Editor’s note: This profile is part of a GPAHE series examining the people shaping American Christian nationalism in post–Project 2025 America. Christian nationalism is distinct from Christianity itself; mainstream churches have publicly rejected the movement as a distortion of the Christian faith. The figures profiled here are the architects of a theocratic, political project working to fuse American national identity with conservative Christian supremacist rule and dismantle democratic institutions.
The pastor who defended American slavery and wants the 19th Amendment repealed spent decades on the Christian nationalist fringe. In February, Pete Hegseth put him behind a Pentagon pulpit.
Key Takeaways
- Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth belongs to Wilson’s denomination, and in February 2026, he brought the pastor into the Pentagon to lead worship.
- At an April 2026 town hall, Wilson said he would reserve public office for Christians as he defines them and put adultery and same-sex relations back in the criminal code. No-fault divorce would also be gone, and a married woman’s vote would pass to her husband.
- Wilson’s Idaho congregation grew into a network of roughly 170 churches across the country and overseas, ringed by hundreds of classical schools, a college, and a publishing house. A family inside it can go years without touching an institution Wilson didn’t build. Moscow residents protesting their town’s takeover keep voting his candidates down. Wilson calls the town his working prototype anyway, and a corporation linked to him is turning Battle Ground, Washington, into the next one.
- When a New Saint Andrews student confessed to molesting children, Wilson asked the judge for leniency and later officiated the man’s wedding. The ministerial student who abused a 13-year-old girl in a member’s home kept his standing too. Adultery, Wilson says, gets a man excommunicated.
For most of his five decades in ministry, Doug Wilson preached to a small congregation in Moscow, an Idaho college town that voted against nearly everything he stood for. On Feb. 17, 2026, he preached inside the Pentagon.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth became a member of one of Wilson’s churches in Tennessee after moving there in 2022 and now attends the congregation the movement planted in Washington, D.C. He invited the pastor to lead one of the military’s new monthly Christian worship services. Wilson spoke for 15 minutes from a pulpit in the Pentagon auditorium; the sermon was carried live on the department’s internal television network, and Hegseth joined him on stage at the end, praying with a hand on the pastor’s shoulder. Wilson later compared the gatherings to Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit descended on the first Christians in the Book of Acts.
Wilson calls himself a Christian nationalist. He wants, as he put it on a podcast that chronicled his rise, “the authority of the Lord Jesus to be confessed by the House,” with the president’s signature on the confession. In dozens of books, most directly in 2023’s Mere Christendom, he argues that American law should be rewritten around his Reformed theology and that public office should be limited to Christians. “It is Christ or chaos. It is Christ or Antichrist,” he writes on page 70.
For 40 years, that program kept him at the margins of evangelical life, where he was known mainly for a booklet defending the slaveholding South. Trump’s second term has given him an audience in the cabinet: at the National Conservatism Conference in September 2025, he shared a stage with border czar Tom Homan and budget director Russell Vought, both of whom contributed to Project 2025, the Christian nationalist blueprint for authoritarian rule.
“He was a fairly fringe figure, but this moment was really his moment,” professor, author, and historian Kristin Du Mez told The 19th in August 2025. “I think he signaled and gave permission to others that they didn’t need to hide some of their more controversial views, such as, should women have the vote? And that’s something that you didn’t hear proudly promoted from very many spaces, even just a handful of years ago.”
By October 2025, Wilson was on The New York Times’ podcast telling Ross Douthat he was more influential than he used to be, and at higher levels. Even his interviewer admitted on air to hesitating over the booking, and others raised the same objection in print.
Asked whom he would meet on a trip to Washington, D.C., Wilson answered: reporters, mostly — the AP and Politico — and he welcomes the scrutiny; a decade ago, he says, critics threw mud, and now they arrive having read him and offering him a platform. The traffic runs both ways. In mid-June 2026, Al Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s flagship seminary, appeared on Wilson’s podcast to promote a five-author book on Christian nationalism that both men have chapters in.
A Prototype in the Palouse
Wilson began pastoring in 1977 at a small congregation in Pullman, Washington — the church that became Christ Church of Moscow, Idaho, a university town of 25,000 just across the state line. Roughly 3,000 people now move in the church’s orbit. The institutions outgrew the sanctuary long ago: Wilson founded the Logos School in 1981, and the classical Christian education movement it seeded now extends to some 500 schools nationwide. In 1988, he added Canon Press to publish his works, then, in the 1990s, New Saint Andrews College for Logos graduates and Greyfriars Hall to train ministers. In 1998, he bound Christ Church to two Washington congregations and created the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, or CREC, which has grown to about 170 congregations, as far away as the Philippines and Japan.
