Reign of Error 002: Pete Hegseth, Doug Wilson, and the God of War
Host Sarah Posner examines Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s escalating campaign to remake the Pentagon in the image of a militant, hyper-masculine Christian nationalism—from dismantling small-business contracting as “DEI,” to purging diversity programs, hosting monthly Christian prayer meetings inside the Pentagon, and framing U.S. military power as divinely sanctioned. As Trump rattles the global order with threats against NATO allies and Greenland, Posner traces how Hegseth’s theology and politics blur the lines among biblical law, domestic authority, and international norms—raising urgent questions about religion, war, and state power.
Posner is joined by Dr. Julie Ingersoll, professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Florida and author of Building God’s Kingdom, for a deep dive into the radical Christian Reconstructionist movement shaping Hegseth’s worldview. They unpack the influence of Doug Wilson and the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, including beliefs about biblical law, patriarchy, Christian dominion, and a “God of war” theology that legitimizes violence and conquest. The conversation explores how once-fringe theocratic ideas have quietly moved into the corridors of power—and what it means when U.S. military leaders see themselves as carrying out God’s will, at home and abroad.
Julie Ingersoll is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville, where she teaches and writes about religion in American culture, with a particular focus on religion and politics and the religious right.
Originally from Maine, she earned a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara, along with degrees in history from George Washington University and political science from Rutgers College. She began studying religion as an undergraduate because of her interest in politics, which she saw as deeply intertwined with religious life—an understanding that only deepened as her studies continued.
More about Dr. Ingersoll: https://julieingersoll.weebly.com/about.html
Additional Resources:
Julie Ingersoll, Building God’s Kingdom: Inside the World of Christian Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015)
Julie Ingersoll, “Why the religious beliefs of Trump defense pick Pete Hegseth matter,” The Conversation, December 12, 2024, https://theconversation.com/why-the-religious-beliefs-of-trump-defense-pick-pete-hegseth-matter-245601
Brian Kaylor, “Hegseth Shares War Psalm He Prayed During Venezuela Attack,” A Public Witness, January 21, 2026, https://publicwitness.wordandway.org/p/hegseth-shares-war-psalm-he-prayed
Brian Kaylor, “At Pentagon Christmas Service, Franklin Graham Praises ‘God of War’,” A Public Witness, December 17, 2025, https://publicwitness.wordandway.org/p/at-pentagon-christmas-service-franklin
Government Worship Watch, A Public Witness, https://publicwitness.wordandway.org/p/government-worship-watch
“The Christian nationalist pastor with ties to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth,” CNN, August 8, 2025, https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/08/politics/video/christian-nationalist-doug-wilson-pam-brown-digvid
Creator: Sarah Posner: https://www.sarahposner.com/
Producer and Engineer: Dr. Ger FitzGerald
Executive Producer: Dr. Bradley Onishi
Production Assistance: Kari Onishi
Generous funding provided by the Henry Luce Foundation.
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American Medieval is a podcast about the Middle Ages, but with an American twist.
Every week, Professor Matthew Gabriel is joined by an expert scholar to talk about some bit of the medieval world itself, or how Americans have throughout our history used the Middle Ages to say something about ourselves.
So far, we've heard about medieval eels, yes, like those in the water, the myth of the fall of Rome, medieval Santa Claus, and dirtbag medievalism.
New episodes are available every Wednesday.
Look for them wherever fighting podcasts can be found.
And remember that if America has never been fully modern, it might be because we've always been a little bit medieval.
See more at AmericanMedieval.com.
Last week, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced he would take a sledgehammer to a long-standing Pentagon program for contracting with small businesses, disparaging it as the government's oldest DEI program.
He pledged, if a contract doesn't make us more lethal, it's gone.
Hegseth has spent his entire tenure making the Pentagon more lethal and, in his mind, more manly.
