Our Faith?

The USDA employee quoted in Wired’s April 2026 report says the email “made them think AI had written it.” [2] The email came on Easter Sunday from Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins to the whole agency — roughly 100,000 people. Its subject line was “He has risen!” Its body called the story of Jesus Christ “the greatest story ever told, the foundation of our faith, and the abiding hope of all mankind.” [2] Our faith?

The sentence that made me want to understand what was happening came next: “This has never happened before. I have never gotten a message like this from anyone.” [2] A worker who has spent years inside a federal agency under multiple administrations of both parties is telling a reporter, on condition of anonymity because they fear retaliation, that the government has never spoken to them this way.

The employee is not alone. At the Small Business Administration, staff were invited to a “newly launched Faith and Fellowship Prayer Service” and instructed not to share the link to the video with anyone outside the agency. [2] Consider this: A government meeting whose content is marked as not for public consumption is internal government business. Internal government business that consists of Christian worship is an establishment of religion.

The pattern repeats across agencies. At Health and Human Services, Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sent staff home early on Good Friday “in observance.” An HHS employee described the administration as “not so much proudly Christian as it is belligerently so.” [2] At the Department of Labor, an agency “faith center” hosts monthly worship services. A DOL employee called it “very explicitly Christian, and even within the realm of Christianity, a very narrow representation of that.” [2] Alveda King, a senior USDA adviser on faith, told Department of Labor employees at one of these services: “We have different denominations, different faiths, and some have no faith — and those are the ones I would be more concerned about.” [2]

One number from the Wired piece that I found incredible. In 2024, 71.9 percent of federal workers said they believed they could report wrongdoing without fear of retaliation. In 2025, the figure was 22.5 percent. [2] While the collapse of confidence in whistleblowing by roughly 50 points over a year has nothing to do with religion it provides the context in which every one of these workers was speaking on condition of anonymity. A federal workplace in which your superiors lead you in prayer and you are afraid to say you are uncomfortable is a workplace in which your boss has power over your career and is now also telling you what to pray — and you are afraid to say you would rather not.

So I went looking for how this all fits together.

The scaffolding

Three moves, all in 2025.

On February 7, seventeen days into Trump’s second term, an executive order established the White House Faith Office, led by the televangelist Paula White-Cain. [19] The White House’s own fact sheet explains that the office will “coordinate with agencies on religious liberty training” and work with the Attorney General “to identify failures to enforce constitutional and Federal statutory protections for religious liberty.” [19] The same fact sheet mentions a task force to eradicate “anti-Christian bias.” The framing is defensive. The only direction of threat contemplated is against Christians, “persecuted by the weaponized Biden Administration.” [19] Interestingly, the official text does not acknowledge the possibility that a majority faith, wielded by the state, can itself endanger religious liberty.

In July, the Office of Personnel Management issued a memo permitting federal employees to try “to persuade others of the correctness of their own religious views” so long as it does not rise to the level of harassment, and to “encourage” colleagues to participate in religious expressions of faith, such as prayer. [2] I wonder how, in an environment of 22.5 percent whistleblower confidence, the distinction between persuasion and harassment is supposed to work.

In May, Trump created the Religious Liberty Commission, with Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick as chair. [20] The thirteen-member voting commission consists of twelve Christian members and one Jewish member — Rabbi Meir Soloveichik of Congregation Shearith Israel, the oldest Jewish congregation in the United States. [21] A separately named advisory board adds further Christian and Jewish clergy and legal scholars in an advisory capacity. [22] At its final hearing on April 13, 2026, held at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, Patrick declared: “The separation of church and state is the biggest lie that’s been told in America since our founding.” [7, 8] The constitutional law scholar Douglas Laycock of the University of Texas noted that “It is literally true that the words ‘separation of church and state’ do not appear in the Constitution, but the idea clearly appears in the Constitution.” [8] Patrick is using a narrow textual claim to dispute a broad structural principle. But the larger point is simpler: the chair of the federal commission created to adjudicate religious liberty has publicly declared the foundational principle of American religious liberty a lie. Whatever you think about the legal nuances, you cannot expect that body to protect a principle whose existence its chair denies.

