Against Evil Or War?: A Defining Choice For Iran’s Christians
(ANALYSIS) If Christianity is known for love and peace, what stance should Christians take towards war?
This is the question many Iranian Christians, like Christians elsewhere, are asking themselves amid the Islamic Republic of Iran’s conflict with the United States and Israel. It is a question discussed on Christian TV programmes and across social media.
Iranian Christians’ responses incorporate a mixture of different strands of Christian theology and ethics, the history of their country and the lived experience of life under an Islamic government — including the killing of many thousands of protesting citizens (among them Christians) in January, and the persistent violation of basic rights, including the right to life, over the past 47 years.
To understand what an Iranian has experienced in the 47‑year hell of the Islamic Republic, one must be Iranian and have lived in Iran.
For many Christians, the hell called the Islamic Republic began early. Less than 9 days after the victory of the 1979 revolution, the first signs of violence appeared: Anglican convert priest Arastoo Sayyah was murdered in Shiraz, and attacks on Christian property began. Soon after, the Islamic government turned its repression against women; killed members of the Bahá’í community; executed prominent entrepreneurs like Habib Elghanian, head of Tehran’s Jewish Association, and seized their property; and sent many former officials to firing squads.
In this context, the famous poem of the German pastor and resister Martin Niemöller about the Nazi period comes to mind: First they came for others, while many kept silent, until, in the end, they came for them. Over the past four decades, millions of Iranians have faced repression, imprisonment, mass executions and killings in the streets.
Iranians’ protests for their human rights — protests in which Christians have also taken part as members of society — have largely been peaceful. The state’s response has been deadly and violent: from the 2009 Green Movement to the November 2019 massacre and the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising of 2022, to cite only a few examples. In the most recent uprising in January, which many describe as a “national revolution”, tens of thousands were reportedly killed, including at least 19 Christians.
The scale of the January killings was unprecedented in Iran’s modern history. Hundreds of children were targeted by security forces, and in the northern city of Rasht, protesters were trapped between fire and bullets in a market. One American outlet described this as an “Iranian Holocaust”.
The regime responsible for this repression has dragged a country with vast oil and gas reserves and rich human capital to the point where many people struggle to secure the basic necessities of life, due to structural corruption and policies that isolate Iran internationally. The leadership has also suffered a moral collapse: while officials shout radical anti‑Western slogans, their children live in the West and their assets are held in those same countries. The regime, meanwhile, offers its citizens nothing other than repression or death.
Is resistance and war against evil permissible?
In such circumstances, many Iranian Christians face a moral question: should one remain strictly pacifist, or should one resist oppression and even support war?
In the Christian tradition, this question has a long history, going back to the first centuries of the church. Iranian Christians, like other Christians, find themselves in two main camps: either as absolute pacifists or as Christians who see war as sometimes necessary as a “lesser evil”, with many of them working within a “just‑war” framework.
All Christians place peace at the centre of their convictions and regard war as an evil. Absolute pacifists believe Christians must never participate in or support war and violence under any circumstances. Pacifism does not mean passivity; however, for them, changing circumstances should not change their principles.
But while Christians see peace as a foundational value, many also believe that, in particular conditions, resistance and even war against evil can be necessary to prevent a greater evil.
For example, Martin Luther, the 16th-century Reformation leader, while calling war a “great plague,” reminded his readers that sometimes it can prevent an even greater evil, writing: “What men write about war, that it is a great plague, is all true; but they should also be aware that it is a greater plague that men do not want to suffer war or fight, but want to have an easy peace and live in pleasure.”
What Luther expresses can also be seen in the discourse of “just war.” The roots of just‑war theory in Christian thought go back to Augustine in the fourth century. Augustine argued that although war is in its essence a bitter and tragic evil, it may sometimes become unavoidable in order to restore peace and restrain injustice.
Yet he insisted that war can only be morally defensible under limited conditions: there must be a just cause, such as repelling aggression or correcting grave injustice; it must be declared by a legitimate political authority; and its primary intention must be the establishment of peace and justice, not revenge or domination. He also stressed that unnecessary violence — such as indiscriminate killing, looting, and burning — must be avoided, which was, for his time, a radically humane position.
These principles were later developed by thinkers like Thomas Aquinas and eventually contributed, through concepts like protecting the innocent (those we now call “civilians”), to modern ideas about the right to life and human rights.
Like Luther, Augustine saw his homeland under threat from destructive invading armies. His enduring perspective emerged from a confrontation between the political reality he faced and his Christian faith.
Changing circumstances have similarly transformed some Christians’ views.
The American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, for instance, began as a pacifist, but with the rise of Hitler and Nazism, changed his position and came to affirm the use of force to restrain evil, moving from pacifism to what he called “Christian realism.”
