Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth gives a State of the Force address at Marine Corps Base Quantico, Wednesday, Sept. 30, 2026 in Quantico, Va. Alex Wong/Pool Photo via AP
On Wednesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the creation of a new entity within the Pentagon: the Office of Religious Affairs. The office, Hegseth promised the assembled troops in Quantico, Virginia, would “report straight to the top. No staff filters, no bureaucratic dilution, a direct line to the secretary.” Chaplains would “finally have an advocate at the highest levels.” What’s more, “policy and resources will serve the mission, not smother the mission.”
A hallmark of Hegseth’s tenure at the Defense Department has been his muscular Christian religiosity. Earlier this year, he spearheaded an initiative to bring prayer services to the Pentagon. Shortly after the start of the Iran War, during one such event in March, Hegseth prayed for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”
Hegseth’s own faith is relevant here: He is a member of a conservative denomination called the Communion of Reformed Evangelicals Churches (CREC) that explicitly advocates for Christians to exert their faith’s influence over the government. As I reported:
At a February Pentagon prayer service, the featured speaker was Doug Wilson, the Moscow, Idaho, pastor who founded CREC. Wilson, who has described his vision of “a network of nations bound together by a formal, public, civic acknowledgement of the lordship of Jesus Christ and the fundamental truth of the Apostles’ Creed,” has long argued in favor of Christian nationalism, and he has likened his fiefdom in Idaho—which includes a church, school, college, and publishing house—to a “working prototype” of what Christian nationalism could look like.
The new Office of Religious Affairs isn’t explicitly Christian; a memo (PDF) published yesterday specifies that “Nothing in this memorandum shall be construed to compel religious participation or to diminish the free exercise rights of any Service member, civilian employee, or family member of any faith or no faith.” Yet earlier this year, the Pentagon released a new list of 31 religions officially recognized by the US Department of Defense, drawn from the 200 that had previously been accepted. On the new list, 22 of the 31 groups were Christian. Atheists, pagans, and humanists, all on the original list, had vanished.
Details about what exactly the Office of Religious Affairs will do have not yet been released, but yesterday’s memo offers a few clues. In addition to moving chaplains directly under the control of the new office and overseeing the groups that decide who can become a chaplain, the office also will “sponsor and oversee research, technology, and analytical tools to support and assess spiritual fitness, spiritual readiness, and spiritual resilience.” It doesn’t define those terms, but Hegseth’s track record speaks volumes. As I reported a few months back:
In his 2024 book, The War on Warriors, Hegseth writes that the Geneva Conventions are unfair because the United States and Europe are the only ones that follow them. Instead, “America should fight by its own rules,” he declares. The nation’s soldiers should be “the most overwhelmingly lethal as they can be.”
Hegseth also bemoans a defense force infected, he writes, with the “fucking scary” disease of progressivism, which “will not stop until trans-lesbian Black females run everything!” He warns, “Sometime soon, a real conflict will break out, and red-blooded American men will have to save their elite candy asses.” In July, Hegseth announced an initiative to screen troops for low testosterone and offer hormone replacement therapy to those found deficient.
Hegseth has also long been preoccupied by what he sees as a “spiritual battle” between secular and Christian culture. Shortly before he became Secretary of War, Hegseth appeared on CrossPolitic, a podcast owned and hosted by Gabe Rench, whose brother, Aaron, is a co-owner of Doug Wilson’s Canon Press. In the episode, Hegseth accused liberals of using “patriotism to untether us from timeless truth, from the Bible” and praised classical Christian schools for providing “a comprehensive worldview that prepares them for the battle to come, because we’re in a spiritual battle, and otherwise we’d be sending our kids in as fodder.”
Among the funding priorities listed in the Defense Department memo about the new office are “faith-based homeschool support for military families,” faith-based suicide-reduction initiatives, and “contracted services from faith-based non-Federal entities.”
As I wrote, Hegseth’s own book echoes those themes:
Hegseth’s 2022 co-authored tome, Battle for the American Mind, is essentially a book-length extension of that metaphor. “Charging the ‘commanding heights’—the leftists’ educational Death Star—with Nerf guns will not suffice,” he writes. “We don’t want martyrs, we want victors.” Classical Christian education is our only hope to “give our kids and grandkids at least a fighting chance to save America and Christendom,” Hegseth concludes. He exhorts parents to “join the insurgency!” Children educated in this way, he believes, might stand a chance at defending their nation—because the wokes have failed miserably.
Notably, Wilson’s Canon Press publishes popular homeschool curricula. “Education is warfare,” the website says. “Canon curriculum is designed to help you raise faithful, dangerous Christian kids, one subject at a time.”
The new memo promises that within 90 days, the office will deliver “a comprehensive baseline report of all unfunded and underfunded religious affairs requirements.” In the meantime, Hegseth has lofty ambitions. “We’re placing spiritual health at the same level as physical health,” he said in his speech. “Our department is, you might say, putting on the full armor of God.”
Correction, October 2, 2026: A previous version of this story misstated the ownership of the podcast that Hegseth appeared on.
