Hegseth’s Divine War
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Detailing the survival and daring rescue of a downed U.S. Air Force colonel in Iran over the weekend, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth likened it to the Christian story of Jesus Christ’s death, entombment in a cave, and resurrection.
“Shot down on a Friday—Good Friday. Hidden in a cave, a crevice, all of Saturday. And rescued on Sunday. Flown out of Iran as the sun was rising on Easter Sunday. A pilot reborn, all home and accounted for, a nation rejoicing. God is good,” Hegseth said during a press conference on Monday.
Detailing the survival and daring rescue of a downed U.S. Air Force colonel in Iran over the weekend, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth likened it to the Christian story of Jesus Christ’s death, entombment in a cave, and resurrection.
“Shot down on a Friday—Good Friday. Hidden in a cave, a crevice, all of Saturday. And rescued on Sunday. Flown out of Iran as the sun was rising on Easter Sunday. A pilot reborn, all home and accounted for, a nation rejoicing. God is good,” Hegseth said during a press conference on Monday.
The biblical comparison may have seemed almost unavoidable, given that the event unfolded on Easter weekend—and indeed, Hegseth wasn’t the only one in the Trump administration to make it: U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent did so as well, calling it an “Easter miracle.”
But for Hegseth, imbuing the military operation with an overtly Christian narrative fits a broader pattern. In his time as U.S. defense chief, and especially during the Iran war, Hegseth has gone to great lengths to promote his far-right Christian views, using the full resources of the military’s large public affairs apparatus.
“What distinguishes Hegseth from prior defense secretaries is his willingness to use overt Christian language and to bring a very sectarian view of Christianity into the Pentagon and into his rhetoric,” said Melissa Deckman, the CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, a nonpartisan research organization. “I think it’s very clear that Pete Hegseth is a conservative Christian; he is a member of a church that was founded by Doug Wilson, who is a self-proclaimed Christian nationalist.”
“Christian nationalists are of the mindset that America should be a Christian nation and that Christians should have dominion over all other parts of society,” added Deckman, whose organization just released a study on the demographics and policy views of Christian nationalists.
Hegseth has argued that the United States was founded as a Christian nation, though the Founding Fathers had complex views on religion, and historians have said that many were influenced by Deism—an 18th century school of religious thought that emphasized rationalism and reason over dogma. The founders also legally enshrined the separation of church and state via the establishment and free exercise clauses of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Some of Hegseth’s critics have argued that his efforts to inject his religious beliefs into the military are unconstitutional.
Hegseth’s disregard of the Defense Department’s carefully developed norm of not promoting an explicit religious view has been consistently opposed by defenders of the United States’ founding doctrine of freedom of religion.
But now, with the secretary’s high-profile extortions from the Pentagon podium for Americans to pray “on bended knee, with your family, in your schools, in your churches, in the name of Jesus Christ” for military victory against Muslim-majority Iran, concerns have mounted about the long-term implications that Hegseth’s espousal of a Christian nationalist agenda could have for U.S. national security and domestic politics.
Hegseth speaks to the media during the annual White House Easter Egg Roll on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington on April 21, 2025. Leah Millis/ReutersAndrew Harnik/Getty Images)
Hegseth’s history of promoting his far-right Christian views began long before his tenure as Pentagon chief. He has a penchant for invoking the Crusades—a devastating series of medieval wars that European Christians launched against Muslims to gain control over holy sites, among other motivations. He has tattoos with crusader imagery that has been tied to right-wing extremist groups—including a Jerusalem cross and the Latin phrase “Deus Vult,” which means “God wills it.”
In his 2020 book American Crusade, Hegseth wrote: “We Christians—alongside our Jewish friends and their remarkable army in Israel—need to pick up the sword of unapologetic Americanism and defend ourselves. We must push Islamism back—culturally, politically, geographically, and in the case of evils such as the Islamic State, militarily.” He also called for “a 360-degree holy war for the righteous cause of human freedom” in order to exorcise “the leftist specter dominating education, religion, and culture.”
Hegseth also has a history of making Islamophobic statements. In his 2020 book, he said that Islam is “not a religion of peace.” While inebriated at an Ohio bar in 2015, Hegseth allegedly chanted “Kill all Muslims!”
