On March 4, I watched Pete Hegseth’s briefing on the United States’ attack against Iran. For the rest of the day, I found myself searching for a fitting word to describe the character I observed and heard with his slick hair, angular jaw, cut suit, and Crusader tattoos.
Hegseth came across as a militant devotee of death. He spoke with an almost giddy glee about “sheer destruction,” “lethality,” and “killing” Iranians. He boasted about America’s military “hardware” and how it will “devastate” Iran. His Mosaic, emphatically Zionist maxim was “no mercy” (see Deuteronomy 7:2). He said from the start, “I stand before you today with one unmistakable message about Operation Epic Fury: America is winning — decisively, devastatingly, and without mercy… Only the United States of America could lead this — only us… They’re toast… We control their fate.”
Hegseth’s clear belief is that killing Iranians will guarantee “victory” over them. (I’m reminded of the Mad Max movie Fury Road, Hegseth strumming his guitar of death.) The assumption beneath this belief is that death is humanity’s worst-possible fate. As such, people are presumed to be terrified of dying, and thus death holds the key to controlling them. Inflict enough death, and you will dominate them. Kill and win.
At first, I wanted to call Hegseth a “pagan.” But this isn’t accurate. Most actual pagans don’t believe that death is the end or our worst-possible fate. They also have a much more morally robust worldview than Hegseth does. It would be insulting to them to call him a pagan.
Then I thought about calling Hegseth’s worldview a kind of radical materialist atheism. But, again, that isn’t fully accurate. First, Hegseth is a kind of theist. (His deity is reminiscent of the archaic war god Mahrem.) Second, materialist atheism does believe that death is the end of us, and so some versions of it could see death as the ultimate weapon and mechanism of control. But I know plenty of atheists whose moral worldview makes Hegseth look like a flimsy paper doll; David Livingstone Smith comes to mind. Death doesn’t scare them.
More technically, I might say that Hegseth’s faith in death reflects what the philosopher Charles Taylor has called late modernity’s “immanent frame” in his A Secular Age. The belief here is that what happens in the material world is the ultimate reality, and so, when this life ends, reality is simply over. In this “immanentist” worldview, death could thus be seen as the final force and thus a form of omnipotence over people. Murder them and they’re gone. The killer is the winner.
But perhaps describing Hegseth as “a militant devotee of death” is as close as I can currently come to naming him accurately. His remarks reflect the worldview of a theistic death cult, a version of white Christian nationalism/Zionism, even as he identifies as an Evangelical Christian. In fact, he posted a video of himself praying the Lord’s Prayer overlaid with footage of the American military bombing people, the ultimate blasphemy of taking the Lord’s name in vain.
Here’s where I’m going with this simple reflection: both Christianity and Islam do not believe that death is our worst-possible fate. They also don’t believe that death is the end of us. Yes, death is painful, primarily for those who survive the death of their loved ones. Yes, death ends our physical lives in the current version of this world as we know it.
But Christianity and Islam both teach a robust doctrine of the resurrection. God created us in the beginning, and God re-creates us in the end (see 1 Corinthians 15; Holy Quran 75). As Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote from a Nazi prison, “Despite everything, we belong to God.” Contra Hegseth, “we” don’t “control the fate” of anyone; God does.
In a profound sense, then, death is just a door to the next stage of our everlasting journey with God and God’s creation. From this theological perspective, death isn’t such a big deal after all.
This is why both Christianity and Islam teach fearlessness in the face of death. To be clear, Christians and Muslims grieve death. Our lives in this physical world are created good by God and thus are worth loving and so worth grieving when they are (physically) destroyed (Genesis 1; Holy Quran 95:4). Jesus taught, “Blessed are the grieving, because they will be comforted” (Matthew 5:4). (This is a significant difference between the Abrahamic religions and Buddhism, though Buddhism also teaches fearlessness of death.)
And so, both traditions give their highest reverence to martyrs, those who are killed for their faith in God and moral conviction. These faiths don’t idolize folks who have managed to live the longest, safest, most materially successful lives like Hegseth. They enshrine people like Jesus who was arrested, tortured, and executed by the state at the tender age of 33 (see Hebrews 11-12). The cross is the symbol of Christianity, after all, not as a Constantinian weapon of war but as a critical witness of radical survival in the face of it.
