Looking for a Holy War
Samuel P. Perry January/February 2026The quiet rise of a little-known sect with big plans for America.
On September 30, 2025, United States senior military leadership converged on Washington at the behest of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. The lead-up to the meeting raised eyebrows. Gathering generals and high-ranking military officials in one place rarely happens, especially on short notice. During his remarks Hegseth told the convened brass, “Real toxic leadership is promoting destructive ideologies that are an anathema to the Constitution and the laws of nature and nature’s God, as Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence.’’ As a rhetorical scholar who researches the church denomination to which Hegseth belongs, my attention was particularly caught by this line. If put into the context of Hegseth’s public facing theology, it conveys a troubling vision for America’s military and for those who value church-state separation.
Hegseth belongs to a Nashville congregation of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC) and has recently attended a newly planted CREC church in Washington, D.C. While students of history might note Jefferson’s secular leanings and deist tendencies, Hegseth resides in a religious world where invocations of God and God’s law are entwined with the very concept of nationhood. The CREC holds that the United States is a Christian nation. The Declaration of Independence is not a secular document. It teaches that secularism in almost any form, along with commonly held notions of the First Amendment’s establishment clause, are anathematic ideologies. In other words, for Hegseth and those in the CREC there is no separating the Constitution and the laws of God. His invocation of Jefferson is part of a retelling of American history central to the CREC’s Christian nationalist self-image.
Moreover, Hegseth’s view of himself as a culture warrior in the middle of a holy war aligns closely with CREC teachings. As Hegseth put it in his 2020 book, American Crusade, “Our American Crusade is not about literal swords, and our fight is not with guns. Yet.” The message from Hegseth is a stark one, pitting Americans against one another on the basis of their adherence to a particular brand of Christianity. It is also a message espoused by Doug Wilson, the patriarch of the CREC. In a 2021 YouTube video promoting anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, Wilson said, “We are not yet in a hot civil war, with shooting and all, but we are in a cold war/civil war.”
In order to understand what this might mean for the United States, its allies, and others who engage the American military, it helps to understand more about the CREC and its history. In a broader sense, understanding the CREC also helps to understand the growing hostility toward the establishment clause held by some on the right.
A Theocratic Blueprint
Founded in 1998, the CREC’s central beliefs revolve around Calvinism and covenant theology. It holds important the concept of paedobaptism, or infant baptism, which allows for the passage of the covenant through families already baptized into the church. CREC churches espouse the patriarchal concept of headship in families—men are the heads of household. Headship includes the idea that one household equals one vote and that only in rare occasions should women be politically enfranchised. According to CREC teachings, only in extreme cases should wives disagree with their husbands or tell them no. In a recent CNN interview, CREC pastor and founder Doug Wilson said, “Women are the kind of people that people come out of.” Wilson further explained in the interview that women submit to men and that while women have the same legal rights as men, they do not operate as equals in the household. Hegseth reposted the interview on X with the words “All of Christ, for All of Life.”
Prior to Hegseth’s nomination and confirmation as secretary of defense, Wilson long remained the most prominent member of the CREC. Wilson, who founded the CREC along with like-minded pastors, is the senior pastor at and founder of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho. He also founded Logos Schools, Logos Press, New Saint Andrews University, and Canon Press, all extensions of the church into areas of secular life. Wilson’s presence encompasses these entities in much the same way he argues that the church ought to encompass every aspect of private and public life.
