Talarico Contests MAGA’s Conquest of American Christianity

At the annual National Prayer Breakfast in Washington on February 5, President Donald Trump indulged himself in a 75-minute rambling tirade devoted to glorifying himself, attacking his enemies, claiming a Republican monopoly on faith, and pledging to “viciously and violently” defend his kind of Christians. But his wasn’t the most alarming speech at the event. That distinction belonged to Trump’s secretary of Defense, as Baptist minister Brian Kaylor observed:

Pete Hegseth, who likes to call himself the “Secretary of War,” spoke after Trump to baptize the U.S. and especially its military. He did so by highlighting the worship services he’s been leading at the Pentagon. And he even suggested that soldiers can gain salvation by fighting for the United States.

“America was founded as a Christian nation. It remains a Christian nation in our DNA, if we can keep it. And as public officials, we have a sacred duty 250 years on to glorify him,” Hegseth said as he pointed upward. “That’s precisely why we instituted a monthly prayer service at the Pentagon, an act of what we see it as, spiritual readiness.”

This was just an appetizer. As Kaylor notes in a separate dispatch, Hegseth has used his government-sanctioned Pentagon worship services to promote the rawest kind of Christian nationalism, most recently treating military leaders to the spiritual stylings of Doug Wilson:

The Idaho pastor and self-described “paleo-Confederate” preached about the importance of trusting God for protection in battle and praised the monthly worship services as perhaps a sign of a new revival like the Great Awakening or the biblical Day of Pentecost….

Wilson, an outspoken proponent of Christian Nationalism, has sparked numerous controversies over the years for what he preaches and teaches. He has downplayed the horrors of slavery and defended enslavers. He also pushes a hardline version of patriarchy, not just insisting only men can serve as pastors or in other church leadership roles but also that they should rule in families.

Hegseth doesn’t just promote Wilson’s views at the Pentagon; he is a member of a congregation affiliated with the denomination Wilson founded and seemed thrilled to be able to welcome this prophet of patriarchy to bless America’s war fighters: “Thank you for your leadership, for your mentorship, for the things you’ve started, the truth you’ve told, your willingness to be bold.”

Irreligious folk accustomed to hearing this sort of divinization of cultural conservatism proclaimed as “Christianity” should be aware that this isn’t what all Christians believe. Indeed, when it comes to the fraught subject of church-state separation, Christian nationalists stand at one extreme on a spectrum that includes many millions of believers who staunchly defend rigorous church-state separation on religious grounds. The same day that Hegseth and Wilson were whooping it up for a militarized American Jesus, Texas legislator and U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico gained a viral YouTube audience for an interview with Stephen Colbert in which he pronounced Christian nationalism as, well, basically unclean:

We are called to love all our neighbors, including our Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Sikh, agnostic, atheist neighbors. And forcing our religion down their throats is not love. It’s why I fought so hard for that sacred separation in our First Amendment.

My granddad [a Baptist minister] raised me to believe that boundary between church and state doesn’t just benefit the state or our democracy, although it certainly does, but it also benefits the church.

Because when the church gets too cozy with political power, it loses its prophetic voice, its ability to speak truth to power, its ability to imagine a completely different world. And this separation between church and state is something we have to safeguard. It’s something we have to fight for.

And I think we need someone in the U.S. Senate who is going to confront Christian nationalism and tell the truth which is that there is nothing Christian about Christian nationalism. It is the worship of power in the name of Christ. And it is a betrayal of Jesus of Nazareth.

Talarico, as it happens, is a Presbyterian seminarian. Mainline Protestant horror at the Prince of Peace being turned into a Man of War is not unusual, although until now it has gotten little attention. Alongside the faith-based backlash to Trump’s mass-deportation effort, which is especially strong among Catholics, we are beginning to receive regular reminders that alongside partisan and ideological polarization is a quiet battle among religious believers spurred by the particularly aggressive version of Christian nationalism espoused by Trump allies. It may be an accident that Talarico’s interview went viral after CBS clumsily discouraged its airing at the behest of Trump’s thuggish FCC chairman Brendan Carr. But the MAGA conquest of American Christianity will not be uncontested.