American democracy’s darkest day in modern times — the Jan. 6, 2021, Christian Nationalist domestic terrorist insurrection — was effectively led by U.S. military service persons, whether active or veterans. Clothed in tactical gear, armed, marching in formation and numbering in the hundreds, they spearheaded the breach of the U.S. Capitol and the hunt to execute certain congresspersons and Vice President Mike Pence. To date more than 200 Jan. 6 domestic terrorists with military backgrounds have been arrested. Marines, active and veteran combined, are the most represented military branch among those arrested.
Shedding yet more light on the Jan. 6 domestic terrorists, the Center for Policy and Research at Seton Hall University School of Law in 2023 released an in-depth report titled “The Jan. 6 Insurrectionists: Who They Are and What They Did.” Examining insurrectionists prosecuted in the first year following the assault on the U.S. Capitol, the report revealed that 92% were white, 83% were men, 25% were armed, 22% had a criminal record and nearly 20% had a background in law enforcement or the military. More than half of active or retired military service members assaulting the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 were collectively affiliated with the militant, Christian Nationalist-oriented, white supremacist groups Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and Three Percenters.
A more recent study from the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland determined that 18% of the Jan. 6 domestic terrorists had military backgrounds.
The day after the Jan. 6 domestic terrorist attack — a coup attempt supported by then-president Donald Trump and barely thwarted by law enforcement and National Guard forces — military and intelligence officers were alerted to a Guard member who worked as a Fox News host. Pete Hegseth, the Guard member in question, sported a tattoo common among white supremacists. Depicting the Latin words “Deus vult” — “God wills it” — the tattoo image depicted a Christian battle cry from the First Crusade of the Middle Ages, a maxim popular among present-day white supremacist groups, including the Proud Boys and Three Percenters. Few members of the military community, however, hold such extremist views. Concerned, Hegseth’s superiors pulled him back from Guard duty during incoming President Joe Biden’s inauguration.
Perceiving himself as being targeted for his extremist views, Hegseth angrily resigned from the National Guard.
Some months earlier the former serviceman had published a telling book, American Crusade: Our Fight to Stay Free. A call to arms directed to white Christian Nationalists, the book depicts America in a struggle fought by conservative white Christians and “freedom-loving people everywhere” protecting their God-ordained superiority and dominance over others by taking freedom away from secularists, leftists, globalists and Muslim immigrants.
“See you on the battlefield,” Hegseth concludes the book. “Together, with God’s help, we will save America. Deus vult!”
Devoted to taking freedom away from many Americans and championing far right, white male, Christian “warriors” as the ideal U.S. military serviceperson, Hegseth caught the attention of Trump, who in November nominated him for Defense Secretary of U.S. military forces. But along with the nomination came scrutiny of Hegseth’s questionable past of sexual assault accusations, acknowledged heavy drinking and allegations of mismanagement and personal misconduct as the head of two veterans’ advocacy organizations. In addition, he has less military experience than any person who has previously held the office of Defense Secretary.
Trump’s authoritarian intentions have long been known and are embraced by many far-right extremists perceiving themselves to be Christians. During the past two years, hundreds of neo-Nazi rallies have taken place across the United States. “Almost every week, small white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups have been descending on downtowns, gathering in public parks or rallying on the grounds of state houses and courthouses across the country,” a November New York Times article noted.
Less than two weeks after Trump’s Nov. 5 presidential victory, Trump-supporting neo-Nazis marched on the streets of Columbus, Ohio. Flying swastika flags, they proclaimed they were marching because “our country is being invaded and white people are being ostracized.”
Since 2016 some neo-Nazis rallies have called out “Hail Trump!” Nonetheless, Trump has consistently declined to criticize neo-Nazi activity. To the contrary, according to eyewitness accounts, he has given shout outs to neo-Nazis, admired Hitler’s ability to raise large crowds, had at least one neo-Nazi aide, said “Hitler did some good things” and lamented “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had.”
But there is more to this story yet: Since Trump’s first presidential campaign and term, his warmness for neo-Nazis and admiration of Hitler have paired well with white Christian Nationalism’s authoritarianism. Hitler’s Christian Nazis, marching under the banner of “Gott mit uns,” or “God With Us,” succeeded in seizing control of Germany’s military forces and suppressing liberalism, providing a lasting model for successive white Christian Nationalist movements, both in the United States and abroad.
