The militarization of Christian nationalism at the Pentagon level redefines U.S. foreign policy as a divinely mandated crusade. This shift replaces secular strategic logic with messianic rhetoric, potentially dismantling traditional military norms and provoking broader religious-geopolitical fractures by explicitly targeting the Iranian state through a lens of biblical retribution.
I guess a zealot, by nature, can’t hide — too extreme are his convictions, too grand his designs, too consuming his arrogance. And so, over recent weeks, Pete Hegseth has fully revealed himself.
He has made clear that every missile the United States fires, every bomb it drops, every Iranian it kills, is for Jesus. Praise be the Lord, who has given America the power to wipe out an entire civilization. That’s what President Trump threatened to do — in an intermittently jaunty social media post, no less — and Hegseth gave no indication of unwillingness to execute that order.
He brandishes assertions about God’s will with the exaggerated brio of an electronics merchant pressing fliers on pedestrians passing by his new megastore: Have I got a holy war for you. Embrace the death. Exult over the destruction. What only looks like hell is a ticket to heaven.
Not everyone agrees. In this era of the extraordinary, Pope Leo XIV has taken the unusual step of publicly and specifically rebuking the Trump administration’s assertion of divine approval for the war against Iran.
In a social media post on Friday, he wrote: “God does not bless any conflict. Anyone who is a disciple of Christ, the Prince of Peace, is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs.”
That was hardly the pope’s first reprimand. During a Mass just before Easter, he voiced his concern that the Christian mission had been “distorted by a desire for domination, entirely foreign to the way of Jesus Christ.” And before that, he cautioned that Jesus “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.”
The pope’s preoccupation obviously reflects all the talk of God, God, God from Hegseth and from Trump, whose piety is profound when that’s convenient. Hegseth at one point used a Pentagon news conference in which he celebrated Iranians’ experience of “death and destruction from above” to beseech Americans to pray for our troops daily, on bended knee, “in the name of Jesus Christ.”
As my Times colleagues Greg Jaffe and Elizabeth Dias wrote: “More than any top American military leader in recent history, Mr. Hegseth has framed U.S. military operations in the Middle East, Africa and Latin America as bigger than politics or foreign policy. Often he has imbued these actions with a Christian moral underpinning that suggests they are divinely sanctioned.”
“Suggests” is gentle. And that article was published before Hegseth volubly likened the rescue of an American airman shot down over Iran to the Resurrection of Jesus. “A pilot reborn, all home and accounted for, a nation rejoicing,” Hegseth said at a news conference. “God is good.”
Hegseth has a tattoo on his right biceps that says “Deus vult,” Latin for “God wills it.” He has described that phrase as a battle cry during the Crusades, which, of course, pitted Christians against Muslims. He titled his 2020 book “American Crusade” — notice any fixation? — and wrote in it that Americans must fight “like our fellow Christians 1,000 years ago.”
He belongs to the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, which exalts patriarchy and descends from a movement that argues that the Bible’s edicts should prevail over secular law.
He tugs church into state. As Michelle Boorstein wrote recently in The Washington Post: “Every month at the Pentagon, Hegseth hosts evangelical worship services that legal experts say are unprecedented. His social media profile and public comments routinely espouse his understanding of Christianity, which is one that would dominate American life and cast those who disagree with him as God’s enemies. He has brought clergy from his small Christian denomination to preach at the Pentagon, including a prominent pastor who says women shouldn’t have the right to vote.”
How exactly did he become secretary of defense, to use the traditional title for the job? (Ever the overcompensating showboat, he prefers “secretary of war.”) It’s astonishing to look back at the period in early 2025 before his Senate confirmation hearing and recall all the worry about the allegations of his public drunkenness in the past, of his gross mismanagement of the groups Vets for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America, of his sexually abusive behavior. (He disputed all of this.) Those were, indeed, blaring alarms. But they were no more concerning than his theocratic bent, which was minimized in the shuffle.
That’s how it goes with Trump and his tribe: The scandals and outrages pile too high for even a small fraction of them to be noticed properly. Besides which, Christian nationalism had embedded itself too deeply in the MAGA movement and the evolving Trump administration for Hegseth’s version of it to stand out as boldly as it should. He has faded into the crowd of holy rollers.
In normal times, under a normal president, we would be talking nonstop about the fact that the lethal behemoth of the United States military is under the supervision of someone who holds such extreme religious beliefs and not only admits but brags about the extent to which they define and drive him.
In normal times, under a normal president, we would gasp at the messianic, bellicose timbre of a government video, distributed last year, that wed a montage of our military arsenal to a soundtrack of Hegseth’s voice reciting the Lord’s Prayer. It didn’t merely imply that ours was an army of God. It trumpeted that — with unsettling fervor, with chilling grandiosity.
Hegseth’s is a gospel of carnage, and I have so many questions about it. How does he square his Christianity with references to “no quarter, no mercy” for enemies of the United States? That’s not how Jesus talked.
How does he reconcile his certainty that he and his spiritual brethren stand at the zenith of all righteousness, empowered to cast unforgiving judgment on all who don’t subscribe to their faith, with the Christian virtue of humility, which Jesus exemplified?
Hegseth exemplifies vanity, and I’m not referring to the shirtless photos and shellacked hair. I mean the insistence that his way is His way and the only way. That God has bestowed a unique blessing on America, whose might proves its right and whose killing is a kind of grace.
What a strange religion. But then there’s so much about Hegseth — and America right now — that I find bizarre.