What Did Pete Hegseth Just Pray For?!

Thank God I'm Atheist

TGIA Media

Religion & Spirituality, Society & Culture

4.7 • 2K Ratings

🗓️ 3 April 2026

⏱️ 63 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

A prayer calling for "overwhelming violence" is where Frank and Dan start this week, as they examine comments from Pete Hegseth and the disturbing implications of religious language being used to justify force and power. They break down how this kind of rhetoric fits into a broader pattern of increasingly militant expressions of faith in political spaces, and what it signals about the direction of religion's role in public life.

From there, Frank and Dan move through a slate of stories that highlight how widespread these tensions have become: a Pentagon proposal to label military chaplains by faith, a conspiracy-driven sermon linking gender equality to demographic control, new legislation in Canada challenging religious exemptions in hate speech law, fresh data showing the continued decline of a "biblical worldview" in the U.S., shifting support for Trump-era deportation policies among religious groups, and a retracted report that briefly suggested a revival of church attendance in the U.K.

💸 Support us on Patreon! www.thankgodimatheist.com/donate

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hey everybody.
0:18.0	Hi, friends.
0:20.0	Well, from beautiful Salt Lake City, Utah. It's thank God I'm atheist.
0:24.4	Where we, a couple of atheists try to make sense of all of this. I'm Frank Feldman. And I'm Dan Beecher.
0:35.5	And coming up on the show today, Dan,
0:39.5	Pete Hexeth prays for violence. He doesn't need to pray for it, Dan. I don't know.
0:47.5	Like, that's like, don't ask God to do your job for you pete yeah it's and he's already doing it it's just the
1:00.3	whole concept of praying for violence yeah it's it's a it's a it's a pretty special moment
1:07.6	we're gonna we're gonna get to Yeah, it'd be like us praying for
1:11.0	podcast, right? Like, it's what we do. Yeah. Right. We're already doing it. So anyway, so that's
1:19.6	coming up. Like you said, on the second half of the show. First, there's some news, Dan.
1:23.7	Okay. Things that have happened. Do tell. Since I brought up the name Pete Hegset, I'm just going to just dive right into this one.
1:31.9	God, we got multiple Heggs.
1:33.6	Sorry, everyone.
1:35.1	I know.
1:35.9	Bad planning on our part.
1:38.8	Or no, we're just going to bookend.
1:40.6	Yeah.
1:41.1	We're bookending the show.
1:42.3	That's a, that's a, it's just fun with whiskey
1:46.3	Pete. We're just reliable narrative structure. Sure. Absolutely. Um, start and where you
1:52.9	started, whatever it's called start. Anyway, um, so he has announced, but there are going to be
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from TGIA Media, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of TGIA Media and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.