Amid his war on woke culture, he purged generals, dismantled diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, banned trans service members and books promoting gender ideology, and ordered a review of women serving in combat.
Although President Trump's attempt to rename the Department of Defense the Department of War would, in reality, require a law passed by Congress, Hegseth has nonetheless forced the change, including renaming the DOD website war.gov.
Last June, Hegseth told Congress that the Pentagon had developed contingency plans for invading Greenland and taking it by force.
Trump continued to agitate the global order and even his far-right allies in Europe with his threats to seize the territory of our NATO ally Denmark.
He appeared to back down following the World Economic Forum at Davos last week, although he could always resume his warmongering.
In his book, The War on Warriors, Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free, Hegseth wrote about international law, who cares what other countries think.
Amid an avalanche of horrific news here at home, including the ongoing paramilitary occupation of Minneapolis and the CBP murder of Alex Pretty, it's easy to lose track of all of Hegseth's scandals, from illegal Caribbean boat strikes, the invasion and seizure of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Signalgate, and more.
At last week's Christian prayer meeting that Hegseth hosts monthly at the Pentagon, he read from Psalm 144 and then told his audience, may our God be the Lord in the conduct of our activities in this department, wherever they may be around the world.
He said the monthly gatherings were designed to help the military remember who we serve, that is, Hegseth's Christian God.
This week, we examine the radical Christian movement that Hegseth has credited with guiding his life, including his military life.
Christian Reconstruction's Transgressive Theology00:15:47
Welcome to Reign of Error.
I'm your host, Sarah Posner, an investigative journalist who has spent decades covering the Christian right.
This is the podcast where we break down the latest news headlines about religion and politics with deep analysis by scholars, journalists, and other experts.
Today, I'm speaking with Julie Ingersoll, professor of religious studies at the University of North Florida, author of the book Building God's Kingdom Inside the World of Christian Reconstruction, and an expert on the radical theology of Pete Hegseth.
Julie, welcome to Reign of Error.
Hi, it's nice to be here.
So Pete Hegseth is a longtime member of Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowship in Goodlitzville, Tennessee.
It's part of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, which was founded by a pastor named Doug Wilson, who has built a small theocratic empire in Moscow, Idaho.
You've studied Wilson and his movement.
What can you tell us about them?
Well, the theology is built on a 20th century movement.
And it's what you and I used to call dominionism when we were writing about this 15 years ago.
People thought that that was alarmist, but they've worked their way into places of power.
They believe that we should be governed by biblical law that applies to Christians and non-Christians.
And they believe that all of the world should be organized as nation states that are Christian nationalist each on their own.
And they're working hard to make that happen.
So Wilson has his headquarters in Idaho, but churches that follow him around the country.
True.
Including one, a new one in Washington, D.C.
And these churches are basically bound to follow Wilson's teachings.
Yeah, I think that's a really important point because people ask, well, how do you tie Hagseth back to Wilson?
Like, you know, so they go to the church.
But these are a specific kind of Presbyterian church, Presbyterian small P, the way that it's ordered.
And you don't just attend on a Saturday or Sunday and, you know, have worship music.
These are churches that you have to intentionally join.
You have to go before a board of elders and be questioned on your theology and your conversion experience.
You have to sign a covenant.
And if you depart from the beliefs of the community, you can be brought before the board of elders and charged with heresy even in a church court.
They have church courts.
This will sound weird to people outside this world, but you know, when I wrote that once online, somebody wrote, well, so she found Presbyterianism.
But I'm not saying that it's shocking that they have that, although it might be.
But what's relevant about that is that for that reason, you can tie the beliefs of Wilson to Hegseth.
Right.
So what is in the covenant that they have to sign?
Well, it has traditional Presbyterian theological creedal stuff, you know, about the Trinity and the divinity of Jesus and all of that sort of stuff.
But it also has statements on the notion of the family, opposition to homosexuality, those kind of things.
Let's take a listen to what Wilson teaches about the separation of church and state.
