Let me tell you what happened on April 2 and sit with it for a moment before scrolling.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made history. Hegseth fired the U.S. Army Chief of Chaplains—Maj. Gen. William Green Jr.—for the first time in our nation’s history.

While dismissing Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George made national headlines, Green’s termination, who had served since 2023, nearly went unnoticed. Baptist News Global

That’s not a footnote. That’s the story.

No Army Chief of Chaplains has been fired since the position was created under the National Defense Act of 1920. Daily Wire Green was dismissed three years into a traditionally four-year term. No official reason was given.

Green, a Black Baptist chaplain, has served in the Army since the 1990s. His removal didn’t happen in a vacuum. It follows a pattern—a pattern that must be named.

Beloved community, this travesty isn’t just about Green’s career. This turn of events forces us to face the reality that religious pluralism now has no place in the United States military.

Here is what we know. Here is what it means. And here is what we do about it.

Green fired amid broader Army purge: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fired three senior Army officials on April 2: Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George, the chief of chaplains, Maj. Gen. William Green Jr., and the commanding general of Army Transformation and Training Command, Gen. David Hodne. NBC News

Green became the Army’s chief of chaplains in 2023. The decorated service member’s commendations include: Legion of Merit, a Bronze Star, and the Army Achievement Medal. Time

No reason was publicly given for Green’s removal. (Sources: NBC News, Reuters, CNN, Time)

Chaplain reforms precede the firing: Hegseth announced that U.S. military chaplains would no longer wear rank insignia just days before Green’s firing. Instead, they’ll display insignia reflecting their religious affiliation. The Hill Hegseth claimed that change would reduce religious affiliation codes from more than 200 to just 31. Military Times: The Pentagon hasn’t released an updated list of recognized faith codes. (Sources: The Hill, Military Times, Stars and Stripes)

Hegseth’s Spiritual Fitness Guide rollback: Hegseth denounced Green’s Army Spiritual Fitness Guide, published in 2025. The 112-page guide featured secular-inclusive principles aimed at encouraging resilience and strength. Hegseth ordered the War Department to scrap it entirely by December, less than six months after it was implemented. Daily Wire (Source: Daily Wire)

Lawsuit filed over Pentagon prayer services: Americans United for Separation of Church and State sued the Pentagon over monthly prayer services Hegseth has hosted since last spring. Yahoo! The organization alleged Hegseth and other cabinet members are abusing their power and resources to impose their religious views on federal workers. CBC News (Source: Associated Press, CBC News)

Hegseth has—since Trump’s return to office—forced out some of the U.S. military’s most senior officers, including Air Force Gen. Charles “CQ” Brown, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the chief of naval operations; and Adm. Linda Fagan, the commandant of the Coast Guard. Stars and Stripes (Source: Stars and Stripes)

Let me be precise: this isn’t a story about one chaplain. It’s a story about who defines what faith looks like in a public institution.

Maj. Gen. William Green Jr. is a Black Baptist minister. Green spent three decades serving this country in uniform. He wrote a guide aimed at developing spiritual resilience — one that spoke to soldiers of every background and none.

Hegseth eliminated it. Then he eliminated Green.

Hegseth is a member of Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), a conservative network co-founded by self-described Christian nationalist Doug Wilson.

CREC preaches homosexuality should be a crime, women should submit to their husbands, that the 19th Amendment should be repealed, and that Christians who owned enslaved people in the South “were on firm scriptural ground.” CBC News

That theological tradition shapes Pentagon chaplaincy policy. Not broadly. Explicitly.

Hegseth has held monthly prayer services at the Pentagon since last Spring, once inviting Wilson himself to deliver the sermon. The Hill Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins continued a pattern of allowing only evangelicals to preside over Hegseth’s Pentagon religious gatherings. British Brief

Hegseth is using the chaplaincy — a constitutionally mandated institution of religious pluralism — as a vehicle for Christian nationalist consolidation.

He claims that chaplains have become overly therapeutic and must return to a pastoral role. That’s not a neutral liturgical distinction. Hegseth has said soldiers need “more than a coping mechanism” — they need “truth, ‘big T truth.” Yahoo!

