Pete Hegseth is a man of simple pleasures — Donald Trump, lethal violence, maximal posturing, push-ups, and Jesus — and he’s lucky enough to have a job where he gets to combine all of them. With a cease-fire holding between the U.S. and Iran as peace negotiations play out, the secretary of Defense/War has maintained a lower public profile over the past week, but he’s made the most of a few opportunities to make a mockery of America’s traditional separation of church and state, as well as a fool of himself.

In recent days, President Trump managed the surprising feat of outraging his conservative Christian base by publicly attacking Pope Leo XIV for being “weak on crime” and anti–Iran war and then posting a sloppily AI-generated image of himself as Jesus on Truth Social (which prompted enough of an outcry that Trump deleted it and claimed he thought it had depicted him as a doctor before posting more bad art of him and Jesus). This came not long after Trump and Hegseth marked Easter — the celebration of the central miracle of Christianity — by publicly suggesting a recent combat search-and-rescue operation in Iran to recover a downed American airman was also a literal miracle.

Hegseth generated some more sacrilege on Wednesday. During a religious service at the Pentagon, Hegseth shared a “prayer”........

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