In addition to their war against liberalism, Hitler’s Christian Nationalist movement prioritized the suppression of inclusive and intellectual-based education. So, too, does today’s American Christian Nationalist movement. For decades they have been planning for the destruction of our secular public education system, in both K-12 schools and universities. Their quest is to replace secularism and science with fundamentalist Christian indoctrination – in public schools, private schools and homeschooling. That indoctrination includes the Christian militarization of young people.
“I think we need to be thinking in terms of these classical Christian schools are boot camps for winning back America,” Hegseth said on a Christian Nationalist podcast, according to a Salon report. The schools he refers to are a component of the far-right Christian education landscape closely linked to Calvinist Christian Dominionist theologian Douglas Wilson. An influential Idaho-based white supremacist, Wilson whitewashes America’s history of enslaving Black persons and is devoted to eradicating liberalism and secularism in American government, society and culture. He is the founder of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, a far-right Christian coalition within which Hegseth is a member.
Hegseth is devoted to the ideology of the late Dominionist founder R.J. Rushdoony, an earlier extremist educator opposed to equal rights and human rights and determined to eradicate secular public schools. Hegseth calls for an “educational insurgency” to “build” an “army” of young people who will rise up and obliterate liberalism, secularism and intellectualism.
Christian Nationalists’s Project 2025 playbook is steeped in Dominionist ideology. Compiled by the plutocratic Heritage Foundation, Project 2025 calls for the elimination of the Department of Education, the eradication of federal funding for civil rights and a transitioning away from modern pluralistic, secular public schools to religious indoctrination common to theocracies.
By nature of early 19th century America being a culturally white Protestant nation preceded by theocratic colonies, both early public education and the U.S. military were largely forged and peopled by white Christians. From these beginnings white Christians, primarily in the South, planted themselves firmly upon a clear biblical defense of Black enslavement — an inhumane and anti-Jesus institution that enriched enslavers. To protect their ill-gotten riches, white slaveowners (with some exceptions) forbade enslaved persons from learning to read or write, while creating armed slave patrols and local militia forces to minimize slave desertions and quash slave insurrections.
Northward, liberal abolitionists condemned the southern slaveocracy and advocated for freedom and education for Black persons, angering slaveowners. White Baptists and Methodists in the South split from their northern counterparts in defense of white supremacy and Black enslavement. Abraham Lincoln’s 1860 presidential win was the final straw: In the months following his election, 11 slaveholding states seceded from the United States, announced the formation of a southern Christian Nationalist confederacy, took up arms and commenced a four-year war against the United States. One Confederate Christian minister spoke for many when, in apocalyptic terms, he celebrated the South’s triumph over “the final antichrist” — abolitionists.
Perceiving themselves to be on the side of God, abolitionists in the North found their own militant cause in fighting for the United States and against the slaveholding South. “Young Men’s Christian Associations and the United States Christian Commission brought evangelical Christianity to the battlefields and launched not a few careers,” in the words of historian Margaret Lamberts Bendroth. The Christian Commission, founded to support American soldiers, “mobilized more than 5,000 lay and clergy volunteers in charitable and evangelistic work in Union army camps and battlefields. This enthusiasm carried over into the post-Civil War decades,” Bendroth notes.
During the American Civil War over slavery, the northern “Battle Hymn of the Republic” was composed. Baptizing the Union Army as fighting for a holy cause, the song, Bendroth observes, combined “conservative Christianity and military-mindedness” and united “the Protestant God with the United States military during a time of war.” Sung in many congregations perceiving human freedom for all to be God’s will, the song evoked battlefield salvation in the words “As He [Jesus] died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.” In the war for freedom, the song evoked God’s holy vengeance — “His terrible swift sword” — in a biblical “Day of Judgment.”
Lincoln himself, an anti-slavery Baptist in his early years but unchurched in his adult life, marveled at God’s conflicted presence in what was officially known as the War of the Rebellion.
“Both [sides] read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other,” the president proclaimed in 1865 in his second inaugural address as Union victory seemed imminent. “The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.”
Unknowable musings about God aside, dueling Christian Nationalist movements emerged in the war over slavery and appropriated opposing gods for their own purposes. Both movements survived the war, and in time one of those two nationalist gods emerged victorious.
Decades after the Civil War, Theodore Roosevelt in a time of Protestant triumphalism rode a tough demeanor and perceived heroic military exploits all the way to the White House. Seen by some as a role model for young men, Roosevelt merged progressive policy with a righteous militant mindset, contributing to the emergence of “Muscular Christianity.” Seeking to reclaim from women the high ground of morality and religion, the movement sought to “extend the influence of a manly, vigorous Christianity throughout society,” in the words of one historian. But soon Roosevelt’s muscular Christianity gravitated away from progressives and into emerging fundamentalism.
