Doug Wilson has a white beard and a spherical stomach, and is due to this fact considerably Santa-like in look. He doesn’t appear in any respect like somebody who delivers denunciations of homosexuality and girls’s suffrage, and who takes an ambivalent place with regards to pre–Civil Battle slavery.
On a latest Sunday morning, Wilson preached from the lectern at a convention middle close to Washington, D.C. The Idaho pastor’s sermon was largely an instructional examination of Ephesians 3:1–6 and its providing of God’s salvation. On this setting, no less than, he skipped the hellfire rhetoric for which he’s recognized, making no reference to his theocratic imaginative and prescient of America’s future or his perception that the apocalypse described within the E book of Revelation already happened—and is enabling a challenge of world Christian conquest. All through the service, I couldn’t assist glancing from my spot within the again at a well-recognized determine seated along with his household close to the entrance, Protection Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Though Wilson’s Christ-or-chaos method to spirituality is fascinating sufficient, the explanation I’d come that morning is that I had needed to higher perceive what Hegseth noticed in him. Like Wilson, Hegseth—the “secretary of conflict,” based on a latest declaration by Trump—has referred to as for restoring a Christian ethos to American life, reversing the secularization of state establishments, and barring girls from sure fight roles. However not like the 72-year-old preacher, Hegseth heads a power of three million service members and civilians whose mission—a secular mission—is to maintain the nation safe.
When the liturgy ended, Pentagon safety officers flanked the room, and church officers politely however firmly steered me and the handful of different reporters out of the constructing in order that we couldn’t see whether or not Hegseth and Wilson spoke. (Wilson wrote on his weblog that they did.) After I requested Kingsley Wilson, the Pentagon press secretary, whether or not Hegseth shares the pastor’s beliefs, she was dismissive. “Regardless of the Left’s efforts to take away our Christian heritage from our nice nation,” she replied in an electronic mail, “Secretary Hegseth is amongst those that embrace it.” Hegseth wouldn’t communicate with me to elaborate.
In an administration that’s already heavy-handed in invoking Christian concepts and imagery in authorities work, Hegseth has gone additional than anybody else. The idea that God has picked a political facet is extensively shared inside Trump’s circle of advisers. Mass deportations, the enlargement of presidential energy, and, particularly after Charlie Kirk’s homicide, a want for vengeance in opposition to perceived enemies are all, of their telling, divinely ordained. “I used to be saved by God to make America nice once more,” the thrice-married, non-churchgoing president has mentioned.
All of it is a departure from how earlier U.S. presidents and army leaders have understood the intersection of religion and obligation for generations. Though America’s armed forces have all the time made house for faith, going again to the Battle of Bunker Hill, that place is a circumscribed one, entrusted primarily to a number of thousand chaplains chargeable for attending to troops of their very own religion and facilitating observance by these of different traditions. Prayers could also be considerable in foxholes, however commanders usually don’t dictate issues of spirituality.
Hegseth has swerved dramatically from that precedent. Along with being the highest-profile member of the administration who belongs to the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Church buildings, or CREC, an Idaho-based denomination that identifies as Christian nationalist, he has made Christianity a conspicuous a part of his official duties. He leads common Pentagon prayer periods, posts typically on social media about his religion (he posted a verse from Psalm 27—“The Lord is the stronghold of my life, whom shall I concern?”—in September), and describes the army’s mission in explicitly biblical phrases. In a single latest podcast look, he recognized “non secular readiness” as a core a part of the army mission. “That’s why wherever we are able to, we invoke the identify of God; we invoke the identify of Jesus Christ,” he mentioned. “We wish that spoken and talked about inside our formations.” Within the hours after the killing of Kirk, the Turning Level USA founder, Hegseth requested a bunch of troops in Washington to recite the Lord’s Prayer with him. Later, Hegseth posted a video setting that recitation to imagery of missiles streaking throughout the sky, warships streaming in formation, and troops advancing on unseen enemies.
