Last year Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced that he was going to “make the chaplain corps great again.”
It was the beginning of a campaign to highlight religion in the U.S. military, moving on from what Hegseth called a time of secular humanism at the Pentagon into one of faith — particularly the Christian faith.
In his recent “State of the Force” address, Hegseth said faith is essential for service members, and the U.S. military must prepare for both physical and spiritual warfare.
“Our department is, you might say, putting on the full armor of God,” he said, a reference to a passage from Ephesians in the Bible. “God is good. Evil is not. And America’s military must understand the difference.”
Earlier this year, the Pentagon slashed its official list of recognized religions from more than 200 down to 30, stripping Unitarian Universalism, Wicca and Asatru and others from the list, as well as humanism and paganism.
The official ranks of military chaplains have been removed from their uniforms, and replaced instead with a marking of their specific religion, whether a cross for Christianity or a crescent for Islam. And Christianity has taken center stage in department messaging.
On a recent visit to Texas A&M this September, Hegseth announced the start of the “Send Me Tour,” a recruitment initiative connecting the secretary with young ROTC members and university cadets around the country.
“Each of us committed to the nation with the sentiment of the sixth chapter of the book of Isaiah,” Hegseth said during his address. “Lord, here I am. Send me. Send me to fight the Redcoats. Send me to fight the Communists. Send me to fight the Islamists. Send me.”
Recruits from Texas can help lead the charge, he said.
“If we don’t have Texans like these out there on the front lines, we don’t have a republic,” he told A&M cadets.
During his State of the Force address Hegseth also announced the creation of a new Pentagon Office of Religious Affairs, which will directly oversee chaplains and report to him.
Worry among chaplains
Chaplains have traditionally served a variety of roles in the military. They deploy with troops to provide worship services, administer sacraments and offer spiritual guidance.
They also offer confidential counseling and work with military families on base to aid them in times of grief — and they support a U.S. military where more than 70% of service members identify as people of faith, with a majority identifying as some form of Christian, and Catholics being the most prevalent denomination.
To the former Chief Chaplain of the Air Force, retired Major General Howard Stendahl, the idea of making the chaplain core “great again” by emphasizing Christianity is contradictory to the founding principle of freedom of religion.
“Temptation to establish religion, it’s a dangerous and precipitous possibility with the rise of Christian nationalism,” he said.
Stendahl, who was the top spiritual leader for 680,000 military personnel at the height of his career and was ordained as a Lutheran minister, got his start at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio. He went on to become a Command Chaplain at Randolph Air Force Base before heading to the Chief Chaplain job at the Pentagon.
For Stendahl, the explicit reference to one religion in the chaplain corps would have been a foreign idea during his 30 years of chaplaincy. Ordained as a Lutheran minister, Stendahl said he strove to honor and respect the religious preferences of a diverse fighting force.
“I wouldn’t want any member of the military — or certainly the constituency, our population of the United States — to believe we wage war in the name of Jesus Christ,” Stendahl said.
He said that the chaplain corps was deeply committed to helping troops practice their faith to the fullest extent. For some service members of unrepresented different faith backgrounds, he would seek out faith leaders of their own religions and bring them to the base to administer sacraments or provide guidance specific to their religions.
Stendahl and other former chaplains worry those kinds of inclusive practices are now becoming less common.
“This is really going in a direction away from accommodation to ‘Gosh, golly, if you want to do well and stay in favor of this administration, here’s the exact hymns that you’ll be singing, so to speak, and the verses you’ll be using in Scripture,'” said Retired Major General William Razz Waff. “This is not helpful for our Jewish and Muslim and Hindu or Sikh friends at all.”
Waff, an Episcopal priest and past national chair of the Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Pastoral Services, said he’s seen an influx of military chaplains from evangelical faiths recently, a trend that began before Hegseth was appointed.
“[I’m] very concerned that we’re going to have this funnel of evangelical Christianity, one flavor, and everybody is going to get fire-hosed with this,” Waff said.
Chaplains must be recommended to the military by an endorsing agent of their faith.
Waff says evangelical organizations have prioritized training and placing chaplains in the military. Among them is Liberty University, the conservative Christian college which recently formed a new partnership with the Pentagon.
Liberty has its own endorsing agent through the Liberty Baptist Fellowship — “they’re flooding the zone,” Waff said.
For comparison, the Roman Catholic Church, which roughly 25% of service members identify as a part of, is similarly represented by one endorsing agent.
Liberty University did not respond to requests for more information.
A longer movement
Some advocates have been hoping to see changes to military religion protocols for years. The Liberty Counsel, a group that sued the Biden administration over mandatory COVID-19 vaccinations for service members, says the directives are a positive sign.
Daniel Schmid, the organization’s vice president of Legal Affairs, says Hegseth is entitled to embrace his own religion, and he applauds the creation of Hegseth’s office of religious affairs.
“He has the right to his beliefs, and as long as he’s not imposing them on anyone, and I don’t think he is, I think he’s trying to protect everybody from different faiths. Then that’s a step in the right direction,” he said.
A spokesperson said the Pentagon has no additional details to provide about how the Office of Religious Affairs will function or who will lead it.
In Hegseth’s announcement of changes to the corps he said chaplains had been “degraded” during an era of political correctness, and that the Army Spiritual Fitness Guide, a spiritual resource manual, only mentioned God once.
“It alienates our warfighters of faith by pushing secular humanism,” Hegseth said.
The Trump administration recently released a list of his second presidency’s “top 250 victories for people of faith.” Ten of these wins “strengthened our military,” the list says, three of those in reference to the repeal of the COVID vaccine mandate and the reinstatement of service members who refused to take the shot.
Hegseth made another change to vaccine policy, the repeal of the influenza vaccine requirement. Shortly after that decision, Lackland Air Force base was home to a flu outbreak that saw nearly 300 trainees sickened and one left dead.
Impeachment vote
Shortly before Congress recessed for a month leading up to the November midterms, Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Kentucky, introduced articles of impeachment against Hegseth, citing his handling of the war in Iran.
Rather than risking a vote, Speaker Mike Johnson sent the House of Representatives home early ahead of the midterm election.
Another vote that was pushed is a decision on the Major Richard Star Act discharge petition. The popular veterans benefits bill received the required 218 signatures necessary to force a floor vote, but was also pushed until after the Nov. 3 election.
The vote will be on the standalone bill, separating the act from the controversial Take Care of America’s Veterans Act, the combination of 62 bills that has divided veterans groups and Congress.
Johnson has not said when the act will be called to a vote.
The San Antonio Report’s military and veterans coverage is supported by Report for America.