That language carries specific theological weights. It’s giving compliance. It’s giving conformity. It’s giving one flock, one shepherd, one doctrine.

Historian Ronit Stahl, author of Enlisting Faith: How the Military Chaplaincy Shaped Religion and State in Modern America, observed: “[The] shift towards the specificity of Jesus Christ and therefore Christianity, and in Hegseth’s case, a particular form of Protestant Christianity, is new, especially coming from the defense secretary.” British Brief

Stahl posed a question every American should ask: “What does it mean to have a leader being not just broadly religious or religious in a pluralistic sense, but religious in a very particular sense?”

What it means, beloved, is that some people’s faith is now more welcome in barracks than others. It means the Black Baptist tradition — a tradition of spiritual resistance, of prophetic witness against empire, of centering those on the underside of power — doesn’t fit the new Pentagon’s theological profile.

What it means is that the chaplain had to go.

That’s not religious freedom. And we should name it plainly. This is the government establishing a preferred religion. The Constitution has a clause—which, apparently, Hegseth hasn’t read—for that.

See. Judge. Act.

SEE: What’s happening in our military isn’t incidental to Christian nationalism — it’s a laboratory for it. Chaplaincy is just the testing ground. Pluralism is being audited. Those who do not conform to a narrow, reactionary theological vision are being removed.

JUDGE: Liberation theology has never been confused about this dynamic. James Cone, the father of Black liberation theology, taught us that theology is always political — and the question isn’t whether God is on somebody’s side, but whether we’re on the side of the oppressed.

When a defense secretary prays for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy” Yahoo! in Jesus’ name, he hasn’t found God. He’s conscripted, God. He’s dressed empire in drag and called it worship.

The Black church — the tradition Green carries in his body and in his ministry — has always known the difference. That tradition was forged in the crucible of enslaved people and told that God ordained their suffering.

The Black Church refused that lie. It’s always refused that lie. The Black church didn’t survive 400 years of white American terror, confusing the gospel with nationalism.

It’s survived by insisting that the God of Exodus and the God of the oppressed can’t be owned by the powerful.

Womanist-mujerista theologian Ada María Isasi-Díaz reminds us that the struggle for justice is itself a liturgical act. One does not simply pray for liberation. What we’re witnessing at the Pentagon is a liturgy of domination disguised as devotion.

Howard Thurman, in his theological masterpiece, Jesus and the Disinherited, posed a question Green’s firing forces us to repeat: What does the gospel mean for those who stand with their backs against the wall?

Not for the powerful. For the ones the powerful are pushing out.

ACT: Despair isn’t the answer. Witness is the answer. Chaplaincy belongs to everyone. The Constitution belongs to everyone. The fight for a pluralist, rights-respecting military institution is a justice fight.

→ LEARN: Read Ronit Stahl’s Enlisting Faith: How the Military Chaplaincy Shaped Religion and State in Modern America for a rigorous historical account of how military chaplaincy was designed and how it’s being reshaped. Read my book, Makeshift Messiahs: Why The American Right Keeps Creating Political Saviors, to help process how we got here.

→ ENGAGE: Connect with the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, which advocates for the constitutional rights of service members across faith backgrounds and tracks abuses of religious liberty within military institutions. If you are a veteran or active-duty service member, their resources are especially relevant right now.

→ ADVOCATE: Contact your U.S. senators and representatives — particularly members of the Senate Armed Services Committee — and urge them to hold oversight hearings on the ideological reshaping of the military chaplaincy. The Senate has the power to confirm senior military appointments. Use it. Find your senators at senate.gov and your representatives at house.gov.

May you rest in this: your faith can’t be conscripted. The empire has always tried to own the gospel, and the gospel has always slipped free.

May you remember Army Maj. Gen. William Green — 32 years of service, a life of pastoral witness, fired without public explanation during Holy Week. May his story remind you why this work matters, and why it costs something.

May you find in your own tradition the words that empire fears most: that God is not on the side of the powerful. God is with those whose backs are against the wall.

We do not do this alone. We do this together.

Go in peace, and go in resistance.

— Rev. Jason Carson Wilson