#peter wehner

Christopher Majka

This essay by Johnathan Rauch and Peter Wehner for the New York Times is perhaps the most incisive and cogent characterization of the Trump administration that I have read: it is a psychotic state. It has many other characteristics as well: fascism, authoritarianism, corruption. But the chaotic, incoherent, and out of touch with reality elements of Trump's personality ultimately eclipse everything else. A pathological personality is in control of the nation and "Mr. Trump’s grandiosity, impulsivity, inconsistency and outright breaks with reality have become state policy. ... There is no precedent or even category for the institutional psychosis displayed by the second Trump administration." - - - - - - - - - - It has been clear for a long time that President Trump is a person with a disorganized mind and a disordered personality. What the past few months and especially the past few weeks have brought into focus is how his pathologies have cascaded downward and outward through his administration. They have become institutionalized. The reason the administration so often does not act coherently is that it cannot. The world faces something new and baffling and frightening in Mr. Trump’s second term: a psychotic state.

This does not mean that every individual in the government is emotionally or psychologically unstable. Nor is it a clinical diagnosis of the president. The issue is that the administration as a whole lacks a consistent attachment to reality and the ability to organize its thinking coherently. Mr. Trump’s grandiosity, impulsivity, inconsistency and outright breaks with reality have become state policy.

In that respect, Mr. Trump’s second term is different from his first. In 2020 he could confabulate about the election result or babble about treating Covid with injections of disinfectant. But he could not translate his fantasies into reality — at least not usually. In the second term, by contrast, institutional psychosis has been on display since Day 1.

It is the Iran war that has most vividly demonstrated the scope of the problem. In this conflict, the most potent antagonist has been the administration’s own incoherence.

The Trump administration chose to wage a war without deciding on its aims, mapping out a strategy, planning for contingencies or even being able to explain itself. The goal was regime change — until it wasn’t. The demand was unconditional surrender — until it wasn’t. Deadlines were issued and then erased. Threats of total destruction were made and then pulled back. Iran’s nuclear program was a casus belli in February, despite the fact that we were told by Mr. Trump that it was “obliterated” last June. The president called for an international coalition to open the Strait of Hormuz, then said the United States could go it alone, then said the waterway would somehow “open itself.” He claimed that the United States had already won the war, that the war would end soon and that the war would end “when I feel it, feel it in my bones.” As a headline in The Times put it, the president’s position on Iran “can change by the sentence.”

Even as the bombs fell, the administration, concerned about gasoline prices, waived sanctions on some Iranian oil, “giving Iran’s war effort against the U.S. a boost,” as The Washington Post reported. Area experts were shocked when the administration proved unprepared for Iran’s partial closing of the Strait of Hormuz, a tactic experts had anticipated for decades. The administration might have been readier had it not chopped back the State Department’s Middle East desk, gotten rid of its oil and gas experts and eliminated its dedicated Iran office. The administration handicapped its own National Security Council by firing staff members, some at the behest of a conspiracy-minded internet personality, and undercutting its independence — not a good idea before starting a war. Trump’s social media posts seemed self-contradictory and borderline demented.

Incoherence is not incidental in this administration; it is the administration’s modus operandi. The so-called Department of Government Efficiency caused chaos in federal agencies by sacking, then sometimes rehiring employees without any evident rationale — and without making a serious dent in government spending. Mr. Trump flipped from “no more wars” to waging war (in Iran) and using and threatening military force (Venezuela, Greenland, Cuba), seemingly every other month. The policy toward Ukraine was simultaneously supportive and not. Tariffs went up and down and on and off, reflecting the president’s whims. In February he bragged that gas prices were low, then in March that they were high.

This is far from normal.

Normal administrations set up policy processes that assemble evidence from varied sources, collate viewpoints and priorities across multiple agencies and ensure rational deliberation before options reach the president. One of us served in three Republican administrations and participated as interagency reviews took place in a cabinet department, in an executive agency and in the White House itself. A single line in a presidential foreign policy statement might require the input of 20 or more people from the Defense Department, the State Department, the C.I.A., the Department of the Treasury and more.

