Dear Friend,
At his Pentagon prayer service this week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth prayed for “great vengeance and furious anger.” It wasn’t from the Bible. It was from a 1970s Japanese martial arts movie that was later popularized by Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction.
Hegseth’s gaffe might be a laughable meme, if it weren’t part of a much more serious pattern. Days later, the Defense Secretary invoked scripture again during a press conference sermon on the Iran War, calling reporters elitist “Pharisees” and likening Trump to Jesus.
It’s a familiar recipe: lots of conviction, no care.
Vice President JD Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019, recently said the Vatican should “stick to matters of morality” and that Pope Leo XIV ought to “be careful” when discussing theology. Both Vance and Speaker Mike Johnson invoked Saint Augustine’s “just war” theory to defend the Iran war and dismiss the Augustinian pope’s calls for peace, with Johnson declaring, “It’s a very well-settled matter of Christian theology.”
Repeat it enough, and your myth becomes unquestionable doctrine.
“Just war” theory isn’t a religious invention, though. Thinkers across centuries and cultures have wrestled with when war is warranted. Before Augustine, Aristotle suggested militaries should be used in self-defense. Chinese philosophers wrote prolifically about warfare. And in India, centuries prior to the Common Era, the Hindu text Mahābhārata presented the first written case for righteous war.
But the politicians parading as theologians aren’t actually interested in applying any real or coherent tradition. Instead, they are, as zealots have long done, writing a new script — selecting, distorting, or inventing whatever justifies the outcome they wanted all along.
On Monday, Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission held its final hearing. Chairman and Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick promptly summarized their findings: “There is no such thing as ‘separation of church and state’ in the Constitution. For too long, the anti-God Left has used this phrase to suppress people of religion in our country.”
That result was never in doubt. Patrick’s been saying it since at least 2013. So, it’s hardly surprising that a cherry-picked group, led by a guy who believes God wrote the Constitution, held a series of meetings at a Bible museum, excluded alternative viewpoints, and arrived exactly where they started.
Last year, American Atheists warned the Commission its deliberate exclusion of minority and nonreligious perspectives would “fatally undermine” any semblance of objectivity. We were right.
The final hearing was filled with attacks on nonreligious Americans, with commissioners calling church-state separation “the biggest lie that’s been told in America since our founding” and warning against the rise of religious Nones because “the secular movement attacks all of us” and “secularists” are to blame for undermining the “fact” that “at the heart of American liberty and religious liberty is faith in the God of the Bible.”
That’s how the project advances from absurd assertions to institutional authority.
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas took it even further, arguing in a speech this week that the founding principle of the United States is that “all rights come from God, not government.” Because “Progressivism” does not agree, he said its proponents (whom he compared to Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and Mao) represent an existential threat that is “incompatible with a constitution premised on the transcendent origin of our rights” and “cannot coexist.”
One attendee observed: “His lecture was really a priestly pronouncement, a sacred reading of a Godly text that listeners were to take in and accept on faith — a word he repeated more often that ‘Constitution’ or ‘law.’”
Of course, faith can’t be tested or debated. So, when the mythmakers are in charge, belief is proof enough. And true believers needn’t answer to anyone on Earth. What began as something that resembled pulp fiction — strange and exaggerated to the point of almost laughable absurdity — becomes a very real and dangerous system in which power is justified by assertions that are never questioned, let alone proven.
There’s a temptation even among fierce critics of Christian Nationalism to respond to this moment by elevating “better” or more inclusive and sincere expressions of faith, but that approach continues to miss the point. The problem isn’t whose faith is guiding public policies; it’s that faith is being used at all to claim certainty and replace verifiable truths.
I don’t want our nation’s foreign or domestic policies shaped by anybody’s theology. Leaders in a secular democracy must ask if their actions are rationally sound, not theologically so. Because if we allow faith to serve as proof, power gets to assert itself without any need to explain itself.
And that, indeed, leaves us with something very Tarantinoan: a world of great vengeance and furious anger, where over-the-top characters with no understanding of irony believe their cruelty is justified no matter what.
Only here in the real world, we don’t get to walk away after the blood is spilled and the credits roll.
In solidarity,
Melina Cohen
Director of Strategic Communications & Policy Engagement
American Atheists is a 501(c)(3) non-partisan, nonprofit educational organization that relies on the support of members like you. Contributions are tax-deductible. Our Federal Tax ID Number is 74-2466507.
American Atheists
225 Cristiani Street
Cranford, NJ 07016
United States