Transcription
Hi, it's Wednesday, March 11th, 2026. You're tuned in to Why America. I'm your lawyer friend, Lijah Miller.
Since the US and Israel's initial strike on Iran on February 28th that started the raging conflict unfolding in the Middle East right now, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation has received more than 200 complaints from members of the US military across all services, claiming that high-ranking officers have been drawing explicit connections between extremist Christian nationalist beliefs, the end times, and the ongoing war with Iran. One complaint indicated that a commander had urged officers to tell their troops that Operation Epic Fury was all part of God's divine plan and that quote, "President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth." The president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation in a statement said that the complaints quote report the unrestricted euphoria of their commanders at what they perceive to be the coming rapture.
Before these over 200 complaints began pouring in, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation had been fielding numerous other repeated complaints due to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegs' order that Christian prayer services be held monthly in the Pentagon and even communicated via email to military personnel and also defense contractors. Last month, Christian nationalist preacher Doug Wilson, head of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, was personally invited by Hegath to preach at the Pentagon. The story of how Pete Hegath got to the head of the most powerful military on the planet and the ideology underpinning his beliefs, which was once a laughably baddy fringe theory, but now has access to the nuclear codes, provides us with a really clear picture of the worldview animating not only Pete Hegath and the Christian nationalists apparently running our military, but also Project 2025 and the entire far right that now has a chokehold on the federal government.
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Peter Brian Hegth was born right here in beautiful Minneapolis, Minnesota. He got a bachelor's degree in political science from Princeton, where he was the publisher and editor-in-chief of the Princeton Tory, the school's conservative student newspaper. He served on the Minnesota Army National Guard at Guantanamo Bay in Iraq and Afghanistan until 2014 when he was assigned to the individual ready reserve through the District of Columbia Army National Guard, though he was barred from serving on duty at Joe Biden's inauguration in 2021 because he had been flagged as an insider threat in part because of the tattoo he has that says "Deus Vult," Latin for "God wills it," a Christian nationalist motto that has ties to far-right groups and is a popular slogan among perpetrators of right-wing terrorism, including at the Charlottesville Virginia riots in 2017. It was this incident that Pete blames for his decision to leave the military.
Starting back in 2006, Heath worked with Vets for Freedom, eventually becoming the organization's president in 2008, though he was removed from leadership by 2011 due to mismanagement of hundreds of thousands of dollars of funds. He then went on to be president of Concerned Veterans of America, which he left in 2016 after a whistleblower reported he fostered a sexist and hostile work environment, used the organization's funds for his own personal expenses, and exhibited out-of-control alcoholism. One time allegedly getting drunk and chanting, "Kill all Muslims." And so naturally, by 2017, Hegath was an official co-host of Fox and Friends.
Hegath, being the holy man that he is, is on his third marriage. His first one to his high school sweetheart ended in divorce in 2008 after Heg Seth admitted to having five affairs. I could have sworn I read something about that the last time I perused the Bible. His third wife is named Jennifer. She was a producer on Fox and Friends and they got married at the Trump National Golf Club in New Jersey in 2019. He's been accused of numerous instances of sexual assault and his own mother, in an email obtained by the New York Times, accused Pete of mistreating women for years. And in January last year, Hegath was confirmed by the Senate in a vote of 51 to 50, with JD Vance casting the tie-breaking vote, as the most unqualified Secretary of Defense to ever serve in that position, having served zero time in government and led no major organization.
Pete seems to have always been a Christian, but sometime around 2021, he and his family moved to Middle Tennessee to a town called Goodlettsville, where he purchased an 8,800 square ft house on 76 acres of land for $3.4 million so that his children could attend Jonathan Edwards Classical Academy, a classical Christian academy, and so the family could join the Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowship. That church is a member of the Congregation of Reformed Evangelical Churches, or CREC, which is an organization co-founded by Douglas Wilson, that Christian nationalist preacher Hegsth recently invited to preach at the Pentagon. Some of Doug Wilson's more inflammatory beliefs include that women shouldn't vote and that slavery was a benevolent institution and enslaved people were actually happier back then.
