Ryszard Kapuściński in Imperium (1993) warned of three plagues, or contagions threatening the world: nationalism, racism and fundamentalism. He further identified one shared trait or a common denominator in ‘an aggressive all powerful total irrationality,’ arguing that ‘[a]nyone stricken with one of these plagues is beyond reason. In his head burns a sacred pyre that awaits its sacrificial victims.’
The lunatics have now well and truly taken over the asylum worldwide. We are now witnessing a new unholy war being led by evangelical Christians against Islam, just as earlier crusades emanated from Europe in the Middle Ages. And like those earlier wars, the acquisition of plunder is clearly a motivating factor.
Noticeably, the clearly sociopathic Pete Hegseth talks of the Iran war as God’s War, and the soldiery are briefed accordingly. Trump uses similar language, but holy wars often occlude terrestrial agendas. Add the dimension of rampant technology, wherein war is conducted remotely in video game sequences and one reaches a level of savagery reminiscent of the 1940s. Meanwhile AI plunders our libraries and distorts our reality with propagandist bombast.
Hegseth’s macabre ceremonies in the White House have included Doug Wilson, the founder of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches. He has stated that homosexuality should be a crime and that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote. As editor of The Princeton Tory, Hegseth also suggested that homosexuality was immoral.
In March 2026, soon after the start of the U.S./Israeli attack – branded with the biblical denotation Operation Epic Fury – it has been reported that military leaders told their service members that the war was ‘part of God’s divine plan,’ and that President Donald Trump had been anointed by Jesus. One commander quoted the Book of Revelation, and said the war will bring the second coming of Jesus Christ. The whole exercise has a distinct air of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove (1959).
The legendary punk band, The Dead Kennedys album In God We Trust Inc (1982) curiously presages our times, but none of what is being done in God’s name is properly Kennedyesque, or indeed genuinely Christian. It appears to be an extension of what Eisenhower warned of the existential threat of the Military Industrial Complex. Wars. As IG Farben and Bleichroder knew, wars are a great source of revenue.
The leading Catholic legal philosopher John Finnis is also a believer in God’s law. Marriage is for him exclusively between a man and a woman and purely for procreation. He considers homosexual congress and sex outside marriage as intrinsically shameful, immoral and harmful. In Natural Law and Natural Rights (1980) he compares abortion to carpet bombing civilians. Sadly, murdering the civilian population of Iran does not appear to bother the zealots in the White House to the same extent as interfering with women’s reproductive rights.
Jonathan Sacks, the leading contemporary Jewish philosopher in the U.K. railed against extremism. In Morality (2020) he outlined positive religious values, including a focus on dignity, associative levels of responsibility, community and a sense of public service and the common good. Is all of this now lost on the Likud faction in Israel?
Christian jihadism, historically, also includes the horrendous conquest of South America by Spanish Conquistadors. In modern times the Blairite justification, couched at one level in Christian terms, for the war on Iraq was also used to mask narrow self-interest in securing oil. The war in Iran, now engulfing the entire Middle East, also has significant acquisitive elements, but is more obviously an attack on what is perceived in racial terms as a satanic culture.
Shortly before his death Sacks equated altruistic evil with the neoconservative group, who held themselves to be good and their opponents to be evil. This leads to the arrogant imperialist assumptions that ‘we’ are inflicting punishment for ‘their’ own good, and that killing multitudes will pave the way to democracy.
Both the late Christopher Hitchens, and indeed Richard Dawkins, have written extensively about the new forms of religious extremes we are witnessing, with the finger of blame primarily pointed at Islam. Islamic extremism does provide graphic examples of brutal beheadings, mass executions, stoning to death for adultery, planes hitting the Twin Towers, as well as the murder of journalists. There is also evident in Britain a lack of integration, and a secessionism unconducive to any kind of harmonious multiculturalism. Recourse to genocide, however, seems to be the preserve of evangelical Christians and Zionists.
Islamic Rage
Much of the Islamic rage can be traced to neo-imperialism in the Middle East. The current phase began in earnest with the invasion of Iraq, and has culminated in this attack on Iran.
Christopher Hitchens’ worst intellectual error, inexcusable in my view, was to support the Bush-Blair invasion of Iraq. He was, indirectly, supporting, though he might not have seen it, an even worse form of religious fundamentalism directed against another.