Extremely American, the podcast that spent years reporting from inside Moscow, describes the movement’s classical schools as weapons production for a war over American culture. The church states the goal openly: a Moscow governed by Christians.
The old notoriety was largely Wilson’s own doing. In 1996, he co-wrote Southern Slavery As It Was, a booklet contending the antebellum South had been slandered. He told The Associated Press last year that horrific maltreatment coexisted with master-slave relationships he likened to scenes from Disney’s Song of the South. He and pastors in his circle also teach that empathy, when it overrides scripture, can be a sin. Douthat raised slavery again, and Wilson gave him a direct answer: a Black person in 1850 Charleston was better off than a Black child conceived in New York or Baltimore today. The slaveholder who treated his slaves decently, he went on, was a good man by his lights.
Dominion Pays
On 30 acres at Moscow’s edge, construction crews began raising a Jeffersonian quad of classical buildings for Logos School in 2025 — a private academy of 750 students in a town whose public school district serves about 2,400 students. Nearly one in four of Moscow’s schoolchildren sit in his classrooms. New Saint Andrews, his college in downtown Moscow, enrolls another 300. The church finished a new hall in 2024 and fills it three times every Sunday; five congregations now meet in and around town.
Church members own businesses such as a coffee shop and a brewery, and the church has bought up property steadily along Main Street despite its neighbors’ objections. This spring, Moscow’s board of adjustment denied a downtown permit to a church-affiliated music and dance studio after residents packed the hearing in protest. Members have broken ground on a housing development at the city limits. The college bookstore goes by Sword and Shovel; New Saint Andrews brands itself with the slogan “Build. Fight.” Wilson credits the influx to big families — four to six children is typical — and to newcomers “chased here by blue state governors.”
Canon Press began as a ministry of Christ Church; in 2012, it was sold to a for-profit company owned by Wilson’s son, the novelist N.D. Wilson, and Moscow businessman Aaron Rench, with Doug Wilson still listed as a member on the company’s latest annual report. The publishing house has issued more than 100 books by Wilson and others; it also operates a streaming service, Canon Plus. In September 2025, it made an unsolicited $10 million bid for Christianity Today and promised that Billy Graham’s magazine would become part of Charlie Kirk’s legacy. The magazine refused, and Baptist News Global asked where a small-town pastor’s press found that kind of money.
Liberty PAC, funded primarily by a company belonging to Christ Church elder Andrew Crapuchettes, backed a slate in the November 2025 races for Moscow mayor and City Council. Moscow’s voters sent every one of them home. Six months earlier, library board candidates who espoused the church’s values had lost just as decisively. A Facebook page kept by residents lists the downtown businesses that Wilson’s followers own and urges shoppers to spend their money elsewhere. And when Sons of Patriarchy, a podcast built on accounts of abuse within Wilson’s movement, taped a live episode in Moscow in August 2025, scheduled for the same weekend as Christ Church’s annual conference, more than 250 people packed the Kenworthy Theater downtown to hear it.
What the Shepherd Forgave
In 2005, Steven Sitler, a New Saint Andrews College student boarding with a Christ Church family, confessed to molesting children — a confession Wilson says came “at my instigation.” At sentencing, Wilson wrote the judge to ask that the penalties be “measured and limited.” Sitler served a brief prison term, and in 2011 Wilson officiated his wedding to a young woman in the congregation. Idaho corrections officials objected, and the judge who allowed the marriage warned that any children it produced might need protection from their father. Four years later, a court found that Sitler had been sexually stimulated by contact with his own infant son and barred him from unchaperoned contact with the child. Wilson has said he would gladly perform the wedding again.
The Wight case broke the same year. Jamin Wight, a 24-year-old student in Greyfriars Hall, Wilson’s ministerial program, was living with a Christ Church family when he began sexually abusing their daughter, Natalie Greenfield, then 13; he pleaded guilty in 2006 to a reduced charge of injury to a child. A decade later, Greenfield published Wilson’s letter to the investigating officer, in which the pastor called Wight’s crime egregious yet insisted the man was “not a sexual predator,” and faulted her parents for what he characterized as a secret courtship, a courtship the family maintains never existed. Wight was later convicted of battering his wife, who divorced him. Peter Leithart, the pastor who oversaw Wight, publicly apologized to the Greenfields for his errors in judgment; Wilson instead rebutted Greenfield’s account. He told Extremely American that adultery would get a man excommunicated from Christ Church. Neither Sitler nor Wight ever was. Wight remained, in Leithart’s words, a member “in good standing” at the church’s daughter congregation in Moscow.
