When President Donald Trump announced on Truth Social on Saturday that the United States had bombed three sites in Iran, he spoke to a MAGA-verse divided. Many of his most ardent supporters—former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, for instance, and far-right political activist Laura Loomer—applauded his decision. But others—including media personality Tucker Carlson, hard-right commentator Candace Owens, and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon—were against the bombing from the beginning. “A bombing campaign against Iran will set off a war, and it will be America’s war,” Carlson warned his 16.4 million followers on X in March. “Don’t let the propagandists lie to you.”
The political fight seemed to boil down to a battle between those who believed that the United States had a responsibility to its foreign allies and others who saw Trump’s decision as a betrayal of his “America First” campaign promise.
But there is another dynamic propelling the deepening rift within the MAGA faithful. Underlying the divide over intervention in the Middle East is not geopolitics but a substantial theological schism within the community of Christian nationalists, and their belief about the “end times,” or the imminent end of the world.
Broadly speaking—though there are certainly exceptions— many of the most ardent supporters of Trump’s decision to bomb Iran identify as Christian Zionists, a group that believes that Israel and the Jewish people will play a key role in bringing about the second coming of the Messiah. As Christians, they are called to hasten this scenario, says Matthew Taylor, a senior scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies (ICJS) in Baltimore and author of The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy. “The mission, so to speak, is to get the Jews back to Israel and to establish themselves within Israel,” he says. “Then you fulfill the preconditions, or one of the preconditions, for the second coming.”
During his first term, Taylor noted, Trump made strong connections with influential figures in the New Apostolic Reformation, a charismatic Christian movement that teaches followers to take “dominion” over all aspects of society, including government. Over the last decade or so, Christian Zionism has become an important part of NAR theology—so much so that during worship, some adherents now wear Jewish prayer shawls and blow shofars, the ram’s horn instruments that ancient Israelites used to call troops to battle and still features in some Jewish holidays. This is an example of what Taylor refers to as philosemitism—the idea of loving Jewish customs and cultures. But within end-times theology lurks a dark side to Christian Zionists’ fixation on Judaism. Once the Messiah arrives, many Christian Zionists are convinced that the Jews will convert en masse to Christianity; in many versions, those who don’t convert will perish. “If you actually read up on antisemitism and philosemitism,” Taylor says, “they really are two sides of the same coin.”
“If you actually read up on antisemitism and philosemitism, they really are two sides of the same coin.”
Even before the bombs were dropped that Saturday, Christian Zionists were hailing a possible strike as divinely ordained. One of their most prominent and politically powerful adherents is former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, who currently serves as the US ambassador to Israel. On a podcast last year, Huckabee described himself as an “unapologetic, unreformed Zionist,” adding, “there really isn’t such a thing” as Palestine. He refers to the West Bank exclusively by its biblical name, “Judea and Samaria.” In the Jerusalem Post’s list of the most influential Christian Zionists, Huckabee comes in second. He follows former Minnesota congresswoman Michele Bachmann, who recently helped launch an Israel institute at Regent University, a Christian college in Virginia Beach, Virginia.
On June 18, three days before the United States bombed Iran, Huckabee texted President Trump, comparing him to “Truman in 1945,” who was faced with the existential decision of whether to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “God spared you in Butler, Pennsylvania, to be the most consequential president in a century, maybe ever,” Huckabee wrote. “I believe you will hear from heaven and that voice is far more important than mine or ANYONE else’s.”
Hours before news of the bombing broke, Lance Wallnau, an influential Texas NAR leader, with robust ties to the Trump administration—last year he hosted a Pennsylvania campaign event for JD Vance— warned his 129,000 followers on X, “Satan would love to crush Israel, humiliate the United States, destroy President Trump’s hope of recovery for America, and plunge the world into war.” But then he reassured them, “That’s not going to happen. Why? I was reminded again just a few moments ago what the Lord told me about Donald Trump in 2015.” He explained that he had received a message from God that Trump was a “modern-day Cyrus,” an Old Testament Persian king whom God used to free the Jews, his chosen people. On his YouTube channel two days after the bombing, Wallnau concluded that the prophecy was coming true. “Jesus is coming back, and I believe this is all part of him setting the stage for his return,” he said.
In Trump’s speech shortly after the bombing, he appeared to give a presidential nod to the Christian Zionist crowd, saying, “I want to thank—in particular—God. I want to just say, ‘We love you, God!’” In those words, some evangelicals thought they heard an affirmation of a common Christian Zionist refrain: “God will bless those who bless Israel.” Eric Metaxas, an evangelical radio host who has collaborated with Wallnau and was present at the rally leading up to the January 6th attack on the Capital, tweeted to his 240,000 followers, “Trump was obviously choked up & meant it,” he wrote. “No president has ever said anything like that. An extraordinary & historic public declaration of faith. God WILL bless this nation. Hallelujah.”
Taylor noted that another NAR leader, the Colorado evangelist Dutch Sheets, had a similar message for his 359,000 YouTube followers on Monday. “We are entering this time,” he said. “Millions of [Iranians] will come to Christ. Be assured: God is involved in this war.” A key figure in the campaign to overturn the 2020 election and the leadup to the January 6th attack on the Capital, Sheets has long held that Trump is a divinely appointed leader.
