Monthly Archives: March 2026

Some Spiritual Thoughts on the Iran War

1 Reply

The following blog is from Marcos Torres, who offers an apolitical analysis of the Iran war with a special focus on how followers of Jesus can and should look at these things. I thought it was worth sharing with my audience. Used with permission:


I’m an Ordained SDA Minister. Here’s What I Think About the War in Iran.
Let me say something that will probably frustrate everyone on both sides.
I’m not cheering.
Not for the bombs. Not for the regime. Not for the dispensationalist theology driving parts of this conflict. And not for the left-wing commentators who’ve tied themselves into knots defending the Ayatollah just to score points against Trump.
I’m not cheering. And I want to explain why.

The Predictable Culture War
The moment the bombs started falling, the internet did what the internet always does.
The right lit up with celebration. Finally. Long overdue. God bless America. America First. Some quarters went further—this is prophetic. This is God’s hand. This is what had to happen.
The left responded with the usual counter-programming. And here’s where it got weird. Some radical commentators—in their desperation to oppose everything the current administration does—ended up in a bizarre rhetorical corner. Softening their language on the Iranian regime. Framing the Ayatollah as a victim of American aggression. Performing moral gymnastics to avoid saying anything that might sound like agreement with Trump.
Both sides did what they always do: used a complex geopolitical catastrophe as raw material for their pre-existing culture war.
What got lost in all of it is the one thing that’s always lost in the noise.
Nuance.

You Don’t Have to Pick a Side to Feel the Weight of This
We’ve been here before.
When the war in Gaza erupted, a similar pressure emerged. You were either pro-Israel or pro-Palestine. You either condemned Hamas or you condemned the IDF. If you mourned the children killed by airstrikes, some people assumed you were defending terrorism. If you named Hamas as evil, others assumed you didn’t care about Palestinian lives.
But that was never the choice.
You don’t have to defend Hamas to mourn the death of innocents. You can hold both. You can name wickedness and still weep over the bodies.
Iran is no different.
The Ayatollah’s regime is brutal. That’s not a political talking point—it’s a documented reality. This is a government that has imprisoned, tortured, and murdered its own people for over four decades.1 A regime that has persecuted Christians within its own borders,2 executed political dissidents,3 and sponsored terrorism across the region.4 Tyrants like this often end their stories in blood and chaos. So no one should be shocked that this day came.
And yet.
None of that means I have to cheer for the bombs. None of that means I can’t mourn the civilians—ordinary Persian men, women, and children—caught in the crossfire of something they didn’t choose and couldn’t stop.
The SDA apocalyptic framework has taught me something the political binary never could: how to mourn with complexity. How to hold conflicting grief at the same time. How to name evil without losing your capacity to weep over the suffering of the people caught under it.

If This Were Just Politics, I Wouldn’t Be Writing This
Here’s the thing.
Empires go to war. That’s what they do. They always have. They always will. If every military conflict were cause for a blog post, I’d do nothing else. National security interests, oil, regime change, geopolitical chess—these are the normal mechanics of human civilization running its usual program.
If this were purely a political war, I would mourn the suffering. I would pray for the people of Iran. But I would probably not be writing this.
But this is not purely political.
And that changes everything.

The Part That Actually Alarms Me
Multiple credible reports have now surfaced—documented by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, covered by Military.com, Newsweek, The Intercept, and Baptist News Global—that service members across every branch of the military have submitted over 200 complaints about commanders framing the Iran war in explicitly apocalyptic terms.5
One non-commissioned officer reported that his commander opened a combat readiness briefing by telling the unit not to be afraid of what was happening in Iran, because it was “God’s divine plan.”6
Another complaint described a commander declaring that President Trump had been “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.”7
This isn’t fringe internet chatter. These are official complaints filed with a military watchdog that has been operating for two decades, with representatives on nearly every military installation in the country.8
And it’s not just happening at the unit level. Senior civilian officials have been framing this conflict in religious language from the beginning. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth declared from the Pentagon podium that Iran was “hell-bent on prophetic Islamic delusions.”9 Ambassador Mike Huckabee told Tucker Carlson it would be “fine” if Israel took “essentially the entire Middle East” because the Bible promised it.10 The mixed messaging on why this war was launched—nuclear threat, regime change, retaliation for proxy violence—has been so incoherent that, as Mikey Weinstein of the MRFF observed, it opened the door to a new justification altogether: end times prophecy.11
The theological framework driving this is dispensationalism—a 19th century interpretive system popularized by Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth and later the Left Behind franchise. It maps ancient biblical prophecy onto modern nation-states, placing Iran (ancient Persia) as a central figure in a final cataclysm.12 Theologian and Baptist pastor Josh Olds summarized it plainly: the irony is profound. A faith centered on loving enemies and making peace has become a framework that welcomes and advocates violence. The result isn’t the advance of God’s kingdom. It’s the catastrophic damage of it in the eyes of a watching world.13
Twenty-seven members of Congress have now formally requested a Department of Defense Inspector General investigation into whether military commanders are violating constitutional protections by invoking apocalyptic theology to justify combat operations.14
This. This is what changes my calculus.