The policy review process can be tortuous and sometimes mistaken. It can’t substitute for wise presidential judgment. But it is vital. It asks hard questions and assesses competing arguments. It ensures expert input in specific domains, anticipates how policies may ramify and prepares for contingencies.

In all those ways, the systematic review of policy amounts to an institutional mind: a cognitive process that organizes the government’s deliberations to keep them rational and anchored in reality. You might think of it as the government’s equivalent of the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for high-level executive functions such as impulse control and long-term planning. In Mr. Trump’s second term, those functions still exist, but they can be disrupted, circumvented or just plain abandoned at any moment on the say-so of the president and his senior officials. In that respect, the Trump administration is mindless.

Policy judgments should be made by the president, not by subordinate agencies and experts. But irrational processes produce inexplicable outcomes, and that is what we have seen, again and again. The only rhyme or reason is the principle that Mr. Trump proclaimed when explaining his policy toward Cuba: “I think I can do anything I want with it.” That is the principle by which his administration governs.

When an agency goes haywire, the administration might rush to stabilize it — for example, at the Department of Homeland Security, where chaos and brutality led to the killing of two American citizens right on the street in Minneapolis. But until a coherent policy process is restored under a chief executive who understands the need for it, we should expect geysers of mindlessness to keep erupting in unforeseeable ways and places.

Understandably, scholars, journalists and politicians have attempted to fit Trump 2.0 into any number of at least somewhat rational frameworks: populism, isolationism, unilateralism, nationalism, transactionalism, the madman theory, spheres of influence, imperialism and more. Some of those frameworks can help illuminate the president and the people around him. As one of us has argued, he is a patrimonialist — a leader who believes the state is his personal property. And both of us have said that his administration displays hallmarks of fascism. Ultimately, however, institutional psychosis defies rational categories. Predicting this administration’s behavior is impossible under any framework. And if Mr. Trump becomes more desperate as he grows more unpopular, the danger only increases.

Which leaves everyone wondering: What are the implications if the administration of the world’s most powerful country is chaotic in its thinking, unpredictable in its actions and not reliably in touch with reality? It’s impossible to know. America and its allies have dealt with a lot of presidential imperfections and failings, but there is no precedent or even category for the institutional psychosis displayed by the second Trump administration. Precisely because the psychotic state is so unpredictable, setting up systems to manage it will not work.

This puts the country and its allies in the precarious but not hopeless position of overrelying on the rational guardrails that remain. Some of these guardrails are within the executive branch: in the federal bureaucracies and the military services, where nodes of ordinary practice and process carry on as best they can. Still more important are guardrails in the other branches of government. The courts have remained independent and tethered to reality. Congress has quietly nixed some of Mr. Trump’s wildest nominees and overruled some of the administration’s destructive impulses, such as its attack on the science budget. State governments, especially in blue states, have been using the courts and their own policies to resist Mr. Trump’s agenda and demand accountable behavior from Washington.

Perhaps most important, the public supports effective and responsive government, not the wild swings of a fugue state — and it is making its feelings known.

Institutional psychosis is ultimately self-defeating and unsustainable. Reality checks will return because reality always reasserts itself. But severe damage will have been done, damage that may take a generation or more to repair.

As the Trump era winds down, the country may relearn something that never should have been forgotten. Institutions need to be reformed, not destroyed; governing well requires skill and careful attention to detail rather than leaders acting on impulse and ignorance; and character and mental stability matter perhaps most of all.

The Trump Administration Is in a Psychotic State

Illustration: Pete Gamlen By Jonathan Rauch and Peter Wehner | April 10, 2026

It has been clear for a long time that President Trump is a person with a disorganized mind and a disordered personality. What the past few months and especially the past few weeks have brought into focus is how his pathologies have cascaded downward and outward through his administration. They have become institutionalized. The reason the administration so often does not act coherently is that it cannot. The world faces something new and baffling and frightening in Mr. Trump’s second term: a psychotic state.

