The warrior ethos has a color
Pete Hegseth fired the Army's top chaplain for insufficient Christianity. His has crusader tattoos. What he did with the promotion list tells you everything else. This is not a culture war. It has a name.
The list had 29 names on it.
Most of them were white men. Four were not: two Black officers and two women. All four of them decorated, all of them with records that earned their place. Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George and Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll looked at those four names and said they belonged.
Pete Hegseth looked at those four names and said they did not.
George then requested a meeting with Hegseth to discuss the promotion list. Hegseth declined. Then he fired George—over the phone interrupting another meeting—in the middle of a war.
That is where we are.
The numbers don't lie
The firings of Gen. George, Gen. David Hodne, and Maj. Gen. William Green Jr. last week were not aberrations. They were part of a recurring pattern. Nine U.S. officials told reporters that Hegseth has blocked or delayed promotions for more than a dozen Black and female senior officers across all four branches of the military. One official put it plainly:
"There is not a single service that has been immune to this level of involvement by Hegseth."
This from the man who said, in February 2025, that "the single dumbest phrase in military history is 'our diversity is our strength.'" He meant it. He has spent every month since using it as his guide.
He fired George for refusing to go along. He fired a four-star general, a Purple Heart recipient and a decorated combat veteran who had led the Army out of a significant recruitment crisis. He fired the man who was actively working to get equipment and personnel into a war theater. An Axios source asked the obvious question:
"Here is a four-star general who is actively working to get equipment and people into theater—to protect U.S. forces—and you fire him? In the middle of a war?"
The warrior ethos, it turns out, has its limits.
It stops at the color line.
The crusader versus the Chaplain
We also have to talk about Maj. Gen. William Green Jr.
Green was the Army's chief of chaplains, a Baptist minister with over three decades of service, who had been decorated with the Legion of Merit and the Bronze Star. Hegseth fired him too, making this the first time in U.S. military history that a Chief of Chaplains has been dismissed during a four-year term. The reason? "Secular humanism" within the chaplaincy.
Pete Hegseth fired the Army's top chaplain, a Baptist, for insufficient Christianity.
This is the same Pete Hegseth who, on March 26, held a Pentagon prayer service at which he called for "overwhelming violence" against America's enemies. The same Pete Hegseth who read from a Bible adorned with two Crusader images. The same Pete Hegseth whose tattoos include the Jerusalem Cross and the phrase Deus Vult, Latin for "God wills it" (the battle cry of the First Crusade). Both tattoos are recognized symbols of the white nationalist movement.
He is not hiding it. He carries it permanently inked on his skin and it has been there his whole tenure as the Secretary of Defense.
On Easter Sunday, as Hegseth's Pentagon processed its latest round of purges, Pope Leo XIV delivered his Urbi et Orbi message. "Let those who have weapons lay them down," he said. He quoted Isaiah: "Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: Your hands are full of blood."
The most senior Catholic voices in the world and in the American military both pushed back on Easter weekend. Hegseth did not respond. His actions tell his tale.
Crusader 2 – 0 Catholics and Baptists.
This has a name
This is Christian white supremacist nationalism.
The promotion list. The firings. The Deus Vult. The prayer services calling for overwhelming violence. The systematic removal of Black and female officers and their replacement with loyalists. The purging of a chaplain for insufficient fealty to a particular brand of Christianity.
This is not a culture war. Culture wars have two sides arguing about values. This is something older, more specific, and more insidious: a belief that martial virtue is racially and religiously encoded and that the warrior ethos belongs, by nature and by God, to a particular kind of man. And of course, it is a man—a white Christian nationalist man.
Other kinds of people in positions of authority is not just a debatable policy preference, but an offense against the natural order. An offense that must be corrected.
Pete Hegseth is not subtle. The text is on his skin.
Senator Raphael Warnock, senior pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church, said this weekend that faith leaders who claim Trump has a divine purpose are doing what religious leaders have always done when they sanctify power: the same thing that was done to justify slavery. [Ed. note: Senator Warnock is, more or less, my neighbor.]
Warnock is right. The contemptible theology that put Deus Vult on Hegseth's arm and summarily removed Black and women officers off the promotion list is not new. It is very, very old.
It was wrong then. His position doesn't make it less wrong now.
Non in cautus futuri.
