Podcast of Hegseth church network airs far-right and Christian nationalist views

The flagship podcast of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), the Christian denomination that claims US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, as a member, has functioned as a platform for the promotion of Christian nationalist and other far-right positions.

CrossPolitic, whose hosts are close associates of Idaho-based pastor Douglas Wilson, has in recent weeks hosted a theocratic Canadian pastor who has called for his country to be absorbed by the United States, and a self-styled “patriot professor” who has backed the rise of Russia and China and the decline of liberal democracies and endorsed the criminalization of homosexuality in Uganda.

The podcast’s themes and guests, and the prestige of its hosts in CREC circles, raise further questions about the extent to which Hegseth’s views on US foreign and defense policy have been shaped by a religious movement that directly opposes liberal democracy and democratic principles including individual women’s suffrage.

One of the podcast’s guests even voiced support for the need for a modern US version of Oliver Cromwell, an English authoritarian and religious zealot who governed England as a dictator after the country’s 17th-century civil war.

The Guardian contacted CrossPolitic for comment, at an address associated with co-host Gabe Rench. He responded: “I have followed your tabloid efforts on us, and I would urge you to repent of your sins, come to Christ, and find a good church.”

CrossPolitic

CrossPolitic is hosted by Rench, Toby Sumpter and Deleaone Shannon. All three have had high-profile associations with Wilson, Christ church and the CREC.

Sumpter, formerly pastor at Christ church, is now pastor at Kings Cross church, also in Moscow, Idaho. It was according to its website “planted in Moscow, ID by Christ church in 2022 and is a member church of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches”. He is still also listed as an “elder pro tem” on the Christ church website.

Rench, formerly a high-profile member of Christ church and a pastoral trainee there, is now a deacon at Kings Cross church, according to the church’s website and his own personal website. He is also founder of Dropwave, a “free speech” podcasting network, and also the Fight Laugh Feast network, which offers a platform for membership and distribution of Crosspolitic and other CREC-linked podcasts including Reformation Red Pill.

The Guardian reported in August the RRP has advocated a range of extremist positions including capital punishment for abortion, the reversal of no-fault divorce, and bans on pornography, gay marriage and adoption by LGBTQ parents.

Fight Laugh Feast also runs conferences. This year’s Fight Laugh Feast conference is themed “School Wars: Rebuilding Christendom with Your Kids.” Scheduled speakers include all three hosts of CrossPolitic, along with Wilson and David Goodwin, who was Pete Hegseth’s co-author on the book Battle for the American Mind.

As the Guardian reported in January, that book claims to reveal a “progressive plan to neutralize the basis of our republic” via public schools, core curriculums, and even rituals such as the pledge of allegiance, all of which stretches back at least a century.

On Hegseth’s account, writing the book inspired him to move his family to Tennessee, and subsequently to join Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowship, a CREC church that meets in Goodlettsville.

In 2024, Hegseth told Joshua Haymes, the host of Reformation Red Pill, that “we moved to Tennessee to move to a classical Christian school because of this book. Because when I started writing it, we didn’t have all our kids in that form of education.”

Later in the same podcast episode, he added: “We moved to a church and a community and a whole view of the world that has changed the way we think, too.”

Steve Turley

On 19 August, CrossPolitic published a hour-long episode with the hosts in conversation with Steve Turley.

Turley, who styles himself as the “patriot professor”, is a classical guitarist, YouTuber and a prolific author whose books are either self-published or issued by religious or rightwing publishers. He has published at least one book with Canon Press, a publisher formerly owned by Christ Church and now controlled by Aaron Rench and Nathan Wilson, as the Guardian reported in 2021.

Reportedly, Turley was also previously a contributor to Russian Faith, a website run by Charles Bausman, who was described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a “an American extremist, pro-Kremlin propagandist, Hitlerite and January 6 riot participant” who apparently fled the United States in the wake of the Capitol attack.

The SPLC described Russian Faith as promoting “a reactionary, pro-Kremlin worldview for an English-speaking audience”.

The Guardian contacted Turley for comment but received no response.

The occasion for the podcast appearance was the publication of a new book by Turley, America Awakened: the Collapse of Globalism and the Return to Faith, Family, and Freedom. In the discussion, Turley expanded on the book’s themes of the collapse of the liberal-democratic international order, and – from Turley’s point of view – the welcome reassertion of traditional values in a worldwide rightwing populist revival.

In the book and the podcast, however, he draws on the work of a neo-fascist writer.

The book extensively cites the French “new right” fascist Guillaume Faye. At one point Turley writes: “We are entering an archeo-futurist era, a term coined by French scholar Guillaume Faye. Archeo-futurism argues that the modern globalist world, with its obsessive faith in progress, technocracy, and mass industrialization, has triggered a crisis of meaning – a spiritual and cultural exhaustion.”

Turley also cites Faye in the CrossPolitics discussion, saying: “So this is where you get this notion of archeo-futurism, that’s the French theorist Guillaume Faye, again, writing it in the early 90s. It’s a really interesting time and all this stuff is coming out.”

The hosts did not push back on Turley’s invocations of a neo-fascist author.

Faye was a leading ideologue of Europe’s new right, best known for repackaging fascist themes, and dressing racial separatism and anti-immigrant extremism in intellectual language that has influenced today’s identitarian and far-right movements.

Turley this year also advanced arguments and concepts associated with Faye in a foreword for a book published by a far-right press. He wrote it for a book, Multipolarity, written by Constantin Von Hoffmeister and published by Budapest-based Arktos Press.

That publisher was once described by the SPLC as an “alt-right publishing syndicate”, which has translated and promoted racist books and which, according to Center for Media and Democracy “is closely tied to Richard Spencer, Red Ice and the white nationalist terrorist group the American Identity Movement”.

Alongside Turley’s foreword is another written by far-right Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin. In his foreword, Turley celebrates what he sees as the recession of the liberal-democratic international order and the rise of authoritarian ethnonationalism around the world.

Turley writes that “we are seeing nothing less than the great ancient civilizations of the past rising from the depths below and returning in all of their splendor all over the world.”

Turley continues: “From Trump’s America First to Viktor Orbán’s Make Europe Great Again, from the revival of Tianxia or the Mandate of Heaven in China to the rise of Eurasianism in a renewed Russian Federation, from Pan-Africanism to Hindu Nationalism, the world is recalibrating around a plurality of political and civilizational poles.”

Turley has a history of advancing extremist positions.

In 2023, Right Wing Watch reported that Turley had on YouTube celebrated the passage of Ugandan laws that made identifying as gay or trans a crime punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

Previously, according to Right Wing Watch, Turley produced and “energetically” promoted a “pro-Mastriano propaganda film” for the Pennsylvania gubernatorial campaign of then candidate Doug Mastriano. The film, entitled The Return of the American Patriot: the Rise of Pennsylvania, faced protests at the time of its launch, with theaters reportedly backing out of screenings.

Hannah Gais, a senior research analyst at the SPLC, who has written extensively on the affinities between far-right movements in the US and Russia, said: “Steve Turley has long served as a sort of bridge between the far-right fringe and Maga, particularly when it comes to the movement’s approach to Russia and Russian nationalism. He frequently presents Russia as a traditionalist bulwark.”

Gais added: “Like Dugin and a lot of Russian nationalists, Turley presents the conflict between the United States and Russia as a clash of civilizations.

“To varying degrees, this is the worldview that has underpinned much of the Maga movement’s pro-Russian rhetoric – and it’s one that aligns perfectly with pro-Russian propaganda.”

Jacob Reaume

On 7 August CrossPolitic hosted a debate which included Canadian pastor Jacob Reaume on the topic “Are Kings or Constitutions more Biblical?”

In the debate, Rench, the co-host, was arguing for constitutional government, which he explained at one point as “I would like our constitution to say the Bible is the highest law of the land. And so that moral code is required and you could get punished for it. And then here’s our secondary constitution.”

Reaume disagreed, offering an even more authoritarian vision.

“But when you say constitutional, some people hear, well, that means we’ve got to have a vote. It’s got to go through Congress and all this other stuff,” he said.

Reaume added: “But in my mind, if the word of God is supreme, and it’s Congress or the vote or all these others, the parliament, they’re holding it up, then they’re in disobedience and they’re in violation of the constitution.”

Reaume continued: “So now you have all of these parasites who are in the system, who are slowing down or poisoning the cup in order to get their way. And they’re using this whole process in order to drag us all down to hell. And I think someone like a Cromwell right now, if he had the base … I don’t know if the base is there.”

Cromwell’s reign in England implemented religious authoritarianism, enforcing Puritan morality while suppressing dissenting faiths. Later in the podcast, Reaume said: “So a Cromwellian figure, if he has a solid base, will use the law to teach the ungodly that they are ungodly so that they will fear their sin.”

Reaume has achieved some prominence in Canada as an advocate of theocratic rule and the end of Canadian self-governance.

Last December on his blog, Reaume described Donald Trump’s threat to annex Canada as a “good and patriotic idea”, writing: “Before labelling me a traitor, consider that I am a patriotic Canadian, loyal to Canada’s historic constitutional order, but I am also awake to the fact that that order has been largely destroyed.”

He added: “Our government has stripped us of our ability to defend ourselves, regularly violated private property rights, trampled on free enterprise, violated religious liberty, denigrated our identity, faces serious allegations of being treasonously compromised by foreign governments in India and China, and our courts have offered little to no recourse.”

On the other hand, he wrote: “South of the border, Americans have maintained their right to bear arms, have found recourse in the courts for the Covid violations against business and churches, and are much more encouraging of the free market.”

In the post’s conclusion, he asked: “If we, the amorphous nation of Canada, are to be absorbed, I cannot think of a nation I would rather absorb us than the United States. If it is not America, who will it be? China? India? Given the options, becoming the 51st state is the best.”

In March, a Canadian political scientist, Noel Anderson, speculated that Hegseth’s Pentagon purges represented an “erosion of institutional checks that can impede the use of force”, including an invasion of Canada.

Reaume has also been involved in efforts by a fundamentalist alliance, Liberty Coalition Canada, to deliver “conservative social and political policies based on literal interpretations of the Bible” by means including running political candidates.

Liberty Coalition reportedly grew out of efforts to resist Covid restrictions. Reaume’s decision to continue hosting gatherings at his churches during the pandemic saw him receive charges in 2021.

Reaume’s church in Waterloo, Ontario, celebrated resistance to Covid and kicked along the Liberty Coalition’s momentum with a 2022 event, the Church at War conference, which featured Rench as a speaker.

The Guardian contacted Reaume for comment.

In an email, he wrote: “You appear to be on a witch-hunt against Mr Pete Hegseth and President Trump.”

Reaume continued: “For that reason, I am not interested in pursuing this further. May you find the love of God, which is exclusively available to all sinners in the cross of Christ.”

Julie Ingersoll, a Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Florida, has written extensively on the theocratic Christian reconstructionist movement that has influenced CREC churches.

She said: “They want a theocratic America built on biblical law which is relatively closed to immigrants and non-Christians to preserve what they consider to be its character and original intent of the founders.”

Ingersoll added: “But at the same time they believe that Christians across the globe should all work toward this in their respective nations and that all the Christian nations would be affiliated in something of a global faith, federated, theocratic reign of the Kingdom of God.”