Hegseth Loses His Holy War
A theological snit at the Pentagon serves as a reminder: Even for MAGA, religious pluralism still has its virtues.
New York Knick fans are accustomed to disappointment, having waited 53 years since their last NBA title. So it wasn’t just annoyance they felt when Donald Trump said he’d attend game three of the finals last night; it was dread, too. The team was on a thirteen-game playoff winning streak, two wins away from the title, and returning to Madison Square Garden. When the basketball gods align like that, you don’t mess with their juju.
And it was clear from the jump that the juju wasn’t right. Trump’s security requirements caused unfathomable waits outside the arena. His appearance on the jumbotron sparked deafening boos. He appeared to fall asleep at one point and was seen scarfing down fries at another.
The Knicks lost a dogfight. And while the president can’t directly be blamed, it’s hard to imagine that the blue-and-orange faithful want him returning to basketball mecca for game four on Wednesday.
Their mayor may be Muslim. Their bagel may be Jewish. Their Christian is Dior, and they’ll show Trump the door. Happy Tuesday.
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Repentagon
by Andrew Egger
Pete Hegseth has sparked a thousand controversies as secretary of defense, nearly all of them on purpose. But it’s safe to say he wasn’t expecting this one.
Last week, the Department of Defense significantly cut down its number of “recognized” faith groups from more than 200 to just 31. The point, as usual, was basically dewokification, with “wokeness” here defined as attempting to respect the faiths of servicemembers belonging to tiny religious minorities: “pagans,” “humanists,” and “New Age” faiths, among many others, were out. The Defense Department, Hegseth said, was “making the Chaplain Corps Great Again.”
But the biggest protests against the change didn’t come from a group Hegseth had taken off the list, but one he’d left on it. The bulk of the remaining list was taken up by various Christian denominations: “Christian - Baptist,” “Christian - Catholic,” “Christian - Non Denominational,” and so on. But one faith was conspicuously missing the “Christian” prefix: “Can anyone tell me,” Sen. Mike Lee tweeted Saturday, “why the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints was left out of the list of Christian churches?”
Seemingly by accident, the Pentagon had reignited a longtime controversy on the religious right: Is Mormonism Christian? Lee, who like many Utahns is Mormon, spent the next few days at all-out online war with online Christians who were overjoyed at what they saw as Hegseth’s “based” decision to leave Mormons outside the tent.
Yesterday, Lee promised relief was coming: “I just got off the phone with President Trump,” he tweeted. “We discussed the Pentagon’s ‘Christian list.’ I won’t speak for him, but I’m thrilled about where this is heading.”
Sure enough, the Pentagon rereleased the list with all “Christian” prefixes eliminated altogether. “The Pentagon list included redundant and unnecessary labeling, and the mistake has been fixed,” a spokesperson said in a statement. “The Pentagon’s job is not to adjudicate theological debates, but instead to ensure sincerely held faith is respected and encouraged in our ranks.”
As a theological matter, the “Is Mormonism Christian” question is fascinating, in part because it brings up other questions of who exactly gets to decide. Historically, Christianity has had very specific theological criteria for who is inside the faith of the church, particularly a series of doctrinal assertions about the nature of God (answer: Triune—three persons in one God) and the nature of Jesus Christ (answer: both fully God and fully man) summed up in a set of early-church creeds.1
But Christianity in America has long been much less institutional and more doctrinally loosey-goosey. There are many churches and many professed Christians who don’t spend much time (if any) on these doctrinal matters, but who still believe that Jesus is their savior. And of course there’s an even broader category of people who have basically stopped having any real doctrinal commitments whatsoever, but who still consider themselves “Christian” in a vague social or political way. Mormons are far outside Christianity if the credal doctrines are what matter, but have a reasonable claim on the “we love Jesus, too” front—and perhaps a better claim than many in the vague cultural-Christian camp.
It’s fascinating to see this long-simmering theological conflict spill over into the intramural fights on the American political right—especially at a moment when many on the right have begun to sneer at anything resembling religious pluralism and agitate for a muscular Christian nationalism to grow in political power in America.
