Pete Hegseth has religious tattoos, some are Hebrew

Piet 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 The US Secretary of Defense has a slew of religiously inspired tattoos that turned heads when Hegseth was publicly vetted for higher office in President-elect Donald Trump cabinet has started.

Hegseth, 44, has a litany of ink referencing his military service and penchant for patriotism, including the US Constitution’s famous opening line “We the People,” a “Join, or Die” slang from the American Revolution, an American flag with an AR-15 rifle and a piece of his regiment, the 187th Infantry.

Other tattoos are religious in nature – raising eyebrows about their potential implications for an official responsible for national security.

Hegseth’s tattoos, political views, religious beliefs and background are consistent with an extreme form of Christian nationalism, said Matthew Taylor, a scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, & Jewish Studies. Specifically, he appears to belong to a fringe denomination known as Reformed Reconstructionism, which believes in applying biblical Christian laws to society, exclusively male leadership, and actively preparing the world for the prophesied return of Jesus.

Pete Hegseth has been appointed by President-elect Trump as his Secretary of Defense. (credit: John Lamparski/Getty Images)

The denomination has an affinity with the Crusades, the military campaign that European Christians conducted in the Middle Ages to liberate Muslims from the Holy Land, as described in the Old and New Testament.

Jerusalem cross

One of Hegseth’s most prominent tattoos is a large Jerusalem cross on his chest, a symbol featuring a large cross, bold with smaller Greek crosses in each of the four quadrants. The symbol was used during the Crusades and represented the Kingdom of Jerusalem that the Crusaders founded.

Crusader symbols have also become popular with the far right, which sees the images as a nod to an era of European Christian wars against Muslims and Jews. The gunman who committed the 2019 New Zealand mosque massacre had adopted symbols from the Crusades, and a Crusader symbol also appeared during the January 6, 2021 riot at the US Capitol and during 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 Joe Biden’s inauguration, so I served under Bush, served under Obama, served under Trump, and now I went to guard the inauguration because I was in the DC Guard,” he told Fox in June . .

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“Eventually, members of my leadership unit thought I was an extremist or a white nationalist because of a tattoo I have, which is a religious tattoo. It is a Jerusalem cross. Anyone can look it up, but it was used as a basis to revoke my orders to monitor 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 line of Hegseth’s 2020 book entitled ‘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 next to neo-Nazi tattoos, according to the Anti-Defamation League, which said elsewhere that the phrase “had been co-opted by some white supremacists.”

Hegseth also has a cross and a sword tattooed on his arm, which he believes represents a verse from the New Testament. The verse, Matthew 10:34, reads, “Do not think that I have come to send peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.”

Later he added ‘Yeshua’, or Jesus in Hebrew, to the sword. Hegseth told the site Media Ink in a 2020 interview that the tattoo was the Hebrew name of Jesus, which he incorrectly said was “Jehweh,” a Biblical spelling of God’s name. He told Media Ink that he got the tattoo while in Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus, located in what is now the 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 planned to do as part of the story,” Hegseth said. “We did a story about how the Christian population in Bethlehem has been dramatically reduced. The man who runs it does a lot of tattoos for Christian tourists who come to see the birthplace of Jesus. It was first to get the tattoo, but more to tell the story of what it’s like to be a Christian in Bethlehem today, who owns a business just a stone’s throw from where Jesus was born, but also the mosque that is located there on Manger Square.

Hegseth opposes the two-state solution and supports exclusive Israeli sovereignty in the Holy Land. He has also said that the idea of rebuilding the biblical Temple on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount is a “miracle” that could happen in our lifetime. Doing so would mean razing the Dome of the Rock, a mosque located on one of Islam’s holiest sites.

Hegseth expressed these views in a 2018 speech 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 provides the right leadership on the issue, calling Europe “a museum that will soon be drowned out by radical Islam and Islamism.”

He said 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 by 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 from the lips of the intelligentsia in America today, when if you walk on the ground today you understand that 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 in Israeli history to a vision of the construction of the Third Temple.

When he visited the Western Wall, he said, “it reminded me of another miracle that I hope you all see not 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 is no reason why the miracle of restoring the Temple on the Temple Mount cannot be possible.

“I don’t know how it would happen. You don’t know how it would happen. But I know it can happen.”