Who Put God on the Bomb?

By Don Jackson | Prodigal Breaking News | prodigalbreakingnews.com

Prodigal — The Podcast, Episode 42, with Don Jackson and Daysha Voss. 🎧 Listen to the full episode on Substack

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On Tuesday, Pope Leo XIV sent a recorded message to religious leaders gathered in Assisi, Italy, the town where Pope John Paul II first brought the world's religions together to pray for peace in 1986. He couldn't travel. He's two weeks out of lung surgery. But his message didn't sound like a man recovering. It sounded like a man drawing a line.

"War can never be waged in the name of God," he said. "There is no such thing as a holy war: only peace is holy."

He didn't name a country. He didn't name a leader. He didn't have to.

The same night, The Wall Street Journal reported that the United States has told Gulf allies to prepare for a possible "short, intense" campaign against Iran after next Tuesday's midterm elections. The White House wouldn't confirm it, calling them "sensitive military plans that may or may not exist," and the New York Times reported that President Trump could still decide not to strike. No strike has been ordered. But the war that began February 28 hasn't ended, and its next chapter is apparently being planned around our election calendar.

So this week, Daysha and I asked the question underneath all of it. Not whether this war is right or wrong. People of good faith disagree about that. The question is older and simpler:

Who put God on the bomb?

1. This Pope has been saying it all year

Tuesday wasn't new for Leo. It was the latest in a string of statements he's made since the Iran war began.

On Palm Sunday, March 29, in St. Peter's Square, he said: "This is our God: Jesus, King of Peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war." He said God "does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them," and then quoted Isaiah: "Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: your hands are full of blood."

On April 10, speaking to Chaldean Catholic bishops, he said "God does not bless any conflict," and that a disciple of Christ "never stands on the side of those who yesterday wielded the sword and today drop bombs."

On April 11, at a prayer vigil in St. Peter's Basilica, the same day U.S. and Iranian negotiators sat down in Pakistan, he said: "Even the holy Name of God, the God of life, is being dragged into discourses of death."

He wasn't alone. On March 15, Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, a man who lives inside this region's wars, said: "The abuse and manipulation of God's name to justify this and any other war is the gravest sin we can commit at this time." He added: "There are no new crusades."

That's the head of the largest church on earth, and its top bishop in Jerusalem, telling governments to take God's name off their weapons.

2. Who they were answering

Pizzaballa was responding to something specific. At a March 10 Pentagon briefing, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth cited Psalm 144, the psalm that opens: "Blessed be the Lord my strength, which teacheth my hands to war."

Two weeks later, on March 25, Hegseth led his monthly Christian worship service at the Pentagon, the first since the war began, livestreamed, with civilian employees and uniformed service members in the room. According to the Associated Press and Word&Way, he read a prayer he said a military chaplain had given troops before an earlier operation:

"Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation."

He prayed for "overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy." The prayer, as reported, asked God to "break the teeth of the ungodly" and to "grant this task force clear and righteous targets for violence." He read from Psalm 18: "I pursued my enemies and overtook them, and did not turn back till they were consumed." Historian Ronit Stahl told the AP that a defense secretary invoking Jesus Christ this specifically is new.

In April, at another Pentagon service, he read a "prayer" for a combat rescue mission that closely tracks Samuel L. Jackson's famous Pulp Fiction monologue, itself loosely based on Ezekiel 25:17. Christopher Hale, who edits the Letters from Leo newsletter, wrote that Hegseth "is doing to Christianity what Al-Qaeda did to Islam."

Hegseth has said he holds these services "mostly" because he needs them himself. His faith is his own. What's different is the office. When the man in charge of the most powerful military on earth stands in the Pentagon and asks God for "righteous targets," it stops being private devotion. It becomes the government telling you whose side God is on.

3. Every side has God on its side

Here's what makes this a pattern and not just one man's sermon: everybody's doing it.

According to Toby Matthiesen, a scholar of global religious studies at the University of Bristol, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu opened the war on February 28 by invoking Purim, the holiday that remembers Haman's plot against the Jews in ancient Persia, and has compared Iran to the biblical Amalekites. In Iran, after Israel killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, clerics declared him a martyr, his successor Mojtaba Khamenei spoke in the language of martyrdom and the hidden twelfth Imam, and Shia clerics called defending the homeland a "sacred duty." Russia's Orthodox Church has called the invasion of Ukraine a "holy war."

Three governments. Three faiths. One God, or three versions of Him, and every one of them conscripted.

Abraham Lincoln saw this exact thing in 1865, at the end of a war fought by two Christian nations:

"Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other... The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes."

If every side is praying for victory, God can't be on every side. Somebody's prayer is a lie. Maybe all of them are.

4. We've seen this movie

None of this is new. It's one of the oldest moves power has.

