Pete Hegseth’s Holy War

0:00There's a viral photograph of Marco Rubio that really tells it all. these Florsheim shoes that Donald Trump has apparently become enamored with, that he has taken, according to the Wall Street Journal, to guessing the shoe size of his visitors and then sending them shoes, which now then you have this incredible photograph of all the cabinet members wearing their matching shoes because they're afraid not to wear them. To me, also really funny that he doesn't just even ask them what size is the proper size. They have to wear the shoe size that he's picked for them, even when it's the wrong size.

0:39So you see Marco Rubio with like an inch behind his heels of gap there. What kind of, you know, wears the wrong size shoes because the boss decreed it? I'll tell you what kind of man. Marco Rubio. Does that really screw future president to you, by the way? It's not a leadership moment. Maybe he did it on purpose to show how little, little Marco is. I'm sure he did. This is a gift with a fish hook in it. Props to the Wall Street Journal, okay? Because this is illuminating about life and, you know, what we sometimes refer to as Pyongyang on the Potomac. Thank God we can still laugh here because, boy, this was not a week full of a lot of laughs, honestly.

1:21It's been really shocking and disturbing to watch the news unfold. So, all right, from Florsheim to the serious stuff. Welcome to The Political Scene from The New Yorker, a weekly discussion about the big questions in American politics. I'm Jane Mayer, and I'm joined as ever by my colleagues Susan Glasser and Evan Osnos. Hi, Susan. Hey there. Great to be with you. Hey, Evan. Good morning, guys. Hi. All right. Well, last month in Washington at the National Prayer Breakfast, the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, took to the stage. I was given the opportunity to read a passage from Scripture today.

2:08And today we gather to recognize that our rights here in this great country come from a loving and benevolent God, not government.

2:23America was founded as a Christian nation. It remains a Christian nation in our DNA if we can keep it. And as public officials, we have a sacred duty 250 years on to glorify him. For years, Hegseth has argued that America was founded as a Christian nation, a core belief of what's known as Christian nationalism. Not long ago, that worldview mostly lived on the fringes of American politics. But now, Pete Hagseth is running the United States Department of Defense, which he calls the Department of War, the most powerful military in the world. And the United States is at war with Iran, a Muslim country.

3:09So today we're asking, what happens when a worldview like Christian nationalism moves from the political fringe into the center of American military power? Susan, Evan, this administration has offered many explanations for the war, each official selling their own version. Is the Secretary of Defense trying to cast this as something close to a holy war? You know, Jane, it's really, I think, a moment to be noted here. In the wake of 9-11, we all remember that sort of feeling of shock and horror. And when the United States went to war in Afghanistan, its mission was very specific, right? It was to sort of topple the Taliban who had given shelter to al-Qaeda, which had launched these attacks on September 11th against the United States.

4:04And it's very interesting, the difference from then to now. George W. Bush, he called it initially a crusade. You know, this was a country that was in shock and horror, fury. He said, we're going to launch a righteous crusade. The enormous blowback from that was actually taken in by that administration. And from then on, what you saw was something that's almost the exact opposite of what we're hearing right now in the nearly two weeks since we've been at war with Iran, which was Bush saying, you know, going out of his way to say this is not actually a holy war. We are not at war against an entire religion.

4:40And, you know, there were great efforts to have him go to a mosque, have him go to point out to people that Islam was not our enemy, even if terrorists who misused the name of Islam were. Do you think that was because they saw it as a peril to go up against one of the world's great religions? Or do you think it was sort of public relations? I mean, we know underneath the surface there was a lot of sort of contempt for Islam. But why do you think he took such care to back off of that language? I think you have to remember we are, after all, a place that has a rigid boundary in theory between church and state.

5:16I think there was, even for George Bush, who was, after all, by his own description, a born-again evangelical Christian, a sense that there were boundaries that one doesn't cross. And, look, there were strategic realities. He was also trying to maintain supportive countries around the world who were wary of him personally and wary of America's intentions. Frankly, Jen, I think it's one of the things that is most noticeable about the difference between then and now. Now you have people like Lindsey Graham, for instance, who has already called this a religious war. Mike Johnson has called Islam a misguided religion.

5:53But there is nobody who personifies this difference more than Pete Hegseth. I mean, it's been easy to overlook this because there's been so much going on in the last few months. But since coming in to run the Pentagon, Hegseth has been convening prayer meetings inside the building. And for Hegseth, this is in its own way a kind of natural evolution of a life that has been building towards this. You know, Susan mentioned a second ago all of the concern when George W. Bush talked about the war in the Middle East as a crusade. Well, remind yourself, Pete Hegseth wrote a book called American Crusade.

