WASHINGTON (RNS) — If U.S. investor and hedge fund manager Scott Bessent is confirmed as President-elect Trump’s treasury secretary, he will be only the second openly gay cabinet secretary (after current secretary of transportation Pete Buttigieg) and the first Senate-confirmed openly LGBTQ+ person to serve in a Republican administration in any capacity.
But Bessent may also broach a lesser-known boundary: If approved by the U.S., he would be the first active French Huguenot to serve in the cabinet in centuries — maybe ever.
Bessent, who lives in Charleston, South Carolina, attends the city’s French Protestant (Huguenot) Church of Charleston, the only active church left in the U.S. that is associated with the Protestant tradition whose members largely arrived in the British American colonies on the run from the French king’s persecution in the 16th and 17th centuries. U.S. members slowly amalgamated into Presbyterianism and other Protestant denominations centuries ago.
Reached for comment, a church official said only that “it’s an exciting honor for our fellow church member, Mr. Bessent, to be considered for such an important post in President-Elect Trump’s cabinet.”
Bessent’s peculiar religious distinction fits nicely with the eclectic religious makeup of Trump’s top-level nominees, among them pastors, Catholic converts and one who owes his spiritual rebirth to a book by a Swiss psychiatrist. Long associated with conservative Protestants, Trump has cho …