There’s a particular danger that emerges when people with real power start talking like the end of the world would be a good outcome.

When war is framed as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy—when violence is described not as a tragic last resort but as a necessary step toward Armageddon—we’re no longer dealing with strategy or even ideology. We’re dealing with toxic religion: belief weaponized to bypass responsibility, sanctify harm, and silence dissent.

I say this as someone who spent years inside Christianity’s most amplified spaces. As a former megachurch pastor, I know how religious language can bring comfort, humility, and moral seriousness when it’s grounded in reality. I also know how violently religion mutates when holy certainty replaces human conscience.

In the people I now counsel as they escape toxic religious systems, the pattern is chillingly consistent: God’s will becomes a totalizing excuse—used to silence questions, override reality, and absolve people of responsibility for the harm they cause.

When that same dynamic enters a military chain of command, the stakes aren’t abstract. They’re lethal.

Toxic religion rarely announces itself as cruelty. It presents itself as confidence. It says, “Don’t worry—this is God’s plan.” And with that single sentence, responsibility is quietly relocated from human hands to divine abstraction. Once the plan is holy, no one has to own the fallout. Suffering becomes meaningful by default. Death becomes necessary. Doubt becomes disobedience.

That’s not faith. That’s abdication.

What makes this moment especially dangerous is that it lands in a culture already strained by fear, uncertainty, and exhaustion. In times like these, people don’t just want answers—they want relief. Apocalyptic religion offers that relief by replacing ambiguity with certainty and moral complexity with cosmic endorsement. It tells people they’re not just acting; they’re participating in something ordained.

The cost of that relief is existential health.

Existential health is the human capacity to endure uncertainty without evacuating moral responsibility. It is the ability to say, “I don’t know how this ends,” and still refuse shortcuts that turn fear into destiny or violence into divine will. It demands humility about what we cannot control, restraint in the stories we tell to justify action, and the courage to own consequences without appealing to God as a moral escape hatch.

Toxic religion destroys that capacity.

Instead of teaching people how to choose life in all its fragility, it trains them to subordinate life to a grand cosmic narrative. Instead of forming conscience, it hands out permission. Instead of grounding people in the human cost of their actions, it elevates them into symbolic roles—soldier, martyr, instrument, enemy—where real lives become secondary to the story being told.

Once that shift happens, ethics become optional. Everything can be justified, because justification no longer lives in this world.

A military cannot function responsibly if its leadership treats reality as a stage set for revelation. Soldiers aren’t chess pieces in prophecy. Civilians aren’t collateral in a holy story. And a chain of command that blurs personal belief with institutional authority doesn’t inspire courage—it breeds silence, fear, and fracture.

Apocalyptic certainty isn’t strength—it’s the decision to protect a story at the expense of human life, and to pretend that meaning can erase what violence destroys.

This is where existential health becomes an act of resistance.

A healthy existential stance doesn’t deny fear; it refuses to exploit it. It doesn’t deny meaning; it refuses to outsource it. It insists that power remain accountable to the human scale—that decisions be justified among the living, not deferred to divine intention.

Existentially healthy leadership is stripped of drama and refuge. It does not promise meaning beyond the act. It looks directly at the human cost, acknowledges the real possibility of being wrong, and accepts responsibility without appeal—to God, history, or fate.

Toxic religion reliably reappears in moments of crisis because it offers something seductive and dangerous: permission. It reframes suffering not as a tragedy to be minimized, but as a requirement to be fulfilled. Once suffering is declared necessary, compassion is no longer a moral obligation—it becomes a liability.

If we care about the psychological health of those asked to serve, and the ethical integrity of institutions entrusted with force, we should be allergic to end‑times rhetoric in leadership spaces—not because it offends religious sensibilities, but because it corrodes judgment.

Existential health requires something harder than prophecy: restraint. It requires leaders who can hold authority without mistaking it for divine appointment, and who can confront fear without converting it into destiny.

The world is not a parable. War is not a sacrament. And no one gets to skip responsibility by claiming the ending is already written.

In a moment when power is tempted to hide behind God, the most radical act left is insisting that this world still counts—and that human lives are not raw material for anyone’s theology.

Jim Palmer