A Christmas Strike and the Politics of Faith in U.S. Foreign Policy

On Christmas Day, a military announcement from Washington was framed not merely as an operational update, but as a religiously charged message to the world. In a post published on the U.S. Department of Defense’s X account, Donald Trump declared that American forces had carried out airstrikes in northwestern Nigeria against militants he described as enemies of Christians.

The problem with the narrative was not subtle. The region cited has virtually no Christian population, and the presence of ISIS-linked forces there has long been debated by analysts. Still, the framing was deliberate. Trump later explained that the timing itself was intentional — the operation was postponed so it could be presented as a kind of symbolic holiday gesture.

The language accompanying the announcement left little room for interpretation. Christmas greetings were fused with threats, faith with firepower. Even the dead were folded into the message, positioned as future targets should violence against Christians continue elsewhere.

When Sectarian Rhetoric Becomes the Message

Mainstream media outlets attempted to soften the impact. The Washington Post, for example, emphasized that the operation was coordinated with Nigerian authorities and urged readers to look past the explicitly sectarian tone. Strip away the religious framing, the argument went, and what remains is a conventional counterterrorism action.

But removing the language misses the point. The rhetoric was not incidental — it was central.

According to official explanations, the strikes targeted an Islamic State faction operating in the Sahel, one that has been fighting not Western forces but rival jihadist groups linked to al-Qaeda. Those rival groups are focused primarily on Mali, where they are attempting to destabilize the government by cutting off fuel supplies to Bamako. The fear in Washington is that Mali could become the first state to fall fully under jihadist control since the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan.

So the logic becomes tangled: the U.S. bombs one extremist group in Nigeria to weaken another extremist group in Mali, in order to prevent a geopolitical collapse that has not yet happened — all while presenting the action as a defense of Christianity.

Old Patterns, New Justifications

For observers with long memories, this rationale feels familiar. During the Cold War, military interventions across Africa, Asia, and Latin America were routinely justified as necessary to halt the spread of communism. The ideological language has changed, but the structure of the argument has not.

There is also a historical echo closer to home. In December 1972, President Richard Nixon ordered the so-called “Christmas bombings” of North Vietnam. The symbolism of pairing religious holidays with overwhelming force has precedent — and it is difficult to believe that parallel was accidental.

What has shifted since then is the nature of ideology itself. Economic systems like communism no longer provide the dominant framework for global conflict. Instead, religious identity has moved to the foreground. From the Balkans to the Middle East to Southeast Asia, faith has become a central organizing principle of violence and power. Even Russia’s war in Ukraine has been wrapped by the Kremlin in the language of religious destiny.

From Secular Citizenship to Sacred Allegiance

Scholars of religion note that this is not a new phenomenon in human history. In late antiquity, roughly between the third and eighth centuries, political identity gave way to religious allegiance across much of the Mediterranean world. As Israeli historian Guy Stroumsa has argued, pluralistic debate was replaced by polemics, and civic belonging by confessional loyalty.

The modern secular state was designed to reverse that trajectory. In the American model, citizenship was meant to exist independently of faith. The Constitution barred religious tests for office, rejected state religion, and guaranteed freedom of belief.

What we are witnessing now is a retreat from that framework.

Faith as a Boundary of “Us” and “Them”

In this light, Trump’s religious language was not an error to be corrected by careful editors. It was the point. The message was simple: violence abroad is justified when it is framed as protection of “our people,” defined not by nationality, but by shared faith.

The tone was echoed across the administration. Official Christmas statements from senior officials emphasized Christian doctrine, salvation, and kingship — language that blurred the line between personal belief and state power.

Taken together, these messages suggest a foreign policy no longer content to speak the language of universal security or secular order. Instead, it gestures toward a world divided along religious lines, where military force is sanctified by identity rather than restrained by law.

That shift, far more than the tactical details of a single strike, is what made this Christmas announcement significant — and troubling.