Niebuhr believed that in a world where individuals and nations are caught up in selfishness and the lust for power, politics inevitably carries moral ambiguity. War is never desirable and always a sign of human moral failure, but in some situations it may be unavoidable to prevent a greater evil. In his view, absolute pacifism often underestimates the reality of power and violence in the world and can unintentionally strengthen tyranny. Sometimes, therefore, it is necessary to use power to restrain power. He famously argued in his essay, “Why the Christian Church Is Not Pacifist,” that a simplistic Christian moralism leads either to self‑righteousness or to inaction.
Iranian Christians, too, have found themselves confronting war‑like conditions in the struggle against a dictatorship and its machinery of killing, and as a result are now moving between these same positions and debates.
A known evil and an unknown future
For many Iranians today, the issue is not only democracy; it is survival. Years of repression and economic crises have made ordinary life impossible for much of the population.
After the recent large‑scale massacre, many Iranians have, for the first time, begun to speak of humanitarian intervention and have explicitly or implicitly supported it: an intervention whose goal would be to restrain the regime’s apparatus of repression, so that the people can determine their own destiny.
Iranians are deeply patriotic and strongly committed to their territorial integrity, and any call for foreign intervention was, until recently, taboo and unacceptable. Without doubt, President Donald Trump’s recent remark that the map of Iran will “probably not” look the same after the war has sent a shockwave through Iranian society.
They face a known evil called the Islamic Republic — now treating Iranians more and more like slaves — and an unknown future that might follow a hellish military intervention.
They are also aware that any foreign intervention is not a charitable act, but one driven by interests that may or may not align with the interests of Iranians themselves — in this case, those of the United States and Israel.
The political philosopher Michael Walzer argues in ‘Just and Unjust Wars’ that humanitarian intervention may be justified when it responds to crimes that “shock the moral conscience of mankind”, and when there is a reasonable prospect of success.
At the same time, historical experience shows that foreign intervention does not always lead to democracy. In cases like Germany and Japan after the Second World War, intervention helped build new political orders, but in countries like Afghanistan or Libya, the results have been far more complex. Still, history also records cases where military intervention stopped criminal regimes — for example, the overthrow of Pol Pot’s genocidal regime in Cambodia by Vietnam, or the rescue of Kosovo from Serbian violence.
War is not sacred
Many Christians, however, warn that in our day, no war is holy, and no political campaign deserves to be considered sacred.
There is a danger that Iranian people, including Christians, will see interventionist powers and political leaders as “divine” or “God‑sent saviours.” This temptation repeats itself in history — for example, during the American Civil War, when clergy on both the Union and Confederate sides portrayed their own cause as holy or as serving the kingdom of God.
The Christian thinker Francis Schaeffer warned in his book ‘A Christian Manifesto’, “We must not confuse the Kingdom of God with our country; in other words, we must not wrap Christianity in our national flag.” In relation to political leaders, support and defence must remain clearly separate from the sacred. When we begin to apply prophetic language and describe a leader as “anointed” by God, we prematurely close off the path to criticism and accountability — the very foundations of democratic life.
Belief in non-violence among Iranian activists remained strong until the recent massacre, when the state cut off the Internet, and its security forces massacred unarmed protesters — including children — in cold blood. Even hospitals were attacked under the cover of darkness.
Such a situation makes it very hard to believe that non‑resistance alone could change the regime’s behaviour, let alone achieve regime change towards a democracy or state that respects human dignity.
Perhaps we can understand why non-violent resistance under a brutal dictatorship so often fails if we listen to these words of Martin Luther King Jr.’s sermon in 1955, from a Baptist church in Montgomery:
“And certainly, certainly, this is the glory of America, with all of its faults. This is the glory of our democracy. If we were incarcerated behind the iron curtains of a Communistic nation, we couldn’t do this. If we were dropped in the dungeon of a totalitarian regime, we couldn’t do this. But the great glory of American democracy is the right to protest for right.”
In my opinion, Iranians living under a theocracy with no respect for human rights endure an experience even worse than prisoners behind the Iron Curtain.
Nevertheless, Iranian Christians, facing dehumanisation since the Islamic Revolution, deprived of their basic rights and subjected to persecution, have continued to resist and bear witness to their faith and identity.
Now, living under bombs, caught between a brutal present and an unknown future, they can also find some comfort in the words of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who fought apartheid: “I’m not optimistic, no. I’m quite different. I’m hopeful. I am a prisoner of hope.”
This, too, is the current sentiment of many Iranian Christians: hope, but without any illusions.
Fred Petrossian is a European-based Iranian journalist, blogger and researcher.