This does not mean that every individual in the government is emotionally or psychologically unstable. Nor is it a clinical diagnosis of the president. The issue is that the administration as a whole lacks a consistent attachment to reality and the ability to organize its thinking coherently. Mr. Trump’s grandiosity, impulsivity, inconsistency and outright breaks with reality have become state policy. [....] Incoherence is not incidental in this administration; it is the administration’s modus operandi. The so-called Department of Government Efficiency caused chaos in federal agencies by sacking, then sometimes rehiring employees without any evident rationale — and without making a serious dent in government spending. Mr. Trump flipped from “no more wars” to waging war (in Iran) and using and threatening military force (Venezuela, Greenland, Cuba), seemingly every other month. The policy toward Ukraine was simultaneously supportive and not. Tariffs went up and down and on and off, reflecting the president’s whims. In February he bragged that gas prices were low, then in March that they were high.

^^^ A punny meme posted at BlueSky by Retired Admiral James Stavridis.

Last week Trump said he would annihilate Iranian civilization if his opponents in his undeclared war did not stop blockading the Strait of Hormuz. Later in the week Iranians permitted some traffic through after they paid tolls to Iran. Trump decided over the weekend that HE would blockade the Strait; maybe he's stealing a grift opportunity from the Iranians.

Meanwhile, the price of gas creeps up by just under 1¢ per day. According to the AAA, the average price for a gallon of unleaded regular in the US today stands at $4.125 per gallon.

The Trump Iran war narrative has been comically incoherent. At the New York Times, Jonathan Rauch and Peter Wehner summarize it...

The Trump administration chose to wage a war without deciding on its aims, mapping out a strategy, planning for contingencies or even being able to explain itself. The goal was regime change — until it wasn’t. The demand was unconditional surrender — until it wasn’t. Deadlines were issued and then erased. Threats of total destruction were made and then pulled back. Iran’s nuclear program was a casus belli in February, despite the fact that we were told by Mr. Trump that it was “obliterated” last June. The president called for an international coalition to open the Strait of Hormuz, then said the United States could go it alone, then said the waterway would somehow “open itself.” He claimed that the United States had already won the war, that the war would end soon and that the war would end “when I feel it, feel it in my bones.” As a headline in The Times put it, the president’s position on Iran “can change by the sentence.”

Trump is using the US military as a personal toy and he is dismissing the economic impacts of his overseas adventures. And we shouldn't forget that his bizarre and psychotic actions are being rubber stamped by Capitol Hill Republicans.

[Trump supporters] can’t defend his fraud and promiscuity, his love of conspiracy theories and affinity for dictators, his pathological lying and deranged rants, his misogyny and racism, his mocking of prisoners of war and those with disabilities.

So they take his least problematic actions and pretend they’re his most problematic offenses. It’s the opposite of damning someone with faint praise; in this case, it’s praising Trump with faint damnation.

Peter Wehner at The Atlantic:

On the morning of august 8, 2022, 30 FBI agents and two federal prosecutors conducted a court-authorized search of Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s Palm Beach, Florida, estate. The reason for the search, according to a 38-count indictment, was that after leaving office Trump mishandled classified documents, including some involving sensitive nuclear programs, and then obstructed the government’s efforts to reclaim them. On the day before the FBI obtained the search warrant, one of the agents on the case sent an email to his bosses, according to The New York Times. “The F.B.I. intends for the execution of the warrant to be handled in a professional, low key manner,” he wrote, “and to be mindful of the optics of the search.” It was, and they were. Over the course of 10 hours, the Times reported, “there was little drama as [agents] hauled away a trove of boxes containing highly sensitive state secrets in three vans and a rented Ryder box truck.”

