PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: THE GLOBE AND MAIL. Stained Glass, Riga CATHEDRAL: Getty Images. Pete Hegseth: AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES.
Adnan R. Khan is a freelance journalist based in the Netherlands and Turkey.
Back in 2020, I found myself in a high-school gymnasium in the Idaho city of Moscow, where a man named Doug Wilson preached every Sunday. The Logos School, built in 1981, had become ground zero for a burgeoning network of K-12 institutions, the Association of Classical Christian Schools (ACCS), that Mr. Wilson had helped establish in 1993. By the time I arrived, ACCS schools numbered in the hundreds, scattered around the U.S. and making inroads into Canada. Their mission: spread the gospel that underpinned Mr. Wilson’s Reformed Evangelical movement.
Logos and its affiliated schools teach what Mr. Wilson has dubbed “Classical Christian Education,” a curriculum that, according to its proponents, places God at the centre of all teaching and promotes a Western-centric world view based entirely on Greek and Roman sources. Its students imbibe fundamentalist readings of the Bible, which Mr. Wilson’s followers believe is the infallible word of God, an approach to scripture called inerrancy.
The ethos at Logos reflected that civilizational and religious chauvinism. When I arrived at the school on that warm Sunday morning during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic to interview Mr. Wilson, no one was masked; when I asked someone why, the person explained that not a single case of COVID had appeared among the congregants. “Our prayers protect us here,” he said, smiling in a way that intimated his firm belief in being one of the chosen.
Analysis: Invoking God, even in the middle of a war, is a tradition in American politics
The mass that followed was surreal. The bleachers filled up quickly. In one corner, a young man in his late teens fervently genuflected, his lips moving in rapid bursts as he silently recited prayers. Banners hanging from trusses depicted fully armoured Knights Templar from the Crusades. The gymnasium overflowed with children, along with pregnant young women – some of whom looked young enough to still be enrolled at Logos.
When the service was about to begin, I was directed to take a seat in the bleachers. A few minutes later, a man with a military-style crew cut and a handgun strapped to his waist sat behind me, eyeing me suspiciously. (Mr. Wilson would later tell me the man was placed there for protection, because his church had received death threats.)
The sermon that followed was a thematic extension of the mood in the gymnasium. Mr. Wilson talked about the struggle between good and evil, and how Christianity, as he interpreted it, was the only valid moral framework by which to govern the world. He quoted the fifth verse of 1 Thessalonians, which calls on believers – the “children of light” – to don “the breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet the hope of salvation” in preparation for the end of days. That’s when all others – the people of “darkness” – would perish.
With the banners of Crusader knights hanging over him, Mr. Wilson’s apocalyptic message took on a distinctly martial flavour. It was clear to me that the members of his flock were not merely believers preparing for the return of Jesus; they were soldiers, and their struggle was a holy war.
Last February, Mr. Wilson found himself standing inside the heart of American military power, on a podium at the Pentagon, delivering a sermon at the invitation of the U.S. Secretary of Defence, Pete Hegseth. His message had barely changed from when I heard him speak in Moscow. There was talk again of breastplates and helmets, and American righteousness in the face of evil. In an apparent nod to Mr. Hegseth’s past life as a counter-insurgency trainer, Mr. Wilson told the crowd of military officers and Pentagon staff that “all the devil’s R&D teams have not come up with armor-piercing anything.”
When Mr. Hegseth, who styles himself as the Secretary of War, joined Mr. Wilson onstage, he recounted a story about co-writing a book on Classical Christian Education. The book, which claims that Marxist and secular progressive ideologies have infiltrated America’s education system and calls for a return to Christian principles based on the ACCS curriculum, was published in June, 2022; that same month, Mr. Hegseth purchased a house in Tennessee, enrolled his children at a school in the ACCS network, and began attending a Reformist Evangelical church, part of Mr. Wilson’s congregation.
At this monthly Pentagon prayer meeting, standing next to Mr. Wilson, Mr. Hegseth made an admission: “We are all fallen,” he said, his left hand resting on Mr. Wilson’s shoulder. “We are all sinful, we are all in need of the grace of God, and all in need of redemption. I certainly stand chief among them.”
