U.S. military commanders have reportedly been invoking extremist Christian rhetoric to push war on Iran, selling the conflict to American troops as an existential “holy war” in apocalyptic language that experts fear could exacerbate the violence and death toll of military operations. Mikey Weinstein, founder and president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, attributes the rise in extremism at the Pentagon to U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who “has created a template that the only approved member of the U.S. military is to be straight, Christian, nationalist and male.” Weinstein warns that “whenever you attach an extremist aspect of any religious faith to that machinery responsible for war … we end up with one thing: oceans and oceans of blood.”