On the day of the search, Trump was out of the state. The club at Mar-a-Lago was closed. Agents alerted one of Trump’s lawyers in advance of the search. And before the search, the FBI communicated with the Secret Service “to make sure we could get into Mar-a-Lago with no issues,” according to the testimony of former Assistant FBI Director Steven D’Antuono. It wasn’t a “show of force,” he said. “I was adamant about that, and that was something we all agreed on.”

The search warrant itself included a standard statement from the Department of Justice’s policy on the use of deadly force. There was nothing exceptional about it. But that didn’t prevent Trump or his supporters from claiming that President Joe Biden and federal law-enforcement agents had been involved in a plot to assassinate the former president. In a fundraising appeal, Trump wrote, "biden’s doj was authorized to shoot me! it’s just been revealed that biden’s doj was authorized to use deadly force for their despicable raid in mar-a-lago. you know they’re just itching to do the unthinkable … joe biden was locked & loaded ready to take me out & put my family in danger." On May 23, Trump publicly claimed that the Department of Justice “authorized the use of ‘deadly force’ in their Illegal, UnConstitutional, and Un-American RAID of Mar-a-Lago, and that would include against our Great Secret Service, who they thought might be ‘in the line of fire.’”

Trump supporters echoed those claims, as he knew they would. Steve Bannon, one of the architects of the MAGA movement, said, “This was an attempted assassination attempt on Donald John Trump or people associated with him. They wanted a gunfight.” Right-wing radio hosts stoked one another’s fury, claiming that there’s nothing Trump critics won’t do to stop him, up to and including attempting to assassinate him and putting the lives of his Secret Service detail in danger. The statement by Trump went beyond inflaming his supporters; it created a mindset that moved them closer to violence, the very same mindset that led thousands of them to attack the Capitol on January 6 and threaten to hang Vice President Mike Pence. Which is why Special Counsel Jack Smith filed a motion asking the judge overseeing Trump’s classified-documents case to block him from making public statements that could put law enforcement in danger. “Those deceptive and inflammatory assertions irresponsibly put a target on the backs of the FBI agents involved in this case, as Trump well knows,” he wrote.

Motivated ignorance refers to willfully blinding oneself to facts. It’s choosing not to know. In many cases, for many people, knowing the truth is simply too costly, too psychologically painful, too threatening to their core identity. Nescience is therefore incentivized; people actively decide to remain in a state of ignorance. If they are presented with strong arguments against a position they hold, or compelling evidence that disproves the narrative they embrace, they will reject them. Doing so fends off the psychological distress of the realization that they’ve been lying to themselves and to others. Motivated ignorance is a widespread phenomenon; most people, to one degree or another, employ it. What matters is the degree to which one embraces it, and the consequences of doing so. In the case of MAGA world, the lies that Trump supporters believe, or say they believe, are obviously untrue and obviously destructive. Since 2016 there’s been a ratchet effect, each conspiracy theory getting more preposterous and more malicious. Things that Trump supporters wouldn’t believe or accept in the past have since become loyalty tests. Election denialism is one example. The claim that Trump is the target of “lawfare,” victim to the weaponization of the justice system, is another.

I have struggled to understand how to view individuals who have not just voted for Trump but who celebrate him, who don’t merely tolerate him but who constantly defend his lawlessness and undisguised cruelty. How should I think about people who, in other domains of their lives, are admirable human beings and yet provide oxygen to his malicious movement? How complicit are people who live in an epistemic hall of mirrors and have sincerely—or half-sincerely—convinced themselves they are on the side of the angels?

Throughout my career I’ve tried to resist the temptation to make unwarranted judgments about the character of people based on their political views. For one thing, it’s quite possible my views on politics are misguided or distorted, so I exercise a degree of humility in assessing the views of others. For another, I know full well that politics forms only a part of our lives, and not the most important part. People can be personally upstanding and still be wrong on politics. But something has changed for me in the Trump era. I struggle more than I once did to wall off a person’s character from their politics when their politics is binding them to an unusually—and I would say undeniably—destructive person. The lies that MAGA world parrots are so manifestly untrue, and the Trump ethic is so manifestly cruel, that they are difficult to set aside.

