Why Reform copying the Hesgeth playbook should worry all of us

Graham Davies

When Donald Trump appointed a Fox TV anchor with no governmental office experience as Defence Secretary and began to use the phrase ‘Secretary of War’ to describe Pete Hegseth you knew trouble was brewing.

Leading Operation Epic Fury, Hegseth’s media appearance became more bizarre as the Iran war escalated and so I felt that a read of his book ‘American Crusade: Our Fight to Stay Free’ was inevitable.

Despite regretting to pay for the kindle version, which turned out to be an angry, vitriolic and tiresome rant, I was rewarded with a frightening insight into American government thinking. That the UK leader of Reform has so much adulation for that administration is scary for a Welsh nation soon to vote for its future.

Whereas our Defence Secretary, John Healey, is viewed as a serious, hugely experienced, sensible politician, his American equivalent appears in the media as aggressive and macho. He revels in the language of violence in the current conflict – crushing the enemy, barbaric savages and giving no quarter (actually a war crime).

Whereas First Minister Eluned Morgan has called for de-escalation and the protection of human life and warns about the possible community tensions in Wales, wild west Hegseth shoots from the hip. Critics and many academics have regarded the book as unhinged, laden with conspiracy theory and falsehood, bigoted and simplistic. Hegseth calls for an American crusade, a holy war for the righteous cause of freedom, emulating the Christian knights who marched to Jerusalem to conquer the Muslim hordes. Americans are warriors who must defeat the forces of elitism, liberalism, socialism, collectivism, Islamism, globalism, Leftism, environmentalism and any other ‘ism’ which threatens American values of capitalism and freedom and Trump’s persona.

Hegseth’s sycophantic admiration of Trump is cringeworthy. He boasts that the people elected an America First Disrupter in Chief. God willed it – he has the Latin ‘Deus Vult’ tattooed on his biceps and a Jerusalem cross on his chest. The phrase is associated with the First Crusade, where it was reportedly shouted by crusaders as a rallying cry.

That Trump ignores protocol and conventional wisdom, mocks political correctness, disrupts and never apologises is somehow creditable qualities. That Hegseth talks about humiliating and intimidating leftist opponents; the poison of social justice, diversity, climate change and universal health care; the superiority of the US in innovation, invention and its constitutional system is quite astonishing if it were not so dangerous.

The fact that these ideas are grounded in a Christian Nationalism which has taken root in far right political parties looking for power in Wales is alarming. Hegseth’s ‘warriors armed with the arsenal of faith’ is a twisted brand and a political ideology based on fear and division and not on the teaching of the New Testament.

Hegseth’s views reflect a distortion of the Christian faith where passages in the Bible which dare to suggest loving one’s enemy, loving and caring for the stranger, welcome and hospitality, mercy and forgiveness are neatly sidelined. The growing phenomenon was seen in Germany in the 1930s with the Deutsche Christen movement which brought together

Nazi ideas and Protestant faith merging Christian symbolism with national identity. It’s on show in Russia at present where the Orthodox Church, through its primate Patriarch Kirill, has given legitimacy and ideological support to Putin’s barbaric imperialism in Ukraine, claiming that it is God’s truth that the ancient Slavic-Orthodox lands should be reunited.

Its proponents abound in Trumpist America where a toxic conflation of nationalism, patriotism, superficial fundamentalist Christianity, authoritarianism and white supremacy is stoking division and hatred. It is impossible to reconcile the behaviour and vicious rhetoric of Trump – he described Iranian leaders as “deranged scumbags” who it was a “great honour” to kill – with mainstream UK Christianity.

When an Anglican bishop claimed: “The far right has parked its tanks on the front lawn of the Church of England” he was flagging up right wing activists Stephen Yaxley-Lennon and UKIP’s Nick Tenkoni who do a good job of splicing the Christian faith with anti-Islam, anti-migrant views and divisive language.

Farage is dangerously popular in US government circles. What he has discovered there he will bring here – Trumpist politics from Magaland. J.D. Vance is a good friend of populist right theologian James Orr and regards him as his ‘intellectual mentor’. Orr is head of policy for Reform UK and once described asylum seekers as “invaders”.

Danny Kruger, another fairly recent Tory jumper and Christian nationalist, was soon in the Farage play-book replacing the language of tolerance with the rhetoric of exclusion in a Parliamentary speech.

What Trump, Vance and Hegseth and their Reform admirers stand for is ugly. Swansea born and former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has called for a Christian language that embraces the embittered, forgotten, despised and threatened. Many more have called upon the Welsh people to reject the distortions of Reform’s thinking which cannot be reconciled with the cultural, social and religious values of Wales.

Graham Davies is author of over a dozen books for teachers and two on Wales and the Spanish Civil War. He’s also a newspaper columnist for the Llanelli Star and Carmarthen Journal