I had earlier point out that the progressives weren’t giving up without a fight. Their hard-fought victory over the military establishment and the consequent loss of it, even if partial, cuts deeply. They have so weakened the edifice that it is crumbling. The department cannot meet recruitment goals, needs warfighters for the national defense and cannot find them, wastes increasingly precious dollars on failed programs, and celebrates transgenders and LGBTQ. This crumbling of the edifice meets with their approval.

But despite the chaos, Pete Hegseth has been confirmed as SecDef. You might be tempted to believe that this commentary is too late. Nay, it’s just in time. You need to pause and reflect on what you’ve just witnessed and why it happened.

There is more to their opposition to Pete Hegseth than meets the eye. In the last three days I have stumbled across no fewer than three professional level legacy media hit jobs on Pete Hegseth’s religious views. The uninitiated may not quickly connect the dots to understand the larger sweep of their opposition to Hegseth, but readers at TCJ aren’t uninitiated. You turn here for insightful, honest and penetrating analysis – and that’s what you’ll get. But you must be patient and study this analysis in order to determine the root causes and reasons for their coordinated campaign against Hegseth and his views.

Let’s begin with a related commentary at The Guardian.

In a series of newly unearthed podcasts, Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s pick for defense secretary, appears to endorse the theocratic and authoritarian doctrine of “sphere sovereignty”, a worldview derived from the extremist beliefs of Christian reconstructionism (CR) and espoused by churches aligned with far-right Idaho pastor Douglas Wilson.

In the recordings, Hegseth rails against “cultural Marxism”, feminism, “critical race theory”, and even democracy itself, which he says “our founders blatantly rejected as being completely dangerous”.

For much of the over five hours of recordings, which were published over February and March 2024, Hegseth also castigates public schools, which he characterizes as implementing an “egalitarian, dystopian LGBT nightmare”, and which the podcast host Joshua Haymes describes as “one of Satan’s greatest tools for excising Christ from not just our classrooms but our country”.

Elsewhere in the recordings, Hegseth expresses agreement with the principle of sphere sovereignty, which, in CR doctrine, envisions a subordination of “civil government” to Old Testament law, capital punishment for infringements of that law such as homosexuality, and rigidly patriarchal families and churches.

Julie Ingersoll, a professor and director of religious studies at the University of North Florida who has written extensively about Christian reconstructionism and Christian nationalism, told the Guardian: “When these guys say they believe in the separation of church and state, they’re being duplicitous. They do believe in separate spheres for church and state, but also in a theocratic authority that sits above both.”

[ … ]

In the first of the recorded episodes, Hegseth tells Haymes, the host, that writing the book with Goodwin led him to move his family to Tennessee so he could enroll them in a classical Christian school.

“The whole writing process was a red pill,” Hegseth says at one point, adding: “We moved to Tennessee to move to a classical Christian school because of this book. Because when I started writing it, we didn’t have all our kids in that form of education.”

Later, he adds: “We landed on one in middle Tennessee and we moved to it. We thought we were moving to a school, but we moved to a church and a community and a whole view of the world that has changed the way we think, too.”

[ … ]

In the home, Haymes says, “the father has actual authority over his wife and children. And then the wife has authority over the children too, but ultimately it’s a patriarchal vision.”

“And then the state,” Haymes says, “… the tool that God has given the state is the sword.” The state’s role is “to praise the good and to protect the righteous from the wicked, but through primarily punishment, capital punishment and [other] punishments”.

“The state’s role is not to do good,” he says. “It’s not their responsibility to educate your children. It is the family’s responsibility. Helped along with the church.”

On this vision, all three spheres are bound to operate within the confines of biblical law where the Bible is understood as a unity, and in which Old Testament law – including proscriptions on homosexuality and adultery – is mostly still binding.

Ingersoll said that “when these guys talk about a biblical perspective, it’s all rooted in this idea”. She added: “The Bible applies to all areas of life, and the Bible from Genesis to Revelation is still relevant for today and for all culture.”

Ingersoll added: “The way they put that into practice is through this mechanism of sphere sovereignty.”

Sphere sovereignty isn’t a mechanism, but before we get too far ahead in this analysis, we need to cover one other commentary. Let’s turn to Julie Ingersoll herself.

The followers of the movement seek to make America a Christian nation, by which they mean a nation built on biblical law, including its prohibitions and punishments.

Christian Reconstructionists want to dismantle public education and replace modern ideas about family with a patriarchal family model because they claim that biblical law requires both. They believe that Old Testament biblical law applies to today’s society and to everyone, whether or not they are Christian. For them, all of life is religious; there is no separation between religion and politics.

Though only a handful of people are formally tied to Christian Reconstructionism, its influence has been broader.

