** 4/3/26 - Hegseth’s Christian Militarism Is Dangerous for America ....
Buzz Sawyer
Hegseth’s Christian Militarism Is Dangerous for America
Paul Poast
During a monthly prayer service at the Pentagon last week, the first since the Iran war began, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recited a prayer asking God to give U.S. soldiers the ability to inflict “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.” One does not have to be a scholar of Christianity to realize that a prayer calling for such violence runs against many core tenets of the faith, including peace, love and the idea that no one is beyond mercy.
It also contradicts the teachings of historical religious leaders like the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who preached a message of Christian nonviolence, and those of contemporary religious leaders like Pope Leo XIV, who in an apparent direct rebuke of Hegseth stated in his Palm Sunday prayer service, “This is our God: Jesus, king of peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war.”
But the attitude expressed by Hegseth’s prayer is consistent with the broader embrace by President Donald Trump’s administration of gratuitous violence, underpinned by the folk realism that “might always makes right.” It is also consistent with the understanding of Christianity espoused by some of the Evangelical pastors that Hegseth accepts as authorities, such as Jared Longshore, who equates worship with warfare.
I’ve already written about Hegseth’s “Warrior Ethos” brand of extreme militarism and how it makes for a poor understanding of what a military can and should be used for. His recent remarks now raise the question of the role religion plays in U.S. foreign policy under Trump.
That religion, specifically Christianity, would inform U.S. foreign policy is not new. U.S. presidents from Woodrow Wilson to George W. Bush have drawn on biblical imagery and even Christian religious principles to formulate and articulate their foreign policies. Indeed, at the heart of American exceptionalism is the vision of the United States as commissioned by God to be a “city on a hill” and a “beacon to the world,” with a mission to metaphorically or even literally spread the Christian Gospel.
Nor is it new to see Christianity used to both justify and temper the violence of war. A primary example of the former was the Medieval-era Crusades, and a prominent example of the latter was the development of “just war theory,” whose strictures that fighting must have a just cause and be carried out in a just manner were an effort to reconcile war with the sixth of the Bible’s Ten Commandments: “Thou shall not kill.”
For Niebuhr, it was critically important to marry the application of military force with humility, and above all to avoid being convinced of the righteousness of one’s cause.
But the view espoused by Hegseth replaces just war theory’s requirement to conduct war in a tempered and proportionate manner with the license to use “any and all means necessary,” while taking apparent glee in doing so. Hegseth’s Christian militarism holds that if the enemy is “evil,” then notions of proportionality, deliberateness and restraint are for the meek and foolish—not the strong and divinely ordained.
Given that the Trump administration has portrayed its foreign policy as realist, it would be tempting to consider its combination with Christian theology as a form of Christian realism. Tempting and wrong, however, as the longstanding Christian realist tradition contrasts sharply with the Christian militarism championed by Hegseth.
Christian realism was developed in the mid-20th century by the American theologian and international relations theorist Reinhold Niebuhr. A contemporary and interlocutor of the father of IR realism, Hans Morgenthau, Niebuhr was also credited by another IR luminary, E.H. Carr, as an inspiration for his seminal realist text, “The Twenty Years’ Crisis.” Niebuhr published a series of essays in 1940 titled “Christianity and Power Politics,” in which he argued that pacifism leading to retreat from the world was not just misguided, but immoral. In laying out the moral imperative for the United States to take a stand against Nazi Germany, he offered what was in many ways the theologically grounded complement to Henry Luce’s “The American Century” essay, published in Life Magazine in February 1941.
But for Niebuhr, it was critically important to marry the application of military force with humility, and above all to avoid being prideful and convinced of the righteousness of one’s cause, whether in the use of force or the pursuit of cooperation. He argued that it is folly for humans to think that we can solve the problems of the world, or that the problems of the world give us license to use “any and all means necessary.” In 1966, with America engulfed in the Vietnam War, Niebuhr gave an interview that most clearly expresses this view. In it, he called the idea that “the kingdom of God had been established in America” dangerous and described the American leaders who had led the country into war in Southeast Asia “the end products of this combination of sectarian and secular utopianism.”
Like Morgenthau and other realists, Niebuhr rejected idealist thinking that convinces people their cause is right and even righteous. But it is Morgenthau who might have captured the need for humility in realist thought best in his own meditation on the role of evil and sin in world politics, when he wrote that in “trying to render to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s, we will at best strike a precarious balance which will ever waver between both, never completely satisfying either.”
Of course, the phenomenon of religious conviction leading to acts of violence is not the exclusive province of Christianity. It also motivates extremist perversions of other religious traditions, such as the jihadist mentality that justifies suicide bombings targeting civilians, the extremist Zionism driving the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the West Bank and the Hindu nationalism that has fueled violence against Muslims in India. But the danger of Christian militarism in world politics today is that it is embraced by key decision-makers of the state that possesses the world’s most powerful military.
Overall, this discussion brings to mind a perhaps apocryphal remark attributed to Abraham Lincoln at the height of the Civil War, in response to the claim that God was on the side of the Union. “My concern is not whether God is on our side,” Lincoln replied. “My greatest concern is to be on God’s side.” Whether Lincoln actually said those words or words to that effect, the quote has had a lasting impact, as well it should.
Niebuhr knew that power unmatched by humility can lead to overreach. That Hegseth and others in the Trump administration do not is a moral failure that could end up costing the United States dearly.
Paul Poast is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago and a nonresident fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.