This Is Not the Gospel

Pete Hegseth is celebrating a war in the name of Jesus. Jesus had something to say about that.

Daytona Beach, Spring Break, 1991

The sun was already punishing by nine in the morning.

I was nineteen years old, standing near the water’s edge on Daytona Beach with a few other students from Campus Crusade for Christ. The sand was white and already hot under our shoes. The beach smelled like sunscreen and salt and the particular chaos of ten thousand college students who had nowhere to be. We had somewhere to be.

We had a script. Approach someone on the beach, tell them you’re conducting a survey, ask if you can ask them a few questions. The survey was a pretense. We all knew it. Our leaders had coached us on it — not cynically, but strategically. It gave us an opening, a foot in the door, and once we had the door, we’d walk them through the Four Spiritual Laws, a small booklet tucked in our shirt pockets that laid out the Gospel in four tidy steps.

I remember holding one of those booklets and watching a guy about my age look up from his towel, squinting into the sun, trying to figure out what I wanted. I knew what I wanted. I told him I was doing a survey.

Something moved through me in that moment. Not quite shame. More like a small internal flinch — the kind your conscience makes when it knows something your mouth isn’t saying.

I was all in. Completely, earnestly, unselfconsciously all in. I had chosen my college largely because of this ministry. These were my people. This was my mission.

I told myself it was for the greater cause.

What Campus Crusade Taught Me Without Meaning To

I am genuinely grateful for Campus Crusade. The friendships I made there are some of the most lasting of my life. The faith I practiced there was sincere — mine and theirs. There was real goodness inside that community, real love, real transformation.

And yet.

The organization taught me something else without ever naming it. It taught me that a cause holy enough could cover means you’d otherwise question. It taught me that the ends — sharing the Gospel, saving souls, winning the campus for Christ — were sacred enough to justify a small dishonesty at the door. It wasn’t cruelty. It wasn’t cynicism. It was strategy in service of something good.

Nobody called it deception. I didn’t call it deception. I called it outreach.

There’s a particular kind of self-deception available only to the truly sincere. You believe so completely in the goodness of what you’re doing that the methods stop requiring examination. The mission sanctifies the method. The cause covers the cost.

But here is what I’ve come to understand that I didn’t understand at nineteen: the methods are not neutral. They form you. Every time you choose a strategy over honesty — even in service of something true — you practice a kind of faith that slowly separates conviction from character. You become someone who believes the right things and does them the wrong way. And over time, you stop noticing the gap.

I was nineteen years old, standing on a beach in Florida, and I was already learning to stop noticing.

Deus Vult

I’ve been thinking about that beach a lot lately.

Because the mechanism I learned there — holy cause, covered means, stopped questions — has not stayed small. I grew up inside this. I know its texture. And I have watched, over the course of my adult life, the same logic scale.

Pete Hegseth has the Latin phrase “Deus vult” tattooed on his right bicep. God wills it. It was the battle cry of the Crusades — the medieval wars in which Christian armies fought to seize Jerusalem from Muslim rule, leaving a trail of blood across two continents. He has described the Crusades as perhaps the most formative moment in the history of the free world. “Do you enjoy Western civilization?” he wrote in his 2020 book American Crusade. “Thank a crusader.”

Hegseth attends Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowship near Nashville — a theologically conservative Reformed congregation. It is worth pausing on this: Hegseth is not a man without a church, without a pastor, without a community of faith. He is formed. He is churched. What he believes, he was taught.

Last month, Hegseth stood at a Pentagon podium and asked the American people to pray for victory in battle — “every day, on bended knee, with your family, in your schools, in your churches” — and he asked them to pray in the name of Jesus Christ. This while American and Israeli forces were dropping thousands of bombs on Iran.

He has described U.S. military operations as divinely sanctioned. He has said “the providence of our almighty God” is protecting American troops. He has mixed audio of himself reciting the Lord’s Prayer with video of missiles firing and warships steaming.

Franklin Graham stood in the Pentagon auditorium flanked by Christmas trees and reminded the troops that God also hates. That God is a God of war.

I have no doubt that Hegseth is sincere. I have no doubt that he loves his country, that his faith is real to him, that he believes with his whole chest that America is engaged in a spiritual battle and that God is on our side. That sincerity is not the question.

The question is whether what he is practicing is actually the Gospel of Jesus Christ — or whether it is something else: a particularly American religion that has borrowed Christian language, Christian symbols, and Christian authority, while quietly replacing Christian ethics with the ethics of empire. This version of faith has deep roots in American soil. It is not new. It has blessed slavery, manifest destiny, and more wars than we can count. It wraps the flag around the cross and calls the package Christianity.

It is not Christianity. Not the kind Jesus taught.

Cardinal Robert McElroy of Washington has called this an immoral war. Pope Leo XIV has called for a ceasefire. They are speaking from within the same Christian tradition Hegseth claims. He reaches past them — past the current Pope, past the current Cardinal — all the way back to the Crusaders.

He didn’t miss the Sermon on the Mount. He set it aside.

And here is what I know from a beach in Florida: I recognize the mechanism.

The cause is holy enough. Therefore the means require no examination. Therefore the cost — to others, to conscience, to the actual teachings of Jesus — gets covered.

My version was a pretend survey and a booklet about spiritual laws. Hegseth’s version is missile footage set to the Lord’s Prayer and a theology of divine violence delivered from the most powerful military podium on earth.

I am not equating them. I am tracing a line.

The line runs from every sincere believer who ever decided that what they wanted to do was also what God wanted them to do — and stopped asking questions after that.

This is not Hegseth’s problem alone. This is the problem of American Christianity broadly — of congregations that pray for troops but not for enemies, of pastors who bless foreign policy without reading the Beatitudes aloud first, of believers who have grown so accustomed to their faith functioning as a source of national identity that they have forgotten it was meant to function as a source of personal transformation.

I sat in those churches. I prayed those prayers. I did not ask the questions I should have asked.

This habit lives inside American Christianity. It has always been here. It just rarely gets a defense budget.

What Jesus Actually Said

Blessed are the peacemakers.

Love your enemies.

Pray for those who persecute you.

These are not obscure verses. They are not footnotes. They are the center of the Sermon on the Mount — the longest recorded teaching of Jesus, delivered not from a palace or a podium but from a hillside, to people with no power at all.

There are people on the receiving end of this theology. They have names. They have families. They are Iranians — Shiite Muslims, most of them — who are being killed by American and Israeli bombs while an American cabinet secretary declares that God’s providence is protecting the troops dropping them. Orthodox Christian theology has a precise term for these people: image-bearers. Made in the image of God. Imago Dei. Every single one of them, according to the Bible Hegseth claims, carries the fingerprint of the Creator. They are not abstractions. They are not collateral. They are not the enemies of God.

They are the neighbors Jesus told us to love.

Hegseth’s theology has an answer for this. The Crusaders had an answer for this. Every empire that has ever baptized its violence in Christian language has had an answer for this. The answer is always some version of: yes, but. Yes, love your enemies — but these enemies are different. Yes, blessed are the peacemakers — but peace requires strength. Yes, the Sermon on the Mount — but have you read the Old Testament?

The answers are not without logic. That’s what makes them dangerous.

A faith that costs you nothing is not the faith of the Gospels. A Christianity that gives you permission instead of a cross has made a substitution somewhere. And when that substitution reaches the Pentagon, people made in the image of God pay the price for it.

Jesus didn’t ask his followers to win. He asked them to lose well.