The women and men who’ve volunteered to serve are noticing the distinction. In conversations with roughly 20 individuals, together with present and former service members and individuals who know Hegseth, I heard many times in regards to the protection secretary’s sharp deviation from Pentagon custom in relation to issues of religion. They seen, for instance, when he reposted a CNN section in August that confirmed Doug Wilson, together with different church leaders, calling for girls to be stripped of the proper to vote and affirming his perception that some master-slave relationships have been characterised by affection. (Later, when reporters requested in regards to the section, Hegseth’s press secretary mentioned that “after all” Hegseth believes girls ought to have the ability to vote. She described Hegseth as a proud CREC member and mentioned he “very a lot appreciates a lot of Mr. Wilson’s writings and teachings.”)
Former Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, a churchgoing Episcopalian, informed me that when he served as President Barack Obama’s protection secretary, he was cautious to not discuss publicly about his personal beliefs. His maxim was that Protection Division personnel—from riflemen to prime brass—can’t advocate for their very own political or spiritual views as a part of their official duties with out risking corrosive divisions within the power. There’s an excessive amount of at stake within the army, together with the freedoms that service members swear oaths to guard. “It is extremely harmful, very improper, to start out down that street,” Hagel informed me, “as a result of that street leads you to numerous locations you don’t need to go.”
Growing up in Minnesota, Hegseth attended First Baptist Church on Sunday mornings and Bible examine on Wednesday nights. His father was a public-school trainer. His mom, Penny, lobbied Hegseth’s college when she disagreed with what Hegseth has since described as a “values-free” curriculum, resulting in younger Pete being put in examine corridor when sure classes have been taught. Hegseth has repeatedly talked a few faith class throughout his senior 12 months at Princeton when, by his recollection, a professor knowledgeable college students that Jesus had been buried in a shallow grave and eaten by canine, an concept that horrified and offended him. (The teacher, Elaine Pagels, a historian of faith, informed me that she could have talked about this concept within the class, however solely as a notion put ahead by one other scholar. “That individual principle will not be mine, nor do I agree with it, as I’d have made abundantly clear,” Pagels mentioned. “Mr. Hegseth is improper to attribute it to me.”)
Hegseth, in his later telling, retained a “Christian veneer however a secular core” into maturity. A number of individuals who knew Hegseth in his 20s and 30s mentioned he was not outwardly spiritual in any noteworthy approach. “He clearly had spiritual beliefs and was critical about them, but it surely was not a central a part of his life,” one one that knew him for a few years informed me.
That modified after 2017, throughout a interval by which his second marriage ended—like his first marriage, the connection collapsed after his infidelity—and he had a baby along with his now-wife, Jennifer, a colleague at Fox Information. Early that 12 months, he had been stung when Trump handed him over to steer the Division of Veterans Affairs. He was ingesting closely and had been accused of sexual assault by a girls with whom he had a sexual encounter shortly after the delivery of his baby with Jennifer. (Hegseth has mentioned the encounter was consensual, and a prosecutor declined to press fees, however Hegseth paid the accuser a $50,000 settlement.) Ties along with his household have been strained; his mom berated him as a person who “belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps round, and makes use of girls for his personal energy and ego” in a 2018 electronic mail. “His life was falling aside on the seams,” mentioned one one that is aware of Hegseth and, like others who spoke candidly with me about their recollections of Hegseth’s life, requested anonymity. The identical 12 months, he and Jennifer turned concerned in Colts Neck Neighborhood Church in New Jersey. This was the place the place, as Hegseth later put it in an interview with the journal Nashville Christian Household, “the message of Christ actually went the 12 inches from head to coronary heart.” Hegseth has credited two individuals, Jennifer and Jesus Christ, for pulling him out of his tumult. “With out these two J’s, I wouldn’t be sitting right here proper now,” he informed a podcaster final 12 months. He quickly got here to consider that he was on a selected non secular and civic mission.
That mission is articulated in his 2020 ebook, American Campaign. In it, Hegseth decries what he sees as a left-wing plot to eradicate religion, and particularly Christianity, from American life. He leans on references to God by the Founding Fathers as a approach to argue that the separation of Church and state is merely “leftist folklore that, after years of indoctrination, has turn out to be orthodoxy.” And he blames secularists for being on a “seek-and-destroy mission” in opposition to America’s Christians.