The Heritage Foundation, the powerful right-wing think tank that was the driving force behind the Project 2025 roadmap for Trump’s second term, also celebrated the Iran strikes. A particularly vocal Heritage staffer on this issue is Victoria Coates, vice president of the group’s Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy. Coates, a Christian, leads Project Esther, Heritage’s roadmap for quashing the pro-Palestine movement in the United States; the name is a reference to Queen Esther, a biblical heroine who saved the Jews in Persia from slaughter. Coates is also the author of the 2023 book The Battle for the Jewish State: How Israel―And America―Can Win. In a statement the Heritage Foundation released the day after the attack, Coates made the case that by bombing Iran, the United States actually progressed toward ending the age-old conflicts in the Middle East. “Now that Iran’s self-defeating dreams of nuclear military power have been decimated,” she said, “we are closer to peace.”
Unlike the Christian Zionists, some Christian members of the crowd that criticizes Trump’s decision to bomb Iran believe modern-day Israel has little to do with the Holy Land of the Bible. In fact, some of them hold that the Christian church now plays the role that Israel itself once did in ancient times, explains Taylor, the religion scholar. He explains the dynamic as more of the absorption of Jewish and Gentile Christians into a single church unit, which then becomes “a kind of replacement theology” in which Christianity supersedes Judaism and “replaces it.”
One group that strongly rejects the idea that Israel and the Jewish people are key to the second coming is the TheoBros, mostly millennial, extremely online men who proudly call themselves Christian nationalists. Great fans of Trump, in the wake of the US bombing, some of the TheoBros’ comments have veered into the terrain of antisemitism. The day after Trump announced the bombing, Stephen Wolfe, author of the 2022 book The Case for Christian Nationalism, tweeted to his 31,000 followers, “2% of the population demand 100% of the wars,” presumably an oblique reference to the roughly 2 percent of the American population who identifies as Jewish. (Wolfe did not respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones.)
The same day, Texas pastor Joel Webbon, another Christian nationalist TheoBro, weighed in, tweeting to his 39,000 followers, “Gentile Christians are not second class citizens of heaven, and Jews aren’t special.” On a Monday airing of his podcast, he clarified that his disdain for Israel did not amount to tacit support for Muslims, using slurs as he referred to adherents of that faith. “I’m not a fan of sand demons and the sand people who worship them, and I’m also not a fan of the synagogue of Satan.” Later in the same episode, he said, “My son is not going to go to war and bleed out and die for my country, with its gay rainbow flag, defending Judaism and Christ-rejecting, hating, spitting-on-Christians Israel, no sir.”
“My son is not going to go to war and bleed out and die for my country, with its gay rainbow flag, defending Judaism and Christ-rejecting, hating, spitting-on-Christians Israel, no sir.”
One of the loudest critics of the Iran strikes is right-wing media personality and erstwhile Trump fan Tucker Carlson—and on this issue, he has clashed dramatically with the Christian Zionist crowd that sees Israel and Judaism as one and the same. A few days before the bombing, Carlson interviewed Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), a Christian Zionist who strongly supports American military action in Iran. The exchange was a microcosm of the broader MAGA divide. Cruz accused Carlson of having an “obsession with Israel,” to which Carlson responded, “Oh, I’m an antisemite now?” and added, “Shame on you for conflating Jews and Israel.” Cruz was apoplectic. “Give me another reason, if you’re not an antisemite, why the obsession with Israel?”
Carlson mainly sees the Middle East conflict as a geopolitical quagmire, not a spiritual battle for a holy land. This stance is likely influenced by the “America First” anti-interventionist crowd he’s long been aligned with. But he too has strong ties to the TheoBro world. Earlier this year, he hosted Andrew Isker, a podcaster and pastor who is part of a movement to build a Christian nationalist community in Appalachia, and regularly tweets about his desire for Jews to convert to Christianity. He also strongly endorses the idea that Jews no longer have any particular claim to Israel. “You talk a lot about the Old Covenant and this idea of Jews and Gentiles. Is that all done now, are they one?” Tucker asked Isker. “Absolutely,” replied Isker. “In the New Testament, Paul makes it clear—there is ‘neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free’; in Christ we are one true Israel. The old dividing lines are abolished.” Carlson chuckled. “To come to the opposite conclusion does sort of make you wonder—have you actually read the Bible?”
A curious figure in the religious MAGA infighting over Iran is US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. While Hegseth currently attends a TheoBro-adjacent church, in the past he was a devoted Christian Zionist. In 2018, when he was still a Fox News anchor, he gave a speech in Jerusalem at a conference hosted by the right-wing Israeli news site Israel National News. “If you walk the ground today, you understand there is no such thing as the outcome of a two-state solution,” he said. “There is one state.”
In the same speech, he referred to the return of the prophesied Jewish diaspora to Israel, the event that Christian Zionists believe will herald the second coming of the Messiah. “There’s no reason why the miracle of the reestablishment of the Temple on the Temple Mount is not possible,” he said. “I don’t know how it would happen. You don’t know how it would happen. But I know that it could happen.”
Despite his current church’s beliefs, Hegseth appears to be holding fast to his Christian Zionist roots—and his allegiance to Trump. At a Wednesday press conference, the defense secretary railed against the media for reporting on intelligence that found that Iran’s nuclear program had not been completely destroyed. Shortly after, he tweeted, “I will always defend @POTUS leadership, especially our skilled and amazing warfighters.”
To Taylor, the divide between the Christian Zionists and their also-Christian detractors reveals a deeper truth about the theological clashes within the MAGA movement. “Everyone can kind of be pro-Trump and pro-Maga, but underneath that, there are real theological and ideological disagreements, and especially in around Jews and Judaism,” he says. “The ideological rift, even among the Christian Trump supporters, is very, very real.”