Active-duty U.S. military chaplains say leadership under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is evaluating whether faith leaders are ideologically aligned with Donald Trump’s administration and Hegseth’s Christianity.
Several chaplains, who serve as officers in the branches, said they fear unconstitutional retaliation and other professional repercussions if their views don’t align with Hegseth, an Evangelical Christian who has implemented sweeping changes to the military’s Chaplain Corps.
“There appears to be an ongoing effort to determine whether subordinate chaplains ideologically align with the Secretary of Defense and the current leadership,” one chaplain wrote to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, a nonprofit group supporting service members’ rights to religious expression. “The messaging is consistent enough that many of us understand what is being rewarded and what is not.”
Acting Pentagon Press Secretary Joel Valdez told The Independent that “these claims are false,” but the complaints follow Hegseth’s overhauling of the Chaplain Corps over the last year.
Under Hegseth’s leadership, the Department of Defense has diminished chaplains’ military ranks and narrowed the Pentagon’s list of recognized faiths to “streamline” how chaplains minister to other service members. The secretary also tossed out “Spiritual Fitness” guides he said were too focused on “new age” concepts.
Those guides are ostensibly designed to help service members identify their personal faith, foundational values and moral grounding to better prepare them for conflict, whether those ideas stemmed from religion, philosophy or other modes of thinking.
But in a video announcing plans to overhaul the Chaplain Corps and spiritual fitness initiatives, Hegseth said chaplains are “not emotional support officers” or “therapists.”
“Faith and virtue were traded for self-help and self-care,” he said.
He derided the Army’s spiritual fitness program for promoting secular humanism, saying it “mentions God one time” and “mentions feelings 11 times.”
“It even mentions playfulness, whatever that is, nine times,” he said. “In short, it’s unacceptable and unserious. So we’re tossing it.”
Spiritual fitness “is now being presented as inherently religious,” a chaplain wrote to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. The complaints were first reported by The Daily Beast.
“Chaplains are increasingly expected to promote it, and the pressure to support its current direction is becoming difficult to ignore,” the chaplain said.
The chaplain also warned against reforms that have significantly expanded the influence of “supervisory chaplains” over their ministry, which could impact their promotions.
“If those determining what constitutes ‘effective ministry’ also expect alignment with a particular religious or ideological perspective, the evaluation system becomes more than a measure of ministry performance — it becomes a mechanism for shaping the future composition of the Chaplain Corps,” the chaplain wrote.
Another pair of military chaplains said they were pressured by administrative staff in their command to join a “commander’s crisis prayer phone tree.”
“It was more than obvious that the only religion associated with this so-called ‘crisis phone tree’ was Christian by the many statements made by the command section administrative staff,” they wrote.
The staffer’s attempts to recruit the chaplains was “clearly an attempt just as we joined this unit to make sure we were Christians in sync with I guess our commander’s obvious Christian religious views,” they said.
The Trump administration has repeatedly been accused of dismantling the church-and-state firewall and violating First Amendment protections by sharing explicitly Christian messages.
Hegseth has explicitly framed war with Iran through the lens of his faith and has rejected the founding principle of the separation of church and state. He has repeatedly invoked scripture and Christian prayer in his remarks while promising violence against his enemies.
The secretary also invited self-described Christian nationalist pastor Doug Wilson — who has defended slavery, wants to criminalize homosexuality and has advocated for repealing women’s right to vote — to preach at the Pentagon in February.
Last month, the Pentagon reduced a list of more than 200 previously recognized faith traditions to 31. The list no longer includes atheists and Unitarian Universalists, among others.
“Secretary Hegseth is not ‘streamlining’ anything. He is elevating one narrow religious worldview from the top of the chain of command,” according to said the Rev. Paul Raushenbush, a Baptist minister and head of the progressive Interfaith Alliance.
“That is dangerous, discriminatory and fundamentally un-American,” he said in a statement. “The First Amendment does not allow the government to create a hierarchy of faiths, and it certainly does not allow the Pentagon to decide which beliefs are worthy of recognition.”
Chaplains fear what appears to be “ideological alignment” could develop into a “broader narrowing of who is considered acceptable within the Chaplain Corps,” one chaplain wrote.
Among those likely to be impacted are chaplains from racial minority backgrounds and minority faith traditions, as well as women, the chaplain told the Military Religious Freedom Foundation.
“I sincerely hope I’m wrong. But from my perspective, the combination of the Spiritual Fitness initiative and the new evaluation system appears to create a structure that could reward ideological conformity while discouraging theological and cultural diversity,” the person said. “That would be a profound shift for a Chaplain Corps whose mission is to provide for the free exercise of religion across a pluralistic force.”
