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CHRISTIAN THEOCRACY IN TRUMP’S DC  
[[link removed]]


 

Ian Ward
May 23, 2025
Politico

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_ Doug Wilson has built a theocratic regime in Moscow, Idaho, where
men rule and biblical teachings guide everything. Now he’s taking
the model national, with a receptive crowd in the GOP. _

,

 

MOSCOW, IDAHO — On a Sunday morning earlier this spring, Pastor
Doug Wilson stood behind the pulpit at Christ Church to deliver his
weekly sermon. His message for the congregation was clear and
uncompromising. The gospels, he said, teach that life offers a choice
between two irreconcilable alternatives: “Christ,” he said,
raising his right hand, “or chaos.”

The audience — about a thousand congregants in modest button-downs
and understated sundresses — listened intently from the pews,
interrupted only by the occasional babble of one of the many babies in
their midst. Sunlight filtered into the sanctuary from three gothic
windows behind the altar, casting shadows on the austere walls and
pitched ceiling. Outside, the green hills of northern Idaho unfurled
like a plush rug all the way to the horizon.

From the pulpit, Wilson, a burly 71-year-old with a white lumberjack
beard and a commanding baritone, turned his attention to the world
beyond the sanctuary. Given the choice between Christ and chaos, he
said, the world has chosen chaos. “We live in a relativistic time,
and that relativistic time has taken as its motto, ‘Reality is
optional,’” Wilson intoned. “That’s why you have people saying
that a girl can be a boy, and a boy can be a girl.”

For the past 50 years, Wilson has been trying to convince America that
it has made the wrong choice —that it should choose “Christ,” as
he put it, instead of chaos. But Wilson isn’t a conventional
evangelist. He is, by his own description, an outspoken proponent of
Christian theocracy — the idea that American society, including its
government, should be governed by a conservative interpretation of
Biblical law. Wilson’s body of work — made up of over 40 books,
thousands of blog posts and hundreds of hours of sermons and podcast
appearances — amounts to a comprehensive blueprint for a spiritual
and political “reformation” that would transform America into a
kind of Christian republic.

Since the 1970s, Wilson has built a sprawling evangelical empire
around his theological principles. The capital of that empire is
Moscow — pronounced “Mos-coe,” not like the capital of Russia
— a small town in northern Idaho, where Wilson oversees a network of
allied institutions that includes Christ Church, a publishing house, a
classic Christian grade school, a Christian liberal arts college and a
ministerial training program. Beyond Moscow, the network of churches
that Wilson founded in the late 1990s — called the Communion of
Reformed Evangelical Churches, or CREC — has grown to include over
150 congregations across four continents; an association of classical
Christian schools that Wilson co-founded in 1993 now counts over 500
member schools across the country.

The scope of his empire notwithstanding, Wilson has spent much of his
career outside the conservative mainstream, which has distanced itself
from his frank defense of theocracy, his ultra-patriarchal views on
gender relations and his reactionary stances on race and “the war
between the states,” as he still calls the Civil War. (On
the “About” page [[link removed]] of his blog,
Wilson describes his politics as “slightly to the right” of the
Confederate general Jeb Stuart.) Online, Wilson has cultivated a
punk-rock aesthetic designed to foster his reputation as the
“based” intellectual bad boy of American evangelicalism: In a
promotional video
[[link removed]] posted at the height of
the conservative backlash to “woke” media companies in 2023,
Wilson used a skull-and-crossbones-emblazoned flamethrower to torch
oversized cardboard cutouts of various Disney princesses and social
media companies, all while puffing on a fat cigar.

But in recent years, Wilson has been making inroads into the
Republican establishment, aided by a growing audience for his work
among allies of President Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. Last
year alone, Wilson appeared as a guest on Tucker Carlson’s podcast
[[link removed]], spoke at an
event organized by the MAGA operative Charlie Kirk, delivered a speech
on Capitol Hill at an event hosted by the MAGA-aligned talent
pipeline American Moment
[[link removed]] and
was given a prominent timeslot at the National Conservatism
Conference, the premier annual get-together for the
nationalist-populist right in Washington. In January, Wilson received
his most significant political boost to date when Pete Hegseth —who
is a member of a CREC church in Tennessee and publicly praised
Wilson’s work — was confirmed as Trump’s secretary of Defense.

When I sat down with Wilson in Moscow earlier this spring, he told me
that he doesn’t know Hegseth personally, but he cheered his
selection to the highest civilian post in the U.S. military. ((In May,
after my visit to Moscow, Wilson briefly met Hegseth during a visit to
his church in Tennessee, as first reported by Talking Points Memo
[[link removed]].)
“It’s gratifying to have like-minded people — people around the
country who think the way I do and who worship the way I do — coming
into places where they can do something about it,” Wilson told me.

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Wilson and his allies are moving quickly to cement their burgeoning
influence in Washington. Later this summer, Christ Church will open
its first outpost in the capital, led by Wilson and a rotating group
of pastors from the CREC. The new church has earned the support of
powerful players in the MAGA movement: Its inaugural prayer services,
planned for mid-July, will be held at an event space operated by the
Conservative Partnership Institute, the Trump-aligned think tank run
by former Republican Sen. Jim DeMint and ex-Trump chief-of-staff Mark
Meadows. In a blog post
[[link removed]] titled
“Mission to Babylon,” Wilson explained that Christ Church is
seeking to make inroads with “numerous evangelicals who will be
present both in and around the Trump administration.”

