Pete Hegseth and What Christian Nationalism Looks Like
Pseudo-history, guns inscribed Trump’s face, and an “insurgency” in education.
YOU DON’T HAVE TO LOOK FAR to find evidence of Pete Hegseth’s interest in Christian nationalism. Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense has it literally inked all over his body, and the books he has written are replete with violent Christian nationalist rhetoric.
But singling out individuals and pinning the label “Christian nationalist” on them—especially prominent individuals, like Hegseth, who is a former Fox News host, has hundreds of thousands of followers on social media, and has been tapped to serve in the next Trump administration—risks blinding us to an important fact.1 Christian nationalism is much more than a story of scattered individuals with radical beliefs or random weirdos who want to destroy democracy. It is a movement, one backed by think tanks and coffee companies and gun manufacturers, authors and educational projects, churches and media ventures. It is a web of money and ideas connecting the Christian nationalists you’ve heard of with many, many more you haven’t.
Let’s pull apart some of the strands of that web and see what we find.
And let’s start with guns. Hegseth avidly promotes America’s Ammo Company, a small business that sells only through its sister company Palmetto State Armory. Both are owned by the investment firm JJE Capital Holdings. Hegseth has also promoted Caliber Coffee, another of JJE Capital Holdings’s companies. The coffee business’s website features a list of its coffee blends named after specific calibers of bullet (e.g., “9MM,” “44 Mag,” “300 Blackout”), a video ad called “Stand for the Flag,” merchandise asking you to “Stand for the Second Amendment,” and on its “About Us” page this promise: “Our values are simple: Faith | Family | Freedom. Our vision is simple, too: bring the highest quality coffee to your cup while sharing our passion for the 2nd Amendment.”
Hegseth’s favorite JJE business, however, appears to be Right to Bear, which describes itself this way:
Right To Bear . . . is an American self-defense association that is dedicated to the preservation of individual liberty, for all freedom loving people, in the United States, who desire to defend their family with the legal protection necessary, in an era of elites trying to control their lives.
That last bit about using guns to defend families from “elites trying to control their lives” is more than just conspiracy-theory patter; it’s matched by deeds. Right to Bear offers its paying members self-defense training and legal aid for “self-defense incident[s].” You can arrange with Right to Bear for armed guards to come to your church, too—“Houses of Worship Volunteer Security Teams.” And Right to Bear partners with other church-security entities, including at least two other right-wing guns-and-God groups, Christian Warrior Training and the Faith Based Security Network.
What about Right to Bear’s sister company, Palmetto State Armory? Its appeal is as simple as you could ask for:
FREEDOM OVER PROFIT.
Since its inception, Palmetto State Armory has focused on providing the best quality AR-15 parts and accessories for the best price possible. . . .
The idea is simple:
SELL AS MANY GUNS TO AS MANY LAW-ABIDING AMERICANS AS POSSIBLE.
Putting guns into “common use” is an important legal defense established by the Supreme Court that safeguards the rights of the people against tyranny. . . .
OUR MISSION IS TO MAXIMIZE FREEDOM, NOT OUR PROFITS. WE WANT TO SELL AS MANY AR-15 AND AK-47 RIFLES AS WE CAN AND PUT THEM INTO COMMON USE IN AMERICA TODAY. OUR FOCUS ISN’T TO MAKE MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF MONEY BUT TO SPREAD FREEDOM AS FAR AND WIDE AS POSSIBLE. [Capitalization in original.]
The AR-15 and Christian nationalists have a long, troubling history together. The idea of mass gun ownership being a tool of “freedom,” while it might sound to our ears today like rhetoric from the Revolutionary War and the era of the Founders, is in fact of more of a Cold War vintage. And the idea of stockpiling weapons to fight government tyranny has been a pillar of the contemporary militia movement since its post-Vietnam inception.
It will not surprise you to learn that the Palmetto State Armory is a big booster of Donald Trump. The company keeps a video on its website of the day in September 2023 when he visited one of their retail locations. Among the guns and gun parts Palmetto Armory sells are some featuring Trump’s name and likeness. They have a new AR-15 lower receiver with Trump’s face and “Trump-47” on it. They have a gold-barrelled Glock with Trump’s signature and “45: Preserve, Protect, Defend” on one side and the presidential seal and part of the First and Second Amendments on the other. And they have a range of “Trump fight” guns, with Trump, fist in the air immediately after the assassination attempt, and the word “Fight!” on them.
