It must be said that there is such a thing as Crackpot Christianity. Crackpot Christianity is Christianity that leaves the teachings of Jesus out. Teachings like “love your enemies,” “blessed be the peacemakers” and other beatitudes, “love your neighbor as yourself,” “do onto others as you would like done onto you,” “do it to the least and you do it to me,” etc.
Crackpot Christianity is invests in religious hypocrisy. Christian Nationalism is certainly Crackpot Christianity. So is idolatry of Donald Trump or any other political leader anywhere.
America currently has a director of the Defense Department, now called the War Department, who is very much immersed in Crackpot Christianity.
Pete Hegseth has been called “a very dangerous person” who “revels in the carnage of Iran War.” An article in The Guardian—a media source I recommend over the media that has sold its soul to MAGA—calls the head of the defense department those very things in the title of a recent article. The subtitle adds: “Critics say brash, bombastic Fox News host out of his depth to guide US military through murky new Middle East conflict.”*
What got Hegseth named head of the defense department in the first place? Donald Trump, who watches Fox News day and night, nominated him for the position. Fifty Republican senators and one vice president voted him into office.
Truth to tell, Hegseth was not even that important at Fox News—he had the lowly position of being a part-time weekend commentator. The latest news about Fox News is that it purposely lied to its many viewers by deliberately distorting its coverage of the return of the bodies of six soldiers killed in the Iran War.
The event is traditionally called “dignified transfer” but guess who wore a white baseball cap with a nickname to the ceremony and did not take it off when saluting the caskets? There was a loud response to this insulting act of the president from both the right and the left.
Fox News covered up for Trump and when caught, apologized—but pointedly did not run the correct footage that shows Trump in his campaign hat disrespecting the fallen soldiers.
The Guardian described Hegseth at a recent Pentagon press conference as “brash, bellicose” and sounding “more like a cartoon bully than a sombre statesman” who “bragged about death and destruction from the sky all day long…We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.”
It is said that the Pentagon is now “the staging ground for an ideological and religious crusade” being led “with machismo, Christian nationalism and callousness toward the lives of US troops.” Hegseth aims his TV appearances toward “sating Trump’s desire for a warmonger worthy of the manosphere.”
Included in the press appearance was a “lurid social media video” that included Hollywood footage from Braveheart, Gladiator, Superman and Top Gun alongside “real kill-shot footage of the attacks in Iran.”
Hegseth’s own mother, Penelope, in 2018 wrote him the following: You are an abuser of women—that is the ugly truth and I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego. You are that man (and have been for years) and as your mother, it pains me and embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth.
Hegseth promised “to dispense with ‘stupid rules of engagement”—rules designed to restrict attacks on civilian populations. Perhaps that helps explain America’s complicity in the attacks on oil depots around Tehran I discussed in yesterday’s DM.
To be continued.
* David Smith, “‘A very dangerous person’: alarm as Pete Hegseth revels in carnage of Iran war.” The Guardian, March 8, 2026.
Banner image: “Protest against the war in Iran, near the White House, 3/7/26.” Photo by Victoria Pickering on Flickr.
Queries for Contemplation
Do you recognize Crackpot Christianity in today’s MAGA world and America’s Mideast war? What can we do about it?
Related Readings by Matthew Fox
Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality
Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth.
A Spirituality Named Compassion: Uniting Mystical Awareness with Social Justice.
Trump and the MAGA Movement as Antichrist.
Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Transforming Evil in Soul & Society.
Charles Burack, ed., Matthew Fox: Essential Writings in Creation Spirituality.
The Coming of the Cosmic Christ: The Healing of Mother Earth and the Birth of a Global Renaissance.
Adam Bucko and Matthew Fox, Occupy Spirituality: A Radical Vision for a New Generation.
