Trump’s Defense Secretary Pick Hopes for a Christian Crusade
Pete Hegseth, host of Fox & Friends, at the National Council of Young Israel Gala in New York City on March 31, 2019.Michael Brochstein/ZUMA
On Wednesday, President-elect Donald Trump announced former Fox News host Pete Hegseth was his pick for secretary of defense. The choice is iconoclastic to say the least. Although Hegseth served as an Army National Guard officer, he has no experience in government leadership that could inform the management of the federal government’s largest agency.
What Hegseth does have are connections to the TheoBros, a group of mostly millennial, ultra-conservative men, many of whom proudly call themselves Christian nationalists. Among the tenets of their branch of Protestant Christianity—known as Reformed or Reconstructionist—is the idea that the United States should be subject to biblical law.
Last year, the magazine Nashville Christian Family ran a profile of Hegseth, in which he mentioned being a member of a “Bible and book study” that focused on the book My Life for Yours by Doug Wilson, the 71-year-old unofficial patriarch of the TheoBros. Patriarch is the right word: When I interviewed Wilson a few months ago, he said that he, like many other TheoBros, believes women never should have been given the right to vote.
Wilson presides over a small fiefdom in Moscow, Idaho, where he is the head pastor of the flagship church of the denomination he helped found, the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC). In Moscow, Wilson has also helped to establish a college, a printing press, and a classical Christian school. In addition to his Moscow ventures, Wilson is also extremely online—he blogs, he posts on social media, and he makes slickly produced YouTube videos. Once a fringe figure, famous mostly among reformed Christians, last year Wilson’s star power brightened considerably in an interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and a speaking slot at the National Conservatism conference alongside then Ohio senator, now vice president-elect, JD Vance.
Wilson is also the founder of the Association of Classical Christian Schools, a national network of private K–12 schools that focus on religious education and the Western canon. (I wrote about the classical education movement here.) As it turns out, this is another point of intersection. Hegseth, who did not respond to requests for comment from Mother Jones, has strong connections to the Association of Classical Christian Schools. He told Nashville Christian Family that his family decided to move to Tennessee so his children could attend the Jonathan Edwards Classical Academy, a school in that network he describes as “a small, country, blue-collar classical Christian school.” During a recent appearance on insurance executive Patrick Bet-David’s podcast, Hegseth said he’d never send his kids to Harvard, but he would send them to New Saint Andrews, the college the Wilson helped found in Idaho.
Hegseth’s involvement with Wilson’s schools goes beyond his own children’s education. In 2022, he co-authored Battle for the American Mind, with the group’s president, David Goodwin. In the book, they argue that Americans have “ceded our kids’ minds to the left for far too long” and promise to give “patriotic parents the ammunition to join an insurgency that gives America a fighting chance.”
In a thread on X this week, Matthew Taylor, a religion scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies, noted that Hegseth has been a guest on “Reformation Red Pill,” a podcast hosted by pastors at the Doug Wilson-affiliated Tennessee church that Hegseth attends. Hegseth has also appeared on Veritas Vox, a podcast produced by a Pennsylvania-based publisher called Veritas, which is also connected to Wilson’s network of churches. Veritas was the publisher of Hegseth and Goodwin’s book on education.
Then there are his tattoos. First is the prominent Jerusalem cross tattoo that Taylor noted is a nod to the Christian crusades, and an important symbol for TheoBros. (Looked at closely, part of the logo of the real estate and investment firm New Founding, owned and operated by several TheoBros, has a kind of a riff on it.) Reconstructionists believe that Christians are called to expand the territory they control—along the lines of the Crusades of the Middle Ages. “It is about building the kingdom of God on earth and in a way that you can actually draw borders and boundaries around it,” Taylor told me.
Hegseth also has a tattoo of the words “Deus Vult” (“God wills it” in Latin); which, writes Taylor, has come to signify the idea for TheoBros that “God mandated Crusaders’ violence.” Because of the extremist nature of his tattoos, Hegseth wasn’t allowed to participate as a guard in Biden’s inauguration.
In 2020, Hegseth turned his obsession with the Christian Crusades into a book, American Crusade. In a piece this week, Media Matters noted that one of its central themes is the destruction of Muslim holy sites in order to reclaim them for Christianity. Hegseth also rails against Muslims’ “well-documented aversion to assimilation.” Julie Ingersoll, a University of North Florida religious studies professor who has studied the Reconstructionist tradition that the TheoBros are part of, told me she finds Hegseth’s fixation on the Crusades “really troubling—but also it’s completely consistent with the Christian Reconstructionists. That’s particularly troubling for someone who might have the biggest military in the world under his control.”
Taylor, too, said he was concerned about the idea of Hegseth controlling the military. He pointed to Hegseth’s urging Trump to pardon Edward Gallagher, the US Navy SEAL who was accused of killing an Iraqi prisoner and posing for pictures with his dead body. Taylor noted that the US military has recently struggled to control the radicalization of its members. He told me he worried Hegseth’s appointment “will only allow this far-right radicalization in the military to fester and grow unregulated, if not even encouraged.”
Hegseth’s latest book, The War on the Warriors, decries what he sees as the infiltration of the military by the “radical left.” Troops, he complains, are “being harassed by obligatory training…grounded in Critical Race Theory, radical sex theories, gender policy, and ‘domestic extremism’ that are designed to neuter our fighting forces.” As my colleague Stephanie Mencimer has noted, that focus on culture war issues is likely part of what prompted Trump and his advisers to choose him—he’s well-suited to advance the anti-woke agenda laid out in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. When Trump announced Hegseth as his pick for defense secretary, the X account of the podcast CrossPolitics, cohosted by a lead pastor at Wilson’s Moscow, Idaho, church, posted, “HUGE WIN! @PeteHegseth is a godly Christian man. He is a member at a CREC church and classically educates his kids. He’ll get the wokeness out of the military which will unfathomably bless our nation.”
Trump has called Hegseth “tough, smart, and a true believer in America First.” As the AP reported, Trump praised Hegseth’s book about the military at a rally in June. He promised the crowd that if he was reelected, “The woke stuff will be gone within a period of 24 hours. I can tell you.”