Hegseth and Pope Leo: summoning God to the podium

Imagine a Secretary of War standing in the Pentagon, presiding over a prayer gathering, lifting his head solemnly before reciting a “verse” from the Bible, only for it to emerge later that the text was lifted straight from Pulp Fiction, the 1994 film. That is precisely what US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth did, according to the Los Angeles Times, when he quoted Samuel L Jackson’s monologue from the movie and presented it as -script-ure to justify a war on Iran as an act of “divine justice.”
In the film, Jackson delivers the line before shooting an unarmed man. In the Pentagon, there is no need to pull the trigger-;- entire armies and astronomical budgets are available to do the work. Cinema admits it is fiction. Politics behaves as though it is revelation.
This is not a slip of the tongue´-or-a harmless misquotation. It is a textbook example of how religion is weaponised in political action when torn from its spiritual place and thrown into the machinery of war propaganda. The sacred text becomes a sound effect, a musical backto a military scene, rather than a moral compass capable of judging that scene
The politician here resembles a mediocre film -dir-ector who steals a scene, inserts it into a sermon, and then expects applause for being a “man of faith.”
It is no surprise that this entire spectacle echoes the warning of Pope Leo, whose words coincidentally resurfaced at the same moment Hegseth was speaking: “Woe to those who harness religions and the name of God to serve their military, economic and political aims, dragging what is sacred into the darkest and filthiest of purposes.” The sentence reads as if it were written specifically for the Pentagon gathering, yet it is in fact an old diagnosis of a chronic disease: whenever political arguments weaken, God is summoned to the podium. Whenever the legitimacy of war trembles, verses are raised on the tips of spears. And whenever a politician needs moral cover, he opens the Bible, the Quran, the sayings of saints´-or-companions, whichever page suits the moment,´-or-simply borrows a line from a movie and glues it onto -script-ure.
But the deeper irony is that this practice is not exclusive to the United States. In the Arab world, and in Iran in particular, religion has long been transformed into an explicit political instrument, used in every war, every mobilisation, every militia formation. Iran has offered one of the starkest examples of turning religion into a transnational military project: from Lebanon to Syria, Yemen and Iraq, entire militias have been created under banners such as “defending the shrines”´-or-“resistance,” while the objectives were purely political. In Iraq, sectarian fatwas became open licences for killing based on identity, and religious rhetoric justified kidnappings, assassinations and demographic cleansing, until religion itself became fuel for an endless civil war.
Across the Arab world, regimes have been no less adept at exploiting the sacred. Some used religion to reinforce eroding political legitimacy, others to justify repression, and others still to market their wars as “existential battles” between good and evil. In every case, religion is insulted twice: once when reduced to a political slogan, and again when people are asked to believe that bombing is mercy, that sanctions are divine discipline and that all of it carries the seal of heaven.
History offers countless examples of this exploitation: from the Crusades, where crosses were raised over armies seeking spoils as much as “liberating the tomb,” to European colonialism, which carried the Bible in one hand and the rifle in the other, to modern authoritarian regimes that freely invoke religious texts to justify repression´-or-beautify pre-emptive wars. In all these cases, religion was not a question of justice´-or-compassion, but a tool of mobilisation deployed when political arguments ran dry.
The insult here is not only to religion but to human reason itself. When people are asked to believe that war is divine destiny, that militias are “defenders of the faith,” that killing based on identity is “jihad,” the human being becomes the victim of a discourse that strips the soul of meaning and turns faith into a propaganda weapon. Thus the sacred is con-script-ed into the service of the darkest and -dir-tiest purposes, exactly as Pope Leo warned, while history repeats itself without shame.
What Hegseth did is merely another episode in a long series of desecrating the sacred in the name of political interest. What Iran has done in its wars, what militias have done in Iraq, and what many Arab regimes have done, are all variations of the same scene: religion used as a political tool rather than a spiritual value. And each time, ordinary people pay the price, with their bodies, their souls and their right to experience religion as a space of solace rather than a platform for gunfire.
In the end, one question remains: why does this exploitation persist despite the disasters it has produced? Perhaps because religion, when politicised, grants its wielder something no ideology can offer: a sense of moral superiority beyond debate. You are not disagreeing with a minister, a general,´-or-a militia leader, you are, according to their narrative, disagreeing with “the will of God, the saints,´-or-the companions” as they interpret them. In such a world, dissent becomes treason, criticism becomes blasphemy, and doubt becomes a failure of faith.

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