He discussed it at the 2025 NATCON conference, which is a gathering of influential figures in the MACA New Right.
And here's what Wilson had to say.
Progressives actually cannot separate church and state in their minds for the simple reason that the state is their church.
The state is their everything.
The state is the environment in which they live and move and have their being.
But if we were to say we favor the separation of church and state, what are we saying by that exactly?
That famous wall of separation.
Where is it located precisely?
Separation of church and state, rightly understood, is separating two distinct kinds of government, civil government and ecclesiastical.
Done rightly, separating church and state is a prudent and wise thing to do.
The principle behind it is a biblical one.
So what Wilson is saying here is not how most people think of the separation of church and state, which is that, you know, under the First Amendment, which is that government will not impose a state religion.
He's rather saying that the state should be weak and the church should be strong.
Do I have that right?
Well, kind of.
This is one of the places where they draw from that 20th century movement, Christian Reconstructionism.
So in their view, all authority belongs to God and it is delegated to three distinct institutions on earth.
Sometimes this is called sphere sovereignty and sometimes it's called jurisdictional authority.
The idea was taken from the Reformation by R.J. Rushdruny in the 20th century modified it.
And Wilson uses Rushduni's version of it.
And so if God gives authority to the church, what they call the civil government, you heard that in the quote, and the family, each of those institutions has a specific task or some specific tasks, and they are prohibited from reaching into the other spheres to do other things.
So for example, this is why they think that public schools are unbiblical.
They are intruding onto the authority of the family.
So church and state are indeed separate, but not in the way that we mean, because they are all ordered under a higher category, biblical law.
So his disdain for the state in particular, he's really criticizing civil authority, civil governmental authority here.
So what does that say?
You mentioned public schools.
They think public schools are unbiblical.
What does it say for other goals that they have for having a society that's governed by biblical law?
Well, it's comprehensive.
So you and I could never go through a list.
It's everything.
They believe that the Bible applies to every area of life.
In fact, their motto, all of Christ for all of life.
That's what that means.
But broadly speaking, they believe that the civil government should protect private property and punish evildoers.
That's their language.
And in that, they also include the notion of protecting the distinct authority of the other spheres.
So they think it's very, very limited.
And that gets back to the characterization that you first asked about, because the result is indeed a very, very small state and a pretty powerful church.
Right.
So Hegseth has been having these monthly prayer meetings at the Pentagon.
And he's brought his own communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches pastor to preach at them.
And that pastor is now in D.C. at a church that Wilson planted here.
But I want to focus on something that Hagseth himself said at one of these prayer meetings that was held.
He has been once a month.
Here's something that he said last week.
And I also want to give a shout out to Brian Keller and his newsletter, A Public Witness, because he's broken a lot of news about these prayer gatherings even taking place, including the Christmas gathering where Franklin Graham, the son of Billy Graham, praised a God of war.
And if we trust Christ, we can never go wrong.
Don't forget to bow your head in the middle of the day when you're making big decisions or when things feel like they're outside of your control.
Happens a lot to me.
It provides a lot of clarity and God's got a plan.
Well, that speaks to the comprehensiveness of how they understand the relationship between religion and society.
But it also speaks to something else that's really important, which is these guys also take a distinctive understanding about the relationship between the New Testament and the Old Testament.
Most Christians in modern times think of the New Testament as in some way replacing the Old Testament.
They think of the Old Testament as a God of war and the New Testament as a God of love.
That has all kinds of issues, but that's what most people think when they talk about the relationship between those two texts or sets of texts.
But these folks believe that God's revelation, the Bible, is a continuing revelation from the book of Genesis all the way through the book of Revelation.
So for them, Jesus in the form of the Trinity was present at creation.
So they don't distance themselves from the characterization of God being a God of war.
They talk about God hating people.
They talk about God having enemies.
So that kind of belligerent, combative character that you see them exhibiting is directly related to how they understand God.