In short, then, for both Christianity and Islam, this mortal life is just a warm up. It matters, but it isn’t everything — not even close. One way or another, we all live, all die, and all return to God. That’s Faith 101.
In a real sense, then, death is just a blip on the existential screen. It’s like changing clothes or stepping through a door from one room to another. Death isn’t a kind of god, a master or lord, like the Mesopotamian Marduk, Greek Thanatos, or Hindu Yama. Ultimately, death is dead, a divine reset button. This is why Jesus boldly taught, “Blessed are the nonviolent [“meek”], because they will inherit the earth” (Matthew 5:5). This was his fearless faith in the face of violent death as a “disreputable Hebrew criminal,” as James Baldwin called Jesus. (He added at the World Council of Churches in 1968, “The Christian world has been misled by its own rhetoric and narcoticized by its own power… The people who call themselves ‘born again’ today have simply become members of the richest, most exclusive private club in the world, a club that the man from Galilee could not possibly hope — or wish — to enter.”)
But for both Christianity and Islam, however, there is “a fate worse than death,” as Jonathan Lear called it in Radical Hope. It’s not really a fate though; it’s a choice.
The fate worse than death is a life that is willfully organized around injustice, violence, and faith in the power of death. Both Christianity and Islam believe that a life sustained by violence mutilates the soul; it cuts us off from God (Matthew 5:44-35; Holy Quran 42:40-43). Our worst possible end is not being killed but killing others. Jesus taught that those who live by the sword (in this world) will die by the sword (in the next?) (Matthew 26:42). The Prophet Muhammad taught that killing one person is equivalent to killing all of humanity (Holy Quran 5:32).
Mortality is not our ultimate enemy. Murder is our ultimate enemy.
And this prophetic teaching is the soul of true religion’s holy terror, what both Christianity and Islam have called “the fear of God.” Dying isn’t the scary thing. We all die. The scary thing is choosing a life that defies God’s will for life, with violence. As the Harry Potter story illustrates, killing splinters the soul; it is spiritual suicide. (Notice that Voldemort, the original Death Eater, ultimately kills himself with his “killing curse.”)
God is not the overlord of a death cult. As Jürgen Moltmann wrote, God is the Lord of life, including the so-called underlings. And so, those who place their faith in lethality, violence, killing — death — have positioned themselves as godless opponents of God.
In the Biblical and Quaranic imagination, however, these “principalities and powers” are not truly powerful (Ephesians 6:12). They are pitiful. They are small shards of self-shattered clay in the Potter’s hands (Romans 9:19-21). Both traditions describe God laughing at them or mocking them, like adolescents throwing a tantrum in the face of their adult parent (see Psalm 2; Holy Quran 2:14-15). Sure, like gleeful kids knocking over stacked blocks, they can rain bombs on babies and destroy whole societies. What grief! But these tyrants are temporary infants in the presence of God. They are self-illusions, if not demonic delusions (see Matthew 12:43-45; 2 Corinthians 10:4-5; Ephesians 6:12; Holy Quran 2:168).
My point is simple: Hegseth’s militant devotion to death as the key to domination is powerless to devout Christians and Muslims. His death-devoted politics is theologically ignorant and existentially ineffective. It backfires, like Voldemort’s Avada Kedavra.
The dear people of Iran will grieve their murdered loved ones and suffer the trauma of survival, just like the dear Palestinian people, along with Native people, Black people, queer people, the women of the world, and many “others.” But they will hail their slain as martyrs and entrust them to God. The spiritually mature will follow the Persian poet Rumi and refuse to be conformed to Hegseth’s devotion to death; they will choose a fiercely nonviolent resistance. (For example, Rumi taught, “Don’t try to put out a fire by throwing on more fire! Don’t wash a wound with blood! … What hurts you, blesses you. Darkness is your candle.”) Others will steel themselves and pledge righteous revenge, as innocent Americans obliviously ask, “Why do they hate us?!” (This is the retributive, adolescent version of Christianity and Islam that Hegseth apes in the extreme.)
