Pete Hegseth's Gospel of Carnage
I guess a zealot, by nature, can’t hide — too extreme are his convictions, too grand his designs, too consuming his arrogance. And so, over recent weeks, Pete Hegseth has fully revealed himself.
He has made clear that every missile the United States fires, every bomb it drops, every Iranian it kills, is for Jesus. Praise be the Lord, who has given America the power to wipe out an entire civilization. That’s what President Trump threatened to do — in an intermittently jaunty social media post, no less — and Hegseth gave no indication of unwillingness to execute that order.
He brandishes assertions about God’s will with the exaggerated brio of an electronics merchant pressing fliers on pedestrians passing by his new megastore: Have I got a holy war for you. Embrace the death. Exult over the destruction. What only looks like hell is a ticket to heaven.
Not everyone agrees. In this era of the extraordinary, Pope Leo XIV has taken the unusual step of publicly and specifically rebuking the Trump administration’s assertion of divine approval for the war against Iran.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/13/opinion/pete-hegseths-religious-war.html?unlocked_article_code=1.alA.jzzC.7mx4TDPJa8yJ&smid=url-share