Once a fringe warning, the threat to women’s right to vote is now out in the open—and in the halls of power.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reposted a video on Aug. 7 with the endorsement “All of Christ for All of Life,” in which a far-right conservative pastor argued that women should not have the right to vote. In the six-minute video, Doug Wilson, co-founder of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC) speaks to CNN, alongside a video of a pastor within CREC advocating for repealing the 19th Amendment, and another stating that only households should vote—strikingly similar to what Pastor Joel Webbon said last year.
A few weeks after the 2024 election, and a few months before the start of Trump 2.0, I warned Ms. readers that Pastor Joel Webbon, a Christian nationalist and president of the Right Response Ministry, stated on a podcast that he believes part of his vote was stolen from him as a result of the 19th Amendment, which cements women’s right to vote. Similar to Wilson, Webbon “allows” his wife to vote to reclaim that part of his vote, believing instead that families should vote as whole units, with men leading this decision-making and voting process. Wilson agrees, arguing that the country should follow his church’s example where only heads of households—male patriarchs—vote in church elections.
Webbon was one of several far-right Christian pastors, politicians and influencers who engaged in intense gender-based violence online immediately following Donald Trump’s election. Some conservative and moderate news outlets flagged this as an extreme example—but as we see this week, with a call issued by Kim Davis, the former Kentucky county clerk who denied a gay couple a marriage license, to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, queer and trans communities warning about an impending fight over LGBTQ+ marriage were right.
So Hegseth reposting this video raises concerns about the 19th Amendment. Webbon’s comments are incendiary, and he wields considerable influence—contributing to “The Statement on Christian Nationalism and the Gospel”—but Hegseth is a member of the president’s Cabinet and has considerable influence over the military. Just how much will Hegseth’s political influence give legitimacy and power to the ideas expressed in this video, in which the head of his own church network argues against women’s right to vote?
And he’s not the only one—other far-right Republicans have expressed similar beliefs, including Paul Ingrassia (Trump nominated him to the Office of Special Council) and Abby Johnson (an antiabortion activist advocating for head-of-household voting). In fact, people opposing women’s suffrage have long voiced this belief, but like the growth of the men’s liberation in the early 1970s amid the second-wave feminist movement, the modern growth of the “Manoverse”—Hegseth is both one of its influencers and one of the influenced—is empowering people with fringe, radical opinions to gain political stamina.
Hegseth said he is proud to be a member of CREC. In fact, the caption that he shared when reposting the image was the motto from the church—Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, that Wilson leads. As Wilson told the Associated Press yesterday, “he was, in effect, reposting it and saying, ‘Amen,’ at some level.” But a deeper dive into CREC reveals troubling gender politics where women cannot hold church leadership positions and married women are expected to submit to their husbands. One woman affirms this in the video Hegseth reposted.
As Brad Onishi, religious scholar and cohost of the Straight White American Jesus podcast, said in an interview with Laura Barrón-López for PBS News Hour last year, Wilson “doesn’t believe that women should have any authority in the home or in society, much less the church.”
Although Wilson argues against complementarianism—the idea that men and women have distinct God-ordained roles—he does argue, as he did in a conversation with Michael Foster, that certain roles are inherent to a person’s nature. It’s an inherently transphobic argument that argues even if a woman could fly a plane in combat or give a better sermon “it wouldn’t have been fitting with the nature of their being.”
“You can nail a nail in with a wrench—I’ve had to do it before—but that’s not what a wrench is for,” Foster said.
Compared to other American churches, the CREC is relatively new: founded in 1998 as a conglomerate of over 130 churches globally. CREC follows a form of Reformed theology, rooted in strict Calvinism as well as 20th century Christian Reconstructionism. Crawford Gribben investigates Christian Reconstruction in his 2021 book Survival and Resistance in Evangelical America: Christian Reconstruction in the Pacific Northwest, a movement exploring how Christians respond to and exercise power within wider society. As Gribben explains, Christian Reconstructionism dates to the late 1950s with Armenian-American Presbyterian minister R.J. Rushdoony. The movement argues that modern social order and government structures should be reordered to follow Biblical law.
Similarly, Julie Ingersoll author of “The Christian Reconstruction Movement in U.S. Politics” (a chapter in the Oxford Handbook Topics in Religion), argues that the broader goal of Reconstruction “dominion theology” seeks “the complete transformation of every aspect of culture to bring it under the authority of biblical law, which they understand as speaking to every aspect of life.” This extends to tangible violence justified as part of Biblical “warfare,” including capital punishment under Biblical Law. This includes capital punishment for rape and kidnapping alongside homosexuality, and for women, “unchastity before marriage.”
According to Gary North, another key Reconstructionist thinker, people who have abortions should be publicly executed, as well as anyone who advises them to get an abortion. Fellow Reconstructionist proponent Joseph Morecraft argues that women serving in civil leadership roles “is a sign of God’s judgement on a culture.” Thus, it makes sense that Doug Wilson, co-founder of the CREC network, stated that the 19th Amendment “was a bad idea.”
Hegseth previously belonged to a CREC church in Tennessee but now attends a newly founded church in the nation’s capital, Christ Church DC. He attended its first Sunday service, invited his personal pastor to the Pentagon to lead Christian prayer services held inside government buildings during work hours and shared invitations to these prayer services to other workers at the Pentagon using their government emails. Hegseth is leveraging his political power and access to strengthen CREC’s access and influence, and likely for a Christian nationalist end.
When CNN reporter Pamela Brown asked Wilson if opening this church in D.C. was part of “your plan to turn this into a Christian nation” during the recorded interview, Wilson replied yes. “I’d like to see the town be a Christian town. I’d like to see the state by a Christian state. I’d like to see the nation be a Christian nation. I’d like to see the world be a Christian nation.” Hegseth reposted the video before Trump released an executive order on Monday stating that he is taking Washington, D.C. under federal control and mobilizing the National Guard in the nation’s capital. In this order, Trump claims that “crime is out of control in the District of Columbia.”
Hegseth’s misogyny runs deep and directly pulls from Wilson, who in that same interview with Foster argued against women flying planes in combat. Back in November 2024, Hegseth said on a podcast hosted by Shawn Ryan that the United States should not have women in combat roles in the military. In his book The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free, Hegseth said that women can and have performed dangerous support roles during war with the caveat that “women cannot physically meet the same standards as men.” Hegseth has similarly been accused of sexual assault.
So it’s no surprise that Hegseth reposted a video in which Wilson argued for the repeal of the 19th Amendment. Last year, I raised the alarm about Webbon’s criticism of women’s right to vote, that this is the canary in the coal mine of Christian nationalism.
As Hegseth proved on Friday, the canary is not only struggling, it’s dead—as Christian nationalism infiltrates the highest echelons of government.
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