Donald trump has nominated Army Major Pete Hegseth to be the next Secretary of Defense. The Princeton-educated Fox News TV personality and former soldier served in Iraq and Afghanistan before resigning his commission in protest over the army’s supposed unfair treatment of soldiers with politically conservative views. Hegseth is interesting because he is the first potential cabinet secretary in almost a century to wed unambiguously Protestant Christianity with his understanding of warmaking. Hegseth attends a conservative Reformed church and sees Theodore Roosevelt, one unafraid to address religion and politics in the same breath, as the model for American greatness. In other words, though seemingly unusual in 2025, Hegseth’s ideas aren’t new. Since the seventeenth century, Americans have seen themselves as fighting for the synthesis of God and country, but in the latter half of the twentieth century little effort has been made to address political theology to soldiers, or to explore the role militaries play in the outworking of political theology.
Nonetheless popular works by military men—Hegseth being one among many—make it clear that American soldiers from the Revolutionary War to our own time undeniably see their service in armies as God-ordained. Some even conceive of military causes as divinely sanctioned. Even politicos disinterested in churchly piety retained some conception of God determining the political outcomes of battlefield victories and defeats.
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