Pete Hegseth’s pastor: ‘Women who dress immodestly are sluts’

A week before the US went to war with Iran, Pete Hegseth, the war secretary, invited the head of his church to lead prayers at the Pentagon.

From his pulpit in Idaho, Doug Wilson, a 72-year-old ultraconservative pastor, preaches that homosexuality is a sin, women who dress immodestly are “sluts”, and Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution is the “silliest thing in the world”.

Until recently, the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC) — founded by Wilson in the 1990s — was widely regarded as a fringe sect with little influence on American politics.

Now, Washington is “crawling with conservative Christian believers”, says Wilson, speaking to The Times at his publishing house’s offices in downtown Moscow, Idaho. He opened a church on Capitol Hill last year to accommodate his growing congregation in Washington. The movement has about 45,000 members in 170 churches worldwide.

“There’s a sense of mission, which is to conquer the world. That’s what Jesus said to do, basically,” he says.

Wilson, who counts Tucker Carlson as a friend and interviewed Charlie Kirk shortly before the right-wing polemicist’s death, has long been famous on the religious right. But his teachings have attracted a much wider audience as a result of the aggressive rhetoric adopted by Hegseth, his most famous follower, during the Iran war. The two men message regularly on spiritual matters.

Pete Hegseth during his first testimony to Congress about the Iran war last month SAUL LOEB/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

“We’ve communicated, but I’ve made a point to not get out of my lane on policy issues,” says Wilson. “Nobody voted for me so if I have communication with him, I want it to be pastoral.”

Channelling the fire-and-brimstone fury of the Old Testament, Hegseth has portrayed the conflict as a holy war. In a prayer session at the Pentagon in March, he beseeched “the Almighty” to “grant this taskforce clear and righteous targets for violence” and to “let every round find its mark”.

“Break the teeth of the ungodly,” he said.

When Hegseth, who is twice divorced, first applied to join the CREC movement, he did not seem a natural fit. A Fox News presenter whose infidelities were well documented, Hegseth paid $50,000 to a woman who accused him of sexually assaulting her in a California hotel in 2017. Hegseth has denied her allegations and said he reached a settlement to avoid damaging his career. He has also denied having a drinking problem, although he admitted he “self-medicated” with alcohol after returning from Iraq, where he served as an infantry officer.

“I would say his prior life was pretty raggedy,” says Wilson.

While making a documentary about religious education in 2022, Hegseth became so convinced by Wilson’s battle to instil conservative values in the younger generation that he moved his family from New Jersey to Tennessee so that his children could attend a CREC school, worshipping at one of the movement’s churches run by Brooks Potteiger, a Nashville pastor who has since been appointed to lead the ministry in Washington.

“Brooks vouched for him as a genuine Christian and a member of good standing, and everything I’ve seen bears that out. He’s a genuine Christian man,” says Wilson.

Hegseth has a tattoo of the Jerusalem Cross on his pectoral muscle and the Latin motto Deus vult, or “God wills it”, on his bicep, both of which are Crusader symbols also adopted by white supremacist groups. Hegseth has described the controversy over his tattoos as “anti-Christian bigotry”.

According to Wilson, the war secretary’s framing of the Iran war as a battle between Christians and Muslims is apt.

“If we got into a fight with Canada over fishing rights off of Nova Scotia, it would not be appropriate, because they are fellow Christians. Well, Canada is pretty far gone, actually,” he says.

“But Iran really is a wicked, wicked place. The leadership there is terrible. I think the language is appropriate if we’re in a war with them. It is appropriate to fight aggressively and speak of it in that way.”

A scholar of medieval history, Wilson believes there are lessons to be learnt from the 11th to 13th-century campaigns waged by European knights to conquer Jerusalem for Christendom, saying Iran is an “evil entity” in a “Bible part of the world”.

“I wouldn’t call it the Fifth Crusade, because we are not explicitly Christian enough,” he says. “But the Muslims think of it as a Crusade.”

