Pete Hegseth Is on a Christian Crusade
Trump's nominee for defense secretary thinks public schools are brainwashing kids, and wants to put God in the classroom—and the Left is to blame for everything
Due to some serious allegations leveled at Pete Hegseth, he looks like a long shot to land the top job at the Defense Department. But on Friday, Dec. 6, President-elect Donald Trump took to his social media channel to profess support for the Fox TV co-host.
All you need to know about the mind of Pete Hegseth is laid out in his books, including his histrionic bestseller from 2022, “Battle for the American Mind”. The book, co-written with David Goodwin, is a gem of culture war simplicity and Christian nationalist saber-rattling. The book purports to be an effort to save our public school system in its subtitle: Uprooting a Century of Miseducation.
The fawning quotes of the book jacket tell you all you need to know about the target audience: “Pete Hegseth brilliantly exposes the undercurrents of wayward indoctrination in American education,” writes Kayleigh McEnany. Ben Shaprio says, “Pete Hegseth is a patriot, and as such he is unwilling to abandon the educational system to predations of the militant Left.”
Tucker Carlson offers a quote about kids learning to hate our society, claiming “Pete Hegseth has seen it, and in this book, he's got a solution.” However, the most to-the-point quote on the back of this best seller comes from John MacArthur. I'll quote him in full: “It is time to rethink the importance of education and bring it back under the Lordship of Christ. This work pulls back the veil to reveal the sinister agenda of progressive education and prescribes a little-known antidote that will, with the grace of our Lord, have a real impact on the future of our kids.”
Hegseth argues that America's failing schools need to adopt a Classical Christian education (CCE). On the whole, the book is a product of our politically divisive times. On the website Goodreads, for example, the reviews are overwhelmingly five stars or one star—love it or hate it. Readers describe the book as a “must-read” salvation for our failing education system, or “a mess of indoctrination and lies”. Readers say the book is “very well written” and “the use of the Bible is excellent,” or call it “completely irrational garbage” that includes scare tactics, us/them narratives, and propaganda.
Hegseth, a co-host of Fox and Friends Weekend, offers no actual reporting or desire to present unbiased information. The book is a screed filled with vague descriptions, anecdotes, and simplistic culture war antagonism. There isn't any attempt to wrangle with statistics and studies or contradictory information. This is a one-sided doom-and-gloom narrative that serves only to place all blame for our education system's shortcomings on the evil progressive Left, the Marxists, and the critical race theory (CRT) crowd.
A Lack of Specifics
“Battle for the American Mind” introduces itself in the hyperventilating language of an author looking to provoke a panic attack and use emotional triggers to blind you to his intellectually flaccid argument. Purportedly, the book is all about "preparing students for the new industrial economy", as early progressives called it. "But now, after 16,000 hours of K-12 indoctrination,” writes Hegseth, “our kids come out of government schools hating America. They roll their eyes at religion and disdain our history. We spend more money on education than ever, but kids can barely read and write — let alone reason with discernment."
I'll be discussing Hegseth's ability—or, lack thereof—to reason with discernment. But, first, you need to understand that the obvious antidote to this inability to reason is religion—Christianity in particular. The book argues in favor of slipping religion into schools through the back door—because all current “progressive” education is conspiratorial and immoral brainwashing. Christianity could never, on the other hand, be considered indoctrination nor brainwashing.
The assumption here seems to be that Christian faith only inspires good in the world. In Hegseth's view, Christianity can do no wrong—and everything else is a cesspool of mind rot and soul-sucking Marxism.
Hegseth does a poor job of defining the boogeymen and evils he is fighting so desperately against in an effort to reclaim the American mind. For one, critical race theory (or, “CRT”). It's mentioned on 18 pages in the book, but is never defined.
For all its successes, Christianity has failed to agree on its particulars so spectacularly that some four hundred different denominations exist today in the United States. That's because our secular government abides by a Constitution that establishes freedom of religion. Although the Declaration of Independence mentions human equality granted by a Creator who's endowed us with "certain unalienable Rights," the Declaration is a pronouncement. The Constitution—which uses moral reasoning but mentions no higher power—is governing law.
What other clear-eyed religiosity can we expect in the upcoming Trump term? Take Vice President-elect J.D. Vance. He converted to Catholicism well after the sexual abuse scandal that revealed the Catholic Church's massive, decades-long coverup of crimes committed by pedophiles in their ranks. Hallelujah! Bishops, archbishops and even popes failed to address the abuse, which allowed perverts wearing the holy cloth to molest even more children. Does that make you feel comfortable putting God back in the middle of the classroom? Might we also discuss the abusive nuns at Catholic orphanages and Native American boarding schools? Something tells me these inconvenient truths aren't included in CCE religious history coursework.
