Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has publicly supported his church’s Christian Nationalist pastor Doug Wilson, reposting a CNN interview in which Wilson says he’d like to re-criminalize consensual same-sex sexual encounters and deny women the right to vote. Hegseth has previously said that it was a mistake to allow homosexuals and bisexuals into the U.S. military.

“In the late ’70s and early ’80s, sodomy was a felony in all 50 states. That America of that day was not a totalitarian hellhole,” Wilson tells CNN in the interview clip, which Hegseth reposted to his personal X account this past weekend. When asked if he’d like those laws to be reinstated, Wilson answers, “Yep.”

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Contrary to his statement, a few states actively repealed their anti-sodomy laws in the ’70s and ’80s. Under these laws, arrestees could be fired, publicly shamed, and denied legal protections over their loved ones in the United States’ fascistic anti-gay system. During the 1980s, the U.S. government also largely ignored the AIDS epidemic, essentially ignoring the deaths of tens of thousands of gay and bisexual men.

Elsewhere in the interview, the CNN interviewer mentions that Wilson believes women shouldn’t be allowed to vote (instead, allowing their husbands or male “heads of the household” to vote), that he would like to turn the world into a Christian world, and that “decent human beings” owned slaves.

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Reposting the interview on his X account, Hegseth wrote, “All of Christ for All of Life,” which is the one of Wilson’s slogans and also the title of his podcast, them reported. Wilson has also written blog posts stating, “We know that sodomy is worse,” the aforementioned publication noted. 

All of Christ for All of Life. https://t.co/QqXhqZFStv

— Pete Hegseth (@PeteHegseth) August 8, 2025

Wilson is the co-founded of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), a Christian Nationalist denomination with over 130 churches worldwide. Among its key beliefs is that the United States should be subject to biblical law.

Wilson recently opened a CREC church in Washington D.C., which he says is part of his plan to turn the U.S. into a Christian nation — Hegseth reportedly attends the church.

In a June 2024 episode of The Ben Shapiro Show, Hegseth said he thinks the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” — the military’s ban on out lesbian, gay, and bisexual service members — was part of the “Marxist” and “leftist” shift that led to “the trans agenda being pushed into the military,” thus undermining the military’s overall effectiveness.

While he later walked back his opposition to LGB military members at a Senate confirmation hearing the following December, he has since helped implement the current president’s purge of transgender military members, alluding to trans individuals as mentally ill, selfish, dishonorable, deceitful, undisciplined, and unfit for military service.

Hegseth spent his college days at Princeton campaigning against LGBTQ+ rights. As publisher of the conservative magazine The Princeton Tory in the early 2000s, he oversaw a team that railed against the “homosexual lifestyle,” and in one 2002 issue, argued that “The movement to legitimize the homosexual lifestyle and homosexual marriages is strong and must be vigorously opposed.” It called homosexuality “abnormal and immoral.”

In that same issue, Hegseth wrote in his “Notes from the Publisher” that the “glorification of diversity” is “a problem that plagues most of American academia today.” He said Western ideas “deserve priority over other areas of study” because the fact that the United States is a global superpower “demonstrates the[ir] enduring strength.”

Another issue of The Princeton Tory published by Hegseth slammed the New York Times for its decision to start covering same-sex marriage announcements, calling it “dangerous” because it could inspire people to want to marry siblings, children, or dogs.

Hegseth has been accused of sexual assault and extreme drunkenness. His own mother has accused him of abusing women.

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