It took only a week after the election for the Christian bashers to attack president-elect Donald Trump’s selection of Pete Hegseth to be Secretary of Defense and Mike Huckabee to be U.S. Ambassador to Israel.
Hegseth is a strong Christian who literally wears his religion on his body (he has more than a dozen tattoos emblazoned on his right arm and chest). To be sure, that is bizarre, but that is not what his critics are upset about. They don’t like what the tattoos represent—Christianity.
If he had metal spikes hanging from his nose, or had tattoos honoring Lucifer on his neck, that would be fine. But once Jesus is brought into the mix, that’s a call to arms. Indeed, the Christian bashers are explicitly calling him out for wanting a call to arms—they are saying he wants to bring back the Crusades.
The Jerusalem Cross on Hegseth’s chest is driving them mad. On his right bicep he has inscribed the Latin phrase, “Deus Vult,” which means “God wills it.”
Mike Huckabee is an Evangelical Christian who is a rock-solid supporter of Israel. But according to John Hudson at the Washington Post that is a problem. He is worried that people like Huckabee, who believe that in the covenant that God made to Abraham about Israel, “have turned that belief into a right-wing brand of Zionism.”
Similarly, the militants at J Street have lashed out at Huckabee for his “extremist views.” Louis Moreno, a former U.S. Ambassador who knows Huckabee, calls him an “utter nut case.” Why? Because the former Arkansas governor believes in the biblical account of the end of times. If he believed the fiction that the sexes are interchangeable, that would be considered reasonable.
Radicals hate Pete Hegseth because he is a committed Christian and a patriotic American. They hate Mike Huckabee because he is a committed Christian who strongly defends Israel. It’s really not all that complicated.