 

[Canon Press President Brian Kohl, right, shows Doug Wilson plans for
new offices.<br /> ]

Canon Press President Brian Kohl, right, shows Wilson plans for the
publishing house’s new offices.

Wilson has good reason to believe those conservative evangelical
elites are receptive to his message. In recent years, a growing number
of Republican elites clustered around the “New Right” of the GOP
have been looking to Wilson’s work as a kind of how-to manual for
injecting a hardline conservative form of Protestant Christianity into
public life — a project that ranges from outlawing abortion at the
federal level to amending the Constitution to acknowledging the truth
of the Bible.

Chief among the sources of Wilson’s appeal on the right is his
defense of a masculinist and explicitly patriarchal style of
evangelicalism: Women are barred from holding leadership roles at
Christ Church, and women in CREC communities are expected to submit to
their husbands. Wilson, who has written several books on marriage,
masculinity and childrearing, is a gleeful critic of feminism, which
he has lampooned in blog posts with titles like “The Lost Virtues of
Sexism
[[link removed]].”
At times, he’s ditched the high-minded theological rhetoric and
referred to various women as “small-breasted biddies
[[link removed]],”
“lumberjack dykes
[[link removed]]”
and “cunts
[[link removed].].”

His taste for provocation is evident across his blog, “Blog &
Mablog,” where his posts — ranging from weedy interventions in
theological debates to Biblical defenses of spanking
[[link removed]] —
are written in a wry and jocular style. (Yes, profanity is
permitted, if used in a godly way
[[link removed]].) In person,
though, Wilson comes across more like a grandpa than the flamethrowing
pirate of his online persona. When I met him for our interview in
Moscow, he was wearing a sweater vest and slip-on sneakers, and he
visibly shrunk from my suggestion that he had become a serious public
intellectual on the right. “I am comfortable calling myself a
‘public intellectual for the deplorables,’” he said with a sly
grin. “I hope that my writing on cultural engagement gets read by
people who are in a position to do something with it.”

[Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and President Donald Trump pray.]

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth sits next to President Donald Trump
during a prayer to open a cabinet meeting. Hegseth is a member of a
CREC church in Tennessee and has publicly praised Wilson’s work. |
Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

His primary message for those people, he told me, is that
“theocracy” isn’t a scary concept.

“When you say ‘theocracy,’ people think _Gilead _and women in
red dresses, or the Ayatollah’s Iran,” he said. But, he argued,
that’s only because most people are thinking of “ecclesiocracy,”
or political rule by clerics and church officials. What he has in mind
for America is closer to a return to the political order embodied by
“the Constitution of the late 18th century and early 19th
century,” with a weak central state, a small-R republican form of
government and a high tolerance for displays of Christian faith in the
public sphere.

 

 

This distinction, however, is unlikely to assuage Wilson’s critics,
who have cast him as the vanguard of the rising forces of “Christian
nationalism” in America. Wilson and his allies have winkingly
embraced the term as a badge of dishonor: In 2022, his allied
publishing house, Canon Press, published a book called “The Case
for Christian Nationalism”
[[link removed]] by
the Protestant political theorist Stephen Wolfe. But whatever its
merits as a marketing tool, the term undersells the scope of
Wilson’s political vision: His ideal political arrangement, he told
me, would be a kind of international confederation of Christian
nations that he calls “mere Christendom,” harkening back to the
alliance of Christian nation-states that dominated Europe during the
Middle Ages.

 

[A stack of Christian books on bookshelf.]

A collection of books published by Canon Press.

As his audience in Washington has grown, though, Wilson has been
sketching out some more concrete plans for shifting America in his
preferred direction. When we spoke in Moscow, he cheered the Trump
administration’s effort to “dismantle the administrative state,”
and he suggested the Supreme Court should build on its recent decision
to overturn _Roe v. Wade _by re-evaluating _Obergefell v. Hodges_,
the 2015 case recognizing a constitutional right to same-sex marriage.

Beyond these near-term goals, Wilson has floated some more fundamental
changes to America’s political system: Amending the Constitution to
include reference to the Apostles’ Creed, restricting office holding
to practicing Christians and changing voting practices to award votes
by household, with the default vote-holder being the male head of the
household. His long-term goal, he said, is to inspire a grassroots
Christian reformation that would excise the whole idea of secularism
from American law and society.

He admits that this reformation would represent a “huge” departure
from America’s current political order, and that even some of his
more modest reforms could only be brought about via constitutional
amendment — or, if that fails, civil strife.

“I’m fond of saying that reformations never happen to the polite
background sound of golf applause,” Wilson said. “It would be
tumultuous.”

Would it be violent, I wondered?

“Well,” he said, chuckling, “that depends on the bad guys.”

[A bumper sticker on the back of Doug Wilson’ truck that reads
Christ or Chaos.]
‘All of Christ for All of Life’

A bumper sticker on the back of Wilson’s truck that reads Christ or
Chaos.