The Rules of His Republic
In April 2026, Wilson took questions at a town hall on the University of Idaho campus and laid out his plans for the perfect country, modeled on what he has already built in Moscow. Public office would be reserved for Christians, he said, and adultery would be a crime again. No-fault divorce would go, and so would Obergefell, which legalized same-sex marriages. He wants same-sex relations made illegal, and he would swap the 19th Amendment for household voting — one ballot per family, cast by the husband. Asked in July 2026 why the Amendment should go, he offered one answer: “Because it’s a good idea.” God, he said, has commissioned the church to disciple the nation.
Wilson has also affirmed to the Times that all Ten Commandments belong in civic law and that Pride parades and drag-queen story hours would be ended by statute. He considers himself a theocratic libertarian. Muslims in his republic could pray but never build a minaret; Dearborn, Michigan, he said, presents a problem he could not solve. The stoning of adulterers came up, and Wilson raised no objection.
Pressed by NPR on what punishment would look like, Wilson reached for the Old Testament kings who shut down the bathhouses and exiled the men instead — execution, he said, was only ever the maximum penalty. In a blog post this month, Wilson blamed the Supreme Court for preserving birthright citizenship, reading the fight as cheap labor for one side and cheap votes for the other, and he predicted ordinary Christians would run out of patience when they saw “their hometown in Ohio turning into something Pakistani.”
Inside his own congregations, women already live under the coming rules: they are shut out of leadership and denied a vote in church decisions. Fidelity, his 1999 manual on Christian sex, casts the marriage bed as a conquest, the husband’s part to colonize and the wife’s to surrender. Slate spent years interviewing women from the Christ Church world and found wives who believed they could not refuse their husbands, and a girl counseled by the Wilsons to forgive the father who had touched her inappropriately. Tia Levings, raised under the same teaching, described the wifely submission Wilson preaches as “church-sanctioned domestic abuse.” Wilson denies condoning any of it. His vocabulary for feminists includes calling them “small-breasted biddies,” “lumberjack dykes,” and “cunts.”
Wilson has written that Mormonism is a “false gospel.” In an email to Mother Jones, he described members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as polytheists, a people he places outside Christianity. In the country Wilson wants, The Salt Lake Tribune reported in July 2026, Latter-day Saints could not hold office and might not vote.
In June, his definition showed up in the Pentagon’s paperwork. Hegseth’s department, whose chief had complained that the chaplaincy was “infected by political correctness and secular humanism,” cut its list of recognized faith codes for service members from 211 to 31. A first draft declined to call Latter-day Saints Christians; when Utah’s two Republican senators erupted, the department erased the Christian designations altogether rather than extend one. Weeks earlier, Wilson had published a chaplain’s letter on his blog warning about Mormon clergy in the ranks, and in a podcast episode titled “Immigrants, Mormons, and Demoncrats” he pronounced the gap unbridgeable.
Assuming the Center
Wilson explains his method with a phrase he has used for decades, “assuming the center,” which he defines as “acting with authority before you actually have any.” Provocation is part of the method.
Every November, he drops what he calls his careful qualifications for a month he brands No Quarter November, announced each year with a video in which he sets something on fire or launches a Molotov cocktail. In the 2023 edition, he interrupts his Thanksgiving dinner to light his cigar with a flamethrower, then uses it to burn cardboard cutouts of Disney princesses and social media logos in the snow. Then goes back in for pie.
In September 2020, Christ Church staged a maskless psalm sing outside Moscow City Hall to protest the city’s mask order, and police arrested three singers on camera. Trump took the church’s side on Twitter. The city dropped the charges, then paid the three singers $300,000 to settle their wrongful-arrest suit. It made him a cause on the national right. Tucker Carlson had him on in 2024, the same year Charlie Kirk put him onstage at Turning Point USA’s Believers’ Summit. Joel Webbon, a Texas pastor this series has profiled, calls for a “Christian Nationalist Caesar” and has hosted Wilson on his Right Response conference stage. The crowds keep growing. By Wilson’s own count, his Moscow congregation has roughly doubled since 2019.
