When Pete Hegseth stepped to the podium on April 17 to brief reporters on the Iran war, he chose to open not with technical details about how the operation is going, but with a sermon.
That, more than anything, describes the current state of affairs at the White House. But bear with me as we go on a dystopian ride with the so-called Secretary of War.
Hegseth talked about how he’d been sitting in a church with his family the previous Sunday when the minister preached from the gospel of Mark. More specifically, the passage about Pharisees watching Jesus “so that they might accuse him.”
The DefSec then recast it as a description of the current fake news media. “Our press is just like these Pharisees,” he said, before accusing them of “politically motivated animus” that blinded them to “the brilliance of our American warriors.”
And this comes just a week after he recited the fake Bible verse from Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction and thought, in the language of the extremely online and the youth he so clearly aspires to be relatable to, that he was “cooking.”
What Hegseth didn’t mention is that the sermon he was channeling tracked closely with one delivered five days earlier at Christ Kirk DC — the Washington branch of the openly Christian nationalist Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, the denomination Hegseth belongs to.
The April 12 sermon was titled “The Fellowship of Grievance.” It exhorted worshippers to embrace what the preacher called a “biblically informed hatred.” No, really.
The Old Testament-flavored language adopted by the Secretary of War
The CREC is not subtle about what it wants. According to a report by The Guardian, the denomination’s motto — “All of Christ for All of Life” — is, per University of North Florida religious studies professor Julie Ingersoll, shorthand for a worldview that admits no neutral ground between church and state, religion and the courts, education or the military.
Co-founder Doug Wilson, who told the New York Times in October he envisions an “ideal theocratic republic,” teaches that civil authorities should enforce Old Testament law and that homosexuality and abortion warrant death penalties under that law. He’s a self-described “paleo-Confederate” who has argued slavery in the antebellum South was “a relationship based on mutual affection.” He also thinks women shouldn’t vote.
And, get this, he’s already preached at the Pentagon twice.
Asked by The Guardian whether CREC had shaped Hegseth’s worldview, Wilson wrote back: “You would need to ask him that. But his worldview is broadly the same as ours.”
In March, hosting the first Pentagon worship service since the Iran war began, Hegseth read a prayer asking that “every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness” and for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”
On March 25, he read from Psalm 18 — “I thrust them through, so that they were not able to rise” — and prayed God would “break the teeth” of America’s enemies. On March 19, he asked the country to pray for U.S. troops “in the name of Jesus Christ.”
That roughly translated to the United States bombing a school in Minab, killing more than 150 children on the first day of the war.
One hundred and fifty children. And that’s not counting the thousands of civilian casualties to come in both Lebanon and Iran over the next 40 days of the conflict. In case you have trouble reading the fine print, that’s exactly what “biblically informed hatred” looks like once it leaves the pulpit.
Published: Apr 26, 2026 08:49 pm