By Michele Steinberg –
As the 250th anniversary of the birth of the United States drew closer this spring, alarming manifestations of ideas alien to the American System and alien to the Constitution’s guarantee of Freedom of Worship, Speech, Press, and Assembly emerged and grew in frequency. Rallies, marches, social media, religious gatherings and podcasts touted Christian Nationalism and Holy War. Preachers advocated a system of theocracy for the United States and were invited into the Pentagon to spread this alien ideology into the military. These extremist ideas were also embedded in some of the official celebrations of the 250th Anniversary.
Consider the following:
*On July 4th, as official celebrations of America 250 were taking place, Patriot Front, a group of white supremacists with a history of violence, staged a march in Washington, D.C. wearing uniforms and covering their faces with white masks, carrying Confederate and American flags while chanting, “Reclaim America.” A banner carried by one cohort of the march declared, “total Aryan victory.” They flooded subway cars in their travels through the Capitol and circled the perimeter of events, creating a chill of racism and threat of violence.
- On May 17th, Rededicate 250, a religious rally, partially funded by the U.S. government via its’ organization Freedom 250, took place on the Washington Mall, featuring video speeches by President Trump, the Vice President and Cabinet members. Christian Nationalism was a widespread theme among participants and invited religious speakers. Pete Hegseth, Secretary of the Department of War invoked “Jesus Christ” as the protector of the United States; Secretary of State Marco Rubio proclaimed that from “the beginning” the “soul of our nation has been rooted in the Christian faith.”
- On March 2, 28 members of the House of Representatives sent a letter to The Honorable Platte B. Moring III, Inspector General U.S. Department of Defense, asking for a full investigation into reports within the U.S. military, encouraged by Secretary Hegseth, that the U.S. and Israeli war against Iran is being promoted as a fulfillment of prophecy. The letter says in part, “Some commanders have reportedly told subordinates that the American and Israeli attacks will hasten the return of Jesus Christ, and have cited passages from the Book of Revelation and instructed officers to tell their troops that current combat operations are all part of God’s divine plan.”
- The Military Religious Freedom Foundation, an organization that supports a secular military according to the U.S. Constitution as well as freedom of worship, reported that it had received hundreds of complaints from U.S. military personnel within days of the beginning of the U.S./Israeli attacks on Iran, that officers were telling them that the Iran war was “intended to bring about the biblical ‘Armageddon.’”
A Republic, not a Theocracy
The founders of the United States held deep reverence for God as the Creator of the Universe and source of the “inalienable rights” of human beings. But religious discrimination – either by decree or by popular or political pressure – was rejected. In fact, religious freedom and the right to worship without any government-imposed official religion was already enshrined in law in some pre-American Revolutionary colonies such as Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey decades before the Declaration of Independence. In other colonies, the Anglican Church (the Church of England) was the official Established Church and other denominations and religions were prohibited and sometimes persecuted. Likewise Massachusetts, with its Puritan/Congregational established church.
In 1786, the landmark Virginia Religious Freedom Act was passed, disestablishing the Anglican Church and mandating freedom of religious belief and practice.
This principle was written into the 1787 United States Constitution in two ways. (1) Article VI states that “No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” (2) The First Amendment, ratified in 1791, states: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;” and asserting religious freedom even before the freedoms of speech, the press, or assembly. (3) The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, guarantees “equal protection of the laws” to all persons, which has been interpreted to prohibit discrimination based on religion.
Over decades and centuries, freedom of religious belief was repeatedly written into official documents, laws, treaties, and speeches of presidents.
In 1796, a treaty that representatives of the United States entered into with Tripoli after the war against the Barbary Pirates, stated in Article 11, “As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion,-as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen,-and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.” The treaty was unanimously ratified by the U.S. Senate and signed by President John Adams in 1797.
On January 6, 1941, in his annual address to Congress, President Franklin Roosevelt stated, “We look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms…. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way–everywhere in the world.”
Theocracy and Empire
American System Now asked Dr. Clifford Kiracofe, Jr., author of Dark Crusade: The Israel Lobby and Christian Zionism, to share some of his thoughts on the recent surfacing of Christian Nationalism and Holy War beliefs in the wake of the U.S./Israeli war on Iran.
A veteran staff member of U.S. Senate offices and committees, including the prestigious Senate Foreign Relations Committee, as well as former professor of American History and studies related to the Middle East at the Virginia Military Institute (VMI) and at Washington and Lee University, Dr. Kiracofe brings an expertise on the influence of “End Times” religious ideologies based on his decades of research. The first edition of his book, Dark Crusade: Christian Zionism and US Foreign Policy (2009) was one of the first to put the spotlight on the process of how religious extremism, the Israel Lobby and Christian Zionism not only influenced domestic policy in the U.S., but exerted influence on U.S. foreign policy as well.
Dark Crusade and Dr. Kiracofe’s earlier speeches and writings in 2002 in many ways broke the story of who the neocons are, and how, with their brotherhood in Britain and Israel, they have used Christian Zionism to distort the United States into a theocratic empire.
