Pete Hegseth may be the most hated man in Washington. According to a recent polling analysis by CNN’s Harry Enten, the defense secretary’s approval ratings have fallen below even the basement-level numbers of President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance. So when Hegseth took a trip to speak at the Iowa State Fair on Aug. 17 — a move traditionally seen as the soft launch of a presidential campaign — the response among much of the political chattering class was peals of laughter. Surely even Republicans wouldn’t sink so low as to nominate a thrice-married repeat adulterer who claims to be a Christian while engaging in very un-Christlike bullying, and whose only job real experience is being on TV a lot? Oh, wait.
The grim reality is that of the Republican names being floated for a 2028 presidential run, Hegseth is the man most closely aligned with white evangelicals, who still make up the majority of GOP primary voters. Like most of this voting bloc, Hegseth’s political and religious views are thoroughly entwined — an alarming fact, considering his church is extremist even by Christian right terms. His pastor, who has given a sermon at the Pentagon, opposes women’s suffrage and has romanticized slavery as the superior state of race relations.
But instead of hurting Hegseth, these radical views could endear him even more to white evangelical voters, who have a tendency to conflate sincerity and extremism. In a field of dull choices like Vance or Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Hegseth’s over-the-top masculinity act, which reads as clownish to people outside MAGA circles, could be just the thing to push the former Fox News weekend host over the top.
In Iowa, Hegseth drew headlines by using a transphobic slur, all while rolling up his sleeve so his cross tattoo was visible. “At the Department of War,” he told the Des Moines crowd, “we do training, not t***nies.”
The secretary regularly brags about Christian devotion, so it may shock some people outside the evangelical world that a supposed man of faith would be so crass. Then again, he and Trump have ejected up to 1,000 transgender service members from the armed forces, not because of their job performance but because of their gender.
Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a Calvin University historian who writes about white evangelicals and gender, was not surprised. She pointed to Wilson’s reactionary rhetoric and beliefs, the core of which is that “Christians must have the things that God hates.” The pastor, she said, “uses that derogatory term himself, and he has also called women who disagree with his patriarchal theology ‘c***s.’”
“Most evangelicals would not go this far in terms of the language they use, but they would resonate with the idea that tolerating or normalizing sinful behavior is wrong,” she added. “In this way, hatred is deemed ‘biblical,’ and cruelty framed as an act of kindness.”
As Kobes Du Mez has chronicled in books like “Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation,” and her forthcoming “Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made,” the stereotype of Christian men as gentle people trying to follow the model of Christ has been broadly disproven by white evangelicals. The modern Christian right fetishizes an over-the-top masculinity, complete with monster trucks and pyrotechnics at Christian men’s conferences. For outsiders, Hegseth’s attempt at this version of manhood, complete with bad tattoos and workout videos, is cringeworthy. But inside the cloistered environs of the Christian right, it reads as tough.
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Hegseth’s management of the Pentagon reflects his church’s tenets of putting white men in leadership and treats everyone else as rightfully subservient. He has pushed Black and women soldiers out of leadership positions and promotion opportunities, and he has erased the contributions they have made to military history. His latest effort to rewrite the military as a white male organization is especially offensive. The Navy is considering stripping the name of Doris Miller, a Black hero of Pearl Harbor, from an aircraft carrier so it can be renamed after Trump, who avoided the draft by claiming he had bone spurs on his feet.
Unfortunately, such naked bigotry is likely to boost Hegseth with many white evangelicals, who have grown more radical in recent decades, as moderating voices have left the movement to join inclusive churches, or quit organized religion altogether.
Unfortunately, such naked bigotry is likely to boost Hegseth with many white evangelicals, who have grown more radical in recent decades, as moderating voices have left the movement to join inclusive churches, or quit organized religion altogether. The situation has been made worse by online influencers, who are eclipsing everyday pastors as the source of moral authority for many believers. It’s a vicious circle: The economics of the internet reward shock value, such as arguing that witch burnings were justified, empathy is a sin or that the 19th Amendment was a mistake, and white evangelicals are rapidly moving toward the extremist levels of misogyny and racist antipathy that Hegseth embodies and his church teaches.
This is especially true when it comes to Christian nationalism, the belief that America is a “Christian nation” and that people who don’t share that view should be marginalized or even ejected from American society. While this used to be a fringe view, even among white evangelicals, in recent years nearly 70% of white evangelicals have come to embrace Christian nationalism.
Hegseth’s church is openly theocratic, and his tenure as defense secretary has been marked by hostility to non-Christian members of the military. Earlier this summer, Hegseth even tried to erase the military’s faith diversity by reducing the number of religions recognized from 211 to a mere 31, with 21 of those being Christian denominations. His plan was eventually scraped after Mormon protested at being classified as non-Christian, but the message sent was that Hegseth sees non-Christians as less American.
While most voters loathe Hegseth, the GOP faithful love the guy, despite his pivotal role in the administration’s losing war with Iran. A recent Quinnipiac University poll showed that 79% of Republicans approve of his job, compared to a meager 34% of Americans more broadly. Hegseth’s violent — and at times eliminationist — rhetoric toward Iran has only served to alienate most Americans, who are sick of forever wars in the Middle East. But for white evangelicals, who seem to have escalated the dehumanizing hatred of Muslims in recent years, his words ring true.
Trump has not hidden that he’s less than thrilled with the current frontrunners to succeed him as the next GOP nominee. He even left Rubio behind on Air Force One after it was reportedly targeted for bombing by Iran, while Trump was secretly escorted to a safer flight. Hegseth, though, was part of the small crew of people Trump deemed worthy of saving, so it’s no wonder the defense secretary thinks he might have a shot at the Republican nomination, especially with the white evangelical voters who remain Trump’s most loyal supporters. No one should be laughing: Hegseth is a symptom of a GOP that has raced far to the right, and he could well reap the benefits of that shift two years from now.
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