Putting on Jesus as a Costume
This is what I’m protesting.
Not empires empiring. Not military conflict. Not even the death of a brutal regime that had this coming.
What I’m protesting is this: one empire, in particular, dressing up its geopolitical ambitions in the costume of Jesus Christ.
That’s different.
Because when Jesus gets recruited for an empire’s war, the damage isn’t just political. It’s theological. It poisons the well. It makes the name of Jesus synonymous with bombs and bloodshed in the minds of millions of people who might otherwise be open to the actual gospel. It takes the Prince of Peace and turns him into a poster boy for Armageddon tourism.
This is exactly what Adventism warned about.
Not secular globalists imposing godlessness from the top. But religious populism—a movement of believers who weaponize sacred language to sanctify power. Ellen White described a time when Protestants, in their pursuit of control, would trample liberty in the name of morality. She described a church that, in its hunger for dominance, would unite with the state and in doing so “separate herself from God.” 15
We are watching that script play out in real time.
And some Adventists—who should know better—are cheering for it because at least the “secular globalists” are “getting theirs.”
That’s a partisan Adventism. And it has no prophetic authority.

So Here’s Where I Stand
Let me be unequivocal.
The Iranian regime is evil. It has oppressed the Persian people for over forty years. It has murdered, tortured, and jailed its own citizens—including women who refused to wear the hijab,16 Christians who dared to gather in Jesus’ name,17 and anyone who had the audacity to ask for freedom.18 The Bible is clear that those who live by the sword die by it. This regime’s day of reckoning was overdue.
I say this without qualification.
And.
I will not cheer for the chaos and bloodshed currently unfolding. I will not celebrate the dispensationalist theology that is fueling aspects of this conflict. I will not pretend that mourning civilian casualties is the same as endorsing the Ayatollah. In the same way I could mourn the children in Gaza killed by IDF airstrikes while naming the wickedness of Hamas—I can mourn the civilians in Iran killed by American bombs while naming the wickedness of a regime that has held its people in terror for decades.
Both things are true.
Both griefs are legitimate.
And anyone who tells you that nuance is weakness has never actually sat with the complexity of what it means to love people in a broken world.

What I Don’t Expect From Politics
I’m not waiting for politics to be the place where love and righteousness prevail.
It never has been. It never will be.
Politics—empire—does not run on love. It runs on subterfuge, leverage, espionage, force, and self-interest. I’m not surprised when I see it doing what it was designed to do. Empires empire. That’s the whole thing.
What I do protest is when Jesus gets conscripted into that machinery.
Because the kingdom of God has no terrestrial ally. It has no geopolitical home. It is not an American kingdom, not an Israeli kingdom, not a Republican or a Democratic kingdom. It is wholly other. It is the stone cut without hands that will grind every human empire into powder. (Daniel 2.)19

What I Actually Hope For
Here’s where I land.
I don’t hope politics will fix this. It won’t.
But I do have a hope. A specific one.
I hope the war ends. I hope the dying stops. And I hope that somehow, on the other side of all of this, the people of Iran find freedom. Real freedom. The kind that lets a woman pastor her church without fear of imprisonment, rape, or death at the hands of the state.20 The kind that lets a Persian Christian lift the name of Jesus openly—not the Jesus with an American flag and a rifle, but the Jesus of the New Testament, whose kingdom is not of this world, whose power is love, whose throne is a cross.
That Jesus.
The upside-down one. The one who called his followers to lose their lives to find them. The one whose kingdom will outlast every empire that has ever tried to co-opt his name.
Ellen White wrote that “the last message of mercy to be given to the world is a revelation of His character of love.” (Christ’s Object Lessons, p. 415)21
If that’s true—and I believe it is—then Adventism’s job in this moment isn’t to pick a side in the culture war. It isn’t to cheer for bombs or cry for the Ayatollah.
It’s to flood the world with a picture of a God who looks nothing like what either side is projecting.
Because the people of Iran—and honestly, the people of everywhere—desperately need to see that Jesus.

