fringe

WASHINGTON — For decades, Doug Wilson was a relatively unknown pastor in Idaho, relegated to the fringe of evangelicalism for his radical teachings.

Now he’s an influential voice in the Christian right. That shift in clout was apparent this past week as he took a victory lap through Washington, sharing a stage with Trump administration officials and preaching at his denomination’s new church.

“This is the first time we’ve had connections with as many people in national government as we do now,” Wilson told The Associated Press in August.

Wilson and his acolytes within the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches still teach that empathy can be a sin, that the U.S. is a Christian nation, that giving women the right to vote was a bad idea. But as evangelicalism has aligned more closely with President Trump’s Republican agenda, these teachings have a larger and more receptive audience.

“Whatever he may have been in the past, he’s not fringe now,” said Brian Kaylor, a Baptist minister and Wilson critic who wrote the forthcoming book “The Bible According to Christian Nationalists.”

Wilson’s Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, opened a church blocks from the U.S. Capitol this summer. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, member of a CREC church in Tennessee, attended the opening.

On Saturday, the fledging congregation gathered for its first church conference. It rented a larger space in Virginia for the weekend to accommodate the 350 people who went to hear Wilson, more than doubling their usual Sunday attendance.

Wilson said they started the congregation to serve church members who relocated to work in Trump’s administration.

“We didn’t come to D.C. in order to meet important people,” Wilson told the gathering. “We’re here because we want to create the opportunity for important people and other people to meet with God.”

Making the case for Christian nationalism

At the National Conservatism Conference days earlier, Wilson was a featured speaker along with members of Congress and Trump’s Cabinet, including border czar Tom Homan, budget director Russell Vought and Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri. Two more CREC ministers were on the program to give an opening prayer and speak on a panel.

From the lectern in his affable baritone, Wilson gave a full-throated endorsement of Christian nationalism.

“America was deeply Christian and Protestant at the founding,” he said, while admitting numerous “credentialed” historians dispute this notion, “which should tell you something about our credentialing system.”

He talked to a sympathetic crowd, filled with conservatives who support a populist, nationalist and largely Christian America. Like Wilson, their movement has momentum, thanks to Trump’s return to the White House.

Wilson’s vision for a renewed Christian America calls for the end of same-sex marriage, abortion and Pride parades. He advocates restricting pornography and immigration.

“It is not xenophobic to object to the immigration policies of those who want to turn the Michigan-Ohio border into something that resembles the India-Pakistan border,” he said onstage.

He questioned, in particular, Muslims’ ability to assimilate: “There’s only so much white sand you can put in the sugar bowl before it isn’t the sugar bowl anymore.”

Downplaying the horrors of slavery

Wilson and the CREC, which he co-founded, ascribe to a strict version of Reformed theology — rooted in the tradition of 16th-century Protestant reformer John Calvin — that puts a heavy emphasis on an all-powerful God with dominion over all of society.

Since the 1970s, Wilson’s ministry and influence have grown to include the Association of Christian Classical Schools and New Saint Andrew’s College in Moscow, Idaho. Wilson is a prolific writer and content creator, and he and his ministry have a robust media presence, including a publishing arm, Canon Press.

His extensive catalog of books and blog posts provides plenty of fodder for his critics. In one infamous example, he co-authored a 1996 book that downplayed the horrors of slavery, an effort not dissimilar from recent Trump administration moves to revise museum exhibits.

Today Wilson says he’d make some points more clearly in “Southern Slavery as It Was.” While he condemns slavery, he still contends some slave owners and enslaved people “had a good relationship with one another.”

“There was horrific maltreatment on the one hand, and then there are other stories that are right out of Disney’s ‘Song of the South,’” Wilson told the AP, referring to the 1946 film that hasn’t been released in decades because it paints a sunny picture of plantation life with racist stereotypes.

Worries that patriarchy can fuel abuse

Wilson’s hard-line theology and happy-warrior ethos have attracted a cadre of young, internet-savvy men to his ministry. They help make slickly produced hype videos to circulate online, like one in which Wilson uses a flamethrower to torch cardboard cutouts of Disney princesses.

CREC leaders like to use humor to poke fun at their reputation.

“We want our wives to be barefoot, pregnant, in the kitchen making sourdough,” joked Joe Rigney, one of Wilson’s Idaho pastors, at the church conference.

“Of course, this is a gross slander,” Rigney said. “We are more than happy for our wives to wear shoes while they make the sourdough.”

CREC practices complementarianism — the patriarchal idea that men and women have different God-given roles. Women within CREC churches cannot hold church leadership positions, and married women are to submit to their husbands.

Christ Church allows only heads of households, usually men, to vote in church elections. Though Wilson said his wife and daughters vote in nonchurch elections, he would prefer the United States follow his congregation’s example with household voting.

To the uproar of critics, Wilson has argued sex requires male authority and female submission, a point he acknowledges is “offensive to all egalitarians.”