Like others within the MAGAverse, Hegesth has embraced a war-on-Christmas-style narrative by which Christians are persecuted by mainstream society; he typically pins blame on state or instructional establishments. In a 2022 section on Fox Information, Hegseth used a Sharpie to write down return to sender on his Harvard Kennedy College grasp’s diploma, in response to Harvard’s appointment of a self-described atheist and humanist as its chief chaplain.
The Ivy League made for a simple goal, however Hegseth has been much more preoccupied with America’s public elementary and secondary faculties, and their half in what he’s described because the “16,000-hour conflict,” a reference to the period of time youngsters spend within the classroom from kindergarten by twelfth grade. Hegseth has repeatedly complained of secular brainwashing, what he sees as a progressive plot to undermine Western civilization. By 2020, no less than one among Hegseth’s school-age kids was enrolled in a classical Christian college, a part of a community of establishments carefully affiliated with the CREC. The faculties instruct college students utilizing a biblical lens, educating Latin and historical Greek and emphasizing advantage and manners. Relatively than the varsity encouraging self-expression in artwork courses, kids reproduce basic works from Western historical past; as a substitute of evolution, college students study biblical creationism. As one college chief within the community mentioned in a promotional video: “Each second of day by day is structured across the one easy idea: The concern of the Lord is the start of information.” In his 2022 ebook, Battle for the American Thoughts, Hegseth describes the rising community of faculties as a part of an rebel, countercultural motion: “We’re outnumbered, and outgunned, however we’re not but defeated.”
Hegseth calls on Christians to embrace the “radical reorientation” of their lives round their kids’s schooling, urging dad and mom to get a second job or forgo holidays to allow them to put their youngsters in Classical Christian Training faculties or, as a fallback, homeschool. As he put it in a podcast look final 12 months: “Why would you roll the cube on the souls of your individual youngsters?”
Resolved to not make that gamble, Hegseth and his spouse relocated their household in the course of the Biden administration from New Jersey to a city close to Nashville so their kids may attend a close-by classical academy. It was there that Hegseth obtained to know the pastor of an area CREC church, Brooks Potteiger. After Hegseth turned protection secretary, he requested Potteiger to preside on the first of the month-to-month prayer providers Hegseth now leads on the Pentagon. Potteiger, square-jawed and bearded, reminded the troops and workers assembled within the Pentagon auditorium that Jesus has “ultimate say” over all worldly issues—together with nuclear-armed missiles. In that setting, he made no point out of his extra controversial positions, together with the concept that males must train “headship” over their wives as a part of a “wonderful and inevitable” return to biblical-style patriarchy. Outdoors of the Pentagon, Potteiger has advocated for men-only gyms (the sight of girls exercising being too tempting) and says that ladies shouldn’t be allowed to evangelise, each as a result of they’re liable to gossip and since they don’t possess the identical theological heft as males. Girls simply don’t have that “sure gravitas” that males do, he has mentioned on his podcast. Potteiger gave the instance of a feminine drill sergeant: “I don’t know if there’s a extra against-nature image you may have than a girl screaming into the face of a person to attempt to deliver down and convey him into submission.”
Individuals who have labored with Hegseth informed me that, for all the bluster in his social-media posts, books, and podcast appearances, faith seldom got here up behind closed doorways in his early months on the Pentagon; one former official described a “frat boy” ambiance greater than the rest. However his religion wasn’t absent both: A number of individuals informed me that he’s talked about having prayed over personnel choices and as soon as referred to as for a bunch prayer earlier than an air strike. In addition they mentioned that Hegseth has extra steadily turned to God when he’s round his colleagues on the Pentagon as he has confronted better criticism of his efficiency. This was notably the case, they mentioned, after he inadvertently shared extremely delicate plans for bombing Yemen with a bunch chat that included the editor in chief of this journal. That episode intensified doubt about his judgment and triggered a probe by the Pentagon’s inspector normal. (One one that is aware of Hegseth informed me he thought the protection secretary can be pleased that I used to be scripting this story, as a result of it will play right into a narrative that he’s being persecuted for his convictions, not derided for his efficiency: “He can then flip round and say, ‘All these items occurring to me is as a result of I’m an out and proud Protestant Christian.’”)
