Culture, Faith and Politics with Pat Kahnke

Pete Hegseth isn't just a bad Cabinet pick. He's a theological project — and silence is no longer an option.

As Secretary of Defense, Hegseth has publicly glorified violence, renamed the Department of Defense the "Department of War," and invoked the name of God to justify military aggression. This isn't political theater. It's Christian nationalism in power — and it belongs to a specific movement with a specific ideology, rooted in Doug Wilson's network out of Moscow, Idaho.

 
In this episode, retired evangelical pastor Pat Kahnke examines what Hegseth's actions reveal about the theology driving MAGA: a version of Christianity that prays for maximum violence against enemies, treats empathy as sin, and seeks to build an authoritarian Christendom — not by following Jesus, but by ruling in his name. This is what happens when Christian nationalism stops being fringe and starts running the Pentagon.

Viktor Orbán lost in Hungary. JD Vance couldn’t get a deal done with Iran. The White House fought with the Pope. And Trump shared an AI photo of himself as Jesus. It was a bad week for the MAGA movement – and even their leader can’t save them. Join Pat Kahnke for a live chat about all this and more on Culture, Faith, and Politics live!

From the Duggar family to Pete Hegseth to the Oval Office — the pattern is the same. MAGA Christianity has built a theological permission structure that protects powerful men and silences women and children. Pat Kahnke and Amy Hawk trace the unbroken line from Bill Gothard's IBLP, to the Duggar family's protected abuse, to Doug Wilson's submission theology, to the men now running the United States government.

Trump and MAGA don't just disagree with Jesus — they are selling the exact system Jesus came to destroy. In this episode of The Bible vs. MAGA, we go straight to the Sermon on the Mount and let the Beatitudes do the work.

A viewer comment defending MAGA's values of honor, winning, and dominance became the entry point for a deeper question: what happens when the church adopts a worldview that Jesus spent His entire ministry dismantling? The honor-shame system that runs MAGA — the obsession with strength, the contempt for the weak, the gospel of winning — is not a Christian value. It is the ancient power structure the Beatitudes were written to expose.

If you are a Christian wrestling with the fusion of Trump and the Gospel — or trying to find the words to explain why it feels so wrong — this is the conversation you have been waiting for.

At Charlie Kirk's memorial, they didn't just grieve — they worshipped. And what happened in that room reveals something disturbing about how MAGA Christianity weaponized worship music to train a movement. Author Rick Pidcock (Weapons of Worship) joins me to expose the psychological and theological mechanics behind worship-as-warfare — from Sean Feucht's rallies to a Seattle service where a worship leader told the congregation to throw rocks at LGBTQ+ people. This isn't fringe. It's a pattern. And it's been building for years inside evangelical spaces.