1.
In President Donald Trump's latest ultimatum to Iran, a 48-hour warning, he ended with the words "Glory be to God." As often happens in certain circles in Israel, the phrase was met with scorn, or at most treated as the equivalent of our own "with God's help." Commentators, whose worldview either rejects religious discourse or is unfamiliar with it in depth, dismissed attempts to interpret the statement. Some pointed to the declaration of faith on the US dollar bill, "In God we trust." It is similar, they said with a wave of the hand. It is not.
It is hard to imagine a contemporary European leader issuing a fateful political statement that included such an expression. In general, our own beliefs are beside the point. The question is whether the phrase carries political and military significance. The answer is yes. The US president activated a cultural, religious and historical code with deeper meaning.
2.
First, we are in a special period: Holy Week in the Christian world. Billions of believers celebrated Easter at the start of the week. For the evangelical public, Trump's core base of support, the phrase gives the war moral and religious meaning, beyond its security and economic interests. In their eyes, this is a war of the children of light against the children of darkness.
In the evangelical view, even more than in the Catholic one, the central idea of Easter is Jesus' resurrection and the triumph over death, meaning over evil in the world. This is why crosses in evangelical churches are bare. One does not find the figure of the crucified Jesus on them, as in Catholic churches, because from their perspective he is not there. He has risen.
3.
In that sense, "In God we trust" means: we trust God to protect us, a declaration of confidence under God's protection, similar to the Jewish phrase "with God's help." "Glory be to God," by contrast, appears in the New Testament and in Christian liturgy. For example, in the Gospel of Luke, chapter 2: "Glory to God in the highest heaven, and peace on earth among those with whom He is pleased." That is a translation from the original ancient Greek. This is already a declaration of victory and sovereignty. Trump inserted the first part of the verse into his message, but his audience knows the second part as well and understands: God is not pleased with the Iranian regime.
Trump's threat that "all Hell will reign down on them" on Iran also carries religious connotations. Add to that the statements by War Secretary Pete Hegseth regarding the Christian dimension of the war against Iran. Pope Leo XIV was quick to reject those remarks, saying they were far from the path of Jesus. The result is a clash of civilizations: the most powerful country in the world, representing Christian civilization, or at least a central part of it, facing the Islamic Republic of Iran, which leads the Shiite world, between 200 million and 300 million believers, while claiming to lead the Muslim world as a whole.
4.
This recalls the rhetoric used by the Reagan administration toward the Soviet superpower. In March 1983, Ronald Reagan addressed a similar support base, the National Association of Evangelicals, and urged his listeners to "beware the temptation of pride," the temptation to treat both sides as equally guilty. He asked them not to ignore "the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire," and by doing so to avoid standing aside and refusing to take part in "the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil."
5.
Trump, then, has effectively stripped the Iranians of their monopoly on speaking in God's name. The religious discourse surrounding the war signals to the world at large, and to the American public in particular, that this is not a war fought only over the nuclear threat and economic interests. It is a religious mission to eradicate evil from the world. In terms of the current Jewish season, this is the eliminating of leaven before Passover.
If you have made it this far, well done. One may reasonably assume that a confrontation with such historical and theological connotations makes diplomatic compromise almost impossible. Trump has likely done more than set a ticking clock for the regime in Tehran. He is rallying the deep faith of his voters to prepare the ground for a major move. Time will tell.