But I think it's important to delve into the ideology espoused by Douglas Wilson, Pete Hgsth, and other Christian nationalists because it can be really easy to hear the more inflammatory stuff and just write it off as absolutely batshit and detached from reality, which it is. But understanding the ideology is helpful for understanding the entire Project 2025 endeavor, the project that is being executed via our government and headed by Trump, a man who has never shown any proclivity for religion and yet has been positioned as the mouthpiece of this Christian nationalist movement. So, let's dig in, shall we?
First, let me be really clear. Even within white Christian nationalism, there is disagreement as to interpretations of the Bible, as to the correct worldview, and more. So, I'm going to lay out for you my understanding of some of this, but please know this is just a primer. This is just the beginning. It's an ideological mess if you start to get into the weeds of it. I'm sure many of you will happily, well, actually, me in the comments, so go right ahead. It helps the algorithm. There are a few key terms we have to identify and try to define in order to understand what the [ __ ] is going on in our military and in our government right now.
First is the idea of Christian reconstructionism. I'm going to be relying on a great journal article by Julie Ingresol called "The Christian Reconstruction Movement in US Politics" for a lot of this. My sources, as always, are linked in the description. It's really interesting reading, so I highly recommend you delve into that after this. Douglas Wilson adheres pretty closely to reconstructionism. Though the original thinker on this type of Christian worldview was named Rousas John Roos Doneyi. The basic idea underlying reconstructionist ideology is that the word of God is the only foundation for knowledge and that the world can only be interpreted through the word of God. Any attempt by humans to untether themselves from the authority of God is an evil rejection of God. Rush Doneyi wrote, quote, "Nothing has a valid interpretation apart from God and his creative and redemptive purpose," and this extends to all aspects of life and society. According to Rush Doneyi, quote, "Law is in every culture religious in origin because law governs man and society because it establishes and declares the meaning of justice and righteousness. Law is inescapably religious in that it established in practical fashion the ultimate concerns of a culture. Accordingly, a fundamental and necessary premise in any and every study of law must be first a recognition of this religious nature of law. Second, it must be recognized that in any culture, the source of law is the god of that society." I must have missed that day in law school. The guy wrote a whole legal treatise called "The Institutes of Biblical Law" in which he tried to take the Ten Commandments and then create case law drawn from incidents in the Bible as a means of creating God-made law that creates biblical standards for governing life and society.
And what stems from this underpinning ideology is an idea called sphere sovereignty. Something Pete Hegsth in podcast interviews has explicitly voiced support for. Sphere sovereignty is like Christian nationalism on steroids. Basically, it's humans' duty to submit completely to God to bring every aspect of life, quote, "under the lordship of Christ." Rashuni's legal treaties was not just a fun academic exercise. It was a model code of laws that should be used to control the human race. In the reconstructionist worldview under sphere sovereignty, there are three spheres of influence with their own clearly delineated authority.
First and foremost is the family, which has two central components: economic and educational. All property and business ventures are an expression of the family's exercise of dominion. And dominion is the family's duty because God told Adam and Eve to be fruitful, multiply, and have dominion over the earth. As autonomous economic units ordained by God, families are led, of course, by the man. And any attempt to regulate families through regulation of property or business or taxes is an affront to God's law, is seen as religious persecution and tyranny. Second, the family in its sole sovereign sphere is meant to control the education of children. Thus, again, any government education, any attempt to regulate education, any attempt to remove control of education from the family sphere is religious persecution and tyranny. Reconstructionists have played an outsized role for decades in the proliferation of anti-public education, of school voucher systems, and of parents' rights crusades. Even groups and institutions that do not formally identify as reconstructionists are often influenced, sometimes unknowingly, by this reconstructionist worldview.
The second sovereign sphere after the family is the church. The church is responsible for preaching the gospel, of course, and also providing a social safety net for needy families. It also acts as judge and jury, with a major problematic part of all of this being that a lot of these churches will do the judicial stuff within themselves instead of actually going to authorities. A lot of abuse can happen because of this. So the government should not be in charge of any of that. It actually goes against the will of God. You see, it is the church's duty to train Christians to properly align all aspects of their life with complete submission to biblical law.