The theology behind the man in the Pentagon

Executive orders and OPM memos explain how religion entered the federal workplace, but not why it took the particular shape it did — the sermons, the prayers for vengeance, the Crusader tattoos on the Secretary of Defense. For that, I had to look at Hegseth, and what I found was not what I expected.

I had thought of him as a Fox News figure implausibly handed the Pentagon. That framing misses what is actually happening because it fails to identify Hegseth as an agent of a particular, specific theology.

In 2018, Hegseth describes undergoing a religious turn. On the advice of the “classical Christian education” advocate David Goodwin, he moved his family to Nashville. He joined Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowship — a congregation of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, led by a pastor named Brooks Potteiger. [1] That move is the key fact of his public life.

The CREC is a small denomination, about 150 churches worldwide, founded by Douglas Wilson in Moscow, Idaho. Wilson has spent his adult life attempting, in his own words, to establish a “theocracy” in his college town. [1] Julie Ingersoll, the University of North Florida religious studies scholar who has studied this community for years, described it to the Guardian: “They don’t embrace democracy particularly. They don’t believe in social equality among people. They think that God created the world and that some people are destined to have authority and to rule over other people, and other people are destined to be followers. When we talk about legitimate government having its authority coming from the consent of the governed, they don’t believe that at all.” [1]

Wilson’s views are well documented, in large part because he has written them down. He is opposed to women’s right to vote, and not opposed to the death penalty for homosexuality. He advocates for ‘biblical patriarchy’ and for what he calls ‘the theology of fist fighting.’ He describes himself as a Christian nationalist, a ‘paleo-Confederate,’ and has said he wants ‘to take over the world for Christ.’ In 1996, he co-authored a book that characterized antebellum American slavery as “a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence” and abolitionists as “driven by a zealous hatred of the Word of God.” [1]

The scholars who study this community most closely make the same point: That what Hegseth and Wilson represent is not mainstream Reformed Christianity. [1, 6]. Most Reformed churches, the ones that have been around for centuries, teach something closer to humility before God — you do not know if you are among the saved, so you examine your conscience and do your work honestly. The CREC took that tradition’s architecture and bolted a political program onto it: Christianize the Earth through the instruments of the state, and if military power is available, use it. The distinction matters because the problem is a specific network of about 150 churches whose theology most Christians, including most Reformed Christians, would not recognize as their own.

Samuel Perry, writing in the Seventh-Day Adventist publication Liberty Magazine, summarizes the CREC’s view: the denomination holds that the United States is a Christian nation, and “teaches that secularism in almost any form, along with commonly held notions of the First Amendment’s establishment clause, are anathematic ideologies.” [6] Anathematic. For the CREC, the constitutional separation of church and state is a doctrine to be rejected as heresy.

Pete Hegseth, as of this writing, is the Secretary of Defense. He answers spiritually to a church leader who has called for the crucifixion of a Democratic Senate candidate. [1, 4] His personal pastor, Brooks Potteiger, has been relocated to Washington to plant a new CREC church for him. Douglas Wilson has preached in the Pentagon at his invitation. [1]

The CREC is not a powerful denomination. It has no lobbying operation, no megachurch network, no think tank. Its influence over the Department of Defense runs through a single convert who was handed the job. No institutional safeguard prevented a 150-church fringe theology from reaching the Pentagon podium. The entire connection is exactly one appointment wide.

The current administration regularly criticizes European democracies, Germany in particular, for limiting speech. Well, Germany went through what unchecked power, married to ideology, can do and built guardrails so it would not happen again. The United States did not build those guardrails. In America, everything is protected speech, no matter how much damage it causes. There is no constitutional mechanism that prevents a Secretary of Defense from leading his staff in prayers for vengeance, no institutional filter between a fringe denomination and the command structure of the world’s most powerful military.

The system assumed that norms would hold. They are not holding.

So, what has he done so far?

