No one could have predicted what lay ahead that day: a teenage girl living under Roman occupation sang a revolution into existence. Not a private lullaby, but a public announcement that reverberates over the millennia: Rulers would be brought down, and the lowly lifted up. The hungry would be fed, and the rich? They would leave with nothing.
“From now on,” Mary said, “all generations will call me blessed.” Mary the mother of Jesus spoke of the reordering of power and noticed those that empire refused to acknowledge. From the foundations of Christian and Jewish scripture — the ones Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth claims to espouse — women are taken seriously.
In the book of Numbers, God appears to humans as a pillar of clouds. In Exodus, a burning bush. If one believes the story set down in the book of Luke, that the God of the universe sent his son to earth, then he didn’t need a young, poor, single woman to deliver a messiah, he could have descended from the heavens in a blaze of glory for all to see.
Instead, in the Biblical account, he chose Mary, and in doing so, made Mary the single human individual who shall be called “blessed” by all who come after her.
Mary’s declarative poem or song, which Christian scripture refers to as the Magnificat, sits in stark contrast to the words spoken thousands of years later in a different public square, halfway across the globe. In it, one of the most powerful men in the United States — and by extension, the world — amplified, and presumably endorsed, a message that women should not vote.
This wasn’t a stray thumbs-up on a meme, Pete Hegseth intentionally reshared a CNN segment featuring pastor Doug Wilson that highlighted “household voting,” which is just a fancy way of saying, “Women should remain subservient to men and should not have the right to independently cast a ballot.” One pastor, part of Doug Wilson’s religious network, even said the 19th Amendment should be repealed.
In July, Hegseth sat in the pews for the launch of Christ Church DC, Wilson’s new outpost a few miles from the Capitol — an expansion both Hegseth and Wilson have framed as a “mission to Babylon.” The Pentagon’s chief spokesman has confirmed both Hegseth’s membership in Wilson’s church network and his appreciation for Wilson’s teachings.
Hegseth’s appearance at Wilson’s “mission to Babylon” is the culmination of a monthslong effort in which Hegseth has situated his role as secretary of defense in explicit proximity to Wilson and his Christian Nationalist beliefs. Wilson is an unapologetic advocate of a patriarchal political theology who says he wants “a Christian town… a Christian nation… [and] a Christian world.”
According to Wilson’s published and recorded work, votes for women — an effort that was largely spearheaded by Christian organizations like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union — are not a triumph of democratic inclusion, but instead something that has harmed families by making women too individualistic.
Wilson also notoriously defends enslavement: he co-wrote a booklet called “Southern Slavery: As It Was.” The booklet said that American chattel slavery created “mutual intimacy and harmony” between the races. (The booklet was found to have significant plagiarism.) In Wilson’s viewpoint, hierarchical social orders should exist in which [white?] men exert formal authority, women submit to them, and the harms of oppressive systems are simply swept under the rug as “regrettable.”
So when a sitting defense secretary endorses voices and churches like Wilson’s, the association isn’t casual, it’s an intentional signaling of what Pete Hegseth actually thinks.