In either case, Hegseth’s assumption that death will dominate and deter anyone in the Abrahamic world is woefully misguided. Bush, Rumsfeld, and their ilk fell into the same theologically ignorant trap after 9/11. Hegseth’s death devotion might work in the decaying materialist empire of America, obsessed with “life extension” and terrified of death at our 250th birthday. But authentic Christians and Muslims? No way.
And so, Hegseth’s smug briefing strikes me as a pitiful self-satire. Even as he boasts of his “Christian” faith, Hegseth’s theological ignorance is abysmal and dangerous. And thus his military strategy — kill them and conquer — is doomed to failure, as it always has been. He’s playing a game without understanding the rules. It’s a bit like kicking birds out of their nests and scoffing at their fall. Birds fly. The dead rise. The martyrs fuel faith. The killed give courage. As is often said in Palestinian spaces, they tried to bury us but didn’t realize we are seeds. As the early Christian theologian Tertullian wrote, “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.”
Our dear brother Pete may have gone to Princeton and Harvard, though he has now “canceled” cadets from attending such “elite” institutions. He may have served in the military and had a show on Fox News. He calls himself a “Christian” in his X bio and is titled the “secretary of war” today. Huzzah! But when it comes to real faith and realist politics, he is woefully adolescent – a “big boy,” as the wife of Rene Good rightly named her murderer, Jonathan Ross. His smugness is a mirage. His certainty is an illusion. His giddy glee is a sick sadism. His projected omnipotence is powerless.
Resurrection is the radical faith of both Christianity and Islam. And this faith pulls the plug on the power of death and thus the morbid, white Christian nationalist politics of killing. When the lights go out here, they come on over there. In fact, the ancestors are always with us even now, the “great cloud of witnesses” cheering us on in our death-and-resurrection faith (Hebrews 11-12). Whether you confess “Jesus is Lord” or “There is no God but Allah,” death has lost its sting, its “victory,” as the religious-extremist-turned-apostle-of-love Paul wrote to an imperial outpost (1 Corinthians 15:55). Murderous threats are just the bad breath of a sin-sickened soul (Acts 9:1, 4). Kill us, if that makes you feel important and safe; but we’ll be fine, forever – we seeds of eternity. As the wise elder taught, “God makes everything beautiful in its time” (Ecclesiastes 3:11).
I grieve for my society. We call ourselves “a Christian nation” committed to a “pro-life” ethic. But many of us Evangelicals are militant devotees of death reliving “the same weary drama” as Lorde said. Calling us “pagan” or “atheist” would be unfair to the good pagans and atheists who, with their basic decency and moral courage, put our immanentist death cult to shame. James Baldwin said it best in his 1961 essay “The Dangerous Road Before Martin Luther King”: we are a “dangerously adolescent country.”
We lie, cheat, steal, and kill with smug smiles, gold crosses around our necks, and a trillionaire’s war chest. But we can’t find the pearl in the abandoned field — the pearl in Gaza and Goma, the pearl in Tehran and Tigray, the pearl in Donetsk and Broadview, the pearl on Nicollet Avenue and in every God-imaging neighbor. It’s Jesus’ pearl of great price, and we militant death cultists are spiritual paupers (Matthew 13:44-46). We are shabby in our certainty, shambolic in our militancy, impoverished in our prosperity, and addicts of our opioid slave religion.
Glory to the martyrs — the arrested, tortured, and executed, the belittled, bombed, and beheaded. Glory to the God of life. The death cult is dying. Resurrection is forever.
We shall overcome — all of us.
Let us, together, say yes to heaven.
***
“You, with the help of wicked men, put Jesus to death by nailing him to the cross. But God raised him from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him.”
Peter (Acts 2:23-24)
***
“As I bleed through the speakers, feel my presence…
To my father, to my wife, I am serious, this is Heaven…
And to the killer that sped up my demise
I forgive you, just know your soul’s in question…
I completed my mission, wasn’t ready to leave
But fulfilled my days, my Creator was pleased…
I don’t need to be in flesh just to hug y’all…
The unity we protect is above all”
Kendrick Lamar, “The Heart Part 5”
