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.