In a June post, he denounced the Nazi element crashing the movement’s conferences while arguing that evangelicals who vote left threaten the country more than deluded bros who “pal around with Nazis.” The same post defended Canon Press for publishing Stephen Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism.
In 2025, Christ Church opened a congregation three blocks from the Capitol in a Washington, D.C., building owned by the Conservative Partnership Institute, the think tank co-led by Trump’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows. Hegseth walked into the inaugural service with his wife and children. By fall, the church’s first conference drew 350 people.
The Justice Department had already sued a town for the church. In May 2025, it went to federal court against Troy, Idaho, a city of about 1,000 whose city council had denied a Christ Church congregation a permit to worship downtown. The suit asks a judge to order Troy to let the church in and to require city officials to undergo religious-discrimination training. Troy’s attorney called the case “an abuse by the federal government” and said the DOJ was after a precedent for overwhelming small jurisdictions. The mayor warned that local democracy is meaningless if Washington can override the town’s zoning. Wilson tied it to the election himself in the July interview with NPR. Had Harris won, he said, “there would have been basically zero evangelicals in the White House administration.” Trump won, and Wilson followed his congregants to power.
Hegseth joined the fold well before he ran the Pentagon. He belonged to a CREC congregation in Tennessee, sent his children to a school in the classical Christian mold Wilson launched, and now sits in the pews of the D.C. congregation. Hegseth wrote his case against progressive schooling, Battle for the American Mind, with David Goodwin, head of the association behind Wilson’s classical-schools movement and a friend of the pastor; as recently as this spring, Wilson admitted to only two meetings with Hegseth, the first at the Nashville church, and said his influence comes through classrooms and books. On Wilson’s CrossPolitic podcast in 2024, Hegseth described the movement’s position as a tactical retreat, an army built underground ahead of offensive operations — all metaphorical, he allowed. A Pentagon spokesman confirmed that the secretary values the pastor’s writings; when CNN profiled Wilson last August, Hegseth shared the story approvingly with his millions of followers.
The Franchise
One test of the model is already underway 30 miles north of Portland. In Battle Ground, Washington, population 23,000, corporations controlled by Camden Spiller, CEO of the electrical-equipment maker Maddox Industrial Transformer, have purchased more than 30 properties, from downtown storefronts to land slated for a church and convention center. Spiller has appeared at a New Saint Andrews event. His pastor, C.R. Wiley, publishes through Wilson’s Canon Press and appears on podcasts alongside him; at a 2023 conference, Wiley said his theological tradition provides resources to “govern unbelievers.”
Maddox people now hold key posts in Battle Ground’s government. The mayor works for the company, the deputy mayor is married to an employee, and another employee sits on the school board. In June, Spiller and his brother bought the Reflector, the town’s 117-year-old newspaper and its only one. Wilson, for his part, told Oregon Public Broadcasting he did not know whether his Moscow work is anyone’s template.
The CREC wants a church within driving distance of most Americans, and Wilson tells audiences his project is built to mature over 250 years — a timetable the Pentagon ignored in February, when it handed him the lectern.
In His Own Words
“A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.”
— Dec. 2023: his instruction to husbands in 1999’s Fidelity, still in print at Canon Press.
“Women are the kind of people that people come out of.”
— Aug. 8, 2025: his case against women’s suffrage, in the interview Hegseth reposted.
“You’re the one asking for it.”
— July 6, 2026: pressed on a 2016 post tying rejection of patriarchy to rape, he compared such women to a wallet left on a dashboard.
“Well, I’m not against it, either.”
— Oct. 9, 2025: on stoning adulterers, after the host assumed he opposed the practice.
“… a multiracial society which has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony …”
— April 2026: describing the antebellum South in his 1996 booklet Southern Slavery As It Was.
“… one of the greatest men this nation has ever produced.”
— Aug. 11, 2025: his assessment of Robert E. Lee.
“I would not want a sexual Gestapo.”
— April 9, 2026: his reassurance to a University of Idaho town hall while arguing to make same-sex relations illegal again.
“… a non-Christian faith with Christian terminology.”
— July 2026: his verdict on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, in an email to Mother Jones.
“Every society is theocratic. The only question is who’s ‘Theo’?”
— Aug. 7, 2025: his answer to the charge that he wants a theocracy.
