Christian Conservatives Draw a Hard Line Against Iran War
Tucker Carlson’s response to the president’s Easter threats was just one example of an important trend.
Tucker Carlson’s most telling break with MAGA had nothing to do with Israel or Iran or President Donald Trump. It was the atomic bomb. Pulling too hard at this particular thread can unravel the entire conservative project, as Carlson’s vehement critics immediately recognized.
“It’s wrong to drop nuclear weapons on people and if you find yourself arguing that it’s a good thing to drop nuclear weapons on people, then you are evil,” he told Joe Rogan in 2024. (Carlson emphatically reiterated the point on a podcast this August.) Backlash from the right was swift, perhaps because many conservatives understand—consciously or otherwise—how central this moral question is to their political history. The conservative order that cohered after Hiroshima and Nagasaki accepted a difficult premise: that vanquishing our enemies or at least containing their power was a task so existential it justified mass killing, via nuclear warfare if needed.
This spring, Carlson again criticized U.S. militarism in Christian terms. After Trump’s infamous Easter Sunday threat to Iran, Carlson said, “Desecrating Easter was the first step toward nuclear war. Christians need to understand where Trump is taking us.” Prominent Catholic conservatives are similarly skeptical of the Trump administration’s moral justifications for the war. When Joe Kent, a practicing Catholic, resigned from his position as counterterrorism director, he published an open letter to Trump that said, near the end, “I pray that you will reflect upon what we are doing in Iran, and who we are doing it for.”
The postwar conservative movement sprang up from the ashes of Japan, as the Soviet acquisition of nuclear weapons turned places like Cuba and Korea and Guatemala into existential battlegrounds. Americans and their leaders came to believe our nukes promoted world peace and our cause was categorically just, premised on a Manichean struggle between good and evil. Soviet power was built on Leninist internationalism, the logic went, so the struggle against Lenin’s heirs was a struggle to prevent the global spread of Bolshevism with nukes.
This view begot something of a rational paranoia, both before the Great War and after it. President Dwight Eisenhower in 1954 said the “possible consequences” of losing Indochina to the communists were “just incalculable to the free world,” citing “falling domino” theory, the principle President Harry Truman first relied on to justify military assistance for Greece and Turkey.
The “Truman Doctrine” was summarized in the president’s 1947 declaration that the U.S. must “support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” This would extend from Korea to Vietnam but also from the Congo to Nicaragua to Iran in decades to follow.
Iran is an instructive and timely example. Writing of the early 1950s, Jack Taylor reported in the UK Tribune, “Anglo-American officials and intelligence agents met at the [British] embassy to consider ‘The Communist Danger in Persia,’ a paper predicated on the suggestion that [Iran’s Prime Minister] Mossadegh ‘would not hesitate to cooperate with the Communists if it served anti-British purposes.’” This, Taylor says, “was followed by more overt attempts to cajole the United States into supporting a coup on the ground that it was a necessary means not of preserving Britain’s oil monopoly but preventing Iran from falling to the Soviets.” One CIA assessment fretted that Iran “seemed headed for an economic collapse and political anarchy,” which would all but ensure its devolution into a “Soviet satellite.”
The left often downplays how such fears rattled the minds of Americans not yet a decade removed from the first mushroom cloud. Even Steven Kinzer, the highly-regarded author of All the Shah’s Men, a groundbreaking history of the CIA coup, cautions, “There’s a great argument, which I don’t think we can ever answer today, as to how seriously Russia was looking at Iran as a target for a possible takeover.”
In the 1950s, Americans could easily be persuaded to see the mere possibility of Soviet expansion as a threat. While often wrong, that mindset is at least understandable. Time and again, this paranoia would turn potential partners—or neutral parties—into enemies, from Guatemala to Indonesia. Of course, as Kinzer and authors like David Talbot have established, these interventions sometimes shared convenient overlap with powerful business interests, which also often shared convenient overlap with leadership in the CIA.
The consequences of post-Hiroshima foreign meddling, CIA coups, and ground invasions haunt virtually every conflict facing the U.S. today. “Domino theory,” however, is much less persuasive these days. The modern version sometimes swaps China for the Soviet Union, as in modern Cuba, where China appears to have an intelligence foothold. But Americans born after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the declassification of Cold War records are less easily persuaded by dressed-up modern domino theory. It’s much more difficult for the hawks to rely on their time-worn justifications for interventionism.
Christians, who were knit tightly into the fabric of the movement conservative “fusionist” alliance, are reconciling themselves with these failures. Combating the threat of nuclear Bolshevism’s global creep was an easy cause for Western Christians to embrace. This remains true today regarding Chinese communism and political Islam.
But the question of whether American resources would be best reserved for relief of the American poor weighs heavily on the right. So too do the questions of whether interventions even achieve their stated goals and whether American hegemony is even feasible in a shrinking globe and the age of asymmetric warfare. Civilian casualties in places like Iran are difficult for Christians to swallow without widespread agreement on the likelihood of an urgent nuclear threat, or the possibility of stopping it by force.