Michael Peabody on the Sabbath and Anti-Semitism

The following blog is shared by permission. I share it because I find his commentaries on religio-political issues balanced and insightful. Shared with his permission from behind a paywall.

Before I share, let me just note that I have been overwhelmed the last six months for a number of reasons, hence the lack of any blogs. Hopefully, this will be a step toward regular sharing again.



WIDOW SAYS ‘SHABBAT SHALOM’ — CANDACE OWENS CALLS IT A CONSPIRACY
As antisemitism spikes nationwide, America’s most-watched podcaster turns a Hebrew greeting into a murder theory
ReligiousLiberty.TV



Seventh-day Adventists have kept the Saturday Sabbath for nearly two centuries, endured the “Judaizer” charge from their earliest critics, and built an entire theology of religious liberty around the conviction that the day you worship is nobody else’s business. They should be paying very close attention to what is happening right now in American public life, because someone is treating the word “Shabbat” as a confession of guilt, someone spray-painted a swastika on a Seventh-day Adventist church last Saturday morning, and the two developments are not unrelated.
________________________________________

The Sarcastic Greeting
There is something almost poetically grotesque about what led Candace Owens to open a recent podcast episode with a sarcastic “OK everybody, Shabbat Shalom,” replacing her theme music with “Hava Nagila.” Three days earlier, Erika Kirk had appeared on CBS and mentioned that she and her late husband Charlie had visited and admired Israel. That was apparently enough. A widow, promoting Charlie’s posthumously published book about his personal embrace of Saturday Sabbath-keeping, offered a Hebrew greeting. Owens treated it as a tell.
The conspiracy Owens has been constructing since Charlie Kirk’s assassination involves, at various points, France, Egypt, and most pointedly Israel. She has implied Israeli government involvement in the murder, claimed Egyptian aircraft had tracked Erika Kirk’s movements for years, and called the evidence in the police affidavit “fake and gay.” When Erika Kirk sat with Owens for four and a half hours, bringing phone records and legal counsel to address the claims, Owens emerged unmoved.
After the “Shabbat Shalom” episode, Blake Neff, producer of The Charlie Kirk Show, pointed out that Owens had “aggressively ridiculed” Erika Kirk for using the phrase, and noted that Charlie’s book was specifically about his love of Shabbat observance. Owens replied: “They need the world to know that Charlie loved Shabbat. We are beyond parody.” She also suggested the book was a fabrication designed to make Charlie appear more pro-Jewish than he actually was.
So in Owens’ framework, a man who kept the Sabbath, wrote a book about it, whose widow uses a Sabbath greeting while grieving, is exhibiting suspicious Jewish entanglement. The ancient Hebrew practice of Shabbat has become a red flag. A greeting becomes a tell. Faith becomes proof of a plot. That is not anti-Zionism. That is not geopolitical criticism. That is antisemitism, and it is worth being precise about that before moving on.
________________________________________
A Swastika on a Sabbath-Keeping Church
On February 28, 2026, a Saturday morning, San Francisco police responded to reports of antisemitic and homophobic graffiti on California Street in Pacific Heights. They found the Central Seventh-day Adventist Church painted with swastikas and slurs, damage estimated at more than $20,000. A suspect, 51-year-old Sadat Mousa, was arrested on the scene and booked on charges including felony vandalism with a hate crime enhancement.
The target was a Seventh-day Adventist church. Not a synagogue. A Saturday-morning Christian congregation whose primary distinguishing public feature is that its members worship on the biblical Sabbath.
________________________________________
The remainder of this analysis is available to ReligiousLiberty.TV subscribers. Given the sensitivity of what follows, including the historical and prophetic implications for Sabbath-keeping communities, we’ve placed this content behind our subscriber wall. If this reporting matters to you, please consider joining the readers who support independent religious liberty journalism.
________________________________________
The Deep Architecture
To understand why this matters for Adventists specifically, it helps to revisit history the denomination tends to footnote rather than foreground. From the movement’s earliest days, the charge of “Judaizing” was leveled at Sabbatarians. Nineteenth-century critics taunted that Saturday worship was the Jewish practice and therefore suspect. The denomination spent decades distinguishing its Sabbath theology from Jewish law, arguing that the seventh-day Sabbath predates Abraham as a creation ordinance.
Adventist scholar Samuele Bacchiocchi spent a career documenting how anti-Judaism drove the early Christian shift from Sabbath to Sunday worship. The social pressure to not look Jewish in a Roman empire hostile to Judaism reshaped Christian liturgical practice for two millennia. Sabbath-keeping was suppressed not primarily through theology but through the ambient cultural force of antisemitism.
