(RNS) — In the past several weeks, religious language has been used in American public life with unusual intensity and disturbing clarity. President Donald Trump ended an Easter morning obscenity-laced threat of violence to Iran with the mocking words “Praise be to Allah.” Also on Easter Sunday, several departments of the Trump administration posted messages celebrating Christ’s resurrection, including the Department of Homeland Security, the State Department, the Defense Department and the Justice Department.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has continued to invoke Scripture to sanction the Iranian war, even as he has removed the Army’s chief of chaplains, Maj. Gen. William Green Jr., from his post, where he has been responsible for advising senior leaders on religious issues and troop morale.

None of these are isolated developments. They raise urgent and fundamental questions about what it means to speak about God in a time of war.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s recent prayer at the Pentagon was particularly notable for its violent religious language. On Wednesday, March 25, he prayed that American forces be granted “overwhelming violence of action” against those who “deserve no mercy,” and that these actions be carried out “without remorse.” He asked God to “break the teeth of the ungodly” and “blow them away like chaff before the wind.” The language is jarring, but it is not original to Hegseth. It draws directly on some of the most violent passages in the biblical Psalms, like Psalm 58’s plea to God to “break the teeth of the wicked.”

Within the Christian tradition, the handful of Psalms quoted in Hegseth’s prayer are known as the imprecatory Psalms, and they are among the most difficult passages in the Bible. For millennia they have been interpreted with caution and often redirected inward, toward the human struggle against sin rather than the destruction of persons. For example, in his “Expositions on the Psalms,” Augustine of Hippo takes one of the verses used by Hegseth from Psalm 144, which addresses the God “who trains my hands for war, and my fingers for battle” and reads it as a description of the Christian life of charity. This “war,” Augustine teaches, is not against human enemies but against sin, and it is waged not through violence but through mercy. For Augustine, God is love as revealed in Christ, and therefore all of Scripture must be read according to this precept. To read a violent passage in Scripture as literally authorizing violence, the way Hegseth does, is to fundamentally misunderstand God’s nature.

Pope Leo XIV has condemned the Iran war in very strong terms. On Palm Sunday (March 29), he preached, “Brothers and sisters, this is our God: Jesus, King of Peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war. He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.” And on Easter Sunday, Pope Leo condemned the “abuses that crush the weakest among us, because of the idolatry of profit that plunders the earth’s resources, because of the violence of war that kills and destroys.” Pope Leo is an Augustinian priest — so his understanding both of war and of the Psalms that Hegseth uses to justify and celebrate violence and destruction — is grounded in Augustine’s theological understanding. One summary of this understanding can be found in Augustine’s “On Christian Doctrine,”: “Whoever thinks that he understands the divine Scriptures or any part of them so that it does not build up the double love of God and of our neighbor does not understand it at all.”

It is unlikely that Hegseth is aware of this theological tradition. He simply takes some of the most violent lines in the Bible and combines them into a seamless appeal for destruction. Reading the actual imprecatory Psalms in full, not just a cherry-picked selection of violent lines, reveals them to be powerful prayers of anguish and grief, arising from the Psalmist’s feelings of vulnerability as much as his rage or desire for vengeance. In Hegseth’s mashup, however, all the complexity and tension disappear, and only decontextualized biblical bloodlust remains.

While Hegseth uses Scripture to sanction violence and war, we are seeing other prominent religious figures — such as Candace Owens and Megyn Kelly, both Catholic — lean on the imagery of Christianity for its symbolic power, especially for its association with authority and order. Matthew Schmitz, a religion editor and commenter, has recently described this phenomenon as “unreligious religiosity.” The problem, however, is not that the use of these symbolic objects and gestures lacks religion, but that it lacks theology.

One recent example is Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s appearance, holding a rosary, on the January 2026 cover of The Atlantic. The object functions as a signal of religious identity and authority, but without any real engagement with the theological tradition it represents. In this form of public religion, the rosary is not prayed but displayed; it operates as a symbol rather than as part of a disciplined devotional and intellectual practice. What results is a religiosity detached from the theological frameworks that give devotional objects and ritual practices their meaning.

The two tendencies — Hegseth’s, which invokes Scripture, and Kennedy’s, which invokes a particular material dimension of religion — are not different, they are symptoms of the same condition. In both cases, religion has been severed from the theological tradition that both limits it and gives it coherence. 

The Christian theological tradition insists Scripture cannot be read in bits and pieces, cobbled together irresponsibly in order to support an agenda of death and destruction. The Bible must instead be read in light of other Scripture and within a broader theological tradition. This means that Jesus’ command to love one’s enemies stands when it is most difficult — even and especially during times of war. Christian theology cannot be decided by any individual — no matter how powerful. Its meaning comes from a body of knowledge that has responsibly sought to interpret and understand the will of God for centuries. 

The danger is not only that military leaders are using religious language to justify violence, or that online influencers are using simplistic memes and images as religious shorthand. The danger is that in both cases, the discipline of theology that must give these texts and objects their meaning is absent. Theology places limits on what can be said in God’s name. Without those theological limits, God can be made to authorize and endorse anything — including hatred, bloodlust and merciless destruction.

(Karen E. Park, a former professor of theology and religious studies at St. Norbert College, is the co-editor of American Patroness: Marian Shrines and the Making of US Catholicism. She writes on Substack at Ex Voto. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)