To be fair, Pete Hegseth is not Catholic. He says he attends a Baptist church. He does so thanks to our freedom of religion (granted by our secular Constitution, not Christianity). Will all Christian denominations be invited to help revamp our education system? How about other religions that, perhaps, think that God by another name (or a multitude of polytheistic gods) should be at the center of the classroom? Is Christianity the only possible source of morality tales to steer our culture's value system?
Given the evangelical community's support of Trump, it's clear that evangelicals would be overrepresented. But what about the Quakers? The Mennonites? Pentecostals? Prosperity gospel TV preachers with enormous mansions thanks to tax-exempt status? Are we letting Mormons in on the deal? The Seventh-Day Adventists might want a say. Lutherans want a seat at the table. The Amish want in, but travel by buggy is too cumbersom, and they won't get on Zoom.
Is this really the best we can do with education and the culture war—pollute it with religious indoctrination? Our soldiers fought and died valiantly for our freedoms—including our freedom of religion. Pete Hegseth served in the military and did so honorably. I'd like to think he served because he loves this country more than to try to impose his religion on American kids through the cudgel of education. Putting Christian teachings in public schools would, by definition, be a violation of our Constitutional guarantee to freely exercise a religion of our own choosing—or to not do so at all.
“Battle for the American Mind” tries to convince us that public education is a wasteland that needs religion. In these collegiate “indoctrination camps,” individuals possess no ability to filter the information presented to them, nor have the initiative to pursue any education on their own. Students, apparently, are mindless sponges that just get brainwashed because of intellectual turpitude.
What's the proof? It's all anecdotal. Hegseth provides few citations and makes plenty of straw man arguments. This is not a serious enterprise. He quotes one unnamed teacher about her classroom, and then uses the opinion to generalize about every school district in America being a disaster. When talking about Common Core, enacted by President Obama in 2010, Hegseth quotes an unnamed teacher to make a grand generalization. Guess what gets no mention? No Child Left Behind, which preceded Common Core and was enacted by Republican President George W. Bush.
Hegseth says near the end of the book that he is a graduate of Princeton and Harvard, "yet I've never read most of the classics.” He goes on to mention Homer, Virgil, Plato and Aristotle. “I've read next to nothing of them in school,” he writes. Who chose his course load? I attended a California State University and had no problem registering for classes that exposed me to the Western canon. I read most of those classic authors—because I chose to do so. I took a class on Shakespeare. Why didn't Hegseth? I read "The Republic" by Plato on my own time and other philosophers of antiquity in an entry-level philosophy course. Pete Hegseth could have easily done the same.
What a tragedy that Hegseth can blame his lack of initiative on an imaginary brainwashing operation. Don't take my word for it. Go to the Princeton English Department web page. There are four classes that teach Shakespeare. Why didn't Hegseth just take one of them? He could have read Chaucer, as well, in English 200 or English 311, just as I did at a state university.
At Harvard, Hegseth could have enrolled in English 121s: Shakespeare from Beginning to End, which is a survey of his plays and poems. He could have taken Humanities 10a, which discusses not only Shakespeare, but also Descartes, Kafka, and Marx. He could have avoided all the indoctrination if only he'd signed up for English 325 at Princeton and studied John Milton. No one was stopping him.
Better still, I would have loved to read Hegseth's response to attending English 207 at Princeton, which is titled “What is Socialism? Literature and Politics”. Here, Hegseth could have read classic socialist philosophy, literature and political writings, and fielded this question posed in the class description: “Are socialist ethics connected to religious traditions such as Christianity and Islam that teach human equality?”
It's sad that Hegseth wants to condemn our entire education system when the obvious antidote was right in front of his nose. A lack of initiative and intellectual curiosity are the real culprits here—not the restrictions of an indoctrination camp. Books are wonderful things. The classics have not been banned. They're housed in the campus library.
As a fan of the humanities and classic texts, I am concerned about some of the curriculum that has replaced the Western canon. I believe in the mission to teach students how to think critically, how to analyze, and how to get in touch with the foundations of Western culture and its intellectual traditions. But just because our universities are falling short in this regard and embracing trendy social theories and abstract theorizing that is too often argued in opaque and unintelligible rhetoric, does not mean that it is all indoctrination. It does not mean that a failure to read the literary classics teaches students to hate our country. Just look at Hegseth himself. He doesn't hate our country, and he couldn't find his way to reading most of the Western greats.
Hegseth complains that schools no longer teach Greek or Latin, and that's worth discussing. For one, Americans are pathetically monolingual, lagging way behind European students. But does learning to read and speak Greek or Latin as part of a Classical Christian education really make students hate our country less and be closer to God? Does knowledge of ancient Greek culture really lead to an acceptance of Christian faith and aesthetics? The Greek and Roman gods might beg to differ.
