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In the war the US launched on the Islamic Republic, the US secretary of war, as he prefers to be called, likes to talk about how the Christian God is on his side.
During an interview with CBS News that aired Sunday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Iran should not doubt US resolve because it is backed by the higher power.
“Our capabilities are better. Our will is better. Our troops are better. The providence of our almighty God is there protecting those troops, and we’re committed to this mission,” he said.
The CBS reporter, Major Garrett, asked if Hegseth views the war from a religious context.
“I mean, obviously, we’re fighting religious fanatics who seek a nuclear capability in order for some religious Armageddon.” Troops, he later added, “need a connection with their almighty God in these moments.”
A couple of days later, not long after returning from a dignified transfer of soldiers killed in action, Hegseth quoted Psalm 144 at a Pentagon press conference: “Blessed be the Lord, my rock, who trains my hands for war and my fingers for battle.”
Hegseth has long wanted to reprogram the country.
“America was founded as a Christian nation,” he said at a recent National Prayer Breakfast. “It remains a Christian nation in our DNA, if we can keep it,” he added, splicing some religion onto a famous Benjamin Franklin quip about whether the US was a republic or a monarchy.
“Not only are we warriors armed with the arsenal of freedom, we ultimately are armed with the arsenal of faith,” he said, adapting Franklin D. Roosevelt’s idea that the US should be the arsenal of democracy to his own religious worldview.
Hegseth says one of his tattoos — a Jerusalem Cross, a religious symbol tied to the Crusades— led him to be labeled an extremist and disinvited from his unit’s detail to President Joe Biden’s inauguration in 2021. The imagery has roots in the Crusades, when European Christians tried to reclaim the Holy Land from Muslims.
The term Deus Vult, “God Wills It,” is also tattooed on Hegseth’s body. In his 2020 book “American Crusade,” he describes the term as “the rallying cry of Christian knights as they marched to Jerusalem.”
Opposition to Islamists, or those who would reorder society and government around the Muslim faith, has been a motivating influence in Hegseth’s public life.
In “American Crusade,” he wrote that the US faces a “crusade moment” that echoes the 11th-century Christian invasion of the Holy Land. Islamists, according to Hegseth, are enabled by American “leftists” against God-fearing Christian Americans.
“We don’t want to fight, but, like our fellow Christians one thousand years ago, we must,” he wrote. He presaged the idea that the US would go to war alongside Israel.
“American Crusade” refers to taking up arms against ISIS, but now the US is at war alongside Israel against Iran, an Islamic republic. In another passage from the book, Hegseth explained his view of the threat posed to the US by Islam.
While the US and Israel opened the fighting with air strikes that killed Iran’s leader this year, the Trump administration argues the battle has been ongoing since 1979, when the Islamic Revolution evicted the US-backed shah from power.
As defense secretary before the war, Hegseth launched an effort to “make the Chaplain corps great again.” Military chaplains are supposed to minister to all religions, but Hegseth wants to rewrite their manual to reinsert more God and rely less on secular language.
“War fighters of faith,” he said in a post on X, have been alienated by secular humanism in the military.
He pushes a monthly prayer that is broadcast throughout the Pentagon. In February, Hegseth invited his pastor Doug Wilson, a Christian nationalist who wants the US to be a Christian theocracy, to address the US military.
Wilson, in an interview with CNN’s Pamela Brown last year, explained his view of women as “the kind of people that people come out of” and defended the idea that the US should be a Christian theocracy.
The Military Religious Freedom Foundation, a nonprofit activist organization that seeks to defend the rights of servicemembers, says it has received numerous complaints in less than a month of war. Those complaints cannot be independently verified by CNN. According to MRFF founder Mikey Weinstein, a former Air Force attorney, that’s because the people making them fear retribution.
But he said the complaints include talk among military commanders that the war on Iran is part of the end-times Bible prophecies. House Democrats have called for an investigation of the complaints.
Weinstein told me Hegseth’s language gives the impression to the Muslim world that the US is launching its own crusade.
“We look exactly like a ninth version of the eight prior crusades, from the 11th through the 13th century,” he said. “To Boko Haram, ISIS, the Taliban, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, whether they are Shia or Sunni, we’re just attacking a huge Muslim nation, and all this does is serve as an immeasurable propaganda bonanza for those that we are fighting.”
Hegseth does not appear to have talked publicly about end-times prophecies or the idea that Israel retaking the holy land presages revelation. But he does not shy away from the notion that the US should be in league with Israel for religious reasons.
A Christian and a Zionist
In a sympathetic line of questioning during his confirmation hearing last year, Sen. Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican, asked Hegseth if he considered himself a Christian Zionist.
“I am a Christian, and I robustly support the state of Israel and its existential defense and the way America comes alongside them as a great ally,” Hegseth said.
Zionism is the idea that the Jewish people have a right to establish and defend their own nation in the Middle East. Christian Zionism, as a distinct term, is the idea that the right of Jews to return to the Holy Land is guaranteed in Genesis.
“Some believe, Christians in particular, that Israel is the fulfillment of biblical prophecy, specifically in terms of the second coming of Christ,” said Allyson Shortle, a professor of politics and religion at the University of Oklahoma, who coauthored a book about Christian nationalism.
Shortle told me Hegseth’s strain of evangelical Christianity is in line with a view of American exceptionalism, meaning that Americans are different from people elsewhere and engaged in a broader moral clash with other societies.
“Christian nationalism and American religious exceptionalism are part and parcel of the same ordering of Christians on top and everybody else sort of falls below in a way that is very domineering,” Shortle said.
Iran, to a person with this worldview, “stands on the other side of a battle that’s as much about principles, beliefs and values as it is about national interest,” according to Daniel Hummel, an author of books about evangelicals in the US and director of the Lumen Center, which describes itself as a community of Christian scholars in Madison, Wisconsin.
“Ideas about Israel’s chosen-ness or that things happening in the Middle East that are cosmic in significance, that’s a very widespread view, among particularly White American Christians,” Hummell said.
While she described Hegseth’s views as being on the fringe, Shortle said about half of Americans do support some sort of Christian nationalist ideology, including the idea that the US was founded as a Christian nation and that it’s divinely inspired.
“Absent the context that this might be part of the Christian nationalist movement, people like the overall idea well enough,” Shortle said, adding, “an alarming amount of Americans, given that it’s connected to a lot of anti-democratic outcomes and anti-democratic beliefs.”
Hegseth does not struggle with such conundrums. In “American Crusade,” he squared the peaceful teachings of Jesus with his opposition to diversity efforts and his general call to arms like this:
“So-called tolerance smells like surrender to Islamists, because it is. Jesus did tell us to turn the other cheek, but I’m pretty sure he wasn’t advising a secretary of defense at the time,” Hegseth wrote back then.