In the Oval Office, as the United States enters a new phase of tension with Iran, a group of evangelical leaders gathered around Donald Trump in prayer, laying hands on him and invoking protection and guidance. The image, promoted by the White House and quickly circulated across social media, has brought back into focus a question that has long run through American public life: the relationship between religion, power and war.
Praying for those in authority belongs to the Christian tradition. For centuries, the Churches have accompanied public institutions in prayer, asking that political leaders be granted wisdom, prudence and a sense of moral restraint. In this case, however, the picture is more complicated. The scene unfolds in the midst of an international crisis and, inevitably, takes on a significance that goes beyond private devotion. More than the gesture itself, what stands out is the context in which it takes place and the message it may convey: that of a religious closeness which ends up overlapping with the legitimation of political action. In the United States, this entanglement is not new. Over the years, part of American evangelicalism has developed a strongly providentialist reading of the nation’s history, one in which America is seen as having been entrusted with a particular mission. This cultural current is rooted in the idea of Manifest Destiny, which has resurfaced more than once in American foreign policy, and which, in some religious circles, has merged with a view of the Middle East read through prophetic and apocalyptic categories. Within that horizon, politics no longer appears primarily as the sphere of restraint, mediation and responsibility, but as the ground of a higher calling. History shows how delicate this shift can be. It happened in the Middle Ages through the language of holy war. It happened in the colonial era, when conquest was accompanied by a religious rhetoric capable of justifying domination and violence. It has happened whenever power has sought, alongside the instruments of force, the reassurance of symbolic consecration. At such moments, religion loses its critical function and is absorbed into a grammar of government.
On the psychological level too, the sacralisation of the leader produces a troubling effect, because it weakens the perception of his ordinary accountability. If the leader is surrounded by religious figures who present him as the recipient of a special blessing, criticism begins to look less legitimate, dissent takes on a moral colouring, and the opponent is gradually removed from the political sphere and recast in almost absolute terms as evil. From that point, the transition is swift: historical conflict is loaded with ultimate meaning, and the language of prudence recedes.
The Sacred bent to power
British culture knows well the risk of religious language being bent to the construction of political consent. In different ways, and with different degrees of intensity, the United Kingdom too has seen faith move out of the realm of conscience and into that of public legitimation. The case of Ian Paisley remains one of the clearest examples: at once a religious and political leader, founder of the Free Presbyterian Church and the Democratic Unionist Party, he embodied for decades a fusion of confessional identity, popular mobilisation and public conflict. This temptation, then, is hardly foreign to British history. Long before contemporary controversies, British literature had already grasped its reach and its destructive potential.
William Blake is one of the earliest great witnesses to this distortion. In London, the image of the “black’ning Church”is enough to evoke a religion that does not protect the weak but appears compromised by the very order that oppresses them. And in The Chimney Sweeper, the devotion of adults stands out against the background of child exploitation, as a sign of an increasingly intolerable distance between the language of pity and the reality of justice. Blake saw clearly the moment when the sacred ceases to question power and ends up being absorbed by it. The same point returns powerfully within the British moral tradition: when faith remains free, it does not confer moral licence on the powerful, but subjects them to judgement. It does not consecrate success, it does not turn authority into justice, it does not cloak the decisions of those who govern in some higher necessity. Rather, it preserves a critical function, recalls the existence of limits, and denies the powerful any sacred investiture.
Then, with Wilfred Owen, in the face of war, every attempt to ennoble it suddenly collapses. Owen speaks of the “pity of War” and creates a poetry that rejects any heroic embellishment of conflict. In Dulce et Decorum Est, the soldier is not a glorious symbol but a shattered body; in Strange Meeting, war appears as a machine that destroys even the meaning of victory itself. What remains is the exposed, exhausted, wounded human being, handed over to a violence that no patriotic or religious formula can make acceptable. This is war, before any attempt to dress it in providential meaning: broken lives, exposed bodies, shattered cities, mutilated families, suspended existences. That is why the scene of prayer in the Oval Office raises questions that are not merely political. The issue touches on the way in which the name of God enters public space. In its most authentic form, Christian prayer accompanies the powerful by reminding them that they are not absolute, that they must answer for their decisions, and that force alone is never enough to ground justice. When, however, a religious gesture appears alongside the prospect of war and is perceived as the seal placed upon a course of action already under way, the danger of ambiguity becomes evident.
Prayer, Power and the Moral Boundaries of Politics
In recent days, Pope Leo XIV has called for people to “stop the spiral of violence before it becomes an irreparable abyss”, bringing the crisis back within the horizon of political responsibility, dialogue and diplomacy. In the past few hours, that appeal has found further confirmation in the video released by the Pope’s Worldwide Prayer Network, recorded at the Church of San Pellegrino in the Vatican, where the Pontiff invokes the “Lord of Life”, asks that “nations renounce weapons and choose the path of dialogue and diplomacy”, and calls on leaders to find the courage to “abandon plans of death”. In those words, a clear distance emerges: on one side, the use of religious language to accompany power as it exercises force; on the other, a prayer that recalls politics to its moral limits, places the most vulnerable back at the centre, and reaffirms the primacy of peace.
Ultimately, when faith ceases to question the conscience of those who wield power and ends up accompanying their use of force, one question remains, a question that has crossed the centuries: in that gesture, is God still being prayed to, or is He being used to give evil a religious form?
fr. F.M.
Silere non possum