On June 6th I was horrified to hear US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s anti-immigrant tirade from the shores of France. This is a highly disturbing alert to the dangers the world faces from America’s Pharaonic ideologues.

I had just returned to France after teaching our Certificate in Holistic Liberation in Cameroon, followed by trainings in Libreville, Gabon. Originally I planned to travel next to Kinshasa, Congo. But due to Ebola-related return travel restrictions imposed by the Trump Administration I had to cancel my trip. Happily, we were able to find a way to teach our five-day course in Congo from France.

It was just after these virtual teaching sessions, June 6, that I heard a fellow American, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who identifies as Christian, give a hate-infused speech that sounded like Hitler and his earlier genocidal manifestation in Egypt’s Pharaoh. There on the beaches of Normandy in his D-day speech Hegseth said that “different European beaches ae stormed by different, dangerous ideologies… When will European capitals do something about the invasion, or is it to late?”

D-day commemorations were ironically celebrating US and British troops storming the beaches of France during World War 2, to fight and eventually overcome the Nazi, whose ideology involved “racial purification” through systematic eradication of Jews and other “undesirables” in the infamous death camps.

The beach-stormers Hegseth was referring to were not himself and his Trump Administration colleagues, but vulnerable refugees from US wars in the Middle East, and now African migrants who make the precarious journey across the Mediterranean from Morocco or Lybia, fleeing poverty in war in places like Sudan, Niger, Cameroon and Congo.

Gracie and I made four trips to Morocco in past years, where we offered our Holistic Liberation course to Sub-Saharan migrants from war-torn and poverty-stricken places like Congo and Cameroon. The people we served had settled in Morocco to start house churches which served migrants, many of whom are Christians on their way to Europe. A lot of Jesus-following migrants are actually now revitalizing oft-dying European churches, bringing a vibrant faith desperately needed in post-Christian Europe and the UK.

Ironically, US Defense Secretary Hegseth’s presence and words on the beaches of Normandy represent the most dangerous of ideologies, similar to the racial-purifying Nazi ideology allied troops came to combat back in 1944. Hegseth echoed statements US Vice President JD Vance regularly makes reproaching Europeans for welcoming migrants who he accuses of threatening “civilization erasure,” which he claims dilutes European racial and cultural purity with people of color and their cultures from the Global South and Middle East.

These leaders and other far right-wing thought influencers in the US are allying themselves with British and European nationalists and fascists to call for racial purification—elevating the Trump Administration’s immigration crackdown.

This crackdown involves the establishments of concentration-camp-like internment centers to hold and deport undocumented immigrants in ways that alarmingly evoke oppressive systems of civilization erasure the Nazis mastered. May we all refuse this growing invasion of dangerous ideologies from Christian nationalists from the US and UK, which comes out of arrogance, blind superiority and historic amnesia. I’m reminded of the book of Exodus’ description of Pharaoh.

“Now a new king arose over Egypt, who did not know Joseph” (Exodus 1:8).

Joseph, Jacob’s beloved son who was sold by his brothers into slavery in Egypt, was a catalyst for God’s project to bless Egypt though a brilliant campaign to increase and effectively store agricultural production for coming times of scarcity. Joseph’s brothers and father later migrated to Egypt in search of famine relief, where they established themselves and multiplied, much like migrants in North America and Europe.

Hegseth and JD Vance most certainly never knew or conveniently “forgot” their own immigrant origins, showing no appreciation for the hard labor that benefits US and European agricultural production now. They also deny the US’s many destructive post-WWII invasions of nations the world over.

Rather, current Trump Administration leaders behave like the forgetful Pharaoh, who reacted with alarm, threatened by the fruitfulness of the migrant labor force who benefitted from divine favor– now engaging in still more oppressive, refugee-producing invasions in the Middle East and beyond.

The Egyptian head of state said to his people, “Behold, the people of the sons of Israel are more and mightier than we. “Come, let us deal wisely with them, or else they will multiply and in the event of war, they will also join themselves to those who hate us, and fight against us and depart from the land.” So they appointed taskmasters over them to afflict them with hard labor” (Ex 1:9-11).

The rich and powerful then and now scapegoat society’s most vulnerable, especially when they see those who they have been exploiting becoming more numerous. Migrants and refugees in United States and Europe find it increasingly difficult to cope due to low wages, the rising cost of living and immigration crackdowns.

“But the more they afflicted them, the more they multiplied and the more they spread out, so that they were in dread of the sons of Israel. The Egyptians compelled the sons of Israel to labor rigorously; and they made their lives bitter with hard labor in mortar and bricks and at all kinds of labor in the field, all their labors which they rigorously imposed on them” (Ex 1:12-14).

Pharaoh orders the Hebrew midwives (public health care workers) to kill new-born baby boys. When they refuse to comply, he orders his people to throw them in the Nile River. Contemporary equivalents of these actions include Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents’ increasing separation of immigrant children from their parents, incarceration, deportation—but also the refusal of adequate health care.

God is consistently on the side of the poor and oppressed. He raises up a liberator from among the targeted immigrant community– and even Pharaoh’s very own daughter collaborates. God tells Moses what is still true today:

“I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt, and have given heed to their cry because of their taskmasters, for I am aware of their sufferings. “So I have come down to deliver them from the power of the Egyptians, and to bring them up from that land to a good and spacious land, to a land flowing with milk and honey” (Ex 3:7-8).

God announces plagues against Egypt, which wreaked havoc on the Egyptian economy and people— a strong warning to US and European elites today. God showed his commitment to the oppressed workers in acts of divinely-orchestrated sabotage. Finally, Pharaoh and his chariots were compelled by a mightier hand. They were overcome by the God of life, destroyed in the waters of the sea that opened up before the fleeing immigrant community– closing over them.

This story serves as a prophetic warning for Western nations today, where Hegseth, JD Vance and President Trump most clearly resemble Pharaoh and his officials, and MAGA supporters represent the Egyptian people– who are on the losing side of sacred history.

May we heed this warning, disassociating ourselves from today’s Pharaohs and Egypt, joining today’s Moses equivalents and the company of God’s people to actively resist and reject identification with the dominant nations, economic systems and ideologies in pursuit of the Kingdom of God.

Take a look at my book God’s Radical Recruiting, which highlights God’s call of Moses and other agents of liberation through Scripture.