The United States has long used religious rhetoric to exhort its soldiers into battle. As the current U.S.-Israeli war against Iran cycles through attacks and ceasefires, the rhetoric is disturbingly familiar. The conflict is being framed not just as a strategic necessity, but a moral imperative—a righteous cause blessed from on high. “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth, who in his 2020 book American Crusade points to the Middle East and writes, “we don’t want to fight, but, like our fellow Christians a thousand years ago, we must. We need an American crusade.” Hegseth asked Americans to pray for her soldiers and their victory “in the name of Jesus Christ.” This fusion of piety and patriotism, where God is an active combatant on America’s side, is exactly what animated one of our greatest writers to pen his most devastating critique of war.
Mark Twain was appalled by the jingoism surrounding the Spanish-American War—the patriotic fervor that sent young men to their deaths while society celebrated the justness of the cause and God’s presumed favor. “The War Prayer” was his protest, a parable so stark and accusatory that he believed it could never be published in his lifetime. As he noted, “Only dead men can tell the whole truth in this world.” He understood that to pray for victory is to simultaneously pray for the ruin of one’s enemy: For shattered homes, orphaned children, and fields sown with blood.
I came across “The War Prayer” while working as the NBC-Radio/Mutual News Moscow correspondent; it was a well-worn copy in the U.S. Embassy’s lending library. I was traveling with the Soviet military to Afghanistan through Uzbekistan the following day, reporting a story titled “Holy War Without End” for the Los Angeles Times Magazine. The occupation would end months after my visit as factions of Afghan mujahideen moved to eradicate foreign forces, claiming Allah in their corner. Hegseth reminds us that America, too, often relies on religious fervor and divine symbolism to validate war.
The United States is not the worst combatant to cloak its objectives in divinity. Iran has fought a holy war against America for nearly five decades. Since the 1979 revolution and the U.S. Embassy’s seizure and hostage crisis, the Islamic Republic’s foundational ideology has been one of “jihad” against the “Great Satan” of America and its Western allies. Iranians and their proxies have killed American civilians and soldiers in Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Iraq, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. Tehran’s leaders invoke Allah’s name to justify their actions, promising glory in this life and paradise in the next for his warriors. The language and iconography of their holy war are different, but the appeal to sacred sanction rhymes with Hegseth’s prayers.
Americans are brought up in a fervent secular belief of church-state separation and are sometimes unaware of how our religious rhetoric resonates. In the raw, emotional days following the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush, always open about his deep personal faith and decent intent, stood on the White House South Lawn and declared, “This crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a while.” The word “crusade,” with its freighted history, sent shockwaves through the Muslim world. The administration quickly walked it back, but the sentiment had been expressed. Hegseth, for his part, has no reservations about using the phrase. It comes from an impulse rooted deep in the national psyche, one that Twain recognized a century earlier.
Whether called a jihad or a crusade, the language serves the same purpose: to sanctify violence and assure a citizenry that prayers for victory are righteous. It was thus in Twain’s time; so too is it now. My film adaptation of “The War Prayer,” embedded below, aims to strip away this veneer of glory. Twain intended for audiences to understand the second, unspoken part of his prayer—the plea for suffering inextricably linked to the plea for triumph. In our age of surreal politics and televised conflict, Twain’s warning has never been more urgent. His truth, once fit only for the dead, must be told to the living.