As a scholar of religion, I have studied Christian conservative movements, especially Christian Reconstructionism, for over 30 years, with six of those years explicitly devoted to the research on Christian Reconstruction. In my book “Building God’s Kingdom: Inside the World of Christian Reconstruction,” I trace the rise of this obscure theocratic version of Christianity.

The movement’s origins go back to the late 1950s and the work of thinker, writer and theologian R.J. Rushdoony. His goal was to “reconstruct” all of society to fit how he understood the Bible. And as I explain in my book, one of his most important strategies for doing that was to eliminate public education and replace it with Christian education.

By establishing the Christian school and Christian home school movements, Christian Reconstructionists brought their version of a biblical worldview to generations of Christians who attended those schools, many of whom had no ties to Christian Reconstructionism itself. The schools taught, and still teach, a curriculum entirely infused with a Christian Reconstruction worldview based on a specific reading of the Bible. History classes become Christian history classes, science classes become the study of creationism, and the study of economics becomes Christian economics.

In the 1970s a Moscow, Idaho, Christian school founder named Doug Wilson, deeply shaped by Christian Reconstruction, expanded his school efforts to include a church, a college, a publishing house and a seminary.

Historian Crawford Gribben also connects Wilson to the earlier Christian Reconstructionist movement. Wilson has said he’s not a Christian Reconstructionist. Nonetheless, he shares their goals and strategies for remaking society according to the Bible.

There are other articles I could link for your reading, but this will do for now. You get the main points if you’ve read this far.

While I haven’t read Julie’s book, I highly doubt that she is a “scholar of religion.” In my view, she would have to perform a detailed exegetical analysis of the Greek and logical analysis in Greg Bahnsen’s book Theonomy in Christian Ethics, as well as perhaps conduct a full assessment of his PhD thesis at the University of Southern California, entitled “A Conditional Resolution of the Apparent Paradox of Self Deception.” Fully understanding these references would at least add to her bona fides.

Furthermore, she leaves out an awful lot in her jump from R. J. Rushdoony to Doug Wilson, from Gary North to Gary DeMar to David Chilton and Kenneth Gentry. To listen to Julie, the Christian Reconstruction movement jumped from Rushdoony to Doug Wilson. This just isn’t the case, and no attempts to dumb it down works with people who understand.

It might have been a worthwhile study for Julie to have grappled with the real roots of this theological tradition, all the way back to John Calvin. But that would have required her to spend several years studying at the Henry Meeter Center for Calvin Studies. A worthwhile study might also have been to trace this lineage from Calvin to Dutch theology in Bavinck, or Scottish Calvinism to American Presbyterianism in Dabney, Shedd, Warfield and Hodge.

But even the Roman Catholics recognize Calvin as the prince of protestant theologians. His views on the sovereignty of God over all of His creation are the basis for everything she’s talking about. It has a rich history and tradition in continental Calvinism and American Presbyterianism. You get none of that from her.

Instead, you heard “When these guys say they believe in the separation of church and state, they’re being duplicitous.” No, they’re not. They believe in the separation of church and state as much as I do. The state cannot and must not administer the sacraments, and the church cannot and must not administer the sword. What for Julie is a separation of church and state becomes a separation of God and state, a view the American founders didn’t hold, and certainly Calvin didn’t hold.

In order to break from the negative comments about Julie and her ilk, let’s try to understand what she’s saying rather than what she didn’t say. Someone told me he believes they hate Pete because he isn’t a “bitch.” “Fundamentally, The Longhouse wants submission.” Here it’s important to understand what this remark means and why it’s important. The Longhouse is something that you need to understand.

In certain corners of the online right you encounter a term that is at first glance puzzling, “The Longhouse.” Maybe you have heard this term. Maybe you have wondered what it means. Maybe this term means nothing to you. Even for those of us who use it, the Longhouse evades easy summary. Ambivalent to its core, the term is at once politically earnest and the punchline to an elaborate in-joke; its definition must remain elastic, lest it lose its power to lampoon the vast constellation of social forces it reviles. It refers at once to our increasingly degraded mode of technocratic governance; but also to wokeness, to the “progressive,” “liberal,” and “secular” values that pervade all major institutions. More fundamentally, the Longhouse is a metonym for the disequilibrium afflicting the contemporary social imaginary.

The historical longhouse was a large communal hall, serving as the social focal point for many cultures and peoples throughout the world that were typically more sedentary and agrarian. In online discourse, this historical function gets generalized to contemporary patterns of social organization, in particular the exchange of privacy—and its attendant autonomy—for the modest comforts and security of collective living.