Incorporating militant imagery into his sermons, famed evangelist Billy Sunday insisted that Christians be both “militant” and “persuasive” and “fight as well as pray,” likening faith to “a warrior invading an enemy’s country.” Concurrently, early fundamentalist theology also embraced a modern belief system long deemed heretical: premillennial dispensationalism.
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Formulated in the first half of the 19th century, premillennial dispensationalism lifted the biblical books of Daniel and Revelation out of their ancient historical context and dropped them into modern times. In this new theology abusive of the Bible, an Antichrist would arise and rule for seven years, followed by the literal return of a warrior Christ who would crush evil, save the planet and afterward rule over Earth for a thousand years. Initially dismissed as nonsense, the theological heresy of premillennial dispensationalism meshed with 20th century fundamentalism’s militant Christianity.
With militant Christianity rising, World War I created a rift. Many Christians initially opposed the war, often preaching peace, reflective of the pacifistic teachings of Jesus and early Christians. Nonetheless, when the U.S. entered the war in 1917, American Christianity broadly embraced as a sacred cause the war against the German Empire and its allies. “The flag and the Cross,” one prominent Christian leader declared, “are now both working for the same ends.” American flags marched into some church sanctuaries.
Post-war prosperity [for some] followed in the 1920s. White American Christianity perceived God’s hand upon their powerful nation. Then came national despair during the Great Depression, calling into question America’s greatness. At the same time, a second great European war arose, with Germany once again on the offensive. As Hitler’s white Christian Nazis toppled Germany’s democracy, persecuted Jews and marched across Europe, a pro-Nazi movement grew in America. Comprised of millions of white Christians, the movement perceived President Franklin D. Roosevelt to be evil and Hitler good, benign or irrelevant. Their isolationist “America First” demands for staying out of the European war initially prevailed. Only after the Dec. 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor did the movement back down.
Suddenly, the nation at large openly perceived Hitler to be a threat to democracy. Many — FDR included — increasingly framed the European conflict as good versus evil. Declaring the apocalyptic biblical End Times at hand — and hence the return of Jesus imminent — during the years of America’s involvement in the greatest world war of all, many former Hitler apologists and others hailed “Christian America” as the world’s savior. American soldiers became “spiritual figures,” their deaths for a holy cause.
“No compromise with Satan is possible,” one radio broadcast intoned. Also on the radio, FDR prayed for American soldiers who were at the forefront of a “struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity” from the “unholy forces” of the Axis. “The grim G.I.,” wrote religion scholar Edward Tabor Linenthal, was “seen as the soldier of the Lord, doing the sordid job of wiping out hideous evil.”
On the home front, American flags were raised in seemingly most church sanctuaries, often alongside the Christian flag. Following the war, anti-communist fervor in the 1950s brought yet more American flags into church sanctuaries to stay. Since then, many churches have also set aside the Sunday on or nearest July 4 for the honoring of Christian soldiers.
Increasingly within many congregations, however, parishioners’ once-simple patriotism has been transformed into triumphant Christian Nationalism embodied by Pete Hegseth.
Two-and-a-half centuries after the nation’s founding, the Christian Nationalizing of the United States military has reached greater heights still during the Trump era. According to a 2019 Congressional Research Service study, about 70% of troops consider themselves to be Christian. [By way of comparison, approximately 60-65% of the nation’s population identifies as Christian, the number steadily dropping.] But that’s not good enough for Trump-allied Christian Nationalists who are determined to eradicate constitutional church-state separation by implementing their theological beliefs into military policy.
Channeling Dominionism, Project 2025’s Defense Department policy chapter includes Christian Nationalists’ check list of abolishing diversity, equity and inclusion offices and staffs; revoking the coverage of travel costs for troops seeking reproductive care; and erasing perceived “Marxist indoctrination and divisive critical race theory programs.” Trump has gone even further, calling for using the military against “radical-left lunatics,” the “enemy from within.”
Some of the Jan. 6, 2021, white Christian Nationalist domestic terrorists warned that their failed assault on America’s democracy was but the beginning of a “second Civil War.” On Jan. 20, 2025, that “second Civil War” will move forward, with Christian Nationalists primed to conquer, purify and deploy our nation’s armed forces against their fellow Americans.
This article was originally published in the July/August 2024 issue of Church & State magazine, a project of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. It is reprinted here with permission.
