amnesty International documents systematic torture, enforced disappearances, and arbitrary killings across multiple decades of the Islamic Republic's rule. See: Amnesty International – Iran. The U.S. State Department's 2024 Country Report on Human Rights Practices in Iran catalogs torture methods in detail, including beatings, electroshock, waterboarding, and sexual violence. See: U.S. State Department – Iran 2024 Human Rights Report. ↩
In 2024, Iranian courts sentenced 96 Christians to a combined 263 years in prison—a sixfold increase from the previous year. House churches are raided, Bibles confiscated, and leaders jailed under "national security" charges. See: Center for Human Rights in Iran – Imprisonment of Christians Jumps Six-Fold. See also: Open Doors – Iran Country Profile. ↩
The UN General Assembly and Human Rights Council have repeatedly condemned Iran's execution of political dissidents and protesters. The 2019 crackdown alone killed an estimated 200–1,500 civilians. See: Wikipedia – Human Rights in Iran. ↩
Iran's state sponsorship of groups including Hamas, Hezbollah, and Houthi militants is documented in U.S. State Department annual reports and widely corroborated by international intelligence agencies. The State Department formally designates Iran as the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism. See: U.S. State Department – Iran 2024 Human Rights Report. ↩
The Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) received over 200 complaints from service members across all branches alleging commanders framed the Iran war in apocalyptic, biblical terms. See: Military.com – Commanders Accused of Framing Iran War as Biblical Mandate; TRT World – US Troops Told Iran War Is "God's Plan". ↩
As reported by independent journalist Jonathan Larsen and published on Substack, cited in Military.com and The Intercept – Iran War End Times. ↩
The complaint was filed by a non-commissioned officer with the MRFF. See: Newsweek – US Commander Said Trump "Anointed by Jesus" to Attack Iran. ↩
The MRFF has operated for over two decades and maintains around 1,200 representatives on nearly every U.S. military installation, including nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers. See: Military.com. ↩
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth made this statement at a Pentagon press briefing on March 2, 2026. See: Al Jazeera – Why Are the US and Israel Framing the Conflict as a Religious War?; People's World – US Troops Told Iran War Will Bring on Biblical End Times. ↩
Ambassador Mike Huckabee made this statement in a Tucker Carlson Show interview released February 20, 2026. See: NBC News – Outcry After Huckabee Suggests Israel Has God-Given Right to Middle East; Axios; The Hill. ↩
Mikey Weinstein, founder of the MRFF, documented the shifting justifications offered by the administration for the Iran conflict. See: Military.com. ↩
The dispensationalist theological tradition—rooted in John Nelson Darby, Cyrus Scofield, and popularized by Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth (1970) and the Left Behind series—places modern Iran (ancient Persia) in the "Gog and Magog" coalition of Ezekiel 38. See: Baptist News Global – The End-Times Theology Driving US Intervention in Iran. ↩
Josh Olds, public theologian and pastor, writing for Baptist News Global. See: Baptist News Global – The End-Times Theology Driving US Intervention in Iran. ↩
The formal request was led by Congressional Freethought Caucus Co-Chairs Rep. Jared Huffman (CA-02) and Rep. Jamie Raskin (MD-08), joined by 27 colleagues. See: Rep. Jared Huffman – Press Release. ↩
Ellen G. White, The Great Controversy (1888), p. 607. Public domain. Available via the Ellen G. White Estate: egwwritings.org. ↩
Iran's compulsory hijab enforcement intensified under the "Noor Plan" from 2024 onward, including digital facial recognition, vehicle confiscation, and violence against women who defied the law. The death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in morality police custody in 2022 sparked nationwide protests. See: Amnesty International – Iran. ↩
In 2024 alone, at least 139 Christians were arrested and 96 sentenced to a combined 263 years in prison. See: Center for Human Rights in Iran; International Christian Concern. ↩
Human Rights in Iran Monitor documents over three decades of systematic repression of political dissidents, journalists, ethnic minorities, and civil society under Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. See: Iran HRM – Human Rights Violations Under Khamenei. ↩
Daniel 2:31–45. The vision of the statue struck by a stone "cut without hands" is a foundational Adventist eschatological text, interpreted as representing the ultimate end of all human kingdoms by the kingdom of God. ↩
Women pastors and Christian leaders in Iran face imprisonment, torture, and rape at the hands of state security forces. See: U.S. State Department – Iran 2024 Human Rights Report; Open Doors – Iran. ↩
Ellen G. White, Christ's Object Lessons (1900), p. 415. Public domain. Available via the Ellen G. White Estate: egwwritings.org. ↩
