A Great Darkening

Jan 19, 2025

I continue to torment myself with wondering how we have come to this miserable state, we, America, a people in Walt Whitman’s words “of all classes and stages of rank—from all countries on the globe—engaged in all the varieties and avocations—of every grade, every hue of ignorance and learning, morality and vice, wealth and want, fashion and coarseness, breeding and brutality, elevation and degradation, impudence and modesty” (Loving, intro. to Leaves of Grass). On Monday a crude, mean, blustering bully who numbers among his passions of the moment coercing Canada to become the fifty-first state, taking Greenland by force from an ally, seizing the Panama Canal, and outlawing windmills, will be restored to power, granted license to rule without restraint by his justices on the Supreme Court, a bare Republican majority in each house of Congress, and a plurality of that portion of Americans who could be bothered to vote in November. In attendance at the inauguration will be an entourage of oligarchs, Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg. In Moscow the tyrant Putin will be beaming. A shadow is cast over the United States Constitution.

Perhaps the state of the nation can be attributed to a wave of mass hysteria, a periodical affliction of humankind not altogether different from other natural disasters. I think too of an anecdote about the time Allen Ginsberg asked William Carlos Williams if he had any advice to give, older poet to younger poet. The anecdote may be apocryphal. I cannot recall the source. At any rate, the story goes that Williams, a distinguished pediatrician and family physician as well as a major American poet, pointed to the window and croaked in his old man’s voice, “Lotta bastards out there.”

Donald Trump’s restoration will elevate to secretary of defense a man so manifestly unqualified and unfit for the position or indeed any high office that one feels sympathy for Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee who could hardly have known where to begin with their questioning, for which each was allotted seven minutes to question and answer the nominee, insufficient to exercise even a semblance of due diligence.

The tabloid fodder chapters of the Pete Hegseth story—drunken escapades in strip clubs, serial infidelities, accusation of rape by a woman whose offer to meet in private with committee Republicans was ignored—competed for time with public statements that women should not serve in combat, disdain for the Geneva Convention and “burdensome rules of engagement,” a laissez-faire attitude about torture, adolescent crusader fantasies, folderol about a warrior ethos, and financial mismanagement at two small nonprofits he headed.

Hegseth responded to questions with a song and dance of evasion and dissimulation. He plastered over past comments about women in combat roles with unsubstantiated innuendo about erosion of standards under the banner of DEI. “A senior defense official, who wasn’t authorized to talk with the media and spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the standards for military service haven’t been lowered and are based on each field and ability, not gender” (Jalonik, Baldor, Takeaways). Intelligencer contributor Ben Jacobs summed up the tactic:

One of Hegseth’s key tools in the course of dealing with hostile questioning has been the filibuster. He talks and talks and talks and answers questions that have not been asked in effort to run out the clock on Democrats and deprive them of a gotcha moment. (Intelligencer)

Hegseth did not mask his contempt for Democrats on the committee. When asked by ranking Democrat Jack Reed if there was “a reason that you were afraid to have one-on-one meetings” with some Democrats, Hegseth explained, “Schedules get full” (Intelligencer).

The former Fox News celebrity likes to say “it’s time to give someone with dust on his boots the helm,” the presumption being that experience in combat makes him uniquely qualified. It appears to escape him that current secretary Lloyd Austin led the 3rd Infantry Division from Kuwait to Baghdad when the US invaded Iraq; James Mattis, Trump’s first defense secretary, commanded an assault battalion in the Gulf War as a lieutenant colonel, and retired as a four-star general; and Chuck Hagel, who held the post under Barack Obama, served as a sergeant on the front lines in Vietnam. The list could go on.

Tammy Duckworth skewered the “dust on the boots” line. If any standards are being lowered, she argued, it is those for the position he seeks.

I have dust on my boots as well. In fact, my boots are still in Iraq, where I left them 20 years ago and my legs were blown off in combat. So let's talk about dust on our boots. The fact of the matter is, this man is not qualified to serve as secretary of defense. It's not about being a change agent.
It's about not being competent. I asked him to name three different ways that a secretary of defense actually negotiates national security or security treaties with our allies. And he couldn't name a single one of them. I asked very basic questions that every secretary of defense should be able to answer. And he couldn't answer a single one of them, because he did not bother to do the homework.
He's so focused on being a culture warrior that he is forgetting what the job is. The job is to really lead a three-million personnel organization with a budget of almost $50 billion.… The last time that he led an organization…he so badly managed its fiscal lead that they had to bring in forensic accountants.
The bottom line is that he's not competent to lead an organization of this size. And he tried to make today's hearing about anything but the fact that he doesn't know what he's doing and would not know what he was doing as secretary of defense. (Bennett, Senator Duckworth explains)

Hegseth illustrated his bona fides as a culture warrior in an exchange with Alabama Republican Senator Coach Tommy Tuberville when he agreed with the coach “that the military academies have abandoned their mission in order to serve as ‘woke universities’ and ‘breeding grounds of leftism’” and promised a purge at the academies (Intelligencer). The call for a purge sounds pretty Stalinist, but what do I know.