8 thoughts on “The Role of Crackpot Christianity in the Iran War & Defense Department”
Crackpot Christianity is a good term although Christianity should probably be in inverted commas. Today’s MAGA world is riddled with Crackpot “Christians”. The Middle East war, while awful, may be necessary. Arabs and Muslims need to live in peace with Jews and Israel. Armed religious dictatorships with supporting fanatical terrorist groups intent on “Death to Israel” cannot be allowed to stand. How to make that happen without a blood bath is difficult, as was witnessed recently by an attempted overthrow within Iran by its own people with tens of thousands being killed by their own Crackpot Islamic leaders. Still, spending a billion dollars a day on this war, on top of the trillions spent on Iraq and Afghanistan wars, is totally Crackpot Wisdom. A billion dollars would resolve Detroit’s urgent need to repair its crumbling housing. Another billion could properly fund Michigan’s teachers. The sooner the world can find peace and live together, the sooner we can have prosperity for all.
I have seen reports that Christian nationalists are using this warvto bring about Armageddon to speed up the second coming. Can this be verified?
In 1919 William Butler Yeats predicted a very dark Second Coming in the Middle East:
The Second Coming
By William Butler Yeats
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Yes, that is exactly what is happening. There are soldiers who have registered complaints about leadership using Armaggedon, holy war, Christ returning rhetoric. It us what pete Hegseth believes, what his pastor Doug Wilson believes, and what Mr. Huckabee, Trump’s ambassador to Israel believes, what a majority of white evangelicals believe. Have a listen to the Lincoln Square podcast below, Andra Watkins is a former evangelical that was raised in it. I am a former evangelical as well.
https://www.youtube.com/live/VDPNs2Tlj18?si=AQTcPMdNLzWdHYLH
YES!!! Tragically, the election of Trump (twice) and his authoritarian regime, his MAGA base, the Republican congressional cowardly enablers, un-Christian nationalists, his billionaire oligarchs, and now the Middle East War are all dangerous continuing symptoms of America’s
long shadow/evil history (especially the genocide of native Americans and slavery) of patriarchy, racism, greed/materialism/power/control of capitalism, disrespect of the feminine, and underlying imbalance of spiritual values. America society and individual Americans need to continue soul searching for deeper spiritual and democratic values as part of Humanity’s spiritual evolution with sisters and brothers around the world, with Sacred Mother Earth/Her living creatures/Her essential abundance, and with-in physical/nonphysical spiritual beings and dimensions of Our Sacred multiverse evolving Cosmos….
What is called “Crackpot Christianity” in today’s DM does not even deserve two capital “Cs”: it is to Christ’s teachings what blackface minstrel shows were to African American culture, i.e. an obscene, hateful and opportunistic parody.
Like Jim Wallis who helped to found Washington, DC’s Sojourner community (and Magazine), we must continue to call out “Christian Nationalists” as not Christian. They simply are not. If they were, they would follow Jesus’s teachings. I say that they are not nationalists either, but that is because of my own crackpot definition of nationalism. It seems to me that one must believe in the foundation of a country’s principles in order to be called a nationalist. Here that would mean believing in the Constitution, the separation of powers, the rule of law, and that all three branches of government are co-equal. It would mean that when a court declares an action as illegal, one must backtrack and at the very least reassess one’s actions. To trample over the country’s form of government, to disrespect the founders’ wisdom, to go off in a completely different direction can not be called nationalistic. We must, daily, call these apostates out. I recommend Wallis’s book The False White Gospel.
Dear Fr. Matt,
Thanks for your posting yesterday. I had such a horrifically clear view of the darkened sky, the black fallout, and the dripping oil raining down on people choking, coughing and trying to breathe. Today’s posting also is horrific, and I feel deep respect for Hegseth’s mother being able to tell the truth about her son, TO her son. I also mourn the loss of the priest in Lebanon, and am glad the Pope has pointedly spoken about him, and this collateral murder. The situation is getting worse, and we pray and write to our congressional reps, and get ready for the next No Kings protest. It feels apocalyptic. It is important not to lose hope, and so I continue to pray.