Dissing patriots, displeasing gods

How renaming a Navy ship reveals a nation's misplaced priorities

Christening and launch of the USNS Harvey Milk in San Diego in 2021. (USN photo by Sarah Burford)

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In the hills of southern Indiana, where my dad hunted small game during the Depression with a 12-gauge shotgun, most people would likely have recognized a “bird dog gift.” It’s something you give to somebody else that’s really what you want yourself — like a guy in those hills who might decide that what his wife really needs for her birthday is a hunting dog, though she doesn’t own a gun and has never shot a bird.

So it happened that I became the owner of a 22-foot sailboat one birthday a couple of decades back, a gift from my wife, who grew up sailing on saltwater. A sailboat would surely be just what I wanted, she assured me. We christened it “Bird Dog,” for reasons that you now understand.

In the three years that we owned the boat, I learned a lot of sailing lore, including stories about the powerful force of superstition. Which is why I know that renaming a boat is nearly a taboo among sailors. Oh, you can do it, of course — but you risk disaster at the hands of the gods, the old salts say, at least unless you follow specific de-christening customs. Poseidon, the Greek god of the seas, demands certain offerings if you wish to withdraw from terms of the grant he has awarded you to safely traverse his realm.

This seems not to have been in the curriculum that Pete Hegseth studied at Princeton before he became an infantryman, and then a weekend cable TV anchor and then — incredibly, given his inexperience in leadership and his poor record of personal deportment — the United States Secretary of Defense. He may not know about the wrath of the gods, but Hegseth is big on power; he claims to be single-minded in his quest to restore what he calls “a warrior ethos” to a military that he says has been weakened by “the distractions of diversity.”¹

Mind you, there is no evidence that the American military has been weakened by efforts over the past decade to assure that, in the words of former Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, “our military looks like the nation that it defends.” Austin, a retired four-star general, felt that diversity efforts strengthened the military; Hegseth, who was a major in the Minnesota National Guard, is intent on reversing them.²

It is in pursuit of that goal — specifically, drumming out the supposedly pernicious influence of women and gays in America’s fighting forces — that Hegseth decided that June, as Pride Month, is the exact right time to change the name of the USNS Harvey Milk, which was named for the iconic gay rights leader who served in the Navy during the Korean War. Milk, a lieutenant (junior grade), was forced to resign and accept an “other than honorable” discharge in 1955 rather than face court martial for homosexuality.³

Hegseth hasn’t gotten around to it yet, but he’s likely to want to rename other ships that reflect a military commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion — words that abruptly became anathema, it seems, when Donald Trump regained the White House.

There’s the USNS Medgar Evers, named for the civil rights leader murdered by a white supremacist in 1963, and the USNS Harriet Tubman, honoring an Underground Railroad conductor and Union spy during the Civil War, and the USNS Ruth Bader Ginsberg, which honors the late Supreme Court Justice.⁴

Evers, we might note, enlisted in the Army in 1943 at age 17, and served in the segregated 657th Port Company, which played a critical role in the Allied advance at Normandy. Tubman led an 1863 raid that liberated some 700 enslaved people, and was posthumously awarded the rank of brigadier general in the Maryland National Guard. Ginsberg didn’t see military service, but her legal work in the late 20^th century helped end the military’s policy of discharging women for becoming pregnant. Patriots all, I’d say.

But naming Navy vessels for such folks apparently undermines our military preparedness, in Hegseth’s view. I’m sure we are all grateful that our Secretary of Defense — who leads the largest bureaucracy in the world, with three million employees globally sworn to protect our republic — is paying attention to such important matters. Who can doubt that this focus will make America stronger?

Unless Poseidon is ticked off, you know — or Neptune, if your polytheism runs to Roman tradition rather than Greek. In polytheistic cultures, people tended to believe that they had to do all sorts of deeds to flatter and please the gods, and that the deities’ displeasure could be as deadly as it was capricious. If that sounds a bit like how people now approach the current god of Pennsylvania Avenue, we may be gaining insight into the decline of American society. We’re being led by a guy who thinks he’s the American Zeus.

Maybe just to be safe, then, Hegseth should take some note of the traditions of christening and, well, un-christening. It might be good practice for dealing with the boss.

Given the influence of Christianity in the Western world, it’s unsurprising that a number of English words are derived from that specific religious tradition. We bury people in a cemetery, a term derived from the Greek koimeterion, which means a “sleeping place,” honoring the Christian concept of resurrection. The Greek work for witness, martyr, which referenced early Christian behavior, is now what we use in English to refer to people who die for their beliefs.

Likewise, the notion of a christening derives from the old English term cristnian, which literally meant “to make Christian.”⁵ That’s not what you do when naming a ship or a boat, obviously, though the peril of the high seas has prompted prayers for safety at the launch of a vessel throughout history.

That part might be appealing to Hegseth, who eagerly flaunted his religious beliefs during his Senate confirmation hearings in January. Questioned about squaring those views with numerous allegations of his excessive drinking and infidelity, he said, “I’m not a perfect person, but redemption is real. I have failed in things in my life, and thankfully I’m redeemed by my lord and savior Jesus.”⁶ Such language is quite popular in politics, you know, when troubling personal histories surface.

