I have sat in enough women’s ministry classes and heard enough triumphalism from the pulpit to recognize the exact shape of the theology that put us here. It is not a theological accident. It is the predictable output of a captured-brand operation that decided God needed a strongman, and who is now watching that strongman marooned on an island of his own delusion.
Let me show you the text the apparatus conveniently ignores. Isaiah 44:9–20. The prophet watches a man carve a block of wood, use half of it to cook a meal, warm his hands, and bake his bread, and use the other half to fashion an image. He falls down before it, worships it, and prays to it: “You are my god, save me.” But the text says the man is deluded; his right hand is full of lies. He remembers his own carpentry but forgets the fire burning the house down.
For thirty years inside the Southern Baptist nomenclature, I watched the slow construction of this exact dynamic applied to political power. Evangelical legalism taught us that the text means anything but this — that idolatry is a quaint, ancient failing of people who bowed to sticks and stones, completely disconnected from the polished boardrooms and cable-news studios of the contemporary American church. The legalist reading domesticates the prophets. It tells the believer that idolatry is safely in the past, allowing the captured operation to project its own political desires onto a modern figure, call that figure God’s anointed, and demand that the figure deliver national glory despite all evidence to the contrary.
We see the plain text playing out in real-time. The strongman, elevated by a religious movement convinced he is a modern Cyrus, is trapped in conflicts he cannot win and does not know how to end without looking like a loser. As this column has noted before, the diplomatic machinery is faltering because the architecture of these conflicts rests on a refusal to acknowledge limits. A cult of infallibility prevents anyone inside the apparatus from admitting a strategic blunder, because to admit a blunder is to crack the very idol the apparatus carved. You do not ask an idol to confess a mistake. You demand it perform a miracle.
What the British columnist Rafael Behr names with a secular clarity that any Bible‑reader should recognize as a prophetic diagnosis is that this delusion afflicts not one strongman but a whole authoritarian type. The parallel Behr draws between Putin and Trump — Ukraine and Iran — is not about moral equivalence. It is about a shared blindness: the refusal to see that reality has a way of humbling even the most grandiose leaders, especially when modern warfare levels the battlefield in ways that erode the myth of invincibility from below.
And here the drone age becomes the plain‑language refutation of the idol. Drone technology has done what decades of arms‑control advocacy could not: it has shrunk the distance between a superpower’s ambition and a smaller nation’s capacity to say no. Ukraine didn’t need to match Russia tank for tank; it needed long‑range drones that could turn an oil refinery into a pillar of black smoke visible from hundreds of miles away. Iran didn’t need to sink the Fifth Fleet; it needed a credible threat to close the Strait of Hormuz — a countermeasure American war‑gamers have been warning about since before Trump ever uttered “maximum pressure.” When the cost of imperial overreach becomes visible on the home front — inflation, modest Victory Day parades, an oil‑price windfall eaten by the very damage it is supposed to pay for — the strongman’s myth of invincibility starts to crack.
The cracks are now visible even where the liberal order is supposedly weakest. A Trump administration, bogged down in negotiations with Tehran, has no bandwidth for Ukraine. Europe, after years of deferring to Washington, has stepped into the gap. Hungary’s Orbán has been ejected from power. A Downing Street summit brought Starmer, Merz, Macron, and Zelenskyy together to sketch a coalition of the willing. The liberal democracies are doing what they claimed they would do when pressed — not because they’ve suddenly become more virtuous, but because the authoritarian model has delivered a practical demonstration of its own limits. Trump’s diplomatic record is already under scrutiny for ceasefires that falter across multiple fronts, and Putin’s reputation for strategic patience has curdled into a reputation for simply not knowing how to stop.
This is where the resilience Behr ascribes to pluralism gains real traction. The authoritarian edifice may promote loyalty at the expense of truth, but it also becomes brittle when truth — in the form of a drone‑struck refinery or a failed negotiation — forces its way back into the palace. Constitutional checks, a free press, and independent courts don’t just make democracies nicer; they make them able to absorb setbacks without the whole system unravelling. Every time a Zelenskyy outmaneuvers a Putin narrative, every time a European ally steps up because Washington is distracted, the strongman’s bet that the “decadent West” would fold is proven wrong.
I am not mocking the believer who is caught inside this machinery. The women I sat with in Bible study are the ones paying for the fuel, the groceries, the consequences of a foreign policy built on celebrity narcissism rather than strategic reality. The machinery is what deserves indictment. The New Apostolic Reformation’s Seven Mountain Mandate, the Cyrus prophecies spun from whole cloth to justify unwavering loyalty to a president, the teaching that dissent is demonic — these are the modern equivalents of the wood‑carver’s chisel. A chisel is not “flawed but obedient” when it carves a lie — the Scriptures name it a delusion, not a qualified instrument. They are the captured‑operation tools used to convince the pew that if we just pray harder and vote harder, our strongman will deliver the kingdom on earth.
The prophets do not allow this. Jeremiah 17:5 names the curse of “those who trust in man, who draw strength from mere flesh.” The text does not say “those who vote incorrectly.” It says those who make flesh their arm are like a shrub in the wasteland, unable to see when prosperity comes. When the apparatus tells you that political dominance is the only path to national salvation, the text reads back: you are carving an idol, and the grain of the wood is already splintering.
We are in the moment the wood catches fire. The strongman looks for a way off the chessboard he refused to read accurately. The religious apparatus that anointed him calls for more fervor, more loyalty, more doubling down on the very infallibility that is sinking the ship. The believer in the pew is told to keep worshipping the image even as the smoke rises from refineries her wages can no longer fuel.
Let me tell you what the text actually requires. It requires the courage to set down the chisel. It requires recognizing that the Gospel does not need a strongman, and that no political figure can hold the weight we have asked them to carry. The idol does not save. It never did. The prophets are not calling us to despair; they are calling us to repentance — a turning away from the delusion that our political machinery is the engine of salvation.
The strongman will have to find his own way to the negotiating table, because the idol cannot fight the war for him. The believers who have been taught to worship the strongman’s invincibility are owed the truth: the wood is burning, the house is warming, and it is time to stop bowing to a thing that cannot speak.