The Trump administration’s Easter messaging moved beyond general holiday recognition, as several Cabinet-level departments posted statements that explicitly celebrated Christian beliefs. On April 5, the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department declared on their official accounts, “He is risen,” according to the Associated Press report.
The Defense Department’s Easter posting, shared on X, included a message attributed to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. In that post, Hegseth said, “The tomb is empty. The promise is fulfilled. Through His sacrifice, we are redeemed. We stand firm in faith, courage, and truth.”
The Justice Department also issued an Easter message on X, tying the holiday to its role in protecting religious liberty. The post said, “Today, as millions of Christians gather in their churches across the nation to celebrate the resurrection of Christ, this Department —- is proud to protect and defend religious liberty,” the AP reported.
The posts drew thousands of comments online, with some people responding with approval and others criticizing the move as government promotion of one faith. The debate quickly reflected a longer-running tension in U.S. public life over how faith references from political leaders and government entities are handled under the constitutional separation of church and state.
Supporters and some Pentagon aides, as described by AP, pointed to historical examples of presidents and administrations making religious references in public settings, including Franklin D. Roosevelt’s support for providing Bibles to troops. They also cited precedents in which presidents offered Easter acknowledgments with different levels of explicitness.
At the same time, the AP report said the broader tradition in recent decades has often been for presidents and administrations to avoid clear-cut favoring of one faith over others in official messaging. It cited past examples in which Republican President George W. Bush explicitly celebrated Christ’s resurrection in 2003, and in which both Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama sometimes issued messages recognizing both Easter and Passover.
The religious language also surfaced in the administration’s conflict framing, with Hegseth repeatedly invoking evangelical Christianity while serving as head of the armed forces. AP reported that Hegseth hosted his first monthly Christian worship service at the Pentagon since the Iran war began, and it described a prayer in which he asked, “Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation,” then prayed for “unbreakable unity, and overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”
MSI previously reported that Hegseth held a Pentagon Christian worship service amid the Iran war—an episode that AP said provides context for the Easter posts. In this Easter coverage, AP also noted that Trump, in a statement issued on Good Friday, evoked the Iran war only indirectly, writing that “From the Christian patriots who won and secured our liberty on the battlefield and every generation since, the love of Christ has unfailingly guided our Nation through calm waters and dark storms.”
On Easter Sunday morning, AP reported, Trump used a harsher tone in a Truth Social post that demanded Iran open the Strait of Hormuz by Tuesday, adding that otherwise “you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.” The Council on American-Islamic Relations responded by assailing Trump’s “deranged mocking of Islam,” AP reported, underscoring the wider backlash that can follow when religious language intersects with U.S. military and foreign policy messaging.