“Trump is not a Christian man”

Born in San Diego, Wilson spent his early years in Japan, where his mother was a Christian missionary. For the past 50 years, his home has been Moscow, a town set amid the wheatfields of Idaho, one of the most productive agricultural regions in America.

Despite Hegseth’s evangelising, Wilson says the Trump administration is far from morally pure. He says the president is “not someone I would call a godly Christian man”, and disagrees with Trump’s appointment of a gay man, Scott Bessent, as his Treasury secretary because homosexuality is not just a sin, it is “a bad one”.

He says the AI image Trump recently tweeted of himself, seen as like Jesus Christ, was “blasphemous” and the president’s excuse that he was likening himself to a doctor was “lame”.

President Trump’s Truth Social post

Yet Wilson, who has an unblinking gaze and the beard of an Old Testament prophet, appears willing to overlook these smaller indiscretions, given the victories the Christian right has racked up in recent years on issues like abortion. He senses further wins to come if JD Vance is elected as the Republican candidate in 2028, even if the vice-president is Catholic rather than Protestant. “Can’t have everything,” he shrugs.

As someone who identifies as a theocrat and a Christian nationalist, Wilson believes families should vote as a singular bloc with men expected to fulfil the role as head of the household. He also preaches that the world is 6,000 years old.

“The Pope is a Chicago lefty”

When it comes to Trump’s war of words with the Pope, Wilson is on the side of the president.

He describes Pope Leo XIV as a “Chicago lefty”. As for the Archbishop of Canterbury, who has made similar pleas for Christians to show greater compassion towards migrants, Wilson finds it “appalling” that a woman is head of the Church of England, and cites it as further evidence of the UK’s slide into a moral abyss.

The Pope with the Archbishop of Canterbury at the Vatican last month SIMONE RISOLUTI/VATICAN MEDIA/ABACAPRESS

“You can’t import the third world without becoming the third world,” he says, noting CREC’s plans to open churches in London and Sheffield. “I hesitate to say it’s past the point of no return, but I think it’s awfully close.”

Wilson’s ties to the UK run deep. He relaxes by reading PG Wodehouse and GK Chesterton. He stays in Oxford when he crosses the Atlantic but avoids London. Perhaps most surprisingly, he kindled an unlikely friendship with Christopher Hitchens during debates on religion before the author’s death in 2011. “We got along great. We both love PG Wodehouse,” he says.

“Slave-owning Christians were on firm scriptural ground”

One of the least diverse states in America, where more than 92 per cent of people identify as white, Idaho has a troubling history of far-right politics. The panhandle was once home to the Aryan Nations, a neo-Nazi white supremacy group designated a “terrorist threat” by the FBI.

In his books, Wilson has condemned the evil of slavery while also writing warmly about the Confederacy and defending slaveowners in the antebellum south, saying “the Christians who owned slaves in the south were on firm scriptural ground”.

He identifies as a “paleo-Confederate” and is sceptical about mixed-race marriages, giving the example of a white woman who would face challenges raising “black kids”. He says: “The issue is that we live in an ethnically charged situation, and your kids are gonna get treatment from some people that you know nothing about.”

Of all his gripes, however, Wilson is most indignant about the 1960s sexual revolution, a moral catastrophe that he condemns frequently in his blog posts, sermons and books. He thinks women should dress modestly. But what is modest dress? “Not what they’re doing now,” he says. “I could pick on yoga pants.”

He continues: “Men know what they think of hookers, which is not very much … When you’re just giving it away to every slob on the bus who wants to look, you’re degrading the currency.”

Protests at the Senate confirmation hearing for Hegseth’s nomination as defence secretary in 2025 ANDREW HARNIK/GETTY IMAGES

Does that mean Wilson and his followers sympathise with the dress codes enforced by Shia clerics in Iran? “No, because wrapping them up in a bedsheet is another way of degrading them. It is possible to be modest and attractive — attractive without attracting. Bundling them up the way really conservative Muslims do is a different kind of degradation. Like you’re not a person. But for a woman to dress like a slut is a different kind of degradation. Both kinds of degradation play off of each other.”

