Pete Hegseth and Trump’s labor secretary sued for prayer services, religious discrimination

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, holding his first monthly Christian worship service at the Pentagon since the start of the Iran war, prayed that American bullets would hit the guns on Wednesday.

“All gatherings should find a mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation,” Hegseth said during the service that was broadcast live.

He also called for US workers to be given “wisdom in every decision, perseverance in the coming trial, unbreakable solidarity, and extreme violence against those who do not deserve mercy.”

Hegseth often invokes his evangelical faith as the head of the armed forces, portraying a Christian nation trying to defeat its enemies through military might. Wednesday’s service included a prayer, which he said was first offered by a military chaplain before the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, and a reading from the Bible.

“I chased away my enemies and found them, I didn’t go back until they were finished,” he said, quoting Ndumiso.

Services continued even after a lawsuit was filed on Monday about such gatherings by the United States of America for Separation of Church and State. The lobbying group filed a similar lawsuit against the Department of Labor, where Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer also hosts monthly prayer gatherings facilitated by Hegseth.

The non-profit group, which has existed since 1948, said the two officials “abused the power of their public positions and the resources paid for by taxpayers to impose their preferred religion on public employees.”

“Even if these prayer services are offered voluntarily, there is pressure on government employees to attend to appease their superiors – especially since these services are taking place during the Trump administration’s campaign to punish anyone who does not follow the Christian Nationalist agenda,” said the group’s CEO, Rachel Laser, in a statement.

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

Recognizing several religions

During the escalation of the Iran war and other global conflicts, Hegseth’s Christian rhetoric has come under renewed scrutiny, including his defense of the Crusades, the brutal medieval wars that pitted Christians against Muslims.

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

Ronit Stahl, author of Instilling Faith: How Military Chaplaincy Shaped Religion and State in Modern Americasays that referring to God in broad language is not unusual in this context.

“But the shift to a direct understanding of Jesus Christ and therefore Christianity and Hegseth, a kind of Protestant Christianity, is new, especially from the secretary of defense,” said Stahl, a historian at the University of California at Berkeley.

“In a nation that does not have a religion according to the Constitution, what does it mean to have a leader who is not just a religion or a religion in a mixed sense, but a believer in a certain sense?”

But Hegseth made some religious moves this week, announcing on Tuesday two changes in what he described in a statement as “making the Chaplain Corps great again.”

Hegseth said the military is limiting the number of religious codes employees wear, if any. Soldiers will now be able to identify 31 codes that have been renamed “religious organization codes,” down from more than 200, including many smaller Protestant denominations and identifying Wiccans, atheists and agnostics. The Department of Defense has not released an updated list of those codes.

He also announced that pastors will wear religious symbols instead of wearing ranks on their uniforms. A pastor is “first and foremost, a pastor, and an officer second,” Hegseth said in a video announcing the new policy.

Military chaplains often provide worship services within the Department of Defense, which under Hegseth was unofficially renamed the Department of Defense. As ordained ministers and commissioned officers, they serve according to their particular tradition, but provide spiritual care to troops of any faith or no faith.

In recent years, the US military has relied heavily on chaplains to help deal with the growing number of mentally distressed soldiers.

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

About 70 percent of the U.S. military identified as Christian, according to a 2019 congressional report. About a quarter are listed as “other/unknown/unknown,” with smaller percentages of atheists/dissenters, Jews, Muslims and followers of Eastern religions.

Controversial religious network

Hegseth, who was raised Baptist, said he experienced a change in his faith in 2018 and immediately began attending evangelical churches.

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

“America was profoundly Christian and profoundly Protestant at its founding,” Wilson said at a service last year near Washington, attended by Republican politicians and officials. And while he acknowledged that many “credentialed” historians dispute this view, Wilson noted that “it should tell you something about our system of verification.”

Wilson, who is based in Idaho, has since the 1970s preached a strict version of Reformed theology – based on the tradition of 16th-century Protestant reformer John Calvin – which places great emphasis on an all-powerful God who has sovereignty over all society.

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

Regarding slavery, about which he has written extensively, Wilson once told the Associated Press that “there was terrible mistreatment on the other side, and then there were other stories straight out of Disney. Song of the South,” referring to the 1946 film that hasn’t been released in decades because it paints a searing picture of field life with subtle racist undertones.

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