Pete Hegseth is Running a Holy War From the Pentagon — and the Pope Just Called Him Out

The Defense Secretary is turning the conflict in Iran into a Holy war. Service members, faith leaders, and even the Pope are pushing back.

Three days before Palm Sunday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth stood at a Pentagon lectern and prayed for “overwhelming violence” against America’s enemies in the “name of Jesus Christ.” He asked God to let “every round find its mark” and called for the destruction of “wicked souls” who “deserve no mercy.”

On Sunday, Pope Leo XIV answered him.

Speaking to tens of thousands of worshippers in St. Peter’s Square, the first American pope declared that God “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.”

He called the Iran conflict “atrocious” and said no one can use Jesus to justify violence. The Vatican’s top diplomat, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, went even further — stating flatly that the Iran campaign does not meet the conditions of Catholic just war doctrine.

It was a theological takedown aimed squarely at the man running America’s war machine.

The Crusader in the Corner Office

Hegseth hasn’t been subtle about where he’s coming from. He has a Jerusalem Cross tattooed across his chest and the phrase “Deus Vult” — Latin for “God wills it,” the rallying cry of medieval crusaders — inked on his body.

In his 2020 book American Crusade, he wrote that anyone who enjoys Western civilization should “thank a crusader.” He warned of growing Muslim birth rates in America and argued Christians must “pick up the sword” alongside Israel to push back Islam “culturally, politically, geographically, and militarily.”

Now he’s the man in charge of actually doing it.

Since taking over the Pentagon, Hegseth has hosted monthly Christian worship services inside the building — services that are livestreamed and promoted through official channels.

He’s invited Doug Wilson, a self-described Christian nationalist pastor who has argued women should lose the right to vote, to preach from the Pentagon auditorium. He’s slashed the military’s religious affiliation codes from 200 down to 31, a move critics call an erasure of the military’s religious diversity.

And he’s pushed to rewrite chaplain guidelines to center Christianity more explicitly.

Only evangelical preachers have been invited to lead his Pentagon services so far. Not a single representative of another faith tradition has presided.

“God’s Plan” and Armageddon

The rot goes deeper than one man’s prayers. The Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) — an organization whose membership is roughly 95 percent Christian — has received more than 200 complaints from service members across every branch, spanning more than 50 military installations. The complaints describe commanders framing the Iran war in explicitly biblical terms.

One non-commissioned officer reported that their commander opened a combat readiness briefing by telling troops this was “all part of God’s divine plan,” citing the Book of Revelation and claiming that Trump had been “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.”

The commander, the NCO wrote, “had a big grin on his face when he said all of this.”

The complaint came from a group of 15 troops — at least 11 of them Christians. That detail matters. This isn’t a secular objection to religion in military life. This is religious service members saying their faith is being weaponized to justify a war they didn’t sign up for.

“What Hegseth has done has been to rip asunder the very essence of our U.S. military,” said Mikey Weinstein, MRFF’s founder and a former Air Force officer. Congressional Democrats have since demanded a Defense Department Inspector General investigation into the complaints.

The Strategic Stupidity of a Holy War

Set aside the constitutional violations for a moment — and they are real. The military swears an oath to defend a secular Constitution, not a scripture. Hegseth’s Pentagon prayer services are already the subject of a lawsuit from Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which alleges that taxpayer resources are being used to impose a preferred religion on federal workers.

But there’s a practical problem too: framing this war as a Christian crusade is a gift to the Iranian regime.

Iran’s leaders have spent decades claiming to defend the Muslim world from “the Great Satan.” Every time Hegseth prays for divine violence against Muslim enemies from inside the Pentagon, he hands them exactly the propaganda they need.

With U.S. military bases and embassies already under pressure across the Middle East, and allies like Qatar and Oman openly questioning America’s reliability, Hegseth is helping splinter an already fragile coalition.

And it’s alienating the roughly 30 percent of American troops who aren’t Christian — including Muslim and Jewish service members who are being asked to fight and die in a war their own Defense Secretary frames as a crusade for someone else’s god.

A War Without an Exit Ramp

This religious framing doesn’t just create diplomatic problems. It makes the war harder to end.

If Hegseth genuinely believes he’s fighting a cosmic battle between good and evil — and every public statement suggests he does — then negotiation becomes impossible. You don’t make peace treaties with forces you’ve described as deserving “eternal damnation.” You don’t compromise with an enemy your commander in chief has been “anointed by Jesus” to destroy.

When the war’s architects see the conflict in these absolutist spiritual terms, every off-ramp disappears. Every civilian casualty becomes acceptable collateral in a divine mandate. The bombing of the elementary school in Minab that killed at least 175 people — mostly children — becomes just another line in a prayer for righteous violence.

The Pope understands what Hegseth apparently cannot: wrapping mass killing in scripture doesn’t sanctify it. It only makes it harder to stop.

What’s Really Happening Here

Pete Hegseth isn’t just a bad Defense Secretary — though he is that, too. He is a man who wrote a book calling for a modern crusade, covered his body in crusader symbols, and then got handed the world’s most powerful military during a war against a Muslim country.

He is doing exactly what he told us he would do.

And unless something changes — unless Congress acts, unless the courts intervene, unless the political cost becomes too high — American troops will keep being told they’re fighting God’s war while their leaders pray for violence without mercy.

That’s not patriotism. That’s not faith. That’s fanaticism wearing a flag pin.