There’s something ironic, or maybe just perverse, in Palmetto State Armory selling guns with the iconic image of Trump raising his fist after he was shot in Butler, Pennsylvania, when you consider that the rifle used in that shooting was made by another of the companies owned by JJE, Palmetto’s parent company.
Palmetto doesn’t sell only Trump-themed stuff, of course—the company offers wares with plenty of other mottos and memes, including Gadsden flags, “Let’s Go Brandon” (remember that anti-Biden slogan?), “We the People,” and “Don’t Tread on Me.
In short, Hegseth has close ties to a gun company that goes out of its way to cater to a right-wing customer base and its related “self-defense association” that emphasizes arming citizens, especially Christians, using rhetoric developed by the militia movement.
IT’S NOT JUST GUNS, THOUGH. Hegseth is also interested in education, and he talks about it quite a lot. It’s the subject of his 2022 bestselling book, Battle for the American Mind. It is the reason for the performative return of his Harvard diploma and his “Miseducation of America” summit a few years ago. Here’s how one writer aptly summarized Hegseth’s comments about education on a recent episode of a Christian nationalist podcast:
Hegseth said that he is working to create a system of “classical Christian schools” to provide the recruits for an underground army that will eventually launch an “educational insurgency” to take over the nation.
“I think we need to be thinking in terms of these classical Christian schools are boot camps for winning back America,” said Sumpter.
“That’s what the crop of these classical Christian schools are gonna do in a generation,” Hegseth agreed. “Policy answers like school choice, while they’re great, that’s phase two stuff later on once the foothold has been taken, once the recruits have graduated boot camp.”
“We call it a tactical retreat,” Hegseth continued. “We draw out in the last part of the book what an educational insurgency would look like, because I was a counterinsurgency instructor in Afghanistan and kind of the phases that Mao [Zedong] wrote about. We’re in middle phase one right now, which is effectively a 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.”
“Obviously, all of this is metaphorical and all that good stuff,” Hegseth claimed, which prompted both hosts and himself to burst out laughing.
Hegseth insists that his “build your army” talk is metaphorical, even as he stresses that his proposed strategy for educational reform is drawn from his real-life counterinsurgency experience. This slipperiness—what should be taken literally, what figuratively?—is downright Trumpian. Are we supposed to understand Hegseth’s love of the Crusades as simply a metaphor—a metaphor all over his book and body and political commentary? What about when Hegseth shows up to a Turning Point USA event to talk with Charlie Kirk about making sure education includes “Biblical truth”—are we to take these ruminations as advice for how education should be reformed?
HEGSETH IS NOT ALONE in being slippery about what is “metaphorical and all that good stuff.” The organizations with which he is associated generally don’t explicitly describe themselves as Christian nationalist, but when you add up their ideas, their rhetoric, and their projects, it’s hard to avoid concluding that they form a constellation deserving that label.
Here’s an example. This past summer, Hegseth posted about his family attending Constitution Camp in Tennessee, “getting schooled on the truth of America’s founders & founding documents.” He put a cute little purple cross next to his words, and tagged three groups associated with the camp: Be the People Project, the American Journey Experience, and the 917 Society. Let’s discuss each of these in turn.
First, Be the People Project says it is “dedicated to changing the direction of America’s culture.” That mission involves “relentlessly” teaching about “conservative values and principles” and “America’s Judeo-Christian heritage,” while criticizing “radical secularism” and pushing for “true racial reconciliation.” The group is led by Carol M. Swain, an academic-turned-conservative activist. Swain was one of the co-chairs of Trump’s right-wing 1776 Commission.2 Her website hosts videos like “Black Lives Matter Is a Marxist Movement”—from Prager University—and events like “Lunch and Learn! How Marxism Affects YOU!” with right-wing conspiracy theorist James Lindsay.
The American Journey Experience claims it is “a state-of-the-art museum and research library” that focuses “on American history from Christopher Columbus to the Space Race.” It would be better described as a vehicle for exposing children to the ideas of its creator: Glenn Beck, the right-wing broadcaster and media entrepreneur, who runs it through his nonprofit group Mercury One. Beck’s partner in this enterprise is the disgraced historian David Barton, infamous for his works of pseudohistory and for his Christian nationalist WallBuilders nonprofit group. The American Journey Experience website, which has Beck’s and Barton’s faces plastered all over it, promises that the students who pay $300 to participate in its four-day summer classes will be taught about “American Exceptionalism,” having a “Biblical Worldview,” and “Christianity’s Influence in America.”