The town of Moscow sits on the eastern edge of the Palouse, a swath of
surreally green grassland that cuts across southeastern Washington,
northeastern Oregon and a small patch of western Idaho. Despite the
steadily expanding population of “kirkers” — as members of
Christ Church call themselves, borrowing the Scottish word for church
— the town is still home to a sizable population of liberals, thanks
in large part to the presence of the University of Idaho’s flagship
campus.

 

 

The combination of ultra-conservative Christians and left-leaning
university types living in close proximity has turned Moscow into an
on-the-nose symbol of life in a divided America: On the five-block
stretch of shops that makes up Moscow’s downtown, a slew of
kirker-owned businesses stand side-by-side with organic food co-ops
and coffee shops displaying Pride flags and Black Lives Matter signs
in their windows. On the Sunday morning of my visit, the kirker who
offered to drive me to church gently ribbed me after I asked him to
pick me up at one of the liberal-aligned coffee shops downtown. I had
no choice, I protested. All the kirker-owned ones were closed for the
sabbath.

 

[Top left: Moscow, Idaho.<br /> Top right: A Black Lives Matter sign
in the front window of a shop in downtown Moscow.<br /> Bottom left:
people sit outside coffee shop in downtown Moscow.<br /> Bottom right:
Welcome to Moscow heart of the arts sign.]

Moscow — a small, bucolic town in northern Idaho — has a
five-block downtown that is divided between businesses owned by
conservative Christian members of Wilson's congregation alongside
others more aligned with the liberal ethos of the state's flagship
university.

The origins of Moscow’s divide date back in large part to Wilson’s
arrival in 1975. Wilson was born in Annapolis, Maryland, where his
father attended the U.S. Naval Academy before becoming an evangelist
and the manager of a Christian bookstore. In 1971, after Wilson had
left home, his parents moved to Moscow, believing that the town’s
proximity to two major universities — Washington State University is
just over the border in Pullman, Washington — made it an ideal
location for evangelizing.

When Wilson arrived in Moscow after his own stint in the Navy, he told
me one afternoon as we drove around town in his pickup truck, his plan
was to stick around for a year or two before heading east — probably
to Laramie, Wyoming — to open a bookstore of his own. But life, as
it does, intervened: He fell in love with a Christian girl in town,
got married, had a daughter and started preaching to a small
congregation.

At the time, Wilson was a Baptist who had fallen under the sway of the
Jesus Movement — the revival of charismatic evangelicalism that
swept through the countercultural and Hippie movements in the 1970s
— but he remained a theological conservative. “I wasn’t a druggy
or hippie that got converted,” Wilson assured me. “I was a Navy
guy.” He also leaned to the right politically, thanks in large part
to a teenage fascination with William F. Buckley and _National
Review_. In 1980, he and his wife, Nancy, bought their first
television set to watch Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter on election
night.

Yet as Wilson began pastoring, he grew troubled by what he saw as the
“schizophrenic” state of American evangelicalism. Throughout the
1970s, evangelicals had swung to the right in response to the Supreme
Court’s _Roe v. Wade _decision, but Wilson thought their political
activism was conspicuously devoid of any meaningful grounding in
Protestant theology. In response, he started reading books by a group
of conservative Reformed theologians — writers like Francis
Shaeffer, who posited that all knowledge was grounded in the truth of
Biblical revelation, and R.J. Rushdoony, who argued that all Biblical
law, including the Old Testament law, still applied to the
contemporary world. Most of the thinkers Wilson was drawn to were
“postmillennialists,” meaning they believed the second coming of
Christ would occur after an extended period of Christian dominion on
earth. As Wilson came to realize, this position implied a
fundamentally activist approach to politics: Christians could hasten
Christ’s return by building a godly society in the here and now.

[Photos hanging in Christ Church offices. Top: In the early years of
the church, Wilson would hold services at Greene’s Body and Paint
Shop.<br /> Bottom: In the early years the church baptized
parishioners on the Palouse River, which runs through Laird Park in
Idaho. ]

Photos hanging in Christ Church offices. Top: In the early years of
the church, Wilson would hold services at Greene’s Body and Paint
Shop. Bottom: In the early years the church baptized parishioners on
the Palouse River, which runs through Laird Park in Idaho.

From these various sources, Wilson formulated a political theology
that he came to call “theocratic libertarianism
[[link removed]].”
It was grounded in his broader theological vision — an
ultraconservative form of Reformed Presbyterianism that traces its
roots back to the 16th century French reformer John Calvin — which
Wilson summarized with a simple mantra: “All of Christ for all of
life.”

 

 

In Moscow, Wilson explained that his political philosophy is not
theocratic in the commonly understood sense of a government run
exclusively by the church. To the contrary, he maintains that God
ordains earthly authority in three separate spheres of life: the
church, the family and the civil government. Within each of these
spheres, the relevant authorities must abide by scriptural
commandments. In the familial sphere, for instance, parents must
educate their children according to Biblical principles, and wives
must subordinate themselves to their husbands in accordance with a
covenantal view of the family. In the sphere of civil government,
officials should strive to bring the law in line with Biblical
commandments, although those principles don’t have to be applied
“woodenly,” as Wilson put it: Governments do not have to enforce
the Biblical mandate that households build balustrades on their roofs,
but they should enforce the principle that homeowners are liable for
risks incurred on their property.

