With Senate confirmation hearings of Trump’s motley crew of Cabinet-level nominees, one issue Democrats will need to confront right away is when and whether the appointees’ often-exotic religious views are an appropriate subject for discussion. I offered some simple guidelines at New York:
Amid all the hotly disputed allegations that he has a history of excessive drinking and inappropriate (or even abusive) behavior toward women, Donald Trump’s defense-secretary nominee, Pete Hegseth, has another potential problem that’s just now coming into view: His religious beliefs are a tad scary.
Early reports on Hegseth’s belligerent brand of Christianity focused on a tattoo he acquired that sported a Latin slogan associated with the medieval Crusaders (which led to him being flagged as a potential security problem by the National Guard, in which he served with distinction for over a decade). But as the New York Times reports, the tattoo is the tip of an iceberg that appears to descend into the depths of Christian nationalism:
“’Voting is a weapon, but it’s not enough,’ [Hegseth] wrote in a book, American Crusade, published in May 2020. ‘We don’t want to fight, but, like our fellow Christians one thousand years ago, we must …’
“In his book, Mr. Hegseth also offered a nod to the prospect of future violence: ‘Our American Crusade is not about literal swords, and our fight is not with guns. Yet.’”
His words aside, Hegseth has chosen to associate himself closely with Doug Wilson, an Idaho-based Christian-nationalist minister with a growing educational mission, notes the Times:
“[After moving to Tennessee two years ago] the Hegseth family joined Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowship, a small church opened in 2021 as part of the growing Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches. The denomination was co-founded by Doug Wilson, a pastor based in Moscow, Idaho; his religious empire now includes a college, a classical school network, a publishing house, a podcast network, and multiple churches, among other entities …
“In his writings, Mr. Wilson has argued that slavery ‘produced in the South a genuine affection between the races,’ that homosexuality should be a crime, and that the 19th Amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote was a mistake. He has written that women should not ordinarily hold political office because ‘the Bible does say that when feminine leadership is common, it should be reckoned not as a blessing but as a curse …’
“Mr. Hegseth told [a] Christian magazine in Nashville that he was studying a book by Mr. Wilson; on a podcast Mr. Hegseth said that he would not send his children to Harvard but would send them to Mr. Wilson’s college in Idaho.”
All this Christian-nationalist smoke leads to the fiery question of whether Hegseth’s religious views are fair game for potential confirmation hearings. Would exploration of his connections with a wildly reactionary religious figure like Doug Wilson constitute the sort of “religious test … as a qualification to any office or public trust” that is explicitly banned by Article VI of the U.S. Constitution? It’s a good and important question that could come up with respect to other Trump nominees, given the MAGA movement’s cozy relationship with theocratic tendencies in both conservative-evangelical and traditionalist-Catholic communities.
Actually, the question of the boundary between a “religious test” and maintenance of church-state separation came up conspicuously during the first year of Trump’s earlier presidency in confirmation hearings for the then-obscure Russell Vought, whom Trump nominated to serve as deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget (he later became director of OMB, the position to which Trump has again nominated him for the second term). Bernie Sanders seized upon a Vought comment defending his alma mater, Wheaton College, for sanctions against a professor who said that Christians and Muslims “worship the same God.” Sanders suggested that showed Vought was an Islamophobic bigot, while Vought and his defenders (included yours truly) argued that the man’s opinion of the credentials of Muslims for eternal life had nothing to do with his duties as a prospective public servant.
This does not, to be clear, mean that religious expressions when they actually do have a bearing on secular governance should be off-limits in confirmation hearings or Senate votes. If, for example, it becomes clear that Hegseth believes his Christian faith means echoing his mentor Doug Wilson’s hostility to women serving in leadership positions anywhere or anytime, that’s a real problem and raising it does not represent a “religious test.” If this misogyny was limited to restrictions on women serving in positions of religious leadership, that would be another matter entirely.
More generally, if nominees for high executive office follow their faith in adjudging homosexuality or abortion as wicked, it’s only germane to their fitness for government offices if they insist upon imposing those views as a matter of public policy. Yes, there is a conservative point of view that considers any limitation on faith-based political activism in any arena as a violation of First Amendment religious-liberty rights. But those who think this way also tend to disregard the very idea of church-state separation as a First Amendment guarantee.
Critics of Christian nationalism in the Trump administration need to keep essential distinctions straight and avoid exploring the religious views of nominees if they are truly private articles of faith directed to matters of the spirit, not secular laws. It’s likely there will be plenty of examples of theocratic excesses among Trump nominees as Senate confirmation hearings unfold. But where potential holders of high offices respect the lines between church and state, their self-restraint commands respect as well.
