How can Pete Hegseth, the United States defense secretary who claims to be a devout evangelical Christian, have placed Quentin Tarantino on the same footing as the word of God?

An example from the early 11th century explains how fake Bible passages can function smoothly in mergers of state and secular power.

Hegseth led a recent Pentagon prayer service with a fictitious Bible verse from Pulp Fiction. From outside the #MAGA ecosystem, this bold fabrication of a Biblical verse is confusing.

That’s because scripture is valued very highly by evangelical Protestants, and it may seem counter-intuitive or blasphemous for Hegseth, who has done so much to merge MAGA rule and militant Christianity, to proclaim Tarantino’s words as the word of God.

But he’s not the first Christian bureaucrat to write his own Biblical verse. In fact, the practice has a long tradition.

Read more: Evangelical holy war: Why some Christians think Trump will end the world

An early example is Archbishop Wulfstan of York, who did something similar in a sermon called Be Godcundre Warnunge (God’s Threat to Sinning Israel).

Wulfstan, who died in 1023, was both a public intellectual and one of the most powerful churchmen in England when the kingdom was under attack, initially, by non-Christian Danish forces.

His generation of literate, high-ranking clerics had found an unusual symbiosis with their secular rulers, often serving them as bureaucrats. Wulfstan, for instance, not only supervised the church bureaucracy and........

© The Conversation