Adulterous alcoholic wife beater keeps getting forgiven, because Jesus
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Should women be allowed to vote? Views differ among top US government officials in the year 2025:
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has reposted and praised a video interview of a self-described Christian nationalist pastor whose church doesn’t believe women should be allowed to vote.
Doug Wilson, senior pastor of Christ Church in Idaho, said during the interview with CNN that, “Women are the kind of people that people come out of.”
“The wife and mother, who is the chief executive of the home, is entrusted with three or four or five eternal souls,” he continued.
In the CNN interview, Wilson also defended previous comments where he had said there was mutual affection between slaves and their masters. He also said that sodomy should be recriminalized. The Supreme Court invalidated sodomy laws in 2003.
In his repost of the interview on the platform X, Hegseth added, “All of Christ for All of Life.”
Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell told NPR in an emailed statement on Saturday that Hegseth is a “proud member of a church affiliated with the Congregation of Reformed Evangelical Churches,” which was founded by Wilson.
“The Secretary very much appreciates many of Mr. Wilson’s writings and teachings,” Parnell also wrote.
In the CNN video, a congregant in Wilson’s church explained that her husband “is the head of our household and I do submit to him.” A fellow pastor also said that families should vote as a household, with the husband and father casting the vote.
Andrew Whitehead, a sociology professor at Indiana University Indianapolis and an expert on Christian nationalism, told NPR the goal for Wilson and his followers is to spread these ideas across the country – and ultimately make them enforceable.
”It’s not just they have these personal Christian beliefs about the role of women in the family. It’s that they want to enforce those for everybody,” Whitehead said.
A particularly idiotic liberal trope is that it’s OK to be a hyper-reactionary Christian nationalist as long as those are just your “private views,” and you don’t try to enforce them on everybody. That makes exactly as much sense as saying it’s OK to be a fascist, as long as you don’t try to enforce your fascism on everybody. The reason this response to poisonous ideologies is an oxymoron is because the WHOLE POINT of these ideologies is to enforce them on everyone. If this were a purely private matter, like Pete Hegseth’s collection of Nazi fetish videos, then we wouldn’t be using the phrase Christian NATIONALISM to describe his views, which for those in the back contains “nationalism” as one of its two words.
In fact the whole discourse of liberal tolerance is becoming increasingly incoherent, in a world full of religious lunatics like Pete Hegseth, who are quite explicit about wanting to nationalize their garbage version of Christianity.
I liked it better when the paradox of tolerance was a subject for political philosophy seminars, as opposed to national referenda in which only the husbands of Bible-believing households get to vote, because that’s what it says in the Bible, supposedly, although I don’t remember a whole lot about voting procedures in there.
And this is really a subject for another post, but I’m struck by the extent to which this version of evangelical Christianity attracts men like Hegseth, because clearly to them it’s a kind of ultimate theological get out of jail free card that works something like this:
(1) Man is Totally Depraved, because of Original Sin. By contrast, God is so unimaginably perfect that the difference between taking a questionable tax deduction and murdering your wife in a drunken rage is ultimately trivial. That’s what al the “we are sinners in the hands of an angry God” rhetoric adds up to.
(2) Therefore, the whole notion of salvation through works, aka making at least some sort of modest effort not to be an adulterous wife beating drunk covered with Nazi tattoos, is just nonsense. Salvation is available only through this exclusive limited time offer to Accept Jesus in Your Heart.
(3) But the great thing is that if you AJIYH you are saved, no matter what. It’s a fool proof 100% guaranteed investment scheme, as if Charles Ponzi and Jesus Christ were the same person somehow, which I think they are in a JL Borges story IIRC though I probably don’t.
In a country founded by zealots and grifters, it only makes sense that these two great historical rivers of American identity should ultimately mix into a mighty Mississippi of theological, political, and economic garbage, flowing from sea to shining sea.
Related: Apocalyptic Calvinism on Meth.