President Donald Trump’s Cabinet is full of evangelicals, many of whom seek to bring a specifically Christian perspective to social issues from abortion to LGBTQ rights to health care. But the addition of CIA Director Mike Pompeo — who is set to replace Rex Tillerson as secretary of state after Tillerson’s shock Twitter firing — could bring an unsettlingly theocratic attitude to America’s foreign policy.

That Pompeo is an evangelical Christian is, on its face, not particularly notable; 25 percent of Americans are. But Pompeo’s specific brand of evangelical Christianity, with its insistence on seeing Muslim-Christian relations as an apocalyptic holy war, makes him an unnerving choice for such a senior foreign policy position.

During his tenure as CIA director, and before that as a member of the House of Representatives, Pompeo has consistently used language that casts the war on terrorism as a cosmic divine battle of good and evil. He’s referred to Islamic terrorists as destined to “continue to press against us until we make sure that we pray and stand and fight and make sure that we know that Jesus Christ is our savior is truly the only solution for our world.”

Pompeo clarified that only a small percentage of Muslims were, in fact, terrorists (although in a 2013 speech, he called them potentially complicit in terrorism). Still, his language echoes a wider point: that the war against terrorism can be fought, in part, with Christian faith.

In other speeches, he’s characterized American domestic politics as a similarly apocalyptic struggle between good and evil, in which other (non-Christian) faiths and political views were signs of cultural decay. He cited a sermon previously delivered by Pastor Joe Wright in front of the Kansas state legislature: “‘America had worshipped other Gods and called it multiculturalism. We’d endorsed perversion and called it an alternative lifestyle.’” Sources inside the CIA told Foreign Policy that Pompeo’s speeches within the CIA are no less loaded with explicitly religious language.

Faith-based outlets like the Christian Broadcasting Network have praised Pompeo’s selection. Erik Rosales, CBN’s national security correspondent, celebrated Pompeo as a man who “even held a Bible study inside the White House.”

But Pompeo’s specific brand of dualistic, evangelical faith — dividing the geopolitical into good and evil — and the office of secretary of state may be at odds.

For Pompeo, American patriotism and a narrowly defined brand of Christian pugilism are inextricable from one another. He’s not subtle about it, either. “To worship our Lord and celebrate our nation at the same place is not only our right,” he told attendees at a Kansas rally in 2015, “it is our duty.” He added that politics is “a never-ending struggle ... until the rapture.”

Pompeo’s reference to the rapture here is particularly noteworthy. The rapture is a distinctively American fringe theology that says Christians will be taken up, or “raptured,” into heaven at the onset of the end times.

As I’ve written previously, a number of GOP politicians allow their belief in rapture theology to influence their political worldview. Because the rapture is ultimately desirable — it marks the return of Jesus Christ — anything that hastens it is desirable too. For many evangelicals, apocalyptic “good versus evil” battles, particularly centered over the “Holy Land” of the Middle East, are signs that the longed-for end may be at hand.

Pompeo’s faith, in other words, has a direct impact on how he views foreign policy — something his rhetoric has consistently demonstrated throughout his career. He’s frequently (and rightly) been criticized for being Islamophobic, but it’s worth noting that his antipathy to Islam isn’t just problematic for its own sake. It also embraces the idea of a catastrophic “final battle” that every government on the planet should want to avoid.

Pompeo is not alone in embracing a religiously loaded, dualistic approach to foreign policy. Evangelical Christianity — including the premillennialist tendencies that include belief in a rapture — has become an increasingly powerful force within the United States military in recent decades.

In 2004, Gen. William G. Boykin, then United States deputy undersecretary of defense for Intelligence, made headlines for loaded remarks about Islam, including the use of apocalyptic language when describing a military victory against a warlord in Somalia: “I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol.” Boykin later insisted the “idol” was greed and violence, rather than Allah, and he received nothing more than a letter of concern, a mild rebuke, for his actions.

In 2004, a Yale report expressed concern about Christian evangelicals proselytizing within the Air Force, including a chaplain encouraging cadets to warn one another that those not saved by Jesus would “burn in the fires of hell.” The report warned, “There’s one religious voice, the conservative evangelical Christian voice, that has decided that it has the right to lay claim to the environment ... and it is able to do that by working with the [Air Force] Academy power structure.”

In 2007, a group of high-ranking Department of Defense members were censured after promoting “Christian Embassy,” an evangelical lobbying group whose website is designed to resemble that of an official government site. And the parachurch organization Officers’ Christian Fellowship, which encourages servicemen to convert one another, has a presence on 80 percent of US military bases.

Since Trump’s election, the evangelical wing of the military seems to be getting stronger. Complaints to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, a watchdog group preserving religious liberty in the military, have doubled since November 2016, with members of non-evangelical faiths protesting the increasingly central role of evangelicalism in the military.

Pompeo’s defenders rightly point out that Pompeo, like any person of faith, is entitled to practice his faith while in office. But a vision of the relationship between America and the Islamic world as, fundamentally, a relationship between good and evil is at odds with the very nature of the secretary of state’s office.

Julie Ingersoll, professor of religious studies at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville and the author of Building God’s Kingdom: Inside the World of Christian Reconstructionism, points out to Vox that Pompeo’s dualism is “explicitly opposed to pluralism and tolerance,” favoring instead a neat division of people into godly or diabolic.

Unfortunately, pluralism and tolerance are precisely what makes diplomacy tick.