By Peter Wehner
Tuesday, April 14, 2026
“The devil,” William Shakespeare wrote in The Merchant
of Venice, “can cite Scripture for his purpose.” As we’ve seen in recent
weeks, so can Pete Hegseth.
Late last month, during the first Christian worship
service at the Pentagon since the Iran war began, the secretary of defense cast
the conflict as essentially religious and spiritual in nature. The focus of his
remarks was less the righteousness of our side of the war than the necessity of
mercilessly inflicting vengeance and pain on the other.
Hegseth invoked Psalm 18, in which King David says he did
not turn back until his enemies were “consumed.” His enemies “cried for help,
but there was none to save them.” Hegseth read passages in which David exults
that he “beat them fine as dust before the wind” and “cast them out like the
mire of the streets.”
Hegseth also read a prayer
composed by a chaplain—relying on imprecatory psalms, including 35, 58, and
144—requesting God’s “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve
no mercy.” Hegseth prayed that “every round find its mark against the enemies
of righteousness.” He requested that God “break the teeth of the ungodly.” By
“the blast of your anger,” he said, God would “let the evil perish.” The
Almighty should “pour out your wrath against those who plot vain things and
blow them away like chaff before the wind.” Hegseth beseeched God to act so
“evil may be driven back and wicked souls be delivered to the eternal damnation
prepared for them.”
The man who refers to himself as the secretary of war
concluded his prayer with “we ask these things with bold confidence in the
mighty and powerful name of Jesus Christ, king over all kings, and amen. Amen.”
To be clear, then: Secretary of Defense Hegseth is
praying for “overwhelming violence” and “no mercy” in the “powerful name of
Jesus Christ,” the Prince of Peace.
As Ronit Stahl, a historian of the military chaplaincy, told
Greg Sargent of The New Republic, “It’s highly unusual for high-ranking
officers or civilian military leaders to relish killing and violence in God’s
name as a religious duty.”
But Hegseth is different. Last month, Hegseth said that
the United States would give “no quarter, no mercy for our enemies,” which
would constitute a war crime under both international law and U.S. military
codes. Pentagon offices designed to prevent civilian harm during combat
operations are being
dismantled. And in Donald Trump’s first term, Hegseth lobbied the president
for pardons for three members of the military who were facing charges related
to, or had been convicted of, war crimes. He defended Blackwater contractors
convicted of murdering Iraqi civilians. He appears to relish
the ability to inflict destruction and death.
Trump, for his part, has threatened
to bomb Iran’s power plants, desalination stations, oil wells, roads, bridges,
and other infrastructure. Last week, he threatened to send the Iranians “back
to the Stone Ages, where they belong.” On Easter weekend, he wrote that
unless the Iranians open the Strait of Hormuz, “all Hell will reign down on
them. All glory to God.” And in the most crazed statement of his crazed
presidency, Trump wrote on Easter morning, “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day,
and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like
it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in
Hell—JUST WATCH. Praise be to Allah.”
The day after Easter, Trump intensified his threats to
devastate Iranian bridges and power plants if Iran’s leaders didn’t agree to a
cease-fire. “Every power plant in Iran will be out of business, burning,
exploding and never to be used again,” the president warned. He dismissed any
concerns that such actions might constitute war crimes. “Not at all,” Trump
said. The following day, the president of the United States wrote
on social media, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be
brought back again.”
In the end, Trump pulled back; a whole civilization did
not die on Tuesday night. But no one can doubt Trump’s genuine indifference to
the norms and laws of armed conflict that, however imperfectly, aim to restrain
the worst abuses. When asked earlier this year if there are any limits on his
global powers, he answered,
“Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing
that can stop me.”
***
Hegseth has given us a lot to untangle theologically.
Take his use of imprecatory psalms, which call on God to rain down calamity and
destruction upon his enemies. Imprecatory psalms are emotional laments, in the
voice of the desperate and the powerless—and they sound very different when
recited by those in charge of the most awesome military force in history. In
imprecatory psalms, it is God, not humans, being asked to execute judgment.
These psalms generally express a deep yearning for justice, with vengeance
placed in the hands of the Lord, freeing us of the consuming need to seek
revenge ourselves.
Psalm 18 is not an imprecatory psalm. In it, David
narrates his own story, telling of the destruction of his enemies and crediting
God for making it possible. Hegseth’s invocation of Psalm 18 sends the message
that military action is an expression of divine will, and that the attack on
Iran constitutes a holy war.