In works such as Culture and Imperialism (1994) and Orientalism (1978) the Palestinian author Edward Said author asserted that ‘Patriotism, chauvinism, ethnic, religious and racial hatreds can lead to mass destructiveness.’ He cites our own Conor Cruise O’Brien to the effect that imagined communities of identity are hijacked by the petty dictators of state nationalism, like Benjamin Netanyahu.
In Marxist terms, religious fundamentalism can be traced to growing disparities of wealth and structural inequality, as well as a lack of opportunities to gain a rounded education. We have seen an all-too-great an emphasis on technical or scientific education for economic advancement, as opposed to a broad liberal education that inculcates critical thinking.
In these straitened times extremism speaks of a need to belong to a cause, leading to belief in something ethereal, no matter how ludicrous. Belief in an afterlife defines people’s existences and justifies even self-immolation.
As the wheels come off the neoliberal economic system and the societal bonds wither, extremist Christian nationalism and the demonisation of the other has stepped into the void to provide solace.
U.S. Evangelism
In the United States, we are witnessing an unholy synergy between Evangelical Christians and racism. Far-right demagogues have articulated a view that ‘our’ country is being overrun by immigrants and that the dominant ethnic group must ‘take back control’ from a phantom intellectual Marxism espoused by liberal elites, Harvard or straight socialism. All of these apparently emanate from the decadence of a mixed race cosmopolis. The fire is spreading to Europe, U.K and Ireland too.
Thus, we find a global descent into the extremist and racist abyss, where those we disagree with are scapegoated and targeted. This is a product of a dualistic mode of thinking, which Sacks identifies with a need to define God in relation to the Satan residing in others. This leads to the demonisation of those we disagree with, evident also in social media vilification.
What the Christian far-right in the United States and elsewhere offer is the establishment of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, which involves isolation of the righteous few in gated communities, segregating the rich chosen people from the disaster they inflict on others.
The now tarnished Noam Chomsky once claimed that the Republican Party is the ‘most dangerous organization in world history.’ Chomsky also claimed in a BBC Newsnight interview that nearly 40% of the American public believe that the Second Coming will occur by 2050. So, Pete Hegseth may be preaching to the converted.
Foto: Ricardo Stuckert/PR
Religion as Agent for Good?
Alternatively, in The Godless Gospel (2020) Julian Baggini calls for forms of religion shorn of hatred so we may realise our best intentions and develop empathy and compassion. He envisages a commitment to personal humility and an obligation and commitment to the truth, causing as little harm as possible. There are clearly good values that Christianity may teach to those of a secular persuasion presently lacking in moral clarity.
Above all, the atheist and perhaps the leading intellect left on the planet Jurgen Habermas recognises how religion engenders social integration, and can be a basis for communicative action, his core concept. As far back as 1978 he argued, from a secular perspective, for the necessity of religious ideas to humanise society. These would be religious ideas where we learn to communicate reasonably without resort to falsetto Jihadism.
The former Pope Francis’s experiences in the barrios of Buenos Aires also appear to have shaped an empathy towards the wretched of the Earth. He preached tolerance and engagement, as well as social and economic justice. The present Pope has, encouragingly, in un-American fashion, condemned what is happening, however mutedly. Let us hope that he is untainted by the dark money of the Vatican and does not go the way of John Paul II.
Christian socialism is a potentially vital force if it reflects the values of what Philip Pullman calls that great man Jesus, but not the values, as he equally presents, of that scoundrel Jesus Christ. This latter is a distortion of New Testament values, dedicated to the accumulation of capital, a lack of compassion and political manipulation.
Neo-feudalism
We appear to be witnessing Old Testament fury, but beyond the zealotry it seems that neoliberalism is morphing into neo-feudalism. The Book of Genesis sanctions man’s dominion over the Earth, which appears to be permitting a scorched earth approach, but this is a smoke screen. Institutional Evangelical Christianity is wedded to the exchange of goods, along with the exchange of gods. Drill Baby Drill.
The last word I leave to Clarence Darrow, who represented a progressive America of another era in his closing speech in The Scopes Trial:
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always it is feeding and gloating for more.——-, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind.
Those who suffer from toxic nationalism, toxic religious mania and toxic racism are beyond reason and must be overcome.
Feature Image: Some of Pete Hegseth’s tattoos, 2021