Reeling from the strength of Wilson’s language, it seems an appropriate moment to question the pastor’s casual use of the word “slut”. He justifies it on the basis that some feminist protesters take part in “slut-walks”. He says: “They object to it because I use it.”

In his essays, Wilson often writes about lust. In one blog post, he offers guidance to a hypothetical couple where the husband has become distracted as “some chick is walking toward them, bouncing away like there’s no tomorrow”. He has described a committee as being “as stacked as Dolly Parton after her new implants”. He has satirised French philosophers obsessing over “pert French breasts”. He has attacked feminists as “small-breasted biddies”. In one essay he wrote in 2010, he castigated protesters “jiggling [their] boobs”.

Wilson says he is a “verbal cartoonist”, who is parodying the language of progressives, but admits he has experienced temptation himself, though never acted upon it.

In 2021, Vice News published a 4,000-word investigation into Wilson, in which an anonymous woman, who moved to Moscow as a 16-year old, alleged she was raped by her husband, a member of Wilson’s church, Christ Kirk, but was told by the church’s pastors that marital rape did not exist. “This particular woman, I know who she is. This particular woman lies. She’s just a liar, makes stuff up,” says Wilson. “We reject wholeheartedly the idea of rape and rape in marriage is not OK. If we knew that a man had raped his wife, he’d be excommunicated.”

DOMINIC GWINN/ZUMA PRESS

In his lengthy response to the Vice piece, Wilson wrote that “every form of woke sex is demented and twaddlesome” and recommended the missionary position for couples. “It doesn’t have to be kinky to be healthy,” he says.

The Vice article also referred to a paedophile member of the church called Steven Sitler, whose wedding was officiated by Wilson and was welcomed back to Christ Kirk after he was convicted and conditionally released from prison for lewd contact with a child under 16.

“Those who slanderously diagnose our pastoral competence from afar … do not know anything about how we have taught him, prayed with him, admonished him, rebuked him, checked on his stories and held him accountable,” Wilson wrote in a 2015 blog post entitled “An Open Letter from Christ Church on Steven Sitler”, attempting to draw a line under the scandal.

“The wicked thou wilt surely slay”

It was Wilson’s evangelical father who decided that Moscow was the fortress from which he would pour forth Christian foot-soldiers across the nation and win America for God.

“My dad was a naval academy graduate. He wrote a book back in the Sixties called Principles of War, applying principles of warfare, Clausewitz and Sun Tzu, those guys, to spiritual warfare,” say Wilson.

Moscow is now a “microcosm” of the battle for the soul of America, according to Wilson.

On the town’s Main Street, University of Idaho students with dyed hair rummage through thrift stores in search of Saturday night outfits and matcha-brewing coffee shops display rainbow flags in protest at the church’s presence.

Wilson’s followers are known as “Kirkers”. The men are recognisable by their tucked-in plaid shirts while the women wear long skirts and cover their hair with bandanas.

The ideological divide between the students and Calvinists is most evident in Moscow’s duelling bookshops: there is one called the “Sword and the Shovel”, which sells Wilson’s favourite authors — CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien, as well as Greek and Latin texts — while another is stocked with all the latest fiction and a section on banned books.

At a converted cinema in Moscow on Sunday morning, newcomers to Christ Kirk receive a friendly welcome.

The Kirkers pull up in camper vans and multi-seater cars. Mothers lead little boys in cowboy boots. Fathers carry girls wearing bows in their hair.

Before the service begins, a student from Oklahoma approaches Wilson to say that he has converted to the movement while studying at the University of Idaho and brought his father along, too.

There is psalm singing from the Old Testament — “The wicked thou wilt surely slay, from me let sinners turn away” — and Wilson’s sermon advises drinking in moderation, with only a passing jab at woke culture. Holy Communion is given to everyone who has been baptised, regardless of age.

Then, during the prayers, it becomes clear the church’s horizons stretch far beyond Moscow. “We pray that Christian candidates running for office would prevail,” says the minister, before November’s midterms. The congregants bow their heads.