By pushing religion almost as much as US military might in his war briefings, Pete Hegseth has raised questions about whether he is a Christian Zionist and if he views current events in the Middle East as prophetic of the end times. His Pentagon updates often include prayers, Bible readings and religiously-inflected statements about pursuing “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.” When asked during his 2025 Senate confirmation hearing if he was a “Christian Zionist,” Hegseth affirmed, “I am a Christian, and I robustly support the state of Israel.”
However, Hegseth’s specific Christian tradition diverges in key ways from that of many prominent Christian Zionists, such as Senator Ted Cruz, or the US Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee. He is both a Christian and a Zionist, yet also motivated by different ideas than other evangelical Christian Zionists.
Hegseth grew up in Minnesota in a Baptist home, but for years has been attending churches in the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, a network of some 150 congregations, comprising around 20,000 members mostly in the United States, that was co-founded by the controversial pastor and theologian Doug Wilson. A longtime resident of Moscow, Idaho, Wilson has gained notoriety over the past five decades for both his theological and political stridency: his support for Reformed (or Calvinist) theology; his advocacy for classical Christian education, conservative politics, revisionist views of American history including questioning the necessity and morality of the Civil War in abolishing chattel slavery in the South, and his embrace of the label “Christian nationalist.”
Among its other aims, Wilson’s network of churches seeks to influence politicians to enact laws and policies to create a society ruled more by divine and Biblical law, a project known as theonomy. This desire extends from Wilson’s Reformed theology, which regards direct Christian influence over the public square as a good, and from a sense of crisis in American society, that it has become overly secular, pluralistic, and inattentive to Christianity.
Hegseth shares Wilson’s theology, anticipating an era when Christians with the same convictions will gain increasing political power to enact their vision. This vision of the future, rooted as it is in Reformed theonomy, contains none of the end times views commonly associated with Christian Zionists like the pastor and founder of Christians United for Israel, John Hagee, or Ted Cruz, or Mike Huckabee. These Christian Zionists tend to regard the events in the Middle East as prophetically significant, as signaling something of the coming end times and, in quick succession, the Second Coming of Jesus, with Israel playing a special role in those developments.
Hegseth’s attachment to Israel is different and stems from his conviction that Israel is “a living, breathing embodiment of freedom. Israel is the front line of Western civilization.” Israel’s civilizational and cultural value puts it front and center as an ally worth fighting for. “For us as American Crusaders,” he summarizes in his book by that name, 2020’s American Crusade, “Israel embodies the soul of our American Crusade – the ‘why’ to our ‘what.’ Faith, family, freedom, and free enterprise; if you love those, learn to love the state of Israel.”
Hegseth is no theologian, but he is familiar enough with his church’s teachings as well as the larger theonomic theology of Doug Wilson and others that these concepts and influences matter in explaining his conduct. While Wilson and Hegseth do not have a strong personal relationship, Hegseth has praised Wilson’s teachings and hosted Wilson at the Pentagon.
In 2023, Hegseth moved from New Jersey to Tennessee to join a church and a classical Christian school planted by the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches. That move is one of the ways Hegseth has expressed his admiration that this network of churches is helping to create an “underground army” of conservative Christians that can influence the public sphere. Hegseth has pithily stated the equation of the American culture wars: “America – God + Leftism = Secularism” and regards his church and the classical Christian school movement in which it is a vanguard as a way to counter the balance of that equation.
This understanding of the culture wars within American society is continuous with Hegseth’s approach to US foreign policy and military engagement. Tattooed across Hegseth’s chest is a Jerusalem cross, and elsewhere the Latin phrase Deus Vult (“God wills it”), which was the battle cry of the First Crusade in 1096. In American Crusade, Hegseth favorably compared voters for Donald Trump with the medieval Crusaders and the soldiers of the American Revolution, with this lineage of fighting demonstrating “that unapologetically going on offense is the only tenable strategy for the defense of our republic.” That all three examples claimed God on their side was significant for Hegseth.
Hegseth doesn’t see violence as redemptive or the promotion of American-style freedom as justifying prolonged military involvement. Instead, he highlights military force as a means of retribution and punishment. Unlike Woodrow Wilson’s millennial vision of World War I as a war to end all wars, or George W. Bush’s goal of a democratic Middle East through military-enforced nation-building, Hegseth envisions America’s aim as unleashing “death and destruction all day long” through “brutal efficiency, total air dominance, and an unbreakable will.” He is not an American crusader for freedom in the classic sense.
Yet “freedom” still shapes his view of the Middle East, including of Israel and Islamism. Even though he doesn’t share in other evangelicals’ end times views, Hegseth does share in other respects some key Christian Zionist assumptions. He expresses the sentiment that “God also stands with the people of Israel against their enemies and blesses those who bless Israel,” citing the Biblical passage in Genesis 12:1-3 where God promises to bless those who bless Abraham and his offspring. Hegseth furthermore, like other Christian Zionists, compares the Biblical kingdom of Israel and the modern state of Israel, seeing continuity between the two.
Hegseth also exhibits the deeper Christian fascination with the Holy Land and the state of Israel that has informed Americans’ generally Zionist bent throughout their history. Like other Americans, Hegseth became especially attached to Israel when he visited the country, which he has done so frequently since the 2010s.
Hegseth supports Israel, too, because of its military prowess in what he considers a civilizational conflict between proponents of freedom, like the United States and Israel, and their opponents, including secularists, leftists, and Islamists. He commends Israel because it “continues to vanquish its Islamist foes.” For Hegseth, Islamism is the genuine expression of Islam. “Yes, millions of those who identify as Muslims are peaceful. Obligatory disclaimer made,” Hegseth writes. “But, no, Islam is not a religion of peace, and it never has been. Islam is neither a religion of peace nor a religion of violence; it is a religion of submission.”
Yet even as Hegseth sees Islamism as a serious threat to America, he also evinces a grudging admiration for it. Here is a case where Hegseth’s two major issues – the military and education – connect again. “Almost every single Muslim child grows up listening to, and learning to read from, the Qur’an,” he observes. The obvious parallel in America would be teaching young Americans to listen, learn, and read from the Bible. But “with our secular American schools – in which the Bible is nowhere to be found,” such an opportunity is squandered. “You’ll understand why Muslims’ worldview is more coherent than ours,” Hegseth concludes, and therefore even more of a threat than at first appears.
When Hegseth speaks of defending Western Christian civilization against Islamic threats and secular progressivism, he is not just targeting Trump’s evangelical supporters—and he is not evoking the exact same theological or political implications as some of his fellow evangelicals like Huckabee or Cruz. Instead, he promotes a consistent, if debated, theology of theonomic statecraft where military strength is a key tool for protecting the Christian essence of America and what he views as God-given freedoms worldwide.
It is challenging to determine how much Hegseth’s religious beliefs directly influence Pentagon policies, versus how much they simply create a rhetorical environment. The merger of evangelical faith, military culture, and civilizational anxiety that his biography embodies represents a broad and intensifying current in American religious life. What is new is not the convictions but their elevation to the highest levels of government. Whether the nation views that as reassurance or alarm will depend, like so much else, on which God one refers to.
Comments