“The sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party,” he writes in “Fidelity.” “A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.”

Former CREC members have accused Wilson and the denomination of fostering a theological environment ripe for patriarchal abuse of women and children.

“I’ve seen how much this hurts people,” said journalist Sarah Stankorb, who documented allegations of mishandled abuse within CREC for Vice and in her 2023 book “Disobedient Women.”

In her 2024 memoir “A Well-Trained Wife,” Tia Levings, a former CREC member, alleges Wilson’s writings on marriage and patriarchy provided a theological justification for her ex-husband’s violence toward her.

“I call it church-sanctioned domestic abuse,” Levings told the AP.

Wilson denies condoning abuse or ever sanctioning physical discipline of wives.

“Our teaching has to be taken as a whole,” he said, emphasizing wives should submit but husbands must love them in a Christ-like way.

“Beating their wives or spanking their wives is a call-the-cops situation,” he told reporters Saturday after his church conference concluded.

CREC has more than 150 churches in the United States and abroad. Wilson said its goal is to have thousands of churches, so most Americans can be within driving distance of one.

Wilson often says his movement is playing the long game, that its efforts won’t come to fruition for two centuries.

“Doug loves to play humble,” Levings said, “that his vision is going to take 250 years to manifest. That’s actually not the case when we look at the results of what his ministry has done.”

After all, it took him only a few decades to get this close to the White House.

Stanley writes for the Associated Press.

Goodsprings, Nevada, is a ghost town located just 30 minutes outside of Las Vegas – and it’s proving incredibly popular with tourists, with thousands flocking in each year

Located in the middle of nowhere and allegedly haunted, the ghost town of Goodsprings is far from the most obvious tourist destination.

Coupled with its proximity to the dazzling lights of Las Vegas, it would be easy for Goodsprings to be overlooked. But, despite its spooky history and sparse amenities, the town finds itself subject to thousands of visitors every year.

Just half an hour away from the city’s bustling strip and vibrant nightlife, life in Goodsprings could not be more different. Home to around 200 residents, this quiet town at the base of the Spring Mountains in the Nevada desert was once a bustling mining hub.

In its heyday in the early 1900s, it housed 800 inhabitants and boasted amenities such as a hospital, hotels and a school – which remarkably still operates today, albeit with only two pupils on its roll. However, as the ore reserves in the Goodsprings mines dwindled, so did its populace.

In 1942, the town served as the base for a special search mission following the tragic plane crash that claimed the life of actress Carole Lombard. Her aircraft crashed into Potosi Mountain, and her husband, Hollywood legend Clark Gable, anxiously awaited news at Goodsprings’ Pioneer Saloon.

It’s said that Gable’s cigar burns can still be seen on the Saloon’s bar to this day. Consequently, there’s a memorial room at the Pioneer honouring its connection to the iconic couple.

Today, Goodsprings has a somewhat eerie aura. A drive through the town on its dusty roads evokes a spooky feeling.

Often the subject of folk tales and ghost hunts, Reddit users have shared their experiences of visiting the town. One stated: “When I went to Goodsprings a few years back with my wife, it was completely dead.

“No one was outside or driving around, it looked like a wild west ghost town that time had forgotten”.

Despite its remote location, the owners of the Pioneer Saloon are eager to provide a warm welcome to visitors. Stephen Staats, also known as Old Man Liver, purchased the iconic pub in 2021 and discovered Goodsprings’ unique place in pop culture.

The town serves as the starting point for the cult classic video game Fallout: New Vegas, which features the main character revived after being buried alive in Goodsprings cemetery. Many of the game’s characters are based on real-life residents, and the Pioneer itself is featured in the game, rebranded as the Prospector Saloon.

Recognising the town’s popularity, Staats hosted a Fallout-themed event on National Video Game Day, July 8, in 2022. He expected “maybe 100 in a crazy world”, but was taken aback when more than a thousand fans showed up.

Since then, it has grown year on year, and following the launch of the acclaimed Amazon Prime Video series based off the game, 6,420 people visited Goodsprings in 2024. Fallout fans have praised the town’s atmosphere and welcoming spirit on Reddit, with one saying: “The locals love it, and it’s kind of their only form of tourism.”

Another, who visited before Staats took over the Pioneer, said: “They were incredibly friendly and welcoming both times I went, and there’s even a marble wall inscribed with the town’s residents since it’s founding, movies and TV shows that have filmed there, all sorts of stuff.”

With a second season of the Amazon Prime show greenlit and likely to be set in and around ‘New Vegas’, Goodsprings could become an unlikely destination to rival the dazzling city that casts its wide shadow over the Nevada desert.

Any profession can corrupt its practitioners — and arts critics are no exception. Are they enlightened standard-setters dragging us back from a cultural abyss — or deformed exiles from the arts who, with sharpened pens and bent backs, are ready to pounce on plot-holes and devour careers at a moment’s notice?

