Pete Hegseth and Trump’s labour secretary sued over prayer services, religious discrimination

Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, hosting his first monthly Christian worship service at the Pentagon since the Iran war began, prayed on Wednesday for American bullets to hit their targets.

“Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation,” Hegseth said during the livestreamed service.

He also asked for U.S. personnel to be given “wisdom in every decision, endurance for the trial ahead, unbreakable unity, and overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”

Hegseth frequently invokes his evangelical faith as head of the armed forces, depicting a Christian nation trying to vanquish its foes with military might. Wednesday’s service also included a prayer, which he said was first given by a military chaplain prior to the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, and a reading from the Bible.

“I pursued my enemies and overtook them, and did not turn back till they were consumed,” he said, quoting Psalms.

The services proceeded even after a lawsuit was filed Monday over such gatherings by Americans United for Separation of Church and State. The advocacy group filed a similar suit against the Labour Department, where Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer also hosts monthly prayer gatherings inspired by Hegseth.

The nonprofit group, in existence since 1948, said both officials were “abusing the power of their government positions and taxpayer-funded resources to impose their preferred religion on federal workers.”

“Even if these prayer services are presented as voluntary, there is pressure on federal employees to attend in order to appease their bosses — especially since these services occur amidst the Trump administration’s campaign to punish anyone who doesn’t comply with its Christian Nationalist agenda,” the group’s CEO, Rachel Laser, said in a statement.

The suit seeks to enforce a public records request from December, asking the Pentagon for internal communications about the worship services, their cost, guests and any complaints received from employees.

Recognizing fewer religions

During the expanding Iran war and other global conflicts, Hegseth’s Christian rhetoric has drawn renewed scrutiny, including his past defence of the Crusades, the brutal medieval wars that pitted Christians against Muslims.

Hegseth often goes beyond standard calls for God to bless the country or its troops; statements of faith common from American politicians in recent decades. Last week, he asked Americans to pray for service members “in the name of Jesus Christ.” On Wednesday, he again prayed in Jesus’ name.

Ronit Stahl, author of Enlisting Faith: How the Military Chaplaincy Shaped Religion and State in Modern America, says referring to God in broad language is not unusual in this context.

---

“But the shift towards the specificity of Jesus Christ and therefore Christianity and in Hegseth’s case, a particular form of Protestant Christianity, is new, especially coming from the defence secretary,” said Stahl, a historian at the University of California at Berkeley.

“In a nation with no establishment of religion per the Constitution, what does it mean to have a leader being not just broadly religious or religious in a pluralistic sense, but religious in a very particular sense?”

And yet Hegseth made other religious moves this week, announcing on Tuesday two reforms in what he has described in a statement as “making the Chaplain Corps great again.”

Hegseth said the military is reducing the number of faith codes by which personnel indicate their religion, if any. The military will now recognize 31 of the renamed “religious affiliation codes,” down from more than 200, which included many small Protestant denominations and identifications for Wiccans, atheists and agnostics. The Defence Department has not yet released the updated list of those codes.

He also announced that chaplains will wear religious insignia instead of rank insignia on their uniforms. A chaplain is “first and foremost, a chaplain, and an officer second,” Hegseth said in a video announcing the new policy.

Military chaplains typically provide worship services within the Defence Department, which under Hegseth has been unofficially restyled as the Department of War. As ordained clergy and commissioned officers, they minister from their specific tradition, but provide spiritual care to troops of any faith or no faith.

In recent years, the U.S. military has become increasingly dependent on chaplains to help address the growing numbers of troops in mental health distress.

Hegseth has previously said he wants military chaplains to focus more on God and less on therapeutic “self-help and self-care.”

Nearly 70 per cent of U.S. troops identified as Christian, according to a 2019 congressional report. Nearly a quarter were listed as “other/unclassified/unknown,” with small percentages of atheists/agonistics, Jews, Muslims and adherents of Eastern religions.

Controversial religious network

Hegseth, who was raised Baptist, has said he experienced a turning point in his faith in 2018 and soon started attending evangelical churches.

He now belongs to the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), a conservative network co-founded by the self-described Christian nationalist Doug Wilson. CREC pastors have appeared at Hegseth’s Pentagon services at least three times, including Wilson who preached there in February.

“America was deeply Christian and Protestant at the founding,” Wilson said at a service last year near Washington, attended by several Republican politicians and officials. And though he admitted that numerous “credentialed” historians dispute this notion, Wilson remarked that “should tell you something about our credentialing system.”

Wilson, based out of Idaho, since the 1970s has preached a strict version of Reformed theology — rooted in the tradition of 16th-century Protestant reformer John Calvin — that puts a heavy emphasis on an all-powerful God with dominion over all of society.

Wilson and his acolytes within the network teach that empathy can be a sin, and that giving women the right to vote was a bad idea. Wilson’s vision for a renewed Christian America calls for the end of same-sex marriage, abortion and Pride parades, and he advocates for restricting immigration.

Regarding slavery, which he has written extensively on, Wilson once told The Associated Press that “there was horrific maltreatment on the one hand, and then there are other stories that are right out of Disney’s Song of the South,” referring to the 1946 film that hasn’t been released in decades because it paints a sunny picture of plantation life with racist stereotypes.

CREC, formed in 1998, has more than 150 churches in the United States and abroad, including at least eight in Canada, according to its website.