It’s been a peculiar week for Pete Hegseth. On Wednesday, the Pentagon official stood at a podium and delivered what he described as a prayer used by combat search and rescue teams, a prayer he attributed to the Old Testament book of Ezekiel. The issue: it sounded far more like a monologue by Samuel L. Jackson before an execution in Pulp Fiction.
Hegseth’s version began: “The path of the righteous man is assailed on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men.” Quentin Tarantino’s original, spoken by Jackson’s hitman character Jules Winnfield just before pulling the trigger, starts almost identically. The actual verse from Ezekiel 25:17 is a simple sentence about vengeance on the Philistines.
“Anyone who claims the secretary misquoted Ezekiel 25:17 is peddling fake news and ignoring reality,” stated Sean Parnell, a Pentagon spokesperson, who also confirmed that the prayer was “clearly inspired by a Pulp Fiction dialogue.”
The following morning, Hegseth was back at the podium (this time for a briefing on the war in Iran) and reached a different passage. Recalling a Sunday sermon about the Pharisees who plotted against Jesus even after witnessing miracles, he turned to the assembled journalists. “I was sitting there in church and I thought, our press is exactly like those Pharisees,” he declared. “The hardened hearts of our press are only calibrated to impute.”
Within an hour, Pope Leo XIV (currently on tour in Africa and already locked in an increasingly intense feud with President Trump – see our latest on that) posted on X: “Woe to those who manipulate religion and God’s very name for their own military, economic, and political gain, dragging what is sacred into darkness and defilement.”
American religion historians have noted that while U.S. administrations have long invoked faith in wartime, the Trump White House has gone further than most, using language that is, in the words of one academic, “stark and unambiguous,” whereas previous presidents had shied away from it. For Hegseth, a self-described Christian nationalist whose use of religious imagery has become a hallmark of his tenure at the Pentagon, this week was, if nothing else, on brand.