The Great Gouging?
Pete Hegseth's (un)holy logic of violence
Hello all! This week on Civic Fields, you’ll be hearing from me, Graham O’Gorman. Civic Fields and I share something fundamental: we’re both children of Ned O’Gorman (the professor, not the poet). I’m currently a theologian-in-training at Western Theological Seminary, with a background in political science and sights set on a law degree. This fall, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking and reading about American evangelicalism. Needless to say, several themes from my studies are pertinent to today’s political climate, including Pete Hegseth’s “Department of War.” I hope it’s helpful!
As is now being widely discussed, on September 2, after destroying a boat at sea, the U.S. military fired again and killed two people clinging for their lives to the wreckage. The boat was purported to be carrying drugs, though there has been no independent confirmation of this claim. The second firing upon the boat was in direct violation of both U.S. and international rules of war.
Before disavowing responsibility for the attack and throwing Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley under the bus as the culprit, Pete Hegseth, America’s tough-guy Secretary of Defense, gloated over the violence with an AI-generated meme. In Hegseth’s own words, such merciless military violence is a reflection of the “warrior ethos” the American military desperately needs to get back—“maximum lethality,” in his view, frees the “hands of our war fighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country.”
Alongside ICE raids, which are becoming increasingly violent, and a conspicuous culture of misogyny, the Trump administration seems to be relishing in the violence. Indeed, the military veteran Phil Klay has recently argued that the Trump administration is making America “great again” by returning it to gladiator-style bloodsport. Ross Douthat, a well-known conservative commentator, is dismayed. Citing the boat strikes, Douthat has written recently that in Trump’s supposed “Christian administration,” Christianity is in fact extremely hard to find.
Perhaps.
Hegseth does not seem much interested in following the law, but he is following a logic, a logic of violence that is ingrained in certain sectors of modern American Christianity.
Contemporary American Christianity, particularly certain forms of evangelical Christianity, is more comfortable with violence than Douthat seems willing to admit. As Kristin Kobes Du Mez has argued in Jesus and John Wayne, there is a version of American Christianity that grew out of World War II and found its feet in the Cold War that has nurtured spectacles of heroic violence. And as the religious scholar Matthew D. Taylor observes in a fascinating book, The Violent Take it By Force, the January 6 insurrection was very much a “Christian” event. Indeed, since Trump first took office in 2017, a fringe of right-wing Christianity, quite comfortable with violence, has moved to the center of power. “Today,” as Taylor quotes the Republican strategist Andrew Card, “the rug [of American evangelicalism] seems to have little rug and a lot of fringe.”
As Taylor’s book details, when Trump sought to capture the religious vote in 2016, he was far too polarizing a figure to garner support from the evangelical “old guard.” He turned, instead, to the scraggily threads clinging onto American evangelicalism. Capturing support from Paula White and other New Apostolic Reformation leaders, Trump began to corner an overlooked section of the religious market. As he rose in prominence, so too did these “apostles” and the influence of their radical beliefs about spiritual warfare, territorial expansion, and American exceptionalism. When it came to theology and piety, not all of them looked alike. The New Apostolic Reformation carries with it an apocalyptic feel, whereas the Christian theocrats that have directly influenced Hegseth seem more interested laying down the Law. But no matter what their stripe, they are all comfortable with taking the country “back” by violent force.
In early November this year, after the Charlie Kirk assassination, the cultural critic Sam Adler-Bell wrote a piece in New York Magazine on political violence in America. He noted how quickly the American imagination can clutch onto a familiar, comforting, salvific genre from the world of cinema where “American brutality is transformed into salutary myths of moral cleanliness.” Like Du Mez, Adler-Bell found in this genre a heralded hero: the John Wayne figure. John Wayne figures,
redeem the violence underpinning the social order while allowing us to remain, at once, tut-tutting bystanders to its cruelty and deliciously complicit in its excess. They venerate and authorize the law while preserving a vital place for the exception. They elevate American innocence and barbarity—our chief vices—to foundational virtues.
Hegseth presents himself very much as a John Wayne figure, minus the holster and hat. He and the Trump administration talk as though they are on a mission to restore American innocence through brutal, targeted aggression against “narco terrorists,” immigrants, and—if they had their druthers—“radical leftists.”
There is a distinct logic of violence here, and it is, however uncomfortably, a “Christian” one, or at least a religiously-infused one: real violence is a means of protecting fantasies of purity. “The perennial American delusion,” Alder-Bell summarizes, “is that purgative violence can be used to restore our blamelessness, our purity.”
From this view, Hegseth’s boat strikes look less like gladiatorial entertainment and more like another famous Roman act of state violence: the crucifixion. Historically, of course, the Christian proclamation was that Jesus was wrongly crucified. Many Christians hang a cruciform symbol of violence in their churches or around their necks in remembrance of a great injustice. But it’s not hard to reverse the logic of the crucifixion back into its old Roman form and make state violence means of purging the impure. Jesus was crucified outside the city according to just this sort of logic: the “guilty” are sacrificed for the sake of the purity of the nation.
What to make of this apparent reversal of the Christian dialectic among self-professed Christians? A look back a short twenty years might shed some light.
In 2003, two books took off in evangelical bookstores. That year, I Kissed Dating Goodbye, a book that helped spark the “purity culture” movement in American evangelicalism. It was published just as another evangelical best seller hit the shelves, Wild at Heart. The latter was a defense of regulated male aggression. Around the same time, still shocked from 9/11, parts of evangelical America began rallying behind anthems like Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red White and Blue” to spur on troops fighting in Afghanistan and preparing to invade Iraq. It was all there—purity, violence, and America. Even if it wasn’t a cohesive ideology, these themes were swirling around in the American evangelical imagination, and took root in certain fringe movements like the New Apostolic Reformation and Calvinist theocracy.
But in 2016 and again in 2024, as Taylor argues, the fringe became the carpet of American evangelical Christianity. Hegseth is a fringe figure sitting squarely at the top of the most powerful military force the world has ever known. Violence, for him, as he has made clear in numerous ways and at numerous times, is not a tragic but necessary means of defending the country. It’s a way of purging all that’s wrong with America. And what’s wrong with America? Hegseth has had the gall to say it is not Christian enough. Except this is for him, not galling at all; it’s what the faith teaches.
Hegseth says he follows in the footsteps of the spiritual influencer, Doug Wilson. He attends Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowship, part of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, founded by Wilson. Wilson is a hyper-Calvinist supporter of American theocracy. He believes that America has “made God angry.” He also believes God made some people irredeemable. “Villains are villains and bad people are bad people,” he said in an interview with Douthat.
Hegseth may be, like John Wayne, just playing a role. But he wears a crusader tattoo, and he clearly enjoys talking both about taking back America for “biblical principles” and relishing in unlawful military violence. Whatever he actually believes, the fringe evangelical imagination is there: the time has come to appease God’s wrath with the mighty arm of the U.S. military, cutting out the evildoers looking to defile the nation. If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out.
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