And the third and final sovereign sphere after family and after the church is what they call civil government. Under this worldview, civil government has the strictly limited role of protecting private property and punishing evildoers, usually through the death penalty. Reconstructionists aren't big fans of the carceral state. Not because they believe in criminal justice reform, but because they believe the only role the state should play is in murdering those who go against biblical law. Like, for example, the gays. This is also why reconstructionists can claim that they believe in the separation of church and state. Not because they think people should be able to practice whatever religion they want free from government persecution, but because it is God's divine will that the family and the church come before the government. And anything the government does that impedes on the sovereign spheres of the family and the church is nothing short of tyranny. And any taxes collected to do those things is nothing short of theft. And hopefully, you can see how reconstructionism can find some convenient bedfellows who may not espouse explicitly reconstructionist dogma but who fit nicely enough into the worldview because they want the same end results, like libertarians, for example.
Another important idea to understand is called dominionism. This is the idea embedded within reconstructionism but shared among many varying Christian nationalist belief systems that God told Adam and Eve to have dominion over the world and therefore it is the fundamental Christian duty to practice that dominion over every aspect of society and all the people on earth. It is the mandate that Christians control the world. Reconstructionists believe it, as do adherents to the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR, which is different from reconstructionism in many ways but also believes in dominionism. The NAR believes that the word of God continues to come to us through apostles and prophets who have revelations, and a lot of them don't necessarily have any formal religious training. Many of them have found great success sharing their revelations right here on YouTube. A central revelation to the NAR is the Seven Mountain Mandate. Basically, the NAR's form of dominionism. Under the Seven Mountain Mandate, Christians must take control not just of religion and church, but also of family, education, government, media, arts and entertainment, and business and economics. You could imagine this would also dovetail nicely with the conservative business movement that gained traction in the 1970s in adherence to the Powell Memo, which encouraged big business to take over educational institutions and the media in order to encourage lower taxation and less regulation. Again, not all adherence to the same strict ideologies, but all finding enough cohesion that they can kind of work together for similar end results.
Ted Cruz's dad was a major figure in the New Apostolic Reformation, which named Ted as a king meant to enact this NAR dominion in the governments. They also believe that the accumulation of wealth into the hands of the few is perfectly fine because in order to take over the earth, the Christians are going to need a lot of cash. It's also why it's perfectly fine for Ted Cruz to jet off to Mexico while people in Texas are dying because of the failed infrastructure he played a part in weakening. It's okay. He's a king. He's here to do God's bidding. Don't worry about it.
Reconstructionism also played a role in the Tea Party movement, of which Ted Cruz is a part. Gary North is an economist and a Tea Party favorite. He is also Roo Doneyi's son-in-law. His preaching of slashing government programs and cutting taxes played right to the Tea Party base, whether any of them were adherents to reconstructionism or not. Ted Cruz was elected to the Senate in 2012 as part of that Tea Party movement. And Doug Wilson is seen as someone who has taken Rush Doneyi's reconstructionist ideas and brought them into the 21st century, especially through the founding of the Congregation of Reformed Evangelical Churches, or CREC, of which Pete Hexath's church is a member, and his work with pushing for homeschooling and the creation of classical Christian schools that weave in the reconstructionist worldview into every aspect of teaching, and of which Pete Hexath's children are students. If God wills humans to submit every aspect of their lives to God, then what better way but to ensure that every aspect of schooling has the indoctrination woven into it. And you better bet that CREC helped spur on Wilson's popularity even further.
Wilson's church, located in Moscow, Idaho, called Christ Church, advocated for resistance to COVID mandates in the town of Moscow, Idaho, of which at least 10% are members of Christ Church. In 2021, Wilson wrote a blog post called "A Biblical Defense of Fake Vaccine IDs," claiming, "We are not yet in a hot civil war with shooting and all, but we are in a cold war/civil war." He urged readers to resist openly in concert with any others in your same position. "This will not be a rebellion against lawful authority, but instead an example of a free people refusing to go along with their own enslavement." Again, you can see easy cohesion here with anti-vaxxers, COVID deniers, and any combo of conspiracy theory-touting wackos. They're not perfectly ideologically aligned, but they want the same end state. CREC also played into a central theme in both NAR and reconstructionism, and that is the persecution complex.