Above all, Wilson believes, the three spheres of earthly authority
must remain separate. Governments should not infringe on families’
responsibility to educate their children — the basis of
Wilson’s critique of public education
[[link removed]] —
and the church shouldn’t own and operate businesses, which is why
individual kirkers, rather than the Church, operate all the coffee
shops and boutiques in downtown Moscow.

Taken together, Wilson’s theology provided a sturdy basis for his
conservative politics: It was pro-capitalist, patriarchal, skeptical
of big government and scornful of progressive visions of a society
without hierarchy or holy men. Having arrived at that theory, Wilson
moved to put it into practice in Moscow. In 1981, when his eldest
daughter was reaching school age, he and two other kirkers opened an
independent Christian academy, called the Logos School, to avoid
having to send their children to the local public schools. Thirteen
years later, when the first graduating class from Logos was preparing
to head off to college, Wilson helped open an independent liberal arts
college, New Saint Andrews, to continue their education in Moscow. To
keep up with the ballooning volume of printed material coming out of
the church and the schools, Wilson also founded his own publishing
house, Canon Press, in 1988. (He has since sold it to his son and a
business partner.) Following Wilson’s entrepreneurial example, a
growing number of kirkers bought property around Moscow and opened
their own businesses.

Soon enough, Wilson’s corner of Moscow began to resemble a microcosm
of the Christian city-states that he had read about in his studies,
with Christ Church at its center. “This is all one fabric,” Wilson
told me.

[‘After the pandemic, what we were saying seemed a lot more
intelligible’]
‘After the pandemic, what we were saying seemed a lot more
intelligible’

A biblical passage that hangs on a sign outside the Nuart Theater in
downtown Moscow.

When the coronavirus pandemic arrived in 2020, Wilson was not
initially opposed to closing Christ Church: After all, his philosophy
of “sphere sovereignty” allowed the state to take reasonable steps
to protect public health, including temporarily shutting businesses
and churches. But after a few weeks of holding services online in
accordance with local policies, Wilson grew itchy. He came to believe
that the government was using the shutdowns to test how much control
normal citizens would tolerate. “And it became our responsibility to
demonstrate: not very much,” he told me.

 

So on a cloudy day in September 2020, Wilson organized a gathering in
downtown Moscow to protest the lockdowns. About a hundred kirkers
showed up in the parking lot outside Moscow’s city hall, where they
stood around a large wooden cross and sang psalms together. Partway
through the demonstration, Moscow police officers arrived and arrested
three kirkers on various charges. (All the charges have since been
dropped, and the city reached a court-ordered settlement
[[link removed]] with
the kirkers in a civil lawsuit stemming from their arrests.)

The following day, footage of the arrest went viral on Twitter, and
then got picked up by conservative cable news. Within two weeks, the
video appeared on Donald Trump’s Twitter feed. “DEMS WANT TO SHUT
YOUR CHURCHES DOWN, PERMANENTLY,” the president wrote in a post
[[link removed]] retweeting
footage of the arrests. “HOPE YOU SEE WHAT IS HAPPENING. VOTE
NOW!”

It was a rare moment of mainstream exposure for Wilson and his
followers. Even as evangelicals entered the Republican coalition
through the 1970s and 1980s with groups like the Moral Majority and
Focus on the Family, Wilson’s heterodox theology and his hard-right
politics had kept him on the fringes of the conservative movement. He
occasionally dabbled in national politics — in 1992, he served as
the Idaho state coordinator for Howard Phillip’s far-right U.S.
Taxpayer Alliance, according to documents from the time
[[link removed]] —
but he otherwise stuck to local politics. He didn’t find much
success there, either: In the early 1980s, he mounted a campaign for a
seat on Moscow’s city council and lost badly. “I was very
successful at getting the liberal vote out,” he joked.

Wilson’s political exile was reenforced by his habit of staking out
politically poisonous positions in various historical controversies,
particularly revisionist debates about the Civil War. In 1996, for
instance, Wilson co-authored a pamphlet with the Calvinist theologian
J. Steven Wilkins that offered a qualified Biblical defense of
slavery, arguing that antebellum slavery “produced a genuine
affection between the races that we believe we can say has never
existed in any nation before the War or since.” In 2004, the
pamphlet — which Canon had pulled from the market because of
citation errors — became a flashpoint in series of protests
[[link removed]] against
Wilson’s growing influence that briefly consumed Moscow.

[A photograph of Doug Wilson and Christopher Hitchens arm wrestling.]

A photograph hanging in Wilson's office of him and Christopher
Hitchens arm wrestling during a debate tour discussing the topic:
“Is Christianity good for the world?”

Despite the fallout from the slavery controversy, Wilson caught his
first real glimpse of mainstream success in 2007, the year that the
British journalist and New Atheist provocateur Christopher Hitchens
published his anti-religion jeremiad _God Is Not Great_. In
conjunction with the publication of the book, Hitchens put out a
public call for practicing theists to debate him, and Wilson answered
his challenge. The two men went on to publish a written back-and-forth
in _Christianity Today_, which Hitchens enjoyed so much that he
invited Wilson to hit the road with him for a series of live public
debates throughout early 2008. The debates — as well as the
surprisingly buddy-buddy relationship that developed between the two
men — were captured for a feature-length documentary
[[link removed]] that debuted in 2009.

 

The film received middling reviews, but it earned Wilson a degree of
legitimacy he had previously lacked. “Wilson is becoming someone who
even those minding their own business in the noncontroversial
‘mainstream’ cannot afford to ignore,” a journalist
for _Christianity Today _wrote
[[link removed]] at the
time.

But it was the viral lockdown protest that finally catapulted Wilson
onto the national stage. Within months of the incident, “a massive
refugee column” of conservative evangelicals fleeing states with
more restrictive lockdown measures started to arrive in Moscow, Wilson
told me. To accommodate the influx of new arrivals, he helped open two
more churches in the greater Moscow area, bringing the total
population of kirkers to over 3,000 people — double the
community’s size from 2019.

But people weren’t just moving to Moscow to escape pandemic
restrictions; they were also eager to hear what Wilson had to say.

“There are things that we would be talking about 25 years ago that
would just get us dismissed as nutters,” Wilson said. “But after
the pandemic, what we were saying seemed a lot more intelligible and,
for many people, compelling.”

In October 2021, Nick Solheim, the co-founder of the conservative
talent pipeline American Moment, traveled from Washington to Moscow to
record an episode of the organization’s podcast with Wilson. During
the pandemic, Solheim had read several of Wilson’s books and was
impressed by his willingness to bring a conservative theological
perspective to contemporary political questions. “He had a wiser
approach than many about how Christians should think about political
issues,” Solheim told me. After the podcast episode published,
Solheim was struck by the amount of buzz it generated in young
conservative circles in Washington. “A lot of Hill staffers were
very interested in it,” he recalled. “They would make these
offhand comments like, ‘If you ever brought him to D.C and did an
event, I would definitely be there.’”

So that’s what Solheim did. In September 2023, Wilson appeared in
the hearing room of the Dirksen Senate Office Building for an event
hosted by American Moment, dedicated to making “the Christian case
for immigration restriction.” At a table at the front of the room,
Wilson sat alongside Rep. Chip Roy, the Freedom Caucus Republican from
Texas, and Russell Vought, the former (and now current) director of
the Office of Management and Budget under Trump.

The American Moment event helped puncture whatever remained of the
informal embargo that had kept Wilson outside of respectable
conservative circles. Soon enough, Wilson was popping up in more and
more prominent spots: In April 2024, he was a guest on Tucker
Carlson’s podcast to discuss his views on Christian nationalism,
earning Carlson’s praise as “one of the rare American Christians
pastors who is willing to engage on questions of culture and
politics.” In July 2024, he spoke at Turning Point USA’s
“Believers Summit,”
[[link removed]] hosted by the MAGA
activist Charlie Kirk. That same month, he appeared at the National
Conservatism Conference in Washington, organized by the conservative
writer and activist Yoram Hazony. (Solheim’s co-founder at American
Moment, Saurabh Sharma, was as a co-organizer of the event.)

The flurry of activity also marked the culmination of Wilson’s own
embrace of the MAGA movement. In 2016, Wilson had been skeptical
enough of Trump that he declined to vote for him. “This New York
tycoon comes out of nowhere, he was a Democrat before, and he says,
‘_Oh yeah, I’m pro-life_’? I just didn’t believe that,”
Wilson recalled. By the end of Trump’s first term, he had been won
over by the administration’s record on abortion and other religious
issues. By 2024, he was ready to leap into the fray.

It was last year at “NatCon,” as the event is called, that
Wilson’s entrance into the conservative mainstream was most evident.
Between speeches by Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley and JD Vance, Wilson sat
down with Hazony and Albert Mohler, the president of the Southern
Baptist Theological Seminary. The symbolism of this arrangement was
not lost on Wilson’s followers. For decades, Mohler had been a
leading face of the conservative evangelical establishment that had
distanced itself from Wilson. Now, the two men were appearing onstage
together, affirming their shared goal, as Mohler put it, of
“maximizing the Christian commitment of the state and of the
civilization.”

Trump’s reelection delivered a more immediate victory for Wilson in
the form of Pete Hegseth’s selection as secretary of Defense. In
2022, Hegseth — along with his wife and seven children — moved
from New Jersey to a suburb of Nashville, Tennessee, where the family
joined a CREC congregation, and his children began to attend a
classical Christian school affiliated with Wilson’s American
Association of Classical and Christian Schools. On at least one
occasion, Hegseth has praised Wilson’s writings
[[link removed]],
which he said he encountered through a church reading group, and has
claimed that New Saint Andrews
[[link removed]],
which Wilson helped found, is one of the few colleges that he would
pay for his children to attend. Just this past week, Hegseth hosted
the CREC pastor Brooks Potteiger — who is close with Wilson
and recently appeared with him at his church
[[link removed]] in
Tennessee — for a prayer service
[[link removed]] in the Pentagon’s
auditorium. (In a statement, chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell
confirmed that Hegseth is a “proud member” of a CREC congregation
and “very much appreciates many of Mr. Wilson’s writings and
teachings.”)

When I asked Wilson about Hegseth’s nomination, he said he was aware
Hegseth was a member of a CREC church before his selection, though he
maintains he doesn’t have a personal relationship with him aside
from their brief encounter in Tennessee. “I don’t have a pipeline
to the Defense secretary,” he said.

Wilson did admit to me, however, that he took one step that “could
be regarded as a rear-guard action” to protect Hegseth’s
nomination. In November, Wilson helped organize and write a statement
called the “Antioch Declaration
[[link removed]],” which denounced the “rising
tide of reactionary thinking” — including “neo-pagan doctrines
of the Nazi cult” — within evangelical circles. This statement was
widely interpreted as Wilson’s effort to distance himself from a
younger cohort of Reformed pastors and adjacent right-wing influencers
who have flirted with — or, in some cases, outright embraced —
various racist, antisemitic and ethnonationalist ideas.

Yet Wilson told me that the statement was designed, at least in part,
to preempt any attempts by Democrats to force Hegseth to answer for
these ideas. “One of my pastoral philosophies is [to think] ‘What
would I do if I were the devil?’ and then I try to do the
opposite,” Wilson told me. “Well, if I were the devil, I would try
to get some CREC person to stand up in public somewhere and say, ‘I
hate the Jews,’ and then get footage of it and show it at the
confirmation hearing.”

Wilson’s diabolic expectations didn’t materialize — Hegseth’s
church membership didn’t come up during his Senate confirmation
hearing, despite several media reports
[[link removed]] tying
him to the CREC — but that was all the better for Wilson. “That
was simply an anticipatory defensive move,” he told me.

On Saturday night in Moscow, Wilson invited to me his family’s
weekly sabbath dinner, hosted at his daughter’s house in the hills
of the Palouse. When I arrived at the house with Wilson, there were
about a dozen adults milling around a large living room nursing
glasses of wine and beer, as streams of children — too many to count
— bobbed and weaved between them. After some polite schmoozing, we
took our places at long tables set up in the living room: the men at
one end, the women at the other and the kids on their own. After
leading the group in a prayer and a song, Wilson sat quietly at his
place, looking reserved. As dinner wrapped up, I picked up my dish to
clear it — until I realized I was the only man with a dish in hand.

After dinner, I joined the men around a fire pit on the back patio to
smoke cigars and drink whiskey. Once again, Wilson sat quietly,
declining a cigar as the men chatted about their families and their
favorite cuts of meat. During my interactions with Wilson, I had
gotten the sense that his outlaw image is mostly the product of clever
marketing cooked up by the young and very online men he has deputized
to run the various parts of his empire. His deputies largely copped to
this dynamic. “I have a feeling that cigar he smokes in the videos
is maybe the one cigar he smokes a year,” said Brian Kohl, the CEO
of Canon Press and a native of Moscow.

Marketing aside, Wilson has been embroiled in some very real
off-camera controversies. In recent years, several former members of
Christ Church have accused Wilson of mishandling or downplaying
[[link removed]] cases
of sexual assault, marital violence and child abuse within the CREC
community. (“They sure have,” Wilson wrote in a statement when I
later asked him about those accusations. “Look at them go.” He has
denied wrongdoing as part of the “library” of responses
[[link removed]] to various controversies that he
maintains on his blog.) Other former members argue that, regardless of
Wilson’s personal involvement in specific incidents, the church’s
teachings about the patriarchal nature of sexual relations either
excuse or implicitly encourage these sorts of acts, especially marital
violence against women. (“Blerg,” Wilson wrote when asked to
comment on this potential connection. On his blog, he denies that he
condones sexual abuse.
[[link removed]])

In particular, Wilson’s critics argue that some of his past writings
about sex — including his statements that “the sexual act cannot
be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party,” and his description
of heterosexual sex as “A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes,
plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts” — amount to a tacit
defense of marital violence. “These pastors told me a wife is not
allowed to tell her husband no,” a former kirker who said she was
the victim of marital abuse told _Vice _in 2021
[[link removed]].

Despite these criticisms — or perhaps because of them — Wilson’s
deputies have made Wilson’s bad-boy aesthetic the centerpiece of
their marketing across the greater Christ Church universe. In a
recent smash-cut video advertisement
[[link removed]] for New Saint
Andrews College, a roguish-sounding narrator appeals to young men who
are “willing to hoist the Jolly Roger and Johnny Cash’s favorite
finger,” as a picture of the country star flipping the bird flashed
in the background. The reality I found on the ground was a bit less
rock-n-roll: As I walked around New Saint Andrews’ main building one
afternoon, I saw a lot of plain-looking teenagers reading thick copies
of Augustine’s _City of God _and practicing their Latin
declensions on blackboards.

Yet something about the college’s marketing seems to be striking a
chord with young evangelicals. NSA’s student population has grown
rapidly in recently years, from just under 150 undergraduates in 2020
to over 300 in 2024, and it has bought more real estate in downtown
Moscow, much to the chagrin of its liberal neighbors. When I spoke
with the college’s president, an Oxford-educated academic named Ben
Merkle, he attributed the recent growth of the college’s population
to an ongoing shift in the attitudes of young conservative Christians.
After the dislocations wrought by the pandemic, Merkle said, young
Christians aren’t just looking to their churches to provide a
spiritual vision. They also want a comprehensive vision of a Christian
life, grounded in a real intellectual tradition and robust cultural
institutions — which is why the Catholic Church, with its centuries
of doctrines and ornate ceremonies, has attracted so many young
conservative converts. Christ Church and its affiliated institutions
are betting that Reformed evangelicalism can offer something similar.
“Men in their twenties are leaving evangelicalism for Roman
Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy because they look over there and say,
‘This is a coherent life,’” Merkle told me. “What they lost is
that the Protestants were the premier purveyors of exactly that
tradition.”

At the same time, the proliferating cohort of NSA graduates has
expanded Wilson’s universe of influence and brought him into direct
contact with various ascendent power centers on the right. Of
particular note is a cluster of NSA graduates who have entered the
world of “anti-woke” venture capital
[[link removed]],
which is serving as a beachhead of sorts for conservatives looking to
make inroads in Silicon Valley. One of the most prominent players in
this area is New Founding, a venture capital and real estate firm
founded by the Harvard Law School graduate Nate Fischer and backed in
part by the tech right stalwart Marc Andreessen
[[link removed]],
and which employs two NSA graduates.

The firm isn’t sectarian in its mission — its leadership includes
a handful of Baptists and Catholics — but it’s not cagey about the
theological underpinnings of the project: On its website, it describes
its mission as “to shape institutions with Christian norms and
orient them toward a Christian vision of life, of society, and of the
good.” Among the projects that New Founding has backed are an
internet publication called American Reformer, which has published
Wilson [[link removed]] and
provides a regular forum for debates within the Reformed evangelical
world, as well as an initiative called the Highland Rim Project, which
is trying to build a Moscow-like Christian community
[[link removed]] in Appalachia.

“There is this idea that Christianity is going to win in the
long-term, so we’ve got to go out and build for the long haul,”
said Joshua Clemans, a graduate of NSA who now works as a partner at
New Founding. Along with another New Founding employee and NSA
graduate named Santiago Pliego, Clemans is part of an extended social
universe — dubbed the “Theo Bros”
[[link removed]] by
some researchers and journalists who have covered it — that connects
Moscow to various reactionary power centers in Silicon Valley and
Trump’s Washington. Fischer, who is now the CEO of New Founding, is
a former fellow at the Trump-aligned think tank the Claremont
Institute, and New Founding podcast
[[link removed]],
hosted by Clemans and Pliego, features a who’s who of guests from
the “dissident right” and Silicon Valley reactionary circles. When
JD Vance was selected as Trump’s running mate in July,
Clemans posted a picture
[[link removed]] of himself
and the New Founding team smiling alongside Vance, with the caption
“Our guy.”

Clemans was circumspect about Wilson’s role in this world. “He’s
more like the _grandpa familias_,” he said. “A lot of people read
and respect his blog, so his opinion carries a lot of weight.” But
the reality is that Wilson’s ideas have become so commonplace in
this ecosystem that many people who don’t read his blog still adhere
to them, Clemans said. “It’s not just Doug. It’s a very robust
and decentralized network of people who are interested in pushing
those ideas.”

Every couple of weeks, Wilson hosts a podcast for Canon Press
called _Doug Wilson and Friends_, where he sits down with figures
from the greater Christ Church universe for unstructured chats about
the issues of the day. Culture war skirmishes are never far afield
from these gab sessions, but in the months since the presidential
election in November, the conversations have drifted more and more
into discussion of Trump’s Washington.

The results can be somewhat jarring to an outside ear. Wilson and his
allies are fluent in the language of conservative evangelicalism, able
to back up their defenses of Trump with a litany of Bible verses and
references to obscure theological texts. But they are also well-versed
in the patois of the bookish and very online right. In a recent
episode titled “Trump World has Overtaken Clown World
[[link removed]]” — borrowing a term
coined on the alt-right internet to describe the upside-down state of
globalized liberal society — one of Wilson’s associate pastors
expressed his hope that Trump would “raze to the ground the edifice
of bureaucratic managerialism.” When I first heard this, I had to
remind myself that I was listening to an evangelical talk show and not
a podcast from the Claremont Institute or some other tweedy MAGA think
tank.

Wilson has, predictably, been following the early developments of the
Trump administration with a mix of glee and joyous disbelief.
“It’s like Christmas every morning,” he told me. He was
especially enthusiastic about the administration’s effort to slash
the administrative state, led by Elon Musk’s Department of
Government Efficiency.

It was, I thought, an odd choice for a Christian conservative like
Wilson, considering DOGE was so closely associated with Musk, a
twice-divorced technologist with a slew of children born out of
wedlock and no discernible attachment to the Christian faith. When I
asked him how he thinks about his own role in a political coalition
that includes plenty of openly non-Christian conservatives, Wilson
drew a distinction between “allies” — people who are fighting
for the same cause that he is — and “co-belligerents,” or people
who share his same enemies but not his aims.


