Donald trump has nominated Army Major Pete Hegseth to be the next Secretary of Defense. The Princeton-educated Fox News TV personality and former soldier served in Iraq and Afghanistan before resigning his commission in protest over the army’s supposed unfair treatment of soldiers with politically conservative views. Hegseth is interesting because he is the first potential cabinet secretary in almost a century to wed unambiguously Protestant Christianity with his understanding of warmaking. Hegseth attends a conservative Reformed church and sees Theodore Roosevelt, one unafraid to address religion and politics in the same breath, as the model for American greatness. In other words, though seemingly unusual in 2025, Hegseth’s ideas aren’t new. Since the seventeenth century, Americans have seen themselves as fighting for the synthesis of God and country, but in the latter half of the twentieth century little effort has been made to address political theology to soldiers, or to explore the role militaries play in the outworking of political theology.
Nonetheless popular works by military men—Hegseth being one among many—make it clear that American soldiers from the Revolutionary War to our own time undeniably see their service in armies as God-ordained. Some even conceive of military causes as divinely sanctioned. Even politicos uninterested in churchly piety retained some conception of God determining the political outcomes of battlefield victories and defeats. When Winston Churchill met with Franklin Roosevelt in the summer of 1941 to pressure the latter to support British war aims, he ordered HMS Prince of Wales’ band to play “Onward Christian Soldiers.”
We sang “Onward, Christian Soldiers” indeed, and I felt that this was no vain presumption, but that we had the right to feel that we were serving a cause for the sake of which a trumpet has sounded from on high. When I looked upon that densely packed congregation of fighting men of the same language, of the same faith, of the same fundamental laws, of the same ideals … it swept across me that here was the only hope, but also the sure hope, of saving the world from measureless degradation.
Franklin Roosevelt shared Churchill’s reliance on the marriage between Christianity and the military to support democracy. As President Roosevelt reminded his countrymen that Christianity imposed on politicians, soldiers, and citizens “a sacred obligation to see to it that out of this war we and our children will gain something better than mere survival.”1
The relationship of warfare to Christian political thought, and in particular Protestant political thought, is at best understood via popular works like Hegseth’s or by scholars pushing back against Christian pacificism. Nicholas Wolterstorff’s The Mighty and the Almighty: An Essay in Political Theology, which challenged John Howard Yoder’s Christian pacifism, is a good example of the latter. Rebeccah Heinrichs, Marc LiVecche and Eric Patterson are all examples of conservative Protestants whose work offers an influential and necessary moral framing useful to the Protestant understanding of warmaking. LiVecche, in a recent Providence piece, rightly notes that “our warfighters will not get such theological or moral philosophical reflection in boot camp, they need to get it now. Before the first shots are fired.” American Christians “cannot adequately be concerned for our veterans when they return home from conflict if we have not properly prepared them to go into it.” Undeniably, theological foundations of morality are necessary for training morally upright soldiery. The challenge of the 21st century for Christian military historians is to ask what, if any, historical models can serve as examples of American Christian soldiery to a population that increasingly doesn’t believe in the moral worth of the United States, militaries, or Christianity.2
Pete Hegseth’s answer to this question is simple. Americans need to return to their Judeo-Christian roots. He is not proposing wedding the church and the military. But, Hegseth does see a particular kind of Greco-Roman-Christian civilization as necessary for sustaining American liberties and liberalism. Historically, wrote Hegseth, “human civilization was rooted in raw power and superstition. Life, as Thomas Hobbes wrote, was brutish and short. To our eyes, their customs were weird and pagan. People were told what to believe, and they did. Each tribe or nation had a god. And broader people-groups shared multiple gods.” Most humans lived under despots, “indentured to authoritarian leaders.” But the Greco-Roman-Christian civilization “changed all that. Today we take this for granted. And, because we take it for granted, we are about to lose civilization as we know it.”
The question of what civilization American policymakers, and warmakers, are trying to preserve is essential. Hegseth clearly believes Christian civilization is in danger of being lost, but in our current social and political climate, classically liberal civilization is perhaps in greater danger of disappearing. The limits of liberal ideology have been litigated routinely in the era of Trump, but the answers to the political questions currently vexing us do not necessarily entail the resurrection of America as a Christian nation, or the restoration of an explicitly Christian soldiery. Instead, saving the West will look more like making Germany act assertively and confidently as a Germany willing to defend itself rather than a traditionalist Christian Germany as such.
The idea of liberalism we know in the West today was undoubtedly formed by (Protestant) Christianity; although European nations have largely abandoned the religious heritage responsible for their classically liberal governments, they must still be persuaded that liberalism is worth defending. Michael Lucchese in Providence Magazine recently argued that “American leaders should emphasize to their counterparts in other alliance countries that boosting defense spending is in everyone’s best interest. Rearmament might offend the ideological sensibilities of European liberals, American Wilsonians, and neo-isolationists, but restoring deterrence must take priority.” The United States’ enemies, noted Lucchese, “will not wait politely for us to prepare for conflict – conflict is already here.”
If Hegseth’s Greco-Roman-Christian soldiers are meant to create a traditionalist Christian clique to overthrow liberal government, his effort will likely be ineffective and unpopular. But if Hegseth can lead Western militaries and politicos towards defending a truly liberal West, formed by Christianity but enacting broad religious toleration among other foundational civil liberties, he’ll be a truly transformative leader credited with reorienting and restoring Western warmaking to its ultimate mission of defending human liberty.
- Ace Collins, Stories Behind the Hymns That Inspire America (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2003) 153–154; James D. Bratt and John F. Woolveton, A Christian and a Democrat: A Religious Biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2019). ↩︎
- Nicholas Wolterstorff, The Mighty and the Almighty: An Essay in Political Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 90, 103. ↩︎
