作者：扎卡里·B·沃尔夫，发布于2026年3月13日，美国东部时间凌晨4:00（3小时前分析）
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在美国对伊斯兰共和国发动的战争中，这位更喜欢被称为“战争部长”的美国国防部长，喜欢谈论基督教上帝站在他这边。
周日播出的哥伦比亚广播公司（CBS）新闻采访中，国防部长彼得·赫格斯表示，伊朗不应怀疑美国的决心，因为美国得到了更高力量的支持。
“我们的能力更强。我们的意志更坚定。我们的军队更优秀。全能上帝的庇佑就在那里保护着这些士兵，我们致力于完成这项使命，”他说。
CBS记者加勒特少校（Major Garrett）询问赫格斯是否从宗教角度看待这场战争。
“我的意思是，显然，我们正在与那些寻求核能力以发动某种宗教末日审判的狂热分子作战。”他后来补充说，“在这些时刻，士兵们需要与他们的全能上帝建立联系。”
几天后，在参加完一次庄严的阵亡士兵遗体交接仪式后不久，赫格斯在五角大楼新闻发布会上引用了《诗篇》144篇：“愿耶和华我的磐石被称颂，祂训练我的手作战，训练我的指头发战。”
赫格斯声称美国是一个基督教国家
赫格斯长期以来一直想重塑这个国家。
“美国是作为一个基督教国家建立的，”他在最近的一次全国祈祷早餐会上表示，“如果我们能坚守下去，它在我们的DNA中仍然是一个基督教国家。”他将一些宗教元素与本杰明·富兰克林关于美国是共和国还是君主制的著名言论混合在一起。
“我们不仅是装备了自由武器库的战士，最终我们还装备了信仰的武器库，”他说，将富兰克林·D·罗斯福提出的“美国应成为民主武器库”的理念改造为自己的宗教世界观。
信仰纹身被标记为极端主义
赫格斯说，他的一个纹身——耶路撒冷十字架（一个与十字军东征相关的宗教符号）——使他被贴上极端主义标签，并被取消了2021年参加美国总统拜登就职典礼军事仪仗队的资格。这个意象可以追溯到十字军东征时期，当时欧洲基督徒试图从穆斯林手中夺回圣地。
“上帝意愿如此”（Deus Vult）这句话也纹在赫格斯身上。在他2020年的著作《美国十字军东征》中，他将这句话描述为“基督教骑士进军耶路撒冷的战斗口号”。
21世纪的“十字军东征”
反对伊斯兰主义者——即那些试图围绕穆斯林信仰重新构建社会和政府的人——一直是赫格斯公共生活中的一个推动因素。
在《美国十字军东征》一书中，他写道，美国正面临一个“十字军东征时刻”，这与11世纪基督教对圣地的入侵遥相呼应。根据赫格斯的说法，伊斯兰主义者被美国“左翼分子”纵容，以对抗敬畏上帝的基督教美国人。
“我们不想打仗，但就像我们一千年的基督教徒先辈一样，我们必须战斗，”他写道。他预示了美国将与以色列并肩作战的想法。
我们基督徒——与我们的犹太朋友及其在以色列的杰出军队——需要拿起毫无歉意的美国主义之剑，捍卫我们自己。我们必须在文化上、政治上、地理上，以及在诸如伊斯兰国这样的邪恶势力面前，从军事上击退伊斯兰主义。
长期以来对伊斯兰教的不信任
《美国十字军东征》指的是对伊斯兰国（ISIS）采取军事行动，但现在美国正与以色列并肩对抗伊朗这个伊斯兰共和国。在书中另一段，赫格斯解释了他对伊斯兰教构成的威胁的看法。
美国人越是生活在“伊斯兰教是和平宗教”的错觉中——尤其是随着欧洲和美国的人口结构不断变化——我们的任务就越困难。自创立以来，伊斯兰教就一直在与它的敌人（即所有‘异教徒’）作战，并且永远不会停止。
虽然美国和以色列以空袭开始了战斗，今年杀死了伊朗领导人，但特朗普政府认为这场战斗自1979年伊斯兰革命将美国支持的国王驱逐出政权以来就一直在持续。
在五角大楼强化宗教色彩
在战争前担任国防部长期间，赫格斯发起了一项“让牧师团再次伟大”的努力。军事牧师本应服务于所有宗教，但赫格斯希望重写他们的手册，重新注入更多关于上帝的内容，减少世俗语言。
“信仰战士”，他在X平台（原Twitter）上发帖称，一直被军队中的世俗人文主义所疏远。
他推动每月一次的祈祷活动，并在五角大楼内广播。今年2月，赫格斯邀请他的牧师道格·威尔逊（Doug Wilson）——一位希望美国成为基督教神权国家的基督教民族主义者——向美国军方发表讲话。
威尔逊在去年接受CNN记者帕梅拉·布朗采访时，将女性描述为“人们从中产生的人”，并为美国应成为基督教神权国家的理念辩护。