6:32crusade. He has defined himself as a kind of a warrior against an existential threat to the West, which he defines not only in terms of Muslim fundamentalism, but also a holy war here at home. That is his word. He says that he is involved in what he once called a 360 degree holy war for the righteous cause of human freedom. So in this episode, Pete Hegseth, who is he? How did he come to embrace Christian nationalism and is an ideology that was once resigned to the margins of American politics infiltrating the U.S. military. Later in the show, we're going to be joined by Catherine Stewart, who has spent years writing and reporting on the Christian nationalist movement in America and is the author of a wonderful book, Money, Lies, and God.

7:27But First, let's start with Hagseth himself. Evan, can you walk us through Pete Hagseth's early background? Yeah, there's basically sort of two big turning points in this guy's life. Just to remind you, I mean, he grew up in a small town in Minnesota. He was a kind of a high school star, basketball, football, valedictorian of his high school. Class goes on to Princeton. He doesn't talk as much about his time in the Ivy League now. But while he was there, he became a conservative figure on campus. He was the publisher of the big conservative paper. And then two things happened. One was the 9-11 attacks.

7:59He ended up joining the National Guard. He went to Iraq. He went to Afghanistan. After he came back to the United States, he took on the cause of service members who had been accused or convicted of violating the laws of war. And that became his cause celeb. It's what brought him together with Trump. Initially, he had mocked Trump like a lot of people in 2016. But eventually, he and Trump found common cause in this. Hegseth described the military as a kind of encumbered by bureaucracy and wokeness. And then the last piece happened. This is crucial. He has moved further and further into a form of Christianity that is farther and farther outside of the mainstream in the United States.

8:39He is part of what's called the communion of reformed evangelical churches. That's a term most people have probably not heard, but the CREC, as it's known, opposes women's right to vote. It believes homosexuality should be a crime. And this has become, by Pete Hegseth's own description, an enormous part of his life. He moved his family to Tennessee, where he is now, his children are in a school, and he's in a church that really revolves around this community. And correct me if I'm wrong, but it believes that Christianity should dominate all forms of civic and government life. It is actually a sort of a form of theocracy that he has embraced.

9:20Can I just say one other thing as someone who sort of delved early on into Hegseth's background? I'm always interested in when people convert to extreme religions, and I was looking at his timeline. He converted, I believe, in 2018. And if you go back and you look at his life in 2017, that was the year that he was accused of raping a woman. His personal life was in a shambles. He was, at the time he'd been married, I think, two times. He was about to get married the third time. He had children out of wedlock with two of these women, and another woman accused him of raping her. Right. And that's an accusation that he's denied, right?

10:03But continue, The charges were hard to bring. The police in Monterey, California, did not formally charge him, but he settled out of court with the woman. Her name has never come out. But it was a definition of a life in turmoil, I think, at that point. And that's when he joined this church in Kultzneck, New Jersey. I also, it strikes me that it's his life being a hot mess, but then he also acquires the grievance to go along with it. And it's that fusion, I would say, of very almost palpable anger combined with embrace of extremist ideology that has sort of brought us this public figure that now I think we're kind of seeing the full measure of in the midst of the war.

10:49It's, you know, war is the kind of crisis that clarifies in Washington. And I think many people are seeing that Pete Hegseth for the first time. The grievance is interesting, too, because he actually has a very specific grievance with the U.S. military. And it goes back to right after this period that you're talking about, after the attack on the U.S. Capitol of January 6, 2021, One, there's this concern, right, about Donald Trump wanting to use military power on his own behalf. He didn't do that, but there was a lot of concern about that. And it's at that moment that a fellow member of the Army National Guard flagged tattoos that Pete Hegseth had as evidence that he was a possible, what they call, insider threat.

11:35And this is very interesting because it's that fusion, again, of religion and state power that I think has made people so alarmed. Pete Hegseth had two tattoos. One was a Jerusalem cross, a symbol that was the coat of arms of the crusader kingdom of Jerusalem and long associated in modern times with the idea of somehow Christian warriors reclaiming the Holy Land. The other tattoo reads Deus Volt, God wills it, which is also a motto from the Crusades. It has been adopted in modern times by white supremacists here in the U.S. And again, when you listen to Pete Hegseth speak, he drips with disdain, almost fury himself.

12:22You know, he calls the operation, the war in Iran, Operation Epic Fury. But just listen to the tone of voice of this man, the leader of the Pentagon, when he speaks about the military and the rules of the past. And we are not going to be constrained by this anymore. We're not going to have this woke military. You name it, the department did it. Foolish and reckless political leaders set the wrong compass heading. And we lost our way. We became the woke department. But not anymore. This is exactly what he's talking about, is this personal grievance that has become sort of the splinter inside of him that has opened up an entire view of what needs to be purged from the culture of the military that he's now in charge of leading.

