Viral video of the protest shows activists standing up during the middle of a service at Cities Church and calling for the ousting of David Easterwood, a pastor at the Southern Baptist church who is also acting director of the St. Paul ICE field office.
During the first Christian worship service at the Pentagon in 2026 — and the first since the operation that resulted in the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro — the Secretary of War framed that U.S. military action as a godly mission.
This isn’t the first time Graham has been invited to speak at the Pentagon. Two previous occasions — one of which was canceled — each sparked controversy because of his comments about Islam.
The pastor, celebrating 50 years in his pulpit, has never had more influence than he does under the current presidential administration.
With Pentagon prayer services continuing into the Christmas season, this issue of A Public Witness peeks inside Pete Hegseth’s monthly effort to establish his brand of rightwing Christianity inside the government.
Scholar Matthew Boedy exposes a dangerous plan driven by prosperity preachers, extremist politicians, and right-wing power brokers to destroy democracy and turn America into a Christian Nationalist state.
Speaking at a recent worship service at the Pentagon, Hegseth said the US needs to be ‘in prayer, on bended knee, recognizing the providence of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.’
‘Whatever he may have been in the past, he’s not fringe now,’ said Brian Kaylor, a Baptist minister and Wilson critic who wrote the forthcoming book ‘The Bible According to Christian Nationalists.’
Empathy is usually regarded as a virtue, a key to human decency and kindness. And yet, with increasing momentum, voices on the Christian right are preaching that it has become a vice.
This issue of A Public Witness looks at how one Calvinist voice with connections to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is publicly doing violence to Scripture to justify some disturbingly unChristlike behavior.