The most important feature of the Longhouse, and why it makes such a resonant (and controversial) symbol of our current circumstances, is the ubiquitous rule of the Den Mother. More than anything, the Longhouse refers to the remarkable overcorrection of the last two generations toward social norms centering feminine needs and feminine methods for controlling, directing, and modeling behavior. Many from left, right, and center have made note of this shift. In 2010, Hanna Rosin announced “The End of Men.” Hillary Clinton made it a slogan of her 2016 campaign: “The future is female.” She was correct.

As of 2022, women held 52 percent of professional-managerial roles in the U.S. Women earn more than 57 percent of bachelor degrees, 61 percent of master’s degrees, and 54 percent of doctoral degrees. And because they are overrepresented in professions, such as human resource management (73 percent) and compliance officers (57 percent), that determine workplace behavioral norms, they have an outsized influence on professional culture, which itself has an outsized influence on American culture more generally.

Richard Hanania has shown how the ascendance of the Civil Rights legal regime, and its transformation into the HR bureaucracy that manages nearly all of our public and private institutions, enforces the distinctly feminine values of its overwhelmingly female workforce. Thomas Edsall makes a similar case in the New York Times, emphasizing how female approaches to conflict and competition have become normative among the professional class. Edsall quotes evolutionary biologist Joyce Benenson’s summary of those approaches:

From early childhood onwards, girls compete using strategies that minimize the risk of retaliation and reduce the strength of other girls. Girls’ competitive strategies include avoiding direct interference with another girl’s goals, disguising competition, competing overtly only from a position of high status in the community, enforcing equality within the female community and socially excluding other girls.

Jonathan Haidt explains that privileging female strategies does not eliminate conflict. Rather it yields “a different kind of conflict. There is a greater emphasis on what someone said which hurt someone else, even if unintentionally. There is a greater tendency to respond to an offense by mobilizing social resources to ostracize the alleged offender.”

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the realm of free speech and the tenor of our public discourse where consensus and the prohibition on “offense” and “harm” take precedence over truth. To claim that a biological man is a man, even in the context of a joke, cannot be tolerated. Instead, our speech norms demand “affirmation.” We are expected to indulge with theatrical zealotry the preferences, however bizarre, of the never-ending scroll of victim groups whose pathologies are above criticism. (Note well, however, that the “marginalized” aren’t necessarily at home in the Longhouse, as evidenced whenever non-white leftist women decry the manipulative power of “white women’s tears.”) Further, these speech norms are enforced through punitive measures typical of female-dominated groups––social isolation, reputational harm, indirect and hidden force. To be “canceled” is to feel the whip of the Longhouse masters.

The emphasis on “feelings” is rooted in a deeper ideology of Safetyism. Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, in their 2018 book The Coddling of the American Mind, define Safetyism as “a culture or belief system in which safety has become a sacred value, which means that people are unwilling to make trade-offs demanded by other practical and moral concerns.”

While Haidt and Lukianoff focus their analysis on proto-woke novelties like “trigger warnings” and “microaggressions,” the cult of Safetyism is best exemplified in our response to the pandemic. Think of the litany of violations of our basic rights to personal freedom and choice over the last two years that were justified on the basis of harm reduction. The economy, our dying loved ones, our faith practices, our children’s education, all of it served up on the altar of Safetyism. Think of the Covid Karen: Triple-masked. Quad-boosted. Self-confined for months on end. Hyperventilating in panic as she ventures to the grocery store for the first time in a year. Then scolding the rest of us for wanting to send our kids back to school, and demanding instead that we all abide by her hypochondria, on pain of punishment by the bureaucratic state. This person—who is as often male as female—is the avatar of the Longhouse.

With Hegseth’s theological views, he runs afoul of The Longhouse, the den of mothers who try to control all speech and every viewpoint, even if those who profess agreement with the den mothers or honor their speech codes are fake. Proper fealty must be rendered to the den mothers. True belief can come later. I have often remarked that the American youth no longer have a vocabulary in which the Gospel makes any sense. They have no corollary belief matrix for propitiation of sins, vicarious atonement, infallibility, or any of the core Christian doctrines. Use of these words is very nearly meaningless to them. They have lost a language of theology. It has been replaced with the language of The Longhouse.

But this makes for very strange bedfellows between the den mother senators and folks like Mitch McConnell who also vociferously opposed Hegseth’s nomination. Never let it be said that The Longhouse cares very much about logical consistency or ideological purity. McConnell opposed Hegseth’s nomination because he is a war monger and wants to empower and enrich the military industrial complex.

“The United States faces coordinated aggression from adversaries bent on shattering the order underpinning American security and prosperity. In public comments and testimony before the Armed Services Committee, Mr. Hegseth did not reckon with this reality.

“President Trump has rightly called on NATO allies to spend more on our collective defense. But the nominee who would have been responsible for leading that effort wouldn’t even commit to growing America’s defense investment beyond the low bar set by the Biden Administration’s budget requests.