Along these lines, Hegseth’s critics view his religious rhetoric on the Iran war as a particularly troubling example of his yearslong effort to promote the view that Western civilization must be defended from Muslims.
“There is no doubt that this war has taken on a very ugly face of Armageddon politics and Christian nationalism, which is extremely scary on a few different levels,” said Haris Tarin, the vice president of policy and programming with the Muslim Public Affairs Council, which advocates for improving policies that impact Muslim Americans. “He has become the face of this war.”
Tarin said that Hegseth’s promotion of Christian nationalism from such high-profile venues as monthly prayer sessions in the Pentagon auditorium is part of a broader pattern of rising Islamophobic rhetoric and anti-Muslim views among far-right Republicans, such as Rep. Keith Self, Rep. Andy Ogles, Rep. Randy Fine, and Sen. Tommy Tuberville.
Hegseth speaks at the International Christian Media Convention at the Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center in Nashville, Tennessee, on Feb. 19. Seth Herald/Reuters
Similarly, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee’s comments that Israel is entitled to annex all of the Palestinian West Bank are alienating to the very Muslim-majority countries—such as Turkey, Pakistan, and Egypt—whose governments are working to find a diplomatic solution to wind down the fighting, Tarin said.
“It is not a coincidence that we are going to war with a Muslim-majority country, and this rhetoric is now on the rise,” Tarin said, situating the Iran war in the minds of Muslims around the world as the third war that the United States has launched in less than 30 years against a Muslim-majority country. “They are very well connected, because when you dehumanize communities and you talk about a domestic international threat, it is easier to push an agenda of war overseas against the people you are connecting and dehumanizing.”
Coupled with Hegseth’s divine war rhetoric, the wartime fuel and food shortages that are disproportionately falling upon poorer countries—to say nothing of the humanitarian and refugee fallout in places such as Lebanon from Israel’s renewed military campaign against Iran-allied Hezbollah—could be used as easy fodder by the likes of terrorist groups such as al Qaeda and Boko Haram and even Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to radicalize and recruit new fighters to launch attacks against the United States.
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“He has provided, among other things, a propaganda bonanza” for terrorist recruiters, said Mikey Weinstein, the founder and president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, who said he is deeply concerned about the long-term implications for American society and the U.S. military resulting from Hegseth’s promotion of hard-right Christian views.
Weinstein said his organization, which works to protect U.S. troops’ right to freedom of religion, has fielded numerous complaints since the start of the Iran war from service members accusing their military superiors of injecting religious war rhetoric and quoting biblical scriptures in their briefings to them.
One such service member, a human resources sergeant deployed overseas with an Army combat brigade who was introduced to Foreign Policy by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, said in an email that “since the war started there have been multiple instances of commanders in the Middle East telling their soldiers that Trump has been ordained by god and that this is a war to bring their bloodthirsty version of Jesus back even though Jesus preached love of others and forgiveness.” The service member was granted anonymity because of retaliation fears.
Hegseth takes the stage during a rally with U.S. Army troops at Fort Bragg in North Carolina on June 10, 2025.Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
The nature in which Hegseth promotes his faith has raised serious concerns among former military leaders that he’s undermining the military’s diversity and religious pluralism in ways that could threaten force cohesion in the midst of a war.
The roughly 1.3 million active-duty troops in the U.S. military come from a diverse array of ethnic and religious backgrounds. A 2019 Congressional Research Service report found that around 70 percent of active-duty military personnel identify as Christian—with around 20 percent identifying as Catholic and 18 percent as Protestant—while around a quarter were designated as “other/unclassified/unknown.” The report also said less than 2 percent of active-duty service members identify with Judaism, Islam, or Eastern religions.
But Steven Bucci—a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank based in Washington—said that the criticism Hegseth has faced over his religious statements and practices is “overblown” and “based on a ‘hope’ of finding something with which to drive a wedge between Trump and Hegseth.”
Bucci, a retired U.S. Army Special Forces officer and former Pentagon official, rejected the notion that Hegseth leaning into his religion will create divisions among service members. There may be a “small number of troops” who aren’t appreciative of Hegseth’s “openness about his faith,” Bucci said, but the “majority love his enthusiasm in general, and a large number agree personally.”
“This is a ‘cause’ looking for proof. I believe it is a nonissue,” Bucci added.