If a person insists, despite the overwhelming evidence, that Trump was the target of an assassination plot hatched by Biden and carried out by the FBI, this is more than an intellectual failure; it is a moral failure, and a serious one at that. It’s only reasonable to conclude that such Trump supporters have not made a good-faith effort to understand what is really and truly happening. They are choosing to live within the lie, to invoke the words of the former Czech dissident and playwright Václav Havel.

One of the criteria that need to be taken into account in assessing the moral culpability of people is how absurd the lies are that they are espousing; a second is how intentionally they are avoiding evidence that exposes the lies because they are deeply invested in the lie; and a third is is how consequential the lie is. It’s one thing to embrace a conspiracy theory that is relevant only to you and your tiny corner of the world. It’s an entirely different matter if the falsehood you’re embracing and promoting is venomous, harming others, and eroding cherished principles, promoting violence and subverting American democracy.

[...] This doesn’t mean those in MAGA world can’t be impressive people in other domains of life, just like critics of Trump may act reprehensibly in their personal lives and at their jobs. I’ve never argued, and I wouldn’t argue today, that politics tells us the most important things about a person’s life. Trump supporters and Trump critics alike can brighten the lives of others, encourage those who are suffering, and demonstrate moments of kindness and grandeur. I understand, too, if their moral convictions keep them from voting for Joe Biden. But it would be an affectation for me, at least, to pretend that in this particular circumstance otherwise good people, in joining the MAGA movement, in actively advocating on its behalf, and in planning to cast a vote for Trump, haven’t—given all we know—done something grievously wrong.

Some of them are cynical and know better; others are blind to the cultlike world to which they belong. Still others have convinced themselves that Trump, although flawed, is the best of bad options. It’s a “binary choice,” they say, and so they have talked themselves into supporting arguably the most comprehensively corrupt man in the history of American politics, certainly in presidential politics. Whichever justification applies, they are giving not just their vote but their allegiance to a man and movement that have done great harm to our country and its ideals, and which seek to inflict even deeper wounds in the years ahead. Many of them are self-proclaimed evangelicals and fundamentalists, and they are also doing inestimable damage to the Christian faith they claim is central to their lives. That collaboration needs to be named. A generation from now, and probably sooner, it will be obvious to everyone that Trump supporters can’t claim they didn’t know.

Peter Wehner wrote in The Atlantic about the deliberate ignorance to the truth by MAGA cultists.

“The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”

This Veteran GOP Staffer Won’t Be ‘Complicit’ In Trump’s ‘Abuse Of Power’ (TWEETS)

Donald Trump’s abrupt decision to fire FBI Director James Comey has predictably come under fire from Democrats, given considerable circumstantial evidence that it has something to do with his request for more money to look into the Russian effort to hack the election. But a number of Republicans also have concerns. As of Wednesday night, according to a running totalof lawmaker reactions from The…

“The devil,” William Shakespeare wrote in The Merchant of Venice, “can cite Scripture for his purpose.” As we’ve seen in recent weeks, so can Pete Hegseth.

Late last month, during the first Christian worship service at the Pentagon since the Iran war began, the secretary of defense cast the conflict as essentially religious and spiritual in nature. The focus of his remarks was less the righteousness of our side of the war than the necessity of mercilessly inflicting vengeance and pain on the other.

Hegseth invoked Psalm 18, in which King David says he did not turn back until his enemies were “consumed.” His enemies “cried for help, but there was none to save them.” Hegseth read passages in which David exults that he “beat them fine as dust before the wind” and “cast them out like the mire of the streets.”