Wilson says often, “All of Christ, for All of Life, for All of Moscow.” These words greet visitors to the website for Christ Church. By Wilson’s own account, theocracy inevitably flows from his “All of Christ, for All of Life” motto. That vision extends well beyond Moscow. Wilson has said, “I want the authority of the Lord Jesus to be confessed by the House and the Senate, and I want the president to sign it.” Wilson and other CREC clergy plainly state that non-Christians should not be allowed to hold political office in the United States, despite this explicitly violating the Constitutional mandate that no religious tests be required for a person to run for or hold office in the United States. For Wilson the establishment clause of the Constitution holds no validity. In his 2025 National Conservative Conference speech “The American Founding and the Golden Calf,” Wilson argues that there are two origin stories of the American founding. Wilson argues “regime historians” housed in universities and in the media promulgate the belief in the separation of church and state. This separation of the state is the golden calf, a false god that must be rooted out of American society. Instead, the United States, Wilson argues, “was a Christian nation at its founding” and cites what he labels “hard” and “soft” state-level religious establishments at the time of the founding. Wilson echoes thoroughly debunked accounts of the founding along the lines of those authored by David Barton. Wilson’s claim in the speech and in many other places is that his theology closely resembles the theology of the Founders. Historian Jon Fea writes, “Wilson is the latest in a long line of right-wing Christian activists to promote a flawed, tendentious reading of American history for their own ideological ends.”
Wilson’s revisionist history serves to create an ethos for CREC theology, which has been shaped by several influences. In some ways Wilson has continued in his family’s footsteps. His father, Jim Wilson, pastored a church in Moscow, Idaho, and owned a Christian bookstore. The elder Wilson wrote many books, among them Principles of War: A Handbook on Strategic Evangelism. The book suggests small to midsize college towns, such as Moscow, provide strategic spaces to institute a biblical worldview through attainment of local office, ownership of small businesses, and control of local institutions. The younger Wilson has stated many times that Moscow is ideal for his religious takeover for this reason—it’s small enough to take over but big enough to be influential. The elder Wilson’s book is sold primarily on a website that features prominent Christian Reconstructionist authors like Greg Bahnsen and Gary DeMar. Doug Wilson’s theology looks much like Christian Reconstructionism’s dominion theology and, when listening to Wilson’s sermons or reading his voluminous output of books and articles, one hears echoes of Rousas John Rushdoony and Gary North.
The CREC’s brand of dominion theology also aligns to some degree with the growing Pentecostal movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation, which was named by C. Peter Wagner in the mid-1990s. Both movements feature an emphasis on Christian leadership in government and other traditionally secular spaces. As sociologist Art Jipson explains, the NAR holds the Seven Mountain Mandate. This is an imperative to gain “Christian control of society through a strategy that Christians should infiltrate, influence and eventually control seven key areas in society—business, government, media, arts and entertainment, education, family, and religion.” While the CREC does not explicitly adhere to the Seven Mountain Mandate, the same total control over all aspects of life is summed up succinctly in the “All of Christ, for All of Life” motto championed by Wilson and other members of the CREC. The emphasis on theological and spiritual warfare in both the NAR and CREC heavily mirror each other. The emphasis on Christianity being tied to masculinity and masculinity being tied to waging war is also a primary feature of CREC theology. But perhaps the greatest similarity between Reconstructionism, the NAR, and Wilson’s CREC movement is the shared focus on Christian schools and homeschooling.
“Education is Warfare”
For the CREC, waging theological warfare involves creating warriors. This creation story centers on turning boys into men that espouse traditional and aggressive notions of masculinity. Wilson commonly refers to the network of schools he founded as “munitions factories” with students embodying weapons against secular society. CREC books on masculinity show a contempt for empathy and stress the need for men to rule over their households and society. In one Canon Press book, It’s Good to Be a Man: A Handbook for Godly Masculinity, the authors assert, “Men were made to rule. They always have and they always will. Nothing can change that.” In his book on classical Christian education, Pete Hegseth refers to the education of children as the 16,000-hour war, a reference to the time children spend in K-12 education.