For those who knew Mr. Hegseth’s history, it was a surprisingly candid admission of the sybaritic life he’d led until his stark religious awakening some time in 2018. The litany of Mr. Hegseth’s transgressions was long and sordid. His own mother, in a 2018 e-mail, had called him an “abuser of women”; in 2017, he was accused by a woman of raping her while she was drunk; in 2016 he was forced to quit his job as CEO at a Republican-funded non-profit after a whistle-blower accused him alcoholism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia and financial mismanagement. But by 2021, he was a soldier of God whose upper body was covered in tattoos depicting Crusader iconography, including the Jerusalem Cross and the Latin words “Deus Vult” – God wills it – the rallying cry used by Christian Knights during the First Crusades.
Mr. Hegseth’s religious transformation and its connections to Mr. Wilson’s Reformed Evangelical movement raise some unsettling questions for people well beyond that flock. At another Pentagon prayer meeting on March 25, nearly a month into the war in Iran, Mr. Hegseth seemed to revel in the idea of righteous violence. “Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation,” he said. “Give them wisdom in every decision, endurance for the trial ahead, unbreakable unity, and overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.” The prayer was so extreme that Pope Leo XIV appeared to respond a few days later, telling a crowd at a Palm Sunday mass in St. Peter’s Square that “God does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.”
For Mr. Hegseth, though, waging war in the name of Christianity is a duty. In a 2024 interview on the conservative CrossPolitics podcast, he tied his decision to send his children to an ACCS school to a counter-insurgency strategy of “tactical retreat where you regroup, consolidate and reorganize. And as you do so, you build your army underground with the opportunity later on of taking offensive operations in an overt way.”
At the end of his tirade, Mr. Hegseth quipped that “obviously … all of this is metaphorical.” Everyone laughed.
The bombing campaign in Iran, however, is no metaphor, nor are the reports that Mr. Hegseth was one of its chief proponents as he continues to advocate for more conflict. Under this “Secretary of War,” the Pentagon is publicly fashioning itself into a Crusading institution, housing leaders convinced that America’s military might is destined to dominate the world. That has given cover to others: Last month, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation said it has received hundreds of complaints from U.S. service members about commanding officers using extremist Christian language to discuss the war.
Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth told Latin American defence leaders gathered for a meeting of the Americas Counter Cartel Conference in Doral, Fla., on Thursday that their countries face a test of whether they will remain Western and Christian or be torn apart by "uncontrolled mass migration" and other perceived threats.
Reuters
In many ways, Mr. Hegseth and Mr. Wilson are a perfect fit. Mr. Hegseth rails against “woke ideology” and how it has feminized the military; Reformed Evangelical church doctrine carves out a narrow, submissive role for women – no voting, no work and certainly no military service. According to Mr. Wilson, sex itself is an act of male domination: “A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants,” he wrote in 1999, and “a woman receives, surrenders, accepts” – a view he has defended as the kind of muscular Christianity that Jesus intended.
Mr. Hegseth, it seems, has found his truest voice inside Mr. Wilson’s unapologetically martial and masculine movement. Striving for a more chauvinist America has apparently become the holiest of callings for him, with very real consequences for the U.S. war in Iran. If this is holy war – if, as his tattoo says, “God wills it” – then why would the rules of war matter? If you are fighting on the side of God, you “fight to win,” and the rules of engagement are, as Mr. Hegseth put it, “stupid.”
It’s not clear if Crusader logic will continue to guide the Trump administration’s Iran policy, or even how long Mr. Hegseth’s holy war goes on after this week’s announcement of a ceasefire. But the radical Christian ideology that underpins it isn’t going away. Mr. Wilson’s movement has only grown since I visited his Idaho church in 2020. Sermons have shifted from the high school to a new complex on the outskirts of town. Its private university, New Saint Andrews College, is divided into three halls named after battles where “Christian soldiers fought against all odds,” and it continues to churn out new, ideologically charged leaders. Its network of schools now spans the globe, moulding a new generation of holy warriors.
Mr. Hegseth may be the first senior cabinet member to unsheathe the Sword of Christianity in pursuit of American foreign-policy goals. He may not be the last.