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 identified, making no reference to his theocratic imaginative and prescient of America’s future or his perception that the apocalypse described within the Guide of Revelation already befell—and is enabling a venture 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 together with his household close to the entrance, Protection Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Though Wilson’s Christ-or-chaos method to spirituality is attention-grabbing 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 battle,” in response to a latest declaration by Trump—has known as for restoring a Christian ethos to American life, reversing the secularization of state establishments, and barring ladies from sure fight roles. However not like the 72-year-old preacher, Hegseth heads a pressure 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 converse 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 growth 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 stated.
All of this can be a departure from how earlier U.S. presidents and navy leaders have understood the intersection of religion and obligation for generations. Though America’s armed forces have at all times 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 accountable for attending to troops of their very own religion and facilitating observance by these of different traditions. Prayers could also be ample in foxholes, however commanders sometimes 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 classes, posts usually 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 navy’s mission in explicitly biblical phrases. In a single latest podcast look, he recognized “non secular readiness” as a core a part of the navy mission. “That’s why wherever we are able to, we invoke the title of God; we invoke the title of Jesus Christ,” he stated. “We would like 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 folks, together with present and former service members and individuals who know Hegseth, I heard repeatedly in regards to the protection secretary’s sharp deviation from Pentagon custom with regards to issues of religion. They observed, 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 best 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 stated that “after all” Hegseth believes ladies ought to be capable of vote. She described Hegseth as a proud CREC member and stated he “very a lot appreciates a lot of Mr. Wilson’s writings and teachings.”)
Former Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, a churchgoing Episcopalian, instructed 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 high brass—can not advocate for their very own political or spiritual views as a part of their official duties with out risking corrosive divisions within the pressure. There may be an excessive amount of at stake within the navy, together with the freedoms that service members swear oaths to guard. “It is extremely harmful, very incorrect, to begin down that street,” Hagel instructed me, “as a result of that street leads you to plenty of 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 faculty 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 couple of 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 canines, an concept that horrified and offended him. (The trainer, Elaine Pagels, a historian of faith, instructed me that she might have talked about this concept within the class, however solely as a notion put ahead by one other scholar. “That specific idea isn’t mine, nor do I agree with it, as I’d have made abundantly clear,” Pagels stated. “Mr. Hegseth is incorrect 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 stated he was not outwardly spiritual in any noteworthy means. “He clearly had spiritual beliefs and was critical about them, nevertheless it was not a central a part of his life,” one one who knew him for a few years instructed me.
That modified after 2017, throughout a interval through which his second marriage ended—like his first marriage, the connection collapsed after his infidelity—and he had a baby together 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 ladies with whom he had a sexual encounter shortly after the beginning of his youngster with Jennifer. (Hegseth has stated the encounter was consensual, and a prosecutor declined to press fees, however Hegseth paid the accuser a $50,000 settlement.) Ties together with his household have been strained; his mom berated him as a person who “belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps round, and makes use of ladies for his personal energy and ego” in a 2018 electronic mail. “His life was falling aside on the seams,” stated one one who 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 grew to become 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 folks, 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 instructed 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 e book, 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 method to argue that the separation of Church and state is merely “leftist folklore that, after years of indoctrination, has develop into 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 through which Christians are persecuted by mainstream society; he usually pins blame on state or academic establishments. In a 2022 section on Fox Information, Hegseth used a Sharpie to jot 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 battle,” a reference to the period of time children spend within the classroom from kindergarten via 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 considered one of Hegseth’s school-age youngsters was enrolled in a classical Christian faculty, a part of a community of establishments intently affiliated with the CREC. The colleges instruct college students utilizing a biblical lens, instructing Latin and historical Greek and emphasizing advantage and manners. Slightly than the college encouraging self-expression in artwork lessons, youngsters reproduce traditional works from Western historical past; as an alternative of evolution, college students study biblical creationism. As one faculty chief within the community stated in a promotional video: “Each second of daily is structured across the one easy idea: The concern of the Lord is the start of data.” In his 2022 e book, Battle for the American Thoughts, Hegseth describes the rising community of colleges as a part of an rebel, countercultural motion: “We’re outnumbered, and outgunned, however we aren’t but defeated.”
Hegseth calls on Christians to embrace the “radical reorientation” of their lives round their youngsters’s schooling, urging mother and father to get a second job or forgo holidays to allow them to put their children in Classical Christian Schooling 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 children?”
Resolved to not make that gamble, Hegseth and his spouse relocated their household throughout the Biden administration from New Jersey to a city close to Nashville so their youngsters might attend a close-by classical academy. It was there that Hegseth received to know the pastor of an area CREC church, Brooks Potteiger. After Hegseth grew to become 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 employees assembled within the Pentagon auditorium that Jesus has “closing 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. Exterior of the Pentagon, Potteiger has advocated for men-only gyms (the sight of ladies exercising being too tempting) and says that girls shouldn’t be allowed to evangelise, each as a result of they’re vulnerable to gossip and since they don’t possess the identical theological heft as males. Ladies simply don’t have that “sure gravitas” that males do, he has stated 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 carry down and produce him into submission.”