世俗军事部门的投诉
致力于维护军人权利的非营利活动组织“军事宗教自由基金会”（Military Religious Freedom Foundation）表示，在战争不到一个月的时间里，他们收到了大量投诉。这些投诉无法被CNN独立核实。根据该基金会创始人、前空军律师迈克·韦恩斯坦（Mikey Weinstein）的说法，这是因为投诉者担心报复。
但他表示，投诉包括军方指挥官谈论对伊朗的战争是圣经末日预言的一部分。众议院民主党人已呼吁就这些投诉展开调查。
韦恩斯坦告诉我，赫格斯的言论让穆斯林世界觉得美国正在发动自己的十字军东征。
“我们看起来就像11世纪至13世纪期间发动的八次十字军东征的第九次版本，”他说，“对博科圣地、伊斯兰国、塔利班、阿拉伯半岛基地组织（无论他们是什叶派还是逊尼派）来说，我们只是在攻击一个庞大的穆斯林国家，而这只会为我们正在对抗的人提供一个不可估量的宣传盛宴。”
赫格斯似乎没有公开谈论过末日预言或以色列收复圣地预示启示录的想法，但他毫不回避美国出于宗教原因应与以色列结盟的观点。
基督徒与犹太复国主义者
在去年的确认听证会上，阿肯色州共和党议员汤姆·科顿（Tom Cotton）以同情的语气问道，赫格斯是否认为自己是基督教犹太复国主义者。
“我是基督徒，我坚定支持以色列及其生存权防御，以及美国作为伟大盟友与他们并肩作战的方式，”赫格斯回答。
犹太复国主义是指犹太人有权在中东建立并捍卫自己国家的理念。作为一个独特术语的“基督教犹太复国主义”，是指根据《创世记》，犹太人重返圣地的权利得到保证的观点。
“有些人，尤其是基督徒，认为以色列是圣经预言的实现，特别是关于基督第二次降临的预言，”俄克拉荷马大学政治与宗教教授艾莉森·肖特利（Allyson Shortle）说，她合著了一本关于基督教民族主义的书。
美国例外论的一种形式
肖特利告诉我，赫格斯的福音派基督教思想符合美国例外论，即美国人与其他地方的人不同，并在更广泛的道德冲突中与其他社会对立。
“基督教民族主义和美国宗教例外论是一体两面，基督教徒处于顶端，其他人则处于从属地位，这种排序非常专横，”肖特利说。
我们与他们
根据丹尼尔·胡梅尔（Daniel Hummel）的说法，对于持有这种世界观的人来说，伊朗“站在一场不仅关乎国家利益，更关乎原则、信仰和价值观的斗争的对立面”。胡梅尔是美国福音派研究书籍作者，威斯康星州麦迪逊市“光中心”（Lumen Center）主任，该中心自称是基督教学者社区。
“关于以色列被选中的想法，或者认为中东发生的事情具有宇宙意义，这在特别是美国白人基督徒中非常普遍，”胡梅尔说。
肖特利称赫格斯的观点处于边缘，但表示大约有一半的美国人支持某种形式的基督教民族主义意识形态，包括美国是作为基督教国家建立的，以及美国受神启的想法。
“如果不了解这可能是基督教民族主义运动的一部分，人们可能会喜欢这个整体想法，”肖特利补充道，“考虑到它与大量反民主结果和反民主信仰相关联，令人担忧的是，有相当数量的美国人支持这一理念。”
赫格斯并不为此类难题所困扰。在《美国十字军东征》一书中，他将耶稣的和平教义与反对多元化努力以及他的总体号召结合起来：
“所谓的宽容对伊斯兰主义者来说闻起来就像投降，因为它确实是。耶稣确实告诉我们要把另一边脸转向敌人，但我很确定他当时并没有建议一位国防部长这样做。”
Pete Hegseth wanted an ‘American Crusade.’ Now he’s leading a war in the Middle East
Analysis by Zachary B. Wolf, 3 hr ago, PUBLISHED Mar 13, 2026, 4:00 AM ET
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In the war the US launched on the Islamic Republic, the US secretary of war, as he prefers to be called, likes to talk about how the Christian God is on his side.
