Let’s talk about Pete Hegseth — the man currently running the United States military — and his recent Pentagon prayer service, which managed to be simultaneously the funniest and most disturbing thing to happen in the Department of Defense in recent memory.

And given this administration’s track record, that is a genuinely high bar.

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What Actually Happened

During a Pentagon worship service on Wednesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth delivered a prayer he said was recited by the “Sandy 1” Combat Search and Rescue team during the mission to recover a downed American F-15E crew member in Iran.

“They call it CSAR 25:17, which I think is meant to reflect Ezekiel 25:17,” Hegseth told the assembled crowd — and then asked everyone to pray with him.

What followed was this:

“The path of the downed aviator is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who in the name of camaraderie and duty shepherds the lost through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to capture and destroy my brother, and you will know my call sign is Sandy 1 when I lay my vengeance upon thee.”

If you recognized that — and millions of people immediately did — it’s because you’ve seen Pulp Fiction. It is the prayer delivered by Samuel L. Jackson’s character Jules Winnfield, in Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 film, moments before he shoots an unarmed man to death.

The Secretary of Defense of the United States led the Pentagon in prayer using dialogue from a Quentin Tarantino movie about hitmen.

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What The Bible Actually Says

For anyone who wants to know what Ezekiel 25:17 actually says — as opposed to what Quentin Tarantino wrote — here it is:

“And I will execute great vengeance upon them with furious rebukes; and they shall know that I am the Lord, when I shall lay my vengeance upon them.”

That’s it. One sentence. A divine declaration of vengeance against the Philistines, dating to the 5th century BC. In the actual Bible, the passage is a condemnation of historic enemies of the Israelites. There is no downed aviator. There is no valley of darkness. There is no call sign.

Tarantino wrote virtually the entire prayer. Hollywood wrote the scripture that the Secretary of Defense delivered at the Pentagon. And Hegseth delivered it — to a room full of military personnel — as a solemn act of worship.

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The Pentagon’s Defense Was Not Helpful

To be fair — and accuracy requires being fair even when it’s inconvenient — Hegseth did acknowledge before delivering the prayer that it was “CSAR 25:17” and that it was “meant to reflect” Ezekiel 25:17. He wasn’t presenting it as a direct scripture reading.

But the Pentagon’s official response made things considerably worse rather than better.

Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell released a statement insisting that “anyone saying the Secretary misquoted Ezekiel 25:17 is peddling fake news and ignorant of reality.”

Anyone claiming that a prayer almost entirely written by Quentin Tarantino, featuring a hitman delivering a monologue before committing murder, is “obviously inspired” by scripture and therefore somehow legitimate — and that pointing this out is “fake news” — has wandered very far from both reality and the King James Bible.

The defense was, to put it charitably, not persuasive. Even Steve Bannon — Trump’s own former chief strategist — advised Hegseth to tone down the religious references in his briefings, arguing they were distracting from operational details. When Steve Bannon is the voice of restraint in the room, something has gone significantly sideways.

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Why This Actually Matters

Beyond the undeniable absurdity — and it is genuinely, spectacularly absurd — there is something worth examining seriously here.

Hegseth has been holding regular Christian worship services at the Pentagon, a practice that has already drawn significant criticism from church-state separation advocates. He has publicly cast the United States military as a force for Christian holy war. He has prayed — at the Pentagon, as the Secretary of Defense — for troops to deliver “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”

And now he has delivered Tarantino’s fictional hitman monologue as a prayer of military benediction.

The original Pulp Fiction scene is, among other things, a piece of sharp satire. Jules, the hitman, recites his “scripture” as a ritualistic justification for violence — a way of cloaking cold-blooded killing in the language of divine righteousness. The entire point of the scene is the grotesque irony of a man about to commit murder wrapping himself in the language of God.

Tarantino wrote it as a critique of exactly that impulse.

Hegseth apparently absorbed it as inspiration.

And that is the part that deserves more than mockery. Because a Defense Secretary who turns to Hollywood’s satire of religious violence to justify real military action — in a war that has killed thousands of Iranian civilians, including hundreds of children — is not engaging in a quirky cultural mix-up. He is demonstrating, in vivid and somewhat surreal detail, exactly what happens when the most powerful military institution on Earth is handed to someone who treats its sacred responsibilities as an aesthetic exercise in tough-guy theater.

There is nothing in the actual teachings of Jesus — or in Ezekiel, for that matter — that would bless the mass killing of civilians. Nothing in scripture that would sanctify the deaths of children as collateral damage in a war started without congressional authorization or clear strategic purpose.

But there is, apparently, something in Pulp Fiction that works for Pete Hegseth.

And that tells you everything you need to know about the man currently running the United States military.