Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Monday likened the rescue on Easter Sunday of a missing American airman shot down over Iran to the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Minutes later, speaking at the same news conference describing the military operation, President Trump asserted that God supports the Israeli-U.S. war against Iran, which has killed thousands, including many civilians. “Because God is good,” he said, “and God wants to see people taken care of.”
Mr. Trump continued: “God doesn’t like what’s happening. I don’t like what’s happening. Everyone says I enjoy it. I don’t enjoy this.”
“I don’t like seeing people get killed,” he said.
In his account of the rescue operation, Mr. Hegseth drew parallels between the airman’s ordeal and the account of Christ’s death and Resurrection given in the Bible.
The F-15E fighter jet, he noted, was “shot down on a Friday — Good Friday.” That is the day Jesus was crucified.
After the airman bailed out over Iran, he hid, Mr. Hegseth said, “in a cave, a crevice, all of Saturday,” reminiscent of the tomb cut into a rock in which Jesus was buried.
Then, he said, the airman was rescued on the day Christians celebrate the Resurrection of Jesus — “flown out of Iran as the sun was rising on Easter Sunday.”
“A pilot reborn, all home and accounted for, a nation rejoicing,” the defense secretary said. “God is good.”
Mr. Hegseth also said that after the plane was shot down, the airman, the F-15E’s weapons systems officer, made contact with his American rescuers with a religious message: “God is good.” “In that moment of isolation and danger,” he said, “his faith and fighting spirit shone through.”
It was the latest example of the secretary of defense invoking Christian theology in public statements about the war with Iran. Earlier in the war, Mr. Hegseth asked Americans to pray for victory in the Middle East “in the name of Jesus Christ.”
Christian leaders, including Pope Leo XIV, the first U.S.-born pontiff, have sharply disagreed with Trump administration suggestions that the war has divine sanction. The pope has repeatedly called for an end to the conflict and criticized the use of Christianity to justify warfare. In a recent homily, Leo said that the Christian mission had often been “distorted by a desire for domination, entirely foreign to the way of Jesus Christ.”
Mr. Hegseth, who is directing a relentless bombing campaign against Iran, a majority-Shiite Muslim nation with a theocratic government, has often idolized the Crusades, the bloody medieval wars in which Christian warriors fought Muslims for control of important religious sites and territory in the Middle East.
Tattooed on Mr. Hegseth’s right biceps is the Latin phrase “Deus vult” — “God wills it” — which he describes as a battle cry of those wars. In his book “American Crusade,” published in 2020, Mr. Hegseth describes the Crusades as “bloody” and “full of unspeakable tragedy,” but argues that they were justified because they saved a Christian Europe from the onslaught of Islam.
Mr. Hegseth’s language also echoes tenets of conservative American Christianity, which often ties U.S. nationalism with religious virtue. Many of Mr. Trump’s Christian supporters have described themselves as combatants in a holy war that seeks to roll back secular and pluralist values and establish the U.S. as a fundamentally Christian nation.
Chris Cameron is a Times reporter covering Washington, focusing on breaking news and the Trump administration.
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