Pete Hegseth, broadly thought-about the least certified Protection secretary in American historical past, is hardly anybody’s model of the perfect Christian husband and father.
Solely 45 years previous, he’s been married thrice.
His first marriage — to his highschool sweetheart — lasted a mere 4 years, deteriorating after Hegseth admitted to a number of extramarital affairs.
A few years later, he married his second spouse, with whom he had three kids. Throughout that marriage, he fathered a baby with a Fox Information producer who finally turned his third spouse.
He paid off a lady who accused him of sexual assault (he denies the assault). He routinely handed out drunk at household gatherings and misbehaved in public when inebriated, in response to quite a few witnesses. His personal mom as soon as accused him of being “an abuser of girls,” although she later retracted her claims when Hegseth was dealing with Senate affirmation.
Nonetheless, the Senate’s Republican majority, cowed by President Trump, confirmed his appointment. Hegseth has two qualities that Trump prizes above all others. He’s blindly loyal to the president, and he seems to be good on TV.
After his set up, Hegseth proceeded to fireplace high navy brass who occurred to be Black or ladies or each. He has restored the names of Accomplice generals to Military bases (Bragg and Benning). His petty “anti-woke” campaign led him to strip the title of the assassinated homosexual rights chief Harvey Milk, a former Naval officer who served honorably, from a Navy ship. And he has thought-about doing the identical to a ship named in honor of the abolitionist and Civil Conflict hero Harriet Tubman. He has stated that ladies don’t belong in fight roles, and has kicked out transgender troopers, cruelly stripping them of the pensions they earned for his or her service.
In March, he shared categorised details about an impending American airstrike in Yemen on an unsecured Sign group chat that included his spouse, on goal, and the editor of the Atlantic, by chance.
He’s, in brief, the least severe man ever to guide this nation’s armed forces.
As if all that weren’t dispiriting sufficient, Hegseth is now in mattress (metaphorically) with a crusading Christian nationalist.
Earlier this month, Hegseth made waves when he reposted on social media a CNN interview with Douglas Wilson, the pastor and theocrat who’s working laborious to show the clock again on the rights of each American who will not be white, Christian and male.
Within the interview, Wilson expounded on his patriarchal, misogynistic, authoritarian and homophobic views.
Ladies, he stated, ought to function “chief govt of the house” and shouldn’t have the fitting to vote. (Their males can do this for them.) Homosexual marriage and homosexual intercourse needs to be outlawed as soon as once more. “We all know that sodomy is worse than slavery by how God responds to it,” he informed CNN’s Pamela Brown. (Slavery is “unbiblical,” he avowed, although he did bizarrely defend it as soon as, writing in 1990 a pamphlet that “slavery produced within the South a real affection between the races that we consider we will say has by no means existed in any nation earlier than the Conflict or since.”)
When a brand new outpost of his church opened in Washington, D.C ., in July, Hegseth and his household have been among the many worshippers. CNN described Hegseth’s presence as “a serious achievement” for Wilson.
“All of Christ for All of Life,” wrote Hegseth as he endorsed and reposted the interview. That’s the motto of Wilson’s increasing universe, which incorporates his Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, the middle of his Communion of Reformed Evangelical Church buildings, a community of greater than 100 church buildings on 4 continents, parochial colleges, a school, a publishing home and media platforms. “All of Christ for All of Life” is a shorthand for the assumption that Christian doctrines ought to form each a part of life — together with authorities, tradition and training.
Wilson is a prolific creator of books with titles akin to “Her Hand in Marriage,” “Federal Husband,” and “Reforming Marriage.” His ebook “Constancy” teaches “what it means to be a one-woman man.” Uncertain it has crossed Hegseth’s desk.
“God hates divorce,” writes Wilson in one in all his books.
Given the best way sexual pleasure is widely known within the Previous and New Testaments, Wilson has a peculiarly dim view of intercourse. I imply, what number of weddings have been graced with recitations from the Music of Solomon, with its thinly disguised allusions to pleasurable sexual intimacy? (“Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth! In your love is healthier than wine.”)
Wilson’s world is significantly much less sensual.
“A person penetrates, conquers, colonizes, crops,” he writes in “Constancy.” “A girl receives, surrenders, accepts.” Mutual sexual pleasure appears out of the query: “The sexual act can’t be made into an egalitarian pleasuring occasion.” Ugh.
There may be nothing notably new right here; Wilson’s ideology is simply one other model of patriarchal figures utilizing faith to battle again towards the equality actions of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They’re principally the hatemongers of the Westboro Baptist Church dressed up in respectable clothes.
“Some individuals might conflate Christian nationalism and Christianity as a result of they each use the symbols and language of Christianity, akin to a Bible, a cross and worship songs,” says the group Christians Towards Christian Nationalism on its web site. “However Christian nationalism makes use of the veneer of Christianity to advance its personal goals — to level to a political determine, occasion or ideology as a substitute of Jesus.”
What you may have in individuals like Hegseth and Wilson are authoritarian males who disguise behind their faith to execute probably the most unchristian of agendas.
God might hate divorce, however from my studying of the Bible, God hates hypocrisy much more.
Bluesky: @rabcarian
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