The Trump administration’s invocation of scripture and
allusions to the total annihilation of the enemy add yet another layer. Hegseth
and Trump and their supporters, particularly the fundamentalist and evangelical
Christians among them, want theological cover for targeting Iran’s power
supply, which might result in mass civilian death. Hospital equipment would
stop working, water purification would cease, sewage systems and food
refrigeration would fail. The food supply chain would be disrupted. Urban areas
might become unlivable, forcing millions to flee.
Trump hasn’t yet done those things, and perhaps he never
will. But the president and his secretary of defense are already justifying
such acts, just in case they decide to go down this path. They want to signal
to the world, and perhaps reassure themselves, that God is on their side. That
killing civilians is not just acceptable but an act of righteous obedience.
Some bells can’t be unrung.
***
Tucked away in this debate is a complicated interpretive
dispute. Some adherents of the Christian faith believe, as many of the
early church fathers did, that biblical accounts of divine violence—especially
accounts of God commanding the Israelites to kill entire populations—are not
literal but allegorical, representing the soul’s battle against sin. Figures
like Origen argued that embracing a literal understanding of texts such as 1 Samuel 15:3, in which God
commands that his people utterly destroy “man and woman, infant and nursing
child, ox and sheep, camel and donkey,” would attribute monstrous qualities to
God, a moral impossibility. A good rule of thumb, they would say, is that if
you find yourself ascribing to God actions that are repellant and horrifying
when done by humans, something is amiss.
Others, like Paul Copan,
the author of Is God a Moral Monster?, believe that the language of herem—a
Hebrew term for a ban, in this case meaning total destruction, or wholesale
slaughter—was typical of the hyperbole found in the ancient Near East. What’s
being described is a military conflict, he would say, but one sanctioned by
God. The specific words in the Bible, however, reflect the military bravado
employed by writers of the Hebrew scriptures. They are not to be taken
literally.
The philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff offers
a contemporary example that helps illustrate this point: If a
high-school-basketball player says that his team “slaughtered” its opponents,
he doesn’t literally mean what he says, and he doesn’t assume that anyone would
take him to be literal. He’s simply saying that his team dominated the game.
Advocates of this interpretive approach point out that in the Book of Joshua,
peoples who were said to have been “utterly destroyed” reappear. So, they
argue, the language was either intentionally hyperbolic or the accounts false.
A third group of scholars that includes Peter Enns, a professor of
biblical studies at Eastern University, believes that the portrayal of God as
an advocate for total annihilation is what you’d expect from a tribal people
describing God in their tribal ways. As Enns has written,
“God never told the Israelites to kill the Canaanites. The Israelites believed
that God told them to kill the Canaanites."
In a blog post published last year, Enns makes what
he considers to be the more important point: “The word of God as a two-edged
sword is supposed to be turned inward, piercing us, not everyone around us.” He
adds, “The Bible is not a weapon, a sword to be wielded against modern-day
Canaanites or Babylonians. It is a book where we meet God. It brings hope,
encouragement, knowledge, and deep truth for those willing to risk, and to
‘die’ to themselves, as Jesus puts it, to accept the challenge of scripture,
knowing they will be undone in the process.”
Rowan Williams, the former archbishop of Canterbury, says
that the Bible is “the accumulation of what you might call the interaction of
God with a succession of human societies.” The biblical scholar John Barton refers
to the Bible as a “dialogue among authors.” The authors say different
things at different times, including about God. The Bible is a book—a library
of books, really—that contains, and is meant to contain, different and at times
competing theologies. The Bible preserves disagreements, and it’s no less
sacred for doing so. (Among the competing accounts of this subject within
scripture are 2 Kings and Hosea, which present contrasting perspectives on
Jehu’s massacre of the House of Ahab, and the differences in attitude toward
the Ninevites in Jonah, where we see expansive mercy, and Nahum, where we see
wrath.)
Still others, like Tremper Longman III, a scholar of the
Jewish Bible, accept the full historicity and divine authorization of the herem
commands. Longman believes that God ordered the wholesale slaughter not just of
opposing armies but of entire populations, including women, children, and
infants. But, he argues, the circumstances were unique, the product of a
particular historical moment, and not to be replicated. To do so would be to
undo the work of Jesus.
