Pete Hegseth just took his personal crusade to a new level | Arwa Mahdawi
The Guardian · L · trust 27/100
‘I’m an atheist but the way things are going the end times are beginning to sound appealing.’ Photograph: Alex Wong/Pool Getty Images North America/AP View image in fullscreen ‘I’m an atheist but the way things are going the end times are beginning to sound appealing.’ Photograph: Alex Wong/Pool Getty Images North America/AP The Week in Patriarchy Trump administration Pete Hegseth just took his personal crusade to a new level Arwa Mahdawi The US defense secretary who hates ‘beardos, weirdos and wimps’ has announced an Office of Religious Affairs at the Pentagon
A part from money and McDonald’s , there’s nothing Donald Trump seems to love more than a “ big, beautiful” wall . The government is currently spending billions of taxpayer dollars to fulfill the president’s fantasy of lining the US-Mexico border with 30ft steel bollard walls and high-tech surveillance.
What the Trump administration is apparently not so keen on is the wall of separation between church and state. While the president may hawk bibles as a side hustle, he is not exactly devout; he serves only mammon. The top levels of his government, however, are stuffed full of religious fanatics who appear hellbent on remaking the country as a Christian theocracy.
Chief among these is the defense secretary and former Fox News personality Pete Hegseth . When he isn’t screeching about “beardos, weirdos, and wimps”, the man is cosplaying as a megachurch pastor. Hegseth, who has been married three times and paid $50,000 to a woman who accused him of rape in 2017 (he denies the accusation), found God relatively recently. He joined an evangelical church in 2018 and is now busy imposing his own brand of religion on the Pentagon, framing the war on Iran as a modern crusade and instituting monthly prayer services.
Sometimes he blends Pulp Fiction with the Bible at these services; other times he prays for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy”. The Jesus that told people to love their enemies, it seems, is far too woke (and bearded ) for Hegseth.
This week, Hegseth took his personal crusade to a whole new level, announcing a new Pentagon Office of Religious Affairs, which reports directly to him. The military he said, was putting on “the full armor of God”. The Pentagon insists that it will not “compel religious participation”, but given Hegseth’s broader efforts to imbue Christianity into the armed forces, it’s hard not to be alarmed. Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which has sued the Pentagon over its worship services, is certainly worried. “All of [Hegseth’s] actions combined with this latest announcement make clear that Hegseth is advancing a Christian Nationalist agenda in the military,” the group said in a statement .
And that agenda seems to go well beyond the military. Hegseth has close ties to Doug Wilson, an extremist pastor and self-described Christian nationalist who thinks that women should not be allowed to vote . In an interview with NPR, Wilson said he doesn’t think his full vision for turning the US into a Christian theocracy will be realized for about 250 years, but he’s taking it step by step. His main focus now is banning abortion and same-sex marriage. While he’s still not a mainstream figure, the likes of Hegseth are pushing him out of the fringes fast. The defense secretary invited Wilson to lead a worship service at the Pentagon in February and has amplified a CNN video where the pastor said women should submit to their husbands.
It’s also not just Hegseth and his extremist pastor that we have to worry about. The Missouri senator Josh Hawley proudly said in a 2024 speech that he is “advocating Christian nationalism” and has been pushing to overturn access to abortion medication in the name of these beliefs. The House speaker Mike Johnson is connected to strongly Christian nationalist views. Meanwhile, JD Vance recently appeared on an evangelical podcast where he said is doing as much of “God’s work as possible” and is OK “if that leads to the end times ”, which are apparently “coming”.
I’m an atheist, but the way things are going, the end times are beginning to sound appealing. Let’s just pray it starts with the end of this administration.
Nineteen states and Washington DC have codified shield laws that protect health providers who prescribe and mail the abortion medications mifepristone and misoprostol to people in states with abortion bans. But these protections are under attack: in the latest attempt to curtail access to the medication, three attorneys general in anti-abortion states (Louisiana, Alabama, Arkansas) filed a lawsuit with the US supreme court challenging these laws. It’s not surprising then that some activists are bypassing the legal and medical systems and taking matters into their own hands: using volunteers to obtain abortion pills abroad and then distribute them to community support networks across the US. “It really doesn’t matter what [state and federal authorities] do legally – we will continue,” one activist told Mother Jones . They added: “There may come a time where we are one of the only, if not the only, option for the nation.”
“We don’t know why she has done this, but it has nonetheless caused a stir,” writes the always hilarious Rebecca Shaw in the Guardian about Margot Robbie becoming Margot Ackerley. “We got the usual discourse of blah blah tradition, blah blah patriarchy, blah blah women’s individual choice and so on.” Instead of engaging in this discourse, Shaw has a very practical solution for how married couples should choose a surname.
New York is one of 19 states that has “voluntary intoxication” laws, which some people argue effectively serve as a legal loophole protecting sexual offenders. If you as a victim were voluntarily under the influence of drugs or alcohol, you cannot claim that you were mentally incapacitated during an assault unless you can show that you were unconscious or otherwise physically helpless.…
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