The Resurrection and the Ratings
Why the war to bring Jesus back to life in Israel is just another grab for attention
An update to the article on Trump the Divine Saviour
Pete Hegseth stood at the White House podium on Easter Monday and told a story.
A pilot was shot down on Good Friday. He hid in a cave on Saturday. He was rescued as the sun rose on Easter Sunday. Hegseth called him “reborn.”
This is not a coincidence. This is not a metaphor that happened to land well. This is a template.
There are three narrative structures that have shaped political identity for centuries. One of them is the Dispensationalist template. It says history has a script. God wrote it. We are approaching the final act. And certain events in the Middle East are not geopolitics. They are prophecy.
You do not need to believe this for it to work on you. That is the whole point. Templates are not beliefs. They are the architecture inside which beliefs form. You do not choose to stand inside a cathedral and feel small. The building does that.
Hegseth knows exactly what he is doing. The pilot rescue happened to fall across Easter weekend. The facts are the facts. But the framing is a choice. Shot down on Good Friday. Cave on Saturday. Risen on Sunday. He mapped a military operation onto the resurrection of Christ and nobody in the briefing room blinked.
Trump followed up. A reporter asked if God supports the US in this war. “I do, because God is good,” he said. Then he described what happens if Iran does not comply by Tuesday night. Every bridge demolished. Every power plant burning and exploding. Complete demolition by midnight.
Fire and brimstone. Vengeance and glory. All on a Tuesday.
Here is the thing people keep missing about Trump’s deadlines.
They are not for Iran.
Iran cannot reopen the Strait of Hormuz by 8pm Eastern on a Tuesday because that is not how anything works. Diplomacy does not have a primetime slot. The 45-day ceasefire proposal from Pakistan, Egypt and Turkey is still being discussed. Iran has counter-proposed a permanent end to the war. These are serious processes involving serious people and none of them operate on a countdown clock.
But CNN does. And Al Jazeera does. And every live blog on every news site in the world does.
The deadline is for the audience. It creates a cliff-hanger. It holds eyeballs. It turns a war into a serialised drama with weekly episodes and a season finale that keeps getting pushed back. “We will find out tonight,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, “one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World.”
That is a trailer. Not a diplomatic communiqué.
The live ticker is Trump’s lifeline. Without it he is a president with collapsing approval numbers prosecuting a war that most Americans oppose. His strong approval among Republicans has dropped nine points since January. Petrol is at four dollars a gallon. The midterms are seven months away. The cumulative picture is terrible.
But the cumulative picture is never what sits in front of the audience. The ticker resets it. Every BREAKING banner wipes the slate. Every update displaces the previous context. You do not sit with 38 days of cluster munitions on Haifa and airstrikes on residential Tehran. You sit with the latest cliff-hanger instead.
Will he bomb the power plants? Will Iran open the strait? Will there be a deal by midnight?
Tune in to find out.
And this is where the Dispensationalist template earns its rent.
A countdown to infrastructure strikes is compelling television. But a countdown to infrastructure strikes framed as the will of God is something else entirely. It is an identity product. It tells a specific audience that this war is not a geopolitical disaster with no exit strategy. It is scripture being fulfilled. The suffering is part of the plan. The destruction is holy. The president is an instrument of divine purpose.
“Glory be to GOD!” Trump posted, directly after threatening to rain hell on 90 million people.
This is the template doing what templates do. It takes an event and makes it legible through a pre-existing structure. The structure was there before Trump. It was there before Hegseth. Christian Zionism has been shaping American foreign policy in the Middle East for decades. The belief that Israel must be restored, that its enemies must be defeated, that these events herald the return of Christ. Tens of millions of Americans hold some version of this view. They did not get it from Trump. Trump got it from them.
He is not deploying the template. He is inside it.
But he is also extracting rent from it. Every invocation of God, every resurrection metaphor, every fire-and-brimstone social media post is an attention product aimed at the segment of the identity market where the Dispensationalist template is strongest. Hannity. Graham. Huckabee. The evangelical base that sees Iran not as a country full of people but as a prophetic obstacle.
The template provides the audience. The deadline provides the format. The ticker provides the distribution. And somewhere inside all of this, a real war is killing real people who have nothing to do with any of it.
The platforms cannot opt out. This is important.
CNN ran the Hegseth resurrection framing as an analysis piece. They noted the religious overtones. They raised the war crimes question. And they ran it all inside a live blog with a countdown clock to 8pm ET.
They are not choosing to amplify the spectacle. They are built to amplify the spectacle. The live blog format exists to maximise engagement with unfolding events. A deadline to potential civilian infrastructure strikes is the platonic ideal of an unfolding event. The platform is a lens. It sits between the signal and the observer. It distorts what arrives. But it has no editorial function. It just bends light toward intensity.
Every rational Iranian response gets metabolised by the same system. “This is a war crime.” Ticker update. “We reject ultimatums.” Ticker update. “We will respond beyond the region.” Ticker update. Iran’s agency becomes content in someone else’s show. Their counterstrategy is structurally unable to compete with a countdown clock.
Trump posted on Truth Social this morning. “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”
Read it again.
A whole civilisation. Will die. Tonight.
And then: “However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen.”
He is offering the destruction of a civilisation and its resurrection in the same sentence. Death on Friday, rebirth on Sunday. The template is so deeply embedded that he reproduces its structure without even trying.
Or maybe he is trying. It does not matter either way. That is the thing about templates. Intent is irrelevant. The architecture persists whether the architect is conscious of it or not.
The war continues. The ticker runs. The deadline approaches.
Tune in tonight.
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