And then there’s the 917 Society, which seeks to promote the celebration of Constitution Day (September 17, hence the group’s name) and to make sure children know about our Constitution—a laudable goal! But what kind of things are the students at the 917 Society’s summer camp—which Hegseth and Swaim presented at—being taught? That “our country was founded on Christian principles”? Fine, but what about the non-Christian, liberal principles that were central to the founding? The 917 Society also partners with the First American Bible Project—mission: to “Put the Bible Back in School”—for “The God and Country Campaign,” which literally puts both Constitutions and copies of the Bible in classrooms together.
The pattern should be pretty clear: These groups each insist in various ways that mainstream ideas about America should be tossed out in favor of a warped understanding of America as defined by its Christianity. They all aim to indoctrinate young people. And they team up as part of an “educational insurgency,” as Hegseth calls it, hoping to take over the country.
FINALLY, IT’S WORTH SAYING a bit about some of what is publicly known about Hegseth’s church activities. In November 2023, he posted a picture of a songbook for Advent that he had just received, commenting:
This Christmas, worship with your family. We plan to, with the help of @theforgepress. We want our kids to remember the ONLY reason for the season: Jesus Christ, our Savior, is born!
Their advent songbook is fantastic. We just got ours. Created by members of our church — @theforgepress is a great new Christian company you won’t regret supporting.
There’s nothing objectionable about an Advent songbook—but there is about the songbook’s printer, the Forge, a Christian nationalist publisher with the tagline “Build. Defend. Expand.” It is a project of Brooks Potteiger and Joshua Haymes, the pastor and pastoral intern at Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowship in Ridgetop, Tennessee.
Potteiger’s X feed reads about how you’d expect a Christian nationalist’s feed to read. In addition to being an excellent woodworker, and, of course, Pete Hegseth’s pastor, he’s a fairly typical pastor in the tradition of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, a denominational umbrella co-founded by Doug Wilson, who over the course of three decades built a “far-flung, far-right religious empire that included a college, an array of lower schools, an entire denomination of churches, and more” from his base in Moscow, Idaho. Wilson is also: the co-author of Southern Slavery: As it Was, an apologia for the chattel bondage of the antebellum South; a founder of Canon Press, which published The Case for Christian Nationalism; and a major figure within the “classical Christian education” movement. (Potteiger has visited Wilson’s church, as recently as this past August.)
The Forge makes its partisan sympathies clear. It sells a red “Make America Christian Again” baseball cap. One of their podcasts is titled “Reformation Red Pill,” an allusion to the image used by “alt-right groups as a metaphor for freeing oneself from so-called liberal viewpoints” and by the “manosphere” to refer “to embracing the idea that men’s unhappiness and lack of sexual success is the fault of women and feminists.” Episode 46 of the podcast bore the title, “4 Reasons EVERY Christian Should Vote AGAINST Kamala Harris.” Guests on the podcast have included George Grant—who proclaimed way back in 1987 that, “It is dominion we are after. Not just a voice . . . not just influence . . . not just equal time. It is dominion we are after”—as well as Doug Wilson and, yes, Pete Hegseth.
PETE HEGSETH’S INTERACTIONS WITH—including any financial relationships he might have had with—the Palmetto State Armory, the Forge, the American Journey Experience, and other Christian-nationalist organizations deserve more investigation. This is just a sample of the associations he advertises on social media, and certainly not what he promotes from his much larger platforms like Fox & Friends and book tours.
There is growing evidence that a disturbingly large number of our fellow citizens have Christian nationalist inclinations. The nomination to a position of immense government authority of Pete Hegseth—someone with deep links to this radical movement—must be an occasion for much more reporting and public debate about Christian nationalism, its tangled networks of churches and businesses and media, and the threat it poses.
Correction (December 2, 2024, 10:15 a.m. EST): As originally published, this sentence referred to Hegseth as a “Fox News host”; the word “former” has been inserted for clarification, as Hegseth left his hosting gig last month.
Trump created the 1776 Commission in September 2020 in an unusual event at the National Archives, and the commission released its final report making a case for a distinctly right-wing approach to teaching history less than 48 hours before Trump left office.
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