Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner prays during a Cabinet meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, at the White House on Feb. 26.The Associated Press
General Dwight Eisenhower’s D-Day message called on Allied warriors to “beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.” Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s prayer at the time included this invocation: “Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our Nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity.”
Some 82 years later, as U.S. military personnel were engaged in combat against Iran’s Islamic theocracy, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth asked Americans to pray “every day, on bended knee, with your family, in your schools, in your churches, in the name of Jesus Christ.”
There have been multiple wartime religious invocations in American history, but generally they have been anodyne calls to prayer such as George W. Bush’s comment, made after the 2001 terrorist attacks, that “the Lord of life holds all who die, and all who mourn.”
Even the reference made by Mr. Roosevelt to “our religion” lacked specificity and came at a time when more than 90 per cent of Americans identified as Christians, according to the Gallup Poll.
The precision in Mr. Hegseth’s call to prayer, issued at a time when the phrase “Christian nationalism” has become part of U.S. political discourse, was directed at a country far more diverse than it was during the Second World War. The most recent Pew Research Center survey, conducted when the country had roughly four million Muslims, found only 62 per cent of Americans identifying as Christians.
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“Past presidents have claimed they had divine authority for war,” said Robert Putnam, a Harvard political scientist and co-author of American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us. “But it’s hard to imagine any recent official publicly claiming Christian authority for it.”
Mr. Hegseth’s call to prayer provided a stark contrast to the remarks of two modern presidential nominees − one a Democrat (John F. Kennedy, a Catholic, 1960) and one a Republican (Mitt Romney, a Mormon, 2012) − who argued that religious identity should not be part of American political discourse. “I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute,” Mr. Kennedy told the Greater Houston Ministerial Association.
For centuries, religion has been a vital part of American civic life − far more so than in Canada. Indeed, a study released in November by the Angus Reid Institute and Canadian think tank Cardus found Americans far more likely to be public about their religion (70 per cent) than Canadians (52 per cent).
Over the course of American history, the country has had two publicly evangelical presidents (Jimmy Carter, George W. Bush); three who appealed directly to religious conservatives (Ronald Reagan, Mr. Bush, and Donald Trump); one who was shaped by “Bible sings” and who as a youth spent his own money to go to a Billy Graham revival (Bill Clinton); three who were children of preachers (Chester Arthur, Grover Cleveland and Woodrow Wilson); and one whose principal means of education was the Bible (Abraham Lincoln).
As early as 1739, Anglican priest George Whitefield sowed the seeds of the Great Awakening in colonial America, even prompting the skeptic Benjamin Franklin to empty his pockets of coins after hearing his preaching. Two years later, Congregationalist theologian Jonathan Edwards delivered perhaps the most famous sermon in American history, titled “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” and arguing, “At any moment God shall permit him, Satan stands ready to fall upon the wicked and seize them as his own.”
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Unbaptized and unaffiliated with any denomination, Lincoln − marinated in the phrases of the King James Bible − repeatedly employed religious imagery. Directly employing a line from Psalm 19 in his second inaugural address to argue that Civil War bloodshed was God’s price for American slavery, he said that “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
Several religion-oriented forces have collided in the past six decades, transforming the character of American life.
In 1962, the Supreme Court struck down mandatory prayer − in most cases, the Lord’s Prayer or the 23rd Psalm − in public schools. Religious figures were prominent in both the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s (led by the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and joined by Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel) and the Vietnam-era antiwar movement (the Protestant Reverend William Sloane Coffin and the Catholic priests Daniel and Philip Berrigan).
In the next decade, the traditional conviction among religious conservatives to avoid secular politics eroded to the extent that, in 1976, Mr. Carter spoke openly about being “born again,” and, in 1988, televangelist Pat Robertson finished second in the Republican Iowa presidential caucuses. More recently, those now known as “nones” − atheists, agnostics and others who profess no specific religious identity − have become the largest single group in the United States.
“Given what’s being done in the name of religion, it’s not surprising people are turning off,” said Randall Balmer, an Episcopal priest and Dartmouth College historian who is the author of God in the White House: How Faith Shaped the Presidency. He called Mr. Hegseth’s remarks “an egregious violation of decorum and the Constitution.”
The growth of America’s Muslim population has prompted fresh sensitivity in the country’s rhetoric, with Mr. Bush apologizing for describing his War on Terror as a “crusade.” There was no such outcry when Gen. Eisenhower titled his 1948 war memoir Crusade in Europe.
For his part, Mr. Trump, confirmed as a Presbyterian but who considers himself a “nondenominational Christian,” repeatedly has employed religious imagery. In a reference to surviving his 2024 assassination attempt, he said in his 2025 inaugural address that he was “saved by God to make America great again.”
In a message to supporters last summer, he said, “I want to try and get to Heaven.” Then he told them, “I’ve launched a 24 HOUR TRUMP FUNDRAISING BLITZ.”