If Charlotte Runcie’s debut novel, “Bring the House Down,” is anything to go by, it’s a bit of both. The book centers around four heady weeks at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, which begins the unraveling of two newspaper critics who have traveled up from London to cover the sprawling performance art event. Runcie, a former arts columnist for the Daily Telegraph, has created something so delightfully snackable that you may, as I did, gulp it down in two or three sittings.

Runcie’s anti-hero is theater critic Alex Lyons. Alex gives everything he reviews either one star or five, and the latter are vanishingly rare. He bemoans a world of “online shopping reviews,” where “five stars has come to mean the baseline, rather than outstanding,” and so insists on panning almost everything he sees. What’s bad for artists is good for him: His reviews become desperately sought-after career makers or breakers. “The paper didn’t allow Alex to award zero stars. Otherwise, he’d do it all the time.”

“Bring the House Down”

(Doubleday)

We learn about Alex’s story through our narrator Sophie Ridgen, his colleague who, despite being in her mid-30s like Alex, is on a very different track. Alex rose quickly through the newspaper’s ranks, and his reviews are featured on the front page almost daily. Sophie continues to toil as a junior culture writer, picking up whatever scraps nobody else wants. Sophie is also a new mom, overworking to compensate for time lost to maternity leave. She feels uncomfortable in her post-pregnancy body, exhausted and frustrated with her husband. Alex, on the other hand, finds it “embarrassingly easy” to get laid.

But Alex’s glory days are numbered. Early on at the Fringe, he sees a one-woman show that, unsurprisingly, he hates. He writes a review as devastating as it is personal (calling the star a “dull, hectoring frump,” her voice a “high-pitched whine”). All of this would be business as usual for Alex except for one problem: After quickly filing his review of the show, he bumps into Hayley Sinclair, its creator and star, in a bar. He takes her home and sleeps with her. He knew the one star was waiting for her; she did not.

When she finds out, there is hell to pay. Hayley transforms her nightly show into the “Alex Lyons Experience,” collecting testimony from his ex-girlfriends and lovers, or even those who have simply received bad reviews from him. Over the following weeks her show swells into a Greek chorus of one man’s wrongs. The whole nation, including members of Parliament, have hot takes (the performance is livestreamed). It doesn’t help his case that Alex is a bit of a nepo baby, as his mother Judith is an actor whose name would be recognized in most British households.

Sophie, living with Alex in the company-rented flat, has a front row seat to his public unraveling. She watches the livestreams with guilty awe, stalks Alex and Hayley compulsively online, and feverishly scans social media for the latest gossip (Runcie is great at writing a fake mean Tweet/X dispatch). She starts missing calls with her husband and their toddler son, as she becomes fully obsessed with the drama unfolding in Edinburgh.

As she continues to inhabit the same flat as her colleague, Sophie is increasingly questioned by others as to whose side she’s on, Alex or Hayley’s. For much of the book, she seems unable to make up her mind. She refuses to give up on Alex, and increasingly becomes his only source of companionship, which she can’t help but find flattering. But she also finds herself sympathetic to and magnetized by Hayley, whose popularity is blossoming on the Fringe circuit and beyond.

While Alex and Hayley both appear to possess other-worldly levels of charisma, one flaw with Runcie’s novel is that this is something we are repeatedly told, rather than shown. Alex spends most of the book being condescending to Sophie, and yet she is transfixed by him. “He had the strange ability to make you feel as if you were the only person who was in on a joke, the only person who understood some fundamental truth about the world that escaped other people.” This feels unsatisfyingly generic, like something you might find in an online wedding vows template.

We are at least given more backstory and a more plausible explanation for Sophie’s fascination with Alex: the ego trip. Having been dragged down by motherhood, a rocky marriage, and grief over the death of her own mother, Sophie enjoys Alex’s increasing dependence on her, a lone rock of support amid an ocean of alienation. There is something undeniably delicious in watching someone you revere fall to their knees, and Sophie begins to see in Alex “a tiny flickering of fear, at first only visible as a barely perceptible interruption to his arrogance, like a power cut that dims the lights for just a hundredth of a second.”

Hayley, unfortunately, never quite comes to life in the same way. And it remains unclear why her show, which is essentially a litany of (legitimate) complaints about a real-life terrible man with some added pyrotechnics, takes Edinburgh and the entire country by such storm. “I find I can’t explain why it had the effect that it did,” Sophie tells us. “This wasn’t theater, not really; it was a happening. The audience weren’t spectators anymore, but a silent, connected web of righteous energy.” Without more to go on, we have no choice but to take her word for it.

The result feels like a missed opportunity to interrogate some important questions. How much does the identity (gender, race, or class) of the critic matter when it comes to their ability to judge art? What about the identity of the artist themselves? In other words, who shall criticize the critics? Readers may leave Runcie’s novel feeling that some of these questions go unanswered, but this deeply entertaining novel is nonetheless well worth the price of admission.

Mills is a writer and human rights researcher who has worked for Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the Wall Street Journal and Associated Press. She lives in New York.