Hegseth’s Christian rhetoric draws renewed scrutiny after Iran war

Since becoming defence secretary, Pete Hegseth has found no shortage of ways to bring his strand of conservative evangelicalism into the Pentagon.

He hosts monthly Christian worship services for employees. His department’s promotional videos have displayed Bible verses alongside military footage. In speeches and interviews, he often argues the US was founded as a Christian nation and troops should embrace God, potentially risking the military’s secular mission and hard-won pluralism.

Now the defence secretary’s Christian rhetoric has taken on new meaning after the US and Israel went to war with Iran, an Islamic theocracy.  “The mullahs are desperate and scrambling,” he said at a recent Pentagon press briefing, referring to Iran’s Shiite Muslim clerics. He later recited Psalm 144, a passage of Scripture that Jews and Christians share: “Blessed be the Lord, my rock, who trains my hands for war and my fingers for battle.”  Hegseth has a history of defending the Crusades, the brutal medieval wars that pitted Christians against Muslims. In his 2020 book “American Crusade”, he wrote that those who enjoy Western civilisation should “thank a crusader”. Two of his tattoos draw from crusader imagery: the Jerusalem Cross and the phrase “Deus Vult” or “God wills it” which Hegseth has called “the rallying cry of Christian knights as they marched to Jerusalem”.

Matthew D Taylor, a visiting scholar at Georgetown who studies religious extremism and has been a frequent Hegseth critic, said, “The US voluntarily going to war against a Muslim country with the military under the leadership of Pete Hegseth is exactly the kind of scenario that people like me were warning about before the election and throughout his appointment process.”

Taylor said Hegseth’s rhetoric and leadership “can only inflame and reinforce the fears and deep animosity that the regime in Iran has towards the US”.

When asked whether Hegseth views the war in Iran in religious terms, a Defence Department spokesperson pointed to a recent CBS interview in which Hegseth seemed to confirm as much.

“We’re fighting religious fanatics who seek a nuclear capability in order for some religious Armageddon,” Hegseth said of Iranian leaders. “But from my perspective, I mean, obviously I’m a man of faith who encourages our troops to lean into their faith, rely on God.”

Generations of evangelicals have been influenced by their own version of Armageddon and the end of the world, circulated by books like the “Left Behind” series and “The Late Great Planet Earth” or the horror film “A Thief in the Night”. Some evangelicals espouse prophecies in which warfare involving Israel is key to bringing about the return of Jesus.

Christian Zionist pastor John Hagee, head of Christians United for Israel, said of the Iran war, “Prophetically, we’re right on cue.”