Pete Hegseth Tried to Invoke the Almighty. He Invoked Quentin Tarantino Instead

On Wednesday, April 15, 2026, Pete Hegseth stood at a Pentagon worship service, Jerusalem Cross stamped on his Bible, and led the room in prayer. He told the assembled that the prayer had been recited by the Sandy 1 combat search-and-rescue crew ahead of the mission that recovered a downed American pilot in Iran. He said it was called “CSAR 25:17,” which he believed was meant to reflect Ezekiel 25:17. He asked everyone to pray with him. And then he read, with evident solemnity, the pre-murder monologue delivered by Samuel L. Jackson’s hitman Jules Winnfield in Pulp Fiction.

Not a paraphrase. Not an adaptation. The speech Jules delivers in Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 film before he shoots a man to death — the one that begins “the path of the righteous man is beset on all sides” — that one. Hegseth swapped in “downed aviator” for “righteous man” and replaced “you will know my name is the Lord” with “you will know my call sign is Sandy 1,” which is somehow both more and less theologically coherent than the original. Everything else is Tarantino. The real Ezekiel 25:17, in the actual King James Bible, is one sentence: God promises vengeance on the Philistines. That’s it. The extended soliloquy about shepherding the weak through the valley of darkness? That’s not scripture. That’s a screenplay. Tarantino himself lifted it from a 1973 Japanese martial arts film and it was already fake when Jules said it.

This is what divine sanction looks like in the Department of War in the spring of 2026. The Secretary himself has argued — at the Pentagon’s own monthly worship services, which he instituted — that what happens in those services should inform military and policy decisions made the rest of the week. He said it out loud, on the record, in the same breath as discussing naval blockades with an admiral. The war gets the prayer. The prayer is a movie. The man running the movie doesn’t know it’s a movie.

At a separate press conference that same day, Hegseth compared journalists to the Pharisees — the New Testament figures who opposed Jesus — accusing them of witnessing miracles and refusing to believe. That one’s actually in the Bible, so progress, technically. But the theological theme is consistent: this administration is doing God’s work, and anyone who says otherwise has a hardened heart. The pope said otherwise.

Pope Leo XIV, on Palm Sunday, offered the view that Jesus “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war.” Archbishop Reinhard Marx of Munich called Hegseth’s Pentagon theology “shameless blasphemy.” The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops pushed back on the Vice President by pointing out that when the pope speaks as the Church’s supreme pastor, he is “not merely offering opinions on theology” — he is preaching the gospel. This was in response to JD Vance, who had some thoughts.

Vladimir Futon, appearing at a Turning Point USA event in Athens, Georgia, advised the leader of the Roman Catholic Church to “be careful” when discussing matters of theology. He framed it as a matter of professional responsibility — the same way a Vice President should be careful about matters of public policy, he said, the pope should be careful about matters of theology. This was not a parody. The man who converted to Catholicism in 2019 was instructing the Bishop of Rome, the successor of Peter, the head of a two-thousand-year-old institution, to watch his step on doctrine. He also told the pope to “stick to matters of morality,” which raises the question of what Vance believes the pope has been doing, but we’ll leave that for the theologians. 

Let’s sit with the architecture of this for a moment. The Pope is criticizing a war. Not a war that has been ongoing for decades, not a war the United States was pulled into by treaty obligation or a surprise attack, but a war that Donald Trump started in March 2026 and has offered inconsistent explanations for ever since. A war the administration’s own people have publicly contradicted each other about in terms of what threat it was meant to address, what the nuclear intelligence actually said, and what the end state is supposed to look like. That war. And the Vice President - (to a man three times married, credibly accused of sexual assault and lies as easily as he breathes) is informing the pope that his theological commentary needs to be anchored in truth. The Onion can’t make this shit up.

Even Senate Majority Leader John Thune, a Republican, looked at Vance’s comments and said “when he talks about matters of theology? Isn’t that his job?” That’s the party’s own leader in the Senate. Trump, for his part, spent several days calling the pope weak on crime, bad on foreign policy, and soft on what he characterized as Obama sympathizers — before posting an AI-generated image depicting himself as Jesus Christ and later claimed was him as a doctor for the Red Cross. Absolutely ludicrous.  The image was deleted. The statement was not retracted. KKKaroline, crucifix gleaming from the TV lights, claimed the image was doctored. The war continues.

Here is what is actually happening. The administration is constructing a theological argument for a war it launched unilaterally, without congressional authorization, and without a coherent public explanation. The Defense Secretary is running worship services where God is invoked to bless specific military operations, while arguing those services should inform policy. When the most prominent Christian leader on earth objects — on religious and moral grounds, in terms drawn directly from scripture — the response from the White House is not to engage the argument. The response is to tell the pope he’s doing theology wrong.

Secretary of Defense Kegsbreath cited a fake Bible verse from a Tarantino film. Vice President Hillbilly Vanilli told the pope to be more careful about scripture. The President called the pontiff weak on crime. This is the theological infrastructure of the United States government right now. Jules Winnfield had a crisis of conscience after the diner scene and walked away from the life. The people invoking his fake Bible verse at the Pentagon are still very much in it.