And so when Hegseth says to trust Christ in everything that you do in your position in the military, either as a service member or a civilian working at the Pentagon, I mean, is he talking about that they should be following biblical law instead of domestic law?
Absolutely.
Military law, international law?
Biblical law.
And those other kinds of law insofar as they comport with biblical law.
And in fact, when they believe that that doesn't comport with biblical law, they are required to resist it.
Just think about the uproar about when he was nominated and his views on women in the military.
Hegseth does not believe that women should be in the military.
He said, oh, well, you know, I don't believe women should be in combat.
And he tries to tease those out to construct a way of saying it that's going to fly under the radar.
Now, when they want to be transgressive, they are intensely transgressive.
You know, Wilson says things like women were made to make sandwiches.
So they say things to make people angry, but when they want to hide the strategy, they often do so.
Hegseth believes that he is a secretary of war working under the authority of biblical law.
Wow.
Can we talk a little bit about, and I want to come back to the patriarchy stuff, but I definitely also wanted to take a little detour to talk about Wilson's views on slavery, the Confederacy, and the Civil War.
So again, this is where Wilson is connecting up with that 20th century movement founded by Rushduni called the Christian Reconstructionists.
Wilson wrote a book a while back in the 90s called Slavery as It Was.
And his argument in that book was rooted in the work of Rushduni, and Rushduni's work was rooted in pre-Civil War Southern Presbyterianism.
So you have this idea that slavery wasn't really that bad.
And, you know, they talked about slave owners being paternalistic and slaves' lives better under slavery in the Americas than they would have been.
And, you know, it's very racist, the dark corners of Africa.
They diminish the significance of slavery.
And they do think it's biblical.
Would you consider them to be lost causers?
Do they think that the Confederacy should have won the Civil War?
They don't think it's a lost cause.
They're still fighting it.
It's not over for them.
They do think that the South should have won the Civil War.
Although sometimes they, you know, like when we say they, there's no specific they.
So sometimes those claims are, yeah, I think Wilson thinks that the South should have won the Civil War.
Another thing that people outside this movement don't always see is a long time horizon with which they are working.
One of the other figures that I've written about actually developed and sold to homeschool families a 200-year plan for a family dynasty.
And 200 years is not the longest.
Like they talk about a thousand years.
So this incremental change that they've been making all along that we see now, it started probably with Rush Junior started in the 1950s.
It's taken that long to get to where it is.
So for them to understand themselves as continuing fighting for the values that were held by the pre-Civil War South, that fits with the long time horizon.
I saw Wilson in an interview say 250 years.
Yeah, they pick a different, I mean, and the point isn't the literal 250 or 200 or even 1,000.
The point is a long time.
It's not an election cycle.
It's not a current crisis.
And that's why their influence is so much greater now than you would think based on their numbers, because there are very few people attached to this movement, relatively speaking.
But starting in the 1960s, they built this Christian school movement.
And then on that, they built a homeschool, Christian homeschool movement.
And that's bearing fruit, changing subtly the way that Christians in general actually, because it made its way outside their movement.
Lots of people put their kids in these schools because these schools were academically good, I guess, in the way that they, you know, I mean, you're teaching providential history.
I don't know how that can actually be, but that's how people thought about them.
And they said, well, you know, if they get a little Christianity on the side, who cares?
They didn't realize it was not on the side.
It, you know, infuses everything.
So those ideas about what society should look like made their way out into the larger conservative evangelical movement that became every iteration of the Christian right.
You know, we've had several of them, as you know.
You and I have talked about this before, that Christian Reconstruction was a fringe theocratic movement, but it's somehow not also not fringe because of the way it has insinuated itself into the thinking of so many evangelicals and probably even some non-evangelicals.
And people want to say they are not Christian Reconstructionists.
So-and-so is not a Christian Reconstructionist.
And I push back on that language because you don't have to be one, whatever it would mean to be one.
