Hegseth Brings Christian Nationalist to Pentagon to Pray for Christian Revival
Doug Wilson's sermon cast the military as the unlikely spark for a Christian national reformation. Not everyone in the building was comfortable with that.
Doug Wilson arrived at the Pentagon on Tuesday with a message for the world’s most powerful military: America is God’s chosen nation, and the men and women in uniform may be the unlikely instruments of its Christian reformation.
Wilson, the controversial Idaho pastor who leads Christ Church and has called for reshaping the United States into a nation governed by Biblical law, delivered a sermon at the Defense Department’s monthly worship service in the Pentagon’s main auditorium, an event organized by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Hegseth didn’t hear a word of it.
The defense secretary arrived late, held up, he said, by meetings at the White House. But he rushed to the stage when Wilson finished, embraced the pastor, and thanked him for his “mentorship.”
Hegseth said he’d catch the sermon on tape. He’d missed hearing Wilson cast his Pentagon audience as soldiers in a spiritual battle, invoking David and Goliath, Gideon’s 300, and decorated Marine legend “Chesty” Puller to make his point.
Wilson opened with a prayer asking God to restore “a great and glorious heritage” that America has “sinned away.” He invoked the Scottish reformer John Knox, the evangelist George Whitefield, whose preaching sparked the Great Awakening, the 18th-century religious revival that swept Britain and the American colonies, and a 19th-century missionary movement that began under a haystack during a rainstorm to make his point: God has a history of igniting religious transformations from the most unlikely places.
“What we are praying for, what we are working for, what we are looking for, what we are longing for,” Wilson told the audience, “is a black swan reformation—a black swan revival. The sort of thing that historians a hundred years from now will look back on and say, yeah, that had to happen, but nobody saw it coming.”
Then Wilson looked at his audience inside the Pentagon and suggested that the US military could be the next link in the chain of Christian revival: “Take a prayer meeting at the Pentagon, for a possible example.”
Who Is Doug Wilson?
Wilson is no ordinary pastor. He leads Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, a congregation that has transformed the small college town into a hub of Christian nationalist organizing. He opened a Washington, DC, branch last summer, with Hegseth and his family attending the inaugural service.
In August, I wrote how Hegseth used his social media platform to promote Wilson’s views to his 1.6 million followers. The defense secretary reshared a CNN segment where Wilson reiterated his call for making consensual same-sex relations a crime and defended his past writings describing “genuine affection” between masters and slaves that " has never existed in any nation before the War or since.” Wilson’s vision includes stripping women of the right to vote. “Women are the kind of people that people come out of,” Wilson says in the CNN video.
Hegseth told the audience on Tuesday that he met Wilson while working on his 2022 book, Battle for the American Mind, about K-12 education.
Hegseth’s co-author was David Goodwin, president of the Association of Classical Christian Schools, an organization Wilson founded. Goodwin consulted Wilson about whether to work with the then-Fox News host.
Wilson, Hegseth said, asked a single question: “Is he redeemed? Does he believe in Jesus Christ as his Savior?”
Satisfied with the answer, Wilson approved the partnership.
“In many ways, it’s that simple,” Hegseth told the Pentagon audience.
By hosting Wilson at the Pentagon and by lending his office’s weight to monthly Christian worship services, America’s defense secretary is doing something without modern precedent: using the machinery of the world’s most powerful military to advance a movement that seeks to remake the United States as a Christian nation.
“It’s Not Optional”
The Pentagon has long offered religious services to service members through its chaplain corps, a constitutionally grounded program designed to accommodate the diverse faiths of military personnel. What happened on Tuesday was different.
This was a worship service organized and championed by the Secretary of Defense himself, the latest in a series of monthly Christian prayer services that have drawn growing complaints from service members and defense contractors. The invitation for Tuesday’s service featured a crucifix above the words “SECWAR’S PRAYER SERVICE” on a dark background, according to military.com.
The Pentagon maintains the services are voluntary. The invitation for Tuesday’s service said the service was optional. ”No one at the Pentagon tracks who does and does not attend,” spokesperson Kingsley Wilson said in January. But current and former service members say the distinction between voluntary and mandatory collapses in the military.
One defense contractor told Military.com that the services put non-Christian recipients in an impossible position: even without explicit punishment, Christians who attend get face time with senior leaders that non-Christians don’t. “Jews, Muslims and other non-Christians are not provided this opportunity,” the contractor said.
Mikey Weinstein, a former Air Force JAG, founded the Military Religious Freedom Foundation two decades ago and has since represented more than 100,000 service members, roughly 95 percent of them Christians. (About 70 percent of the Armed Forces identify as Christian, according to a 2019 Congressional Research Service report.) Weinstein has spent those two decades fighting what he calls the encroachment of Christian nationalism into the military, and he says complaints have been mounting.
After the invitation for Tuesday’s service circulated, his organization received more than 50 emails and phone calls in a single day from concerned contractors and service members, the fastest influx of complaints in the organization’s history, he said.
Weinstein said one person told him their section chief—a Senior Executive Service-level civilian—framed the invitation this way: “Look, the boss wants it. You don’t have to be a Christian. Why don’t you give it a try?”
Where Are We Headed?
The military chain of command, Weinstein notes, is not a civilian workplace. “Your military superior is not your shift supervisor at Starbucks,” he told The After-Action Report. “They have complete and total control over you.” When a commanding officer signals that attendance is welcome, subordinates hear something different, particularly in what Weinstein calls a one-mistake military, where a single negative evaluation can end a career.
One service member told Military.com they missed out on a service school nomination after not attending a prayer service. Another, a 23-year Air Force veteran now working as a government contractor, put it bluntly: “Blatantly unqualified lickspittles are put in positions of authority based on loyalty to the would-be king and use those positions to strong-arm subordinates into taking part in quasi-religious activities with the implied message that failure to comply will cost careers.”
The military has been a tremendous force for integration in society—desegregating the Armed Forces preceded the broader desegregation of American society—but now those gears are being thrown into reverse. What Hegseth is constructing is a system that replaces loyalty to the Constitution, the foundational principle of the armed forces, with loyalty to Christ. If it continues, it will have consequences for unit cohesion, which depends on a shared mission, not shared faith. And do we really want to go down a road where the people who operate and maintain America’s nuclear arsenal and advise the president on the use of force have their judgment shaped by an ideology that sees American military power as an instrument of Christian national transformation?
Hegseth, meanwhile, had no such qualms. With his head bowed and a hand on Wilson’s shoulder, he closed the service with a prayer of his own, thanking God for “our great nation founded 250 years ago on truth” and asking for “the wisdom to see what is right and the courage to do it.”
“Here in this place where many different things were worshipped for a very long time,” he said, “we get a chance to worship Jesus Christ openly and in public.”
He was standing in the Pentagon.
Scary stuff.
It's sickening to read about events like this. Anyone in uniform, or a civilian supporting the military, who has different beliefs, runs the risk of becoming an outcast. The military should never be used for either partisan political purposes or religious goals. Military members and civilians who support the military, either by working for the government directly or a contractor, should not be coerced into participating or supporting these types of events.
As a former Air Force officer I realize that every service member joins for their own reasons, whether patriotism, family tradition, or just needing a job. People should never be put in the position of having to attend a religious service. The reality is that for a service member, especially an officer, if your commanding officer suggests or strongly recommends you do something, then it's pretty clear what has to happen. Saying "no" comes with consequences.