U.S. President Donald Trump speaks next to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, during a cabinet meeting at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 10, 2025.
President Donald Trump and his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, use Christian nationalism as the ideological fuel for their right-wing political movement. Yet according to one expert, they often do not understand the very Bible that they like to reference.
"He vowed that in his military, there would be 'no fatties. No trannies. No beardos. No weirdos. No wimps. No radicals,'" wrote The Dispatch's Paul D. Miller, professor of the practice of international affairs at Georgetown University, the managing editor of Providence Magazine and the Hugh Shelton visiting chair of ethics at the U.S. Army’s Command and General Staff College Foundation, on Monday. Yet it appears Hegseth struggles to accurately connect the aforementioned philosophy with the Bible.
"Hegseth compared American servicemen to the prophet Isaiah receiving God’s commission," Miller wrote. "'‘Lord, here I am, send me,' Hegseth said, quoting Isaiah 6:8. 'Send me to fight the Red Coats. Send me to fight the Communists. Send me to fight the Islamists. Send me.' (It’s one of Hegseth’s favorite tropes. He launched a recruitment tour using the 'Send Me' slogan as the centerpiece of the pitch.) "
Miller added that Hegseth also quoted Psalm 33:12 (“Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord.”), Psalm 118 ("The Lord is on my side; I will not fear: What can man do unto me?”) and Ephesians 6:11 (“Our department is, you might say, putting on the full Armor of God”) through 6:12 (“while we wage physical war, we all know the real battle is spiritual.”) in the same speech.
Yet "Hegseth is plainly taking Scripture out of context—King David was not thinking of America when he praised the nation whose God is the Lord," Miller wrote, adding that Hegseth similarly errs in "conflating the American soldier with a divinely inspired prophet (Isaiah) and the United States with God’s chosen covenant people (the 'nation whose God is the Lord'). If he means any of this literally, it is literally blasphemous."
Yet even if he does not mean any of it literally, Hegseth is still revealing himself to be remarkably shallow in his theology, Miller claimed.
"He tears scriptural phrases out of context and throws them in the speechmaking blender, and they come out like so many aphorisms and clichés," Miller argued. "They line his speech to elevate the bombast, to balance the jejune with the sacred. For Lincoln, Scripture serves to illuminate, judge, and humble the nation. For Hegseth, Scripture elevates, ennobles, and even sacralizes the nation."
He added, Hegseth’s misuse of Scripture is especially galling because he does this sort of thing in the name of restoring Christianity to its formerly central place in American public life while overseeing a war that is, at least, troubling in light of the Christian just war tradition."
Miller neglected to mention Hegseth's most infamous religious gaffe, when he invoked pseudo-scripture by reading lines by Samuel L. Jackson's character in the Quentin Tarantino film "Pulp Fiction" to the actual Bible.
“The path of the downed aviator is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men,” Hegseth said in a speech, referencing a fictional Biblical passage (Ezekiel 25:17) recited before a hit is performed. “Blessed is he who in the name of camaraderie and duty shepherds the lost through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to capture and destroy my brother, and you will know my call sign is Sandy One when I lay my vengeance upon thee. Amen.”
Despite the claims made by Trump and Hegseth, the co-author of the Declaration of Independence and third American president, Thomas Jefferson, coined the phrase "separation between church and state" to emphasize the importance of keeping both spheres distinct.
“Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State," Jefferson wrote during his presidency.
