A poster showing the image of Jesus Christ firing a mortar was recently discovered on a U.S. Army base, resulting in new concerns about the potential link between military operations and religion as it pertains to the ongoing campaign in Iran.
An active-duty Army noncommissioned officer who requested anonymity for fear of retribution has alleged that they, along with two other NCOs, were working at their installation headquarters when they “discovered a poster of Jesus firing a mortar round that was left over by the previous unit that we rotated in to replace.”
The NCO, according to an email originally sent on Thursday to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) and shared with Military.com, said the building in which the poster was discovered formerly served as the headquarters for that previous unit. It has prompted trepidation about why it was there in the first place, and whether it is correlated with language describing the military campaign abroad.
“This really concerned me that the previous unit would have something like [this], especially considering the reports of commanders in the Middle East telling there [sic] soldiers that the war with Iran is a holy war and God has anointed Trump to bring about the apocalypse,” the NCO wrote in their email, concluding by saying the military should not be “taken over by these Christian nationalists.”
Military.com reached out to the Department of Defense for comment.
MRFF founder and President Mikey Weinstein, in remarks provided on Friday to Military.com, called it a “flagrant display” in a working area space of headquarters of a U.S. military combat battalion. He claimed it “viciously violates a slew of Department of Defense Directives, Instructions and Regulations,” specifically referring in part to Joint Ethics Regulation (JER) DOD 5500.07-R.
He said it is a prima facie violation of the No Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution.
The black-and-white image, as discovered by Weinstein, was originally posted with a watermark on May 3, 2025, on a Facebook page called U.S Army W.T.F! moments (USAWTFM). That color image hoisted on a wood background includes captions on the top and bottom.
On the top, it reads: “DO NOT JUDGE, OR YOU TOO WILL BE JUDGED” referencing Matthew 7:1.
The caption on the bottom states simply, “MORTAR JESUS.”
Pentagon’s Christian-Based Statements
The concern expressed by this NCO comes one day after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said during a briefing regarding Iran that “the mullahs are desperate and scrambling” while invoking a passage of scripture shared by both Christians and Jews, Psalm 144: “Blessed be the Lord, my rock, who trains my hands for war and my fingers for battle.”
In the infancy of the U.S. military campaign, more than 200 active-duty service members contacted MRFF to report claims that some of their superiors were pushing a Biblical-based prophecy correlated directly with the campaign in Iran.
A combat-unit commander told non-commissioned officers at a Pentagon briefing that the Iran war is part of God’s plan and that President Donald Trump was “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth,” as initially reported by independent journalist Jonathan Larsen.
The Pentagon, when asked by Military.com about those allegations, did not directly answer questions related to the so-called prophecy and Christian nationalism within the ranks.
“This repulsive and completely unconstitutional, immoral, unethical and illicit poster of Jesus firing a mortar round only further immeasurably buttresses the absolute validity of the equally repugnant and repellent ‘Armageddon narrative of the Book of Revelation in the New Testament’ spewed forth by a number of U.S. military commanders to their subordinates as divine justification from Christ after America’s unprovoked attack on Iran on Feb. 28-March 1, 2026,” Weinstein said.
Earlier this week, Military.com learned that DOD abruptly canceled its annual Christian prayer service that in the past has featured controversial keynote speakers including Doug Wilson. Brooks Potteiger, Hegseth’s pastor in Tennessee, has also spoken at such services.
