Hegseth Built a New Pentagon Office for Religion. Military Religious Leaders Wish He Hadn’t.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has extended a line for the military’s religious leaders to reach him directly — and current and former military chaplains say they don’t want it.

Hegseth announced the creation of a new Office of Religious Affairs on September 30, vowing that the office would give members of the armed forces’ chaplain corps access to him without “bureaucratic dilution.” It coincides with his openly Christian “Send Me” campaign, an online propaganda effort that the Pentagon launched over the summer promoting a biblical phrase widely understood as a vow to accept a divine mission.

“We should not be in the business of wrapping the state’s mission in one particular religion,” an active-duty Army captain serving as a non-Christian chaplain told The Intercept. But as Hegseth’s Pentagon increasingly pushes Christianity, the chaplain, who was granted anonymity because he feared retaliation from the Defense Department, said he and other non-Christian chaplains worry the new religious affairs office will be used to do just that.

Hegseth’s body bears an assortment of Christian and Crusader imagery, including a Jerusalem cross across his chest and the Latin phrase “Deus vult,” or “God wills it,” on his bicep — a battle cry associated with the medieval Crusades that has since been adopted by far-right extremists. His forearm bears a cross and sword referencing Matthew 10:34, in which Jesus declares that he came not to bring peace but a sword, alongside the Hebrew name for Jesus. In 2021, a fellow National Guard member flagged Hegseth as a potential security threat over his Deus vult tattoo, before Hegseth was removed from an assignment protecting Joe Biden’s inauguration.

As defense secretary, Hegseth has frequently turned to messaging that centers religion and vengeance while promoting the U.S. and Israel’s unpopular war in Iran. His “Send Me” campaign is built around Isaiah 6:8, a biblical verse commonly invoked by Christians as a call to serve God. During his 9/11 speech last month at the Pentagon, Hegseth said the “struggle against evil” that followed the attacks continues today and “will continue until Judgment Day,” before turning to the current war with Iran.

“Using specific scriptural language for a military campaign inappropriately frames state-sanctioned armed conflict and government service as a Christian religious crusade,” the chaplain said. “Once a mission is declared God’s will, every act inside it is sanctified in advance.”

The new Office of Religious Affairs, the chaplain said, could entrench this dynamic. While the Pentagon memo establishing the office says it cannot compel religious participation or diminish the free-exercise rights of service members of any faith or no faith, the office’s director will report directly to Hegseth and the deputy defense secretary, oversee the Armed Forces Chaplains Board, and work with the civilian religious organizations that endorse military chaplains. The office will also oversee efforts to assess spiritual fitness, spiritual readiness, and spiritual resilience across the force. This consolidated control, the chaplain warned, may make it difficult to maintain pluralism among the chaplain corps.

“Our chaplain corps must serve [non-Christian service members], not just the soldiers that share a faith with the SecDef,” the Army chaplain said. While it’s too early to know what that authority will mean for non-Christian chaplains, he wondered how it might change the ranks of the chaplaincy itself.

“Will this group begin accepting fewer and fewer non-Christian chaplains into our ranks?” he said. “Will we begin seeing fewer and fewer non-Christian chaplains be chosen for promotions?”

The concerns extend beyond the active-duty chaplain. Rev. Dr. Rebekah Savage, a former military chaplain who now helps oversee the Unitarian Universalist Association’s endorsement of clergy serving as military chaplains, said the organization was not consulted before the office was established.

“I am deeply concerned about how this office will serve the religious needs of the members of the service,” she said. “I can’t speak for others who are a part of the chaplaincy corps, but I know I am not alone.”

In response to questions about the new office from The Intercept, Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson wrote in a statement that the department “protects the constitutional right of every service member and civilian employee to practice their faith without coercion or discrimination. This is why Secretary Hegseth recently established the Office of Religious Affairs.” She said that prayer services and religious activities are always voluntary.

“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,” Wilson added. “Despite the Left’s efforts to remove our Christian heritage from our great nation, Secretary Hegseth is among those who embrace it.”

In August, when “SEND ME” could still be dismissed as a string of social media posts, the Pentagon repeatedly declined to explain what the phrase meant or whether it represented a broader communications strategy.

As scholars of religion previously explained to The Intercept, the Pentagon’s use of the passage strips away part of the biblical story. Isaiah is not being sent to destroy God’s enemies; he is being sent to preach a warning to his own people. And the commission ends not in military triumph, but judgment. Cities are left empty, the land is devastated, and God’s own people suffer the destruction.

“Secretary Hegseth’s Send Me Tour is a military outreach and recruitment initiative focused on recognizing the Americans who volunteer to serve,” Wilson added in her statement. “We are grateful for the Americans—past, present, and future–who have raised their right hand and said, ‘Send Me.'”

Hegseth addresses Reserve Officers’ Training Corps cadets during a “Send Me” tour event at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, on Oct. 17, 2026. Photo: Capt. Tessa Lindsey/U.S. Army National Guard

Questions about the Pentagon’s treatment of minority religious traditions predate the new office.

In June, Savage joined 10 other religious endorsers in a letter to Hegseth objecting to revisions to the military’s Religious Affiliations Code list. The signatories said the changes removed or obscured the identities of several religious communities, including Unitarian Universalists, historically Black churches, and Wiccan and Pagan practitioners.

The endorsers warned that the changes could affect religious accommodations, access to clergy, and the distribution of chaplaincy resources.

“Classification is resource allocation,” they wrote.

Savage said the earlier changes, combined with the establishment of the Office of Religious Affairs, “calls the Department’s commitment to meeting the spiritual needs of all of its members into question.”

The active-duty Army chaplain questioned how the office’s stated religious-freedom protections would work in practice under a defense secretary who has increasingly incorporated Christian scripture into his public messaging.

“What oversight will exist to prevent religious bias?” he said. “When investments are made, will they be defining spiritual fitness by Christian, or by more pluralistic metrics?”

The same concerns extend to money. The office’s funding priorities include faith-based home school support for military families, faith-based suicide-reduction programs, and contracts with faith-based organizations.

“Will the Humanists, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and other groups receive an equal, commensurate amount of support and funding for such programs?” the Army chaplain said. “Or will all or most of the funding go to Christian based organizations?”

Beyond institutional support, the chaplain said the Pentagon’s religious messaging could interfere with one of the central responsibilities of his profession: helping service members navigate questions of conscience, morality, and killing.

In reporting for Task & Purpose last month, this reporter examined how Army chaplains were preparing to address the moral and spiritual consequences of artificial intelligence in warfare. As one scholar of military ethics pointed out, moral injury can arise when service members feel responsible for actions that violate their values, even when they have little meaningful control over those decisions.

The Army chaplain raised a related concern: What happens when the military itself invokes religious authority to justify its mission?

“What can I say to a non-Christian soldier who is being ordered to kill his fellow man or risk dying himself for a god he does not believe in?”

“If my role as a chaplain is to advise soldiers and commanders of issues of morality and ethics, what can I say to them now?” he said. “How can I advise a commander on doing moral and ethical actions if the state has announced that their god has ordained their war?”

For service members who do not share the religious beliefs invoked by military leadership, the Army chaplain said, that tension could be especially difficult to reconcile.

“What can I say to a non-Christian soldier who is being ordered to kill his fellow man or risk dying himself for a god he does not believe in?” he said. “What do I tell a soldier who believes an action is immoral, but also believes that God commanded it?”

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