Hegseth has invoked George Washington as a kindred spirit, citing the presumably apocryphal story of a person coming upon him praying alone within the forest at Valley Forge. “That man proper there mentioned just a few prayers earlier than he got down to attempt to set up a brand new nation,” Hegseth informed a podcaster this month, signaling to a portrait of Washington that hangs in his workplace overlooking the Potomac. However Washington was famously non-public in his religion, and quite than infusing the American authorities in its infancy along with his beliefs, he stood for spiritual freedom.
Hegseth, in the meantime, has discovered some ways to trumpet his religion. His problem coin, a memento that army and protection leaders go out to many subordinates or different individuals they meet, encompasses a Jerusalem, or Crusader’s, cross—the identical one Hegseth has tattooed on his chest. In 15 years of protecting the army, I’ve by no means seen every other problem coin that options spiritual iconography. At the least one one that is aware of Hegseth says his reveals of religiosity are notable for one more purpose, too: “For me, there’s a serious contradiction in observing what he preaches or tweets and what he truly practices,” this individual mentioned, pointing to Hegseth’s abrupt dismissals of skilled officers for example. “You possibly can’t be a God-fearing Christian man and deal with individuals the best way he does within the DOD.”
One man who heartily approves of Hegseth’s method is Doug Wilson, whose Church espouses a “dominionist” theology, that means that Jesus ought to exert dominion over all points of humanity, together with authorities and public areas. After I interviewed Wilson not too long ago by Zoom, he described a central criticism: “Too many Christians assume that their religion is to be this privatized occasion, behind their eyeballs and between their ears,” Wilson informed me. Not so the CREC. Wilson describes a 250-year timeframe to realize the Church’s splendid Christian state, one that might flip again the clock on the legalization of homosexuality, homosexual marriage, abortion, and every thing else he considers the “clown world” of contemporary American life.
Wilson, a former submariner who grew up in a minister’s household close to the Naval Academy in Annapolis, ultimately wound up in Moscow, Idaho. It was there, within the Nineteen Seventies, that he constructed the church that might turn out to be the CREC empire. At present, his mannequin is South Carolina within the early days of America, a society whose constructs he admires for causes together with its requirement that officeholders be Protestant Christian males. Wilson believes that America ought to be a form of theocracy, not a secular democracy. If he had his approach, clerics wouldn’t management the federal government, he says, however Christianity would infuse every thing: legislation, structure, even dentistry. Immigration by non-Christians can be restricted to guard America’s biblical character, and solely Christians would maintain workplace. Non-Christians can be permitted to observe their faiths however with diminished rights, and by no means within the public sphere. Or, as he’s beforehand put it: “sure to church bells, no to minarets.”
And largely no to girls in positions of energy—although Wilson says that he would have made an exception for Margaret Thatcher. In his splendid America, divorce can be uncommon, permitted solely underneath a handful of circumstances—resembling infidelity or abandonment—and sodomy and same-sex marriage can be recriminalized. Though Wilson informed me that ladies’s proper to vote isn’t on the prime of his record of issues, the CREC requires “family voting” by which solely the person on the head of every household casts a poll. (Different Church elders explicitly name for repealing the Nineteenth Modification.)
Wilson’s motion stays small—the CREC counts roughly 150 church buildings nationally; the Catholic Church has almost 20,000—but it surely isn’t only a community of church buildings. The CREC’s profile has been supercharged by its publishing home, its affiliated federation of faculties, and now its connection to the person main probably the most fearsome army on the planet. Wilson delights in his position as a provocateur, and on social media he shares movies that present him utilizing a flamethrower to incinerate big cutouts of princesses from Disney (whose executives “have an evil agenda”) or carrying a Mr. Rogers–esque cardigan earlier than setting fireplace to a mannequin city just like the one tended by the kids’s-TV star. (“Burn no matter bridges you might want to burn,” he says earlier than setting fireplace to a miniature railroad trestle.) Hegseth, too, has singled out Disney within the tradition wars; final 12 months he mentioned he had barred his household from watching the corporate’s programming, which he has lambasted for references to local weather change and for “gender-bending heroism.”
