At The Telegraph this week, Tim Stanley, an Evangelical Baptist turned atheist turned Anglican turned Roman Catholic, posits that President Donald Trump’s Iran War is being pursued at the behest of a coalition of Fundamentalist Evangelicals—Dispensationalist Fundamentalist Evangelicals, we should note—and Jews. Stanley finds the roots of this coalition in the aftermath of the Reformation. “In the wake of the Protestant Reformation, the new churches studied scripture for predictions of when this glorious thing might occur, and the world around them for signs of its immediacy.” Impatient Protestants, he tells us, tried to speed things up. Seventeenth-century “Christians seized upon a passage in Romans—‘and all Israel shall be saved’—to infer that if you could only convert the Jews, Jesus would return. So, Oliver Cromwell permitted Jewish liberty in England, out of a combination of tolerance and religious chauvinism.” Ancient Israel, Stanley writes, “enjoyed a close relationship with God. Protestants wanted a piece of that, too. Whereas the Roman Church imitated the Roman Empire, the Reformers leaned into nationhood, relocating authority in local leaders, like Henry VIII, who turned to the Old Testament for models of how to rule.” Religious dissenters like the Pilgrims and Puritans, “who were persecuted at home, meanwhile, yearned to build a New Jerusalem in their own promised land. The Pilgrims, some of whom studied Hebrew, thus founded their ‘City Upon a Hill’ in America, predicting it would rise or fall, just as Israel did, depending upon its holiness.”
John Milbank, the respected Oxford don, chimed in on social media and immediately tied a war—instigated supposedly by Fundamentalists—to Calvinism. On X he blamed “the perversion of Christianity by the evangelical Right. It represents a strain of Protestantism that is still partly stuck in the unqualified Old Covenant: putting nation above cosmopolis, sanctifying violence and power as power.” In a subsequent post on the same thread, Milbank proposed that “Calvinism is so ‘Hebraizing’ (no doubt in a way that fantasizes what Israel was) that it tends to distort Christianity entirely. This is one key source of what is problematic in the USA.”
Milbank’s mental taxonomy of Reformed Protestantism—which for him seems to have ceased developing sometime in the 1640s—is ahistorical and unhelpful in understanding the religious contours of U.S. foreign policy. Stanley’s history is reductionistic and imprecise—he can hardly be blamed for that, since he’s juggling the history of Evangelicals, atheists, Anglicans, and Roman Catholics given his personal journey—and also not valuable for an understanding of religion and the Iran War. Even if we grant a simple historical truth—that forms of Christian Zionism were derived from Calvinism—there’s no evidence that the Iran War has particular support from Calvinist churches, churchmen, or churchgoers in the United States, much less Reformed intellectuals.
Take Dr. Brandon Zaffini, for example. He’s a former soldier and a political scientist employed at Geneva College, the denominational institution of the Reformed Presbyterian Church. His Calvinist credentials are unimpeachable, and…he’s a vocal opponent of the Iran War. On social media he has appealed to anti-war voices across the political spectrum, including Edward Feser, a highly regarded Roman Catholic ethicist. Dr. Ben R. Crenshaw, a fellow of the Declaration of Independence Center at the University of Mississippi, has warned against the massive costs of the war and its potential to turn into another endless military quagmire. Mike Sabo, a Magisterial Protestant intellectual and Iran War skeptic who serves as an editor at The Claremont Institute’s publication The American Mind, cautioned enthusiasts for war on Protestant nationalist lines by noting at The American Reformer that “the perception in any way that the U.S. is doing the bidding of another country, even if it’s a long-time ally like Israel,” would not sit well “with the motto of America First.” The United States’ sovereignty rests “on the idea that our political leaders are doing what is in the interest of our own country. Undermining this key principle would be a major mistake—especially given a political class that, absent Trump, the American people have little trust in.”
Interestingly enough, the most well-known Reformed doubter of the Iran War is one of Milbank’s former students, Rev. Dr. Peter Leithart. Leithart is far from a nationalist, and his ecclesiocentrism mirrors, to some degree, John Milbank’s own commitments regarding religion’s relationship to the state and the social order. In a recent piece at First Things, Leithart asked whether the U.S.–Israel assault on Iran fulfilled the criteria of Christian just war theory. The answer, Leithart stated flatly, was a decided no.
A just war must have clear and achievable objectives, but the Trump administration’s messaging, if not its moral reasoning, has been muddled. Do we have a reasonable expectation of success? It’s difficult to tell what’s real and what’s not, but it seems the U.S. is in danger of depleting its munitions before gaining a decisive victory. We seem to have underestimated Iran’s military capability and determination, especially after Khamenei’s death, while overestimating the Iranian opposition’s appetite for a coup. Have we stumbled into the position of the king in Jesus’s parable, who starts a war without first counting the cost (Luke 14:31–33)?
Leithart was not sparing in his criticisms. Some of Trump and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s statements even raised “the question of whether the Trump administration regards war as a rule-bound enterprise at all.”
Calvinist intellectuals, one might note, don’t speak for Reformed churches or churchmen. But here again our British friends’ analysis fails. Not one of the conservative Reformed denominations that comprise the NAPARC—North American Presbyterian and Reformed Council—confederation has passed any resolution or made any statement commending or supporting the Iran War. Neither, for that matter, has the Anglican Church in North America, or the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod. What Milbank and Stanley seem to imply is that any time Baptists, Dispensationalists, or Evangelicals support a military venture, their opinions are synonymous with—or speak authoritatively for—Magisterial Protestant intellectuals or churchmen. That proposition would come as a surprise to most Magisterial Protestant churchmen and intellectuals. Especially this one.