Serious Conservatism Requires: Law, a Wage, and a marriage Kept

The prophecy is the tell. A serious conservatism does not need it, and cannot survive the men who preach it.

In March, as the Iran strikes began, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation logged more than a hundred complaints from service members. One, reported by Jonathan Larsen and picked up by Newsweek, had a combat-unit commander telling his non-commissioned officers that the war was God’s plan and that the president had been “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon.” No officer has said this on the record. The complaints are anonymous. They are still the language that has been loose in the ranks, and this week the secretary of defense gave it a ceiling. At Quantico on 30 September, Pete Hegseth announced an Office of Religious Affairs reporting straight to him, told the force it was “putting on the full armor of God,” and informed them that God is good, evil is not, and the military must understand the difference.

That is not a program. It is a mood. The right spent a decade asking to be taken seriously again. This is how it spends the chance.

The old conservative argument was not that America had been chosen to open the last seal. It was that a country is a settlement of families, laws, and habits, and that those had been taken apart. Pat Buchanan made the case in plain speech. The culture broke in the late 1960s. Divorce was normalized, illegitimacy rose, the old restraints on sex and trade and borders were called liberation, and the bill arrived as crime, fatherless streets, and a politics that could no longer say what a man owed his children. The remedy he pointed at was not a verse about the end of the world. It was legislation and recovery: borders that mean something, a trade policy that keeps a wage, a public square that does not treat the traditional family as a private hobby. Ready statements. A society closer to the one that existed before 1968, built back by rule and custom, not by waiting for a signal fire.

Richard Nixon is the useful contrast, and not because he was a saint. He was not. He resigned in disgrace, and the right has spent fifty years explaining him away. What he did not do was treat a household as optional. He married Pat Ryan in 1940 and stayed married to her until he died in 1994. One marriage. Two daughters. The public man and the private arrangement were the same arrangement. That was the pre-1968 expectation of a man who held authority, and it was an expectation he met even while the office collapsed around him. You can convict him of the crimes and still notice the marriage. The current cabinet asks to be judged on the sermon and excused on the settlements. Nixon offers the reverse exhibit: a ruined president who kept the thing these men will not keep, and who never needed a chapter of Revelation to explain a war.

Nothing in the Quantico speech does the recovery work. An office of spiritual readiness does not cut the divorce rate. A brief that the real battle is spiritual does not put a father back in a house. The pre-1968 country was churchgoing, and it was also legally and socially hard on the dissolution of marriage. The two went together. You cannot have the hymn and discard the rule, then call the result a restoration.

The personnel make the contradiction obvious, and the contradiction is specific.

The secretary delivering the armor-of-God address has been married three times. Meredith Schwarz, divorced. Samantha Deering, divorced. Jennifer Rauchet, the current wife. He is the man telling the force that God is good and evil is not. The old standard would have asked him to keep a house before he was invited to preach one.

The president in whose name the anointing is claimed has been divorced twice, and the record does not stop at the decrees. In 2006, adult-film actress Stormy Daniels says, he had sex with her in a Lake Tahoe hotel while his third wife was at home with their infant son. Michael Cohen paid her $130,000 in the closing weeks of the 2016 campaign to stay quiet. Trump has denied the encounter. A New York jury convicted him of falsifying the records that reimbursed Cohen for the payment. The hush money is not a rumor. A movement that calls this man anointed to light a signal fire has already decided that adultery is a footnote and prophecy is the text.

The Treasury secretary is the third count, and it is the one the biblical language cannot survive. Scott Bessent is openly gay. He has been with John Freeman since the 1990s, they are married, and they have two children by surrogacy. He sits in a cabinet whose secretary of defense quotes the armor of God and whose commanders, if the complaints are even half true, cite Revelation over a war. The same book they are waving prohibits what Bessent lives. Leviticus does not become optional because the portfolio is bonds. A politics that thunders the verse at soldiers and seats the arrangement at the treasury table is not confused. It is using the verse as scenery.

A cabinet that talks like a revival tent and lives like a second marriage, a paid silence, and a same-sex household is not modeling the thing it says the country lost. The old standard was public. A man in authority was expected to have kept a household. That expectation was often hypocritical, and it was still a standard. The new one is theatrical. The sermon is for the troops. The settlements are private. Troops can count. So can anyone who has read the book the sermon is taken from.

There is a second cost, and it is strategic. A commander who tells his men the war is the preface to the return of Christ has already stopped evaluating the war. He cannot ask what the blockade is for, what the ceasefire costs, or what a campaign that does not end on schedule does to the force. Prophecy closes the question. Buchanan’s conservatism was the opposite habit. It distrusted foreign crusades, biblical or democratic, because both spend the country on abstractions. A right that has rediscovered God only as a warrant for the next strike has not rediscovered conservatism. It has rented the vocabulary.

The work, if anyone still wants it, is dull. Marriage made costly to exit and worth entering. Divorce law that does not treat children as an afterthought. Housing and wages that let a household form before thirty. Schools that are not embarrassed by the two-parent norm. A public rhetoric that can say this without a chapter of Revelation attached. That is the pre-1968 ask, and it is a legislative ask. It does not require a direct line from the chaplain corps to the secretary. It requires men who have kept the arrangement they intend to write into law. Nixon kept his. The men quoting God over Iran have not kept theirs.

Until then the religious language is gibberish in the strict sense. It does not refer to the policy in front of it, and it does not refer to the lives of the men speaking it. The policy is a war and a reorganized office. The lives are three marriages, a hush-money payment to Stormy Daniels, and a treasury secretary whose household the cited book condemns. The language is the end of the age. A serious right would retire the language, or retire the men. It cannot keep both and still call itself the party of the family.