https://youtu.be/DecoZs9WCFI?si=3fDjXeZ0SfxWl78D
https://open.substack.com/pub/paulstreet/p/horrific-white-christian-fascism
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I Can’t Believe These Trump Clips Aren’t Everywhere
Horrific White Christian Fascism atop the Pentagon
The US “Secretary of War” in prayer with a pastor who looks back kindly on Black chattel slavery
The mainstream Washington DC-based political journal The Hill chillingly reports that:
“A controversial Christian nationalist pastor who has argued that women should be denied the right to vote led a worship service at the Pentagon this week at the invitation of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Doug Wilson delivered a 15-minute sermon Tuesday as part of a monthly Christian worship series started by Hegseth at the Department of Defense (DOD) this past May. In his sermon, which was broadcast live on the Pentagon’s internal TV network, Wilson said he prayed for ‘a black swan revival,’ or another great awakening of Christianity in the country….A DOD account on social media later posted a photo of Hegseth praying with his hand on Wilson’s shoulder and stating: ‘We have gathered at the Pentagon for our monthly worship service. We are One Nation Under God.’”
The Hill reports that Hegseth is a member of Wilson’s church, the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches. It quotes Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson (no relation) on why Hegseth invited Doug Wilson to preach at the Pentagon:
“Secretary Hegseth, along with millions of Americans, is a proud Christian and was glad to welcome Pastor Wilson to the Pentagon on Tuesday. The Christian faith is woven deeply into the fabric of our nation. Despite the Left’s efforts to remove our Christian heritage from our great nation, Secretary Hegseth is among those who embrace it.”
The Hill notes that pastor Wilson professes the following beliefs: homosexuality should be criminalized; women must be obedient to the commands of their husbands; the 19th Amendment granting voting rights to women should be repealed; southern slave-owners were on “firm scriptural ground.”
The Hill quotes Fred Wellman, a Democratic congressional candidate who says that Hegseth’s platforming of pastor Wilson is “an unconstitutional and extreme attack on the 1st Amendment”[1] whereby “Hegseth is using his official position to make his religion the official one of the Department of Defense using official facilities, communications channels and personnel.”
The Hill might have also mentioned the fact that Hegseth attended the opening of Wilson’s church in Washington DC last year and that Wilson is on record with the alarming belief that the best period in the history of US race relations was the era of Black chattel slavery. More than two decades, Wilson and a co-author wrote the following in a book titled Southern Slavery as it Was: “Slavery as it existed in the South … was a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence…There has never been a multiracial society which has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world…Slave life was to them [slaves] a life of plenty, of simple pleasures, of food, clothes, and good medical care.”[2]
The Hill might have noted the absurdity of Kingsley Wilson’s claims that there is a relevant “Left” seeking to eliminate American Christianity and that (more on this below) Wilson and Hegseth represent “the Christian faith” and “our Christian heritage” in general.
The big thing missing in The Hill’s report is the real horror and real nature of Doug Wilson’s beliefs, shared by the maniacal far-right self-described Crusader atop the most lethal imperialist military in world history.
“Controversial” and “Christian nationalist”? Try genocidally racist, white nationalist, and indeed Christian fascist. This arch-reactionary motherfucker Doug Wilson and his deranged acolyte Pete Hegseth want to repeal every civil and social right won in American through courageous and often bloody struggle from the bottom up by masses of oppressed people. They pine for the restoration of racial and gender slavery, the incarceration and torture of gay and trans people, the prohibition of free speech and assembly, and more terrible to contemplate, all in the name of “One Nation Under God.”
The revolutionary communist leader Bob Avakian has been warning us for many years about the danger of Amerikkkan Christian fascism. As Avakian wrote in July of 2024, while Trump was claiming that God had just saved his life during an alleged assassination attempt: “Chistian fascism is not the same as Christianity in general as a religion: Christian fascism is a form of Christian fundamentalism, a fanatically anti-scientific lunacy marked by determination to reverse even the partial gains that have been made in the struggle against injustice and oppression over the past 75 years.” Avakian noted the Christian theologian James Luther Adams’ warning that “American fascists would not come wearing swastikas and brown shirts [like the German Nazis]. The American variety [of fascists], he said, would come carrying crosses and chanting the Pledge of Allegiance.” [3]
That’s exactly what we see with the open Christian fascist “crusader,” Pete Hegseth, rechristened Secretary of War by the corrupt fascist leader Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump. Speaking to 800-plus top military brass called to Quantico from across the vast US global military empire last September, Hegseth railed about America “warriors’” need to replace “tepid legality with maximum lethality.” Speaking after Hegseth, Trump himself informed the commanders that the “War Department’s” lethality needs to be directed against the nation’s top adversary, “the enemy within,” by which Trump meant everybody to the “radical” left of Dear Leader Trump, with a special emphasis on the nation’s majority nonwhite Democratic Party-run cities.
Truth is these fascists are taking aim at gains won during the Civil War (the abolition of slavery and birthright citizenship) and the Progressive Age (women’s suffrage)!
Why does the demented neofascist Christian white nationalist “crusader” Hegseth sit atop the “War Department,” along with the unqualified MAGA general Dan “Raizin” Cain, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff? Because of his willingness to do something Trump45’s Defense chiefs refused to do: deploy the US armed forces in American streets to crush resistance to the Amerikaner fascist[4] agenda if “necessary.”
“Carrying crosses and chanting the Pledge of Allegiance”: a Christian fascist crusader eager to rape America and the world with the US military under his, Trump’s, and God’s command.
Notes
+1. The actual language of the First Amendment is rather restricted. It prohibits Congress from making laws “respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” That said, the Supreme Court has subsequently imposed a “high and impregnable wall,” mandating government neutrality and blocking state-funded and state-mandated religious activities. We may not want to see the current Trump-crafted Supreme Court make a definitive ruling on “the establishment clause.”
+2. For proof that the truth of slavery was precisely the opposite – ruthless and bloody exploitation and indeed torture of Black slaves in service to profit – see The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery the Making of American Capitalism (Basic Books, 2014), partially reviewed in Paul Street, This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America (New York: Routledge, 2021), pp. 230-231.
+3. I am sadly aware that the mere mention of Avakian’s name sets alight the underclothes and skin of many “left intellectuals” who have read barely a word from his prolific historical and philosophical body of work. The truth is that Avakian has been eloquently and learnedly warning about Amerikan Christian fascism for a least three decades now.
+4. Meaning white supremacist, arch-patriarchal, xenophobic nationalist, and dictatorial, with a strong “Christian” fundamentalist flavor in the American historical context.
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