Hegseth does a poor job of defining the boogeymen and evils he is fighting so desperately against in an effort to reclaim the American mind. For one, critical race theory (or, “CRT”). It's mentioned on 18 pages in the book, but is never explained. Similarly, cultural Marxism is mentioned on 15 pages, but I finished the book with no better idea of what it is. According to Hegseth, cultural Marxism “is now based in pseudo-virtues that do not include Christian tolerance,” he writes. “They now want to control what you believe and think.” So, what is it the Marxists want us to believe? Hegseth fails to clarify.
It's a shallow argument. Doesn't Christianity tell you what to believe? Don't churches want to control you? Doesn't Christianity come with a set of beliefs you must accept if you want to be forgiven for your sins and have your soul go to Heaven? How do you base school instruction around a single religion yet not push that faith to the point of attempted indoctrination?
Hegseth doesn’t seem to realize his own flimsy argumentation. Had he bothered to pick up Plato, he could have become familiar with Socrates. The socratic method (which he says he never learned) questioned the validity of belief in the ancient Greek gods. This search for wisdom, by extension, can be used to question the validity of any faith, including that of modern Christianity.
This book declares an understanding that "human nature—imprinted on our hearts by our Creator—does not change". For asking questions about such suppositions about gods and human nature, in his search for wisdom, Socrates was put to death.
Rationalizing Political Violence
Hegseth isn't just ham-fisted about teaching Christianity; he weaves in other fetishes of the political right. For one, climate change gets mentioned repeatedly because it is, of course, an agenda of the Left. The Bible says nothing of climate change, so I guess it's all a hoax. So much for scientific inquiry in this so-called education.
Hegseth goes on to mention cancel culture and shaming—and he has a point here about the excesses of the politically correct. The tendency to shout people down for presumed evils, the canceling of controversial speakers, and the like, has no place in a truly free society. It is antithetical to having an open dialog on a university campus. But Hegseth goes on to call corporations and government bureaucracies that play woke politics “the new priests of the progressive gospel” in a pitch to make the reader paranoid of being controlled by woke product marketing and a woke deep state.
What are these cancel culture priests going to do? “You'd better take a knee during the national anthem, or else!” taunts Hegseth, as if unaware that it was the NFL that ruined Colin Kaepernick's football career for just that—taking a knee during the national anthem.
But here's the big rub: In his previous book, "American Crusade" from May 2020, Hegseth didn't swear off violence. He opened up its possibility. "Our American Crusade is not about literal swords," he wrote, "and our fight is not with guns. Yet."
In "Battle for the American Mind," Hegseth declares, “Not every left-leaning American is willing to rationalize violence yet, but this is where we are headed.” Note the speculative "yet" once again. To write this just a year-and-a-half after the January 6, 2021, attack on our Capitol by alt-right political groups with paramilitary gear and weapons, is comically delusional. But it's not surprising. He has rationalized the violence of the Christian Crusades, which included mass killings of Muslims and Jews.
"Yet" did not last long. But it was alt-right paramilitary goons who attacked our Capitol over Trump's bogus lies about election fraud. Does Hegseth not remember Trump's words on the Ellipse before his conspiracy-believing supporters stormed the Capitol? Where was the Left rationalizing violence? This is one-sided and selective memory, at best.
Say what you want about violence at BLM marches—condemn all political violence and the property damage caused by rioters. Decry the thieves who took advantage of protest crowds and looted stores. But stop ignoring the rising instances of right-wing political violence fueled by slander and violent rhetoric. We know what we saw. We know what we heard. It was the Right who chanted to hang the vice president and assaulted police officers. And it was Republican politicians who failed to hold Trump accountable. Hegseth's paranoia about political violence from the Left is disgustingly disingenuous. Shall we revisit the case of the alt-right extremist who shot and killed a federal security officer in Oakland, California, at a BLM march in May 2020?
Since Hegseth hinted that we are facing a future where the Left rationalizes violence, it only follows to also ask who is responsible for the rising tide of mass shootings in America. More often than not, the sociopath is right-wing, not left-wing, if a political motivation is found. When someone shoots up a supermarket or synagogue, how often are we pointed to a Marxist manifesto? Many of these hateful, racist or anti-Semite gunmen have far-right beliefs motivating their sick behavior. Check the FBI statistics. You can't just blame the Left.
It's not just in America. The mass shooter of two synagogues in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March 2019 left behind a far-right, white supremacist and anti-Muslim manifesto. The manifesto also mentions the Christian Crusades.
A Blurring of Church and State
For years, the Republican party has been beholden to the National Rifle Association. In refusing to enact gun control legislation, the GOP has worshiped the sanctity of the Second Amendment. The amendment is all of twenty-seven words. Yet, it would seem that the GOP believes the right to bear arms in a "well regulated militia" to counter governmental power, expands to allow every hateful psychopath in America to arm themselves like a one-man army. In doing so, we've failed to protect the rights of school children to pursue life, liberty, and happiness. School shootings increased 124 percent in one year, from the 2020-21 school year to the following year. In those two years, there were 1,375 school shootings at elementary and secondary schools. More than 1,100 people were injured. Five hundred and fifteen people died.
So, how about the First Amendment? It's slightly longer, and explicitly says "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof".
Does Hegseth respect this amendment as much as Republicans worship their purist interpretation of the Second Amendment? No way. He throws the First Amendment under the bus. "What should the relationship between the state and church be?" he writes. "Rather than adhering to a trite phrase 'separation of church and state,' CCE students know the source, and why the idea of separation is not what it's presented to be by the Left. As a Christian, should you take a political position? Should you speak boldly about the course of our leaders?...Rather than being told what to think, CCE students have the tools to think well."
Not that well, apparently. This invitation to inject religion into government like a vaccine against evil isn't even unanimous among Christians. Plenty of Christians want to worship the way they want, and want to instruct their children in faith the way they choose—not however the government school decides to interpret the word of God.
To Hegseth, the separation of church and state enshrined in the First Amendment is a tool of the Left. His argument can't pass a smell test. This is a "classical" education that sidesteps the indoctrination of Marxists? The First Amendment also forbids Congress from "abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press". Does Hegseth consider these phrases equally trite? Does a CCE constitutional law course teach students that they can throw out whatever parts of a Constitutional amendment they don't like, but keep the phrases that sit well with their religious objectives? Sounds to me like trying to justify ripping up the Constitution.
Hegseth claims that the Founding Fathers wanted Christianity in education. What's his proof? Only three of the nine quotes he cites from the Founding Fathers even mention God. The Founding Fathers speak of freedom, virtue and knowledge. He quotes James Madison: "The advancement and diffusion of knowledge is the only guardian of true liberty". Madison didn't mention God. But, once again, the only interpretation in this book is that the only source of knowledge is God.
This book is essentially a Christian educational pitch dressed up in the clothes of ancient Greece. The Classical Christian education sounds enticing when they're talking about philosophy, cardinal virtues, the Trivium, history, Socratic discussion, and the like. Not all CCE programs are the same, of course, but this curriculum description from the Association of Classical Christian Schools in Moscow, Idaho, struck me: "Theology is the queen of the sciences, with all subjects understood through the revealed word of God and natural/human history and philosophy".
That sounds terribly reductionist and dangerous. Theology is the queen of the sciences? The pursuit of science is a process, not a conclusion. The last time I checked, the revealed word of God was over two thousand years old. Scientists have learned a lot since then. Would you see a doctor who said he would be using theology to help interpret a physical malady you were suffering from?
If students are having to understand the theory of evolution or modern virology, biology or chemistry "through the revealed word of God," I'd say that those students are more likely to build a "life-sized" replica of Noah's Ark than to make any actual scientific discovery.
It's a TV Show, After All
In the end, "Battle for the American Mind" is a very unserious—and dangerous—book. That a book purportedly about classical education would veer into the author's distorted view of who's responsible for political violence is enough proof of that. Add to it Hegseth's efforts to trivialize the separation of church and state, and you have a recipe for theocracy. As described in this book, teaching the classics is just a cover for putting Christian indoctrination in schools.
Why are we backsliding on this issue? For one, we are witnessing a trend: mediocre intellects making the leap to politics using fame achieved on TV or social media. The cost of entry to be a culture warrior on social media is zero. Fame acquired on the boob tube keeps blurring the line between entertainment and statecraft. We watch too much TV and spend too much time on TikTok. Name recognition is everything. We like famous people and influencers. We crave entertainment. We can't sit through long slogs of legislative prescriptions. Trump's list of cabinet nominees is a direct acknowledgement of this superficiality. Trump is building a political-entertainment industrial complex filled with telegenic lightweights with little valuable experience.
Sadly, our Founding Fathers did not have the prescience to write an amendment that might effectively counter this narcotic of mass media TV fame. Now, a president-elect who played a tough boss on his "reality" TV show, has nominated a Fox TV personality to act like he can lead the most powerful military in the history of the world. Hegseth's beliefs and conspiratorial mindset seem primed to arm our military for a Christian Crusade. And it will all be made for TV.
In "Battle for the American Mind," Hegseth blames progressive K-12 education for rotting the minds of Americans. Now, he's willing to work for a pathological liar who's obliterated political norms, doesn't respect the Constitution or our institutions, is hawking a $60 Bible, and has promised a spree of politically motivated vengeance. And now, on December 6, we all learned that Elon Musk spent more than $260 million dollars to help elect Donald Trump.
If anything, the re-election of Trump is proof that our school system has not brainwashed us nearly enough.