(Photo illustration by Bill Kuchman/The Bulwark | Photos: Creative Commons, Shutterstock)
ANYONE WHO HAS EVER BEEN A BOSS or had a boss knows that the influence of a superior extends far beyond explicit instructions. Subtle signs of expectations, priorities, values, and preferences can be just as important, if not more so. This is especially true in the military, where the hierarchy is rigid and formal. Commanders are responsible not only for the orders they give but for their “command climate.” When that climate becomes religiously tinged, it creates a dangerous situation—for our military, for our country, and for the Constitution.
This is why I find Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s increasingly overt use of evangelical Christian language and symbolism in his official role so troubling.
Military service has a way of stripping life down to its essentials. During deployments, especially in combat, soldiers confront fear, grief, exhaustion, and uncertainty in ways that are difficult to explain to those who have not experienced them. Faith can become an extraordinary source of strength; it can provide comfort to a frightened young soldier, give meaning to a grieving family, and offer hope to a unit struggling after battlefield losses. I’ve witnessed those moments, and I’ve seen chaplains help soldiers and assuage their families’ grief through some of the most difficult experiences imaginable.
Hegseth has every right to his personal religious convictions, as does every service member. There is nothing inherently inappropriate about a secretary of defense attending worship services, seeking spiritual guidance, or discussing the importance of faith in his own life. Nor is there anything wrong with strengthening the military’s chaplaincy, ensuring religious accommodations, or providing better spiritual support to service members and their families. These are goals I wholeheartedly support.
But Hegseth has gone further. He invited his personal spiritual adviser to lead a worship service at the Pentagon. He has repeatedly used explicitly Christian language in official communications. Just recently, he described his department as putting on the “armor of God,” because “while we wage physical war, we all know the real battle is spiritual.” His rhetoric and actions raise legitimate questions about whether the department is strengthening religious freedom for everyone or elevating a particular interpretation of Christianity within the chain of command.
FAITH HAS AN IMPORTANT ROLE in the military—but it isn’t missionary work or evangelism. When we lost soldiers in Iraq, chaplains were among the most important members of the unit. They offered something orders, operational plans, and military briefings could never provide: compassion in the face of unbearable loss. Chaplains are representatives of their own faith traditions, but they are also commissioned officers serving a diverse military community. Chaplains of every denomination will sit quietly with an atheist struggling with grief, without attempting to convert that person or suggesting that the absence of religious belief makes the grief less meaningful. Every chaplain is deeply committed to their religious convictions while recognizing that the soldiers they serve are entitled to their own. They also understand the distinction between providing religious ministry and imposing religious belief.
Over nearly forty years in uniform, I commanded soldiers from different religions, backgrounds, cultures, and communities—some deeply religious, others irreligious. What mattered to me was their character, competence, and commitment to one another. In combat, the soldier beside you does not become more trustworthy because of the way they pray. Trust comes from knowing that person will do their duty, protect their teammates, and uphold the nation’s and the profession’s values.
Commanders and all leaders in the military have an equally important obligation. They are responsible for creating an environment where every soldier can practice a faith, change a faith, or profess no faith without fearing that those choices will affect their standing in the unit. That responsibility is particularly important because of the nature of military authority. When a commander speaks, subordinates listen. In a hierarchical organization where assignments, evaluations, promotions, and careers depend on leaders’ judgments, the distinction between encouragement and pressure can become dangerously blurred.
That’s why leaders at any rank or position must be particularly thoughtful when discussing their personal religious convictions. While they need never be ashamed of their faith, they also should not use their rank, authority, or influence to suggest their beliefs are preferred.
The Constitution to which every soldier, sailor, airman, marine, and guardian swears an oath protects religious liberty by prohibiting government establishment of religion and guaranteeing free exercise. It also prohibits religious tests for public office.
FREEDOM FROM RELIGIOUS PRESSURE isn’t just a right guaranteed by the Constitution and a requirement for a multi-confessional force drawn from a country that has always been divided by religion. It’s also an important part of the heritage of the American military from its earliest days, bequeathed to us by George Washington.
