Via Public Witness: Hegseth Borrows Violent Prayer from ‘Pulp Fiction’ to Bless Iran War at April Pentagon Worship Service.
For the second month in a row, Pete Hegseth, who likes to call himself “secretary of war,” read a violent prayer — that echoes a scene in the Quentin Tarantino film Pulp Fiction — during a worship service at the Pentagon on Wednesday (April 15) to bless the U.S. war against Iran and call for “great vengeance and furious anger.” Hegseth also argued that what they hear in the worship service should impact the policy and military decisions they make — including decisions related to the war.
Let me note that this is a crass illustration of the Christian Nationalism rampant in this government. It is one thing for the Secretary of Defense to be a self-professed Christian, and even to be very public about it. It is another for that SecDef to be leading Bible studies at the Pentagon and directly linking US military action to some kind of scriptural purpose.
This is fusion of religion with state action (and not just any state action, but state-sanctioned violence, to include killing of civilians on the other side of the world), may strike some as exulting Christian values, but this is really trying to whitewash state action via religion. It should further be noted that, as a historical matter, attempts to fuse church and state in this fashion sully the religion far more than they lift up the state.
If Pete Hegseth wanted to be a pastor, he should have at.
Side-note: Hegseth’s focus on a God of vengeance and not a God of love is, well, telling, is it not?
Along similar lines, I noted this from Wired the other day: Government Workers Say They’re Getting Inundated With Religion.
The whole piece is worth a read, but here is the bit on the Pentagon:
The move towards religion in government has been most apparent at the Department of Defense. Under secretary of defense Pete Hegseth, the Pentagon has hosted a monthly prayer service featuring well-known evangelicals like Franklin Graham and his son Edward Graham, as well as Doug Wilson, a Christian Nationalist preacher who has argued for the establishment of a theocracy and said that women should lose the right to vote.
In a sermon delivered before Christmas, Franklin Graham told members of the military that “God is also a god of war.” On Good Friday, the DOD hosted a prayer service only for Protestants. A Pentagon spokesperson later told HuffPo that the “Pentagon Chaplain Office’s priest is not in town.” Hegseth has repeatedly framed the US war in Iran as a “holy war,” calling Iranians “barbaric savages” and called on Americans to pray for victory “in the name of Jesus Christ.”
Hegseth, who has controversial religious tattoos, attends a church that is part of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), a group of ultra-conservative congregations where Wilson is a cofounder. The church’s pastor, Brooks Potteiger, has also spoken at the Pentagon. (Last month, while speaking on a podcast, Potteiger called for James Talarico, the Texas Democratic nominee for Senate, to be “crucified with Christ.”)
“Prayer services at the Pentagon are 100 percent voluntary and are not mandated whatsoever,” DOD press secretary Kingsley Wilson told WIRED in response to a request for comment. “Anyone at the Pentagon is welcome to attend. It is not against the law to worship Christ voluntarily anywhere in the United States.” Wilson added that Hegseth is a “proud Christian” and that the Pentagon does not consider the prayer services to be a violation of the distinction between church and state.
While presidents from all parties have long attended religious events like the annual National Prayer Breakfast, Don Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, says that this differs from the way religion—and specifically Christianity—is showing up in the federal workplace.
“The Trump administration has opened a new chapter in the integration of Christianity into the daily work of government,” says Moynihan.
One thing is for certain: when the view is that expressions of faith in a government workplace are “optional” and “voluntary,” but those expressions are of the majority religion, or are being propagated by supervisors, well, that clearly puts pressure on minorities to, at best, be quiet, doesn’t it?
There is also the practical question of whether any time or resources should be going towards these kinds of “voluntary” activities.
It does seem worth pointing out that what we are seeing is ultimately about power and not faith, per se. And this helps explain why a lot of evangelicals are pro-Trump, even given his rather obvious lack of faithful adherence to Christianity, shall we say
