Throughout a month-to-month prayer service on the Pentagon final week, the primary because the Iran struggle started, Protection Secretary Pete Hegseth recited a prayer asking God to present U.S. troopers the power to inflict “overwhelming violence of motion in opposition to those that deserve no mercy.” One doesn’t need to be a scholar of Christianity to appreciate {that a} prayer calling for such violence runs in opposition to many core tenets of the religion, together with peace, love and the concept that nobody is past mercy.
It additionally contradicts the teachings of historic spiritual leaders just like the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who preached a message of Christian nonviolence, and people of latest spiritual leaders like Pope Leo XIV, who in an obvious direct rebuke of Hegseth acknowledged in his Palm Sunday prayer service, “That is our God: Jesus, king of peace, who rejects struggle, whom nobody can use to justify struggle.”
However the perspective expressed by Hegseth’s prayer is in keeping with the broader embrace by President Donald Trump’s administration of gratuitous violence, underpinned by the folks realism that “would possibly at all times makes proper.” Additionally it is in keeping with the understanding of Christianity espoused by a number of the Evangelical pastors that Hegseth accepts as authorities, similar to Jared Longshore, who equates worship with warfare.
