Pete Hegseth, Christian Nationalism, and the Festering Wounds of the Forever Wars
Just after January 6, Pete Hegseth’s tattoos were scrutinized, his loyalties were questioned, and, suddenly, he was on the outs with the Army.
Dispersed among the hundreds that sacked the Capitol that day were scores of people with a military background. The Pentagon reacted to this fact with alarm, and a brief burst of accountability. As part of this, a fellow National Guard soldier flagged Hegseth as a potential “insider threat,” citing military regulations that prohibit extremist ink.
“My orders were revoked to guard the Biden inauguration,” Hegseth recently told former Navy SEAL Shawn Ryan on his popular podcast.
“What a punishment,” Ryan responds sarcastically, and the two men laugh.
Hegseth insists that his separation from the military was mutual, even as his description of the event itself indicates a profound sense of betrayal. “The military I loved, I fought for, I revered … spit me out,” he writes in his most recent book, The War on Warriors.
For two decades, Hegseth dedicated himself to the Global War on Terror, fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan before defending these unpopular conflicts in major political and media arenas. Along the way, his body hardened, and his ideas did, too. He got religious tattoos, and all-American ones, including an AR-15, an American flag, and the words “We the People.”
His major objection with the military now is not so much with being labeled an extremist as it is with the military rejecting their own creation. To him, the Pentagon has become overwhelmed by a soft, incompetent, and prejudicial leadership class that fails to recognize a basic truth: Dogma is the key to dominance.
This belief crystalized in Hegseth’s mind a few years ago, when he spotted an image online of a triumphant ISIS fighter – a Quran in one hand, an AK-47 in the other. “With God on his side and the wind at his back, he is a conquering warrior,” Hegseth writes in his 2017 memoir, Man in the Arena. “He is fighting for something greater than himself. He is fighting for his God.”
Hegseth has always been prone to red, white and blue religiosity, even by the high standards set by his long-time Fox & Friends castmates. His recent slate of shows on Fox News’ streaming service include “Battle in Bethlehem,” “Life of Jesus,” and “Christmas at the Reagan Library.”
But since his resignation from the military, he’s increasingly turned to his other tribe, Christianity. This culminated two years ago with his dramatic move from New Jersey to Tennessee, where Hegseth and his family have emmeshed themselves in a school and church associated with reformed reconstructionism, an ideology helmed by the far-right theologian Doug Wilson.
Matthew Taylor, a senior scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish Studies, recently told me that that Hegseth’s new faith community, coupled with his writings and tattoos, indicates his deep belief in holy war. “The last thing we need is a Christian ISIS. The last thing we need is western Christians imagining themselves as holy warriors waging some sort of global conflict on Islam. That is the spark for terrorism, for hatred, for visceral violence.”
Much of the military community has reacted with shock and horror to Hegseth’s nomination, an indication, among other things, of Washington’s near-total failure to grapple with the deep and still festering scars of the Forever Wars. Hegseth’s public displays of faith, Islamophobia, and anger towards the Pentagon brass make him a perfect avatar of the War on Terror, which was, according to many who served, a terribly planned, thinly disguised holy war that left a trail of unjustified bloodshed in its wake.
“The rank and file, and even some of the officers, have accepted the gravity of the failures,” said Adam Weinstein, a Marine Corps veteran, and Deputy Director for Middle East Policy at the Quincy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank focused on peace and diplomacy. “There’s a deep sense of sacrifice and loss for nothing. And that can lead to fatalistic beliefs, it can lead to Islamophobia. In its healthier form, it can lead to questioning the principles of interventionism and the U.S. foreign policy establishment.”
Hegseth’s alleged pattern of drinking, organizational mismanagement, and sexual misconduct now threaten to derail his nomination, even as such behavior also mirrors the military. The institution can’t pass an audit and routinely retaliates against victims of sexual misconduct rather than punish the perpetrators. Substance abuse also remains an all-too-common symptom of service.
Even Hegseth’s radicalism is in line with the institutional he may soon lead. According to a 2023 study, military service now ranks as the single strongest predicator of violent extremism.
In a new piece for POLITICO Magazine, I profile Hegseth and his hard turn towards faith. Give it a read if you can.
Prior to 1960 you could easily say that the overwhelming majority of the military, I dare say in the 98% range, would agree with Hegseth’s Christian, patriotic views.
The political left has slapped the label “white, Christian, nationalism” on it, however, I served with tons of black and Latino’s with the same views.
Of course, beginning with Gen X (my generation), we began chronicling our experiences with tattoos. Prior to deploying to Gulf War I, my entire squad pulled up to a tattoo studio and we all got patriotic tattoos. We were a rapid deployment FORSCOM unit and were the only unit from our base to deploy.
As we all know, tattoo popularity exploded with post 9-11 troops as did the imagery from warrior cultures past, from the Vikings to the Revolutionary War.
There’s a reason the military cannot recruit right now and it isn’t because of men like Hegseth. My own son and many of his fellow officers resigned their commissions during the Biden catastrophe.
One of the many reasons the American military is so great is that it’s an all volunteer force. In the decades since Viet Nam, and especially after Carter’s disastrous presidency, the military has attracted a certain type of soldier.
These men and women come from all walks of life and are (were) the most organically diverse group of citizens in America. The men I served with came from every post of the country; from rural Georgia to Los Angeles and from Iowa to New York City.
We have gone on to be a true slice of Americana; doctors, lawyers, executives, custom car builders, engineers and politicians. We had men who served to earn their citizenship; one from a former Soviet bloc country and another from Mexico.
We ate together, trained together, bled together, got in the occasional bar fight together and we kicked ass in combat. When I ran for office the first time, the men in my unit came out of the woodwork to donate to my campaign, many of whom I hadn’t spoken to since leaving the service.
Christian Nationalism is what made the American military great. While we all understand that not everyone believes in God, or may practice different religion (they did in the other wars too); we all love America.
Until the advent of DEI, no one was forcing their beliefs, religious or otherwise, on soldiers or on America as a whole.
The US Military and huge swaths of the US Government have gone off the rails, if we don’t get things back on track the country is headed for disaster.