God, Guns, and Gas

The same logic that says women shouldn't vote says the Earth is ours to use up. Meet the pastor now whispering that into the world's most powerful military.

Three days ago, Pete Hegseth — the man who calls himself the Secretary of War — stood in the Pentagon auditorium, draped his arm around a pastor’s shoulder, and prayed.

He called the pastor his mentor — said this pastor was bold. And that pastor’s name is Doug Wilson. Now, you may not know his name yet, but I hate to tell you — you will.

Wilson is the founder of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho — a self-described Christian nationalist and “paleo-Confederate” with views so violent and extreme that we’re going to need a whole paragraph just to get through them. He runs a publishing house, a network of “classical Christian” schools, and now a newly planted church in Washington D.C. — a deliberate expansion mission into the capital — that Hegseth’s family has been attending.

The Pentagon published the photos itself. Oh, but their little Christofascist hearts were proud.

From DOW Rapid Response on X

Now, you might be reading this thinking: okay, whatevs . . . so, the revolting Secretary of Defense has some unhinged pastor friend, what does this have to do with climate? Yet the connections between Christian nationalism, fossil fuel capitalism, and planetary destruction are one fight, rooted in one idea — and that idea has been doing an enormous amount of work for about five hundred years.

The problem is we’ve all been trained to see our fights as separate — and this separation divides us. The culture war is over here, the climate crisis is over there, and economic inequality? Ah, that’s somewhere way over there . . .

But if we’re going to stand a chance in stopping this growing fascism, we have to stop segregating the fight. Because the same logic that says women shouldn’t vote says the Earth is ours to use up.

These are not separate positions.
They are one view.
And the word to describe them is ‘dominion’.

Dominion comes from Genesis 1:28. It is where God instructs the first humans to “fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing.”

Now, theologians have been arguing about what dominion actually means for centuries. One interpretation is that it essentially means ‘stewardship’: we are caretakers of creation and accountable for what we do with it (and as a card-carrying atheist, I’ll take that version of God, thanks).

Another interpretation is that dominion means ‘mastery’: the earth and everything on it was given to us to exploit, subdue, and rule. Strip it, drill it, own it, full stop (hey lookit, colonialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy hiding in a Bible verse, again).

Pete’s mate Doug Wilson has never been shy about which interpretation he believes. He’s called climate science “global warming hooey”, compared climate activists to apocalyptic doomsayers, and devoted entire podcast episodes to the idea that climate action is really just a government control scheme. His beliefs do not merely fail to care about the earth, they actively sanctify its destruction — because to him, the Earth is not a living system we are part of. It is a dominion we were appointed to rule.

And when you really look at the full inventory of Wilson’s beliefs, you realize this isn’t a guy who just wandered into extreme positions — this is someone who followed one idea to its logical conclusions, and thus all its offshoots make perfect sense to him.

For example, Wilson believes enslaved people had an “affectionate” relationship with their enslavers — i.e., the white people who *owned*, raped, and tortured them for centuries were actually affectionate — and this vile man compared their relationship to a Disney movie.

He also believes that women must entirely submit to men, including surrendering their vote, which will of course be exercised by male heads of household. He believes that non-Christians should not hold public office, that gay relationships should be illegal, that climate science is a hoax, and that the United States should be remade as a Christian republic under biblical law. The repulsive list just goes on and on.

And every single one of Wilson’s *positions* flows from the one idea: the world is divided into those appointed to rule, and the things appointed to be ruled.

Men over women.
Christians over non-Christians.
White civilization over everyone else.
Straight over gay.
Humans over nature.

The hierarchy is conveniently invisible and God-given, and to challenge any part of it — whether through suffrage, civil rights, climate regulation, or Indigenous land sovereignty — is to rebel against divine order.

This Christofascist framework has a name. Scholars call it “dominionism”, or Christian Reconstructionism, and its modern American form was shaped largely by a theologian named R.J. Rushdoony, who argued that the U.S. should be governed by Old Testament law. A later generation of dominionists mapped this onto what they call the ‘seven mountains of society’ — government, military, media, arts and entertainment, education, religion, and family — all of which they believe Christians are called to seize and control.

Now let’s remember, Pete Hegseth now controls one of those “mountains” and the Pentagon photos were posted by the official DOD rapid response account with the caption: “We are One Nation Under God.”

I’m not being dramatic when I say: they are telling us exactly what they’re doing.

But to really understand why this all matters for the climate — for land, for the communities most vulnerable to climate breakdown, and for the literal future of humankind on this planet — we have to follow the idea back further than Wilson, further than Rushdoony, all the way to 1493 and a papal edict that most Americans have never heard of.

It’s called “The Doctrine of Discovery”.

In 1493, Pope Alexander VI issued a decree granting European Christian monarchs the divine right to claim any land not already held by Christians — regardless of who was living on it. The reasoning was unsurprisingly rooted in disgusting racism and supremacy: non-Christian people, because they were not Christian, had no legitimate claim to their own territories.

