Pentagon Office of Religious Affairs Has a Favorite

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced a new Pentagon Office of Religious Affairs on Wednesday, and the office comes with a written promise: it will advocate for military chaplains at the highest level of the department without compelling religious participation, favoring one faith, or diminishing the rights of personnel of any faith or none, according to the Associated Press. The promise is on paper. The record around it makes it hard to take at face value.

Hegseth introduced the Pentagon Office of Religious Affairs in a speech, telling the audience that "our department is, you might say, putting on the full armor of God, because while we wage physical war, we all know the real battle is spiritual," as the AP reported. That is the language of a man who has hosted Christian worship services for Pentagon employees and spoken of the United States as a Christian nation, the AP noted. The office will report directly to him. Allies are already uneasy about the direction of the department; Canada's prime minister has said he is prepared for the extreme tail risk of US military action.

The neutrality pledge does not match the record

A Pentagon statement says the new office will not favor any faith. But the Pentagon Office of Religious Affairs arrives after a string of faith-related moves that point in a single direction. Hegseth ordered the military's list of recognized religious affiliations cut from more than two hundred codes to thirty-one, according to reporting from the Air Force Times. Critics noted that most of the remaining codes cover Christian denominations, and the new list no longer includes atheists, Unitarian Universalists, pagans, or Wiccans, according to an analysis published on Substack. Under the previous administration, Army Chaplain Corps guidelines said the corps represented a far wider range of faiths.

Hegseth also ordered chaplains to stop wearing rank insignia and wear symbols of their faith instead, the Air Force Times reported. He has said the Chaplain Corps was afflicted by "political correctness and secular humanism," according to SSBCrack, and argued the corps had drifted from deeply rooted faith toward a therapeutic approach. In December, when he eliminated the Army's Spiritual Fitness Guide, he said chaplains are "not emotional support officers," as the Substack analysis reported. Now the same secretary is placing spiritual health "at the same level as physical health," as he put it on Wednesday, and building the Pentagon Office of Religious Affairs to formalize that elevation. Chaplains were told they are ministers, not therapists. Now spiritual readiness is being sold as equal to physical readiness, and the secretary has not explained how both can be true.

Chaplains were never the problem this office solves

The Chaplain Corps has existed since George Washington founded it in July 1775, according to the Christian Post, which puts the active-duty Army chaplain headcount in the low four figures. Chaplains already ministered to troops of every faith, and to troops of none, long before anyone proposed a new office reporting to the secretary. The Pentagon Office of Religious Affairs does not create religious support. It moves religious authority upward, into the hands of a secretary whose public worship has been conspicuously, specifically Christian.

In May, Hegseth led a Pentagon prayer that began "King Jesus, we come humbly before you," according to the Christian Post. The featured speaker at a February service was Doug Wilson, the Moscow, Idaho, pastor who founded the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, according to the same Substack account. Hegseth has been associated with a church linked to Wilson's congregation, according to SSBCrack. Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson told the Daily Beast the prayer services are voluntary and nobody is punished for skipping them. Lou Elliott-Cysewski, a spokesperson for Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, told the Daily Beast that a sense of greater mission is useful in the military, but warned that "being weaponized is the opposite of what the original intention is," adding, "People tune out and I think that's really, really dangerous." That warning is worth keeping in mind as the Pentagon Office of Religious Affairs takes shape.

Read the memo, not the press release

The practical details are worth reading closely. The Pentagon Office of Religious Affairs has no named director yet. A Pentagon memo says the military department secretaries must submit a baseline report of unfunded and underfunded religious affairs requirements within ninety days, according to the Air Force Times. The director will coordinate spiritual resources, including support for military families using faith-based homeschooling, the Substack account also reported. The memo also lists contracted services from faith-based organizations outside the federal government among the things the office could fund, according to the AP's account of the announcement. That last item means public defense dollars could flow to private religious groups, with the selection process decided by an office that answers to Hegseth alone.

Faith offices elsewhere in the federal government are not new. They were established under President George W. Bush and continued in different forms under Presidents Obama and Biden, as the AP noted, and President Trump established a White House Faith Office. None of that makes the Pentagon version ordinary. The same department spent the fall defending its Anthropic blacklist in court, and Washington's lofty promises keep deflating; the White House's "morally binding" AI accord turned out to be just a handshake. A faith liaison in a domestic agency is routine. The Pentagon Office of Religious Affairs sits inside the institution that commands the armed forces, created by a secretary who narrowed the recognized faith list and hosts Christian services at headquarters. That is something else.

Rachel Laser, the head of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, put the objection plainly, telling the AP that Hegseth's announcement "violates that promise by elevating Christianity to an even higher role in shaping U.S. military policy." Her organization has sued the Pentagon over its worship services. The Pentagon's statement says the Pentagon Office of Religious Affairs will favor no faith. Everything else the secretary has done on religion suggests the office will not need to name the one it serves. The Pentagon Office of Religious Affairs is faith infrastructure, built by a secretary who has already decided which faith the infrastructure is for.