Longman relies on what he calls “spiritual
continuity.” What he means by that is “the war against the Canaanites was
simply an earlier phase of the battle that comes to its climax on the cross and
its completion at the final judgment. The object of warfare moves from the
Canaanites, who are the object of God’s wrath for their sin, to the spiritual
powers and principalities, and then finally to the utter destruction of all
evil, human and spiritual.”
None of these scholars, despite their other
disagreements, sees holy war as normative. That should be especially obvious to
those who claim to follow Jesus, who told them to “love your enemies and pray
for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in
heaven.” The Sermon on the Mount is a repudiation of the conquest ethic.
When Peter drew his sword at the Garden of Gethsemane,
during the night of Jesus’s arrest, Jesus told him, “Put your sword back in its
place, for all who draw the sword will die by the sword.” Jesus affirmed a
shocking thing: The kingdom he was inaugurating is not advanced by the sword.
Yet Hegseth prayed that “every round would find its mark.”
Virtually all of the individuals within the various
interpretive camps in Christianity I’ve discussed above would contend that it
is a serious misreading of scripture to argue that imprecatory psalms and
conquest accounts in books like Deuteronomy, Joshua, and 1 Samuel are
endorsements of the wholesale slaughter of innocents today.
And that’s not all. Almost all rabbinical
scholars—whether they affirm the historicity of the conquest accounts or
not—emphatically agree that the rules of the warfare the scripture describes no
longer apply. Among other things, Jewish scholars point out, the specific
peoples against whom herem was commanded no longer exist as identifiable
groups. That door has been bolted shut. “There is a category of milchemet
mitzvah, which is a commanded war of self-defense,” Michael Holzman, the
rabbi of the Northern Virginia Hebrew Congregation, told me. “But wars of
annihilation no longer exist.”
Serious and thoughtful people have argued over these
issues, which have bedeviled Christians and Jews for millennia. But Hegseth,
Trump, and many of their fundamentalist and evangelical followers seem less
interested in textual interpretation than in seeking scriptural validation for
their bloodlust. They seem determined to find texts within the Bible to justify
their dark passions, their emotional and psychological predilections. They
believe what they believe quite apart from the Bible; its utility is to affirm
what they already intend to do. Hegseth and his merry band of holy warriors
aren’t interested in being on the side of God so much as they are insistent
that God is on their side.
This is a constant temptation, and giving in to it almost
always ends badly.
On an individual level, there’s something quite sad about
people whose lives are fueled by hate and vengeance, who seem perennially
unsettled, and for whom inner peace and calm contentment seem always out of
reach. They are at war with the world and at war with themselves.
When these individuals assume positions of power,
however—when they are able to inflict suffering on others, particularly on a
mass scale; when their pathologies become society-wide and find a haven within
the highest reaches of government—sympathy should give way not just to concern
but to outrage.
***
One thing I’ve come to see, more clearly than I once did,
is that understanding sacred texts does not depend solely on knowledge of the
text. At least as important, and perhaps a good deal more important, are the
sensibilities and temperament—the wisdom—that readers bring to the text.
In fundamentalist and evangelical circles in particular,
enormous emphasis is put on reading scripture and memorizing Bible verses. That
can be a blessing, of course. Christians and Jews believe that the books
comprising their canon are holy. They bear witness to God—the Word behind the
words—and reveal what it means to live rightly before God. In times of trial
and grief, the words of the Bible can be healing. They can provide hope and
grace in the journey.
But it’s also true that in the wrong hands, Bible verses
can become decontextualized, or be used to sanctify preexisting biases.
Scripture has on far too many occasions been used to deny scientific truths
(evolution and the age of the Earth) and to advance immoral ends (slavery,
segregation). People frequently use the Bible to wound others under the guise
of speaking “truth in love.” Many of the greatest crimes in Christian history
were committed by people who knew their Bible exceedingly well.
The Bible said it, I believe it, and that settles it
is an approach to hermeneutics that can lead people astray. It rests on two
mistaken presumptions: that the Bible is easy to interpret, and that our own
interpretations of the Bible are inerrant. Neither is true.
The latest debate about holy war is a reminder that moral
dispositions and discernment are among the most important interpretive tools
Christians have. The apostle Paul seemed to hint at this when he said, in 1
Corinthians 13, that you can have all knowledge, you can fathom all mysteries,
you can have faith that moves mountains, but without love, you are nothing.
Those who relish mercilessness and see themselves as
agents of God’s wrath are nothing.
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