¿Por qué Pete Hegseth está expulsando a las mujeres del mando?

On a brilliantly sunny day in early May, I found myself in Moscow, Idaho, eating brunch with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s spiritual leader, Doug Wilson. We dove into the quiche, studded with bits of bacon and onion, prepared by his wife, Nancy, as we sat in the sun-drenched breakfast nook of their compound, high on a hill above rolling farmland. The emerald-green wheat fields below looked like a golf course for giants. Wilson, a self-proclaimed Christian nationalist, is the 73-year-old senior pastor and founder of Christ Church, a congregation of approximately 3,000 in Moscow. But his influence extends far beyond this small town. Wilson has spoken at high-profile conservative events, including the 2024 National Conservatism conference, where then-Sen. JD Vance was also a headliner. He appeared on a political strategy panel with Russell Vought, President Donald Trump’s Office of Management and Budget director and a key architect of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 conservative blueprint. He’s also the co-creator of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, a global network of 160 congregations — including the one Hegseth attends in Washington, DC. A few months before my visit to Idaho, Hegseth had invited Wilson to the Pentagon to deliver a sermon to troops and officials on the importance of faith in times of war. A core tenet of Wilson’s beliefs is that a patriarchal society, what he calls “biblical masculinity,” is both a religious mandate and “cultural gluten,” as he wrote in his 2023 book, Mere Christendom. “Without it, the cookie just crumbles to pieces in your hand, and is tasteless on top of that.” In a previous book, Fidelity: How to Be a One-Woman Man, he wrote: “The sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.” For that reason, he went on, the dynamic of a dominant man and a submissive woman is “an erotic necessity.” As Wilson put it in an interview with CNN last year: “Women are the kind of people that people come out of.” He also has called feminists “a large army of singularly unattractive and bitchy women” and said women serving in the military are “ loathsome ” to God — an observation that may inform Hegseth’s hostility to women in senior military leadership. In all matters, he believes, wives should defer to their husbands, the “covenant heads” of the family. Women shouldn’t assume church leadership roles, or speak in church, and heads of households, overwhelmingly male, should vote on behalf of their entire families. For the last two years, as I’ve covered the rise of Christian nationalism, Wilson and I have developed a mildly adversarial email rapport. I ask questions; he answers, sometimes working in a little dig, like calling Mother Jone s a “commie publication.” As Hegseth was bragging about his “ kinetic strikes ” on narco-terrorist vessels and then launching the attack on Iran, I began to realize that the secretary’s determination to eradicate “woke” from the US military tracks consistently with Wilson’s teaching of a warrior-like Christian faith. So I decided it was time Wilson and I met in person. I invited myself to Moscow, and he graciously accepted. Over the course of my five-day trip, I had unprecedented access to the world he has carefully built, which serves as a model for what he imagines a Christian United States might someday look like. I would meet happy and prosperous famil