Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has created a new Office of Religious Affairs at the Pentagon that will directly oversee the military's chaplains and report straight to him, in what he called a long-overdue rescue of faith in the armed forces from the secular bureaucracy that buried it.
Hegseth announced the office on September 30 during his "State of the Force" address at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia, before some 600 officers and service members. Under his memorandum, the office's director will serve as his principal adviser on religious affairs, reporting directly to the secretary and deputy secretary. The office will control the Armed Forces Chaplains Board, issue religious policy across the military, and fight for funding for religious ministry, chapels and facilities, chaplain-led programs, chapel youth programs, faith-based homeschool support for military families and faith-based suicide-reduction work. Every military department has been ordered to produce, within 90 days, a full inventory of its unfunded and underfunded religious affairs needs.
Hegseth said the old system let "people with no expertise in faith or religion dictate the spiritual life of our warriors," leaving chaplains "buried echelons deep, waiting for permission" while secular careerists and lawyers made the decisions. The new office, he said, means "no staff filters" and "no bureaucratic dilution" between chaplains and the secretary. "Political correctness and Secular Humanism got a vote," he said. "Chaplains did not." He told the troops the department is "putting on the full armor of God," adding: "God is good. Evil is not. And America's military must understand the difference."
"This won't be a paper-pushing shop. It will have real teeth. It will protect budgets, demand infrastructure, and strengthen religious support. The experts, our chaplains, will finally have an advocate at the highest levels."
The office is the biggest piece of a wider remake of religion in the ranks. The Pentagon has cut its official list of recognized religions from more than 200 down to 30, stripped rank insignia from chaplains' uniforms in favor of faith markings, and scrapped a spiritual fitness guide Hegseth said pushed secular humanism and treated chaplains like "emotional support officers." The new office will also oversee research and tools to assess "spiritual fitness, spiritual readiness and spiritual resilience" across the force. Hegseth noted that only about 5% of the military professes no religion, and his memo states that nothing in it compels religious participation or diminishes the rights of service members of any faith or none.
The Catholic Archdiocese for the Military Services, USA, which oversees spiritual care for Catholic troops, said it "appreciates" the new office and hopes it "will enhance and strengthen the support offered to the men, women and their families who serve in the military, and to the chaplain corps." Archbishop Timothy Broglio has also backed Hegseth's related chaplaincy reforms. Daniel Schmid of Liberty Counsel applauded the office too, saying Hegseth is "trying to protect everybody's faiths."
Former chaplain leaders are pushing back. Retired Major General Howard Stendahl, a former Air Force chief of chaplains, called the changes a "temptation to establish religion — it's a dangerous and precipitous possibility with the rise of Christian nationalism," and said he would not want troops to believe "we wage war in the name of Jesus Christ." The Freedom From Religion Foundation has opened an investigation into the office, filing for records on its funding and on how the Pentagon plans to measure a service member's "spiritual fitness." The Pentagon has said it has no additional details yet on how the office will function or who will lead it. "Our department therefore has a sacred duty — first-class religious support wherever we send our warriors," Hegseth said.
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