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Let It Burn!
A reminder of who our new Defense Secretary is- Pete Hegseth's mother begged him to "get some help" — instead, he joined a grossly misogynist church; leader argues that men "dream of being rapists" because women aren't submissive enough
Pete Hegseth's church teaches extreme female submission
The denomination's leader argues men "dream of being rapists" because women aren't submissive enough
www.salon.com
Even by the reality-TV chaos standards of our political moment, this one was a doozy: Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump's nominee to lead the Department of Defense, called out as an "abuser of women" by his own mother in the pages of the New York Times. To be fair, Penelope Hegseth's 2018 email excoriating her son, who was then a Fox News contributor, was not intended for public consumption. But the email, which seems to have been passed around Hegseth's social circle at the time, was leaked to the Times over the weekend. In it, Penelope Hegseth calls her son a man who "belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego." Pete Hegseth, then 37 years old, was in the midst of his second divorce.
While Penelope Hegseth has since disavowed her 2018 declaration, those accusations were backed up by a New Yorker investigation showcasing years of complaints from colleagues that Hegseth ran his veterans organization in "a hostile and intimidating working environment," where sexual harassment — and even attempted sexual assault — was blown off or blamed on victims. Hegseth himself was characterized as a heavy drinker who "treated the organization funds like they were a personal expense account — for partying, drinking, and using [the organization's] events as little more than opportunities to ‘hook up’ with women on the road." This follows reports that Hegseth was accused of rape in 2017. Criminal charges were not filed, but Hegseth reportedly reached a financial settlement with the alleged victim in exchange for a non-disclosure agreement.
In joining a CREC church after two failed marriages, multiple adulteries, a rape accusation, and sexual harassment allegations, Hegseth is very much in line with Trump's belief in doubling down rather than accepting criticism.
In the years since, Hegseth — now on his third marriage — has claimed that he rediscovered Christ, saying "faith became real" to him in 2018. He became deeply involved with the Association of Classical Christian Schools (ACCS), moving to Tennessee to enroll his children in a branch of this fundamentalist organization. He also joined the associated denomination, the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches. Both are led by Doug Wilson, an untrained and self-proclaimed pastor who advocates for Christian nationalism and has become famous for his trollish promotion of his far-right political views. At the center of Wilson's philosophy is a misogyny so overt that it's sometimes hard to believe he's serious.
"Wilson holds the most extreme views of women’s submission found in any form of Christianity," Julie Ingersoll, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Florida, told Salon. "Women are taught that submission to their husbands (and other male authorities) is submission to God. Independence of any kind is cast as sin."
In one famous passage from his book on marriage, Wilson suggests that sexual violence is women's fault for not being submissive enough. "[T]he sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party," he writes. "A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts." The alleged failure of women to submit, he continues, leads men to "dream of being rapists," deprived of the "erotic necessity" found in women's submission. Nancy Wilson, Doug Wilson's wife, backs this view, comparing a wife to a "garden" cultivated for the husband's pleasure: "But of course a husband is never trespassing in his own garden."
Wilson has repeatedly denied that such teachings are a justification for marital rape, but interviews with members of his church and students from his schools suggest they were left with little room for interpretation. Sarah Stankorb, who reported on sexual and domestic violence in the CREC for Vice and Slate, told Salon that female church members she interviewed "understood that they must submit to their husbands in all things." In the church's marital counseling, "submission is often treated as a cure-all" and wives are instructed "to fix marital problems by being sexually available."
Podcaster Peter Bell and social media manager Sarah Bader have been producing a podcast about Wilson and the culture of abuse at CREC churches and ACCS schools, titled "Sons of Patriarchy." They've recorded a seemingly endless number of interviews with people who witnessed or survived sexual abuse or domestic violence — and documenting the unwillingness of CREC leaders to take it seriously. Bader told Salon women are told they are "accountable for all of their husband's sins" and that Wilson just "rewrapped rape as 'submission.'" Students at ACCS schools who said they were sexually abused by teachers reported being blamed for causing the older men to "stumble." Women say they've been blamed for being raped, for husbands who abuse alcohol and for men's infidelity.