As Julie Ingresol notes in her journal article, quote, "One's opponents are not just people with whom one disagrees, but proponents of the forces of evil, power-hungry liars and deceivers, bound for eternal damnation, but capable of wreaking havoc in the meantime. In some substantial measure, the evidence that one is on the side of righteousness is that he or she is faced with persecution. This accounts for some of the highly charged rhetoric and emotionally charged anger of some contemporary conservatives. The claim of persecution becomes not just a description of an experience but a theological necessity. If it didn't exist, it would have to be invented. Being persecuted is in and of itself proof of the righteousness of your ideas." Therefore, adherence to these worldviews feel vindicated in their perceived persecution, in their enslavement, as they call it, under COVID mandates or other tyrannical forces that overstep the boundaries of sphere sovereignty. They have to be persecuted because otherwise, how would they have proof of the righteousness of their convictions? Therefore, any condemnation of their beliefs by the media or government or judges or you or me doesn't make them stop and reconsider their worldviews. It actively reinforces their worldviews. I'm telling you, this is like the most ingenious self-reinforcing cult ever invented. Because if every aspect of your life should be dominated by the will of God, then any interference by the government into any aspect of your life can be considered an infringement on your right to practice your religion.
And so part of this worldview includes this really violent rhetoric wherein the Crusades are glorified as this godly holy war, as is the Confederacy in the US Civil War. You can see this in the violent warrior rhetoric touted by Pete Hegsath not only at the Pentagon but also in his various books and podcast appearances where he uses violent rhetoric to discuss everything down to the schooling of children. In one podcast, he says children are being quote "accosted and assaulted on a daily basis with evil ideologies that are corrupting their mind, that are corrupting their affections and leaving them incapable of seeking the kind of wisdom that's required." And the response to this should be insurgency or guerrilla war. Again, he's talking about children in classrooms. Or in his book titled "American Crusade: Our Fight to Stay Free," when he said, quote, "Our present moment is much like the 11th century. We don't want to fight, but like our fellow Christians 1,000 years ago, we must arm yourself metaphorically, intellectually, physically. Our fight is not with guns yet." So, of course, when we start bombing Iran, Hegsth has helped create a culture where this type of extreme violence is not only justified but in fact ordained by God.
But there's one more piece of the puzzle I want to lay out for you that's important to understand, and that is how the end times fit into these various ideologies. To understand that, you have to understand premillennialism versus postmillennialism. Premillennialism is the rapture-style end times you hear about and that the high-ranking officials in the military seem to be adhering to when they cheer on the war in Iran. Politico sums it up well, writing, quote, "God, believers were taught, worked through distinct historical eras, or dispensations. The current era, the church age, would close suddenly. True Christians would be taken up from the earth in the rapture, lifted directly to heaven. What followed would be a 7-year period of tribulation marked by war, chaos, and persecution under a global ruler known as the Antichrist. During this period, prophetic passages from Daniel, Ezekiel, and Revelation would unfold on the world stage. Nations would align. A climactic battle would center on the Middle East, and forces often identified with Gog, the apocalyptic enemy described in the book of Ezekiel, would move against Israel from the north. At the end of this catastrophe, Christ would return in glory, defeat the Antichrist at Armageddon, and inaugurate a 1,000-year reign of peace before a final judgment." So, that 1,000-year reign of peace is the millennium in premillennialism. We haven't reached it yet in their interpretation of Revelation.
As the Jacabin reports, quote, "Central to the modern interpretation of this worldview is the Old Testament book of Ezekiel 38, which describes a coalition of nations, traditionally identified by prophecy experts as Russia, Turkey, and Persia, modern-day Iran, descending upon Israel in the war of Gog and Magog." Sounds made up. It's made up. The article goes on to say, quote, "Much of the current strain of Christian Zionism seen in contemporary evangelical churches comes from a similar belief in the United States and Israel's dual role in jumpstarting the biblical end times, usually involving a battle against Iran."
