Doug Wilson has a white beard and a round belly, and is therefore somewhat Santa-like in appearance. He does not seem at all like someone who delivers denunciations of homosexuality and women’s suffrage, and who takes an ambivalent position on the subject of pre–Civil War slavery.
On a recent Sunday morning, Wilson preached from the lectern at a conference center near Washington, D.C. The Idaho pastor’s sermon was mostly an academic examination of Ephesians 3:1–6 and its offering of God’s salvation. In this setting, at least, he skipped the hellfire rhetoric for which he’s known, making no reference to his theocratic vision of America’s future or his belief that the apocalypse described in the Book of Revelation already took place—and is enabling a project of global Christian conquest. Throughout the service, I couldn’t help glancing from my spot in the back at a familiar figure seated with his family near the front, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Although Wilson’s Christ-or-chaos approach to spirituality is interesting enough, the reason I’d come that morning is that I had wanted to better understand what Hegseth saw in him. Like Wilson, Hegseth—the “secretary of war,” according to a recent declaration by Trump—has called for restoring a Christian ethos to American life, reversing the secularization of state institutions, and barring women from certain combat roles. But unlike the 72-year-old preacher, Hegseth heads a force of 3 million service members and civilians whose mission—a secular mission—is to keep the nation secure.
When the liturgy ended, Pentagon security officers flanked the room, and church officials politely but firmly steered me and the handful of other reporters out of the building so that we couldn’t see whether Hegseth and Wilson spoke. (Wilson wrote on his blog that they did.) When I asked Kingsley Wilson, the Pentagon press secretary, whether Hegseth shares the pastor’s beliefs, she was dismissive. “Despite the Left’s efforts to remove our Christian heritage from our great nation,” she replied in an email, “Secretary Hegseth is among those who embrace it.” Hegseth wouldn’t speak with me to elaborate.
In an administration that is already heavy-handed in invoking Christian ideas and imagery in government work, Hegseth has gone further than anyone else. The belief that God has picked a political side is widely shared within Trump’s circle of advisers. Mass deportations, the expansion of presidential power, and, especially after Charlie Kirk’s murder, a desire for vengeance against perceived enemies are all, in their telling, divinely ordained. “I was saved by God to make America great again,” the thrice-married, non-churchgoing president has said.
All of this is a departure from how previous U.S. presidents and military leaders have understood the intersection of faith and duty for generations. Although America’s armed forces have always made space for religion, going back to the Battle of Bunker Hill, that place is a circumscribed one, entrusted primarily to several thousand chaplains responsible for attending to troops of their own faith and facilitating observance by those of other traditions. Prayers may be abundant in foxholes, but commanders typically do not dictate matters of spirituality.
Hegseth has swerved dramatically from that precedent. In addition to being the highest-profile member of the administration who belongs to the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, or CREC, an Idaho-based denomination that identifies as Christian nationalist, he has made Christianity a conspicuous part of his official duties. He leads regular Pentagon prayer sessions, posts often on social media about his faith (he posted a verse from Psalm 27—“The Lord is the stronghold of my life, whom shall I fear?”—in September), and describes the military’s mission in explicitly biblical terms. In one recent podcast appearance, he identified “spiritual readiness” as a core part of the military mission. “That’s why wherever we can, we invoke the name of God; we invoke the name of Jesus Christ,” he said. “We want that spoken and talked about inside our formations.” In the hours after the killing of Kirk, the Turning Point USA founder, Hegseth asked a group 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 across the sky, warships streaming in formation, and troops advancing on unseen enemies.
The men and women who have volunteered to serve are noticing the difference. In conversations with roughly 20 people, including current and former service members and people who know Hegseth, I heard again and again about the defense secretary’s sharp deviation from Pentagon tradition when it comes to matters of faith. They noticed, for example, when he reposted a CNN segment in August that showed Doug Wilson, along with other church leaders, calling for women to be stripped of the right to vote and affirming his belief that some master-slave relationships were characterized by affection. (Later, when reporters asked about the segment, Hegseth’s press secretary said that “of course” Hegseth believes women should be able to vote. She described Hegseth as a proud CREC member and said he “very much appreciates many of Mr. Wilson’s writings and teachings.”)
Former Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, a churchgoing Episcopalian, told me that when he served as President Barack Obama’s defense secretary, he was careful not to talk publicly about his own beliefs. His maxim was that Defense Department personnel—from riflemen to top brass—cannot advocate for their own political or religious views as part of their official duties without risking corrosive divisions in the force. There is too much at stake in the military, including the freedoms that service members swear oaths to protect. “It is very dangerous, very wrong, to start down that road,” Hagel told me, “because that road leads you to a lot of places you don’t want to go.”
