Re-enacting the Crusades

[Celerity]

Pete Hegseth’s Christianity—tribal, with plenty of enemies who deserve the sword—is central to the MAGA worldview.

https://prospect.org/2026/04/13/reenacting-the-crusades-pete-hegseth-maga-trump-evangelical-christianity/


Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth speaks to senior military leaders at Marine Corps Base Quantico, September 30, 2025, in Quantico, Virginia. Credit: Andrew Harnik/Pool via AP

MAGA is nothing if not tribal. It has two deities—Donald Trump and a parochial and xenophobic Christian God—and views everyone outside those faiths as enemies to be dissed, degraded, or destroyed.

Evangelical Christians have long been more tribal than Christian in any theological sense, which for decades has predisposed them to flock to Republicans who not only attacked their political opponents but effectively consigned them to Hell. They remain the largest constituency in the MAGAverse, as no one previously had railed against those they saw as pagans and heretics as vociferously and violently as Trump. Even as the polls show increasing public rejection of Trump and his war in Iran, the MAGA faithful have stuck with him and all his dubious enterprises. An Economist/YouGov poll from March had Trump with an overall approval rating of 35 percent, but among self-described MAGA Republicans, it was still a stratospheric 82 percent. This despite the fact that by ordering his face be placed on coins and on banners draped from government buildings, he has become the first literally idolatrous president in our history. That the MAGA faithful are idol worshippers is daily demonstrable.

This has not required the MAGA faithful to abandon their tribal form of Christianity, of course, and in recent weeks, both the vice president and several cabinet members have conflated state policy with the tribal version of Christianity. Speaking last week in Budapest on behalf of the re-election campaign of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán (which was soundly defeated on Sunday), JD Vance noted that Trump’s America and Orbán’s Hungary were united by their common allegiance to “Christian civilization and Christian values.” He implored listeners to vote for Orbán as the way to “stand for freedom, truth, and the God of our fathers.” That Trump-Orbán bond was sealed by their respective wall-building projects on their borders, and their determination to keep immigrants—non-Christians and Muslims in particular—from coming to their lands.

Trump’s defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, was already a militant evangelical Protestant before Trump plucked him from Fox News to run the Pentagon. He’d enrolled his children in a Classical Christian Education school, where science was subordinated to scripture. He’s held sectarian evangelical services within the Pentagon, and has made repeatedly clear that U.S. armed forces fight not just for America against its enemies but for Christianity against its enemies—secularists, adherents of other faiths (Muslims particularly)—for which reason God (the Christian God, of course; there is no other) is on their side. Vowing “no quarter” would be given to the “barbaric savages” of the Iranian regime, Hegseth called on the American people to pray “every day, on bended knee … in the name of Jesus Christ,” for victory. (Somehow, I doubt war hawk Steven Miller did that.)

Hegseth’s fusion of state policy with tribal Christianity was echoed on Easter when another Trump cabinet member, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, emailed the roughly 100,000 USDA employees, not to wish them a happy Easter, but to share some Christian news: “Today we celebrate the greatest story ever told, the foundation of our faith, and the abiding hope of all mankind,” she began. “From the foot of the Cross on Good Friday to the stone rolled away from the now empty tomb, sin has been destroyed. Jesus has been raised from the dead. And God has granted each of us victory and new life. And where there is life—risen life—there is hope.”

snip

[leftstreet]

1. Trump is the worst CEO in the world

You whip up the fervor of your psycho evangelical base, you don't actually put one of them in management!

This was handled expertly from Reagan to Bush to Bush the 2nd

LOL