The Contra War was secular but framed as religious in America

Evidence

PERHAPS NO EPISODE better reveals the connections between the Reagan administration and the leadership of the Christian Right than the Nicaraguan Contra War. In the summer of 1979, the Sandinistas, a revolutionary leftist group, had overthrown the dictatorial Somoza regime. The United States suspected the Sandinistas were supported by the Soviets and the Cubans, and as president, Reagan promised military aid to the counterrevolutionary Contras. From 1981 until 1988, the war between the Sandinistas and US-backed Contras devastated the Central American country. Both sides committed brutal atrocities, and tens of thousands of Nicaraguans died. The war was not primarily a religious war, but in the United States it was framed as such. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 261

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly relevant to ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ style analysis — here the parallel is framing a geopolitical conflict in religious/moral terms to mobilize a constituency, a framing strategy rather than a dress-code panic but structurally the same move of reading politics through piety.
• XREF: Echoes the pattern of moral framing of military conflict also seen in the Milgrom law-merchant reading and in the book’s overall continuity-not-hypocrisy thesis.