On many military-related issues, Wilson’s views monitor these of Hegseth: In Wilson’s telling, girls haven’t any place on submarines or in different close-quarters fight roles. “A nation which defends herself with girls in fight now not deserves to be defended,” he mentioned in a single deal with. In sure areas, nonetheless, Wilson sees issues in a different way than Hegseth does: Wilson insists, for example, that the Uniform Code of Navy Justice should be upheld. Hegseth, in the meantime, has boasted about telling subordinates to disregard guidelines of engagement and has derided army JAG Corps attorneys as “jagoffs.” Throughout Trump’s first time period, Hegseth used his perch at Fox to foyer the president to point out leniency towards troops accused of conflict crimes.
However any variations appear small in contrast with the mission that each Hegseth and Wilson say they’re on: advancing an expansive, generally militant model of Christianity that’s evident throughout all points of public life. Not like nearly all of evangelical denominations, the CREC is what’s often known as a post-millennial church. Relatively than awaiting an end-of-days cataclysm that might arrive at any second, to be adopted by Jesus’s triumphant return, CREC devoted consider that the traumatic occasions cited within the E book of Revelation already occurred (in 70 C.E., when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem). They anticipate as a substitute Christianity’s eventual international triumph, ushering in a brand new “golden period” for humanity and, someday later, Jesus’s return. It’s a notion that gives loads of time to advance an earthly challenge that appears loads just like the one advocated by Trump and his MAGA adherents.
Last summer time the CREC opened a brand new church in Washington, D.C., blocks from the U.S. Capitol, in a rowhouse owned by the MAGA-run political nonprofit Conservative Partnership Initiative. I visited on a latest Sunday and located a handful of protesters exterior of the constructing in crimson robes and hoods paying homage to The Handmaid’s Story. Upstairs, households in Sunday finest bustled between rows of folding chairs because the service obtained began. The kids current have been remarkably properly behaved in the course of the 90-minute liturgy. On one again wall, somebody had tacked up the Attraction to Heaven flag—the Revolutionary Battle–period flag that MAGA’s “Cease the Steal” crowd embraced following Trump’s 2020 defeat. As somebody who has attended extra Catholic plenty than I can depend, the service felt largely acquainted—with some obvious exceptions. All through the proceedings, I heard the occasional political reference, the form of factor that might sound extra pure coming from Fox Information than from a pulpit. One minister referred to “plotting globalists” and referred to as for the “restoration and reformation of the nation’s capital.”
As I used to be reporting this story, I listened to dozens of interviews, speeches, podcast appearances, and Fox segments from Hegseth over the previous decade. In these remarks and in his books, Hegseth espouses lots of the CREC beliefs in regards to the centrality of faith, the ills of secularism, and the way America has misplaced its approach. I’ve by no means heard him publicly embrace the church’s most radical teachings on diminishing girls’s authorized rights, outlawing homosexuality, or advocating for an antebellum splendid.
However Hegseth’s agenda on the Pentagon maps neatly onto a few of these broader CREC positions. Since taking workplace in January, Hegseth has overseen efforts to erase tens of hundreds of references to the heroism of service members who should not white males and tried to power out transgender troops. He has additionally fired quite a few senior officers who’re both girls or individuals of shade with out explaining why. And though Hegeth has walked again his previous assertions that ladies shouldn’t be within the army, he has concurrently initiated a course of that many see as a backdoor try and get girls out of sure jobs. As one senior feminine officer put it to me, Hegseth is “sending a really clear message: ‘I don’t need girls to serve.’” On the very least, he’s altering the tradition. A number of girls within the army informed me that they’ve seen extra looseness amongst their male colleagues in latest months, and particularly a willingness to disparage the concept of girls serving in sure roles. Some service members who aren’t Christian have equally felt misplaced underneath Hegseth’s management.
Rabbi Harold Robinson, a retired rear admiral and Jewish chaplain who additionally served as chairman of the Nationwide Convention on Ministry to the Armed Forces, informed me that he’s deeply frightened that Hegseth is chipping away on the sense of cohesion amongst service members, which has up till now been one of many U.S. army’s biggest strengths. Throughout his 36 years of service, Robinson mentioned, he by no means paused to marvel in regards to the political or spiritual affiliation of the women and men who served with him. “All I needed to fear about was, ‘Does he have my again? And do I’ve his again?’” Robinson informed me. “After I can’t do this anymore, then the establishment is weaker.”