During an interview with CBS News that aired Sunday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Iran should not doubt US resolve because it is backed by the higher power.
“Our capabilities are better. Our will is better. Our troops are better. The providence of our almighty God is there protecting those troops, and we’re committed to this mission,” he said.
The CBS reporter, Major Garrett, asked if Hegseth views the war from a religious context.
“I mean, obviously, we’re fighting religious fanatics who seek a nuclear capability in order for some religious Armageddon.” Troops, he later added, “need a connection with their almighty God in these moments.”
A couple of days later, not long after returning from a dignified transfer of soldiers killed in action, Hegseth quoted Psalm 144 at a Pentagon press conference: “Blessed be the Lord, my rock, who trains my hands for war and my fingers for battle.”
Hegseth argues the US is a Christian nation
Hegseth has long wanted to reprogram the country.
“America was founded as a Christian nation,” he said at a recent National Prayer Breakfast. “It remains a Christian nation in our DNA, if we can keep it,” he added, splicing some religion onto a famous Benjamin Franklin quip about whether the US was a republic or a monarchy.
“Not only are we warriors armed with the arsenal of freedom, we ultimately are armed with the arsenal of faith,” he said, adapting Franklin D. Roosevelt’s idea that the US should be the arsenal of democracy to his own religious worldview.
Faith is tattooed on his chest
Hegseth says one of his tattoos — a Jerusalem Cross, a religious symbol tied to the Crusades— led him to be labeled an extremist and disinvited from his unit’s detail to President Joe Biden’s inauguration in 2021. The imagery has roots in the Crusades, when European Christians tried to reclaim the Holy Land from Muslims.
The term Deus Vult, “God Wills It,” is also tattooed on Hegseth’s body. In his 2020 book “American Crusade,” he describes the term as “the rallying cry of Christian knights as they marched to Jerusalem.”
On a 21st-century ‘crusade’
Opposition to Islamists, or those who would reorder society and government around the Muslim faith, has been a motivating influence in Hegseth’s public life.
In “American Crusade,” he wrote that the US faces a “crusade moment” that echoes the 11th-century Christian invasion of the Holy Land. Islamists, according to Hegseth, are enabled by American “leftists” against God-fearing Christian Americans.
“We don’t want to fight, but, like our fellow Christians one thousand years ago, we must,” he wrote. He presaged the idea that the US would go to war alongside Israel.
We Christians — alongside our Jewish friends and their remarkable army in Israel — need to pick up the sword of unapologetic Americanism and defend ourselves. We must push Islamism back — culturally, politically, geographically, and in the case of evils such as the Islamic State, militarily.
A longtime distrust of Islam
“American Crusade” refers to taking up arms against ISIS, but now the US is at war alongside Israel against Iran, an Islamic republic. In another passage from the book, Hegseth explained his view of the threat posed to the US by Islam.
The longer Americans live with the delusion that Islam is a religion of peace — especially as the demographics of Europe and the United States continue to change — the more difficult our task. Islam has been at war with its enemies — meaning all ‘infidels’— since it was founded, and it will never stop.
While the US and Israel opened the fighting with air strikes that killed Iran’s leader this year, the Trump administration argues the battle has been ongoing since 1979, when the Islamic Revolution evicted the US-backed shah from power.