Before Washington was president, he was our nation’s first top military commander and the creator of the Chaplain Corps. While he was an Anglican/Episcopalian, he was a staunch believer in religious liberty and pluralism. He did not require members of either the Continental Army or the United States Army to subscribe to a particular religion. (Interestingly, he also didn’t have specific religious requirements for the people he enslaved.) As president, he attended services of various faiths, including Catholic, Protestant, and Quaker services. He was clear, in a letter to Virginia Baptists worried about the lack of protections for religion in the original text of the Constitution, that he would never have endorsed the document if he thought it didn’t protect freedom of religion.
Perhaps most famously, he responded to a letter from the Jewish congregation of Newport, Rhode Island with one of the great statements of religious pluralism in American history:
It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.
He rejected the notion that religious freedom was something a majority graciously granted a minority. Liberty of conscience was an inherent right of citizenship. A general who had commanded a revolutionary army and a president helping establish an entirely new form of government understood that national unity did not require religious uniformity. His own religious convictions did not give him the authority to define someone else’s identity.
What a contrast with the current secretary of defense.
A secretary of defense should be the strongest advocate for every service member’s freedom of conscience, including those whose beliefs and faiths differ profoundly from his own. He must ensure that religious accommodations are respected and that no soldier ever feels compelled to participate in a religious activity to demonstrate loyalty or professional commitment.
A SECRETARY OF DEFENSE SHOULD ALSO BE a person whose religious faith makes him humble, responsible, and committed to serving others. I’ve spent much of my adult life studying Washington, and, like him, I rose to the rank of lieutenant general (the rank Washington held when he died) after experiencing my share of failures. Those failures taught me that leadership requires learning from mistakes, acknowledging shortcomings, and understanding that the responsibilities entrusted to any leader must be greater than any personal ambitions.
That’s one of the reasons I’ve always been drawn to the character George Washington in the musical Hamilton. The depiction is, needless to say, an imperfect representation of the man, but it captures part of his essence by portraying leadership through virtue. Like Washington the historical figure, Washington the character self-consciously performs a show of leadership that the rest of us can emulate.
Washington the man was very private about his religious convictions and beliefs, but there’s no doubt that he took the moral teachings of religion extremely seriously. He spent a portion of his Farewell Address on the necessity of religion—in the sense not of a particular faith, but of moral instruction—for a people to remain free.
I can’t help but infer that it was Washington’s seriousness about faith and virtue that led him to address his own failings head on. As a young man, he famously wrote out 110 rules of civility, perhaps so that he could be polite to everyone he met. He also knew that he had, at times, a short temper, which he spent his entire life learning to control. And it’s hard to interpret his decision to free all his slaves upon the death of his wife, Martha,1 as anything other than an admission that slavery was morally repugnant.
Washington the character from Hamilton sings an entire song about how replaceable he is. In “One Last Time,” he explains that, with his decision to voluntarily resign from politics rather than seeking a third presidential term, “the nation learns to move on” and “outlives me when I’m gone.” To my mind, the sense of serving something that is greater than you, and will outlast you, is a deeply religious one.
During the show’s finale, as Eliza Hamilton describes her efforts to fight slavery, something Washington himself failed to do during his lifetime, Washington lowers his head in shame. To me, that gesture says more about leadership, character, and the contradictions and aspirations of American history than any lengthy biography.
Hamilton: The Revolution, the book co-written by Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jeremy McCarter about the creation of the musical, describes the struggle of Christopher Jackson, the actor who inaugurated the role of Washington, to portray the man he admired but whose participation in slavery he could never reconcile. In researching the role, Jackson wanted to understand Washington’s strengths, failures, and shame. He eventually concluded that portraying Washington truthfully required acknowledging both his greatness and his moral failings. Jackson once offered an observation that has stayed with me: “The idea of our nation is perfect, the execution is not.” A remarkable insight into the American experiment, and into the responsibility of those entrusted with leading it.
When, in the musical, Washington tells Hamilton he won’t run again for president, Miranda has Washington cite a favorite biblical passage—one that appears as a motif throughout his correspondence, including in his letter to the Newport Hebrew congregation: “Every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.” It’s a beautiful image of peace, security, and belonging. But as Miranda and McCarter explain in their book, those words meant more to Washington than a peaceful retirement at Mount Vernon.
Every American who serves our nation deserves to sit safely beneath their own vine and fig tree, without fear. Washington understood that promise, and our military leaders must ensure we keep it.