​When Scripture Becomes Stage Prop

On Ezekiel, Pulp Fiction, and the temptation to turn holy words into spectacle

There is something revealing about the recent controversy surrounding Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s use of “Ezekiel 25:17” language in a Pentagon worship service. The immediate issue is easy enough to name. The words he used were not, in any full sense, the words of Ezekiel. The biblical verse is short and severe: “I will execute great vengeance on them with wrathful punishments. Then they shall know that I am the Lord.” In context, it belongs to Ezekiel’s oracle against Philistia, within a larger set of judgments against the nations. It is prophetic speech arising out of the trauma of exile, and its point is not human bravado but divine sovereignty.

But biblical language has a way of wandering.

In Pulp Fiction, Ezekiel 25:17 was expanded into one of the most memorable monologues in modern film. The opening lines about “the path of the righteous man,” the “tyranny of evil men,” and being “his brother’s keeper” are not from Ezekiel at all. They are cinematic invention: stylized, menacing, unforgettable. The movie turns a terse prophetic oracle into a ritual speech for a hitman—half intimidation, half theater.

Then came the Pentagon prayer. Hegseth used a military adaptation of the film’s version, reportedly calling it “CSAR 25:17,” and ended not with “I am the Lord,” but with “my call sign is Sandy One.” Pentagon defenders later said the prayer was “obviously inspired” by Pulp Fiction. That clarification matters. It suggests that the problem was not a simple mistake, as though someone had innocently confused Tarantino with the prophet Ezekiel. The speech was adapted knowingly.

And yet that does not really settle the matter. It sharpens it.

My question is not whether the line came from the Bible or the movies. The question is what happens when Scripture is cut loose from its own world and made to serve another one.

In Ezekiel, these words belong to the Lord. They are not a slogan of esprit de corps. They are not the self-description of a warrior. They are not a flourish to lend sacred gravity to a dangerous mission. They are God’s declaration of judgment. The line that matters is not “great vengeance” but “they shall know that I am the Lord.” The burden of the text is theological. It concerns who rules history, who judges the nations, and who is God.

That changes everything.

Once those words are detached from their prophetic context, they become strangely useful. A filmmaker can turn them into cool menace. A public official can turn them into martial devotion. Social media can turn them into mockery before the day is out. The words still carry force, but their force has been severed from their truth. They become available as style.

That may be the most unsettling thing about this episode. We live in a culture so formed by spectacle that we increasingly treat sacred language as reusable atmosphere. Scripture becomes less a word that addresses us than a storehouse of gravitas—phrases to borrow, tones to inhabit, weight to appropriate. Holy speech becomes symbolic capital. It can be sampled, remixed, dramatized, and deployed.

That is a spiritual problem before it is a political one.

The prophets are not given to us so that we may decorate our causes. They are not there to provide a little biblical thunder for projects we already regard as righteous. Prophetic speech does not exist to sanctify our instincts. It exists to confront them. It places every human venture under judgment—kingdoms, armies, rulers, nations, ideologies, and, not least, our confidence that our cause is obviously the good one.

That is why the migration of this text is so revealing. In Ezekiel, the speech is divine judgment. In Pulp Fiction, it becomes performance. In the Pentagon service, it becomes public piety wrapped around military identity. That is a long journey, and not an innocent one.

One of the curiosities here is that Pulp Fiction itself seems to understand something that public religion often forgets. In the film, the speech eventually turns back on the speaker. Samuel L. Jackson’s character, Jules, begins to suspect that he has never understood the words he has been reciting. The speech ceases to be merely theatrical and becomes, for him, a moment of self-recognition and moral crisis. The language judges the speaker.

That is closer to prophecy than it first appears.

Prophetic speech is dangerous in precisely this way. It does not simply animate us. It interrogates us. It does not merely authorize action. It asks by what spirit we act. It does not flatter our righteousness. It tests it.

Perhaps, then, the embarrassment of this episode is not only that a movie monologue found its way into a worship service. It is that we have become so accustomed to turning revelation into theater that many barely notice the difference. We know how to admire cadence. We know how to borrow intensity. We know how to perform seriousness. What we do not always know is how to stand under a word that is not ours to manage.

That is the difference between citation and obedience.

To hear Ezekiel rightly is not to relish the sound of vengeance. It is to remember that judgment belongs to God, not to us. It is to hear, within the terror of the prophet’s language, the announcement that no empire, no nation, no official, and no warrior gets to claim the Lord’s voice as private property. The holy is not a prop. It is not a mood. It is not an accessory to power.

And whenever we forget that, Scripture does not become more useful.

It becomes less true.