Don’t expect the polls to carry the day.
Bush is a lot smarter than most Democrats, and realizes that polls mean only present support. Once he’s gotten out there and beat the drum for a while, the polls will change.
Unless Democrats respond in kind, with Kristoff’s advice… reject it sight unseen and declare there is no Crisis.
Cranky, Allen and others.
There are big political and mechanical differences between Iraq and pushing Social Security Privatization through. Once the decision is made to go to war the nation is on a speeding train with no way to control the engineer. And all kinds of wells are tapped: general patriotism “we are at war”, “support the troops”. And once you are engaged in combat it is in many ways too late, there is no easy way to extract yourself.
Social Security is different. No one enlisted in the War on Social Security. It may be true that this president has the iron grip over his party and the media that you suggest, and that he will be able to ram some plan through even in the face of productivity numbers that suggest no crisis at all. I don’t agree with the premises, but those are issues for another time.
The problem Bush and the Republicans face is time. Whatever plan is adopted, it will require months to actually put individual accounts into place and then to allow individuals to exercise whatever limited choices in investment vehicles they have. As the actual details of the plan start coming out, mainly the fact that future benefits even with returns on the private accounts will be much less than promised under the current plan, people will begin to murmer.
Now if they were able to maintain the sense of “crisis” they might sell this as being “better than nothing”. But the only way to do this is to stop reporting economic productivity numbers altogether. 4.0% economic growth for 2004, already in the bag, simply blows the doors off the productivity models of the Social Security Trustees, not just the Intermediate Cost (which called for 2.7% in 2004 and 1.8% in 2005) that produces the 2018 and 2042 dates used by all, but all the Low Cost one that shows no long term shortfall at all (2.8% and 2.1%).
By June it will be clear that doing nothing would have been a better deal than doing something, particularly this something. And Republicans will be staring up a hill at 2006. They will be faced with having broken something that never needed a fix, lurching ever closer to that Third Rail of American politics.
The beauty is that there is no downside to cut and run here. There is no way that accounts will be set up by June and the US will have invested probably a few million dollars in staff time. The Republican Congress will have two choices: repeal it, or ride it into the Valley of Death that will be the 2006 midterms.
Bush may not care, he is not running for reelection, but the firmer he grasps that veto plan, the better for Dems in 2006.
And? Not to be rude, but it appears to me that the general public is not going to be given a chance to express its opinion. Transfer of Social Security wealth to Wall Street is already scheduled to happen, and there will be a big “burst” of support at just the right minute to satisfy the media.
Cranky
OK, but since when does this administration need informed public support to achieve its goals? And the goal here of course is not to improve investment opportunities or retirement benefits for retired Americans – it is to destroy a successful and essential government program as part of an ideological crusade to deligitimize all government programs that do not redstribute wealth upwards. They will lie and distort and dissemble to whatever degree necessary unless Democrats stand up and call this for what it is, and contesting the issue on this terrain – what the American people really want – is not what the fight is about.
That is, of course, until they start the lying.
Actually, check out Talking Points Memo – Josh points out that the Post wrote up the poll quite badly and that the numbers look better for the Democrats.
LATEST NEWS IN THE WASHINGTON STATE GUBERNATORIAL RACE
Democratic candidate Christine Gregoire put together a string of victories Wednesday against Republican Dino Rossi. The race, which still isn’t over, has been extremely close.
Permanent Defense: King County reported +59 votes for Gregoire, giving Gregoire the overall lead in the statewide manual recount by 10 votes. This does not count the 725 ballots the Supreme Court said can be counted.
The especially good news about all of this is it shows Democrats are willing to stand and fight. We won’t be intimidated by the GOP….No more stolen elections! Christine Gregoire has held on for almost two months now – and we believe she will emerge from this as our state’s Governor.
He’s hoping to scare the public into supporting his plans, a la Iraq. The advantage he had that time was that a lot of Americans wanted to lash out at Arabs–any Arabs–in the wake of 911, so they were open to persuasion. The advantage he has this time is that the relentless talk of “Social Security crisis” has eroded the public’s support to some extent, since many are skeptical that they’ll ever get benefits. It’s not as strong a card to play as the post-911 anger was, so there’s hope. Given the Democrats’ disarray, however, I’d say he has a decent chance of prevailing. The real test is whether the Dems can wake up and finally start acting like an opposition party, and not get caught up in giving the Republicans fig leafs.