On 17 April, at a briefing on the Iran war, secretary of defense Pete Hegseth told reporters he had been “sitting in church with my family” the previous Sunday while the minister preached from Mark 3.

Hegseth then recast a passage about the Pharisees watching Jesus “so that they might accuse him” as a description of the US press corps, which has long been a target of his ire. “Our press is just like these Pharisees,” Hegseth said. He accused “the legacy Trump-hating press” of a “politically motivated animus” that blinded it to “the brilliance of our American warriors”.

The sermon Hegseth described as attending bears similarities to one delivered only days earlier at Christ Kirk DC, a Washington branch of the openly Christian nationalist Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), the denomination to which Hegseth belongs.

The 12 April sermon, titled “The Fellowship of Grievance”, also exhorted worshippers to embrace a “biblically informed hatred”.

That sermon, other Christ Kirk DC sermons, and episodes of podcasts produced inside the CREC network show pastors who have preached to Hegseth’s congregation, and the most senior figures in the denomination, advancing a theocratic program that would restrict the vote, criminalise LGBTQ+ expression and apply biblical law through the courts.

Asked in an email whether CREC had shaped Hegseth’s worldview, CREC founder and pastor of Christ Church, Moscow, Douglas Wilson wrote: “You would need to ask him that. But his worldview is broadly the same as ours.” Asked if he was a Christian nationalist, Wilson wrote: “Yes, that would be a fair description.”

Hegseth’s cabinet tenure continues to underscore the growing influence of CREC inside the US military and the Trump administration, including through his portrayals of the Iran war.

The preacher at the 12 April service was Dr Benjamin Merkle. He is the president of CREC-aligned New Saint Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho, a senior fellow of theology there, a teaching elder at Christ Church Moscow, the CREC’s flagship congregation, and the son-in-law of Wilson, the denomination’s co-founder.

Christ Kirk DC has met since July 2025 in a Pennsylvania Avenue building owned by the Conservative Partnership Institute, a Trump-aligned non-profit which, as previously reported in the Guardian, acquired the real estate to support activities including influencing Republican staffers and targeting government employees. The congregation uses a rotating roster of CREC preachers.

In the sermon, Merkle cast the Pharisees as having “gathered around simply so that in this moment they can find something prosecutable against Jesus, because of the hatred that they have in their heart”.

Merkle told the Guardian in a phone call that he had not listened to Hegseth’s press conference or seen any reporting on it.

“I wasn’t making a political observation, I was making a human observation,” Merkle said of his comments on the Pharisees. He added: “Secretary Hegseth’s application to that situation could very well be a very appropriate application of the principle that I was fleshing out.”

Despite speculating on Hegseth’s adaptation of the sermon, Merkle refused to confirm or deny Hegseth’s attendance at the service. When asked in an email to confirm his attendance, Merkle answered: “Sorry, I don’t want to be weird. But I don’t think I will do that.”

Similarly, the Pentagon would neither confirm nor deny Hegseth’s attendance. Asked to do so in an email, Hegseth’s assistant press secretary, Riley Podleski, wrote: “We have nothing further to provide”.

In the sermon, Merkle also said that the previous day he had been at a conference where “someone was lamenting how unified the left seems to be in their attacks on the right” while “the conservative right is very disjointed”. “When they all hate the same thing,” Merkle said, “it forms a temporary unity, a fellowship of the grievance.”

Asked about these remarks, Merkle said: “My point is that when you have a strong opposition from multiple different places to one particular figure or one particular movement or people, then you can find groups that would never have gotten along before suddenly kind of bond together. And I do think we see that in our current political situation. I think that’s one appropriate application of it.”

After spending 40 minutes contrasting the unity of the Christian church with the “grievance” unity of its opponents, Merkle told his congregation: “It’s also not true that those who love God are only united by our loves. We’re also united by the things that we hate. We share a hatred of evil. There are things that God hates, and it’s right for us to share that hatred.” Christians, he said, are defined “not just by love” but by “biblically informed hatred”.

Asked about the phrase, Merkle said: “I dislike how, particularly more liberal branches of Christianity, we start to define godliness as love – but love disembodied, love in its most general state.

“You’re supposed to hate what is evil, detest what is evil,” Merkle said. “But evil is defined by God’s word.”

Asked whether believers were to hate abstract evil or the people who do evil, Merkle said: “It’s a classic evangelical trope to say we hate the sin and not the sinner. But the problem is, in the end, God throws sinners into hell. So I don’t know that it’s right to draw that distinction as if I can just hate this thing that was done but not the person that did it.”

Julie Ingersoll, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Florida, has studied the CREC for decades. She told the Guardian: “The CREC motto ‘All of Christ for All of Life’ refers to their view that there is no area of life that is not governed by God’s law. This version of Christianity allows for no realm in which there can be neutrality: not church and state, not religion and the courts, not education or the military.”

