Mother Jones reports:

On Wednesday, President-elect Donald Trump announced former Fox News host Pete Hegseth was his pick for secretary of defense. The choice is iconoclastic to say the least. Although Hegseth served as an Army National Guard officer, he has no experience in government leadership that could inform the management of the federal government’s largest agency.

What Hegseth does have are connections to the TheoBros, a group of mostly millennial, ultra-conservative men, many of whom proudly call themselves Christian nationalists. Among the tenets of their branch of Protestant Christianity—known as Reformed or Reconstructionist—is the idea that the United States should be subject to biblical law.

Last year, the magazine Nashville Christian Family ran a profile of Hegseth, in which he mentioned being a member of a “Bible and book study” that focused on the book My Life for Yours by Doug Wilson, the 71-year-old unofficial patriarch of the TheoBros. Patriarch is the right word: When I interviewed Wilson a few months ago, he said that he, like many other TheoBros, believes women never should have been given the right to vote.

Wilson presides over a small fiefdom in Moscow, Idaho, where he is the head pastor of the flagship church of the denomination he helped found, the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC). In Moscow, Wilson has also helped to establish a college, a printing press, and a classical Christian school. In addition to his Moscow ventures, Wilson is also extremely online—he blogs, he posts on social media, and he makes slickly produced YouTube videos. Once a fringe figure, famous mostly among reformed Christians, last year Wilson’s star power brightened considerably in an interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and a speaking slot at the National Conservatism conference alongside then Ohio senator, now vice president-elect, JD Vance. [Continue reading…]

Pete Hegseth, Liberty University Convocation, 2019: