Does Hegseth’s Religion Disqualify Him From A Cabinet Position?

No religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States (Constitution of the United States, Art. VI).

In recent weeks at least three people have contacted me to notify me that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is a member of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC). They did so because I have been observing, commenting on, and criticizing the theology, piety, and practice of the CREC for a long time. To be sure, there are things to criticize. They call themselves Reformed, but they hold confessions that contradict the confession of the Reformed churches. Further, the extensive number of exceptions allowed in the CREC weakens the force of the confessions considerably. Most notably, however, their former presiding minister, Doug Wilson, is notorious for his public, published rhetoric (which is so scandalous that it cannot be published here), his corruption of Reformed theology (e.g., the Federal Vision theology), and his pastoral practice for which he has been criticized (albeit mildly) by a committee of the CREC and by others (e.g., Rod Dreher, Rachel Shubin, Hohn Cho, and Rachel Green Miller et al.).1 Nevertheless, despite these issues, the CREC has never actually disciplined him. Indeed, the CREC has become the home not only of the Christian Nationalist movement, but also of the Federal Vision movement, since all but one of the signatories of the Joint Federal Vision Profession, the de facto confession of the Federal Visionists, is a minister in the CREC.2 The implication in the communications regarding Hegseth’s nomination seemed to be that Hegseth’s membership in a CREC congregation disqualified him from being nominated and serving as the Secretary of Defense.

Hegseth, a two-time recipient of the Bronze Star, is only the third Secretary of Defense to receive the Bronze Star for courage under fire during his military service.3 He has also been the subject of a number of criticisms, some of them more weighty, some less, that might have disqualified him from holding a cabinet-level position in the United States government; but his religious affiliation cannot be one of them, and it is that issue I am considering in this essay.

The Travail Of Religious Liberty

There can be little doubt about the intent of the American founders in Article VI of the Constitution. The language is unambiguous. The denial of religious liberty in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is an essential part of the background to the decision by the American Founders to reject religious tests for public office. We could start at almost any point before the early twentieth century but let us begin with the Great Ejection of 1662. To a considerable degree, the English Civil Wars (1642–51) were wars about which Christian tradition would control the State-Church in England. That struggle dates to the strange case of Henry the VIII, who ruled England from 1509–47, and his quest for a son to succeed him. I say strange case because Henry began his career as monarch with a recognition from Pope Leo X (1475–1521) as a “Defender of the Faith” (Defensor Fidei), which Leo awarded to him in 1521 for his attack on Martin Luther. Ultimately, however, his quest for an heir led him to assert the primacy of the crown over the church and to lead the church, however unevenly, toward the Reformation.

He was succeeded by his only son, the sickly Edward VI (1537–53), who began his rule in his minority and thus the kingdom was actually governed by regents until he came of age. During his reign (1547–53), Edward and his regents led the English church toward the Reformed Reformation. He even imported two notable Reformed theologians, Peter Martyr Vermigli (1499–1562) and Martin Bucer (1481–1551), to advance the Reformed Reformation in England. But his short reign was succeeded by that of “Bloody Mary” Tudor (1516–1558), who ruled as Mary I. It was the Reformed who called her “Bloody Mary” for her fanatical devotion to murdering and martyring particularly Reformed Protestants for the sake of the gospel, among them the Oxford Martyrs, Hugh Latimer, Nicholas Ridley, and Thomas Cranmer.4

She was in turn succeeded by Elizabeth I (1533–1603), who reigned over both the English state and church beginning in 1558 until her death. She reversed Mary’s imposition of Roman Catholicism and in some ways set the course of the Anglican church for centuries after. She initially silenced all preaching for about two years and imposed a revision of the Edwardian Prayerbook. Still, from the 1540s for the next century and longer, the issues of religious liberty and the struggle for control of the state-church festered and finally broke into open warfare. Under Elizabeth both orthodox Reformed Christianity and Roman Catholic sympathizing movements co-existed. Those same tensions would increase in the seventeenth century under James I/VI, who succeeded Elizabeth. When William Laud, who wanted to take the English church backward to what the Reformed regarded as intolerable Romanizing practice (and Arminian theology) was made Archbishop Canterbury by Charles I in 1633, conflict, even war, loomed. That war, between the Parliamentarians and the Royalists, finally broke out in 1642.

Ultimately, England would remain a Protestant nation, but the Royalists won, and in 1662 under the Act of Uniformity, more than 1,000 non-conforming (Congregational and Presbyterian) ministers were ejected from their churches. They were banned from performing ministerial functions (e.g., preaching and administering the sacraments), though many (e.g., John Owen) continued to minister to underground churches.

The year before, however, Parliament had passed another law, the Corporation Act, restricting public office to members of the Church of England. These two acts meant that non-conformists were pushed to the margins, and sometimes persecuted and even jailed, not only in the church but also in secular civil life. In 1688, the Act of Uniformity was modified by Parliament by the Act of Toleration, and it was amended again four years later. Still, the Act of Uniformity was not abolished until 1828.

This means that restrictions as to who could hold both sacred and secular office in England, and in her American Colonies, were a fact of life in the decades leading up to the American Revolution in 1776 and the ratification of the Constitution in 1789. Remember too that the Pilgrims who sailed to these shores in the early seventeenth century were mostly religious dissenters from the established church in England.

Were The Founders Right?

What the English did to the Irish and what they attempted to do to the Scots and the Americans— that is, impose the Book of Common Prayer—was part of a pattern with roots going back as far as Constantine’s suppression of the Donatists in the fourth century and to Theodosius’ imposition of Christianity as the state-religion of the Empire in AD 380. Religious liberty was not, as people say, “a thing” for a very long time.

Since the last quarter of the eighteenth century, at least, most American Christians have been convinced that the American rejection of Christendom was right. Since then, many others (e.g., Abraham Kuyper) have come to agree with the American settlement. On the conviction that God’s Word gives no warrant for a state-established Christian church, most traditions have revised their confessions accordingly. The American Presbyterians revised the Westminster Standards in the eighteenth century and the American Reformed revised the Belgic Confession finally in 1958.5 The United Reformed Churches in North America formally embraced this revision in 2019.

Religious tests for office depend on a theocratic assumption, that the Lord ordained the state to establish the church. But if the American Founders and the nineteenth-century courts were right to disestablish the church, then the religious test is a non-starter. As Kuyper argued in the nineteenth century, one simply cannot sustain a case for a state-church from the New Testament, nor from the Old Testament after the expiration of the Old Covenant theocracy, read as the New Testament teaches us to read it.

We can see from Paul’s own teaching about the magistrate that there cannot be a religious test for public office. What religion was Nero when Paul wrote to the Roman congregation to submit to him and the other pagan Romans running the empire, the regions, and the cities? They were all pagans. According to Paul (and the rest of the Apostles), their paganism did not disqualify them from office. God’s Word says:

Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, for he is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer. Therefore one must be in subjection, not only to avoid God’s wrath but also for the sake of conscience. For because of this you also pay taxes, for the authorities are ministers of God, attending to this very thing. Pay to all what is owed to them: taxes to whom taxes are owed, revenue to whom revenue is owed, respect to whom respect is owed, honor to whom honor is owed. (Rom 13:1–7)

According to Paul, was Nero or Pilate or any of the others a legitimate office holder? Yes. Are they entrusted by God with the sword to decide who lives and who dies? Yes. Did Paul believe that the Roman magistrates were able to rule justly? Yes. Were they Christians? No. Do Christians owe them honor, obedience, and the payment of taxes, even onerous taxes? Yes.

From where, then, in the New Testament would anyone argue for a religious test for office when Paul has no such test for the magistrate. Neither does Peter. Neither did our Lord Jesus. The religious test is a remnant of theocracy, and it died with the death of Jesus and with the expiration of “the state of that people,” as we say in Westminster Confession 19.4.

Hegseth’s religious affiliation may justly be troubling to some orthodox Reformed folk, but this is the American settlement. Most Americans did not refuse to vote for Kennedy because he was a Roman Catholic or for Richard Nixon because he was a Quaker, and millions of Americans voted for a devout member of the Latter-Day Saints, which according to most Reformed Christians is a cult. This is no defense of Hegseth’s religious affiliation, but it is a defense of a basic American principle which was hard won and which we should seek to preserve.

Notes

  1. See R. Scott Clark, “It Can Be Difficult But We Need To Open Our Eyes And Pay Attention To The Facts”; John Fesko, “Review: ‘Reformed’ is Not Enough,” Reformed Theology: In Piety, Practice, and Preaching, November 20, 2021.
  2. See “Resources On Christian Nationalism,” and “A Joint Federal Vision Profession (2007)” on the Heidelblog.
  3. The others were James Forrestal and Mark Esper. Lloyd Austin earned the Silver Star.
  4. R. Scott Clark, “Ridley, Latimer, And Cranmer: The Oxford Martyrs.”
  5. See Kevin DeYoung, “A Tale of Two Texts: How the Westminster Confession of Faith Was Changed by American Presbyterians to Reflect a New Understanding of the Civil Magistrate,” Themelios 49, no. 2 (2024); R. Scott Clark, “The Revision of Belgic Confession Article 36 on Church and State.”

©R. Scott Clark. All Rights Reserved.


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  • R. Scott Clark
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    R.Scott Clark is the President of the Heidelberg Reformation Association, the author and editor of, and contributor to several books and the author of many articles. He has taught church history and historical theology since 1997 at Westminster Seminary California. He has also taught at Wheaton College, Reformed Theological Seminary, and Concordia University. He has hosted the Heidelblog since 2007.

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11 comments

  1. What disqualifies Hegseth isn’t his religion but the mere fact that he’s never managed a 7-Eleven— let alone a miniature golf course — and now he’s tasked with running one of the largest most complicated organizations on the planet.

    • Agreed. His extreme lack of experience has been my concern from the get go.
      His membership in the CREC is unfortunate, though not surprising.

      • I agree with Roxanne and would like to add that I appreciated Mr. Hegseth’s acknowledgement of Jesus Christ before Congress and the entire world. My prayers are with him as he serves and for the Lord to direct him in a better path theologically. 🙂 Thank you, Dr. Clark for sharing your thoughts on this matter and opening up the discussion.

        • Great comment, Angela. Millions of us are pulling for Mr. Hegseth, as well as certainly for him to ‘come out ye from among them!’ He’s certainly a bright man; let’s hope he repents and follows our Lord far better theologically! And for all of em, for that matter. Thanks Dr Clark!👍😊

    • So you’d rather have someone running the military whose qualification is running a 7-11 or a mini golf course rather than serving as a Major in the US Army and earning two bronze stars? Okay…

    • He’s managed men in combat. That is a test far more severe than being governor of a large state. Also, if you look at his resume you will find it hard to argue that he qualifies as a significant thinker about the military. I remember that when the President announced Vice President Vance as his running mate, the conservative commentariat was alive with cries of “a terrible choice,” “an unforced error,” and other similarly uninformed opinions. What was Robert McNamara’s experience to be Secretary of Defense? How did being President of General Motors qualify him for it? What were Franklin Roosevelt’s qualifications to be Assistant Secretary of the Navy when he was a thirty one year old New York State senator, appointed to the job by the newly elected Woodrow Wilson? Moreover, everyone knew that the appointed Secretary, Josephus Daniels, was a patronage appointee, and that it would probably be young Roosevelt who would be doing most of the actual work. This turned out to be the case. He didn’t do too bad a job, did he? ( I have always found allegations that Roosevelt knew the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor especially noxious in view of Roosevelt’s love of the Navy. )

      • To suggest that a person had direct experiences (combat, etc.) in the military, therefore he’s qualified to run the Pentagon is like saying Vanna White has experience with words and letters, therefore she’s qualified to run the Dept. of Education.

        • Running a giant organization well requires a very specific range of skills that are learned over many years. Generally, when picking a guy to run a giant organization the best practice is to be able to look at a great big progression through the guys career and see where he just definitively hit home runs over and over, in the business of *running a big organization* (ideally in organizations that got bigger and bigger and increasingly complex through the progression) — millions of miles from being a Major in the Army. Respectfully, there are plenty of guys who advance through some ranks in the military, earning medals, etc. but then later have utterly mediocre (or worse) careers afterward.

          • Then your criteria would demand a General, but if you got a General, you wouldn’t be getting an Admiral, would you?

            What could possibly “qualify” someone to be Secretary of Defense? Careerism, I suppose, a longtime Assistant Secretaryship, maybe? Do we want careerists? Lloyd Austin was a careerist.

            Robert Kennedy was a few weeks past his thirty fifth birthday when his brother appointed him to be Attorney General. Jack’s customary panache didn’t fail him: “I thought it would be a good idea to give Bobby a little experience before we sent him out to practice law.”

            The consensus of legal historians is that RFK was a superb Attorney General, and if you come back and say, “LIBERAL legal historians,” I will know that you are a stranger to the history of that administration.

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