This moment is present as subtext in the Pentagon fight. The idea that Hegseth and Co. would have backtracked on their based new recognized-faiths list over organized protests from, say, Wiccans is hilarious: kicking woo-woo lefty-coded groups to the curb was the entire point of the exercise. The reason Mormons had capital with which to challenge the list to which they objected was because they’re more or less in good standing with the current religious right: They’re a relatively large, reliably conservative church body that sends a number of their own to Washington as Republican lawmakers.
And yet it’s just the latest reminder that “Christian nationalism” is really something that can only exist in America as a force against the established liberal order. If it were ever to come close to achieving actual hegemonic cultural or political power, it would immediately collapse under the weight of its own internal contradictions—because no single vision or version of Christian political power actually commands anything like majority support even on the political right. Who’s going to run the show? Catholics? Mormons? Radical Calvinists?
This is not, by the way, a problem specific to Christian nationalists, but to basically all forms of Trump-era right-wing nationalism, all of which are predicated on the assumptions of small intra-right factions that, when the right takes real power, they’re the ones who will be calling the shots. I wrote about the phenomenon when I attended last year’s National Conservatism Conference: “The NatCons are all chasing a vision of national greatness, but it turns out that ‘national greatness’ is a concept with as many definitions as there are NatCons.” As above, so below.
Amusingly, the Mormonism/Christianity episode seems to show the Pentagon recreating civic pluralism from first principles: To solve the fight, they found it useful to get less specific about who “counts” as Christian, not more so. If these folks could remember that that’s a useful prudential standpoint for all public policy, we’d be in business.
A Letter from the Insurrectionists
by Mona Charen
Dear President Trump,
We, the undersigned, are the patriots who stood with you on January 6th. We are the people who charged the Capitol, broke windows, smashed doors, injured 140 law enforcement officers with flagpoles, bear spray, and other weapons (causing the deaths of five), sent lawmakers fleeing for their lives, stole property, erected a gallows, sought to kill the vice president and speaker of the house, and left urine and feces on desks and in hallways. We don’t regret a thing. Unlike those who spoke at the rally that day—John Eastman, Rudy Giuliani, Mo Brooks, and of course, yourself—1,270 of us were tried and convicted and 660 of us were sentenced to terms in prison (long ones, in the cases of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers).
You’ve often stressed how terrible our plight has been since then. We were gratified, for example, when you justified the $1.776 billion slush fund by noting that we’ve been “horribly treated, horribly treated . . . they’ve been weaponized, they’ve been in some cases imprisoned wrongly, they paid legal fees that they didn’t have, they’ve gone bankrupt, their lives have been destroyed, and they turned out to be right.” We can see how deeply you feel the injustice.
Don’t get us wrong, we appreciated the blanket pardons for everyone, even the most violent. But as you yourself have said, more must be done to redress this injustice.
It’s a shame and disgrace that the Deep State was able to thwart your plan to create a taxpayer fund to compensate us for our suffering. But because we know how deeply you feel about this, we are confident that you will use your own money to create the war chest. In the last few years, you’ve been able to defeat the swamp in Washington and rightfully add at least another $3 billion to your personal net worth since January 2025. We imagine that’s only a down payment.
We don’t believe the fake news media stories about how you’ve been the stingiest billionaire in American history, claiming to donate to charities that you actually stiffed. One story about you just showing up at a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a charity dedicated to kids with AIDS was really below the belt. They claimed that you just swanned into the event, took a seat at the front that was meant for an actual donor who was late, and basked in the assumption that you had donated, even doing the Macarena with the kids! And even afterwards, you never sent a dime. Or so the fake news said!
Nor do we credit the stories that say the vast majority of your charitable giving was actually just easements you signed with environmental groups when your plans to develop land parcels were blocked. About $119 million of the claimed $130 lifetime charitable donations were from these easements, so they claim. As for the rest, well, most were funded by the Trump Foundation, which was later shuttered for malfeasance. Or so the lying media would have it.
Sir, we know those stories are false. We have faith that you will do right by us out of your own pocket.
In fond expectation,
The January 6th Patriots
P.S. If you need our Social Security numbers, just ask Musk’s DOGE team. They have all that private stuff, right?
