Fox News' Pete Hegseth: As a Father, 'The Only Thing That Matters Is Introducing' My Kids 'to Jesus Christ'

Pete Hegseth, anchor of "Fox & Friends Weekend," is known for boldly sharing his perspective on myriad cultural and political issues. But that’s not what matters most to him.

Speaking recently with CBN’s Faithwire, the 42-year-old Hegseth said using his platform to share his Christian faith is the most valuable use of his time and resources — a realization sparked, in large part, by his role as a father.

Listen to the latest episode of CBN’s Quick Start podcast

"I’ve got a bunch of kids and you start to realize that the only thing that matters is introducing them to Jesus Christ,” he said. “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."

It’s that perspective that inspired Hegseth’s latest special, "The Life of Jesus." Three parts of the four-part series are now streaming on Fox Nation, Fox News’ digital platform.

The Fox News anchor said he co-hosted the series with his hometown pastor, Chris Durkin, who leads Colts Neck Community Church in New Jersey, because he was “utterly insufficient to tell the story myself.”

In the series, Durkin and Hegseth chronicle some of the most significant stories from Scripture, retracing the steps of Jesus in the Holy Land, matching the biblical accounts to the real-life locations in which they likely happened.

"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," Hegseth said. "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."

He went on, "It’s the greatest story ever told, and we have the Scriptures. 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."

Hegseth noted his intention isn’t to prove Scripture, because "we know the Gospel is the inspired Word of God and that Jesus walked this earth 2,000 years ago." Rather, he and Durkin simply sought to retrace the steps of Jesus "as accurately as we could."

The TV personality said the "big takeaway" for him was seeing, firsthand, the historical context of Jesus’ Words throughout the Gospel accounts of the New Testament, imagining what it must have been like to wrestle with "the confusion [over] the extremes of either He is the Messiah long-prophesied or He is a heretic; there is nothing else in the middle."

"You realize people saw the miracles — and they still said, 'I don’t buy it,'" he reflected. “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."

Hegseth described filming the series as "inspiring" and "humbling."

"The Jesus that our churches tried hard to introduce us to but a lot of us wandered away from or dismissed or it became divisive, we hope you just meet the story of the man, the Savior, in this film."

You can listen to more of our conversation with Hegseth on the “Quick Start” podcast: