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At National Prayer Breakfast, Hegseth Says US Soldiers Gain Salvation by Dying for ‘Christian Nation’
(publicwitness.wordandway.org)
this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2026
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Hegseth said:
That tells me that either he hasn't actually read the Bible or he needs to work on his reading comprehension.
Jesus described his mission in this way:
I'm an atheist, but I was raised by evangelicals who emphasized following Christ's example as portrayed in the Gospels. I can't believe that the rabbi who commanded his followers to "turn the other cheek" and "bless those who curse you" could inspire the nationalist bullshit that is quoted from Hegseth in this article.
I'm concerned for the future of Christianity in a country that believes Hegseth and other Republican figureheads instead of their own Bible. And I'm worried about what that will mean for non-Christians in the American military and, eventually, in the rest of the country.
… eventually, in the rest of the world.
My dad isn’t religious, but in his stupid mind, the US is a Christian country. He views all Muslim nations as our natural enemies.
P.S. fuck all Christians and Muslims; their idiocy ruins us
The PS is an incredibly ignorant and unnuanced take. I'm not a Christian or a Muslim, but you're projecting an image that you have of religion most likely based on conservative and institutional Christianity and Islam. There's so much diversity within these groups that dismissing everyone who associates with Christianity or Islam as idiots is ridiculous. While many of them are backwards, science-denying, homophobic, transphobic, racist, nationalist bigots who absolutely deserve all the criticism, and there are churches which induce trauma and hurt on vulnerable people, there are also plenty of people for whom religion is not about belief in supernatural beings or the authority of a book written around two thousand years ago.
For many people, it's all about being part of a community, and religion is an effective way of bringing people together across social boundaries. They enjoy the music, the rituals, the eating together and the charitable events, and they find the myths and stories of the religion to be more of a convenient excuse for all of that without needing to believe that a god really exists or that their book should be taken as some kind of moral authority. This is especially true for people born into the tradition without any choice about their religious affiliation until they were independent from their family. Now, if you were arguing that the world would be better off without Christianity or Islam, that would be a much more understandable position, but I think calling anyone who identifies as a Christian or Muslim an idiot is just plain ignorant.
As a former evangelical now atheist, did you go through a period of agnosticism before settling on atheism? I've been going through some unpacking the last few years after distancing myself from religion and I'm curious what your process looked like.
It was a piece-by-piece deconstruction that took nearly a decade. I started with, "Maybe it's the divinity of Jesus that's my problem," and it snowballed from there. I did a lot of research and visited a lot of different religious groups during that decade.