When Pete Hegseth talks to God, he asks the Almighty to help him kill people—as violently and ruthlessly as possible.
In a potential violation of the separation of church and state, Hegseth has ordered monthly prayer meetings at the Pentagon, and in his first such gathering since launching the war against Iran, the defense secretary pleaded for divine assistance in mowing down the Iranian foe.
“Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our nation,” Hegseth intoned to a military audience, reciting a prayer previously given by a military chaplain before the Venezuela raid and applying it to American troops in Iran.
“Give them wisdom in every decision,” Hegseth continued, “endurance for the trial ahead, unbreakable unity, and overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”
Hegseth’s prayer service attracted only scattered media attention. But it helps explain the real impetus behind a development that deserves far more notice: The appointed leader of the world’s most powerful military regularly speaks about his capacity to rain terror and death on the enemy with an undisguised relish that should unsettle us all.
By now it’s become unmistakable that Hegseth’s tenure has been marked by open and unrestrained sadism and bloodlust. He enthuses about raining “death and destruction from the sky all day long” and about “punching” the enemy “while they’re down.” He speaks of liberating the military from “stupid” rules of engagement. He delights in unleashing its “maximum lethality.” He rhapsodizes about killing “without hesitation”—with no moral qualms whatsoever.
This talk has already stirred deep concern among lawmakers. “The U.S. military needs to be better than other militaries,” Senator Mark Kelly, a retired Navy pilot, told me, adding that we should conduct ourselves as “merciful people” who “respect life” and “respect the rule of law.”
Yet Hegseth’s prayer also displays something else: With fresh clarity, it exposes how the roots of his bloodthirstiness lie in his particular brand of right-wing Christianity.
Hegseth appears to be a devotee of Christian Reconstructionism, a theology preached by influential far-right pastor Douglas Wilson that aims to reshape all earthly endeavors around the dictums of what his disciples claim is God’s law. As scholar-of-religion Julie Ingersoll explains on Sarah Posner’s podcast, Wilson believes that “all authority belongs to God,” rendering the state’s authority wholly subordinate to a “higher category of Biblical law.” A Pentagon spokesman has confirmed that Hegseth recently met with Wilson and is his “admirer.”
What does this say about Hegseth’s conduct in the Iran war? A lot, it turns out.
During his prayer extolling “overwhelming violence,” Hegseth expanded on this by reading from Scripture. “I pursued my enemies and overtook them,” Hegseth preached, quoting King David recounting his wars against Israel’s ancient foes and likening them to the Iranian enemy. “Those who hated me I destroyed. They cried to the Lord, but He did not answer them.”
“Snap the rod of the oppressor,” Hegseth continued in his appeal to God. “Break the teeth of the ungodly” so that “wicked souls” are “delivered to the eternal damnation prepared for them.”
Hegseth directed this prayer toward “our men and women in harm’s way right now”—meaning in Iran. As Rev. Brian Kaylor, who closely track’s Hegseth’s services, told me, Hegseth’s verses are “kind of a Mad Libs mashup of Biblical violence.”
What should we make of this? The relationship between organized religion and the military has long been complex and contested. The armed forces have chaplains. But their role is pluralist, affording members of diverse faiths a place to seek guidance. Yet speaking from the government-owned Pentagon, Hegseth has urged prayer “in the name of Jesus Christ”—his Christian God.
Official religious appeals, it should also be noted, have long been commonplace within the armed forces. Military chaplains have often prayed publicly before missions. Presidents have at times claimed divine blessing for conflicts or pronounced the enemy godless. It’s of course understandable that troops facing danger would pray for deliverance.
But Hegseth is doing something different. It’s unusual for a defense secretary to directly appeal to God—his God exclusively—to assist in maximal killing, says Ronit Stahl, a historian of the military chaplaincy. What’s notable is Hegseth’s suggestion that God actively approves of as much killing as possible, and his enlistment of God in making it “overwhelming”—supremely violent and brutal.
“Rarely has an American military leader justified killing by declaring that God has sanctioned violence as an ultimate, higher good,” Stahl told me. “It’s highly unusual for high-ranking officers or civilian military leaders to relish killing and violence in God’s name as a religious duty.”
Hegseth has open contempt for limits on what our military can inflict on foes. He has called for “no quarter” and “no mercy for our enemies.” That means killing enemies who have surrendered—a war crime. His executions of suspected Caribbean drug-runners violate international law—and possibly U.S. law and American military codes as well.
But grasping the roots of this in his particular far-right Christianity makes all this bloodlust more intelligible—and much worse. If Hegseth truly believes his war on Iran is unfolding in accordance with his conception of Biblical law—the highest authority of all—then that explains why he treats all those niggling secular constraints as unbinding on him. Maximum violence and killing of the enemy—who cry out to God, but unlike Hegseth, don’t get an answer back from Him—are affirmatively good.
“It’s not the way somebody who claims to be a person of God—a religious person—should think,” Senator Kelly, who has flown many combat missions himself, told me. War, he added, “is a morally and ethically complicated thing for any person. Any serious warfighter struggles with it.” If we don’t wrestle with this, Kelly said, we’ll “start to lose ourselves.”
The ugliness here runs deeper still. Like other MAGA figures, Hegseth sees himself as a warrior saving “Western civilization” from ruinous barbarism, which includes battling against everything from the Iranian regime to mass migrations. Hegseth’s bicep tattoo extols the Crusaders, which he sees as his inspiration: God apparently wants Hegseth, their spiritual descendant, to kill Western civilization’s enemies as violently as possible.
But Western civilization has also bequeathed to us another legacy worth invoking here: The just war tradition, which is grounded in conceptions of our common humanity. That’s the idea that our adversaries are human beings in spite of their “enemy” status, which places limits on what we can do to them in war. It was given early formulation by Cicero and elaborated on by European philosophers like Hugo Grotius and Immanuel Kant.
Political theorist Matt McManus notes another irony here: Christian thinkers like Augustine also helped formulate a theory of forbearance in war premised on Christian principles that appears anathema to Hegseth. As McManus told me, this theory requires the waging of war “for the right reasons and in a non-brutal way.”
Obviously we’ve failed miserably at times to honor those ideals. But that should lead us to try harder to meet them, not to decide they’re worthless or unattainable. Hegseth imagines himself heroically defending “the West” while discarding its noble contributions to that just-war tradition.
These ideals generally include prohibitions on needless wars; on excessive cruelty; and on unnecessarily wanton and unrestrained killing, especially of civilians and combatants who surrender, among other things. Hegseth has violated all of them: The rationale for his war is based on lies. He casts his maximally brutal killing as an inherent good. His war has killed nearly 1,500 civilians, including many children. He lionizes the killing of enemies who surrender.
But Hegseth answers to a higher authority. Utterly incapable of genuine humility, Hegseth knows with unshakable certainty that those simply cannot be transgressions. No: They’re all in God’s plan.
