Pete Hegseth wears his Christian pride on his sleeve — literally, and sometimes in Hebrew.
The Minnesota National Guard veteran, Fox News personality and now nominee for US secretary of defense has a slew of religiously inspired tattoos that have drawn attention as Hegseth’s public vetting for a senior position in President-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet has begun.
Hegseth, 44, has a litany of ink that points to his military service and penchant for patriotism, including the US Constitution’s famous opening phrase “We the People,” a “Join, or Die” snake from the American Revolution, an American flag with an AR-15 rifle and a patch of his regiment, the 187th Infantry.
Other tattoos are religious in nature — and raising eyebrows over their potential implications for an official with responsibility for national security.
Hegseth’s tattoos, political views and religious affiliation and background are consistent with an extreme strain of Christian nationalism, according to Matthew Taylor, a scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, & Jewish Studies. Specifically, he appears to be belong to a fringe denomination known as Reformed Reconstructionism, which believes in applying biblical Christian law to society, exclusively male leadership, and actively preparing the world for the prophesied return of Jesus.
The denomination has an affinity for the Crusades, the military campaign waged during the Middle Ages by European Christians to rid Muslims from the Holy Land, as described in the Old and New Testaments.
Jerusalem cross
One of Hegseth’s most prominent tattoos is a large Jerusalem cross on his chest, a symbol featuring a large cross potent with smaller Greek crosses in each of its four quadrants. The symbol was used in the Crusades and represented the Kingdom of Jerusalem that the Crusaders established.
Crusader symbols have also grown popular on the far-right, which sees the imagery as a nod to an era of European Christian wars against Muslims and Jews. The shooter who committed the 2019 New Zealand mosque massacre had adopted symbols of the Crusades, and a crusader symbol also appeared at the Jan. 6, 2021, riot in the US Capitol as well as at the 2017 far-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Hegseth has said his tattoo kept him away from President Joe Biden’s inauguration just two weeks after Jan. 6.
“I was in the National Guard during the inauguration of Joe Biden, so I served under Bush, served under Obama, served under Trump, and now was going to guard the inauguration because I was in the D.C. guard,” he told Fox in June.
“Ultimately, members of my unit in leadership deemed that I was an extremist or a white nationalist because of a tattoo I have, which is a religious tattoo. It’s a Jerusalem cross. Everybody can look it up, but it was used as a premise to revoke my orders to guard the inauguration.”
Hegseth also has “Deus Vult,” Latin for “God wills it,” tattooed on his bicep. The phrase was used as a rallying cry for the First Crusade in 1096. It is also the closing sentence of Hegseth’s 2020 book, titled “American Crusade.”
The slogan has also been used by members of far-right, white supremacist and Christian nationalist groups. The perpetrator of the 2023 Allen, Texas, mall shooting had it tattooed alongside neo-Nazi tattoos, according to the Anti-Defamation League, which said elsewhere that the phrase had been “adopted by some white supremacists.”
Hegseth also has a cross and sword tattooed on his arm, which he says represents a New Testament verse. The verse, Matthew 10:34, reads, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.”
He later added “Yeshua,” or Jesus in Hebrew, under the sword. Hegseth told the site Media Ink in a 2020 interview that the tattoo was Jesus’ Hebrew name, which he mistakenly said was “Yehweh,” a Biblical spelling of God’s name. He told Media Ink that he got the tattoo while in Bethlehem, Jesus’ birthplace, which is located in the present-day West Bank, where he was reporting for Fox Nation.
“Israel, Christianity and my faith are things I care deeply about,” Hegseth told Media Ink.
“It was something I had planned to do as part of the story,” Hegseth said. “We were doing a story about how the Christian population in Bethlehem has been dramatically reduced. The guy running it does a lot of tattoos for Christian tourists who come to see the birthplace of Jesus. It was, one, to get the tattoo but more to tell the story of what it’s like to be a Christian in Bethlehem today who has a business just feet from where Jesus was born but also the mosque that’s there in Manger Square.”
Hegseth opposes the two-state solution and supports exclusive Israeli sovereignty in the Holy Land. He has also said the idea of rebuilding the biblical Temple on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount is a “miracle” that could happen in our lifetimes. Doing so would require the razing of the Dome of Rock, a mosque located on one of Islam’s holiest sites.
Hegseth expressed these views in a 2018 speech delivered in Jerusalem at a conference organized by the right-wing Israel National News, also known as Arutz Sheva.
The speech laid out a vision of a world beset by a growing darkness that can only be saved by the United States, Israel and fellow “free people” from other countries.
He criticized the Obama administration’s record on Iran and said Trump is providing the right leadership on the issue while calling Europe “a museum soon to be drowned out by radical Islam and Islamism.”
He said that seeing the reality on the ground and talking to Israelis revealed the irrelevance of the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“I take a solemn responsibility in coming here and learning from Joe and from others about the truth on the ground and then going back to America and fighting the fake news about the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Arab Israeli peace process, the so-called two-state solution that still drips off the lips of the intelligentsia in America today, when if you walk the ground today, you understand there is no such thing as the outcome of a two-state solution. There is one state.”
He concluded his speech by drawing a line from the historical milestones of Israeli history to a vision of the building of the Third Temple.
Visiting the Western Wall, he said, “got me thinking about another miracle that I hope all of you don’t see too far away, because 1917 was a miracle, 1948 was a miracle, 1967 was a miracle, 2017, the Declaration of Jerusalem as the capital was a miracle. And there’s no reason why the miracle of the reestablishment of the Temple on the Temple Mount is not possible.
“I don’t know how it would happen. You don’t know how it would happen. But I know that it could happen.”