Relax, The Pentagon’s New Office Of Religious Affairs Doesn’t Violate The Constitution

War Secretary Pete Hegseth immediately set tongues wagging with his Wednesday announcement establishing the Office of Religious Affairs to support service members and the chaplains who guide and counsel them.

What Hegseth said was fairly simple: Because 95% of American service members claim to be religious, the War Department should support those service members by providing resources and direct access to the leadership put in place to guide them.

“No staff filters. No bureaucratic dilution. A direct line to the secretary,” Hegseth explained. “This is not going to be a paper-pushing shop; it’s going to have real teeth. It’ll protect budgets, demand infrastructure and strengthen religious support. The experts — our chaplains — will finally have an advocate at the highest levels. Policy and resources will serve the mission, not smother the mission.”

“Political correctness and secular humanism got a vote — chaplains did not,” he said of military religious policy in recent years. “Budgets were cut. Resourcing and manpower needs were ignored. Base chapels fell apart.”

“We’re placing spiritual health at the same level as physical health,” he added. “The department is putting on the full armor of God because while we wage physical war, we all know the real battle is spiritual. God is good. Evil is not. America’s military must know the difference.”

Hegseth, himself a Christian, did not utter a single word suggesting that the chaplains would be steered in the direction of any specific religion. And traditionally, although they may be ordained according to their own personal faith traditions — primarily Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Sikhism — military chaplains are tasked with providing counsel and care for all service members regardless of their personal faiths.

But the usual suspects, as usual, heard what they thought Hegseth meant instead of what he actually said — and immediately accused him of violating the Establishment Clause written into the First Amendment of the United States Constitution: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof …”

“Can someone get this man a copy of the Constitution. Lots of pocket versions available,” former “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd advised.

Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA) accused Hegseth of laying the first bricks in the road to “Gilead,” referencing “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

“First Amendment: ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.’ Hegseth: ‘Today, at my direction, I’m establishing the Office of Religious Affairs.’ It’s no accident that he used the word ‘establish’ here. Hegseth is a full-throttle Christian nationalist who hates separation of church and state. He chips away at it all the time — through his monthly Christian church service at the Pentagon auditorium, his endless proselytizing, by removing religious minority faith codes from the Chaplaincy program, etc., etc. The road to Gilead is paved with dystopic crap like this,” he complained.

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, a Jewish Democrat, trotted out Hegseth’s plan as justification for her support for U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed — who has voiced support for allowing Sharia law in the United States.

“When people ask me how I, as a Jew, can support @AbdulElSayed, it’s bc nothing is more dangerous to religious minorities in the U.S. than the creation of a state religion. Mike Rogers will confirm judges hellbent on destroying any separation of church & state. Abdul will not,” she said in an X post, ignoring his position on Sharia.

Unclench, you disingenuous creeps.

First, the Establishment Clause bars Congress from passing a law establishing a state religion and imposing its practice on citizens. As the war secretary is not Congress and has no control whatsoever over the legislative body, what the First Amendment bars Congress from doing has absolutely no bearing on what the war secretary establishes within his own department.

Second, Hegseth gave no indication that he intended to establish an official religion to which all members of the War Department would adhere.

And finally, what Hegseth is doing to restore religious support within the military is a much-needed step in the right direction. He has pushed the military to move away from generic, secular “spiritual wellness” — and toward supporting individual war-fighters and their families in their religious needs — and unsurprisingly, that is inspiring panic in the woke critics who were all too happy to see the United States military turned into a social experiment.

The same people who are having kittens over the Office of Religious Affairs probably still have their knickers twisted over the fact that he fired Maj. Gen. William Green Jr., former Chief of the U.S. Army Chaplain Corps — and it all may be connected.

Although no official cause was given when Green was fired in April, Hegseth had previously voiced disapproval of one of Green’s pet projects: the Army Spiritual Fitness Guide, published in 2025.

The 112-page guide — and accompanying Battle Book — has since been removed from the U.S. Army’s website. Commissioned under former Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, the guide featured “secular-inclusive” principles aimed at encouraging resilience and strength. It was written as part of the Army’s Holistic Health and Fitness program (H2F).

The guide was published in August 2025, and by December, Hegseth had ordered the War Department to scrap it entirely.

“It mentions God one time. That’s it. It mentions feelings 11 times. It even mentions playfulness, whatever that is, nine times,” Hegseth said at the time, complaining that in the military, “chaplains have been minimized, viewed by many as therapists instead of ministers.”

The establishment of the Office of Religious Affairs is just the next step in Hegseth’s effort to restore the chaplains’ intended role — and it comes not a moment too soon.

More from this network:
Domains for Sale · GOTPeople.org · TheDSAPlatform · The Truth About Socialism

Donate to GOTPeople.org