Individuals who have labored with Hegseth instructed me that, for the entire 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” environment greater than anything. However his religion wasn’t absent both: A number of folks instructed me that he’s talked about having prayed over personnel selections and as soon as known as for a bunch prayer earlier than an air strike. Additionally they stated 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 stated, 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 common. (One one who is aware of Hegseth instructed me he thought the protection secretary can be completely satisfied 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 probably apocryphal story of a person coming upon him praying alone within the forest at Valley Forge. “That man proper there stated a number of prayers earlier than he got down to attempt to set up a brand new nation,” Hegseth instructed 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 somewhat than infusing the American authorities in its infancy together 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 navy and protection leaders move out to many subordinates or different folks they meet, encompasses a Jerusalem, or Crusader’s, cross—the identical one Hegseth has tattooed on his chest. In 15 years of masking the navy, I’ve by no means seen every other problem coin that options spiritual iconography. A minimum of one one who is aware of Hegseth says his reveals of religiosity are notable for an additional purpose, too: “For me, there’s a serious contradiction in observing what he preaches or tweets and what he truly practices,” this particular person stated, pointing to Hegseth’s abrupt dismissals of skilled officers for example. “You possibly can’t be a God-fearing Christian man and deal with folks the way in which 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 elements of humanity, together with authorities and public areas. After I interviewed Wilson lately 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 instructed me. Not so the CREC. Wilson describes a 250-year timeframe to attain the Church’s best Christian state, one that may flip again the clock on the legalization of homosexuality, homosexual marriage, abortion, and every part else he considers the “clown world” of recent 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 may develop into the CREC empire. Immediately, 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 needs to be a type of theocracy, not a secular democracy. If he had his means, clerics wouldn’t management the federal government, he says, however Christianity would infuse every part: regulation, 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 apply 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 ladies in positions of energy—although Wilson says that he would have made an exception for Margaret Thatcher. In his best America, divorce can be uncommon, permitted solely below a handful of circumstances—akin to infidelity or abandonment—and sodomy and same-sex marriage can be recriminalized. Though Wilson instructed me that girls’s proper to vote isn’t on the high of his record of considerations, the CREC requires “family voting” through 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—nevertheless it isn’t only a community of church buildings. The CREC’s profile has been supercharged by its publishing home, its affiliated federation of colleges, and now its connection to the person main essentially the most fearsome navy 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 hearth to a mannequin city just like the one tended by the kids’s-TV star. (“Burn no matter bridges it is advisable burn,” he says earlier than setting hearth to a miniature railroad trestle.) Hegseth, too, has singled out Disney within the tradition wars; final 12 months he stated 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 observe these of Hegseth: In Wilson’s telling, ladies haven’t any place on submarines or in different close-quarters fight roles. “A nation which defends herself with ladies in fight not deserves to be defended,” he stated in a single handle. In sure areas, nevertheless, Wilson sees issues in another way than Hegseth does: Wilson insists, for example, that the Uniform Code of Army Justice have to be upheld. Hegseth, in the meantime, has boasted about telling subordinates to disregard guidelines of engagement and has derided navy JAG Corps legal professionals 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 battle crimes.
However any variations appear small in contrast with the mission that each Hegseth and Wilson say they’re on: advancing an expansive, typically militant model of Christianity that’s evident throughout all elements of public life. Not like nearly all of evangelical denominations, the CREC is what’s referred to as a post-millennial church. Slightly 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 Guide of Revelation already occurred (in 70 C.E., when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem). They anticipate as an alternative Christianity’s eventual world 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 venture that appears lots just like the one advocated by Trump and his MAGA adherents.
Last summer season 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 outdoors 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 received began. The kids current have been remarkably properly behaved throughout 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 rely, the service felt largely acquainted—with some evident exceptions. All through the proceedings, I heard the occasional political reference, the form of factor that may sound extra pure coming from Fox Information than from a pulpit. One minister referred to “plotting globalists” and known 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 most of the CREC beliefs in regards to the centrality of faith, the ills of secularism, and the way America has misplaced its means. I’ve by no means heard him publicly embrace the church’s most radical teachings on diminishing ladies’s authorized rights, outlawing homosexuality, or advocating for an antebellum best.
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 aren’t white males and tried to pressure out transgender troops. He has additionally fired quite a few senior officers who’re both ladies or folks of shade with out explaining why. And though Hegeth has walked again his previous assertions that girls shouldn’t be within the navy, he has concurrently initiated a course of that many see as a backdoor try to get ladies out of sure jobs. As one senior feminine officer put it to me, Hegseth is “sending a really clear message: ‘I don’t need ladies to serve.’” On the very least, he’s altering the tradition. A number of ladies within the navy instructed me that they’ve observed extra looseness amongst their male colleagues in latest months, and particularly a willingness to disparage the concept of ladies serving in sure roles. Some service members who aren’t Christian have equally felt misplaced below 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, instructed 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. navy’s best strengths. Throughout his 36 years of service, Robinson stated, he by no means paused to surprise 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 instructed me. “After I can’t try this anymore, then the establishment is weaker.”
