When Easter Gets Drafted into War

Christ Is Risen. Not Enlisted.

If you ever wanted to hear what Christian Nationalism sounds like when it finally says the quiet part out loud, here it is.

Not whispered in a backroom. Not dressed up in vague language about “values” or “heritage.” No, this is the full-throated version. The kind that takes the resurrection of Jesus Christ and straps it onto the side of a fighter jet.

According to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, an airman who hid in a cave and was later rescued is not just a military success story. It is Easter. It is resurrection. A pilot reborn. A nation rejoicing. “God is good.”

And then, without missing a beat, President Donald Trump assures us that God is on our side of the bombs. God, apparently, is keeping score. God is invested in outcomes. God prefers certain geopolitical arrangements and is, we are told, aligned with the violence necessary to achieve them.

If you’re tempted to nod along, to let this slide past as just another strange soundbite in a strange age, then let me say it plainly. This is not Christianity.

This is not even a distortion of Christianity that has lost its way by a few degrees. This is something else entirely. This is the old heresy with a fresh coat of patriotic paint. This is the ancient temptation to remake God in our image, only now God is draped in a flag and embedded with a military unit.

And, if we are honest, it is not new. It is just loud.

If your god always agrees with your foreign policy, you don’t have a god. You have a mascot. And mascots don’t get crucified.

Let’s talk about that for a moment, because the problem here is not just bad theology. It is a refusal to let Jesus be Jesus.

The resurrection of Jesus Christ is not a metaphor for survival. It is not a poetic way of describing a successful extraction mission. It is not the triumphant return of someone who beat the odds.

The resurrection is God’s decisive act against the powers of sin and death. It is the vindication of the crucified one. The one abandoned. The one executed by the state. The one who refused violence and absorbed it instead.

The resurrection cannot be separated from the cross. You do not get Easter morning without Good Friday. And Good Friday is what happens when the world does what it always does. It crushes, eliminates, and justifies itself while doing it.

So, when we take that story and use it to narrate a military operation, we are not honoring the resurrection. We are evacuating it. We are turning the empty tomb into a press release.

The Jesus of the Gospels does not emerge from the grave to endorse an empire. He emerges to expose one.

He does not come back to tell Rome, “You were right all along.” He comes back as the one Rome tried to silence, standing alive in the middle of history as God’s judgment on every system that kills in the name of order, peace, or necessity.

And here is where the language of “God is on our side” becomes more than just sloppy. It becomes dangerous.

Once you are convinced that God is backing your violence, there is very little you won’t justify. Civilian casualties become regrettable but necessary. Endless conflict becomes holy endurance. And suddenly, phrases like “God wills it” start to sound less like history lessons and more like mission statements.

We have been here before.

The Crusades were not a misunderstanding. They were a theological disaster. A moment when the church forgot that its Lord was crucified by an empire, not crowned by one.

So, when Pope Leo XIV pushes back and reminds us that the Christian mission has been distorted by a desire for domination, he is not being political. He is being Christian.

“On this day of celebration, let us abandon every desire for conflict, domination and power, and implore the Lord to grant his peace to a world ravaged by wars and marked by a hatred and indifference that make us feel powerless in the face of evil.” - Pope Leo XIV

Domination is entirely foreign to the way of Jesus Christ.

Jesus does not conquer by killing his enemies. He conquers by dying for them.

Which is precisely why this kind of rhetoric should make Christians uneasy, if not outright angry. Not because we are naïve about the world. Not because we think conflict can be solved with sentimentality. But because we know who our Lord is.

And our Lord is not a general.

He is the one who told Peter to put away his sword.

He is the one who wept over Jerusalem instead of burning it.

He is the one who, when given the chance to call down legions of angels, chose instead to stretch out his arms on a cross.

So no, an airman rescued from a cave is not Easter.

It may be good news. It may be a reason for gratitude. It may even be, in its own way, a small sign of life in a dangerous world.

But it is not resurrection. Because resurrection is not about getting out alive. It is about God raising the one who was killed.

And until we are willing to let that distinction stand, we will keep confusing our victories with God’s. We will keep baptizing our violence. We will keep announcing a gospel that sounds suspiciously like us.

And the real Gospel, the one about a crucified and risen Lord who refuses to be co-opted by any nation, will keep standing there, quietly, stubbornly, refusing to go away.

Christ is risen.

Not as a metaphor.

Not as a military analogy.

But as a warning to every empire that thinks it can speak for God.