How the Trump administration uses the Bible to justify military invasions and immigration raids

Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner prays during a Cabinet meeting with President Donald Trump at the White House in Washington on Feb. 26, 2025, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also bows his head. Pool photo/AP hide caption

As massive immigration enforcement actions were underway in Minnesota this January, the Department of Homeland Security released a video that, at first glance, appeared to resemble a cinematic trailer.

Set to the singer Lorde's haunting cover of "Everybody Wants to Rule the World," the footage unfolds in a sequence of eerie juxtapositions: a helicopter hovering in green night-vision haze, armed agents battering doors and bodies moving with choreographed urgency. Across the screen a quote from the Gospel of Matthew: "Blessed are the peacemakers."

Moments later, after more imagery of military-style immigration enforcement actions, the rest of the biblical passage materializes: "for they shall be called the sons of God."

"My first thought was, there is a gun called the Peacemaker," said Dyron Daughrity, a minister in the evangelical Church of Christ and dean of religion and philosophy at Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif. "It's sort of this idea of peace through strength."

Scripture has long been a rhetorical resource for presidents—Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and George W. Bush among them—who invoke the Bible to frame moments of national crisis or purpose. But the Trump Administration references the Bible in a very different way – using specific passages to connect its policies and actions with God's will – from immigration enforcement to military action.

The Bible's place in political life appears to be on the rise. A study released by Pew Research this month found something new among those surveyed. For the first time since Pew's been asking the question, a majority of those surveyed say that the Bible should have a great deal or at least some influence on U.S. laws, with 28% saying that when the Bible and the will of the people conflict, the Bible should have more influence over laws.

For Daughrity, the imagery in the DHS video is striking but not unprecedented. "It's very common for armies, militaries just throughout history to invoke the name of God, to invoke the name of Jesus Christ," he said. The pairing of biblical language with force, in that sense, belongs to a long and familiar tradition.

Others see something more intentional—and more troubling. Yii-Jan Lin, a professor of New Testament at Yale Divinity School and author of the book Immigration and Apocalypse , views the video as a calculated provocation.

"DHS is causing surprise for a certain reason—to make a statement: that whatever Homeland Security is doing is to create peace, even if it looks violent," she said.

To some scholars of Christianity, that framing comes at a serious cost by undermining some of the core ethical teachings of Jesus. The Rev. John Dickson, who teaches at Wheaton College near Chicago, points to the broader context of the verse itself: the Sermon on the Mount.

"The opening line of the whole Sermon on the Mount—the Beatitudes—is 'blessed are the poor in spirit,'" he said. "It sets the whole thing against that discussion of how one takes the kingdom: through meekness, peacemaking, humility, love." These words, he says, stand in stark opposition to DHS actions.

For Obery Hendricks, an ordained elder in the African Methodist Episcopal Church who teaches religion at Columbia University, the dissonance is both aesthetic and religious.

"To use that song 'Everybody Wants to Rule the World,' what they're saying is, 'Yes, we are building an empire,'" he said.

This fusion of scripture and statecraft extends to other parts of the Trump Administration.

Among its most religiously outspoken figures is Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, an evangelical who's written a book titled American Crusade . He has frequently framed political and military action in explicitly biblical terms, both during the war with Iran and in the days and weeks leading up to the military actions there.

After the invasion of Venezuela, Hegseth quoted from Psalm 144 at a Pentagon prayer service, held January 21: "Praise be to the Lord my Rock, who trains my hands for war, my fingers for battle."

At the National Prayer Breakfast in early February, he began with a reading from the Gospel of Mark: "If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever loses his life for my sake and the Gospels will save it."

Hegseth then offered an interpretation that recast the passage in martial terms. "The warrior who is willing to lay down his life for his unit, his country, and his creator," Hegseth said. "That warrior finds eternal life."

To Lin, this is a consequential shift: from cross to sword .

"What Hegseth is cleverly doing is calling to arms—to be warriors, to pick up a sword in a type of glorious martyrdom," she said. But, she added, "he's missing the power dynamic here, which is Jesus is not doing that for the cause of empire but actually against [it]."

Dickson reads the same biblical passage as pointing in the opposite direction entirely: opposing zealotry. "This was the ultimate critique of a warrior theology," he said. "It is saying Christianity moves forward through service and suffering, not through force."

And yet, for some observers, the growing openness with which politicians speak about faith is a positive development. Daughrity sees a shift from the relative restraint of previous decades to a more explicit embrace of religious identity.

"Where a politician probably wouldn't have talked like that, let's say 30 years ago, now they're just openly embracing their religiosity," he said. For him, that visibility carries its own imperative: "To compete in this world, we have to defend our faith, and we have to be evangelistic."

That perspective, however, depends on a particular understanding of scripture—one that treats it as a resource to be deployed rather than a text that challenges its reader.

Lin, who was raised in an evangelical immigrant congregation, worries about the implications of reading the Bible in this way in a pluralistic society. "I think it can be a conversation partner with many different ways of thinking about immigration policy, but there are many different sacred texts that could be used," she said, "and also just ethics that doesn't have to subscribe to any one religion at all."

Hendricks draws a sharper distinction. "We're talking about ideological Christianity versus Christianity of faith," he said. "The ideological Christianity refracts everything in the Bible through the prism of the interests of one who's interpreting it."

The alternative, he suggests, is more demanding. In what he describes as a Christianity of faith, scripture does not sanctify power—it interrogates it, challenging every political position rather than blessing any one agenda.

The tension between those approaches is not new. But in an era when scripture appears not only in speeches delivered by administration officials but also in highly-produced videos—scored, edited, and disseminated for maximum impact—the question is newly urgent: not whether the Bible belongs in public life, but what happens when it is used to sanctify power rather than to question it.