Since Hegseth’s confirmation, the Pentagon has hosted monthly Christian worship services. Before the Iran war, Brooks Potteiger preached from Matthew 10 on God’s sovereignty over falling sparrows and, by extension, “Tomahawk and Minuteman missiles.” [1] Franklin Graham told uniformed service members that “God is also a god of war.” [1] On Good Friday, the Pentagon hosted a prayer service restricted to Protestants. [4] Rabbi Laurence Bazer, a retired Army colonel and chaplain, observed that the military’s strength lies in the diversity of faiths among its service members, and that this diversity is “worth protecting.” [1]

Then the war began. In mid-March 2026, the US military entered its war with Iran. Hegseth cited Psalm 144, “Blessed be the Lord, my rock, who trains my hands for war,” in describing the campaign. [1, 3] He called Iranians “barbaric savages” and promised “no quarter.” [1] The language matters theologically, not just rhetorically. The Western Christian tradition — Augustine, Aquinas, the entire Just War framework that has governed Christian thinking about warfare for sixteen centuries — requires proportionality, discrimination between combatants and non-combatants, and the use of force only as a last resort for the common good, never for vengeance. “No quarter” and “barbaric savages” are not the language of Just War. They are the language of holy war, a category the mainstream tradition explicitly repudiates. The CREC does not need the Just War framework because it derives its authority directly from God’s commands in scripture rather than from moral reasoning about proportionality. That is the theology that was operative when the missiles were launched. On February 28, a Tomahawk missile hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, Iran. According to a preliminary US military investigation, the US was responsible. More than 175 people were killed, most of them children. [1] Neither Trump nor Hegseth has taken responsibility or expressed remorse.

On April 15, Hegseth read a prayer at a Pentagon worship service titled “CSAR 2517” — Combat Search And Rescue, Ezekiel 25:17. The prayer is almost word-for-word the monologue Samuel L. Jackson’s character recites in Pulp Fiction before executing an unarmed man, adapted with a US military callsign substituted for the name of God. “And you will know my call sign is Sandy 1 when I lay my vengeance upon thee.” [4] He had been talking about blockades with Admiral Cooper fifteen minutes earlier. He said so himself. [4]

When the administration’s defenders insist that Hegseth’s faith is a private matter, they are asking us to believe something the man himself does not believe: that what happens on Sunday and what happens on Monday can be separated. He has said plainly that they cannot. “May what we talk about, how we worship today, inform the remainder of our day and the remainder of our week and who we are and how we conduct ourselves, no matter what we’re doing.” [4]

The alliance that shouldn’t hold

The administration’s religious program has at least three factions, each wanting different things. Hegseth’s camp believes Christians are supposed to take over the institutions of the Earth, including government, military, and education, and build a Christian civilization now, before Christ returns. Paula White-Cain’s and Mike Huckabee’s camps believe the world is heading toward an apocalyptic ending that Christians should accelerate, mostly by supporting Israel, because Christ has to come back first to set things right. Kevin Roberts’s camp, rooted in Catholic tradition, wants the church and the state formally integrated, with government guided by church teaching. These are three incompatible visions of a future that hopefully never comes to be.

Under almost any other conditions in American history, these three camps would be fighting each other, not co-governing. Hegseth’s denomination regards the prosperity gospel as a form of idolatry. The Catholics regard Protestantism itself as a break from the true church. White-Cain’s camp regards Hegseth’s project of Christianizing the Earth before Christ’s return as theologically impossible — in their reading, only Christ himself can do that. These are major disagreements that have split churches, ignited wars, and redrawn the map of Europe over five centuries.

What holds the alliance together is a shared set of enemies: pluralism, “secular humanism,” reproductive rights, public schools, LGBTQ legal equality, and the administrative state as it operated before 2025. This is a coalition whose members hate the same things more than they agree on anything positive. Patrick’s Religious Liberty Commission is the clearest illustration. Twelve Christian members and one Jewish member on the voting commission [21], drawn from camps whose theologies contradict each other at the root, and the commission does not address those contradictions. It does not need to. Its work is organized entirely around the shared enemy list, not around any positive theological program. As long as the question remains “who are we against?” rather than “what are we building?”, the seams hold.