It’s no coincidence that postwar Latin America gave birth to Catholic liberation theology. Oscar Romero, slain while officiating mass at the hands of the Contras, preached in his final homily, “Every country lives its own Exodus.”
“Today,” said Romero, “El Salvador is living its own Exodus. Today we are passing to our liberation through a desert strewn with bodies and where anguish and pain are devastating us.” Romero became an icon of liberation theology, later to be canonized by a pope raised in postwar Argentina.
As Filip Mazurczak noted in First Things, despite vilification from the right, Romero “stood apart from liberation theology, distinguishing between the liberation of communism and the liberation Christ offers.” Mazurczak continues, “His personal hero was Pope Pius XI for resisting fascism and communism at the same time.”
The Manichean struggle to protect American soil from the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki led down dark paths and in the end harmed the West’s credibility in arguing—correctly—that communism is more dangerous than liberalism. Justifying atrocities in the name of stopping atrocities is a dangerous game that can numb us to the consequences of our own actions.
It should be no surprise that Christian conservatives are now less confident in interventionism. Echoing Solzhenitsyn, Billy Graham in the 1950s preached, “All of the trouble with Russia began in the Garden of Eden.” Today, with the wreckage of Cold War conflicts in our rearview mirror, this feels like a defense of realism. Indeed, Graham himself differed from many Evangelicals of his day on nuclear proliferation.
“Now I know that some people feel human beings are so terrified of a nuclear war that no one would dare start one. I wish I could accept that,” said Graham in 1979. “But neither history nor the Bible gives much reason for optimism. What guarantee is there that the world will never produce another maniacal dictator like Hitler or Amin?”
“As a Christian I take sin seriously,” Graham added, “and the Christian should be the first to know that the human heart is deceitful and desperately wicked, as Jeremiah says. We can be capable of unspeakable horror, no matter how educated or technically sophisticated we are. Auschwitz is a compelling witness to this.” It’s funny this sentiment wound up distinguishing Graham from many Christians of his day.
Sen. Robert Taft, a Christian, delivered a speech at Kenyon College barely after the mushroom cloud had receded from Japan in October of 1946. “Our whole attitude in the world, for a year after VE Day, including the use of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” said Taft, “seems to me a departure from the principles of fair and equal treatment which have made America respected throughout the world before this Second World War. Today we are cordially hated in many countries.”
The speech ended with a prescient observation. “War has always set back temporarily the ideals of the world. This because of the tremendous scope of the war, the increased barbarism of its methods and the general prevalence of the doctrine of force and expediency even before the war, the effect today is even worse and the duration of the post-war period of disillusionment may be longer,” Taft argued. “As I see it, the English-speaking peoples have one great responsibility. That is to restore to the minds of men a devotion to equal justice under law.”
Taft’s invocation of global hatred shows his argument was both pragmatic and moral. Equal justice under the law, of course, does not include justifying covert meddling abroad for the sake of moral ends, or justifying human rights abuses for the same reasons.
In the wake of Trump’s decision to strike Iran, intellectuals on the Christian right engaged in a robust debate over whether the move met the criteria of Just War Theory, as established by Augustine and Aquinas. Even Vice President J.D. Vance and the pope debated this question in the press.
In First Things, R.R. Reno drew on recent history to caution against drawing pat conclusions about the justice of the war. “Just war theory also puts forward the principle of probability of success,” he wrote. “In view of the failure of past administrations to declaw Iran, it’s not unreasonable to conclude that the present airstrikes and cruise missile attacks will blow up facilities and kill people to no good effect. The Iranian regime will survive, regroup, and rearm, ready for another turn around the dance floor of futile negotiations, in which case the explosions, deaths, and suffering will have been for naught.”
Reno concluded “it is unwise to issue confident moral judgments about Operation Epic Fury.”
In Public Discourse, Edward Feser firmly placed the current war outside Catholic tradition. “While preemptive war can be justifiable in light of the just war criteria developed in the natural law tradition, preventive war cannot be,” he contended. “Like a person, a country can justifiably be harmed only for what it has in fact done or is actively preparing to do, not for what it merely might do. If what a country might do provided a sufficient casus belli, then any country could justify war against any merely potential enemy.”
That last observation is reminiscent of a speech Taft gave at Grove City College in 1943, in which he argued,
If we admit that the United States can properly go to war to impose our ideas of freedom on the rest of the world, then it seems we must admit that the Soviets have a right to crusade to impose Communism on the rest of the world because they believe Communism to be the final solution of the world’s problems.
This is not moral relativism. Indeed, it’s closer to the Golden Rule.
The senator made his case before our troops landed in Normandy, but eight decades later—after stalemates from Vietnam to Afghanistan and amid a disaster in Iran—his sentiment is increasingly compelling to Christian conservatives, exhausted and confused by the bitter fruits of our country’s record abroad.
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