Excerpted below are sections of the more than one hour interview of Dr. Kiracofe by Michele Steinberg for ASN.
MS: In 2002, you began to speak and write about neoconservatism and U.S. war policy leading to the 2023 Iraq war. Then you delved into the phenomenon of Christian Zionism along with the neo-cons and seemingly never-ending wars in the Middle East. How did that lead to writing Dark Crusade?
CK: My approach is really simple. I wanted to learn about the phenomenon of Christian Zionism and give it some historical context to what’s going on in the United States.
So, I started investigating, and I got myself all the way back to Napoleon. And Napoleon, in his conquest of Egypt, which was under the control of the Ottoman Empire, attempted to rally Ottoman Jewish people who lived in the Ottoman Empire to his side and promised them their own country. But the Jewish people in the Ottoman Empire preferred to stay with the Ottomans because they were doing okay under the Ottomans.
And that was the Napoleonic phase, the idea of an imperial power attempting to use Jewish people, the wealthier ones, of course, and the Jewish business community and religious community for imperial purposes. That’s about 1799, 1800.
Well, the next step is the British Empire, which, noticing how the French attempted to beguile the Jewish philanthropists and all this, decided that was a really good idea too. So, we start to see in the early 1800s in London, the British monarchical and aristocratic elite in charge of the country and the foreign policy, making overtures to wealthy Jewish financiers in London, England.
That foreign policy came under a very savvy, crafty foreign minister, Lord Palmerston, whose son-in-law, Ashley Cooper (later Lord Shaftsbury) was one of these sort of evangelical Christian types in England who advised him that he, the foreign minister and government, could rally a good support base for English Imperial or British Imperial policy in the Near East in the Middle East Holy Land if he and the Foreign Ministry and the Empire would support and encourage Christian Zionism.
So basically, the main point here that I want to make is that for the British Empire, Christian Zionism was a useful tool of Empire in the Middle East.
MS: So, would you characterize it as, it was useful for the British to expand Empire, and the use of Christian Zionism and Christian nationalism today is distorting our nation from republic to empire. Is that a fair statement?
CK: Absolutely. I go into that in detail in my new edition of the book, in the final chapter where I make some historical points and the idea of “A Republic, Not an Empire,” which actually was the name of a book by conservative Patrick Buchanan some 30 years ago.
“A Republic, not an Empire.” You see that theme today also with Ron Paul, Rep. Tom Massie, Marjorie Taylor Green, Rep. Ro Khanna on the Democratic side, some progressive Democrats, et cetera. So, it’s bipartisan today, the struggle to recapture, you could say, our republic, our republican identity, from an imperial mode that we’re now in, is bipartisan on the progressive side of both parties.
Sticking on the republic side of things. If you go back into Roman history — not the Roman Empire, but the Roman Republic — and the fall of the Roman Republic, looking at, say, its last 100 years, what was going on? You had two military dictators, Sulla and Marius, and the rise of militarism. And you had the destruction of the ancient constitution of the Roman Republic and its disintegration into a military dictatorship.
During that same period of time, there’s another parallel. You had the penetration of the Roman Republic by alien religions. The Mithra cult particularly penetrated the military, it was a foreign cult and specifically penetrated the military. And you also had the Isis cult from Egypt and other alien religious cults penetrating the Roman Republic.
So for me, the Christian Zionist today is a penetration of an alien religious ideology that actually was invented in England in the 1820s and 30s. So, we have an alien religious cult coming into the United States, this time from England.
MS: I think your focus on the role of alien religions is quite important. Our currency, our coinage, and so forth have words like, “In God We Trust.” And this is quite understandable. And it’s universal. But today’s use of so-called Biblical prophecy seems very different. In early March, an active-duty NCO told the Military Religious Freedom Foundation a day or so after the U.S. attack on Iran, “This morning, our commander opened up combat readiness status briefing by urging us not to be afraid because this war is all part of God’s divine plan…. President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to earth.”
Neither of us are lawyers, legally trained. But I know that in the jobs that you have had, you’ve sworn to protect the Constitution. So, in your opinion, how do you see attempts like these to move, or even force, military personnel to adopt or act on these religious beliefs?
CK: Well, yes, we do in federal service take such an oath to defend the Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic, underlining domestic in the current situation. So those of us who are so sworn, if we are serious about it, whether we are in active government service or whether we’re retired or whatever, we have taken that oath.
So, in my non-legal point of view, it’s unconstitutional. And I hope that the lawsuits that the servicemen and their lawyers are going to launch or have launched are very aggressive in defending our constitutional rights. Basically, the way you could view it is, as I was saying before, in the old Roman Republic, the Mithra cult penetrated the Roman army, and the Republic fell.
Part II coming next: Cliff Kiracofe’s exposition of Darbyism, and Britain’s cultic invasion of the new American Republic, from Dark Crusade: The Israel Lobby and Christian Zionism.
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