Which raises an uncomfortable question for the present moment. Could a sufficiently intense resurgence of antisemitism generate renewed pressure on Sabbath-keeping communities? Not necessarily through Sunday laws enacted by legislatures, but through the ambient social violence of a culture that has learned to treat Jewish practice, and practices adjacent to it, as suspect?
What the Numbers Say
The data is not reassuring. A recent American Jewish Committee poll found that 41% of American Jews are avoiding publicly displaying identifiers of their faith out of fear, and 66% feel less secure than a year ago. In January 2026 alone, New York City recorded antisemitic hate crimes at a rate 182% above the prior year’s baseline. In 2025, violent antisemitic incidents included an arson attack on a governor’s mansion during a Passover celebration and a shooting outside a Washington museum that killed two Israeli Embassy staff members.
Into this environment, a podcaster with one of the nation’s largest audiences treats “Shabbat Shalom” as a conspiracy marker. The algorithm rewards her for it. The mockery is directional: Saturday worship is suspect, the language of the Hebrew Sabbath is suspect, and the people who use it are suspect. She is not carefully distinguishing between Jewish Shabbat observance and Adventist Sabbath theology. The hostility is not that precise.
The Pattern Adventists Should See
The Adventist prophetic framework has long anticipated conditions under which Sabbath observance would become socially or legally costly. Those discussions tend to focus on Sunday law legislation, on formal legal coercion. But formal coercion is rarely how persecution begins. It begins with ambient hostility, with culture, with the slow normalization of the idea that people who worship differently are not merely wrong but dangerous.
A man primed by that ambient hostility sprayed swastikas on a Seventh-day Adventist church on a Saturday morning. A podcaster with tens of millions of listeners turned a widow’s “Shabbat Shalom” into a punchline with a conspiratorial edge. The Adventist Record in Australia noted plainly that “a threat to the Jewish faith community is a threat to our faith community.” That observation no longer needs to travel across the Pacific to find its application.
The right response is not panic. It is clarity, solidarity, and preparation.
What Adventists Should Watch For
This is not a theoretical exercise. Here is what to monitor concretely in the months ahead.
Copycat vandalism. The San Francisco incident will not be the last. Adventist churches that display Sabbath-related signage, operate visible Friday-evening or Saturday-morning programming, or are located in urban areas with elevated antisemitic incident rates should be reviewing their physical security, documenting their facilities with photographs, installing security systems and cameras, and establishing a direct contact at their local police department before something happens rather than after.
Conflation in public discourse. Watch for commentary, particularly from the conspiratorial right and the anti-Zionist left, that treats Adventist Sabbath observance as a form of Jewish sympathy deserving the same hostility. The logic is already present in the Owens framework. It does not require a large additional step to apply it more broadly to Saturday-keeping Christians.
Legislative activity around Sunday. The Heritage Foundation published a study in January 2026 specifically promoting Sunday-closing laws, a development that followed directly on the heels of Charlie Kirk’s posthumous book about Sabbath-keeping gaining a wide readership. Watch state legislatures, not just Congress, for Sunday rest proposals framed as worker protection or Christian heritage measures. These will not arrive labeled as Sabbath restrictions. They will arrive labeled as something else.
Social media targeting of Adventist content. If the cultural logic that treats “Shabbat Shalom” as a conspiracy marker continues to spread, Adventist pastors, educators, and communicators who use Sabbath language publicly online may find themselves on the receiving end of coordinated harassment. Screenshot threats. Report them to law enforcement and local conferences. Keep records.
The thread connecting Owens’ podcast to a spray-painted swastika on California Street is not difficult to follow. Ambient hostility finds its targets through cultural permission, and right now that permission is being issued from some of the largest microphones in the country. Adventists, of all communities, should recognize that pattern. They have read about it in their history books. They are watching it form in real time.
What Candace Owens is doing has a name. A grieving widow using a Hebrew phrase for a peaceful Sabbath should not have to defend it.
________________________________________
Michael Peabody is an attorney and publisher of ReligiousLiberty.TV, tracking First Amendment and religious freedom cases across the United States.

© 2026 Founders’ First Freedom
Founders’ First Freedom, PO Box 571302
Tarzana, CA 91357