In August 2025, a rumor spread online about U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s views on women and voting after he shared a CNN report about a conservative evangelical church he has attended. According to the rumor, Hegseth doesn’t believe women should be allowed to vote, supporting the views of church leaders.
For example, an Aug. 8, 2025, post on X said Hegseth had endorsed “Christian nationalist pastors” (archived):
As of this writing, the post had received more than 280,000 views and 16,000 likes. Versions of the claim spread across X, and Snopes readers searched the site to confirm the veracity of the rumor.
Hegseth did endorse the church in an X post on Aug. 7 (archived):
“All of Christ for All of Life,” he wrote. Christ Church’s website revealed that phrase was part of its motto — “All of Christ, for All of Life, for All of Moscow” (referring to the church’s headquarters in Moscow, Idaho). The church also has various missions, including one in Washington, D.C., whose motto is “All of Christ, for All of Life, for All of DC.”
As part of its nearly seven-minute video report, CNN recorded two of the church’s leaders saying they believed men alone should cast a vote on behalf of their families. One said he would support repealing the Constitution’s 19th amendment (archived), which in 1920 gave women the right to vote. Here is the exchange reporter Pamela Brown had with church leaders Toby Sumpter and Jared Longshore (emphasis ours):
SUMPTER: In my ideal society, we would vote as households, and I would ordinarily be the one that would cast the vote, but I would cast the vote having discussed it with my household.
BROWN: But what if there’s a … your wife doesn’t want to vote for the same person as you?
SUMPTER: Right, well, then that’s a great opportunity for a good discussion.
BROWN: There are some who have gone so far as to say that they want the 19th Amendment repealed.
Longshore is the executive pastor at Christ Church.
However, while Hegseth amplified the report on his church and openly endorsed its message (including in a clip later in the report, in which he voiced admiration for Christ Church head Douglas Wilson), Snopes had not found an interview in which Hegseth specifically said he supported this particular point of doctrine promoted by the church. We also could not identify any document in which he clearly refuted this point. Therefore we have refrained from rating the claim.
Joe Rigney, associate pastor for the church, said in an email that while Hegseth and his family had attended a few services at the church “in the last month,” they were not aware of the secretary’s views on women’s suffrage, nor did the church expect its parishioners to agree on every one of its doctrinal beliefs. “We have had no conversations with Secretary Hegseth about his views on civil polity,” Rigney said. He added that Hegseth had not become a member of Christ Church, which requires “an evangelical confession of faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, crucified and risen for sinners, as well as baptism in the triune name.” Such a membership does not require agreement on specific points of the doctrine, either.
Further, Rigney directed us to a blog post by Wilson, the senior pastor, in which he clarified that their doctrine on voting was not an outright ban on women voting. Rather, they sought to promote household unity by having the head of the household vote in the name of all of the household’s members. While the church expects the head of the household to be the man, they said there were cases in which women acted as the head of the household. Wilson added that this was the model they followed at Christ Church:
At Christ Church, when we have our elections for elders and deacons, we vote by household. Membership is individual, but in any act of collective decision-making, we treat the household as a governmental entity. The person who casts the vote on behalf of the household is the head of that household, which ordinarily is the husband and father. But this means that when a woman is the head of the home (e.g. a widow), she is the one who casts the vote. When we have our Heads of Households meetings, the women who are heads of households attend them.
We reached out to the Department of Defense, asking for a statement from Hegseth on this claim. We will update this report should we receive a response.