The pope explicitly granted the right to “invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue” any non-Christian peoples encountered, seize their lands, and reduce them to perpetual slavery. And to be clear, this wasn’t some weird fringe theology — it was the actual foundation of property law, international law, and American law. And it is, in modified form, still operative in U.S. courts today.

Scholars who study the Doctrine of Discovery trace a direct line from those 15th-century official church documents into the dominion theology of Christian nationalist movements today.

The “logic” is identical. Assert Christian European civilization’s superiority over all others and justify extraction — of land, of labor, of resources — as divinely sanctioned. Treat non-Christian people and non-human nature as subordinate: raw material for the project of Christian civilization.

And here’s the thing nobody taught us in school: political theologians have noted that the emergence of this belief system was inseparable from the emergence of whiteness itself. In other words, that the two ideas grew together to reinforce one another — that the settler did not belong to the land, but rather the land belonged to the settler, et al. It’s that very way of narcissistic thinking that led to the violent theft of Indigenous territories, the brutal enslavement of African peoples, and the unforgivable transformation of living ecosystems into extractable commodities.

It is the same claim Doug Wilson is making from the Pentagon — same logic, yet now with a military budget of $850 billion that we all pay for.

Which leads us to the part in this essay where the fossil fuel industry shows up . . .

Dominion theology would have likely stayed a fringe academic obsession if powerful economic interests hadn’t of course found it useful. The Cornwall Alliance — one of the most influential evangelical organizations opposing climate action — has received significant backing from fossil fuel interests and has worked in close partnership with the Heritage Foundation. And the Cornwall Alliance’s campaign ‘Resisting the Green Dragon’ explicitly framed environmentalism as, wait for it, a satanic threat: a “demonic” ideology that put the needs of nature above people.

Climate science was not just wrong, they argued. It was heresy.

This was not organic theology — it was manufactured and produced at the intersection of religious extremism and fossil fuel money, specifically designed to insulate evangelical communities against climate concern. And it worked extraordinarily well. Pew Research finds that evangelical Protestants are now the group least likely to believe climate change is human-caused, and the most likely to see climate regulations as a threat to “freedom”.

The earth is not sacred.
It’s a resource.
God said so.
Now please sign this lease for the drilling rights.

Christofascism is not a culture war sideshow. It is a climate story. The same worldview that justified the Doctrine of Discovery — the theft of Indigenous land, the enslavement of African people — justifies the seizure of the atmosphere and the sacrifice of the communities most vulnerable to climate breakdown.

The U.S. Department of Defense is the world’s single largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels, with the U.S. military burning roughly 100 million barrels of oil per year and its greenhouse gas emissions exceeding those of many mid-sized countries. The military-industrial complex and the fossil fuel complex are not separate systems — they are both operating under a theology that says extraction is divine mandate.

When Hegseth invited Wilson to preach at the Pentagon and called him a mentor, he was not engaging in a private religious act. Wilson’s sermon cast the Pentagon audience as soldiers in a spiritual battle and literally suggested that the U.S. military might be the spark for a new Christian revival. He compared the prayer meeting to Pentecost. He invoked David and Goliath. He was, in the auditorium of the world’s most powerful military, describing a holy war.

Read that again.

This is not just some fringe pastor with weird ideas about women. This is the theological director of a movement that has been systematically building toward institutional capture for DECADES, who now has a direct line to the Secretary of Defense, and whose worldview — of domination over people, over women, over non-Christians, over the land itself — is now the operating theology of U.S. military power.

Read that one again too. And then think what you can do about it . . .

We have to all collectively understand that the climate crisis is not primarily a technical problem, it’s a power problem. The fossil fuel industry has not survived this long because its product is indispensable — it has survived because it has captured the institutions, politicians, courts, and ideological frameworks that might otherwise hold it accountable.

And Doug Wilson is exactly the kind of true believer this system needs, providing the theological permission structure that makes extraction feel “righteous” — that makes planetary destruction feel like obedience to God.

And the communities paying the price for that theology? They are overwhelmingly the same communities whose land was taken under the Doctrine of Discovery. Whose labor was exploited under the theology of racial hierarchy. Whose autonomy is now threatened by the theology of patriarchal dominion.

These are not separate fights.
They have never been separate fights.

They are the same fight, rooted in the same logic, facing the same enemy — one that is now praying together in the Pentagon.

And yes, this all feels overwhelming. But the answer is actually simple, even if it’s hard: We cannot allow our fights to be siloed. Period.

When you hear about Doug Wilson and the Pentagon, say: this is a climate story. When you hear about fossil fuel subsidies, say: this is a white supremacy story. When you hear about Indigenous land rights, say: this is a climate story, a religious freedom story, a colonial history story — all at once.

We are in the same fight against the same five-hundred-year-old logic of domination and extraction. The people who built the world we’re now trying to survive have known this from the start — and they’ve been playing that long game ever since.

People . . . it’s time we started playing it too.

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