Pete Hegseth is odd. This isn’t just a personal opinion, though there’s no doubt that he gets widely mocked for his carefully cultivated public persona, which is a mix of megachurch preacher, gym rat and Robert Duvall’s napalm-huffing character in “Apocalypse Now.” The fact that the defense secretary is different is simply a statistical reality.
It’s not just that he’s a white evangelical Christian, a group that, according to PRRI, makes up only 13% of the population. Hegseth’s church, the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, is extreme even for the right, with a leader who argues against women’s suffrage and teaches that slavery was the height of “mutual intimacy and harmony” between the races. Even within MAGA, those remain fringe positions, despite great efforts by some Christian nationalists to reignite “debate” on such long-resolved issues.
All this means it’s hard not to laugh when Hegseth pontificates about his hatred of “weirdos.” Although he has a war to fight in Iran, somehow he finds time to focus his attention on what he clearly sees as the greater battle: remaking the military according to the demands of his very white, very male, very right-wing vision.
“No fatties, no t******s, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals,” Hegseth said during a Sept. 30 speech at the U.S. Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia. He didn’t explicitly say “no women,” but his kicker — “with testosterone testing on top” — made the implication plain. The “no beardos” demand may seem strange, but as Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times explained, it’s coded racism. Hegseth ended medical exemptions that allowed beards for people, mostly Black men, with certain skin conditions. This may explain why he has no problem when white men have beards, as seen on his church leader, Doug Wilson, or the many celebrities the defense secretary likes to take photos with. (Hegseth himself sported a beard in 2018.)
“Wimps,” “radicals” and “weirdos” are more ambiguous pejoratives, but Hegseth’s recent actions suggest his definitions are expansive enough to cover the vast majority of Americans. He’s been on a firing spree, demanding a 20% cut of the Pentagon’s top brass in an apparent effort to expunge those he deems “woke.” The move comes after nearly two years of blocking promotions for and pushing out Black and female military leaders. Hegseth also rewrote the list of religions recognized by the Pentagon, narrowing from over 200 faith categorizations to a mere 31 — 22 of which are Christian. He claims this is to simplify the bureaucracy, but his motives are likely more disturbing: to stigmatize non-Christians and restrict the definition of “Christian.” The Air Force is already forcing service members to register their religious beliefs under the truncated list, drawing criticism from atheists and others whose belief systems are not included as options.
Last week, Hegseth upped the ante by announcing the formation of the Office of Religious Affairs “to strengthen the moral, ethical and spiritual readiness of our warfighters.” Despite boilerplate claims that this action will not “compel religious participation” or “diminish the free exercise rights” of service members, both the policies and pomp surrounding the announcement made it clear that the goal is to promote Hegseth’s version of Christianity — and shame anyone who does not adhere to it. The office will be run by the defense secretary himself and, in ominous language, promises to fund “research, technology, and analytical tools to support and assess spiritual fitness,” which sounds like a data-gathering operation to ensure troops meet Hegseth’s esoteric views on proper religious practice.
“Our department is, you might say, putting on the full armor of God,” Hegseth said in his announcement, using language from the Book of Ephesians that will be sure to resonate with Christian evangelicals.
Taken together, this purge helps clarify what Hegseth means when he’s talking about “weirdos” and “wimps,” as well as other slurs like “t******s.” He’s hostile to women, the LGBTQ+ community, people of color and anyone who doesn’t adhere to his vision of conservative Christianity — although it’s worth noting that with his message of peace and love, Jesus Christ himself would not be accepted by Hegseth as a Christian.
The secretary may have gone to Princeton University, but he hasn’t yet grasped the concept of irony. The people he deems “weirdos” far outnumber those in his narrow category, presumably of non-weirdos, many times over.
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Hegseth has tried to justify his position and rhetoric by arguing that a proper military should only contain “the real 1%” of supposedly superior people. But as Eliot Cohen of The Atlantic notes, this claim is ignorant of history. You need large numbers to win wars, which inherently means that armies can’t be elitist institutions.
Hegseth has a real math problem on his hands. His “real 1%” of alleged non-weirdos is just not enough people to staff a modern military, especially in times of war. His solution appears to be to hit the road, trying to recruit more mini-Hegseths to enlist. On Sept. 19 he embarked on the Send Me Tour in an effort to reach out to people in white evangelical-heavy parts of the country with a Bible-heavy pitch about how Jesus wants them to fight for their country. Both the tour’s name and the secretary’s stump speech rely heavily on Isaiah 6:8; Hegseth equates God’s call to the prophet to be faithful with his own plea for evangelicals to join the military.
In a response video, Sen. Raphael Warnock, the Democrat from Georgia who is also an ordained minister with multiple theology degrees, didn’t mince his words. “Pete Hegseth is busy twisting the scriptures yet again . . . When Isaiah answers that call, it is not a call to go into battle.” Instead, Warnock said, “Isaiah challenges corruption” and “those who would crush the poor.”
Those objectives, of course, are not remotely Hegseth’s. His creation of a hierarchy that places white, straight men at the top and relegates everyone else into an underclass of “weirdos” and “wimps” ignores the Bible’s historical context — and actual meaning. Anyone who doubts that can simply examine his behavior in office and his monomaniacal focus on sorting America’s service members into a worthy-unworthy dichotomy, based solely on how much they adhere to his own self-serving ideals of what a soldier should look like.
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