• 1095. Pope Urban II calls the First Crusade at Clermont, and the crowd answers Deus vult: "God wills it." Those two words launched two centuries of holy war. They've come back in our time as a slogan on flags, patches and tattoos.
• "Gott mit uns." "God with us." Stamped on German soldiers' belt buckles through two world wars.
• 1845. John L. O'Sullivan writes that it's America's "manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence." Providence: God's will. And the land God supposedly allotted already had people on it.
• The plantation. Slaveholders preached "servants, obey your masters" to enslaved people. An 1807 "Slave Bible" printed for use with enslaved Africans cut out most of Exodus, the part where God sets the slaves free. Somebody decided which parts of God got preached.

Frederick Douglass named the difference in 1845: "I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land."

That's the line. The Christianity of Christ, and the Christianity of the land. One of them blesses the bomb.

5. The honest part: what about self-defense?

We want to be fair, because this is where the conversation gets real.

Saying God doesn't bless war is not the same as saying no nation may ever defend itself. The Catholic Church itself has taught a "just war" tradition for 1,600 years, from Augustine to Aquinas: force only as a last resort, for a just cause, by a legitimate authority, with proportion, and never aimed at civilians. Plenty of serious believers think some wars meet that test. People disagree about whether this one does, and that's a real debate.

But notice what just-war thinking does. It treats war as, at best, a tragic necessity that has to be justified to God. It never asks God to "break the teeth" of anyone. The moment a government stops asking "is this justified?" and starts saying "God is with us," the questions stop. If God wants it, who are you to ask about the cost, the civilians, the exit plan, or the timing?

That's the danger. A holy war can't be questioned. That's the whole point of making it holy.

6. The savior reflex

There's one more piece, and it's the one we keep coming back to on this show.

A lot of us were raised to wait for someone to save us. A Messiah, a leader, a strongman with a plan. When people are trained to look for rescue from above, it's a short step to believing that whoever's in charge is acting for God. And then the war becomes holy, the leader becomes anointed, and questioning either one feels like questioning heaven.

That reflex isn't faith. It's outsourcing your conscience.

7. Back to Source

At Prodigal, we start somewhere the Pentagon chapel doesn't. Before any flag, any government, any church, there's Source: the one consciousness every one of us is a wave of. If that's true, then the people on the other end of the bomb are waves of the same ocean. Asking Source to bless their destruction is asking life to bless its own death.

So no, we can't tell you how the Iran war ends, or whether a strike comes after November 3. Nobody outside a few rooms knows. But we can tell you this: the next time someone tells you God is on their side of a war, ask who benefits from you believing it. Ask who gets to stop asking questions.

Six days from now, you have a voice that doesn't need anybody's blessing. Use it. And between now and then, refuse the language that turns human beings into "those who deserve no mercy."

Notice the pattern. Interrupt it.

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Go deeper: Process this episode with the Prodigal AI companion guide at prodigalai.app.

This episode is brought to you by FemChoice, Don Jackson's own company, full disclosure. A private, standalone cycle tracker: no app, no phone, no account. Your Cycle. Your Device. Your Privacy. Shop FemChoice on Amazon

📖 Don's book, Prodigal: Leaving Church and Finding God (Iff Books): https://www.collectiveinkbooks.com/iff-books/our-books/prodigal-leaving-church-finding-god

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Tags: Religion & Power, Iran War, Pope Leo XIV, Christian Nationalism, Holy War, Prodigal — The Podcast

Hashtags: #NoticeThePattern #ProdigalThePodcast #NoHolyWar #PopeLeoXIV #IranWar #ChristianNationalism #WeAreSource #ProdigalBreakingNews

Sources:

• America Magazine: Pope Leo's message to the Assisi peace meeting (Oct. 27, 2026)
• The Times of Israel and The New Arab, citing The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times: reported post-midterm Iran campaign; White House response (Oct. 28, 2026)
• AP via KSAT: Pope Leo's Palm Sunday homily (March 29, 2026)
• AP via The Gazette: "God does not bless any conflict" (April 10, 2026)
• AP via PBS NewsHour: Pope Leo's April 11 vigil, "discourses of death" (April 11, 2026)
• America Magazine: Cardinal Pizzaballa, "the gravest sin" (March 18, 2026)
• AP via PBS NewsHour: Hegseth's March 25 Pentagon worship service
• Word&Way: the March 25 prayer text and Psalm 144 (March 2026)
• Forbes: Hegseth's April 15 Pentagon service and the Pulp Fiction prayer (April 16, 2026)
• Toby Matthiesen, University of Bristol, via The Conversation and RTÉ Brainstorm: religious framing by the U.S., Israel and Iran (April 1, 2026)
• Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address (March 4, 1865)
• Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Appendix (1845)
• John L. O'Sullivan, "Annexation," United States Magazine and Democratic Review (1845)
• Select Parts of the Holy Bible for the Use of the Negro Slaves in the British West-India Islands (1807), Museum of the Bible
• The Bible: Psalm 3:7, Psalm 18:37, Psalm 144:1, Isaiah 1:15, Ezekiel 25:17, Matthew 5:9, Matthew 26:52