Pete Hegseth’s Pastor Calls Immodest Women ‘Sluts’ as War Secretary Prays for ‘Righteous Violence’ Against Iran

Just a week before the United States launched a war with Iran, Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, invited Doug Wilson — a 72-year-old ultraconservative pastor notorious for incendiary sermons — to lead prayers at the Pentagon. Wilson’s message is crystal clear: women who dress “immodestly” are “sluts,” homosexuality is a sin, and Darwin’s theory of evolution is “the silliest thing in the world.”

Wilson founded the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC) in the 1990s, once considered a fringe sect with little political influence. But now, Washington is “crawling with conservative Christian believers,” according to Wilson, who recently opened a church on Capitol Hill to serve a growing flock of about 45,000 members worldwide. The church’s mission? To “conquer the world,” as Wilson puts it, quoting Jesus’s command.

Hegseth’s alliance with Wilson is more than spiritual. The war secretary, who has a documented history of personal scandals including a $50,000 settlement over sexual assault allegations he denies, has adopted Wilson’s apocalyptic worldview. In March, during a Pentagon prayer session, Hegseth called on “the Almighty” to “grant this taskforce clear and righteous targets for violence” and to “break the teeth of the ungodly.” The language is straight out of Old Testament fire-and-brimstone rhetoric, casting the Iran war as a holy crusade.

Wilson, a scholar of medieval history, openly compares the US conflict with Iran to the Crusades, framing Iran as an “evil entity” in the “Bible part of the world.” He dismisses the idea of fighting Canada over fishing rights because Canadians are “fellow Christians,” but insists Iran’s leadership is “wicked” and justifies aggressive warfare language. The pastor even downplays the notion that the US is explicitly Christian enough to call this a crusade, but notes that “the Muslims think of it as a Crusade.”

Hegseth’s personal symbolism underscores this militant religiosity. He sports tattoos of the Jerusalem Cross and the Latin phrase Deus vult (“God wills it”), both Crusader emblems also co-opted by white supremacist groups. Hegseth claims criticism of these tattoos is “anti-Christian bigotry.”

Yet Wilson does not shy away from criticizing the Trump administration’s moral shortcomings. He calls Trump “not someone I would call a godly Christian man,” condemns the appointment of a gay Treasury secretary as sinful, and brands Trump’s AI-generated image depicting himself as Jesus as “blasphemous.” Still, Wilson seems willing to overlook these flaws in light of the Christian right’s political gains.

The alliance between Hegseth and Wilson exposes a troubling fusion of extremist religious ideology and US military policy. As the Pentagon embraces prayers for “righteous violence” and frames foreign wars as divine missions, the line between faith and fanaticism dangerously blurs — with real consequences for democracy and global peace.