Report reveals fundamentalist extremism spreading through Trump's Pentagon

President Donald Trump reviews the troops in Emancipation Hall in Washington, D.C., during his Inauguration ceremony on Jan. 20, 2024. GREG NASH/POOL VIA REUTERS

At a Pentagon recent press briefing, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth closed his remarks with a reading from the Bible’s Book of Psalms, ending with “Amen.”

That was not the first time Hegseth has used prominent Christian declarations in public, and it’s apparently bleeding over to others in the military. Some members of Congress are now calling for a Department of Defense investigation into military officers allegedly invoking the Bible in pursuit of the Iran war.

What is clear is that Hegseth and others are putting an evangelical Christian nationalist spin on a range of things, from Charlie Kirk's murder to the military and Iran. That is fraught with implications during a war with a nation where the main religion is Islam.

Hegseth has been hosting monthly worship services, overlaying Scripture on images of fighter jets and missile systems, and telling assembled troops the country needed to be “on bended knee, recognizing the providence of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”

That, says the Religion News Service (RNS) “raises the uncomfortable question” of what the language of Christianity means for the DoG while at war.

Diving into that question, the RNS repeated an interview that aired last year on the podcast “Complexified” between host Amanda Henderson and RNS reporter Jack Jenkins.

Jenkins said that historically, religious expression in the U.S. military is not uncommon. “We’ve had many a military leader reference God or Christianity at some point in some sort of vague ways that are often kind of considered part of what’s referred to as the civil religion of the United States — kind of these more vague appeals,” Jenkins said. The Pentagon, Jenkins notes, has chaplains, hosts Mass five times a week, and houses a chapel that regularly holds worship services for a myriad of different faith traditions.

But Hegseth’s approach seems to center his form of Christianity, Jenkins said.

Hegseth spoke at the Charlie Kirk memorial and once again seemed to center his own version of Christianity rather than the more traditional vague invocations, Jenkins said.

“He again made this overt appeal to Americans to also embrace the specific kind of Christianity that he was modeling,” Jenkins said. Now, he’s not saying, like, ‘Join my denomination.’ But it’s very clearly coming from an evangelical Christian space.”

Another way that is being demonstrated is in military recruitment videos. Many of the promotional videos for the U.S. military overlay imagery of weapons of war and service members with a Bible verse.

That raises the question of whether they’re intentionally trying to recruit people “with the idea that the U.S. military is also something that can be held in concert with one specifically evangelical Christian faith,” Jenkins said.

Whether there has been pushback on this overt religion trend is unclear, Jenkins said. But given its ongoing presence in the public proclamations, an order to halt is unlikely.

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