Growing up in Minnesota, Hegseth attended First Baptist Church on Sunday mornings and Bible study on Wednesday nights. His father was a public-school teacher. His mother, Penny, lobbied Hegseth’s school when she disagreed with what Hegseth has since described as a “values-free” curriculum, leading to young Pete being put in study hall when certain lessons were taught. Hegseth has repeatedly talked about a religion class during his senior year at Princeton when, by his recollection, a professor informed students that Jesus had been buried in a shallow grave and eaten by dogs, an idea that horrified and offended him. (The instructor, Elaine Pagels, a historian of religion, told me that she may have mentioned this idea in the class, but only as a notion put forward by another scholar. “That particular theory is not mine, nor do I agree with it, as I would have made abundantly clear,” Pagels said. “Mr. Hegseth is wrong to attribute it to me.”)
Hegseth, in his later telling, retained a “Christian veneer but a secular core” into adulthood. Multiple people who knew Hegseth in his 20s and 30s said he was not outwardly religious in any noteworthy way. “He clearly had religious beliefs and was serious about them, but it was not a central part of his life,” one person who knew him for many years told me.
That changed after 2017, during a period in which his second marriage ended—like his first marriage, the relationship collapsed after his infidelity—and he had a child with his now-wife, Jennifer, a colleague at Fox News. Early that year, he had been stung when Trump passed him over to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs. He was drinking heavily and had been accused of sexual assault by a women with whom he had a sexual encounter shortly after the birth of his child with Jennifer. (Hegseth has said the encounter was consensual, and a prosecutor declined to press charges, but Hegseth paid the accuser a $50,000 settlement.) Ties with his family were strained; his mother berated him as a man who “belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego” in a 2018 email. “His life was falling apart at the seams,” said one person who knows Hegseth and, like others who spoke candidly with me about their recollections of Hegseth’s life, requested anonymity. The same year, he and Jennifer became involved in Colts Neck Community Church in New Jersey. This was the place where, as Hegseth later put it in an interview with the magazine Nashville Christian Family, “the message of Christ really went the 12 inches from head to heart.” Hegseth has credited two people, Jennifer and Jesus Christ, for pulling him out of his tumult. “Without those two J’s, I wouldn’t be sitting here right now,” he told a podcaster last year. He soon came to believe that he was on a specific spiritual and civic mission.
That mission is articulated in his 2020 book, American Crusade. In it, Hegseth decries what he sees as a left-wing plot to eradicate faith, and especially Christianity, from American life. He leans on references to God by the Founding Fathers as a way to argue that the separation of Church and state is merely “leftist folklore that, after years of indoctrination, has become orthodoxy.” And he blames secularists for being on a “seek-and-destroy mission” against America’s Christians.
Like others in the MAGAverse, Hegesth has embraced a war-on-Christmas-style narrative in which Christians are persecuted by mainstream society; he often pins blame on state or educational institutions. In a 2022 segment on Fox News, Hegseth used a Sharpie to write return to sender on his Harvard Kennedy School master’s diploma, in response to Harvard’s appointment of a self-described atheist and humanist as its chief chaplain.
The Ivy League made for an easy target, but Hegseth has been even more preoccupied with America’s public elementary and secondary schools, and their part in what he’s described as the “16,000-hour war,” a reference to the amount of time kids spend in the classroom from kindergarten through 12th grade. Hegseth has repeatedly complained of secular brainwashing, what he sees as a progressive plot to undermine Western civilization. By 2020, at least one of Hegseth’s school-age children was enrolled in a classical Christian school, part of a network of institutions closely affiliated with the CREC. The schools instruct students using a biblical lens, teaching Latin and ancient Greek and emphasizing virtue and manners. Rather than the school encouraging self-expression in art classes, children reproduce classic works from Western history; instead of evolution, students learn biblical creationism. As one school leader in the network said in a promotional video: “Every moment of every day is structured around the one simple concept: The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.” In his 2022 book, Battle for the American Mind, Hegseth describes the growing network of schools as part of an insurgent, countercultural movement: “We are outnumbered, and outgunned, but we are not yet defeated.”
Hegseth calls on Christians to embrace the “radical reorientation” of their lives around their children’s education, urging parents to get a second job or forgo vacations so they can put their kids in Classical Christian Education schools or, as a fallback, homeschool. As he put it in a podcast appearance last year: “Why would you roll the dice on the souls of your own kids?”