13:16He said, I joined the army to fight extremists in 2001. Twenty years later, that same army labeled me one. That is the heart or the kernel of that grievance. Well, that's right. And I think that for Donald Trump, you know, Evan, you mentioned when he came together with Trump after, you know, initially looking down on him in 2016. I mean, Donald Trump has this power of finding broken people, of attracting, figuring out, you know, somebody who's got seething anger, even if on the surface they look like a polished television host who went to Princeton, has Ivy League pedigree. There's always something there.

13:59And that's what I found in covering both the first term and the second term, that these are people who have a chip on their shoulder, an axe to grind. And I think, you know, it's, again, handing ultimate power to those folks is why we're talking about this in the context of the war. And maybe that case that did specifically really get Pete Heggs at the job is worth mentioning as well, Jane. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, he has been a champion for war criminals. That had been his cause when after the war, when he was in Fox News, he championed the cause of three service members who had been charged with war crimes.

14:36and said that they were not criminals, they were warriors, as he put it. And Trump took up this cause and commuted their sentences or gave them clemency. And the thing that's worth remembering, though, as Pete Hegseth was making this his cause, the U.S. military was on the other side of this because the brass at the military and the people who served with Pete Hegseth actually opposed what he was doing because they knew that the laws of war are the laws of decency and also what sort of separates us from barbarians. And they also know that it's what keeps our own service members safe. And so this was his own personal cause, and it was something that caught Trump's eye.

15:21I just wanted to say that as we try to describe the evolution of Pete Hegseth, that his contempt, I guess you have to call it for Islam, preceded him being called an extremist. And this goes back 10 years. You know, there was this incident that a whistleblower at one of the organizations, he was at a tiny nonprofit, and one of the organizations that he was running was beset by all kinds of management problems because he was a terrible manager and drunk much of the time. But in one drunken bout, he was in the bar described as chanting, kill all Muslims, kill all Muslims. So this was way back. This was like 2015.

16:02This has been an ongoing thing with him. Well, I think what we've come to is there's a procession of, in a sense, these kinds of signal moments in his life. First, he goes off to the Middle East. He sort of becomes self-defining as a warrior against Islam. He then has this rupture with the military, where ultimately he ends up seeing himself as somebody who is trying to bring back what the U.S. military should be. And then finally, he finds a religious context in which for him, he is now essentially a warrior, not only on behalf of Trump's ideas and the American idea, but a Christian idea. And now he finds himself in the catbird seat at a moment when the United States, for the very first time, is engaged with Israel in an attack on a Muslim nation.

16:50Yeah, let's talk about Operation Epic Fury. Okay, let's talk a little about it. For many Americans, they're just seeing, in a way, this figure for the first time, really. And, you know, it's a widely mockable, easily mockable figure. I feel like Colin Joe's portrayal of Pete Hegseth in Saturday Night Live is going to be one of the sort of enduring moments from the Trump 2.0 presidency. I mean, it's just, you know, at times when I've been watching these Pentagon briefings, it's like as if Pete Hegseth is imitating Colin Jost imitating Pete Hegseth. I mean, really, he's become in some ways the inhabitant of his own caricature.

17:32And so he, you know, he comes in this sort of Fox TV suits. They're too tight. The pants are kind of too short. I never understood that, by the way. Side note. Maybe it's to show the shoes. Well, I don't know, you know, but except. So he comes out, right, and he's like sort of stoked and he's ready for combat, except the combat is with the fake news media. And the thing that most people knew about Hegseth before the war started, right, was that he had banned basically all of the traditional media, including, interestingly, his own former network Fox News, which refused to sign the onerous and I think now the subject of a lawsuit, but the onerous code that was being demanded of reporters under Hegseth, that they would essentially forswear doing any actual reporting.

18:17So nobody, no real news organizations, including Fox News, signed up for that. So now he replaced the entire Pentagon press corps basically with kind of right wing influencers, including amazingly, there's a guy who's now accredited to the redone Pete Hegseth press corps who actually was one of the rioters on January 6th. I mean, that really just tells you a lot. So we knew that he was sort of at war with the fake news. He was at war with the, quote, woke DOD. His crusade seemed to be, frankly, to purge, quote, unquote, DEI from the Pentagon. And now here he is. He gives these briefings on this war.

18:57And to me, it's the most un-American thing I've ever seen. It's a grotesque celebration of the violence and power and killing capacity of the American military. It's a laser focused maximum authority mission delivered with overwhelming and unrelenting precision. No hesitation, no half measures. As President Trump declared yesterday, we're crushing the enemy in an overwhelming display of technical skill and military force. We will not relent until the enemy is totally and decisively defeated. Those are really what Pete Hegseth has been delivering from the podium without clarity about the mission in Iran, without clarity about the goals, without clarity about the progress, and without an effort to invest the American people in this use of their power.