Imposing more religion at the Pentagon
As defense secretary before the war, Hegseth launched an effort to “make the Chaplain corps great again.” Military chaplains are supposed to minister to all religions, but Hegseth wants to rewrite their manual to reinsert more God and rely less on secular language.
“War fighters of faith,” he said in a post on X, have been alienated by secular humanism in the military.
He pushes a monthly prayer that is broadcast throughout the Pentagon. In February, Hegseth invited his pastor Doug Wilson, a Christian nationalist who wants the US to be a Christian theocracy, to address the US military.
Wilson, in an interview with CNN’s Pamela Brown last year, explained his view of women as “the kind of people that people come out of” and defended the idea that the US should be a Christian theocracy.
Complaints from the secular military
The Military Religious Freedom Foundation, a nonprofit activist organization that seeks to defend the rights of servicemembers, says it has received numerous complaints in less than a month of war. Those complaints cannot be independently verified by CNN. According to MRFF founder Mikey Weinstein, a former Air Force attorney, that’s because the people making them fear retribution.
But he said the complaints include talk among military commanders that the war on Iran is part of the end-times Bible prophecies. House Democrats have called for an investigation of the complaints.
Weinstein told me Hegseth’s language gives the impression to the Muslim world that the US is launching its own crusade.
“We look exactly like a ninth version of the eight prior crusades, from the 11th through the 13th century,” he said. “To Boko Haram, ISIS, the Taliban, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, whether they are Shia or Sunni, we’re just attacking a huge Muslim nation, and all this does is serve as an immeasurable propaganda bonanza for those that we are fighting.”
Hegseth does not appear to have talked publicly about end-times prophecies or the idea that Israel retaking the holy land presages revelation. But he does not shy away from the notion that the US should be in league with Israel for religious reasons.
A Christian and a Zionist
In a sympathetic line of questioning during his confirmation hearing last year, Sen. Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican, asked Hegseth if he considered himself a Christian Zionist.
“I am a Christian, and I robustly support the state of Israel and its existential defense and the way America comes alongside them as a great ally,” Hegseth said.
Zionism is the idea that the Jewish people have a right to establish and defend their own nation in the Middle East. Christian Zionism, as a distinct term, is the idea that the right of Jews to return to the Holy Land is guaranteed in Genesis.
“Some believe, Christians in particular, that Israel is the fulfillment of biblical prophecy, specifically in terms of the second coming of Christ,” said Allyson Shortle, a professor of politics and religion at the University of Oklahoma, who coauthored a book about Christian nationalism.
A form of American exceptionalism
Shortle told me Hegseth’s strain of evangelical Christianity is in line with a view of American exceptionalism, meaning that Americans are different from people elsewhere and engaged in a broader moral clash with other societies.
“Christian nationalism and American religious exceptionalism are part and parcel of the same ordering of Christians on top and everybody else sort of falls below in a way that is very domineering,” Shortle said.
Us vs. them
Iran, to a person with this worldview, “stands on the other side of a battle that’s as much about principles, beliefs and values as it is about national interest,” according to Daniel Hummel, an author of books about evangelicals in the US and director of the Lumen Center, which describes itself as a community of Christian scholars in Madison, Wisconsin.
“Ideas about Israel’s chosen-ness or that things happening in the Middle East that are cosmic in significance, that’s a very widespread view, among particularly White American Christians,” Hummell said.
While she described Hegseth’s views as being on the fringe, Shortle said about half of Americans do support some sort of Christian nationalist ideology, including the idea that the US was founded as a Christian nation and that it’s divinely inspired.
“Absent the context that this might be part of the Christian nationalist movement, people like the overall idea well enough,” Shortle said, adding, “an alarming amount of Americans, given that it’s connected to a lot of anti-democratic outcomes and anti-democratic beliefs.”
Hegseth does not struggle with such conundrums. In “American Crusade,” he squared the peaceful teachings of Jesus with his opposition to diversity efforts and his general call to arms like this:
“So-called tolerance smells like surrender to Islamists, because it is. Jesus did tell us to turn the other cheek, but I’m pretty sure he wasn’t advising a secretary of defense at the time,” Hegseth wrote back then.