With so much to cover it is little surprise that Hegseth’s religious affiliation got short shrift. His beliefs came up primarily with the claim of newfound faith and redemption for past mistakes that at other points in the hearing he dismissed as false claims and anonymous smears. Hegseth may be as he says a changed man. The substance of that change, the doctrines of a faith and ties with religious figures far outside any mainstream, went unexamined.

Hegseth and his family are members of a Tennessee church affiliated with Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, led by Pastor Doug Wilson, founder of a Calvinist group of churches called the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC).

Wilson and his allies have a rigid patriarchal belief system and don’t believe in the separation of church and state. They support taking away the right to vote from most women, barring non-Christians from holding office and criminalizing the LGBTQ+ community. (Druzin, Trump’s Defense secretary)

Brad Onishi, a former evangelical pastor who studies religious extremism, echoed that depiction in an interview with the PBS News Hour’s Laura Barrón Lopez:

Doug Wilson is a firebrand pastor and theologian…known for radical beliefs about gender. He doesn't believe that women should have any authority in the home or in society, much less the church. He has said that the time of enslavement in this country was the time of harmony between the races.
If you don't share the same hymn book as Wilson, then you can't be mayor. If you're a Hindu or Muslim, you simply can't hold any kind of authority in our public square. (Barrón Lopez, How Hegseth’s controversial)

Hegseth “has spoken positively about Wilson’s writings (Druzin) and according to Onishi has “claimed Wilson as a kind of spiritual mentor.”

I have not dug deeply enough to discover if there is any direct connection between CREC, the New Apostolic Reformation, and Catholic postliberal circles where JD Vance hangs out. All are flavors of Christian nationalism, disparate groups with an agenda in common: the destruction of the secular state and the imposition of a militant theocracy in its place. Christian nationalism has been called “a Christian version of the Taliban” (Druzin).

The February issue of The Atlantic has a chilling article about the New Apostolic Reformation by Stephanie McCummen (The Army of God Comes Out). The article opens with McCummen’s visit to the Gateway House of Prayer on the Thursday night after Donald Trump won the election. A celebration was taking place in

a converted barn off a highway stretching through the cornfields of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania…it was not exactly a church, and did not exactly fit into the paradigms of what American Christianity has typically been. Inside, there were no hymnals, no images of Jesus Christ, no parables fixed in stained glass. Strings of lights hung from the rafters. A huge map of the world covered one wall. On the others were seven framed bulletin boards, each representing a theater of battle between the forces of God and Satan—government, business, education, family, arts, media, and religion itself. Gateway House of Prayer, it turned out, was a kind of war room. And if its patrons are to be believed, at least one person, and at peak times dozens, had been praying every single minute of every single day for more than 15 years for the victory that now seemed at hand. God was winning. The Kingdom was coming.

The essay concludes the next day back at the barn where McCummen found people “praying in tongues and free-forming in English as the Holy Spirit gave them words.” A typical reaction to her presence came from a man who questioned her: “The whole world knows The Atlantic is a left-wing, Marxist-type publication. Why would you choose to go and work there?” After a while the leader of the group decided she should leave. “She could not have been nicer about it,” McCummen writes. “She spoke of God’s absolute love, and absolute truth, and absolute justice, and then I headed for the door.”

A few women followed me into the lobby, apologizing that it had come to this. They were sorry for me, as believers in the movement were sorry for all of the people who were lost and confused by this moment in America—the doubters, the atheists, the gay people, Muslims, Buddhists, Democrats, journalists, and all the godless who had not yet submitted to what they knew to be true. The Kingdom was here, and the only question was whether you were in, or out.

McCummen could have been writing about Pete Hegseth, his spiritual mentor, and CREC. Or Vance and the postliberals. Their doctrines and fanatical conviction of rectitude are relevant because Hegseth’s confirmation “would threaten the cohesion of a religiously and racially diverse U.S. military” (Druzin). What imaginable place could there be for people who have not yet submitted to what Hegseth knows to be true?

As William Kristol reminds us, Monday is not Trump’s day. It is Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

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