That kind of coalition is historically unstable. It tends to tighten under perceived external threat and to crack only when one faction wins enough power for the question “what kind of Christian are you?” to become more urgent than the question “are you with us or against us?” That eventual cracking is a reason for patience, not complacency. It is absolutely not a reason for short-run complacency, because in the meantime, the alliance is functioning, governing, and prosecuting a foreign war as if it spoke with one theological voice.

Julie Ingersoll’s observation stays with me: “Leaders of Christian nationalism are operating on timelines in the hundreds of years.” [1] The campaign to eliminate the Department of Education began in 1979. The campaign to overturn Roe v. Wade took fifty years. The movement is patient, it has institutional depth, and it has now achieved what its earlier generations only imagined: direct authority over the federal executive, the Speaker’s office [18], the Pentagon, the commission convened to interpret the First Amendment [20], a Supreme Court majority, and vast stretches of the federal bench.

Who’s pushing back

If this were only a story about consolidating power, it would be a shorter, grimmer essay. But the reading turned up something I had not expected: the opposition is not coming primarily from where the administration says it is.

The administration and its allies are working to frame critics of Christian nationalism as “anti-God” (Patrick), “secular humanists” (Hegseth), bearers of “anti-Christian bias” (the White House task force’s founding premise). The frame is useful to them because it converts a constitutional argument into a culture-war one. And it is false.

On Palm Sunday, Pope Leo XIV preached what appeared to be a direct rebuke of Hegseth’s theology. Days later in Bamenda, Cameroon, he warned against “those who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic and political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth.” [5] In Bamenda, he sat with the Supreme Traditional Chief of Mankon, the Emeritus Moderator of the Presbyterian Church, and the Imam of the Central Mosque of Buea. His sermon closed with a quote from the imam: “Let us thank God that this crisis has not degenerated into a religious war, and that we are still trying to love one another.” [5]

Archbishop Reinhard Marx of Munich, preaching Easter Sunday, called Hegseth’s prayers “shameless blasphemy” and drew what I think is the most important parallel in this story: he equated Hegseth’s theology to the “holy war” rhetoric of Kirill, the Russian Orthodox patriarch who has spent three years blessing the invasion of Ukraine as a sacred struggle. [12, 13] A German Catholic prelate put the Secretary of Defense and the Patriarch of Moscow in the same sentence, two men who use God to bless their wars.

Brian Kaylor, a Baptist minister and editor of Word&Way, called Hegseth’s National Prayer Breakfast promise of eternal life to warriors “not just Crusader theology but something that would be considered heretical in most of Christianity today.” [4] John E. Jones III, a federal judge appointed by George W. Bush, told The Conversation that Hegseth’s Pentagon services “sure look like” violations of the First Amendment’s ban on government-established religion. [3]

Then there is James Talarico, a Texas state representative, former middle-school teacher, a Presbyterian studying for the ministry, and the 2026 Democratic nominee for the US Senate from Texas. Talarico has spent his brief political career making the argument against Christian nationalism from inside Christian speech — quoting Jesus’s words in Matthew 25, that how you treat the hungry, the sick, and the imprisoned is how you treat God, on the Texas House floor, arguing against the Ten Commandments-in-classrooms bill on explicitly theological grounds. When Brooks Potteiger, Hegseth’s personal pastor, went on a podcast and called for Talarico to be “crucified with Christ,” [1, 4] that was not a randomly chosen target. Potteiger did not name Chuck Schumer. He named Talarico because Talarico contests the CREC on the territory it most needs to control, arguing from the Bible in the political arena. A young Christian Democrat who knows his Bible and argues for pluralism from it closes the door on the “secular leftism” retort that has done most of the work of immunizing Christian nationalism from religious criticism. Potteiger’s curse is a measurement of how threatening that voice is to the project he serves.

The people opposing this turn include a Pope, an archbishop, a Baptist minister, Kristin Kobes Du Mez — the Calvin University historian whose book Jesus and John Wayne traced the century-long development of white evangelical militant masculinity — a Bush-appointed federal judge, a retired Army rabbi, Muslim and Hindu and Sikh religious leaders, and federal workers themselves. It is not a secular movement. It is the rest of American religious pluralism.

The worker again

I started this with a USDA employee’s sentence, and I keep coming back to it. But before I do, I want to set one other voice next to everything I have described.

