For Faisal Rashid, a 35-year-old American Muslim in Pasadena, the call to Mecca this year was an irrevocable commitment of the soul. Back in February, he and his wife had woken before dawn, hearts pounding through a frantic digital scramble to secure a travel package before the quotas closed. When they got the confirmation, his wife was already crying and praying. He was, he said, “very, very joyful.” The Iran war widened after their booking; a tenuous ceasefire now holds; the region remains on fire. Yet their resolve was never shaken by the mounting anxiety. This week, they join millions of pilgrims circling the Kaaba and standing in prayer on the plains of Arafat, performing one of the five pillars of Islam — a defiant, ancient anchor of submission to the divine that no geopolitical tremor can extinguish.
While Faisal Rashid practices a living, breathing, peace-seeking faith, the Christian Nationalist apparatus treats the Iran war as its own private apocalyptic theater. In the thirty years we spent inside the Evangelical apparatus, we learned to see the world through a specific lens — the headlines of the Middle East reduced to checkboxes on a dispensationalist chart. When the fighting erupted, the apparatus did not see the millions of human beings caught in the violence. It saw a prophetic checklist. It saw Gog and Magog. It saw the fulfillment of end-times prophecy rather than the destruction of human lives.
The people who cheered this war most loudly are the same ones who have spent decades conflating American military power with biblical prophecy. They are the Heritage Foundation, the Council for National Policy, the pastors on the Pulpit & Policy circuit, the new apostolic figures who have turned the pulpit into a war room. They do not see Faisal Rashid as a fellow worshiper of the One God. They see him as a pawn on a board they invented.
The chasm between what the Bible plainly says and what this legalist machinery has taught its members is vast. Read the prophet Amos: “Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them” (Amos 5:22). He was not talking about American military parades. He was indicting a religious culture that performs ritual while its people “trample the needy and do away with the poor of the land” (Amos 8:4). Read Isaiah, who called the people who celebrate violence “rulers of Sodom” and commanded instead: “Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed” (Isaiah 1:10, 17). The fasting God actually wants is “to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke” (Isaiah 58:6). The legalist machinery reads those same verses and preaches that war is a sign of divine favor, that American bombs are the instruments of God’s glory. The prophets say the exact opposite. The captured reading has bent the Bible into a yoke of its own making, a shackle for the nations of the world.
When we open the red letters of Jesus, the plain language is the same. He did not hand his followers a set of end-times battle plans. He said, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God” (Matthew 5:9). He said, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:44). The Christian Nationalists want to use the Bible to do the work of Caesar; the red letters tell us that Caesar does not get to write the end of the story. The cross is the end of all religious violence — the judgment on every attempt to purchase peace with the blood of enemies.
We who have come out of the Evangelical apparatus are not leaving the Bible behind. We are taking it back from the people who have used it to build a slaughterhouse. The prophets named this idolatry long ago. The red letters call it hatred disguised as holiness. Faisal Rashid, his wife, and millions of pilgrims are standing on Arafat this week, practicing the ancient discipline of submission to the divine. The cheerleaders of apocalyptic theater are standing in their churches, treating the war as a private spectacle. One group is anchored in a faith that no conflict can extinguish. The other is practicing the modern idolatry of the state. We are going back to the God who blesses the peacemakers — and who judges every idolatry that dares to call war holy.