Pete Hegseth delivered a prayer at a Pentagon worship service Wednesday morning that had the internet doing a double-take. The words he read out were not from the Bible. They were from Pulp Fiction.
The defense secretary introduced the prayer as “CSAR 25:17,” telling the congregation it had been recited by pilots ahead of combat search-and-rescue missions, including the recent operation to recover two U.S. Air Force crew members shot down over Iran. According to Newsweek, Hegseth said the name was meant to reflect the Biblical verse Ezekiel 25:17 before reading it aloud to the assembled military crowd.
The problem is that the words he recited belong to Samuel L. Jackson’s character Jules Winnfield in the 1994 Quentin Tarantino film, not any passage of scripture. In Pulp Fiction, Jules falsely claims the words are from Ezekiel 25:17 before shooting a man. UNILAD noted the real Ezekiel 25:17 reads: “And I will execute great vengeance upon them with furious rebukes; and they shall know that I am the Lord, when I shall lay my vengeance upon them.” Tarantino and co-writer Roger Avary created their own far more elaborate version, which is what ended up in Hegseth’s sermon.
What Hegseth actually said
Hegseth’s prayer replaced the movie’s original language with military-specific phrases. Where Jules says “the path of the righteous man,” Hegseth said “the path of the downed aviator.” Where the film mentions “charity and good will,” his version used “camaraderie and duty.” And instead of closing with “you will know my name is the Lord,” Hegseth ended with: “You will know my call sign is Sandy 1 when I lay my vengeance upon thee, and amen.”
Hegseth told those present the prayer was passed to him by the lead mission planner of the Iran rescue operation and had become standard before CSAR missions. He did not appear to acknowledge the words’ origins in the Tarantino film. The Pentagon has not publicly addressed the mix-up.
Social media and political fallout
The sermon went viral almost immediately. A Reddit post called “Pete Hegseth quotes fake Pulp Fiction Bible verse during Pentagon sermon” collected more than 22,000 upvotes. One commenter wrote: “There’s no way his speech writer isn’t memeing on him. This is directly from the movie, you can’t mistake the cadence.”
The timing made things worse for Hegseth. The worship service took place just hours before nine House Democrats formally filed six articles of impeachment against him. The charges include allegations of war crimes and abuse of power related to the U.S. war in Iran. Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson dismissed the effort, calling it “just another charade in an attempt to distract the American people from the major successes we have had here at the Department of War.” With Republicans holding a majority in the House, the impeachment is widely expected to fail.
This is not the first time Hegseth’s Pentagon prayer services have drawn controversy. A month prior, he called for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy” during another worship event. The services themselves have also been challenged in court. Americans United for Separation of Church and State filed lawsuits against the Department of Defense and the Department of Labor over the services, arguing that the federal government’s role is to serve the public, not to host worship ceremonies. A former federal judge appointed by George W. Bush told The Conversation that Hegseth’s services appear to violate the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause.
The incident is also unfolding against a broader backdrop of tension between the Trump administration and the Catholic Church. Pope Leo XIV has fired back at Donald Trump over recent clashes, and Archbishop Reinhard Marx of Munich publicly criticized Hegseth in an Easter sermon, calling his conduct “shameless blasphemy.” Meanwhile, Donald Trump has been sharing AI images of himself as Jesus, a move that has already drawn its own wave of criticism from religious figures.
