This post from the U.S. Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth is just distracting fluff, but it’s such a curious collection that I want to give it a second look (video of him here). 

If we take “BIBLICAL” to mean “in the Bible,” and “Bible” to mean specifically the Old and New Testaments, then those first three claims are accurate in that they appear in the Bible, but there’s still some wiggle room around what they mean AND whether or not they’re moral or reasonable. There are many, many passages of the Bible we ignore for better or worse. More on that later. And, of course, anything in the Bible is almost necessarily political. It’s chock full of rules and laws that people had to follow or face the consequences, not unlike our current legislation. It’s part of a long line of versions of legislation from the Code of Hammurabi to all those American Amendments. 

Abortion: There are passages on how much “the fruit of the womb is a reward” (Psalm 127:3), but Exodus 21:22-25, which provides rules for when a fight breaks out and a pregnant woman gets accidentally hit and miscarries (they thought of everything!), is sometimes used as proof that the mother’s life supersedes the life of the fetus. Also in that passage are rules about what to do if you poke out your slave’s eye and how to sell your daughter appropriately. And in Numbers 5:11-31 it tells us how priests should treat any woman suspected of adultery by putting a curse on them with “bitter water” that causes a miscarriage (aka gives them an abortion). 

Protecting our borders: There’s lots on marking out territories, the right to stop invaders, and God “destroying the nation whose land he is giving you” (Deuteronomy 19), but also the corollary: respecting other nations’ borders. “Do not move an ancient boundary stone” (Proverbs 23:10), so invading Iran to stop them from accessing uranium for medical isotopes, which they’re using to make cancer treatments, is an abomination. God can grant territory by causing floods or pestilence or what-have-you, and then we can take it, but not before. And you only get that land if you follow all the holy laws. Deuteronomy also lays out that a man who accidentally kills someone should be allowed to flee to another place in order to save his life from avengers, and should only be rejected by that new city if he intentionally killed someone with malice. That’s it. That’s the only reason to reject a refugee. Furthermore, one witness to the murder isn’t enough, the city needs the testimony of at least two or three witnesses in order to kick him out. AND if any witness proves to be a liar (coughBondiNoemToomanytonamecough) then “do to the false witness as that witness intended to do to that other party.” They can be first in line in the horrific detention centres they’re building all over their country. 

Trafficking women and children is all over the Bible in the worst way. Selling women and children is fine as long as you don’t sell them to enemy foreigners. Giving your daughter and maid to satiate an angry mob is the righteous thing to do when they’re after your friend. Taking the “spoils of war” is also expected behaviour: “Kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man” (Numbers 31:17-18). So, sometimes it’s better to look to our current legislation now that we have almost come to terms with women being equal human beings. Widows and fatherless children of your own nation get some extra protection, though, or else “My wrath shall wax hot, and I will kill you with the sword; and your wives shall be widows, and your children fatherless” (Exodus 22:22-24). He was vindictive and jealous in the OT. Having a son softened him. 

But then comes that fourth one about sexual perversions. Who can forget that parable of boys and girls sharing a locker room at the gym and suddenly they’re all speaking different languages, amiright?! The Bible speaks glowingly of Lot’s daughters getting him hammered and having it off with him (Genesis 19:30-38). It’s portrays as good because they’re preserving the family line, but it’s all sorts of fucked up. There are many rules around sexual propriety around adultery that he’s ignoring: “Anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matthew 5:27-78). And, yup, Deuteronomy 22 says, “The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment,” but it also says, “Thou shalt not sow thy vineyard with diverse seeds: lest the fruit of thy seed which thou hast sown, and the fruit of thy vineyard, be defiled.” If we’re following these precepts, written almost 4,000 years ago, then I don’t want any of these assholes allowed to eat food that came from seeds that have been “defiled” by cross-pollination or, God forbid, GMOs. So, basically, nothing in our current grocery stores. Other passages around sexual impropriety involve women being slaughtered or sold, like if your new bride can’t prove her virginity on your wedding night: “Bring out the damsel to the door of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her with stones that she die.” I’m very afraid that those are the bits these wingnuts like.  

Protecting the culture from pagan religions is a joke, right? Because the early Christians absorbed pagan rituals in order to make their new religion more popular. We don’t know JC’s date of birth, but we peg it to December 25th because it fit with the Feast of Saturnalia already happening to celebrate the end of the shortest day, and the birth of the sun. And we don’t know when he died, but pagan spring festivals felt like a good fit for a resurrection, and that still moves around the calendar depending on the moon (the first Sunday after the first full moon following the vernal equinox – first day of spring). 

What’s being ignored in Hegseth’s rant? “The love of money is a root of all kinds of evils” (1 Timothy 6:10). 

He left out the very Biblical concepts of usury and jubilee. “If you lend money to any of my people with you who is poor, you shall not be like a moneylender to him, and you shall not exact interest from him” (Exodus 22:25). “If people are too poor to support themselves, help them and don’t take any interest from them” (Leviticus 25:35-37). “You shall not change interest to your brother” (Deuteronomy 23:19), and aren’t we all brothers and sisters?? Ezekiel 18:13 says, “Hath given forth upon usury, and hath taken increase: shall he then live? he shall not live: he hath done all these abominations; he shall surely die; his blood shall be upon him.”

An interesting shift happened with the word “usury.” It used to mean any interest on a loan, and was considered really bad to do. According to this History of Usury, in the Gettysburg Economic Review, in ancient Greece, lending money for profit was seen as unnatural and dishonourable, and the negative association lasted through the spread of Christianity and Islam into the Middle Ages, making usury a crime. It was the expansion of trade and rise of capitalism that shifted the definition of usury to mean excessive interest, like with current credit card companies. According to this History of Finance, usury was put into law in the English Usury Act of 1545, which ended the prohibition of usury, and set the maximum rate at 12% for commercial loans, which gradually fell over the next 150 years down to 5% in 1714. During the Enlightenment, Adam Smith wanted strict regulations on interest, and Jeremy Bentham was opposed on the grounds of restrictions being a violation of liberties. Bentham’s view held out, and restrictions were scrapped in 1854. 

Adam Smith also advocated for LIMITED profit, and famously said, “All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” And here we are, with a handful of people stealing literally billions from their citizens, and somehow they can’t be arrested for it. That’s the truly anti-Christian part of it all.