“If you wake up in the morning living in the kind of country that thinks it’s okay to kill — not simply military officers — but their daughters… That country is not worth fighting for,” American conservative commentator Tucker Carlson said on Monday (March 9, 2026), about an airstrike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab, southern Iran, on February 28, 2026. Multiple media platforms have blamed the U.S. for the attack that killed 168 children and 14 teachers.
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Going all out against Israel and war-supporting politicians including U.S. President Donald Trump, Mr. Carlson is taking the U.S. Christian conservative movement by storm. His views on war and politics, he says repeatedly, are guided by his Christian faith. This is a line of attack that war enthusiasts in the U.S. have not been familiar with.
His targets — among them Senators Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio — defend their support for Israel as a Christian obligation. Support Israel and be blessed, oppose Israel and be cursed — that is the summary of this faith. Mr. Graham, the South Carolina Senator and a main proponent for many years of attacking Iran, said recently: “If America pulls the plug on Israel, God will pull the plug on us.” Mr. Carlson argues that opposing Israel’s wars, not supporting them, is the real Christian obligation.
Christian Zionism
Mr. Carlson confronts Mr. Graham and his ilk on the terrain of faith, arguing that support for the killing of innocents will bring god’s curse upon America. “The New Testament is against killing the innocent. We are not, as Christians, allowed to kill the innocent. Period,” he said at AmericaFest, the Turning Point USA annual conference in Phoenix, Arizona, on December 18, 2025. “You see elaborate arguments on behalf of doing so or ignoring it,” he said, referring to Christians who support Israel’s military operations in Gaza and calling for war against Iran. “And people who do it will be punished for it. And nations that endorse it will be punished for it. And you are seeing that now.” Mr. Carlson calls out the “genocide in Gaza” and says the Christian duty is to oppose, not endorse, this or any war.
Christian Zionism, the theological framework that guides the politics of many leaders such as those named above, is based on a literal reading of the Old Testament. Christian Zionists consider the Jews the chosen people of God, and the modern nation-state of Israel as the historical continuity of the Israel of the Old Testament. This is at odds with mainstream Christian theology, which holds the church as a universal promise of God, with no ethnic marker for the chosen people. The chosen community in the New Testament, the new Israel, is the universal community of the faithful, and has no connection to the modern nation-state.
Most mainline churches reject claims of theological exceptionalism for Jews or for the State of Israel and would prefer to support a two-state solution to the conflict. The Vatican established diplomatic relations with Israel in 1993, acknowledging political reality, yet has historically opposed the theological basis of Zionism. Mr. Rubio is a Catholic, but his views are closely aligned with Christian Zionism. Christian Zionists believe that following a period of “great tribulation” — war and destruction in which Israel plays a central role — Jesus will return and establish a millennial kingdom on earth. It is no coincidence that, soon after the U.S.-Israel axis began bombing Iran, Mr. Graham declared: “This is a religious war, and we will determine the course of the Middle East for a thousand years.”
U.S. support for Israel
Mr. Carlson has been a fierce critic of American support for Israel, particularly on Christian grounds. In June 2025, he confronted Mr. Cruz on his unquestioning support for Israel; the Senator ended up citing the Old Testament to justify it. The video has been viewed more than 39 million times on X alone. Mr. Carlson’s interview with Mr. Huckabee on February 18, 2026 became one of the most widely discussed examinations of U.S.-Israel ties in recent years. Both Mr. Cruz and Mr. Huckabee deployed Christian tropes in defence of Israel; Mr. Carlson turned them around to question its actions and American support for Tel Aviv.
Mr. Carlson criticises American support for Israel on secular, strategic grounds, too. Speaking at the Doha Forum last year, he described Israel as “a completely insignificant country” with “no resources” and dismissed the relationship bluntly: “What are we getting out of this? Nothing. It’s only cost.” He argues that America’s ties with the energy-rich Gulf states are “infinitely more important” than its ties with Israel, and that Washington has “no overriding strategic interest” in a country it is committed to defending at enormous expense.
The Iraq and Afghanistan wars, he argues, produced nothing but “incalculable damage — not just economic and physical damage, but spiritual damage” to the U.S. A war fought for Israel would be a repetition of the same error. A long-time ally of Mr. Trump and the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement, he pressed the President against going to war until it happened. Mr. Trump has since distanced himself from Mr. Carlson, who has only escalated his campaign.
Culture wars
Christian conservatives were united in their culture war with liberals and progressives on abortion, homosexuality and same-sex marriage, on opposing immigration, and on emphasising the civilisational exceptionalism of the West. Mr. Carlson has been the flagbearer for all these causes. Benjamin Netanyahu’s relentless efforts to push the boundaries of Israel’s conflict with its neighbours, literally and metaphorically, forced an urgent question upon them: what is the proper Christian response? The hegemony of media in the U.S. has been broken by social media platforms, and Mr. Carlson has the perfect pulpit for his prophecies on American and world politics. His former employer Fox News, meanwhile, is a shrill war supporter.
Mr. Carlson’s views against immigration and abortion, and his advocacy of strong borders and the deportation of undocumented residents, are disliked by the left and progressive forces in the U.S.; critics from both directions accuse him simultaneously of racism, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. Last December, he addressed the charge directly: “Attacking millions of Americans because they’re Muslims — it’s disgusting. And I’m a Christian, I’m not a Muslim.” On the charge of anti-Semitism, he has been equally direct: “I’m not an anti-Semite because anti-Semitism is immoral. In my religion, it is immoral to hate people for how they were born, period. But that is not a limited principle. That is a universal principle.”
Republican lawmakers publicly acknowledge Mr. Carlson’s influence over the party’s voters, and even progressive voices have adopted a more measured view of his politics. Mr. Carlson is closely aligned with Vice-President J.D. Vance, himself an opponent of the war. Mr. Carlson is a game changer in the American conservative religious landscape because he is able to strike at the very roots of the mythology that the present political entity of the State of Israel is the historical continuity and replica of the Israel of the Old Testament — a myth that has fed and strengthened generations of the Christian right in the U.S. His campaign against America’s appetite for war, waged on New Testament ground, is old wine in a new bottle — but it may be more potent than anything that came before.
Published – March 11, 2026 12:58 pm IST