Resolved not to make that gamble, Hegseth and his wife relocated their family during the Biden administration from New Jersey to a town near Nashville so their children could attend a nearby classical academy. It was there that Hegseth got to know the pastor of a local CREC church, Brooks Potteiger. After Hegseth became defense secretary, he asked Potteiger to preside at the first of the monthly prayer services Hegseth now leads at the Pentagon. Potteiger, square-jawed and bearded, reminded the troops and staff assembled in the Pentagon auditorium that Jesus has “final say” over all worldly matters—including nuclear-armed missiles. In that setting, he made no mention of his more controversial positions, including the idea that men ought to exercise “headship” over their wives as part of a “glorious and inevitable” return to biblical-style patriarchy. Outside of the Pentagon, Potteiger has advocated for men-only gyms (the sight of women exercising being too tempting) and says that women shouldn’t be allowed to preach, both because they are prone to gossip and because they don’t possess the same theological heft as men. Women just don’t have that “certain gravitas” that men do, he has said on his podcast. Potteiger gave the example of a female drill sergeant: “I don’t know if there’s a more against-nature picture you can have than a woman screaming into the face of a man to try to bring down and bring him into submission.”
People who have worked with Hegseth told me that, for all of the bluster in his social-media posts, books, and podcast appearances, religion seldom came up behind closed doors in his early months at the Pentagon; one former official described a “frat boy” atmosphere more than anything else. But his faith wasn’t absent either: Several people told me that he’s talked about having prayed over personnel decisions and once called for a group prayer before an air strike. They also said that Hegseth has more frequently turned to God when he is around his colleagues at the Pentagon as he has faced greater criticism of his performance. This was particularly the case, they said, after he inadvertently shared highly sensitive plans for bombing Yemen with a group chat that included the editor in chief of this magazine. That episode intensified doubt about his judgment and triggered a probe by the Pentagon’s inspector general. (One person who knows Hegseth told me he thought the defense secretary would be happy that I was writing this story, because it would play into a narrative that he is being persecuted for his convictions, not derided for his performance: “He can then turn around and say, ‘All this stuff happening to me is because I’m an out and proud Protestant Christian.’”)
Hegseth has invoked George Washington as a kindred spirit, citing the possibly apocryphal story of a man coming upon him praying alone in the forest at Valley Forge. “That guy right there said a few prayers before he set out to try to establish a new nation,” Hegseth told a podcaster this month, signaling to a portrait of Washington that hangs in his office overlooking the Potomac. But Washington was famously private in his faith, and rather than infusing the American government in its infancy with his beliefs, he stood for religious freedom.
Hegseth, meanwhile, has found many ways to trumpet his faith. His challenge coin, a memento that military and defense leaders pass out to many subordinates or other people they meet, features a Jerusalem, or Crusader’s, cross—the same one Hegseth has tattooed on his chest. In 15 years of covering the military, I’ve never seen any other challenge coin that features religious iconography. At least one person who knows Hegseth says his shows of religiosity are notable for another reason, too: “For me, there’s a major contradiction in observing what he preaches or tweets and what he actually practices,” this person said, pointing to Hegseth’s abrupt dismissals of experienced officers as an example. “You can’t be a God-fearing Christian man and treat people the way he does in the DOD.”
One man who heartily approves of Hegseth’s approach is Doug Wilson, whose Church espouses a “dominionist” theology, meaning that Jesus should exert dominion over all aspects of humanity, including government and public spaces. When I interviewed Wilson recently by Zoom, he described a central complaint: “Too many Christians think that their faith is to be this privatized event, behind their eyeballs and between their ears,” Wilson told me. Not so the CREC. Wilson describes a 250-year timeframe to achieve the Church’s ideal Christian state, one that would turn back the clock on the legalization of homosexuality, gay marriage, abortion, and everything else he considers the “clown world” of modern American life.
Wilson, a former submariner who grew up in a minister’s family near the Naval Academy in Annapolis, eventually wound up in Moscow, Idaho. It was there, in the 1970s, that he built the church that would become the CREC empire. Today, his model is South Carolina in the early days of America, a society whose constructs he admires for reasons including its requirement that officeholders be Protestant Christian men. Wilson believes that America should be a kind of theocracy, not a secular democracy. If he had his way, clerics would not control the government, he says, but Christianity would infuse everything: law, architecture, even dentistry. Immigration by non-Christians would be limited to protect America’s biblical character, and only Christians would hold office. Non-Christians would be permitted to practice their faiths but with diminished rights, and never in the public sphere. Or, as he’s previously put it: “yes to church bells, no to minarets.”
And mostly no to women in positions of power—though Wilson says that he would have made an exception for Margaret Thatcher. In his ideal America, divorce would be rare, permitted only under a handful of circumstances—such as infidelity or abandonment—and sodomy and same-sex marriage would be recriminalized. Although Wilson told me that women’s right to vote isn’t at the top of his list of concerns, the CREC calls for “household voting” in which only the man at the head of each family casts a ballot. (Other Church elders explicitly call for repealing the Nineteenth Amendment.)
