Pete Hegseth worked with his pastor Chris Durkin, to bring their miniseries documentary “The Life of Jesus” to Fox Nation. The documentary shares some of the most well-known stories of Jesus’s life and shows the places where they most likely happened. In addressing why he chose to make the series, Hegseth said, “It’s a passion of mine to remind — first and foremost — myself, my family but, writ large, our culture of the reason for the season. Underneath all of that pageantry [of the holidays] is the truth, and the birth of a baby in Bethlehem 2,000 years ago, and the life that Jesus, fully God and fully man, lived.”

Hegseth noted that becoming a father really impacted his desire to focus on the Gospel. “I’ve got a bunch of kids, and you start to realize that the only thing that matters is introducing them to Jesus Christ. You spend so much time teaching them how to dribble a basketball or to love America — and those are all great, but they’re utterly insufficient.” Hegseth has previously written about the importance of introducing children to Jesus, particularly in the realm of education. In an interview about his book, The Battle for the American Mind, Hegseth noted with co-author David Goodwin how removing God from schools has severely deteriorated the culture. In noting how reformers and political thinkers like John Dewey and the Frankfurt School impacted the changing landscape of American education, Hegseth said, “These were all atheists. These were all socialists, or almost all of them were, and their goal was social change, and they knew the schoolroom was the place they could do it. And it started with the removal of God.” Goodwin agreed, pointing to the 1962 US Supreme Court decision to remove God from the classroom. “They gradually took prayer out of school, they then took the Bible out of school, and they then forbid really any teaching of Christian instruction in school. But that was the kind of the capstone of a long effort. It wasn’t the beginning. It was really the end.”

In bringing the story of Jesus to others through Fox Nation, Hegseth hopes to make Jesus real to others. “It’s the greatest story ever told, and we have the Scriptures,” he said. “The goal here to make it a little different was to take people to the places because we know a lot more now than we did even 10 years ago or 20 years ago about where the events unfolded in the Gospels.” He acknowledged “we know the Gospel is the inspired Word of God and that Jesus walked this earth 2,000 years ago,” and that they attempted to accurately retrace the steps of Jesus. He stressed the dichotomy of how Jesus had to be either the Savior or a heretic based on his claims in the Bible. “You realize people saw the miracles — and they still said, ‘I don’t buy it.’ Or they saw the miracles, and they said, ‘This is the man, this is the Savior, our Messiah.’ I got that sense as we were telling the story, almost like heart palpitations.”