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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.

“What the f— is going on?” Bernard Sumner says jokingly.

After crashing on both Zoom and WhatsApp, the founding member of New Order decided to give FaceTime a shot. He materializes, sitting on a couch with a white wall behind him. Mild, inviting eyes hide behind his glasses.

It’s been 45 years since he, now “below 70 and above 20,” founded the group alongside bassist Peter Hook, drummer Stephen Morris and keyboardist Gillian Gilbert. But it’s impossible not to mention New Order in the same breath as its previous ensemble in Joy Division. The story is all too familiar, with the band springing up after a Sex Pistols gig in Manchester.

“Famously, loads of people went … Morrissey was there, and the Buzzcocks were there … and everyone went out and formed a band,” Sumner quips.

And to anyone who has ever heard Joy Division, it makes complete sense. The band’s debut album “Unknown Pleasures” is imbued with the Pistols’ signature sense of “anarchistic rebellion, aggression and energy,” from the very first track. Sumner describes the gig as a pivotal moment in the history of music as it, sonically, gave everything the “kick in the balls” it needed.

“It was really ‘f— the establishment’ … we’d all had a pretty s— time at school and the rebelliousness and didn’t like the establishment,” Sumner says. “It was giving those teachers a kick! F— you and f— your lessons and f— all the s— you’re trying to teach us, because we’re not f— interested.”

“Punk gave us the excuse we really needed,” he adds.

But just a few years after Joy Division graced the music scene, the group came to an untimely demise following the death of lead singer Ian Curtis. And a year after that, New Order appeared with Sumner, Hook, Morris and Gilbert at the helm, and an entirely different sound to back them.

The band began to mix in synthesizers with the typical instrumentation, creating an unforgettable, hypnotic sound — every thump and woosh calls listeners to the dance floor and begs them to move. Sumner says it came from nothing, with no conscious effort being put into the familiar noise that would go on to define decades to come.

New Order performs in front of a buzzing crowd in Sydney, Australia.

(Warren Jackson)

“Four people came together and that’s what we did,” Sumner says. “We got rehearsals, but we had no great plan, we didn’t give a s— about earning loads of money, we didn’t give a s— about being famous.”

In fact, their creative process boiled down to going to rehearsals, talking about what they saw on TV the night before and going to grab a baked potato from Spudulike near the studio.

“Then we’d go, ‘Should we try to write something?’” he recalls. “We go, ‘Yeah, okay,’ and then we switch the amps on, and just see what happened.”

He even tells a story of the first time they worked in New York, and met up with famous producer Arthur Baker. The latter was used to working with session musicians, and while doing so, decided to throw New Order into a studio while he finished up.

“He said, ‘Come up with some ideas,’” Sumner says. “We just couldn’t, because we’d been put on the spot and told to do it, and that had never happened before … the trick was not to think about it.”

However, even with its original and revolutionary style, New Order struggled to etch its name in the charts outside of the indie and indie alternative categories. In the ’80s, they were reliant on radio play and didn’t get much outside of college campuses in America.

Instead, groups like Sumner’s, such as the Smiths and Echo & the Bunnymen, ignored what was going on in the mainstream altogether, leaving the numbers game to pop music.

“We just ignored what was going on in the mainstream,” he says. “We didn’t really like what we were hearing on the radio, so we made our own radio.”

Of course, when the internet came around, it bypassed mainstream radio and absolved the band’s issues with getting airtime. This led to its undoubted success in bridging the gap between generations, with parents sharing the group’s records with their kids.

“Good music is good music, isn’t it? It always floats to the top,” he says. “Buy a New Order record, it’s a good investment for the rest of your life.”

Sumner claims the group is now “more successful” than they’ve ever been and says it comes down to a couple of factors, including cohesion.

“In the early days, we used to get f— up quite a lot and that f— up the shows,” Sumner says. “We used to play a really good one, celebrate how great it was, and then the next one would be terrible because we celebrated too much.”

Bernard Sumner of New Order bows out to fans.

(Warren Jackson)

“Our popularity has increased, really, rather than decreasing, and it usually decreases, doesn’t it?” he jokes.

This relationship between generations that grew up listening to the group and those now is all too apparent when it comes to festivals like Cruel World, which celebrates post-punk, new wave, goth and alt-rock. The event, first hosted in 2022, has brought the likes of Iggy Pop, Duran Duran and Morrissey back to the main stage.

Now, New Order is set to headline the festival on May 17 alongside Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. It’s an unexpected ’80s revival that has maintained steady enough attendance to point toward becoming a staple, much like many of Goldenvoice’s other feats.

“There must be an appetite for this [era of] music, otherwise they wouldn’t be putting it on,” Sumner jokes. “It’s got soul, it really has got soul.”

As for what’s next in terms of new releases, the group recently had to shut down rumors of an album on the way. It’s been 10 years since its critically-acclaimed album, “Music Complete,” was delivered to fans, who are understandably craving a new project. Sumner says the delay comes down to general motivation to write again, with some members wanting to do so and others not being “too keen.”

“I’m one of the ones that does,” Sumner assures. “That’s all I can say, really.”