It is problematic to pen anything related to the current American regime. Partly because, given their skill at media manipulation, it is difficult to know what is banter, bluster and bluff, and what is destructively serious. Partly because to comment feeds the malignant narcissism, both personal and nationalistic, that undergirds it. And partly because any criticism of the regime anywhere, even here, it sees a potential threat (which is part of the sickness of narcissism).

In recent weeks said regime, after starting a war without a clear purpose in mind, and becoming less clear as time progressed, articulated a form of aggressive militant Christianity, and were then seemingly surprised when church leaders, notably Pope Leo, demurred.

From the instigation of the war on Iran, Secretary of the (newly named) Department of War, Hegseth, has invoked his Christian God's blessing on the bombing. “We are hitting them while they’re down, which is the way it should be,” he said. The regime's called it a holy war, fought in the name of Jesus, and blessed by God.

On Easter weekend, when the American President declared his intention to wipe out an entire civilization (Iran) unless he got his way, the Pope called his words “unacceptable.” The President responded by writing a long screed declaring that the Pope was a loser and then, with the help of AI, sharing a picture of himself as a robed Jesus beaming healing. Even some of regime's acolytes found the latter offensive, and the former injudicious.

What though seems to have attracted the ire of the Pope was not the childish insults and cartoonery, but Hegseth’s insistence that God was blessing the war. Pope Leo, responded that God “does not hear the prayers of those who wage war.”

At this point, the regime at its brazen and bumbling best, brought forward its newly minted Catholic, JD Vance, to warn Pope Leo that he should be “careful” in his use of theology, because there was a “thousand-year tradition of just war theory.”

Indeed, there is a millennium-old just war tradition. (Which I might add is not uncontentious in Christian circles, for any just war can and does quickly slide from the moral high ground). And this just war theory descends from St Augustine of Hippo. And Pope Leo, as it happens, is an Augustinian, and spent 16 years in various forms of seminary education, studying among other things this theory.

The Pontiff had been careful in his choice of words, namely those who “wage” war. Augustine’s theory, as it has developed over the years, makes it clear that the only sanctified warfare is practiced by those who are attacked first. A constant tenet of that thousand-year tradition is a nation can only legitimately take up arms in self-defense once all peace efforts have failed.

Bill McKibben, writing in The Guardian, comments on the American regime’s theology: “(The regime's reliance on) the whole white right-wing megachurch evangelical movement is unforgivably shallow. There are plenty of fine evangelical theologians, and serious conservatives too... But the part that reaches the public from its big-name pastors is a mishmash of isolated passages from Revelation… things that are very much not the preoccupations of the Gospel.

”The shallowness as well as the sublime stupidity of proponents of this militarized aberration of Christianity was writ large when Secretary Hegseth, leading a prayer meeting in the Pentagon, quoted from what he seemingly thought was the Book of Ezekiel (chapter 25). Alas it was from the ‘Gospel’ of Pulp Fiction (a classic 90s movie satirizing America's infatuation with violence). As American comedians lament, ‘It’s hard to make this stuff up!’

Sometime in the future, many years from now, historians will sift the data that empires tend to store and weigh the virtues and vices of this regime. No doubt there will be differing opinions, even contentious ones. Yet I wonder if we will see again the elevation of such naked foolishness (as in "The Emperor's New Clothes"), its tolerance by so many of its citizens, and its calamitous consequences.

Glynn(Photo: Wikimedia Commons. Secretary Pete Hegseth, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Vice President JD Vance)