In the cavernous auditorium of the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth stood before a crowd of uniformed service members and proclaimed the nation’s need to be “on bended knee, recognizing the providence of our lord and savior Jesus Christ.”
It was not a Sunday sermon but a mandatory‑hours prayer service, led by Hegseth’s personal pastor from a Tennessee church founded by a theologian who openly advocates for a “Christian theocracy.”
The scene, repeated monthly since last spring, is not an aberration. It is the culmination of a 250‑year‑old war against the American experiment itself—a war that, for the first time, has seized the levers of federal power.
That is the argument of scholar Jerome Copulsky, whose book American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order traces the lineage of religious movements that have sought to dismantle the pluralist, secular democracy the Founders erected.
“What all these people really opposed is that the United States was not founded to be a Christian nation, in the way they imagined a Christian nation should be,” Copulsky said in a recent interview.
From the 18th‑century “Covenanters” who rejected the Godless Constitution, to the pro‑slavery theologians of the Confederacy, to the 20th‑century Christian Reconstructionists who wanted to impose Old Testament law, each generation produced its own “heretics” to the liberal order.
They were, Copulsky writes, “religious dissenters” from a system built on individual rights, civic equality, and the separation of church and state.
For most of American history, these illiberal visions remained on the fringe. Now they are in the Oval Office, seeking a massive increase in military spending.
In February 2025, President Donald Trump created a White House Faith Office, charging it with “empowering faith‑based entities” across the federal government. The same week, he signed an executive order establishing a Justice Department task force to “eradicate anti‑Christian bias,” defined broadly enough to include prosecutions of abortion‑clinic protesters.
By April, the State Department had ordered staff to report colleagues for “anti‑Christian bias,” citing examples such as displaying Pride flags or enforcing pronoun policies.
In May, Trump stood in the Rose Garden and publicly dismissed the separation of church and state.
“They say separation between church and state … I said, ‘All right, let’s forget about that for one time,’” he declared before signing an order creating a Presidential Commission on Religious Liberty stocked with Christian‑right allies.
Days later, he posted an AI‑generated image of himself dressed as the pope, a stunt that drew condemnation from Catholic leaders but underscored his message: religion is now a weapon of state.
And that weapon is being loaded with a $1½ trillion budget request.
In the context of global threats to the United States, a long-overdue defense modernization bill, and the ambitions of Trump’s signature defense priorities, perhaps the budget request should have been expected.
The push has only intensified. At a Christmas worship service in the Pentagon courtyard last December, Franklin Graham preached from the book of Samuel about a God who “orders the total destruction” of enemies.
Hegseth, a philanderer whose church belongs to the ultra‑conservative Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, has moved to overhaul the military’s Chaplain Corps to fit a “Christian religious vision.”
CNN analysis noted that Trump’s administration has “increasingly fused” church and state, pointing to a funeral that turned into a revival meeting where Vice President JD Vance called on Americans to “put Christ at the center of your life”.
These are not isolated acts.
They are the program of what Copulsky calls “religious illiberalism”—a project that finally has the power to enact its goals. The modern “post‑liberal” intellectuals, Catholic integralists, and nationalist conservatives who now advise Trump share a common thread with the heretics of the past: a belief that America was founded wrong, that its commitment to neutral government and equal rights is a fatal flaw.
“When I started the book, I knew I wanted to write about groups that opposed the American project,” Copulsky said. “But it took a while for the through‑line to emerge: that what all these people really opposed is that the United States was not founded to be a Christian nation.”
The secular nature of the United States was unanimously embraced by the founders, as Democratic-Republican Thomas Jefferson coined the term, “separation of church and state,” while Federalist John Adams asserted in 1796, that “the Government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.”
The question now is whether the heretical Trump jihadists can finally win. They have captured key institutions: the Pentagon, the Justice Department, the White House.
They have policy vehicles like the Faith Office and the Religious Liberty Commission.
And they have a president who is conducting himself like the antithesis of Jesus Christ as he vows to “bring religion back in America.”
Yet Copulsky cautions that the coalition is fractious.
Theocratic Reconstructionists, Catholic integralists, and Christian nationalists all dream of different kingdoms.
“They can work together as cobelligerents for a while,” he said, “but at some point, the fissures will begin to show.”
For now, the fissures are hidden by the sheer momentum of power.
Every prayer service in the Pentagon, every task force hunting “anti‑Christian bias,” every executive order erasing the line between church and state is a step toward a America that the Covenanters, the slave‑holding theologians, and the Reconstructionists would recognize.
It is an America that the Founders, with their deliberate separation of spheres, tried to prevent.
The heretics are no longer shouting from the wilderness.
They are drafting the orders, leading the prayers, and wearing the uniforms. They are also purging patriotic Americans from positions of power upon the slightest indication that they would resist illegal orders or obstruct the execution of coup d’etat.
After 250 years, their holy war against liberal democracy has a commander‑in‑chief.