Mother Jones illustration; Kevin Wolf/AP; IMDb
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On Wednesday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth introduced a religious service at the Pentagon by offering a prayer, which he said he had learned from military leaders. “They they call it CSAR 25:17,” he said, using the acronym for Combat Search and Rescue missions, “which I think is meant to reflect Ezekiel 25:17.”
The prayer he recited, though, doesn’t appear in the Bible. Rather, as internet observers quickly pointed out, it bore an extremely close resemblance to the monologue that Samuel L. Jackson delivers in the 1994 film Pulp Fiction, just before he executes someone.
The Pentagon was quick to explain away Hegseth’s apparent conflation of the Bible and a violent Tarantino classic. The prayer “was obviously inspired by dialogue in Pulp Fiction,” tweeted Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell. “Both the CSAR prayer and the dialogue in Pulp Fiction were reflections of the verse Ezekiel 25:17, as Secretary Hegseth clearly said in his remarks at the prayer service. Anyone saying the Secretary misquoted Ezekiel 25:17 is peddling fake news and ignorant of reality.” (On Thursday, Hegseth also used religious language to describe journalists. “I sat there in church and I thought, our press are just like these Pharisees,” he said, referring to the Jewish enemies of Jesus.)
“Dads push us to take risks. Moms put the training wheels on our bike. We need moms, but not in the military.”
We’ll probably never know precisely why Hegseth saw fit to use a cinematic prelude to murder as a blessing for the troops, but in the context of his religious beliefs, it’s not a particularly surprising choice. In fact, it aligns perfectly with Hegseth’sfixation on a violent version of Christianity. To start, there are his tattoos: a Jerusalem cross—a symbol associated with the Catholic Church’s anti-Muslim Crusades—and the related phrase Deus Vult, Latin for “God wills it.” Because of these tattoos, Hegseth was forbidden from serving as a guard at Biden’s inauguration. In his 2020 book, American Crusade, Hegseth rails against Muslims’ “well-documented aversion to assimilation.”
In addition to his fixation on the Crusades, Hegseth has close ties to a conservative denomination called the Communion of Reformed Evangelicals Churches (CREC) that explicitly advocates for Christians to exert their faith’s influence over the government.
In that mission, Hegseth has excelled. One big accomplishment: He spearheaded an initiative to bring prayer services to the Pentagon. During one such event in March, shortly after the start of the Iran war, Hegseth prayed for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”
At a February Pentagon prayer service, the featured speaker was Doug Wilson, the Moscow, Idaho, pastor who founded CREC. Wilson, who has described his vision of “a network of nations bound together by a formal, public, civic acknowledgement of the lordship of Jesus Christ and the fundamental truth of the Apostles’ Creed,” has long argued in favor of Christian nationalism, and he has likened his fiefdom in Idaho—which includes a church, school, college, and publishing house—to a “working prototype” of what Christian nationalism could look like.
Wilson is a prolific blogger and producer of videos, many of which promote the muscular version of Christianity that Hegseth also seems to favor. As I wrote in 2024, Wilson’s videos have tackled women’s culpability in rape, the dark side of empathy, and the virtues, as he put it, of “something called the patriarchy—that which, according to our soi-disant and lisping political theorists, must be smashed. Only they say something like ‘thmasth.’” Last year, during an interview with Tucker Carlson, he professed that “women are the kind of people that people come out of.”
Hegseth embraces a macho ethos in his 2024 book The War on Warriors, decrying the lack of masculinity in the military:”I’m going to say something politically incorrect that is perfectly commonsensical observation. Dads push us to take risks. Moms put the training wheels on our bike. We need moms, but not in the military, especially in combat units.”
When Trump announced Hegseth as his pick for defense secretary, the X account of the podcast CrossPolitics, cohosted by a lead pastor at Wilson’s Idaho church, posted, “HUGE WIN! @PeteHegseth is a godly Christian man. He is a member at a CREC church and classically educates his kids. He’ll get the wokeness out of the military which will unfathomably bless our nation.”
Indeed, Hegseth has made anti-wokeness a priority. Under his leadership, the Pentagon has eliminated diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, severed ties with universities it considered too woke, and dismantled a group that promoted women in the military.
Hegseth bragged about his achievements in an address in Virginia last September, “Foolish and reckless political leaders set the wrong compass heading and we lost our way,” he said. “We became the woke department. But not anymore.”
