John Prine Had It Right, Not Pete Hegseth

by

Perspectives

A United Methodist Insight Editorial | Oct 1, 2025

In my younger days, I listened to a lot of music. Being of the rock ‘n roll generation, music was a defining part of our society.

A personal favorite of mine was and is country rocker John Prine, whose observations of the political scene in the late 1960s and ‘70s – the Vietnam War era – were right on target. One of his songs that has stuck with me through the years is “Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You into Heaven Anymore,” with its trenchant chorus:

“But your flag decal won’t get you into Heaven anymore,

They’re already overcrowded from your dirty little war.

Now Jesus don’t like killing, no matter what the reason’s for

And your flag decal won’t get you into Heaven anymore.

Prine’s words came back this week as I listened to clips from the speech given by Secretary of Defense/War Pete Hegseth to around 800 top-ranking military personnel. Like many other American Christians, I was aghast at his characterization of Jesus as a “warrior.”

I wasn’t the only one to be gobsmacked by Hegseth’s blatant misrepresentation of Jesus. Renowned church historian Diana Butler Bass, whose gracious presence has blessed me on more than one occasion, wrote immediately after the speech in The Cottage, her Substack blog, on “The Warrior Ethos:”

“The strong consensus of the early church teachers was that war meant killing, killing was murder, and murder was wrong. In the third century, Cyprian of Carthage noted: “The world is going mad in mutual bloodshed. And murder, which is considered a crime when people commit it singly, is transformed into a virtue when they do it en masse.” Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Hippolytus, Tertullian, and Origen all specifically condemned participation in war. ‘The Christian fathers of the first three centuries’ states theologian Lisa Sowle Cahill, “were generally adamant that discipleship requires close adherence to the nonviolent and countercultural example of Jesus’ own life and his sayings about the nature of the kingdom.”

That’s it, folks. Jesus don’t like killing, no matter what the reason’s for.

KIlling might be in war, like in Gaza and Ukraine and Sudan and elsewhere. It might be starving Palestinian children and their families, as if living in the rubble of war wasn’t killing enough.

Killing might be through ripping away health care from millions of Americans through a “big, ugly” partisan theft of government funds to benefit billionaires through tax breaks.

Killing might be shutting down a government so that people can’t receive the services they’ve been promised and contributed money for.

Killing might be stopping funds already allocated to help God’s most vulnerable people all around the world so that they die from the consequences.

Killing might be sending out shock troops masked without uniforms and identification to harass and terrify the strangers that in our oldest sacred texts God says we’re to welcome with hospitality.

Killing might be assaulting journalists in New York and killing them in Gaza so the world can’t see the oppression of God’s people and rise in resistance.

There’s lots of killing going on in the world today, just as in Jesus’s time. The difference now is that we have Jesus’s example and teachings, carried forward through two millennia by faithful disciples.

John Prine got it right, then and now. And it’s our time to sing his songs and tell the world about what Jesus really said that we believe and act on.

Cynthia B. Astle is Editor of United Methodist Insight, an online journal she founded in 2011 as a media channel to amplify news and views about, by and for marginalized and under-served United Methodists.