Paul D. Miller, a professor of the practice of international affairs at Georgetown University, has accused U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth of repeatedly misusing Scripture in his public speeches, arguing that the Christian nationalist rhetoric favored by Hegseth and President Donald Trump often rests on biblical passages stripped of their context.

Writing in The Dispatch on Monday, Miller — who also serves as managing editor of Providence Magazine and holds the Hugh Shelton visiting chair of ethics at the U.S. Army's Command and General Staff College Foundation — argued that Trump and Hegseth treat Christian nationalism, a term scholars generally use to describe the belief that the United States is an inherently Christian nation whose government and laws should reflect Christian values, as the ideological fuel for their right-wing political movement, yet frequently misunderstand the very Bible they invoke.

According to Miller, Hegseth once vowed in his military there would be "no fatties. No trannies. No beardos. No weirdos. No wimps. No radicals." In Miller's view, however, the defense secretary struggles to connect that philosophy accurately with the Scripture he cites.

Miller pointed to a speech in which Hegseth compared American servicemen to the prophet Isaiah receiving God's commission — a reference to Isaiah 6:8, in which the prophet volunteers to carry God's message to the people of Israel. "'Lord, here I am, send me,' Hegseth said, quoting Isaiah 6:8. 'Send me to fight the Red Coats. Send me to fight the Communists. Send me to fight the Islamists. Send me.'" Miller noted that the line is one of Hegseth's favorite tropes and that the Pentagon chief launched a recruitment tour using the "Send Me" slogan as the centerpiece of the pitch.

In the same speech, Miller wrote, Hegseth also quoted 33:12 ("Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord"), Psalm 118 ("The Lord is on my side; I will not fear: What can man do unto me?") and Ephesians 6:11 ("Our department is, you might say, putting on the full Armor of God") through 6:12 ("while we wage physical war, we all know the real battle is spiritual").

In Miller's judgment, the citations distort their sources. "Hegseth is plainly taking Scripture out of context — King David was not thinking of America when he praised the nation whose God is the Lord," he wrote. Hegseth errs, Miller argued, in "conflating the American soldier with a divinely inspired prophet (Isaiah) and the United States with God's chosen covenant people (the 'nation whose God is the Lord'). If he means any of this literally, it is literally blasphemous."

Yet even if he does not mean any of it literally, Hegseth is still revealing a remarkably shallow theology, Miller contended. "He tears scriptural phrases out of context and throws them in the speechmaking blender, and they come out like so many aphorisms and clichés," Miller argued. "They line his speech to elevate the bombast, to balance the jejune with the sacred. For Lincoln, Scripture serves to illuminate, judge, and humble the nation. For Hegseth, Scripture elevates, ennobles, and even sacralizes the nation."

Miller added that Hegseth's handling of Scripture is "especially galling" because he does this "in the name of restoring Christianity to its formerly central place in American public life while overseeing a war that is, at least, troubling in light of the Christian just war tradition."

Miller's essay did not address what Alternet described as Hegseth's most infamous religious gaffe: reciting lines spoken by Samuel L. Jackson's character in Quentin Tarantino's film "Pulp Fiction" as though they came from the Bible, referencing a fictional passage (Ezekiel 25:17) that is recited before a hit is carried out in the movie. In the original text, the verse belongs to a chapter in which God pronounces judgment on the Philistines, and it bears little resemblance to the movie's invented speech.

"The path of the downed aviator is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men," Hegseth said in a speech. "Blessed is he who in the name of camaraderie and duty shepherds the lost through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to capture and destroy my brother, and you will know my call sign is Sandy One when I lay my vengeance upon thee. Amen."

Whatever the outcome of the theological dispute, American history offers a longstanding counterpoint. Thomas Jefferson, co-author of the Declaration of Independence and the third president of the United States, coined the phrase "separation between church and state" in an 1802 letter to Connecticut's Danbury Baptist Association to emphasize the importance of keeping the two spheres distinct.

"Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between Church & State," Jefferson wrote during his presidency. The words Jefferson invoked come verbatim from the First Amendment, ratified in 1791, whose religion clauses remain the legal benchmark in American disputes over faith and government.