Wilson’s movement remains small—the CREC counts roughly 150 churches nationally; the Catholic Church has nearly 20,000—but it isn’t just a network of churches. The CREC’s profile has been supercharged by its publishing house, its affiliated federation of schools, and now its connection to the man leading the most fearsome military on the planet. Wilson delights in his role as a provocateur, and on social media he shares videos that show him using a flamethrower to incinerate giant cutouts of princesses from Disney (whose executives “have an evil agenda”) or wearing a Mr. Rogers–esque cardigan before setting fire to a model town like the one tended by the children’s-TV star. (“Burn whatever bridges you need to burn,” he says before setting fire to a miniature railroad trestle.) Hegseth, too, has singled out Disney in the culture wars; last year he said he had barred his family from watching the company’s programming, which he has lambasted for references to climate change and for “gender-bending heroism.”
On many military-related matters, Wilson’s views track those of Hegseth: In Wilson’s telling, women have no place on submarines or in other close-quarters combat roles. “A nation which defends herself with women in combat no longer deserves to be defended,” he said in one address. In certain areas, however, Wilson sees things differently than Hegseth does: Wilson insists, for instance, that the Uniform Code of Military Justice must be upheld. Hegseth, meanwhile, has boasted about telling subordinates to ignore rules of engagement and has derided military JAG Corps lawyers as “jagoffs.” During Trump’s first term, Hegseth used his perch at Fox to lobby the president to show leniency toward troops accused of war crimes.
But any differences seem small compared with the mission that both Hegseth and Wilson say they are on: advancing an expansive, sometimes militant version of Christianity that is evident across all aspects of public life. Unlike the majority of evangelical denominations, the CREC is what’s known as a post-millennial church. Rather than awaiting an end-of-days cataclysm that could arrive at any moment, to be followed by Jesus’s triumphant return, CREC faithful believe that the traumatic events cited in the Book of Revelation already occurred (in 70 C.E., when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem). They anticipate instead Christianity’s eventual global triumph, ushering in a new “golden era” for humanity and, sometime later, Jesus’s return. It’s a notion that provides plenty of time to advance an earthly project that looks a lot like the one advocated by Trump and his MAGA adherents.
Last summer the CREC opened a 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 recent Sunday and found a handful of protesters outside of the building in red robes and hoods reminiscent of The Handmaid’s Tale. Upstairs, families in Sunday best bustled between rows of folding chairs as the service got started. The children present were remarkably well behaved during the 90-minute liturgy. On one back wall, someone had tacked up the Appeal to Heaven flag—the Revolutionary War–era flag that MAGA’s “Stop the Steal” crowd embraced following Trump’s 2020 defeat. As someone who has attended more Catholic masses than I can count, the service felt mostly familiar—with some glaring exceptions. Throughout the proceedings, I heard the occasional political reference, the sort of thing that would sound more natural coming from Fox News than from a pulpit. One minister referred to “plotting globalists” and called for the “restoration and reformation of the nation’s capital.”
As I was reporting this story, I listened to dozens of interviews, speeches, podcast appearances, and Fox segments from Hegseth over the past decade. In those remarks and in his books, Hegseth espouses many of the CREC beliefs about the centrality of religion, the ills of secularism, and how America has lost its way. I have never heard him publicly embrace the church’s most radical teachings on diminishing women’s legal rights, outlawing homosexuality, or advocating for an antebellum ideal.
But Hegseth’s agenda at the Pentagon maps neatly onto some of those broader CREC positions. Since taking office in January, Hegseth has overseen efforts to erase tens of thousands of references to the heroism of service members who are not white men and attempted to force out transgender troops. He has also fired numerous senior officers who are either women or people of color without explaining why. And although Hegeth has walked back his past assertions that women shouldn’t be in the military, he has simultaneously initiated a process that many see as a backdoor attempt to get women out of certain jobs. As one senior female officer put it to me, Hegseth is “sending a very clear message: ‘I don’t want women to serve.’” At the very least, he is changing the culture. Several women in the military told me that they’ve noticed more looseness among their male colleagues in recent months, and in particular a willingness to disparage the idea of women serving in certain roles. Some service members who aren’t Christian have similarly felt out of place under Hegseth’s leadership.
Rabbi Harold Robinson, a retired rear admiral and Jewish chaplain who also served as chairman of the National Conference on Ministry to the Armed Forces, told me that he’s deeply worried that Hegseth is chipping away at the sense of cohesion among service members, which has up until now been one of the U.S. military’s greatest strengths. During his 36 years of service, Robinson said, he never paused to wonder about the political or religious affiliation of the men and women who served with him. “All I had to worry about was, ‘Does he have my back? And do I have his back?’” Robinson told me. “When I can’t do that anymore, then the institution is weaker.”
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