While the CREC remains a relatively small denomination in terms of membership numbers, its schools and homeschooling networks have a broad reach. Despite the humble beginnings of Logos School in a basement in Moscow, the school and the network of schools it spawned has grown exponentially. Wilson founded the school when his wife expressed concerns about their daughters attending public schools. Across the country and internationally, the Logos online school now operates in 16 countries and has more than 2,000 students. Logos Press operates as an imprint in Wilson’s larger publishing house, Canon Press. The Logos schools website proudly proclaims that in 1991 “Wilson’s book Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning introduced the world to classical Christian education and the educational experiment called Logos School.” It is worth noting that private classical schools and religiously affiliated classical schools became popular in the 1970s as a means of defying public school integration and busing. Additionally, the Association of Classical Christian Schools (ACCS), which is an accrediting body founded by Wilson, counts 500 schools among its members and according to its website directs 50,000 parents a year to classical schools. The ACCS has a sister organization for colleges and universities, The Council of Classical Christian Colleges, which has 24 affiliate members across the country, including Wilson’s own New Saint Andrews College in Moscow.
In looking at the connections between CREC churches, CREC schools and homeschooling curriculum, and its vast publishing and media networks, the blueprint for a Christian nationalist theocracy comes into sharper focus. The Christian nationalist label, proudly self-applied from the pulpit, the classroom, the page, YouTube channels, and podcasts, carries with it a defiant opposition to secular society and pluralism. These schools feature curriculum published by the CREC’s publishing arm, Canon Press. The folks that write those curricula and books operate within CREC churches and schools in something of a feedback loop. Classical Christian education conceived of by the CREC feeds into the hyper-patriarchal worldview that Wilson and others in the church espouse, and aims to raise “dangerous Christian kids” who “leave craters in the world of secularism.”
Hegseth’s book with coauthor David Goodwin on the subject of classical Christian education, Battle for the American Mind: Uprooting a Century of Miseducation, gives insight into how the CREC views the “16,000-hour war” and how it might be expanded by focusing on the CREC’s retelling of American history and its founding. Goodwin, a friend of Doug Wilson’s, serves as the president of ACCS. Their book conceives of this expansion as taking place within the realm of classical Christian education. However, since Hegseth became the secretary of defense, the expansion of Hegseth and Goodwin’s vision has accelerated into a space traditionally thought of as secular or at least religiously pluralistic. In an op-ed for the Washington Times, Goodwin extols Hegseth’s anti-woke bona fides and explains how Hegseth intends to carry out President Trump’s directive to reshape the Department of Defense Education Activity (DODEA). The DODEA, with a $2.25 billion budget, runs military schools and the service academies and enrolls more than 65,000 students. In his op-ed, Goodwin muses about Hegseth implementing the principles of classical Christian education in these schools.
One sees reflections of the CREC’s teachings in Hegseth’s vision for the military with fewer women in roles of leadership and combat, and the removal of senior leadership that have previously espoused DEI programs and progressive programs. As Hegseth said when referencing diversity initiatives in his speech to the generals: “As I’ve said before and will say again, we are done with that s***.” In Hegseth’s emphasis on a warrior mentality it’s difficult not to hear the echoes of the holy warrior rhetoric of the CREC.
America’s military has long maintained the importance of avoiding religious favoritism or the appearance of waging holy wars. The coming years will show whether Hegseth’s leadership and Wilson’s influence makes this conventional understanding of the establishment clause a thing of the past.
Outside of Hegseth’s longevity in politics or Wilson’s cult of personality, the potential for the CREC and its networks to influence American politics remains a concern for those committed to the separation of church and state. The alternatives histories offered in school curriculum developed by the ACCS find their ways into educational spaces not directly identifiable as CREC affiliated. The books and online media find purchase in spaces beyond CREC churches and school with potential to normalize and amplify the message that evangelical Christians are at war with secular society and anyone unaligned with their religious beliefs.
Article Author: Samuel P. Perry
Samuel P. Perry, a scholar of race, religion, and rhetoric, is an associate professor at Baylor University, Texas. He is author of the book Rhetorics of Race and Religion on the Christian Right: Barack Obama and the War on Terror (Lexington Books, 2019).