In the name of the Father, the Son, and Samuel L. Jackson.

There is a scene in Pulp Fiction, you know the one, where a man reads scripture before committing an act of violence. The scripture is not real. Quentin Tarantino wrote it. The verse number is real, the first line is borrowed, and the rest is invention. It has been mistaken for the Bible for thirty years by people who should know better. On April 15, 2026, the United States Secretary of Defense stood before a packed Pentagon chapel, told the assembled military personnel to “pray with me please,” and recited it as a genuine pre-mission prayer used by rescue airmen over Iran.

He called it “CSAR 25:17.” It is not a book of the Bible.

Nobody in the room stopped him. The service was livestreamed. It went viral not because the clip was leaked by a whistleblower but because it was broadcast, apparently without irony, to anyone who cared to watch. The mockery arrived online within hours; the certainty that many in the chapel believed every word of it arrived alongside.

This is worth sitting with before moving on to the larger questions, because it is not simply embarrassing. It is diagnostic. The Secretary of Defense of the world’s most powerful military cannot tell a Tarantino screenplay from scripture, and felt sufficiently confident in that ignorance to deploy it as holy sanction before men and women who might shortly be asked to kill or die. The question is not whether Pete Hegseth knows his Bible. The question is what it means when the gap between performance and belief has become so wide that no one checks.

The difference a word makes

Language has been doing interesting work in this administration, and not accidentally. There is a distinction, liturgically, politically, and in terms of the constitution’s establishment clause, between a blessing and an invocation. “God bless our troops” is the former: generic, ecumenical, and asking nothing specific of anyone’s deity. Presidents have been saying it for decades across party lines. It commits no one. It excludes no one. It is, at its most cynical, civic decoration.

What Hegseth has been doing in the Pentagon’s monthly Christian worship services, urging strikes “in the name of Jesus Christ,” framing the Iran campaign as Christ’s own work, praying for vengeance upon the enemy, is something else. It is an invocation. It calls a specific god to a specific war, on behalf of a state whose founding documents were designed to prevent exactly this. It tells the non-Christian service members in the building, and 110 of them have since filed formal complaints, that the military’s god is not theirs.

Trump’s “Easter miracle” framing of the Iran rescue mission sits at the same coordinates. When a head of government declares that God has intervened on his nation’s behalf in a military operation, he is not offering a blessing. He is issuing a theological verdict. The enemy, by implication, is not merely opposed but damned. History has seen this before. It tends not to end well.

From a different direction entirely

Here is a thing that should be stranger than it has seemed: the Iranian President posted on X to condemn Donald Trump’s attacks on Pope Leo XIV as a “desecration” of Jesus, “the prophet of peace and brotherhood.” Ayatollah Khamenei has, for years, used Christmas addresses to invoke Isa, Jesus as Islam understands him, miracle-working and fully human, a messenger of justice against oppression, as a counterweight to what he characterises as the Western distortion of the faith.

This is not ecumenism. It is a geopolitical manoeuvre, and a reasonably effective one. When the Secretary of Defense is reciting Tarantino as scripture and the President is posting AI-generated images of himself as a healing Christ with a demon hovering above his head, the Supreme Leader of Iran invoking the Prince of Peace as a pacifist corrective is not, strictly speaking, the more absurd position. That ought to bother people.

The rhetorical trap is elegant and Iran knows it. Hegseth prays for vengeance upon the enemy in the name of Jesus. Iran responds that this is a betrayal of Jesus, whom they also revere. The American position is that God is on their side. The Iranian position is that God is embarrassed by them. One of these is harder to argue with on the merits.

An old man speaks from Cameroon

Pope Leo XIV chose English for his Palm Sunday homily. He was in Cameroon. The choice of language was not accidental. He said, in terms unusually direct for a pontiff addressing a living head of government, that God “turns away from the prayers of those who initiate war with hands full of blood,” and that Christianity “twisted by a thirst for control” was alien to the teachings of Christ. Trump called him “beyond woke.”

It is the directness that is striking. Popes generally work in the subjunctive, conditional statements, unnamed referents, and pastoral concern at a careful remove. Leo named the behaviour without quite naming the man, which is the traditional form, but the content left no serious ambiguity about the address. Hegseth’s sermons, Trump’s Easter posts, the AI Jesus meme with the demon above his head that the White House posted and then deleted and then admitted to posting: the Pope looked at all of this and used his Palm Sunday address to say, in English, from Africa, that he saw it.

The sound of Australian Christianity not speaking

Australian Catholic bishops have issued calls for prayer. They have expressed, in the measured language of institutional Christianity, their hopes for peace in the Middle East. Archbishop Costelloe welcomed the new pope warmly. No one has said much about Pete Hegseth reciting Jules Winnfield in a military chapel, or about the Secretary of Defense framing an air campaign as the work of Christ.

This is not, in itself, surprising. Australian Christianity has historically been more comfortable in the institutional than the prophetic register. It tends to wait. It watches to see which way things are settling before committing to a position, and when it finally speaks it can be quite loud about it, but only once the territory is reasonably clear. The Pope has the microphone; they are standing behind him nodding.

The broader Australian silence is more structural than cowardly. A country where 43 percent identify as Christian and where the Rationalist Society picketed an Anzac dawn service for being too religious does not have the cultural vocabulary for holy war panic. American Christian nationalism reads, at this distance, like 'Florida Man' news: alarming in aggregate, locally irrelevant, and absolutely someone else’s problem. The AUKUS alliance means we will not say anything officially. The secularity of public life means most people have changed the channel, and the alliance architecture means the government won't be the one to raise it.

And yet. A member state of the Five Eyes is conducting military operations framed as holy war by its own defence secretary. The Pope has delivered, in plain English, a public rebuke. Iran is quoting Jesus in response. Somewhere in this picture there is a story that Australian Christianity might consider itself positioned to have a view on, if it could locate the nerve.

What actually happened at Ezekiel 25:17

The real verse is one sentence. God promises furious vengeance against Israel’s neighbours and says they will know who He is when it arrives. That is all. There is no righteous man beset on all sides. There is no valley of darkness, no shepherd, no finder of lost children. Tarantino added those. They are good lines. They were written for a hitman.

What Hegseth did was take a movie version of a real verse, adapt it for military use by swapping “the righteous man” for downed airmen and adding the call sign of a rescue team, and present it as ancient sacred tradition before a chapel full of people who trusted him to know the difference. Some of them will have gone home and looked it up. Most, probably, will not have.

This is not a footnote. The blunder and the broader pattern are the same blunder. Both involve reaching for the weight and authority of the sacred and finding that you have picked up something that merely resembles it. The difference is that Tarantino knew what he was doing.

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The views expressed are those of the correspondent. Factual claims draw on publicly available sources.