The National Council of Churches has organized a letter of religious voices effusively praising the Iran nuclear deal and urging Congress to support supposedly the “most robust monitoring and inspection regime every negotiated” that “moves us a step closer to a world without nuclear weapons.”

Signers of the letter to Congress are mostly officials of NCC member denominations plus a few Catholics, Jim Wallis of Sojourners and Florida pastor Joel Hunter, who’s a spiritual counselor to President Obama.

Of course, the NCC is now mostly just a predictable liberal voice of declining Mainline Protestantism. But its Iran nuke deal perspective unfortunately represents a significant swath of American Christianity that mistakenly confuses the path of Jesus with geopolitical tomfoolery.

Revealingly, signer Jim Wallis, an Evangelical Left pacifist, has separately warned that there should be “no illusion that Iran will instantly change its destructive and disruptive behavior because of this agreement.” And he has urged the U.S. to “insist that Iran cease funding armed groups throughout the Middle East, improve its human rights record, and end its hostility toward Israel, through “focused diplomatic and economic pressure.”

The NCC letter, in contrast, did not acknowledge any possible shortcomings in the deal with Iran’s corrupt and oppressive theocracy, effectively making itself more peacenik and geostrategically naive than famously anti-war Jim Wallis. Instead it insists that “rejection of this deal would be a rejection of the historic progress our diplomats have made to make this world a safer place.”

Is there any diplomatic accommodation of a nasty regime that the NCC and likeminded groups would NOT support under any circumstances? Would the NCC have supported the Munich appeasement of the Third Reich, for example? Indeed, much of American Protestantism in the 1930s was pacifist and did support accommodating the rising Fascist powers. After all, what could be worse than war, they asked, not realizing that bad diplomacy can help ensure war.

Then as now Mainline Protestant elites, although much less influential now, naively believed in a world where every dispute even with mass murderers can be negotiated amicably in route to a global harmonic convergence. Christian teaching about human sinfulness vigorously instructs otherwise.

Everyone of good will can pray and hope that the Iran nuke deal, if not stopped by an unlikely veto-proof Congressional vote, will prevent a nuclearized theocratic Iran.   But, as even Jim Wallis noted, Iran’s “destructive and disruptive behavior” probably will not change. In fact, the deal, which releases Iran’s sequestered assets of $150 billion, ultimately allows Iran to resume arms purchases including elements for ballistic missiles, which would permit Iran to develop nuclear weapons in 15 years. So the agreement, as weak diplomatic accords often do, could actually precipitate war instead of preventing it.

Already Iran is effectively at war with many of its neighbors through proxies in Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and elsewhere, which this deal will help underwrite. Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and other regional powers will act against Iran as their interests dictate. What if the Iran nuke deal fulfills the fears of its critics by solidifying Iran’s strategic reach over the Mideast? What if it inflames these proxy wars and fuels the emergence of new ones? What if regional powers, before the deal proceeds much further, take their own unilateral preemptive action against Iran? What if these regional powers, resigned to Iran becoming a nuclear power, launch their own nuclear programs? And what happens when Iran cheats on the deal? What are the enforcement or punishment measures, and will peacenik religious supporters of the deal affirm their enactment or simply push for still another unenforceable accord?

Opponents of the Iran nuke deal also have to admit there are likely no good options. China, Russia and much of Europe are unlikely to support effective continued sanctions against Iran. Predictably European business interests are wasting no time rushing to Tehran to profiteer with the mullah kleptocrats, which supporters of the deal will celebrate as part of Iran’s “opening” to the world. Interest in blocking Iran’s nuclear ambitions is mostly confined to those nations most directly threatened by Iran, i.e. Israel, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, and the U.S., which has remained the consistent and ideologically defining hate target of Iran’s Shiite dictatorship since it seized power 36 years ago. Other regimes will try to benefit from or accommodate a nuclear Iran, as circumstances allow.

Dreams about a non-nuclear world are intrinsic to the nocturnal fantasies of religious idealists, but governments of actual countries typically don’t have the luxury of such delusions. They will act on the reality of today and the expectations of tomorrow, not unrealizable hopes. The current U.S. administration negotiated the Iran nuke deal with the hope that by gaining, perhaps, 15 years of time, the character of Iran’s theocracy will change, or that regime will be replaced. We can hope so, but the financial and strategic windfall from this deal will, in the immediate future, likely only further inflate the political sails of Iran’s mullahs.

Diplomacy typically only works if conducted from a position of strength and the willingness to walk away. This deal was pursued by the U.S. with near desperation, ensuring bad terms. But negotiating from strength is a foreign concept, indeed even seen as sinful, by religious idealists as embodied by the NCC group. For them, diplomacy and international statecraft are merely about good will, hospitality, and daring to trust.

The NCC letter continues a longtime religiously utopian tradition of addressing the world as it wishes it to be instead of the way it is. Such illusions, if treated seriously, undermine the pursuit of genuine peace with justice. Who will be the voices within American Christianity who seriously strive to apply the coldly practical teachings of their faith to the moral requirements of international statecraft and defense against global predators such as the blood-drenched rulers in Tehran?