'You can’t bomb knowledge': Gospel & geopolitics in Iran

Over the weekend, the US conducted bombing strikes by air on three sites of nuclear infrastructure in Iran.

President Trump lauded the operation as a "spectacular military success" against the "world’s number one state sponsor of terror", claiming that Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities had been "completely and totally obliterated".

This comes only weeks after Israel began a series of strikes on Iran – with targeted strikes and car bomb assassinations on generals, politicians, and leading nuclear scientists.

A history of hostility

For years there has been a hostile and tense relationship between Iran and the US. With the prospect of Iran as an enemy with significant resources, including a nuclear programme, previous American Presidents were cautious not to start a war in the Middle East. The Uranium enrichment facilities deep underground struck by specialist bombs over the weekend were feared to be working towards the creation of nuclear warheads. Since 2019, this programme was incrementally breaking the terms agreed in the Iran Nuclear Deal between Iran, the US, Russia, and a group of other Western nations in 2015.

Donald Trump is the first President to choose a direct, confrontational strike instead. And at the time it seemed to be – in all but name – a declaration of war. There is now a ceasefire, of course, in place. But the problem is: you can’t blow up knowledge. If Iran has the know-how and the intent to develop a nuclear bomb, these attacks will not ultimately stop them. Solid international institutions and the international rule of law are the only things that have prevented wider nuclear proliferation. We could argue that the US taking this action now, undermines that rule of law and actually weakens our ability to keep a lid on nuclear proliferation.

And from Tehran to Tel Aviv people are waiting in fear of what this next phase of instability has in store for the people of the Middle East.

Growing Christian presence

But as the violence ramps up, so too does the presence of Christians in Iran, where the evangelical church is growing at an extraordinary rate. According to Elam, a global ministry for Iranian Christians, there were an estimated 500 Iranian convert Christians in 1979 at the time of the Islamic Revolution. Today there is an unknown number, but charity for persecuted Christians Open Doors conservatively estimate 800,000 believers.

The violent theocratic regime as well as the bold witness of Iranian believers in the face of persecution, imprisonment, and torture, has contributed to a fresh openness to the gospel.

State persecution of Christianity all over the world is often fuelled by governments that are suspicious of foreign influence – especially Western influence. Christianity, apart from the small minority traditions, such as the Armenian or Coptic churches, is often seen as a Western religion. The same was true of atheistic regimes through history, like China under Mao or Soviet states in Easter Europe, or indeed North Korea today. To be a Christian is to be seen as a treacherous Western sympathiser.

The damage of Christian nationalism

My opinion of Christian nationalism and its ill-effects at home in Western nations are well documented – but here its damage is seen internationally. If our national identity and our identity in Jesus Christ is conflated and mixed up together – stating that Christianity and British or American patriotism are one and the same thing, for example – then it also undermines the global reality of the church, and contributes to the suffering of our brothers and sisters overseas. In giving their lives to Christ, they are seen as traitors to their people. Converts are regularly arrested for ‘crimes against national security’.

The US’ bombing of Iran threatens to only make this worse. We must pray that willing hearts are not hardened to the gospel by politics, or by the military action of a "Christian" nation. The church has spread with the expelling of foreign missionaries and the persecution of the indigenous believers that remained – just as revivals have happened in China and elsewhere. Let’s pray that our persecuted brothers and sisters do not receive further backlash, and that the rights of Christians and all other religious minorities are not forgotten in peace talks and negotiations.

In all the chaos of the geopolitics, lets remember believers in Iran, Israel, and the whole Middle East with the words of Psalm 46:

"Come and see what the Lord has done, the desolations he has brought on the Earth.
He makes wars cease to the ends of the Earth.
He breaks the bow and shatters the spear; he burns the shields with fire.
He says, ‘Be still, and know that I am God;
I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the Earth.
The Lord Almighty is with us; the God of Jacob is our fortress."