Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is rattling troops across all ranks by pushing a hardline religious agenda onto the military, according to a top military advocacy group.
President of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, Mikey Weinstein, said morale in the military has nosedived since Hegseth’s appointment and the rollout of his religious policies.
“They’re terrified right now,” Weinstein, whose organization is dedicated to protecting religious freedom within the U.S. military, told The Daily Beast.
He said the number of complaints the organization has received since Hegseth became Secretary of Defense had tripled--and a large share of them come from Christians in uniform.
“About 95 percent of our clients are actually Christians who are being tortured for not being Christian enough by their chain of command,” Weinstein said.
Since becoming Secretary of Defense, Hegseth has made waves at the Pentagon with directives striking out diversity and inclusion measures, and by ousting top Pentagon officials he doesn’t see eye-to-eye with.
After Chief Army Chaplain Maj. Gen William Green Jr. was reportedly forced into early retirement by Hegseth, Weinstein said his sources in the Pentagon chalked it up to him being “a person of integrity. He was not standing by for this Armageddon narrative.”
Weinstein said the root problem is the injection of Christian nationalist ideology into the military.
“Christian nationalism is completely antithetical to our congressional representative democracy,” he said.
Christian nationalism is a movement that seeks to shape U.S. governance around Christian doctrine, a shift critics say would limit democracy and religious freedom. It is rooted in fundamentalist Christian ideologies and is widely viewed by scholars and many other Christian groups as an extremist ideology.
“It does not want democracy. It is a hideous cabal of a tortured, twisted version of Christianity. It’s incredibly misogynistic, it’s incredibly Islamophobic, anti-Semitic, transphobic [and] homophobic,” said Weinstein, adding that Christian nationalists believe that women shouldn’t be in the military or vote.
One initiative the group flagged as especially concerning is Hegseth’s monthly prayer.
“It’s all about time, place and manner when it comes to our constitution…[Hegseth is delivering his prayer] in uniform, in the largest auditorium in the Pentagon, and he televises it on internal channel two at the Pentagon,“ he said, adding: “this is an absolute s--tting on our Constitution.”
Since the war in Iran began in February, Hegseth’s rhetoric has alarmed senior officers, Weinstein says.
In an interview with 60 Minutes in March, Hegseth was explicit about his belief that the military didn’t have space for atheists.
“But from my perspective, I mean, obviously, I’m a man of faith who encourages our troops to lean into their faith, rely on God. There are no atheists in foxholes,” he said.
Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson said in a statement that Hegseth is “a proud Christian.”
“The Christian faith is woven deeply into the fabric of our nation and shared by America’s wartime leaders like President George Washington, who prayed for his troops at Valley Forge, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who gifted Bibles to America soldiers during WW2 and encouraged them to read it,” he said, ignoring specific queries as to whether military members are targeted over their beliefs.
“Despite the Left’s efforts to remove our Christian heritage from our great nation, Secretary Hegseth is among those who embrace it,” Wilson said.
He did not respond to the Daily Beast’s questions about Christian Nationalism, or Hegseth’s prayers and faith initiatives.
A registered Republican, Weinstein worked as a White House lawyer under President Ronald Regan in the 1980s. He was in the military for over a decade, and also worked for eccentric billionaire and would-be President, H. Ross Perot.
Now, he says what’s happening inside the U.S. armed forces amounts to “a national security threat to our country.”
He pointed to how Hegseth, who has two Crusades-era tattoos, has also used fiery rhetoric in discussing the war in Iran.
“Whenever an extremist version of any religious faith joins up with that part of the state that creates war…We end up with one thing: oceans and oceans of blood," Weinstein cautioned.
