A Baptist journalist is responsible for identifying Pete Hegseth’s prayer as cribbed from Pulp Fiction, and his attention to detail has gone around the world.
It was Brian Kaylor, editor of Word&Way, who broke the news of last Wednesday’s Pentagon worship service and Hegseth’s unusual prayer. His report quickly got attention on social media. No other reporter watched and wrote about the service that day.
“If you look at the foreign coverage of this, it is in every part of the globe,” MS NOW host Nicolle Wallace declared last Friday evening. “It has saturated the entertainment press here and around the world. It is a story that has spun around the globe faster than any story about Donald Trump that I’ve covered since the start of the war with Iran.”
Brian Kaylor
Kaylor and his co-author, Jeremy Fuzy, write a regular Substack called A Public Witness. That’s where they pointed out that the secretary of defense had spoken aloud a prayer that was nearly verbatim from the Quentin Tarantino film Pulp Fiction.
This latest prayer should not be confused with another violent prayer Hegseth used at the previous month’s Pentagon service.
This one, Hegseth said, was “delivered from the lead mission planner of Sandy 1,” the head of the recent rescue mission that located and extracted Air Force crew members shot down in Iran.
According to Kaylor, the story he broke ended up in Variety, USA Today, Rolling Stone, BET, The Guardian, San Francisco Chronicle, Mother Jones, Forbes, The Daily Beast, Deadline, Mediaite, People, Hollywood Reporter, New York Post, Washington Times and Al Jazeera.
Comedian Stephen Colbert roasted Hegseth for the prayer. After splicing together clips of Hegseth praying with Samuel L. Jackson’s monologue, Colbert quipped, “Wow. That mashup really feels like your self-tape versus the guy who actually got the part.” Colbert then gave a satirical prayer filled with movie lines from Taxi Driver, Forrest Gump, Snakes on a Plane, and Babe.
Kaylor noted the Pentagon both affirmed what happened and tried to criticize media for talking about it: “Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell on Thursday acknowledged the prayer ‘was obviously inspired by dialogue in Pulp Fiction.’ However, Parnell then tried to insinuate that both the prayer and the dialogue ‘were reflections of the verse Ezekiel 25:17, as Secretary Hegseth clearly said in his remarks at the prayer service. Anyone saying the Secretary misquoted Ezekiel 25:17 is peddling fake news and ignorant of reality.’”
The movie dialogue does borrow some from Ezekiel 25:17 but also misquotes it — “and the prayer read by Hegseth misquotes it even more by changing the person promising ‘vengeance’ from being God to the commander of the U.S. military mission,” Kaylor said.