At the risk of stepping too deeply into religious matters, I must note that the word Hegseth used — “redemption” — is a term that Christian teachings have loaded with meaning. Its promise arises not from mere remorse for past bad behavior, but from a commitment to leading a better life, one that is more in keeping with the teachings of the faith.

And about those teachings: Hegseth has said that his faith compels him to lead an “American crusade,” invoking images of the brutal medieval wars that European Christians waged against Muslims.⁷ Some might not consider the bloody fights of a millennium ago as the appropriate model for a contemporary national leader. They were generally unsuccessful for Christian forces, by the way, and fostered violence and mistrust between Christianity and other religious faiths that linger to this day.

There are other options that those who consider themselves people of faith might choose as their guide, including teachings that don’t require bloodthirsty vengeance. One could start, for example, by taking note of Jesus’ frequent condemnation of the hypocrisy of the religious people of his time, and take a vow against sanctimony. Or those in positions of authority might check out the call of all major religions to justice and mercy (see Micah 6:8 in the Old Testament), and the warning that the powerful will be held to account for oppressing the poor and those marginalized by society. Jesus himself, whose followers comprise almost two-thirds of American adults, is quoted in the Gospel of Luke as saying that his task was to “proclaim good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the prisoners… and to liberate the oppressed.”

Might the historically oppressed in American society include people of color, gays and women? Its number surely would include Harriet Tubman, the freedom fighter who was born into slavery, such military men as the gay activist Harvey Milk and the black activist Medgar Evers, and Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who fought for women’s rights. Aren’t they the sort of righteous Americans whom political leaders claiming to honor cherished tenets of religion would honor?

But those standards aren’t, in fact, what our government is about these days — not as a Republican-led Congress and White House advance legislation that will further enrich those at the top of society with trillion-dollar tax breaks while eliminating healthcare for millions of Americans, and that will authorize foreign aid cuts that already have led to hundreds of thousands of deaths, with millions more certain to follow the statutory end of the Bush-era PEPFAR program that has saved so many from HIV/AIDS infection.

These are not the actions of a civilized, caring society. We are reminded of Thomas Jefferson’s pithy observation, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.”⁸

But we were talking about Poseidon’s judgment, weren’t we? That’s less troubling to weigh.

Polytheism isn’t widespread today, and in Western society we tend to think of it as mere superstition. It was the typical form of worship before the emergence of the Abrahamic religions — Judaism, Islam and Christianity — which brought new teachings while absorbing some of the customs of what came to be considered paganism. Nowadays, we don’t think much of all the pantheons and players in those early religions — from Aphrodite to Zeus, Apollo to Vesta. Mostly, we simply find it all amusing.

But we still play along with some of the old customs handed down from millennia ago. So the National Maritime Manufacturers Association a few years ago helpfully posted a guide for how to rename a vessel. It begins with a “purging ceremony” to rid the ship or boat of any trace of the old name, which includes a direct address to Poseidon — “Oh mighty and great ruler of the seas and oceans…” — and then moves on to an invocation of the four wind gods (Boreas, Zephyrus, Eurus and Notus). Eventually the ritual calls for a whole bottle of champagne, half of which, sadly, must be poured into the sea, from east to west. “Share the rest among yourselves,” the instructions kindly suggest later.⁹

And so it should go, I might suggest, if Pete Hegseth wishes to rename all those ships that right now honor people who have fought for justice or stood up to oppression: Do the ritual, Pete, or risk displeasing the gods.

It’s just superstition, though, which makes it about as sensible as believing, say, that diversity weakens our military, and that we therefore need to rename a bunch of ships to try to put those types of people back where they used to be. That’s a bird dog gift for America if ever I heard of one: Some of those pious folks in Washington may want it, but we Americans don’t need it.

1. https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/trumps-pick-for-defense-sec-spent-his-college-years-crusading-against-glorification-of-diversity-and-the-homosexual-lifestyle

2. https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2023/04/10/the-diversity-bogeyman-is-the-us-too-woke-to-wage-war/

3. https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/12/15/navy-made-harvey-milk-resign-being-gay-now-theyre-building-ship-named-after-him/

4. https://www.newsweek.com/full-list-navy-ships-that-could-renamed-pete-hegseth-2080759

5. https://www.etymonline.com/word/christen

6. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Pete-Hegseth

7. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/how-hegseths-controversial-religious-views-could-affect-military-leadership

8. https://jeffersonhour.com/blog/1249wwtjd

9. https://www.discoverboating.com/resources/ceremony-for-renaming-your-boat

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WHAT DO YOU THINK?

This essay suggests that it’s a mistake to turn away from efforts to increase diversity in the nation’s military, and that the Pentagon focus on that — evidenced in the renaming of a ship named for gay rights activist Harvey Milk — is hypocritical. Do you agree?

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ENDNOTE

THANK YOU for reading The Upstate American, and for joining us in the conversation about our common ground, this great country. As we together navigate these challenging times, I hope you’ll join us again next week — or send me a message with ideas you’d like to see us address.

-Rex Smith