But people are shaved by the worldview that these folks developed and intentionally disseminated out into the larger culture, even if they've never heard of them.
Right.
You know, if somebody sends their kids to a Christian school, they are influenced by Rushdini because Rushdini made sure that that was legal by arguing in court for it to be a part of what's recognized as a religious freedom right.
So Hegseth, this became an issue during his confirmation hearings, but it's kind of fallen by the wayside since he denied charges of sexual assault, but has admitted he settled a lawsuit with an accuser.
He has admitted to infidelity, but has said he truly was changed by Jen, his present wife, and my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
But Wilson has some, to put it very mildly, controversial views about women and gender roles, including within marriage.
In his book, Fidelity, What It Means to Be a One Woman Man, Wilson wrote that heterosexual sex, quote, cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party.
A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants.
A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.
Is that extreme even within the world of Christian Reconstruction?
Not within the, like within the CREC.
Wilson really loves to be transgressive.
So most people would kind of believe a soft version of that.
Most people in this world, they probably wouldn't say it like that.
You know, Wilson does this no quarter November where he sits on a burning couch and makes, you know, like he really loves to be provocative in those kinds of ways.
So part of that is an effort to be provocative.
But the underlying idea that he's expressing is a widely held understanding of the relationship between men and women.
This is a very, very strong version of women's subordination.
And so when they talk about that wives should submit to their husbands, that it's both sexual, psychological, household management kinds of issues all tied in together.
Yep, this is an extreme form of patriarchy that infuses everything about how they see the world.
So Wilson believes that homosexuality should be criminalized.
Christian Nationalism's Rise00:15:19
And I think that the Rush Dooney talking about homosexuals being stoned in the Bible, and that was part of biblical law, was one of the reasons for a long time a lot of people said, oh, no, I'm not a Christian Reconstructionist because it was so extreme.
But it really is part of Christian Reconstruction.
They really believe that that's in the Bible, so therefore that's part of the biblical law they want to see in the world.
Yes, this is part of biblical law.
And I initially underestimated the short time it would take for us to get where we are.
And so in a way, Hegseth's rise to power, which I think a lot of people think of as, well, Trump saw him on Fox News, and that's why Trump picked him, which could be true, but it could also be true that this is a way of softening or normalizing someone with his extreme beliefs to be in a position of power.
There's a shocking number of people around the Trump administration who have or have had scandals about sex abuse and violence against women.
And it seems as though the standard for what is unacceptable has changed drastically, right?
Going from not making sexist jokes in a business, because that's kind of where we were, right?
You know, you don't do that at work, to now, like, you know, sexual assault is, well, you know, she said, he said, who knows?
Maybe she wore something wrong, right?
So we're back to where we were years ago on those kinds of questions.
Well, America has elected the grab and by the pussy guy twice.
Right.
In that CNN segment, they interviewed members of Wilson's church who said that they agreed with the idea that the wife should just vote the way her husband tells her to.
And that's how their church voting is run as well.
So when Hegseth writes all of Christ for all of life, that is, without saying it, I support the implementation of biblical law for all of life.
Yeah.
So Hegseth's pastor at Pilgrim Hill Church in Tennessee is a protégé of Wilson.
His name is Brooks Pottiger.
And this month, Wilson assigned him to Pastor Christ Church in D.C., which is the latest CREC offshoot.
What's Wilson's goal in opening a church on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. in this new Trump era?
To bring all of Christ to the people in D.C. You know, in this administration, there's likely to be a good number of people who already have these views and people who are in institutions where leadership has these views.
And it might be a good career move to participate in institutions that have these views.
So, I mean, they're just hoping to build a church that's going to have this same view of all of Christ for all of life.
So do you think that he's hoping to convert or save ordinary folks in the Washington, D.C. area?
Or is he looking to make this a power center where people in power, people who work at the White House, people who work on Capitol Hill, people who work in federal agencies, will be converted not just to Christianity, but to this particular version of it.
