The Guardian has published a detailed account of the theology animating Pete Hegseth’s conduct as US Secretary of Defense — the Crusader tattoos, the Pentagon worship services, the framing of the Iran war as divinely sanctioned, the school bombing that killed more than 175 people, most of them children, met without remorse.
It is worth reading in full.
But the most important words in the piece are not Hegseth’s. They are Abraham Lincoln’s, from his second inaugural address in 1865, as the Civil War neared its end.
“Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. Let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has his own purposes.”
Lincoln did not claim to know whose side God was on. He acknowledged that he, as a man, was in no position to know. He looked to the future not with triumphalism but with the slow difficult work of binding up wounds and making peace.
The Guardian — Pete Hegseth’s holy war