Hegseth also read a prayer composed by a chaplain—relying on imprecatory psalms, including 35, 58, and 144—requesting God’s “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.” Hegseth prayed that “every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness.” He requested that God “break the teeth of the ungodly.” By “the blast of your anger,” he said, God would “let the evil perish.” The Almighty should “pour out your wrath against those who plot vain things and blow them away like chaff before the wind.” Hegseth beseeched God to act so “evil may be driven back and wicked souls be delivered to the eternal damnation prepared for them.”

The man who refers to himself as the secretary of war concluded his prayer with “we ask these things with bold confidence in the mighty and powerful name of Jesus Christ, king over all kings, and amen. Amen.”

To be clear, then: Secretary of Defense Hegseth is praying for “overwhelming violence” and “no mercy” in the “powerful name of Jesus Christ,” the Prince of Peace.

As Ronit Stahl, a historian of the military chaplaincy, told Greg Sargent of The New Republic, “It’s highly unusual for high-ranking officers or civilian military leaders to relish killing and violence in God’s name as a religious duty.”

But Hegseth is different. Last month, Hegseth said that the United States would give “no quarter, no mercy for our enemies,” which would constitute a war crime under both international law and U.S. military codes. Pentagon offices designed to prevent civilian harm during combat operations are being dismantled. And in Donald Trump’s first term, Hegseth lobbied the president for pardons for three members of the military who were facing charges related to, or had been convicted of, war crimes. He defended Blackwater contractors convicted of murdering Iraqi civilians. He appears to relish the ability to inflict destruction and death.

Trump, for his part, has threatened to bomb Iran’s power plants, desalination stations, oil wells, roads, bridges, and other infrastructure. Last week, he threatened to send the Iranians “back to the Stone Ages, where they belong.” On Easter weekend, he wrote that unless the Iranians open the Strait of Hormuz, “all Hell will reign down on them. All glory to God.” And in the most crazed statement of his crazed presidency, Trump wrote on Easter morning, “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell—JUST WATCH. Praise be to Allah.”

The day after Easter, Trump intensified his threats to devastate Iranian bridges and power plants if Iran’s leaders didn’t agree to a cease-fire. “Every power plant in Iran will be out of business, burning, exploding and never to be used again,” the president warned. He dismissed any concerns that such actions might constitute war crimes. “Not at all,” Trump said. The following day, the president of the United States wrote on social media, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

In the end, Trump pulled back; a whole civilization did not die on Tuesday night. But no one can doubt Trump’s genuine indifference to the norms and laws of armed conflict that, however imperfectly, aim to restrain the worst abuses. When asked earlier this year if there are any limits on his global powers, he answered, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

Hegseth has given us a lot to untangle theologically. Take his use of imprecatory psalms, which call on God to rain down calamity and destruction upon his enemies. Imprecatory psalms are emotional laments, in the voice of the desperate and the powerless—and they sound very different when recited by those in charge of the most awesome military force in history. In imprecatory psalms, it is God, not humans, being asked to execute judgment. These psalms generally express a deep yearning for justice, with vengeance placed in the hands of the Lord, freeing us of the consuming need to seek revenge ourselves.

Psalm 18 is not an imprecatory psalm. In it, David narrates his own story, telling of the destruction of his enemies and crediting God for making it possible. Hegseth’s invocation of Psalm 18 sends the message that military action is an expression of divine will, and that the attack on Iran constitutes a holy war.

The Trump administration’s invocation of scripture and allusions to the total annihilation of the enemy add yet another layer. Hegseth and Trump and their supporters, particularly the fundamentalist and evangelical Christians among them, want theological cover for targeting Iran’s power supply, which might result in mass civilian death. Hospital equipment would stop working, water purification would cease, sewage systems and food refrigeration would fail. The food supply chain would be disrupted. Urban areas might become unlivable, forcing millions to flee.

Trump hasn’t yet done those things, and perhaps he never will. But the president and his secretary of defense are already justifying such acts, just in case they decide to go down this path. They want to signal to the world, and perhaps reassure themselves, that God is on their side. That killing civilians is not just acceptable but an act of righteous obedience.