Well, I clearly think it's both, but the reason they pick Washington, D.C. instead of, I don't know, Jacksonville, Florida, is because that's where the power center is, right?
So here's Pottiger delivering a sermon last May at Hegseth's Christian prayer meeting.
This was the first Christian prayer meeting that Hegseth has since made a monthly event in the Pentagon auditorium.
There's a temptation to think that you're actually in control and responsible for final outcomes, especially for those who issue the commands and do the aiming and the shooting.
Now, you do have a great responsibility.
There is no doubt about that.
But you are not ultimately in charge of the world.
The Lord is.
The Lord is.
Our Lord Jesus said in Matthew 10, not a sparrow will fall to the ground apart from my heavenly Father.
And if our Lord is sovereign even over the sparrows' fallings, you can be assured that he is sovereign over everything else that falls in this world, including tomahawk and minuteman missiles, including strategy meetings and war room debriefings.
Jesus has the final say over all of it.
What is Pottiger telling the military in the Pentagon auditorium here?
Well, it almost sounds like the Bhagavad Gita, but he's telling them that he's drawing on this tradition, comes out of Calvinism.
They believe in predestination.
So he's using in this quote, predestination, to help people who might be on the front lines not feel the kind of empathy.
This is, you know, they talk about the sin of empathy.
They're trying to make people willing to do the kinds of warring that they want.
We haven't talked enough about the characteristic of war in this.
Hegseth wants the military to be more lethal.
And, you know, in one sense, that's what they do.
But he's got such an emphasis on it.
He's, you know, pugnacious and combative about the military.
And I think that this is all related to this notion of the god of war.
It's their conception of manliness.
So it's related to all the gender stuff.
It's conquest.
It's colonialism.
So it's related to their desire to control what they're calling the Western hemisphere, which is also related to the shift at public schools to force the teaching of history in terms of what they call Western civilization.
When I say it's a comprehensive worldview, I'm saying these things are all interrelated.
So say more about that.
Say more about how they claim they are engaging in a new kind of educational curriculum to save Western civilization and what that has to do with, say, wanting to take over Venezuela.
All of this, you know, the attacks in Venezuela, the stuff about Greenland, stuff about Canada is all connected to this desire to colonialize, dominate Western civilization.
And they say it in a smaller way.
And then you need to look to what is the logical conclusion of this, like how bad could they do?
Because often they do the worst thing that they could do.
And there's no natural boundaries to the West.
This could include Europe.
This could include, I mean, in the back of their minds, if they had the opportunity for this to be the whole world, they would make it the whole world.
You know, Stephen Wolf in his book, A Defense of Christian Nationalism, talks about the whole world being Christian.
So when he says Christian nationalism, he does not just mean our U.S. nation and its Christianity.
He says that all nations should be Christian nationalists in their own way.
So the goal is to dominate the world.
It's expansive.
They'll say they're going to start with Greenland because it's a tactical necessity.
But yeah, they'll go as far as they can.
So I think that many of us, myself included, think of the saving Western civilization or saving our European heritage that a lot of white nationalists talk about.
They see that as being allied with Europe, not liberal Europe, but the far right in Europe, AFD, the reform UK, other far-right parties in Europe.
And they see that as a joint venture in preserving what they would characterize as Western culture, Western civilization.
It's really white culture.
But you're talking about something different with how Hegset and his allies are talking about this.
It's really more of we're going to take over the world.
It's not that we want to save classical civilization so students can study Plato.
But I feel like they're talking about something a little different here.
I think they are.
What they idealize is Constantine and the Roman Empire.
Okay.
So it goes way back further than Europe.
And you see, okay, so here's where you can see little evidence of this.
If you look at that controversy over Hegseth's tattoos, the Deus Volt is God wills.
Yes.
The Crusades.
Right.
