Pete Hegseth's wartime rhetoric has invited scrutiny of his faith, which has Minnesota roots

MINNEAPOLIS — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s biblical rhetoric and prominent religious tattoos have long been decried by some as signals of Christian nationalism and crusader ideology.

But in recent months, as Hegseth became the face of the Trump administration’s military campaign against Iran, scrutiny of the Forest Lake native’s faith has intensified, with headlines highlighting his proselytizing, his monthly Pentagon prayer services and his use of biblical language to defend U.S. military actions.

Though Hegseth’s faith is now centered in the teachings of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, a conservative, traditionalist network often criticized for its views on gender and authority, its roots run back to Minnesota.

While Hegseth didn’t respond to requests for comment, his father said many of his son’s outspoken convictions today represent a recommitment to the Christian family values he tried to instill in his children with the help of a then-small church that has since grown to be Minnesota’s largest.

“If you’re going to take a platform with your faith, people are gonna examine you like crazy,” Brian Hegseth said in his first interview with the Minnesota Star Tribune since his son was nominated for the job in the Trump administration in 2024. “But they don’t want the whole story. They just want the sensational, they want the hypocrite.”

Growing up Baptist

Religion was a central fixture in the Hegseth family life.

Pete Hegseth, now 45, and his two brothers were raised by “God-fearing, America-loving, and hardworking parents who took pride in the ‘homely virtues of the household,’ ” he wrote in his 2016 memoir, “In the Arena: Good Citizens, a Great Republic, and How One Speech Can Reinvigorate America.”

Brian and Penny Hegseth both grew up in Norwegian American families, attending rural, Lutheran churches. When the couple moved to Forest Lake in the mid 1980s, they went searching for a church that allowed them to “get away from life and worship the way we wanted to,” Brian Hegseth told the Star Tribune.

They found a home at First Baptist Church in White Bear Lake. It had about 250 members then and was just far enough down Hwy. 61 that Brian, the head basketball coach for Forest Lake High School, didn’t have to field questions about the latest game highlights while trying to pray.

Penny Hegseth played piano for the children’s choir, and the kids attended Sunday school.

The family prayed together every night, and Pete chose to be baptized during his middle school years. Around that time, the Hegseths spent a summer in Canada’s Lac La Croix First Nation, a place they visited several times to help run vacation Bible school and offer Bible studies.

“It wasn’t every day spent trying to save people,” Brian Hegseth said. “Our charge in going there was to live as a traditional Christian family.”

Pete Hegseth looked forward to Christian basketball camps each summer, Brian Hegseth said, though he figures the appeal was probably more about court time with friends than it was about memorization of Bible verses and testimony-sharing.

Still, he said, “There were awards given out for attitude and understanding the Christian walk. He won a lot of those accolades.”

Eagle Brook’s expansion

By 1995, First Baptist Church was renamed Eagle Brook under the leadership of Bob Merritt, a Wisconsin country pastor who took over the 300-person congregation in 1991.

It now serves more than 28,000 people across 14 locations and another 29,000 tune in online. Its services typically open with contemporary music in an auditorium-like sanctuary. The rows of chairs fill with parishioners wearing Vikings jerseys and flannels, some holding a cup of Eagle Brook blend coffee from the church’s cafe.

In the acknowledgments for his memoir, Pete Hegseth thanked the church and Merritt specifically, writing in the book that the pastor “supported me through bright and dark days.”

Merritt, who stepped down as lead pastor in 2020 and now travels the country advising churches and pastors, declined a request for an interview. The current senior pastor, Jason Strand, said the church doesn’t discuss individual members or their faith journeys.

Strand said in a statement that the church’s “approach has been very consistent over the years,” and attendees come from across the political spectrum. Brian and Penny Hegseth still attend services there.

“Our mission is simple: we are empowered by God to reach others for Christ,” Strand wrote. “Our Five Values outline what we hope for each of our attenders: follow Jesus, spend time with God, connect in community, serve others and live generously.”

‘Living his faith’

Both Brian and Pete Hegseth have said that it wasn’t until about eight years ago that Pete Hegseth started “living his faith.”

Together with his third wife, Jennifer Rauchet, he joined Colts Neck Community Church, a Baptist church in New Jersey where they were living.

“People always want to point to him — because here’s a guy with a couple of failed marriages and rumors about this and that — and say ‘Who is he to call himself Christian?’ ” Brian Hegseth said. “But he did grow up with the values, and he and Jen put a stake in the ground at Colts Neck, where the pastor counseled them on their marriage and how they wanted to move forward.”