“In his testimony before the Committee, Mr. Hegseth provided no substantial observations on how to defend Taiwan or the Philippines against a Chinese attack, or even whether he believes the United States should do so. He failed, for that matter, to articulate in any detail a strategic vision for dealing with the gravest long-term threat emanating from the PRC.

Mitch’s view of the world isn’t The Longhouse view of the world. Men perish in war. Men come home without limbs, eyesight, and without proper brain function. Men get stabbed with knives in warfare. Men get shot in warfare. The relative safety and peace of The Longhouse is a world away from the horror of warfare.

Just like the poor women who get the hell beaten out of them by transgender men competing in women’s sports, women get harmed by men who are much larger and stronger than they are. This is what The Longhouse bequeathed to its adherents, i.e., the belief that there is no fundamental difference between themselves and men. So women in sports have to become injured, sit out the competition, or be relegated to losers when men wish to compete against them. The price for peace at the fires of The Longhouse is high indeed. Higher still when women begin to come home in body bags or raped as prisoners of war.

There is a difference. Women still cannot graduate from the Marine Corps Infantry Officer school in Quantico without pelvic fractures and lower extremity injuries. The female anatomy isn’t designed to carry 125 pounds of kit between full body armor (including SAPI plates), weapons, ammunition, provisions and hydration. The bone structure is different, and women lack the necessary testosterone for strength and healing.

The Russians found this too when they sent women into combat in their misadventure into Afghanistan. Women suffered from an extremely high incidence of lower extremity injuries, as well as pulled men out of the right who chose to care for them rather than obey orders. Ankles and knees ceased to function for many women carrying the necessary weigh for combat. Since then, the combat load has only increased. Females have graduated from Ranger school, but almost always upon retry and entry into the program at their drop-out point, something never allowed to men in the program.

Turning back to McConnel, his objections are rich indeed. No one heard from him when the previous administration gave away the most strategically important air base on earth, Bagram Air Base. Nor have we heard from McConnell on the billions of dollars worth of weapons left behind in Afghanistan from the ill-fated and poorly executed withdrawal. What we hear is that Mitch wants to spend even more money.

The questions for Hegseth might have focused on how the U.S. is going to solve its problems with the F-35 without bankrupting the country (for some two trillion dollars worth of programmatic fixes). Let’s rehearse that again for effect. The cost for fixing the problems with the F-35 won’t cost two million dollars, or two hundred million dollars, or two billion or two hundred billion dollars. No, the cost for a final fix for the F-35 will cost two trillion dollars. Instead, Hegseth endured the preachy harridans demanding to know why he had not submitted to the language of the Long House. Hegseth has been set up to fail on virtually every front, but genuflecting to the proper word usage is apparently more important than substance.

The two examples above from Julie Ingersoll are part of an ensemble of critical commentaries you’ll find with the proper search. There are dozens of such articles to have hit the media over the last week or so. Ingersoll likely doesn’t really care about women in combat. Nor does she likely care much about polices enforced in the DoD under a Trump administration with Hegseth at the helm. What Ingersoll cares about is that Hegseth hasn’t bent the knee to the den mothers. It’s his belief system, his world and life view, that so offends their sensibilities that Ingersoll must seek out attention for her views and the senators must screech and wail.

How I feel when people tell me who I’m allowed to talk to on the internet.

pic.twitter.com/xlFza3QTXK

— Cernovich (@Cernovich) January 14, 2025

Ms. Ingersoll isn’t really a Calvin scholar, nor does she wish to be. She has a “bee in her bonnet” to deny the claims of the prince of theologians and the sovereign God he worships today. McConnell doesn’t really care about women in body bags or even the issue of women in combat. He has a bee in his bonnet to spread dollars to the military industrial complex. For the time being, the Longhouse is buddies with Mitch. Tomorrow, maybe not so much. Each new day sees yet another demand for expression of fealty to the den mothers.

I suspect that the only one who really believes what he’s saying in this sorry and sad dance is Pete Hegseth, and even then, I doubt he is as committed to Calvinian theology and Calvinist principles as I am. For the record, men, not women, bear responsibility to serve in combat if war is necessary (Gen. 14:14; Num. 31:3,21,49; Deut. 20:5-9,13-14; Josh. 1:14-18; 6:3,7,9; 8:3; 10:7; 1 Sam. 16:18; 18:5; 2 Sam. 11:1; 17:8; 23:8-39; Ps. 45:3-5; Song of Sol. 3:7-8; Isa. 42:13). It’s based on the creation order and family headship.

I doubt that Hegseth would have been confirmed if he had said these things, even if he believes them. I do long for current-day theologians who aren’t too cowardly to stand on principle and who are willing to adhere to the doctrines of the reformation without compromise, concession and accommodation.