War Secretary Pete Hegseth’s announcement Wednesday that he is establishing an Office of Religious Affairs inside the Pentagon set off an immediate political firestorm, with critics accusing him of violating the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause and supporters calling it a long-overdue restoration of spiritual care in the ranks.
According to The Daily Wire, which reported on and defended the move, Hegseth framed the office as a bureaucratic fix rather than a doctrinal one. Because 95% of American service members identify as religious, he argued, the department should give them resources and a direct channel to the leadership responsible for their spiritual welfare.
“No staff filters. No bureaucratic dilution. A direct line to the secretary,” Hegseth said. “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.”
The secretary also characterized recent military religious policy as hostile to faith. “Political correctness and secular humanism got a vote — chaplains did not,” he said. “Budgets were cut. Resourcing and manpower needs were ignored. Base chapels fell apart.”
He added that the department would treat spiritual readiness as equal to physical readiness, saying, “The department is putting on the full armor of God because while we wage physical war, we all know the real battle is spiritual.”
The constitutional objection, answered
Critics zeroed in on Hegseth’s use of the word “establishing.” Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA) compared the move to the first bricks on the road to “Gilead,” the theocratic dystopia of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” pointing to the First Amendment’s bar on laws “respecting an establishment of religion.”
“It’s no accident that he used the word ‘establish’ here,” Huffman said, calling Hegseth a “full-throttle Christian nationalist” and citing the secretary’s monthly Pentagon auditorium church service, what Huffman described as “endless proselytizing,” and the removal of religious minority faith codes from the chaplaincy program.
Former “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd weighed in more briefly, suggesting on social media that someone hand Hegseth a pocket copy of the Constitution.
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, a Jewish Democrat, invoked the office while explaining her support for U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, writing that “nothing is more dangerous to religious minorities in the U.S. than the creation of a state religion.”
The Daily Wire’s report pushes back on those arguments on three fronts. First, it notes, the Establishment Clause restricts Congress, not the secretary of war, and Hegseth has no authority over the legislative branch. Second, nothing in his announcement suggested he intended to impose an official religion on the department. And third, the outlet argues, restoring religious support is a needed course correction after years in which, in its telling, the military was treated as a social experiment.
The chaplain fight behind the announcement
The new office is the latest move in a broader effort by Hegseth to reposition the chaplaincy. In April, he fired Maj. Gen. William Green Jr., then the chief of the U.S. Army Chaplain Corps. No official reason was given, but Hegseth had publicly criticized one of Green’s signature projects: the Army Spiritual Fitness Guide, a 112-page document published in August 2025 alongside a companion Battle Book and commissioned under former Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.
The guide was built around what were described as “secular-inclusive” principles meant to build resilience, part of the Army’s Holistic Health and Fitness program. By December, Hegseth had ordered the War Department to scrap it entirely, and it has since been pulled from the Army’s website.
At the time, Hegseth mocked its contents. “It mentions God one time. That’s it. It mentions feelings 11 times. It even mentions playfulness, whatever that is, nine times,” he said, adding that in today’s military, “chaplains have been minimized, viewed by many as therapists instead of ministers.”
Military chaplains are traditionally ordained within their own faith traditions — among them Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Sikhism — but are tasked with counseling service members of any belief or none. The Daily Wire’s account stresses that Hegseth never indicated chaplains would be steered toward a particular religion, and that the office is aimed at funding, infrastructure, and advocacy rather than doctrine.
Whether the office quiets its critics is another matter. The fight over the chaplaincy has become a proxy for a larger argument about religion’s place in the armed forces, and Hegseth’s announcement handed both sides a fresh rallying point.
Source: www.dailywire.com — https://www.dailywire.com/news/relax-the-pentagons-new-office-of-religious-affairs-doesnt-violate-the-constitution