Pete Hegseth stood before thousands of Christian broadcasters in Nashville and made a claim that would have been unremarkable to every American president before roughly 1965: the United States of America was built on biblical foundations, and abandoning them means abandoning the republic itself.

The Secretary of War delivered the keynote address at the National Religious Broadcasters' Freedom 250 Celebration, held at the Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center as part of the NRB 2026 International Christian Media Convention. His message was direct, unapologetic, and aimed squarely at the intersection of faith, liberty, and national defense.

Hegseth called President Donald Trump "a fierce defender of Christians and people of faith," then laid out a case that the country's founding documents are inseparable from the religion that shaped them.

"As we celebrate our nation's 250th year, it's important to understand that the very fabric of our founding documents are woven into the threads of Christian and biblical principles."

The argument the left can't answer

Hegseth's speech traced what he called a "direct through line from the Old and New Testaments ... to the development of Western civilization and the United States of America." This is not a fringe theological claim. It is a historical observation that was standard curriculum in American universities for two centuries before the academy decided otherwise, as The Christian Post reports.

The core of his argument struck at the philosophical roots of the American experiment. Individual dignity. Natural rights. Limited government. Religious freedom. Hegseth argued that each of these flows from a single premise: that every person is created in the image of God.

"Ancient and godless societies viewed the individual as subordinate to the state or the collective. The godless left today still sees it that way. But the Christian belief that every person is created in the image of God established a new understanding of humanity. It was not a declaration of worldly economic equity or social justice, but a profound recognition of the transcendent inherent dignity of every individual."

That distinction matters more than most people realize. The modern left claims to champion "human dignity" while simultaneously insisting that rights come from government, that the collective supersedes the individual, and that the state should function as the ultimate moral authority. Hegseth identified the contradiction plainly: without God as the source of rights, the state becomes God. And a state that grants rights can revoke them.

He quoted John Adams's warning that the U.S. Constitution suits only a "moral and religious people." Adams wasn't making a suggestion. He was issuing a prerequisite.

The 1775 business

Hegseth pivoted from philosophy to the institution he now leads, and he did it with the confidence of a man who has carried a rifle in service of the ideas he was describing.

"Our country is celebrating 1776 this year and rightfully so. But of course, at the War Department, we're in the 1775 business. That's where we picked up the rifles to defend those ideas, but it's also when we went to Bended Knee with the founding of our chapel."

He credited George Washington with recognizing that "faith provides comfort, guidance and resilience in the face of hardship and danger," a recognition that led to the founding of the Chaplain Corps in 1775. Before the Declaration of Independence was drafted, the Continental Army had chaplains. The order of operations tells you something about priorities.

Hegseth, who was commissioned as an infantry officer in the U.S. Army National Guard after graduating from Princeton in 2003, is not a man theorizing about military service from behind a desk. He deployed to Guantanamo Bay, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He earned two Bronze Star Medals, the Combat Infantryman Badge, and the Expert Infantryman Badge. He authored five books, including "The War on Warriors," a 2024 New York Times bestseller.

When he talks about what the military needs, he speaks from the field, not the faculty lounge.

Purging the Pentagon's progressive experiment

The speech catalogued concrete reforms the administration has implemented within the military:

• Monthly Christian prayer services instituted at the Pentagon
• Revitalization of the Chaplain Corps
• Purging what Hegseth called "godless and divisive DEI" and "gender-bending equity" from military operations
• Rescinding gender-affirming care guidance from prior administrations
• Ending taxpayer-funded abortions in certain contexts

Hegseth condensed the military's cultural reversal into a single line that drew the sharpest contrast possible: "We train our troops, we no longer trans our troops."

For years, the previous administration treated the armed forces as a laboratory for social engineering. Pronoun training replaced combat readiness. Diversity officers multiplied while recruiting numbers cratered. The military's purpose, to fight and win wars, was subordinated to an ideological project that had nothing to do with lethality and everything to do with progressive signaling.

"We are one military, one fighting force, one nation under God. We are not 'in woke we trust,' we are 'in God we trust.'"

That line captures a restoration, not an innovation. The military existed for nearly 250 years without DEI bureaucracies. It won two world wars, stared down the Soviet Union, and projected American power across every continent. The notion that it suddenly needed gender ideology seminars to function was always absurd. The current administration simply had the nerve to say so out loud and then act on it.

A call to Christian boldness

Hegseth directed his closing appeal to the broadcasters in the room, urging Christian communicators to resist efforts to silence biblical views on life, borders, gender, and culture. He framed the call as "not political, it's biblical."

This is where the speech connected the theological argument to the cultural battle. For a decade, the left has worked to redefine religious conviction as bigotry, to treat orthodox Christian teaching on marriage, sexuality, and the sanctity of life as hate speech. The strategy is obvious: if you can delegitimize the moral framework, you can replace it with your own. Hegseth was telling an audience of media professionals that their silence is the left's greatest weapon.

He called for bold, virtuous citizenship rooted in faith, then closed with Psalm 18: "The Lord is on my side. I will not fear."

And then he said what no Secretary of Defense has likely ever said from a convention stage:

"Christ is King. He died for our sins. ... He will come again in glory. Amen."

Why this speech matters beyond Nashville

The predictable response from the left will be alarm. Theocracy accusations. Separation of church and state hand-wringing. The usual.

But Hegseth did not call for a state religion. He made a historical argument that the principles undergirding American liberty are Christian in origin, and that severing the nation from those roots hollows out the foundation beneath every right the left claims to defend. Free speech, equal dignity, the inherent worth of every human being: these did not emerge from a vacuum. They grew in soil that was tilled by centuries of Judeo-Christian thought.

The left wants the fruit without the tree. Hegseth is reminding the country that the tree still stands, and that there are people in positions of authority who intend to water it.

A 45-year-old combat veteran with two Bronze Stars, standing in Nashville, telling a room full of Christians to stop apologizing for what they believe. That is not theocracy. That is a free man exercising the liberty that his forebears, on Bended Knee and on the battlefield, bled to secure.