Pete Hegseth was accused of sexually assaulting a woman in 2017, which he denied. No charges were ever filed. He paid the accuser $50,000. He has also acknowledged instances of infidelity, including having a child with Rauchet when he was going through a divorce with his second wife.

In a December 2024 interview with Megyn Kelly, Pete Hegseth, a former co-host of "Fox & Friends Weekend," said finding his ”two Js" — Jennifer and Jesus — helped save his life.

“I’ve created plenty of problems for myself, but I know sitting here, I am a liberated man by the Gospel of Jesus Christ,” he told Kelly. “People can take that and believe that or not.”

After moving his family to the Nashville area in search of a classical Christian school for his children, Pete Hegseth joined Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowship, a congregation of about 50 families that’s affiliated with the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC).

“I didn’t even know who he was when he came. They were just normal parishioners, coming to Bible studies, coming to church and filling in church life,” said Brooks Potteiger, the pastor at Pilgrim Hill.

Since Pete Hegseth became defense secretary, Potteiger has led two prayer services at the Pentagon and led attendees in a prayer that the defense secretary “continue to lead in the fear in the Lord.”

Potteiger will soon leave Tennessee to go to Christ Church in Washington, D.C., another CREC church that Pete Hegseth now attends. The move is not related to Hegseth’s position, Potteiger said.

Christ Church was, in the words of church leaders, “planted” by Doug Wilson, a pastor who was one of the first leaders in the CREC. Wilson also led a prayer service at the Pentagon this year. Wilson has come under fire for promoting a patriarchal societal structure and pushing against the idea that a wife should have a separate vote from her husband.

Potteiger said Pilgrim Hill supports a “one vote per household” model but isn’t fundamentally against women’s right to vote.

“We’re a younger church with old goals,” Potteiger told the Star Tribune. “I really do believe that at the founding of our country, when there was more Presbyterianism in America, we would have been seen as pretty normal.”

Each worship service includes hymns or the singing of Psalms and a confession of sins. Potteiger has said in podcast interviews that parishioners don’t land at a CREC church “by accident.” He helped Pilgrim Hill after worrying that the social justice movement coming out of 2020 was “a Trojan horse” to “inject critical race theory” into nondenominational and Baptist-affiliated churches.

“There’s a movement of people who long to return to substance, to confession, to the Christian inheritance that has been passed down, which we’ve been shedding like crazy,” Potteiger said, adding that too many modern churches feel like “Ikea furniture.”

“It looks cool, and it’s functional as far as it goes,” he said. “But the problem is, I can’t give it to my great-grandson... I want something built with oak, something hardwood, something sturdy that’s as useful now in 200 years as it is today.”

Hegseth’s piety — a core tenet of the CREC church — has drawn scrutiny when discussing the violence of war. During the March worship service at the Pentagon, the first since the war in Iran began, Hegseth prayed that weapons find their “mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation,” and said “Give them wisdom in every decision, endurance for the trial ahead, unbreakable unity, and overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”

Though he didn’t call out Hegseth directly, Pope Leo soon issued a rebuke of those promoting war, saying that God ignores the prayers of those whose “hands are full of blood.”

“When the Pope takes a policy stance or a war stance, I think he’s just another citizen, some other human,” Brian Hegseth said. “I mean, if the Pope says ‘No praying about war,’ King David might have something to say about that.”

Hegseth is among a group of people with varying Christian beliefs within the Trump administration, said Matthew Taylor, a visiting scholar at Georgetown University who studies Christian nationalism. Taylor, a vocal Hegseth critic, said that Hegseth’s alignment with Wilson positions him as more of an “outlier figure” than a representative of the mainstream Christianity that Eagle Brook’s approach may represent. He added that he couldn’t think of any past secretary of defense who has invoked personal faith as much as Hegseth.

“He has imported his vision of Christian supremacy and American Christianity into that role,” Taylor said.

Brian Hegseth has attended church with his son in both Tennessee and Washington, D.C. The traditional hymns and the structured order of worship sound and look different from his home church, but many of the core messages represent the faith he always wanted for his son, he said.

“I always leave those services feeling ministered to and very motivated to go out and serve the Lord,” Brian Hegseth said. “I can’t speak to Pete’s particular beliefs, but I know he loves their church and must agree with the basic tenets of it.”