Abraham Lincoln delivered his Second Inaugural Address on March 4, 1865, with the Union on the verge of military victory. He did not triumph. He did not claim God’s favor. He said, of the two sides of the war, that “both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other.” He said, “The Almighty has his own purposes.” He closed not with domination but with the slow work of “binding up the nation’s wounds.”

Hegseth, in the middle of a war in which a US missile killed more than 175 people at a single elementary school, most of them children [1], claims daily that God is on his side, and insists that the worship he leads at the Pentagon should shape the military decisions he makes in the afternoon. [4]

“This has never happened before.” A true sentence, spoken by a person who is afraid to say it with his name attached, about the country he works for. The country in which that sentence cannot be said safely is not the country in which the First Amendment operates; it is the country that the people who say the separation of church and state is a lie are trying to build.

It is further along than I had realized before I sat down to read.

Sources

[1] Julia Carrie Wong, “Pete Hegseth’s holy war,” The Guardian, April 10, 2026 — theguardian.com

[2] “Government Workers Say They’re Getting Inundated With Religion,” WIRED, April 14, 2026 — wired.com

[3] “Pete Hegseth’s Christian rhetoric reignites scrutiny after the U.S. goes to war with Iran,” PBS NewsHour / AP, March 2026 — pbs.org

[4] Brian Kaylor, “Hegseth Borrows Violent Prayer From ‘Pulp Fiction’ to Bless Iran War at April Pentagon Worship Service,” Word&Way, April 15, 2026 — wordandway.org

[5] Kielce Gussie, “Pope in Bamenda: ‘Woe to those who manipulate religion for military or political gain,’” Vatican News, April 2026 — vaticannews.va

[6] Samuel P. Perry, “Looking for a Holy War,” Liberty Magazine, January/February 2026 — libertymagazine.org

[7] “Dan Patrick says separation of church and state is a lie,” Baptist News Global, April 2026 — baptistnews.com

[8] “Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick argues there is no separation of church and state in the U.S. Constitution,” Houston Public Media / KUT, April 15, 2026 — houstonpublicmedia.org

[9] “The Meaning Behind Trump Cabinet Pick Pete Hegseth’s Christian Tattoos,” Religion Unplugged — religionunplugged.com

[10] Ariel Schwartz, “The Sacralization of the Iran War,” Chicago Council on Global Affairs — globalaffairs.org

[11] Maura Casey, “Project 2025: The Blueprint for Christian Nationalist Regime Change,” Kettering Foundation — kettering.org

[12] “Christian Nationalism and the Making of a Holy War,” LA Progressive — laprogressive.com

[13] “What happens when religious fundamentalists come to power? (Part Two),” On Point with Meghna Chakrabarti, WBUR, April 7, 2026 — wbur.org

[14] “What happens when religious fundamentalists come to power? (Part One),” On Point with Meghna Chakrabarti, WBUR, April 6, 2026 — wbur.org

[15] “Trump administration religious messaging,” The Independent — the-independent.com

[16] “AU sues over prayer services organized by Depts. of Labor and Defense,” Americans United for Separation of Church and State — au.org

[17] “Diverse Faith Leaders, Groups Unite to Challenge Administration’s Biased So-Called ‘Religious Liberty Commission,’” Interfaith Alliance — interfaithalliance.org

[18] “Speaker Johnson: Christian Nationalism in the Speaker’s Office?” Congressional Freethought Caucus white paper — huffman.house.gov

[19] “Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Establishes White House Faith Office,” The White House, February 7, 2025 — whitehouse.gov

[20] “Establishment of the Religious Liberty Commission” (Executive Order), The White House, May 1, 2025 — whitehouse.gov

[21] “President Trump Announces Religious Liberty Commission Members,” The White House, May 2025 — whitehouse.gov

[22] “President Donald Trump Names Advisory Board Members to the Religious Liberty Commission,” The White House, May 2025 — whitehouse.gov

Quotations from Ingersoll, Kaylor, Taylor, Jones III, Bazer, Laycock, Roberts, and Laser are taken from the sources listed above.