How Pulp Fiction Ended Up in a Pentagon Prayer Service

On April 15, Hegseth stood at the podium.

Pete Hegseth has been running monthly Christian worship services out of the Pentagon since taking office as Secretary of Defense, and for a while, the most controversial thing about them was the fact that they were happening at all. On April 15, Hegseth stood at the podium during one of those services and asked his audience to pray with him, leading them through what he introduced as "CSAR 25:17," a prayer he said was recited by the Sandy One combat search-and-rescue team before their mission to recover two crew members of a U.S. F-15E Strike Eagle shot down over Iran on April 3. The pilot was rescued the same day; the weapons systems officer, an Air Force colonel, was recovered two days later in a nighttime operation involving dozens of aircraft.

"I think it's meant to reflect Ezekiel 25:17," he told the room, except what followed was not Ezekiel 25:17.

What Hegseth actually read was a militarized adaptation of the monologue delivered by Samuel L. Jackson's hitman character Jules Winnfield in Quentin Tarantino's 1994 film Pulp Fiction, specifically the speech Jules delivers right before shooting a man to death. The real Ezekiel 25:17, as written in the King James Bible, is a single sentence about divine vengeance against the Philistines. The Tarantino version, which Hegseth's prayer closely mirrors, is an extended Hollywood invention that Tarantino himself lifted from a 1973 Japanese martial arts film called Bodyguard Kiba and expanded for the script. Words were swapped out to fit the military context, "righteous man" became "downed aviator," and "you will know my name is the Lord" became "you will know my call sign is Sandy One," but the DNA of the prayer is unmistakably Miramax.

To Hegseth's modest credit, he acknowledged the prayer was not a verbatim scripture reading. Still, Quentin Tarantino wrote most of it, and the Secretary of Defense apparently did not know that. Pentagon chief spokesman Sean Parnell attempted damage control on X the following day, arguing that both the CSAR prayer and the Pulp Fiction dialogue were "reflections" of Ezekiel 25:17, and that anyone claiming Hegseth misquoted scripture was "peddling fake news and ignorant of reality." This defense requires believing that a hitman preparing to execute someone and a combat rescue team preparing a mission both independently arrived at nearly identical 90-word passages through scriptural reflection, which is a generous interpretation of coincidence.

The worship services had already drawn significant legal and institutional scrutiny before April 15th. Hegseth has hosted conservative pastors affiliated with the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, a network co-founded by Christian nationalist pastor Doug Wilson, and has used the services to pray for military force in explicit terms. At the March 25th service, Hegseth asked God to grant troops "overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy" and to "break the teeth of the ungodly." Americans United for Separation of Church and State filed suit against the Department of Defense over the services, and John E. Jones III, a former federal judge appointed by George W. Bush and current president of Dickinson College, told The Conversation the services appear to violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

Thirty House Democrats had separately requested a Defense Department inspector general investigation into whether Hegseth's religious rhetoric had penetrated the military chain of command in ways contravening constitutional protections and professional military standards. Steve Bannon, on his podcast War Room, advised Hegseth to keep religious references out of operational briefings, arguing they were displacing substantive discussion of military strategy and drawing media attention away from what Bannon considered significant operational accomplishments. Archbishop Reinhard Marx of Munich described Hegseth's theology as "shameless blasphemy," and Pope Leo XIV, in his Palm Sunday address, stated Jesus "rejects war" and "does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war."

The day after the Pulp Fiction prayer circulated online, Hegseth stood at a Pentagon briefing and compared the assembled press corps to the Pharisees in the Book of Mark, telling reporters determining which side they were on was sometimes difficult.

The Sandy One mission planner who wrote "CSAR 25:17" almost certainly knew exactly where those lines came from. Hegseth read them aloud at an official government worship service and walked away apparently satisfied. Nobody in the chain of command between that pilot and that podium said a word, and the distinction between the man who wrote the prayer and the man who delivered it is the funniest thing to happen at the Pentagon since it was called the Pentagon.

Somewhere, Samuel L. Jackson is either furious or flattered.

@Santitos

@salinasmariasantos

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