I would never let any individual politician be anything more than a human dupe. After all individual politicians come and go so quickly that they don't matter in the grand scheme of things. And on the other hand the grand scheme doesn't change at all even if power switches from one side to another.
And in KULT terms I'd let this specific conflict be a product of human idiocy, just as it is in real life. No supernatural involvement at all. KULT is not about the supremacy of a certain religion, and even though it uses certain Judeo-Christian terminology it is not Jewism, not Christian theology, not Gnosticism - instead it is a truth (in-game) no religion is even very close to. Of course religiousness is part of the always on-going perversion of humanity, but the conflicts arising out of it are just parts of that, and not the be-all-end-all of some grand scheme or other.