The Jerusalem Cross, the Crusades.
That's the period in history where they think Christian was at its pinnacle.
Constantine sought to govern the whole world, and clearly they were this belligerent, warring kind of place.
The Crusades aren't a tragedy in history for them.
They are idealized.
Including all the violence.
Yeah.
Or especially all the violence.
Well, they want to be lethal.
So when Pottager talks about God having control over everything, including the Minuteman missiles and the Tomahawk missiles, is he trying to say to service members, don't worry that you're dropping bombs on other human beings.
God is actually the one in control and God wants you to be doing this.
I think so.
And so when we...
I mean, I haven't asked him, but yeah.
And so when we think about the reporting that came out late last year about at least one of the boat strikes in the Caribbean, where the Washington Post reported that there were survivors after an initial strike and that Hegseth gave the order to kill everybody.
So he is thinking or believing or wanting to believe that he is carrying out God's will there.
He absolutely believes that what he's doing is God's will.
You brought up the Crusades, so let's talk about Wilson's views on immigrants and particularly Muslim immigrants.
In that same speech that we played the clip from earlier at NATCON, he talked about this.
And let's take a listen.
It is not xenophobic to object to the immigration policies of those who want to turn the Michigan-Ohio border into something that resembles the India-Pakistan border.
That kind of nonsense from our utopian social engineers is actually the root of our current set of practical dilemmas.
While remaining Protestant in her ethos, Protestant America did successfully adapt to the presence of Catholics and Jews, and nothing succeeds like success.
But millions of Muslims without any commitment to or mechanism of assimilation is another matter.
So is this kind of Islamophobia central to how Wilson views the world?
He wrote a book about this.
I don't think it's always framed in terms of Islam, but the idea that you should try to live in a place or make the people around you like you, that that's a natural, ordinary thing.
That trying to live in a place like a city where you have people from all over the world speaking different languages and sharing different kinds of food and different traditions and thinking that's fun, they think this is bad.
He says this weird thing about that there are people who want to turn the Ohio-Michigan border into what the India-Pakistan border is like.
And obviously that there is a Indian-Pakistan border is a product, again, of imperialism.
But he's sort of suggesting that they are inherently violent.
And if you let them come here, they'll turn our country into a place where these border disputes and violence and terrorism is commonplace or intractable.
So just in case people listening aren't aware, one of the parts of your question includes the idea that Michigan has lots and lots of Muslim immigrants.
It's a state where that's a voting presence.
You know, the senators sent from there are not, Trump doesn't like them.
So that's what's behind this issue of the border.
But we also have extraordinarily good social science repeated over time that shows that the Muslims in the U.S. are not different from the white Americans who were already here in terms of education, in terms of political diversity, in terms of wealth.
I mean, on all of demographic characteristics.
So when you take this disdain for Muslims and for immigrants together with Trump's persistent threat to invoke the Insurrection Act and send military troops into cities that are already being subjected to ICE invasions like Minneapolis, where there is a large Muslim Somali immigrant population.
I mean do you worry about how Hegseth views the potential role of the military domestically?
Oh, I worry a lot about this.
Yeah, I don't think he will hesitate to take commands from the president to engage in what he will think of as a holy war.
And that is because, do you think he thinks that Trump is anointed, like a lot of evangelicals think?
Or do you just...
So, you know, there's the Christian nationalism as a movement is really kind of interesting.
You know, there's some Catholics, there's some reformed Protestants, and then there's the Charismatics.
The Charismatics are the ones who talk about anointing.
These folks don't, they're not like, they're not magical in their kind of Christianity.
They're super rationalistic about it.
And I think that they think that leadership is predestined, chosen by God.
So they wouldn't use the anointment language, but they think that it is the case that if the things that they think should happen are happening and they're happening under the leadership of Donald Trump, then Donald Trump must have been chosen by God for that role, regardless of his own personal failings.
Right.