Some bells can’t be unrung.

Tucked away in this debate is a complicated interpretive dispute. Some adherents of the Christian faith believe, as many of the early church fathers did, that biblical accounts of divine violence—especially accounts of God commanding the Israelites to kill entire populations—are not literal but allegorical, representing the soul’s battle against sin. Figures like Origen argued that embracing a literal understanding of texts such as 1 Samuel 15:3, in which God commands that his people utterly destroy “man and woman, infant and nursing child, ox and sheep, camel and donkey,” would attribute monstrous qualities to God, a moral impossibility. A good rule of thumb, they would say, is that if you find yourself ascribing to God actions that are repellant and horrifying when done by humans, something is amiss.

Peter Wehner: Pete Hegseth’s moral unseriousness

Others, like Paul Copan, the author of Is God a Moral Monster?, believe that the language of herem—a Hebrew term for a ban, in this case meaning total destruction, or wholesale slaughter—was typical of the hyperbole found in the ancient Near East. What’s being described is a military conflict, he would say, but one sanctioned by God. The specific words in the Bible, however, reflect the military bravado employed by writers of the Hebrew scriptures. They are not to be taken literally.

The philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff offers a contemporary example that helps illustrate this point: If a high-school-basketball player says that his team “slaughtered” its opponents, he doesn’t literally mean what he says, and he doesn’t assume that anyone would take him to be literal. He’s simply saying that his team dominated the game. Advocates of this interpretive approach point out that in the Book of Joshua, peoples who were said to have been “utterly destroyed” reappear. So, they argue, the language was either intentionally hyperbolic or the accounts false.

A third group of scholars that includes Peter Enns, a professor of biblical studies at Eastern University, believes that the portrayal of God as an advocate for total annihilation is what you’d expect from a tribal people describing God in their tribal ways. As Enns has written, “God never told the Israelites to kill the Canaanites. The Israelites believed that God told them to kill the Canaanites."

In a blog post published last year, Enns makes what he considers to be the more important point: “The word of God as a two-edged sword is supposed to be turned inward, piercing us, not everyone around us.” He adds, “The Bible is not a weapon, a sword to be wielded against modern-day Canaanites or Babylonians. It is a book where we meet God. It brings hope, encouragement, knowledge, and deep truth for those willing to risk, and to ‘die’ to themselves, as Jesus puts it, to accept the challenge of scripture, knowing they will be undone in the process.”

Rowan Williams, the former archbishop of Canterbury, says that the Bible is “the accumulation of what you might call the interaction of God with a succession of human societies.” The biblical scholar John Barton refers to the Bible as a “dialogue among authors.” The authors say different things at different times, including about God. The Bible is a book—a library of books, really—that contains, and is meant to contain, different and at times competing theologies. The Bible preserves disagreements, and it’s no less sacred for doing so. (Among the competing accounts of this subject within scripture are 2 Kings and Hosea, which present contrasting perspectives on Jehu’s massacre of the House of Ahab, and the differences in attitude toward the Ninevites in Jonah, where we see expansive mercy, and Nahum, where we see wrath.)

Still others, like Tremper Longman III, a scholar of the Jewish Bible, accept the full historicity and divine authorization of the herem commands. Longman believes that God ordered the wholesale slaughter not just of opposing armies but of entire populations, including women, children, and infants. But, he argues, the circumstances were unique, the product of a particular historical moment, and not to be replicated. To do so would be to undo the work of Jesus. Longman relies on what he calls “spiritual continuity.” What he means by that is “the war against the Canaanites was simply an earlier phase of the battle that comes to its climax on the cross and its completion at the final judgment. The object of warfare moves from the Canaanites, who are the object of God’s wrath for their sin, to the spiritual powers and principalities, and then finally to the utter destruction of all evil, human and spiritual.”

