In his inaugural State of the Force speech, Pete Hegseth, Secretary of War, reminded service members, whom he calls warriors, of the mission he charged them with one year prior: “War fighting. Preparing to fight and preparing to win. Unrelenting, unapologetic, and uncompromising in that single pursuit.” Under his guidance, he claimed, the military has been rebuilt, “the warrior ethos has been revived.” Thanks to President Trump, Hegseth continued, “The state of our Force today is stronger than it has been in our nation’s history. I’m looking at the most capable, the most focused, and the most lethal in American history.”
In an effort to continue his reforms, Hegseth announced “six strategic initiatives that will govern the Department’s direction for years to come.” One such initiative is the establishment of the Office of Religious Affairs, to address what Hegseth believes is a devaluing of faith across the military. “For decades we let people with no expertise in faith or religion dictate the spiritual life of our warriors,” he said. But the buck stops here. Chaplains “finally have an advocate in the highest places.” They’ll have full budgets and they won’t be restricted by bureaucracy, secular humanism, or political correctness.
Perhaps to kick off the spiritual revival, Hegseth delivered a sermon.
“As Psalm 33:12 extols us, Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord. Two hundred and fifty years ago, we rejected an earthly king an ocean away, appealing instead to a heavenly king above. George Washington made sure that the Continental Army had chaplains back at the beginning, back in 1775. That force appealed to Heaven and we still do today. Our national motto is, after all, In God we trust. Today we reaffirm that trust. We’re placing spiritual health at the same level of physical health. Our department is, you might say, putting on the full armor of God. Because while we wage a physical war, we all know the real battle is spiritual. God is good. Evil is not. And America’s military must understand the difference.”
Hegseth speaks Bible, which no doubt appeals to his supporters, many of whom also speak Bible. But it’s the kind of speaking you do in the early stages of learning a new language, such as when you awkwardly ask a native speaker if the museum is behind the supermarket or in front of it. Your interlocutor no doubt understands what you’re trying to say, but they also wonder if you truly know what you’re trying to say.
And so it is with Hegseth: “Do unto your [war] unit as you would have done to your own child’s unit. Would you want them to serve in a unit where standards were lowered to meet quotas? … The answer is not just no, it’s hell no.” If you listen carefully, you can hear the reference to the Golden Rule. Hegseth believes he is reciting Jesus, but he’s doing so with the fluency of a tourist asking for the price of those brown socks over there.
Listen to what he does with a passage from the book of Isaiah. “Lord, here I am, send me! Send me to fight the Redcoats. Send me to fight the communists. Send me to fight the Islamists.” And here’s how he speaks Paul: “Our department is putting on the full armor of God.”
There is nothing inherently wrong with incorporating scripture into our everyday speech. We sometimes finish our own thoughts with Bible verses. Or, when we can’t think of exactly how a verse goes, we communicate what we believe to be the gist, in our own words. Moreover, many Christians read and interpret biblical texts intertextually. We smash together different stories or allusions, making sense of one tricky verse in the New Testament with the help of a bit of poetry from the Old. None of that is necessarily blasphemous.
Unless it is.
Speech is blasphemous when it slanders God, and speech slanders God when it mocks God’s people. And God’s people, as Psalm 33 makes clear, are those who put their trust in him.
Not in military might.
If Hegseth continued to recite Psalm 33 during his State of the Force address, he would have gotten to these lines:
“A king is not saved by his great army;
A warrior is not delivered by his great strength.
The war horse is a vain hope for victory,
And by its great might it cannot save.”
Hegseth brags that the US has “the most powerful and prepared military on the planet.” But according to the theological imagination of one of his favorite Psalms, God is neither impressed nor distracted by a warrior ethos. His eye is on “those who fear him, on those who hope in his steadfast love.” God is moved to come to the defense of those who wait for him, of those who trust him, of those who sing this Psalm prayerfully, desperately, those who are surrounded by horses and chariots, threatened by power, threatened by lethality. This is the God who is remembered for overthrowing the powerful Egyptian army on behalf of a group of slaves, for besting the forces of chaos to create a new world.
It’s strange to speak Bible the way Hegseth has done, strange to press scripture into service of the very agenda it exists to condemn. Yes, Hegseth speaks words like “Golden Rule,” but he isn’t fluent in Jesus. He peppers his speeches with decontextualized biblical phrases, but he is far from a native speaker. That kind of fluency requires an ear to hear the silent “no” that echoes from the cross in protest of state violence, requires a heart formed by the psalter, which notably ends with an ambitious call for peace: “Let all that has breath praise the Lord.”
Yes, the Book of Psalms climaxes in an imagined future where all of us together sing to our God. We all belong to him. There is only one God, as Hegseth well knows. But what he seems to forget is that if there is only one God, then there is only one people, and God is for all of us—the mightiest warrior and the weakest child.
It’s just that God has different ways of dealing with all of us. He rescues the orphan and widow. He makes haste to deliver the vulnerable. He hears the cries of the afflicted.
And the warriors? Oh, he’s watching.
That’s why we’d all better be careful about how we use the Psalms. Because other people might be singing the same psalm to the same God, asking him to deliver them from the greatest empire the world has ever known, calling on him to make a mockery of greatness, to disarm modern warriors the way he once drowned the Egyptians in the Red Sea.