The important thing for conservative evangelicals, he said, is to find
political leaders who can steer the entire coalition in the right
direction. When I asked him who in Washington he saw as viable leaders
in this mold, he mentioned some libertarian stalwarts, like Sens. Rand
Paul and Ted Cruz, as well as some MAGA populists like Hawley, Vought
and Vance. He said that he thinks the vice president is “shrewd”
and “very smart,” but he was disappointed that he had watered down
his anti-abortion position during the campaign to curry favor with
Trump. I wondered if he would be comfortable voting for a Catholic
like Vance.

“The question is compared to what?” he said. “Compared to
whatever Menshevik is going to be nominated by the Democrats?”

This uneasy alliance with figures like Musk and Vance speaks to a
broad political challenge facing conservative evangelicals like
Wilson. Despite consistently high levels of evangelical support for
Trump, Wilson is entering the conservative mainstream at a moment when
the Republican Party is trying to project a more secular
self-identity, in large part in response to the influx of
non-religious conservatives who have followed Trump into the party.
Although Trump has followed through on some of the religious right’s
key priorities, like overturning _Roe_, he has also diluted religious
conservatives’ influence by attracting an array of secular
constituencies — from Barstool conservatives
[[link removed]] to
transhumanist tech-bros — to the GOP.

All this means that Wilson faces steep odds of persuading the
Republican Party to put his more explicitly theocratic ideas into
practice anytime soon. Yet Wilson sounded largely unconcerned when I
asked him about this dynamic. He told me that he’s focused on the
political long game rather than influencing policy in the near term,
and that his theory of political change is premised on the idea that
politics is downstream of culture, which in turn is downstream of
worship — meaning that the best way for Christians to shape politics
is to change what people hear from the pulpit on Sunday.

Yet for all the fault lines dividing MAGA, Wilson believes the
conservative movement is trending in the right direction, at least
philosophically. As he wrote in a recent blog post
[[link removed]],
Trump’s coalition includes an eclectic mix of “Catholic
integralists,” “NatCon conservatives,” “Christian classical
liberals who hate the label of Christian nationalism” and “guys
wearing bowties who work for think tanks in DC” — none of whom
actually agree with each other about the type of world conservatives
should aspire to create. But the thing that increasingly holds this
group together, Wilson wrote, is the argument he’s been making for
years: “the grand secular experiment of civil governance has been a
moral and political disaster of the first order.”

“If modern secularism were a school of culinary arts, we are all of
us now staring at a heaping plate of warmed-over dumpster
scrapings,” he wrote. “We all agree on that.”

As we wrapped up our conversation in Moscow, Wilson told me that he
doesn’t think he’s moved into the conservative mainstream so much
as the conservative mainstream has moved to include him. Twenty years
ago, he said, “if you challenged [the liberal consensus] like I
would have, you would have been laughed out of town.”

“But everything has disintegrated in the last few years,” he told
me, “so when I say that the secular experiment has failed, a lot of
Christians — and even non-Christians — say, ‘_Yeah, it
has_.’”

On his visits to Washington, he added, he has been surprised to
discover how many people are open to the basic idea that the secular
liberal order in America is coming to an end, and that something else
— maybe even a Christian theocracy — will eventually take its
place.

“It’s very strange,” he said. “_You agree? What?_”

_Ian Ward [[link removed]] is a reporter at
POLITICO, where he covers the conservative movement and the American
right for POLITICO Magazine._

_He specializes in long-form features exploring the people, ideas and
institutions that shape the Republican Party, and he has reported
extensively about the "New Right"
[[link removed]] and
its influence within the mainstream GOP. He is also a regular
contributor to the Magazine's "Q&A" vertical
[[link removed]],
which sheds light on the latest news out of Washington using extended
conversations with seasoned politicos, policy experts and academics._

_Ian was a freelancer reporter and contributing writer to POLITICO
Magazine before joining full-time in 2022. During the 2024
presidential campaign, he covered Vice President JD Vance
[[link removed]],
whom he profiled for the Magazine in March 2024. Before joining
POLITICO, he wrote for publications including Vox and the Portland
Press Herald._

_A native of Washington, D.C., he graduated from Bowdoin College in
Maine, where he served as a managing editor at the Bowdoin Orient. He
is based out of Brooklyn, New York._

_POLITICO [[link removed]] is the global authority
on the intersection of politics, policy, and power. It is the most
robust news operation and information service in the world
specializing in politics and policy, which informs the most
influential audience in the world with insight, edge, and authority.
Founded in 2007, POLITICO has grown to a team of more than 1,100
working across North America and Europe. In October 2021, POLITICO was
acquired by, and is a subsidiary of, Axel Springer SE
[[link removed]]. _

_POLITICO.com is accessible without subscription. POLITICO's newspaper
is available for free in locations throughout Washington. Domestic
subscriptions are $200 for one year and $350 for two years. Overseas
subscriptions are $600 per year. To subscribe, please sign up online
[[link removed]] or call
866-504-4251._

* Christian nationalism
[[link removed]]
* Doug Wilson
[[link removed]]
* theocracy
[[link removed]]

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