AROUND THE BULWARK
Putin’s ‘Cringe’ Weekend of Humiliation… His effort to put on a show of strength didn’t fool anyone, writes CATHY YOUNG.
Talk of Canceling Elections Shows Trump Is Unfit for Office… No president has ever canceled a federal election, even in our deepest crises, observes ROBERT DALLEK.
Make It the Summer of Epstein… On the flagship pod, BILL KRISTOL joins TIM MILLER to make the case why Democrats must ruthlessly hang Todd Blanche’s dirty work on every Republican senator who’s willing to confirm him as AG.
Quick Hits
H-1B FEES: One of the biggest policy wins Donald Trump gave his coalition’s hardline nativists last year was a new $100,000-a-head fee on companies hiring foreign workers on H-1B visas—a major crackdown on skilled legal immigration. But yesterday, a federal judge blocked the policy, declaring it a tax requiring congressional approval. The New York Times has more:
The decision by Judge Leo T. Sorokin of the Federal District Court for the District of Massachusetts nullified one of a series of tactics the Trump administration has used to restrict legal immigration, even in fields in which foreign skilled labor helped address severe shortages.
In a 42-page opinion, Judge Sorokin acknowledged that the policy, imposed in September, appeared to step on Congress’s “exclusive power” to levy taxes under the Constitution. He dismissed claims by the Trump administration that the fee was a “regulatory payment” that would have been within the executive branch’s power to set, not a tax.
“This is mere ipse dixit,” he wrote, meaning offered without evidence. “Defendants offer no definition for what constitutes ‘a regulatory payment,’ cite no cases or statutes employing the term, and advance no reasoned argument explaining how this term encompasses something different than a tax or a penalty.”
The White House intends to appeal the ruling, which comes months after a different federal judge ruled in the administration’s favor in a separate suit against the same policy. Read the whole thing.
FISA SPYING ON THE CHOPPING BLOCK: For years now, despite perennial protests about warrantless spying from civil-libertarian lawmakers, Congress has repeatedly managed to cobble together coalitions to reauthorize the post-9/11 surveillance authorities of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Now, however, the program might be on life support—with Democrats threatening for the first time to oppose the program en masse over Donald Trump’s appointment of Bill Pulte as acting director of national intelligence. Here’s Politico:
Democrats are withdrawing their support in protest of the Pulte appointment, with nearly every Democratic senator joining a handful of Republicans in tanking a procedural vote early Friday morning that would have allowed for passage of that three-year deal before the June 12 deadline.
It’s only the latest in a string of occasions where Trump has acted seemingly on impulse and without consideration for the political fallout and ramifications on Capitol Hill. That has complicated efforts by Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Speaker Mike Johnson . . . to enact the president’s agenda with just months to go until the midterms.
“I don’t think he thinks about the impact on us and the timing,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) told reporters. “Which is unfortunate because it really has had an impact. Quite honestly, I’m worried about what we’re going to do on FISA.”
In one sense, this is just Democrats going to war with the toolkit they have: If the only pain point they can inflict on the administration in protest of Pulte’s appointment is FISA reauthorization, you’re going to see more Democratic defections than you would otherwise. But Pulte’s appointment also makes the abstract civil-liberties argument much more concrete: It’s not just a matter of possible future abuse of surveillance authorities, but of all but guaranteed present abuse.
Cheap Shots
The sixth-century Athanasian Creed ends a lengthy list of pronouncements on these matters with an exclamation point: “This is the catholic faith: he who does not believe it firmly and faithfully cannot be saved.”
"The Knicks lost a dogfight. And while the president can’t directly be blamed, it’s hard to imagine that the blue-and-orange faithful want him returning to basketball mecca for game four on Wednesday."
Sports fans in Texas would beg to differ with you on the "can't directly be blamed" as they have seen it time after time, sport after sport, every time Ted Cruz attends a game.
As a member of the LDS Church, I have been warning my fellow Church members that are far-right and supportive of Christian Nationalism for years that if the country went Christian National, our Church would be outside looking in. Proof given - especially with the result that rather than include the LDS Church as Christians, they would rather remove the "Christian" designation from all other Christian churches.