19:55And I just I think these briefings that he's been doing, you know, will be studied by people for many years. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, it strikes me as on the most basic level as such a violation of the Ten Commandments that he says that he embraces, thou shalt not kill. He really seems to be reveling in the killing and has yet to apologize or even address other than to say that they are investigating the bombing of a school in Iran that killed 175 or so people, most of whom were schoolgirls. It's hard for most people to match that with their idea of Christianity, but not for Hegseth, apparently.

20:47We're going to take a quick break, and when we come back, we'll be joined by Katherine Stewart, who will walk us through Pete Hegseth's Christian nationalist ideology and how it's shaping the U.S. military. The political scene will be right back.

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22:21All right, now we want to turn to the ideas behind Pete Hegseth's worldview. And for that, we're joined by the journalist Catherine Stewart. She spent years reporting on the rise of the religious right and the movement known as Christian nationalism. Catherine, welcome to the show. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me. Well, you've spent a lot of time studying Christian nationalists closely, and now one of them, Pete Hedgeth, is actually running the Pentagon. So we're in the middle of a war. Does any of this surprise you? Well, not really, although I think at a higher level, we can't imagine that Trump himself is pursuing an explicitly religious agenda.

23:06Pete Hedgeth may be a different story here. But I think it's basically meant to serve the political purpose of Trump's administration and MAGA movement more broadly. And this is actually where some of that Christian nationalist and religious messaging plays a role, right? Trump wants to shore up his base of support. A disproportionate number of his followers are supporters of Christian nationalism. So he needs a way to justify this needless and expensive and unpopular war. and religion becomes a way to justify it. Can you help us explain what we mean when we talk about Christian nationalism? This has become something that I think listeners of this show and people who follow politics are increasingly aware of, but the language itself, the terminology may still be a bit mysterious.

23:53What is Christian nationalism and how does it differ from some of the things you mentioned a moment ago about charismatic or evangelical Christianity? I think of it as a mindset and also a machine. So, you know, the mindset includes the idea that America was established to be a Christian nation, but only according to a certain interpretation of Christianity, certainly not progressive or mainland Christianity, because its proponents adhere more to a hardline form of Christianity. And the idea that that's what once made us great and we need to take it back, right? And our law should be based on a kind of reactionary interpretation of the Bible.

24:29But I think the machine of Christian nationalism movement is arguably more important because much of it functions as a giant voter turnout machine, right? Christian nationalist movement, its strength is in this deeply networked organizational infrastructure. It's a leadership-driven movement, an organization-driven movement. I think a very underappreciated feature of the movement are these pastoral networks that draw pastors into groups and conservative and conservative-leaning pastors and tell them that it's their biblical duty to turn out their congregants to vote for the issues that matter, which inevitably boil down to things like abortion, same-sex marriage, etc.

25:15And, you know, much of that movement really functions as a giant voter turnout machine. The networking organizations are also really important, like the Council for National Policy, which brings together heads of these organizations with very rich funders and keeps the movement sort of on the same page. How do you see Hegseth as fitting into this network? Well, I think it bears looking into the religious movement that Hegseth follows because he credits it with guiding his life, including his life in the military. He attends the Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowship, which is linked to Doug Wilson, a very powerful pastor whose ministry is based in Moscow, Idaho, but has offshoots around the country.

26:01And Wilson has adhered to a very, very theocratic and patriarchal form of religion and vision for society. He has actually said it was a mistake for women to have the right to vote, and it's been terrible for America. and pastors affiliated with this religious denomination say that the 19th Amendment, which guarantees women the right to vote, should be repealed and replaced with something they call head of household voting, which is where the supposed head of the household, who is inevitably going to be a man, gets to decide the votes on the entire House. And Doug Wilson has actually appeared at the Pentagon.

26:41Hexeth has implemented a number of concerning activities at the Pentagon He's holding monthly worship services where Wilson and also Pete Hegseth's personal pastor, Brooke Pottinger, have delivered sermons. And then we also need to just look at Hegseth himself. He's got these crusader tattoos on his body, like the Jerusalem cross, which is also called the Crusader cross. He has actually cast some of his actions, his other actions at the Pentagon, as helping to save America as a Christian nation. And he has also put forth, the Department of Defense has put forth these videos of Bible verses overlaid with images of tanks and missiles and soldiers, a kind of conflation of religion with military aggression.

27:33And I think this is deeply concerning. It calls into question the kind of ways in which Hegseth's religion influences his military decisions and his decisions for all of America. Yeah, well, it's interesting you bring that up, of course, now that we're at war. I was really struck, as I'm sure you were, by this report that the Military Religious Freedom Foundation has already received more than 200 complaints from service members in the not quite two weeks of this conflict with Iran, reporting that military commanders are invoking biblical end times prophecy to justify the war. Now, this is really amazing to me.