According to the sergeant deployed overseas, this religious war talk by some military officers has been disturbing to many young enlisted troops, while noncommissioned officers like himself and others also worry about Hegseth’s leadership “because he’s advocated for war crimes to be committed in the past” and last year fired the top judge advocates general (JAGs) for the Army, Air Force, and Navy—specially trained attorneys whose job it is to advise military commanders on the laws of war.
“Secretary Hegseth, along with millions of Americans, is a proud Christian,” Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson said in a statement. “The Christian faith is woven deeply into the fabric of our nation and shared by America’s wartime leaders like President George Washington, who prayed for his troops at Valley Forge, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who gifted Bibles to America soldiers during WW2 and encouraged them to read it. Encouraging the American people to pray for our troops is not controversial.”
There is no contemporaneous evidence documenting whether Washington knelt and prayed at Valley Forge. And regardless of whether he made public displays of his personal faith, the events at Valley Forge predated by some years the writing of the U.S. Constitution and the ratification of its First Amendment, which prohibits the government from establishing a religion. Roosevelt did encourage U.S. troops to read the Bible, writing in a foreword for copies distributed to the armed forces in 1941 that it had been a source of “wisdom, counsel, and inspiration” for “men of many faiths and diverse origins.”
In recent days, Hegseth conducted another firing spree of top Army officers who he concluded did not align with his vision for the military, including the service’s chief of staff and its top chaplain, Maj. Gen. William Green Jr.
The firing of Green, who is Black, appeared to be retaliation for the two-star general’s concerns about Hegseth’s push to reduce the military’s faith and belief code system from more than 200 faith codes down to 31 religious affiliation codes and to require military chaplains to replace their officer rank on their uniforms with their religious insignia, according to Weinstein, who said he heard from multiple well-placed Defense Department personnel about the matter.
“Green was one of the main institutional antagonists against reducing the faith codes from 200 to 31, a move that will eliminate atheistic and agnostic codes as well as Wiccan codes,” Weinstein said in summarizing what he had heard from Defense Department whistleblowers.
Last week, Hegseth also took the highly unusual step of intervening in the military’s promotion process to block the elevation of four officers to one-star general status. Two of the affected officers were reportedly women, and the other two officers were Black.
Hegseth is fixated on shaping the military’s top officers to conform to his preference for being straight, male, conservative Christian, and white, according to Weinstein, who estimates that close to one-third of the department’s military and civilian workforce ascribes to Christian nationalist views. Weinstein, who is Jewish and a former Air Force JAG, said he believes that the defense secretary’s actions amount to a violation of a clause of the U.S. Constitution that prohibits religious tests in order to hold public office.
“Hegseth has created a cookie-cutter template of the preferred candidate,” Weinstein said. “He has created a de facto religious test.”
Hegseth looks up at the sky during a flyover at the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, on Sept. 19, 2025. Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
Notably, Hegseth’s holy war rhetoric has faced veiled pushback from Pope Leo XIV, who recently said that God rejects the prayers of leaders who wage wars. Hegseth has publicly prayed for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy” and for God to “break the teeth of the ungodly.”
U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly, a Democrat and retired Navy pilot—who Hegseth has sought to punish for his participation in a video that urged troops to refuse to carry out unlawful orders—said in an interview with MS NOW last week that, as a Catholic, he found the secretary’s religious war rhetoric very concerning.
“This isn’t the way that, you know, war fighters should be thinking about a mission that the government asks them to be on,” Kelly said. “I find it pretty objectionable that the secretary of defense is trying to intertwine religion with combat operations on the other side of the planet.”
In a Sunday interview with CBS News, Catholic Archbishop Timothy Broglio said he didn’t agree with Hegseth’s efforts to paint the Iran war as something that Jesus would justify.
“It’s a little bit problematic in the sense that the Lord Jesus certainly brought a message of—a message of peace,” said Broglio, who oversees the Archdiocese for the Military Services USA, which encompasses more than 200 priests serving as U.S. military chaplains. “I think war is always a last resort. … I do think that it’s hard to cast this war, you know, as something that would be sponsored by the Lord.”
This post is part of FP’s ongoing coverage. Read more here.
Rachel Oswald is a staff writer at Foreign Policy. X: @OswaldRachel
John Haltiwanger is a staff writer at Foreign Policy. Bluesky: @jchaltiwanger.bsky.social X: @jchaltiwanger
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