Postmillennialism is the belief that Jesus created his kingdom on earth the first time around and that the church, via its gospel, has the duty of aligning the world as closely as possible with the word of God. And then once all of society is finally aligned with God's will and after many, many years of that alignment, Jesus will finally return to bring the glorious end times. In America, Protestants in the 19th and 20th centuries were generally postmillennialist, which is why they were really concerned with things like helping poor children and prohibition. They were trying to get society aligned with God so that Jesus would come back. Christian reconstructionists like Doug Wilson and Pete Hegsth also align with postmillennialism. It's their job to get society to submit to biblical laws by exercising dominion over the world so that Jesus can come back.
But again, even with these differing viewpoints, their overarching end goals tend to make those who believe in pre-millennialism and those who believe in post-millennialism fall into largely the same camp of the far right when it comes to how society should run. And then some denominations see no issue in believing contradictory things at all. For example, the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR, of which Ted Cruz and his father are a part, strongly espouses dominionism and often merges and conflates the dominionism of premillennial beliefs, you know, Armageddon, etc., with the post-millennial goal of attaining dominion over society so that Jesus can eventually return.
And that's kind of why I wanted to talk about all of this today. Because when you start to understand the various worldviews that make up white Christian nationalism as a whole, what at first appears as a thorny nest of contradictions and strange bedfellows, which it is, starts to actually make it all make a little more sense. From the cultural fights against trans kids in public schools and book bans, to the righteous glee pervading our armed forces while attacking Iran, to support for Doge and the slashing of government programs, to claiming to be Christian while bombing children in Gaza. It's all part of this plan ordained by God. Questioning their adherence to whatever their flavor of white Christian nationalism might be only helps to reinforce their belief in their own righteous suffering and persecution. And now that worldview has infected our armed forces and it's infected our Supreme Court, which has increasingly found in favor of Christians' ability to practice their religion freely at the expense of all our rights to be free from their religion. It's infected our Congress, not just through Ted Cruz, but many others. Congress is exceptionally more religious and Christian than the average American is. And it's infected the entire executive branch with Trump as, once again, a strange bedfellow considering how little he espouses Christian beliefs, but whose end goal aligns with the white Christian nationalist worldview of complete world domination. It's on display in Project 2025, a playbook that is now, by some accounts, over 50% complete, and one that is obsessed with pushing the narrative that white Christian families are under attack by DEI and civil rights and other evil forces from within the federal government, which should shrink back down to its God-ordained role of protecting private property and inflicting the death penalty.
It all starts making sense when you dive into the Christian nationalist worldview, which in and of itself isn't even coherent. For a group of people that claim to be really sure about the word of God, they have a [ __ ] of a lot of disagreements amongst themselves. And yet, they're able to overcome those disagreements in order to work together towards shared goals in a way that leftists really struggle to do because we require ideological purity from our membership. So maybe we should take a page from the book of the gospel of white Christian nationalism and try to figure out some end goals we can all rally behind instead of bickering on Reddit about who's a true leftist and who's really just the petite bourgeoisie or whatever the [ __ ] you armchair philosophers like to go off on in the comments of my all my videos.
If you want to delve more into the intricacies of the worldview animating the federal government right now, I've linked all my sources in the description. Again, this was just a beginning primer for you. There are some really interesting reads in there. Knowledge is power, know thy enemy, etc. If you'd like to support my work, consider joining on YouTube, Substack, or Patreon to get access to all these episodes completely ad-free. And if you like my Reagan Ruined Everything sweatshirt, you can get one for yourself at lijahmillermerch.com. Thank you to my multiplatinum patrons: Christopher Cohen, Evan Freley, Mark, Sarah, Shelby, Dennis Smith, Art, David, Latranger, Lucas, Thomas Johnson, Ent. Your generosity makes this channel what it is. So, thank you. And if you like this episode, you'll like my episode from Monday about what's going on with the Strait of Hormuz. Thanks so much for watching. Have a good day. Bye-bye.