The US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth’s ‘Deus Vult’

‘Deus vult’ (God wills it) was the rallying cry of medieval crusaders. Its reappearance, symbolically and rhetorically, in the US defence secretary Pete Hegseth’s public language should alarm anyone who believes war must remain bounded by law rather than theology. The Independent reports that Hegseth has repeatedly framed the Iran conflict in explicitly theological terms, portraying it as a confrontation between “good and evil,” invoking Christian scripture, praising Crusader symbolism, and describing God as aligning with US military action against Iran. Experts interviewed in the Independent’s report stress that such religious framing by a sitting US defence secretary is “completely, totally unprecedented” in modern US history. Michael Weinstein of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation characterises the messaging as casting the […]