And so if he, as the commander-in-chief, orders Hegseth to send the military to an American city to, in their view, put down a rebellion or an insurrection, which is the argument they clearly plan to make if they do this, if they do this, Hegseth will see this as part of his responsibility to carry out God's will.
Right.
Recognizing Military Obstacles00:04:35
I think he would see it that way.
I think he would also probably recognize the obstacles that they would face.
The obstacles in Minneapolis have really turned that situation around.
I don't know what the military will do in that situation.
I don't think they have all that much respect for Hagseth, and that's certainly contrary to the way that they see their role and the oaths that they take.
So I think he would recognize it as potentially not successful.
But I don't think he would, if he didn't do it, it wouldn't be because he thought it wasn't in God's will.
It would be like, oh, I'll do this later when it would work better.
Right.
Before Hagseth was approved, I wrote a piece.
Initially, it was a very strong statement, although in editorial process it got softened to some degree.
But my concern was that we treat religion in the U.S. as a special category.
Everybody can have their own opinion, and we shouldn't, you know, we shouldn't make decisions based on other people's religion.
And to some level, those are great commitments to pluralism.
But I was trying to advocate that the Senate should inquire about Hagseth's religious views, because when they say all of Christ for all of life, they mean that there is no realm that is not religious.
So, for example, the way that we try to separate church and state by giving exemptions for religious groups.
That doesn't work very well if everything is religious.
Well, Julie, listen, thank you so much for doing this today.
Oh, you're welcome.
It's a pleasure.
It's fun to talk to you.
Last week, the White House shared doctored photographs of Nakima Levy Armstrong, one of the activists who protested at City's Church in St. Paul, Minnesota on Martin Luther King weekend.
The fake photo was intended to make it seem that Armstrong was crying while being taken into custody on spurious charges of conspiring to violate church members' religious freedom rights.
The White House used its official X account to amplify these fake images to an audience that lusts for demeaning content about their political enemies to make them a target of racist ridicule and abuse.
CNN reporter Daniel Dale reached out to the White House for comment about the manipulated photos.
He reported that in response, the White House sent him a tweet from a White House spokesperson that read, enforcement of the law will continue.
The memes will continue.
That phrase, the memes will continue, rattled around in my head for days, for two days before the customs and border protection execution of Alex Pretty, and for the days afterwards, trying to process, like millions of Americans, grief and rage.
This might seem like an odd topic for this week's anti-doom segment, but the White House, like the rest of MAGA, from its influencers to Republican elected officials, have so sequestered themselves in the cesspool that is X, that they have completely lost touch with how real humans act.
They've deluded themselves into thinking that everyone sits glued to Elon Musk's depraved algorithm, waiting for the latest dunk on radical leftists or domestic terrorists, that they think this is how other people live and interact with one another.
The heroic Minnesotans who have braved this frigid winter to observe and protest ICE have exposed these meme monsters for the cowardly goons that they are.
Minnesotans supported their community and protected their neighbors and, traumatically, collected videos of executions that have disproven the regime's lies.
Their tireless work and the regime's excesses are starting to turn the tide of public opinion.
Trump's approval rating continues to decline.
Support for abolishing ICE continues to grow.
Senate Democrats are threatening to block or condition DHS funding.
And even some Republicans are realizing, likely in many cases, not from their hearts, but from a cold, hard look at the polling data headed into the midterms, that continued support for ICE is a political loser.
I'm sure the memes will continue because the Trumpers don't have another strategy, but it's not a winning strategy, especially compared to human beings and the real-world life and death situations they are facing in Trump's America.
Continued Support for ICE Losing Ground00:00:27
Thank you for listening today.
Reign of Error is made possible thanks to generous funding from the Henry Luce Foundation.
Executive produced by Brad O'Nishi for the Institute for Religion, Media, and Civic Engagement and Access Monday Media.
Co-produced by Jer Fitzgerald.
I'm the show creator and host.
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