She added: “Not only do they want the US to be a Christian nation, but they also want all nations to be Christian nations.”

Merkle’s father-in-law, Wilson, is a co-founder of Christ Church Moscow, CREC and New Saint Andrews, and one of the most prominent Christian nationalist leaders in the US. Wilson and his church teach that civil authorities should enforce Old Testament law, and that both homosexuality and abortion warrant death penalties under that law.

Wilson told the New York Times in October that he looks forward to a future in which “there aren’t any Pride parades and there aren’t any drag queen story hours”.

Asked if his sermon connected to CREC demands for abortion to be outlawed and severely punished, Merkle said: “I would absolutely make that connection. I mean, I hate abortion.

“And I really reject the claim that it’s this private, personal decision. It’s the execution of a child, and I think it’s grotesque that our culture accepts it, and I want to see that eradicated,” Merkle said. “I think it’d be a great blessing to our nation to see the widespread murder of our children eliminated.”

Asked if LGBTQ+ people merited biblically informed hatred, Merkle said: “I think God is clear that he made a woman to go with a man and a man to go with a woman, and that’s what a marriage is.”

He added: “I think that the acceptance of homosexuality not only has done great evil to America, but I think it does great evil to those that are practising it. I think it does great harm to them, and I think they’re greatly blessed to be delivered from it.”

On abortion and homosexuality, Merkle said: “If we were to hate what is evil, I think those two things are evil. So I think that’s a pretty simple syllogism.”

‘I hope that God kills him’

At key moments in his cabinet tenure, Hegseth has given CREC pastors a platform in services that have put Christian nationalism at the centre of the US military.

Brooks Potteiger, Hegseth’s pastor in Goodlettsville, Tennessee, presided over the first worship service in a monthly series Hegseth initiated at the Pentagon in May 2025. Potteiger returned on 21 January 2026 for the first service after the US operation that captured deposed Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro.

In a 4 March blog post, Wilson announced that Potteiger had “accepted a call and will be coming to serve as an on-site pastor” of Christ Kirk DC starting in July.

Potteiger has been described in reporting as Hegseth’s spiritual adviser. Asked if that was accurate, he told the Guardian in an email: “I’d simply say he’s been one of many parishioners at church that I’ve had the privilege of ministering to.”

Potteiger drew media attention in March after appearing on the Reformation Red Pill podcast with its host Joshua Haymes. Discussing Texas Democratic senate candidate James Talarico, Haymes said: “I hope that God kills him.” Potteiger responded: “We want him crucified with Christ.”

Asked about the exchange, Potteiger said: “Being ‘crucified with Christ’ is a quote from the apostle Paul in Galatians 2:20 talking about conversion. Mr Talarico claims to be a Christian but teaches contrary to Christ. Far from wishing him harm, I wish for him to have a true experience of salvation.”

On 17 February, 11 days before the US joined Israel in the first attacks on Iran, Wilson presided over a Pentagon worship service. “God can do what he likes,” Wilson told the assembled personnel, “and as we should know by now, what he likes to do is to take the most unlikely materials and do something glorious with it.”

Hegseth’s own public rhetoric has increasingly drawn on the vocabulary of Christian nationalism.

On 5 March, at a counter-cartel conference, Hegseth told Central and South American leaders that with the US they were “western nations with distinct characteristics” and “Christian nations under God”. On 19 March, he asked the American people to pray for US troops “on bended knee” and “in the name of Jesus Christ”. On 25 March, he read from Psalm 18 – “I thrust them through, so that they were not able to rise; they fell under my feet” – and prayed that God would “break the teeth” of US enemies. On 16 April, he offered a garbled passage of Ezekiel filtered via Pulp Fiction.

The Guardian previously reported that Hegseth said on Haymes’ podcast in 2024 that moving his family to a CREC church had brought him “a whole view of the world that has changed the way we think, too”.

In response to questions about his relationship with CREC, Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said in a statement: “The Secretary is a proud member of a church affiliated with the Congregation of Reformed Evangelical Churches, which was founded by Pastor Doug Wilson. The Secretary very much appreciates many of Mr Wilson’s writings and teachings.”

Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, said: “Hegseth has aligned himself with some of the most extreme Christian nationalists in the country. Their anti-LGBTQ+ beliefs and extremist views about women should give anyone pause, as well as his ‘biblical’ attacks on journalists, especially when Hegseth is sharing them with our soldiers and blasting away at the separation of church and state.

“But even more worrisome is his infusion of his Christian beliefs as the basis for our war in Iran,” Beirich added. “Our national security should not be based on fanatical holy war fantasies, but that is what Hegseth, and by extension Trump, have wrought.”