President Trump attacked Iran on February 28, 2026. This is not a Leap Year, but the president has plunged into the unknown vagaries of another overseas conflict. But why are Americans fascinated by war? Humanity should have evolved to the point of not fighting wars, but here we are in another one.
Rodney Kennedy
Stanley Hauerwas offers a controversial explanation: “America is a society and a state that cannot live without war. … War is the glue that gives Americans a common story. … War is America’s central liturgical act necessary to renew our sense that we are a nation unlike any other nation.”
Hauerwas forces us to look in the eye of the myth of American exceptionalism. Instead of believing we are different and unique, many Americans believe we are great and meant to be greater by God. Every word and action of President Trump and MAGA evangelicals plays to Americans’ pride and our desire to believe we are the greatest nation on earth, we are therefore chosen by God, and we have a historic destiny to spread democracy and American goodness to the world. Americans are mostly unmoved by the charge of being colonialist and imperialist.
War is evil. War is killing. War is destroying. War has been left out of human evolution. I think of war as the original sin. And America is up to our steeples in war.
I view war as a direct repudiation of the cross of Jesus. America is crucifying Christ again while singing praise songs in megachurch worship centers, but the blood sacrifices are not redemptive. War is blasphemy. No other human action is as alien to the teachings of Jesus as war. Eschatologically, war has been abolished. In the cross of Christ, war has been abolished. I am of course talking about another world that is more real than the world determined by war: the world redeemed by Christ.
Hauerwas asks us to face our addiction to war in War and the American Difference. Refusing to be another of the many enablers of war, Hauerwas demands “church” be the alternative to “war.” He suggests, “Americans are determined to live in a world of safety even if we have to go to war to make the world safe.” What happens when America is Goliath and not David in combat?
MAGA faith in God has become indistinguishable from the loyalty to the God of War. Evangelicals have always embraced the God of wrath, vengeance, and judgment. The American flag flies above the cross of Christ. This is why if you shake an evangelical, Romans 13:4 falls out instead of John 3:16. “Onward Christian soldiers” might as well be painted on our Tomahawk missiles.
While many argue about a president going to war without Congressional approval, I am more concerned about the pretense of going to war as if it were God’s will. President Trump went to war with Iran because nothing prevented him from going to war with Iran. He even admitted he went to war because he “had a feeling” Iran was about to attack first. Trump’s “feeling” is far removed from God’s will.
Others argue about just war. This is why presidents offer justifications. One of the criteria for a “just war” is for the war to have an end. By justifying his war as a war against terrorists, Trump has a license for unlimited war. The war against terrorism is a war without end. The very word “terrorist” opens Pandora’s Box. The president who can go to war against terrorists on a whim can also label anyone he chooses a “terrorist.”
As we have seen, “domestic terrorist” has caught on as a description of some American citizens. The possibility of “war” against our own people is now on the table. Yes, we have killed our own before. During the Lynching Era, almost 5,000 Americans were killed. That’s a war by any name.
In less than two years, President Trump has become the “war president.” The joint mission in Ecuador makes nine military operations for Trump since his second inauguration. The “war on terrorism” and the “war on drugs” expand Trump’s list of targets. And he has his “war eye” on Cuba.
A plume of smoke rises after a strike in Tehran, Iran, on March 2, 2026. (Mohsen Ganji/Associated Press)
Our fascination with war has been primed by our violent television programming. Communication scholar Christopher J. Wernecke argues Americans have easily and gleefully joined the Trump team. He claims Americans were “primed” by values created by reality television: white supremacy, hegemonic masculinity, carnivalesque violence, and nostalgia.
War has become a spectator sport. We watch war as if it were another movie or television series. The line between fantasy and reality, fiction and reality has been lost in the new televised, digital world.
There are trends suggesting America’s television habits, especially reality TV, have developed war values in the American spirit. Duck Dynasty, Ice Road Truckers, Swamp People, and Appalachian Outlaws pretend to be real, but they are performances. They have the attributes of war: survival, violence, ugliness, blood, and guts.
Television has merged with our own real world to create a televisual world where reality and fantasy merge. What happens on television becomes as much a part of our world as the furniture arranged around the television set as the altar with a liturgical setting.
Watching the U.S. vs. Iran war means binge-watching all the episodes in “Trump’s War.” War becomes normal discourse, our way of talking. In this way, Americans can agree war is horrible, but shrug and say there are no alternatives. My modest goal is to ask for a rethinking of our assumptions about the necessity of war.
Reality TV has given American audiences “an unmediated, voyeuristic [and] playful look into “real” people, places, events, and phenomena.” Producers of reality TV, like televangelists, manufacture emotional responses, creating visceral responses from viewers. Americans watch videos of fighter jets, naval destroyers, and smart bombs hitting targets and feel a rush of adrenaline and even applaud and high-five as America attacks a Muslim nation.
Television requires excitement. America has “television eyes,” and in those eyes war is more exciting than peace. Most Americans watch war from the comfort of home. James David Duncan, in The Brothers K, has an interesting reflection: “War is so damn interesting. … The appeal of trying to kill others without being killed yourself is that it brings suspense, terror, honor, disgrace, rage, tragedy, treachery, and occasionally even heroism into a range of guys, who might, in times of peace, lead lives of unmitigated peace.”
War is President Trump’s default setting. Trump is a creature requiring revenge and retaliation for all slights and grievances. His speeches reek of war. “We will protect American lives,” he yells. “Your family members will not have died in vain.” He asserts a superhuman ability to protect America: “I will fight for you with every breath of my body.” He has promised, “We will eradicate Radical Islamic Terrorism completely from the face of the earth. You got to knock the hell out of them. Boom! Boom! Boom!”
There’s a strange verse in Matthew’s Gospel that I believe flashes its warning lights in the face of Trump: “From the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and violent people take it by force” (Matthew 11:12). Daniel J. Harrington, S.J., in his commentary The Gospel of Matthew (Sacra Pagina), argues the passage refers to Herod.
The reality is that, when you have seen one Herod, you have seen them all. They all act the same way in their greedy, insecure, uncaring, violent insufficiency. The Herod we now face is President Trump in all his insecure, fearful, and paranoid glory. He sends troops into American cities and bombs into Iran with equal lack of feeling.
How many wars must we fight to satiate the bloodlust of our president? How many immigrants must we deport to win the war on immigrants? How many American cities must we invade to satisfy Trump’s need for control? How many professors and universities must we silence? How many voting rights must be shredded? How many boats (allegedly drug-filled) must we blow out of the water? How many people must we kill? The president, my friend, will sell us all the wars he can.
America needs a war rehab program to help us break our addiction.
Rodney Kennedy has his M.Div. from New Orleans Theological Seminary and his Ph.D. in Rhetoric from Louisiana State University. The pastor of 7 Southern Baptist churches over the course of 20 years, he pastored the First Baptist Church of Dayton, Ohio — which is an American Baptist Church — for 13 years. He is currently professor of homiletics at Palmer Theological Seminary, and interim pastor of Emmanuel Friedens Federated Church, Schenectady, New York. His eighth book, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit, is out now from Cascade Books.
