Yesterday, the Secretary of Defense stood in front of a gathering of soldiers and led them in something close to a sermon.
“Each of us committed to the nation with the sentiment of the 6th chapter of the book of Isaiah, ‘Here I am Lord. Send me,’” Pete Hegseth intoned. “Send me to fight the Redcoats. Send me to fight the Communists. Send me to fight the Islamists. Send me.”
He calls it the Send Me Tour. The name comes from the Book of Isaiah.
Before I get too far into this, I want to be clear about where I’m coming from. I’m a man of faith. When I was in uniform overseas, my faith was a big part of what sustained me. A lot of the women and men I served with would tell you the same. Faith and military service have gone together in this country since the beginning.
And that’s exactly why this bothers me so much.
Pete Hegseth has spent this year quoting the Bible to sell his war with Iran. But nearly every verse he spouts on the stump actually says something very different from his chest-thumping message.
Pete decided to cite Scripture. So let’s let the Scripture answer.
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“Send Me”
In Isaiah 6:8, the prophet hears a voice asking, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” He answers, “Here am I; send me.”
In the story of Isaiah, God is the one asking. Isaiah answers, but not to volunteer for the army. He’s accepting a call from the Lord to deliver a hard message to his own nation, not to go conquer someone else’s.
Hegseth has chosen a strange book to borrow for a war. Isaiah is where we get perhaps the most famous vision of peace in the entire Bible:
“They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”
One pastor told HuffPost that picking Isaiah to rally people for war reveals “a clear ignorance of Isaiah, who repeatedly warns against trusting in military power.”
He’s right. There’s simply no Biblical justification for how Hegseth twists a prophet’s answer to God into a recruitment slogan for the Pentagon.
“In the Name of Jesus Christ”
This is the part that troubles me most.
At a Pentagon worship service in March, Hegseth prayed for American troops to deliver “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.” He closed the prayer “in the mighty and powerful name of Jesus Christ.”
That name belongs to the man who said, “Blessed are the peacemakers.”
Who said, “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you.”
Who hung on a cross and prayed for the people who put Him there: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”
How dare Hegseth act as if he determines who does and does not deserve mercy. The whole premise of the Christian gospel is mercy for people who don’t deserve it and no man gets to decide who that is.
To be perfectly clear, I’m not a pacifist. I served in the military, and I don’t believe the Bible asks soldiers to lay down their arms. Christians have wrestled with the question of just war since Augustine, sixteen hundred years ago, and there are times a nation has to fight.
But that tradition asks sober, humble questions about whether a war is truly necessary and how it’s fought. It never suggests that a general gets to supersede God in the process.
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No Nation Before God
Now I know most of you aren’t here for a theology lesson. But what Hegseth is doing twists the faith of millions of Americans to justify war and has lasting impacts. So let’s get to the heart of all this.
The first commandment is “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” Hegseth likes to say “Christ is King.” If he means it, then America’s military objectives don’t come first. Donald Trump’s agenda certainly doesn’t.
Using God’s word to rally people to the state’s war is, at best, politicizing faith. At worst, it’s twisting the word of God to serve earthly ambitions. And Scripture has a name for putting anything in God’s place: idolatry.
It’s also dangerous in the most practical way. Our military belongs to every American who serves in it, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and nonbeliever alike. Muslim Americans are wearing the uniform right now. When the Secretary of Defense frames a recruiting drive as a Christian calling to go fight “the Islamists,” he tells those service members they’re outsiders in their own military.
And if you’re a person of faith, you should be the most offended by what Hegseth is doing.
But don’t mistake any of this for a call to keep your faith quiet. When you see your faith twisted to sell a war Congress never authorized, that’s exactly the moment to stand strong and say so in your church and in your community.
That’s the gift of this country. America is the place where you can hold your faith, whatever it is, and live it freely without the government telling you how. It’s also the place where you’re free to stand up and say “not in my name” when someone in power tries to borrow that faith for his own ends. The founders put those two freedoms in the very same sentence of the First Amendment. They were meant to go together.
“Here am I; send me” is something said to God, not to Pete Hegseth. And when Isaiah said it, God didn’t send him to war. He sent him to tell his own nation a hard truth it didn’t want to hear.
That call is still going out. Answer it.
—Adam
I am not a religious man. But this response was beautifully written. And restores my faith, in humanity.
Everyone knows what Hegseth is…a poor excuse for a man. Lots of noise and no substance.