On Wednesday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth introduced a religious service at the Pentagon by offering a prayer, which he said he had learned from military leaders. “They they call it CSAR 25:17,” he said, using the acronym for Combat Search and Rescue missions, “which I think is meant to reflect Ezekiel 25:17.”

The prayer he recited, though, doesn’t appear in the Bible. Rather, as internet observers quickly pointed out, it bore an extremely close resemblance to the monologue that Samuel L. Jackson delivers in the 1994 film Pulp Fiction, just before he executes someone.

The Pentagon was quick to explain away Hegseth’s apparent conflation of the Bible and a violent Tarantino classic. The prayer “was obviously inspired by dialogue in Pulp Fiction,” tweeted Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell. “Both the CSAR prayer and the dialogue in Pulp Fiction were reflections of the verse Ezekiel 25:17, as Secretary Hegseth clearly said in his remarks at the prayer service. Anyone saying the Secretary misquoted Ezekiel 25:17 is peddling fake news and ignorant of reality.” (On Thursday, Hegseth also used religious language to describe journalists. “I sat there in church and I thought, our press ​are just like these Pharisees,” he said,........

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