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The Department of War vs. the Pope
Christian Nationalism is the logical conclusion of prosperity gospel paganism.
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1. Christian Nationalism
Heads up: We’re gonna get super churchy today. I know that’s not everyone’s thing. That’s okay. But it’s important because I want to try to answer three questions:
Why are Pete Hegseth and—of all people!—Donald Trump invoking God so much lately?
What kind of Christianity—or more specifically, what kind of Christianity-adjacent traditions—are they invoking?
How is the Trump/Hegseth brand of Christianity threatened by Pope Leo’s Catholicism?
Big caveat: I’m going to talk almost exclusively about Catholicism as a stand-in for True Christianity™.¹
Partly this is because of my own papist biases, but mostly it’s because once you get into Protestantism, everything gets more complicated. It can be hard to delineate what a “True Baptist” believes. Just within the largest Baptist denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, membership is seen as a matter of voluntary association and churches are understood as a matter of biblical doctrine to have a fundamental and un-infringe-able autonomy. Even then, the underlying theological consensus within the SBC has dramatically shifted within my lifetime. Many Protestant sects also allow a good deal of theological free-lancing. Another denomination, the Church of England, has a famously large tent that covers everyone from extremely conservative theologians on one end to those who don’t even accept a realist conception of God’s existence on the other.
Whatever its flaws, at least the Roman Catholic Church has a catechism and a magisterium and a pope. It is possible to say “Catholics believe X” pretty definitively in most cases.
With all those caveats in mind, let’s go.
You may have noticed an uptick in overt religiosity from the Trump administration around the Iran war. Here is Trump offering glory to God while threatening to kill people:
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At a press conference on April 6 Trump was asked, “Do you believe God supports the United States’ actions in this war?” His response:
TRUMP: “I do, because God is good. God is good, and God wants to see people taken care of. God doesn’t like what’s happening. I don’t like what’s happening.²
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has done quite of lot of God talk, too. On March 8 he told CBS News, “The providence of our almighty God is there protecting those troops, and we’re committed to this mission.”
At a briefing on March 10 Hegseth offered this . . . statement? invocation? prayer? “May the Lord grant unyielding strength and refuge to our warriors, unbreakable protection to them and our homeland, and total victory over those who seek to harm them.”
And then there was Hegseth’s “God is good” press conference testimonial.
At the same time you may have noticed the Trump administration moving toward increasingly open conflict with the guy who sits at the head of the Catholic Church, Pope Leo XIV.
This is important.
A big part of Trumpism is Christian nationalism. Christian nationalism is not primarily a flavor of Christianity. It is a sub-brand of nationalism.
Christian nationalism cannot abide Catholicism—no matter what the Catholic integralists insist, the two must inevitably fall into conflict. Today I’d like to talk about why that is.
“God is good.”
Hegseth said that phrase over and over while bragging about the successful rescue of an American airman and boasting that the Iranian military was “impotent.”
You will note that Hegseth did not say “God is good” when reporting on the deaths of the first six American soldiers killed in the Iran war.
Why not?...