Pete Hegseth, former Fox & Friends weekend co-host and President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for Defense Secretary, is taking heat over reports that in 2021 he was accused of being an “insider threat” by fellow National Guardsman DeRicko Gaither.
The explanation for this accusation? A tattoo of the Latin phrase “Deus Vult,” which means “God wills it,” on his inner bicep. “White-Supremacist use of #Deus Vult and a return to medieval Catholicism, is to invoke the myth of a white Christian (i.e. Catholic) medieval past that wishes to ignore the actual demographics and theological state of Catholicism today,” then-head of security Gaither wrote in a letter to his superiors. Disgusted, Hegseth chose to leave active duty shortly thereafter.
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Cue the liberal pearl-clutching. NPR’s “domestic extremism correspondent” Odette Yousef explained that “Deus Vult,” was “sort of the battle cry to take back the Holy Land and to slaughter Muslims.” Yousef added that “symbols and language tied to the Crusades are very present in some extremist movements” and that scholars had told her that Hegseth belongs to the “very militant end of the Christian nationalist spectrum.” Sherrilyn Ifill, former director-counsel of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, declared on MSNBC that Hegseth is “known to be a white supremacist” because of his opposition to affirmative action in the military.
Now, I’m not exactly sympathetic to Hegseth and his cries of victimhood at the hands of “anti-Christian bigotry.” Certainly, the father of seven presents as proudly Christian, with a Jerusalem cross prominently tattooed on his chest and having hosted a Fox documentary on the life of Jesus. He’s also on his third marriage—after having engaged in multiple extramarital affairs, including having a child with the woman who is now his wife while he was still married to his second wife. He also paid a (married) woman who accused him of sexual assault in order to prevent her from filing a lawsuit that might damage his career. Now, perhaps Mr. Hegseth has repented of these infidelities and is living with his “wife” as brother and sister…but I doubt it.
Rather, I am interested in defending “Deus Vult.” Its caricature by liberal, secular media, gives the impression that if some random white supremacist appropriates anything conservative or Christian, that thing is immediately tainted and forever associated with bigotry, racism, and murder. For, apart from the fact that such correlative judgments are applied unevenly—the deaths of millions at the hands of socialist, atheist regimes in Russia, China, and Cambodia have done little to tar socialism or atheism as irreparably evil in the eyes of the Left—there’s another concern even more threatening to the Catholic Faith as believed and practiced. And that is the insidious attempt to portray legitimate goods, and even integral elements of our Faith, as unacceptable for polite company or participation in public life.
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But first, let’s address the charges against “Deus Vult.” What, one may wonder, was Hegseth’s fellow National Guardsman talking about when he claimed the phrase necessarily invokes “the myth of a white Christian (i.e. Catholic) medieval past that wishes to ignore the actual demographics and theological state of Catholicism today”? Only someone entirely ignorant of the Crusades and medieval Catholicism could utter something so risibly stupid.
Yes, many crusaders could anachronistically be described as “white,” given the majority came from Christian Europe—but they also fought on behalf of Eastern Christian communities in the Levant and Egypt that were the same “color” as their Muslim adversaries. Indeed, crusader armies were composed not only of Europeans but Armenians, Arabs, and various other Levantine peoples, and there was a great deal of religious tolerance among Christian groups.
Then there’s the NPR reporter’s claim that “Deus Vult” amounts to “sort of the battle cry to take back the Holy Land and to slaughter Muslims.” Putting aside whatever is meant by the sophomoric qualifier “sort of,” Ms. Yousef is at least half-right. Yes, “God wills it” was indeed a rallying cry of the crusaders, who were called by Catholic leaders to sell their possessions and go on a new kind of religious pilgrimage, one that required them to both pray and fight. War, in this case, was necessary: within a hundred years of Islam’s birth, it had conquered three-fifths of the Christian world. Muslim Seljuk Turks in 1071 massacred a Byzantine army and threatened Constantinople, the last obstacle between Islam and Christian Europe.