None of these scholars, despite their other disagreements, sees holy war as normative. That should be especially obvious to those who claim to follow Jesus, who told them to “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven.” The Sermon on the Mount is a repudiation of the conquest ethic.

When Peter drew his sword at the Garden of Gethsemane, during the night of Jesus’s arrest, Jesus told him, “Put your sword back in its place, for all who draw the sword will die by the sword.” Jesus affirmed a shocking thing: The kingdom he was inaugurating is not advanced by the sword. Yet Hegseth prayed that “every round would find its mark.”

Virtually all of the individuals within the various interpretive camps in Christianity I’ve discussed above would contend that it is a serious misreading of scripture to argue that imprecatory psalms and conquest accounts in books like Deuteronomy, Joshua, and 1 Samuel are endorsements of the wholesale slaughter of innocents today.

And that’s not all. Almost all rabbinical scholars—whether they affirm the historicity of the conquest accounts or not—emphatically agree that the rules of the warfare the scripture describes no longer apply. Among other things, Jewish scholars point out, the specific peoples against whom herem was commanded no longer exist as identifiable groups. That door has been bolted shut. “There is a category of milchemet mitzvah, which is a commanded war of self-defense,” Michael Holzman, the rabbi of the Northern Virginia Hebrew Congregation, told me. “But wars of annihilation no longer exist.”

Serious and thoughtful people have argued over these issues, which have bedeviled Christians and Jews for millennia. But Hegseth, Trump, and many of their fundamentalist and evangelical followers seem less interested in textual interpretation than in seeking scriptural validation for their bloodlust. They seem determined to find texts within the Bible to justify their dark passions, their emotional and psychological predilections. They believe what they believe quite apart from the Bible; its utility is to affirm what they already intend to do. Hegseth and his merry band of holy warriors aren’t interested in being on the side of God so much as they are insistent that God is on their side.

This is a constant temptation, and giving in to it almost always ends badly.

On an individual level, there’s something quite sad about people whose lives are fueled by hate and vengeance, who seem perennially unsettled, and for whom inner peace and calm contentment seem always out of reach. They are at war with the world and at war with themselves.

When these individuals assume positions of power, however—when they are able to inflict suffering on others, particularly on a mass scale; when their pathologies become society-wide and find a haven within the highest reaches of government—sympathy should give way not just to concern but to outrage.

One thing I’ve come to see, more clearly than I once did, is that understanding sacred texts does not depend solely on knowledge of the text. At least as important, and perhaps a good deal more important, are the sensibilities and temperament—the wisdom—that readers bring to the text.

In fundamentalist and evangelical circles in particular, enormous emphasis is put on reading scripture and memorizing Bible verses. That can be a blessing, of course. Christians and Jews believe that the books comprising their canon are holy. They bear witness to God—the Word behind the words—and reveal what it means to live rightly before God. In times of trial and grief, the words of the Bible can be healing. They can provide hope and grace in the journey.

But it’s also true that in the wrong hands, Bible verses can become decontextualized, or be used to sanctify preexisting biases. Scripture has on far too many occasions been used to deny scientific truths (evolution and the age of the Earth) and to advance immoral ends (slavery, segregation). People frequently use the Bible to wound others under the guise of speaking “truth in love.” Many of the greatest crimes in Christian history were committed by people who knew their Bible exceedingly well.

The Bible said it, I believe it, and that settles it is an approach to hermeneutics that can lead people astray. It rests on two mistaken presumptions: that the Bible is easy to interpret, and that our own interpretations of the Bible are inerrant. Neither is true.

Missy Ryan: Holy warrior

The latest debate about holy war is a reminder that moral dispositions and discernment are among the most important interpretive tools Christians have. The apostle Paul seemed to hint at this when he said, in 1 Corinthians 13, that you can have all knowledge, you can fathom all mysteries, you can have faith that moves mountains, but without love, you are nothing. Those who relish mercilessness and see themselves as agents of God’s wrath are nothing.