By Hannah Anderson
Sunday, July 19, 2026
Pastor Doug Wilson gave a surprisingly dispassionate interview to NPR’s Leila Fadel
last week. I describe it as “surprisingly dispassionate” because in the
interview, Wilson espoused repealing the 19th Amendment, ending
no-fault divorce, and introducing religious tests for public office; yet his
delivery of these radical ideas was decidedly unbothered—a marked contrast to
the responses the interview elicited from exvangelicals and beyond. The
emotional gap between Wilson’s rhetoric and how people respond to it is one of
the defining features of his public presence. It’s also a key to understanding
his ideas and how he uses them.
For the uninitiated, Wilson is an evangelical pastor in
Moscow, Idaho, who’s come to greater visibility due to his association with
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. As Wilson tells it, Hegseth became enamored of Wilson’s approach to
education and moved his family to Tennessee to be part of a school that
implemented it. Through those networks, Hegseth began attending a congregation
in the Communion of Reformed
Evangelical Churches (CREC), a denomination Wilson started. (The pastor of
that congregation, Brooks Potteiger, has since relocated to Washington, D.C.,
to start a congregation under the direct authority of Wilson.)Wilson downplays any influence
with Hegseth, naming the relationship as one of overlapping circles, shared
acquaintances, and the occasional text message. He was recently invited to
preach at the Pentagon worship service Hegseth began last year.
Given his proximity to power, Wilson has become the
subject of national media coverage, which often focuses on his claim to want to
establish the United States as a Christian theocracy. Such language conjures
visions of a real-life Gilead, the authoritarian and patriarchal republic that
is the setting for The Handmaid’s Tale, but it would be a mistake to
read Wilson as an ideologue. In fact, he spoke pragmatically in the NPR
interview, naming the work of democracy as the work of persuasion. Wilson’s
demeanor, even if slightly awkward, was not forceful or aggressive. He was measured,
friendly, playful. But that disconnect—between the weight of what Wilson is
suggesting and how easily he suggests it—is what’s concerning.
I first became acquainted with Wilson’s ideas more than
25 years ago. His books were being covertly passed around the fundamentalist
college I attended. Wilson was a pastor, but he also smoked, drank, and used
foul language. That devil-may-care sensibility was enough for my friends to
believe they’d found something substantively different from the strict homes
and churches in which we’d been raised. Wilson’s certainty on things like
gender roles, family life, and education also appealed to those of us on the
cusp of early marriage and parenthood. We were all in over our heads, and his
confidence offered a sense of stability.
Over the years, my friends moved away from Wilson’s
orbit. For some, it was a gradual process. For others, however, it came through
a crisis when the “Moscow Mood” proved unsustainable in the face of actual
life. Discussing male headship and the proper ordering of a home may work in a
conversation in a dorm room or a church basement, but it doesn’t fare as well
when your spouse cheats on you or is abusive. Wilson himself is not lost in the
clouds, however. He’s planted churches, built schools (including a college), started
a publishing house, and founded a denomination. In this way, Wilson uses
the power of abstraction for very practical ends.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about Wilson’s ideas,
however, is how much they recycle. When asked about Christian nationalist
policies he would focus on today, Wilson replayed a narrow set of issues from
the culture wars: abortion, LGBTQ rights, and feminism. Wilson runs his
ministry along the tried-and-true template of the megachurch pastor or
televangelist, presiding over a conglomerate of churches, schools, and media
outlets that also employ his family. (Wilson’s daughters, Rebekah and Rachel,
and his wife, Nancy, play significant roles as public
communicators of Wilson’s message, billing themselves first as homemakers.
His son-in-law, Ben Merkle, is the president
of the college.)
And while Wilson claims the moniker “Reformed” (his
college is “New St. Andrews,” echoing the University of St. Andrews), his lack
of formal theological training (he has an M.A. in philosophy from the
University of Idaho but no theological degrees from seminaries) and penchant
for innovation are constitutionally at odds with that tradition. In many ways,
Wilson’s approach reflects more of his upbringing as a child of the post-World War II religious revival than the
traditionalism he espouses. Wilson’s parents, Jim Wilson and Bessie Dodds, met in postwar Japan while he was stationed there and she was serving as a missionary. Jim Wilson would
eventually spend nine years as a naval officer and 12 years as an evangelist
with the parachurch organization Officers’ Christian Union before moving to
Moscow, Idaho, to open a Christian bookstore. In this way, their son’s path to
preaching at the Pentagon is more than predictable.
One way Wilson distinguishes himself, however, is how he uses
radical ideas. Unlike those who might hide a radical agenda, Wilson speaks
openly about it—almost performatively. Those familiar with his broader body of
work know that he delights in the drama of it all in much the same
way that President Donald Trump seems to. Wilson doesn’t reverse course so much
as place responsibility for the drama on others. He courts outrage and then
retreats to the abstract when others react. “Screamers,” he called them in the
NPR interview. Speaking with Fadel, Wilson suggested that previous interviewers
just threw “mud at the wall. You’re a fascist. You’re a Nazi. You’re a thing,
you know …” but now, he’s “risen to the dignity of needing to be intelligently
opposed.” In other words, the problem isn’t what he said; it’s that you
(mis)understood. You were too sensitive. Satire is a legitimate form of argumentation, and you don’t
understand how rhetoric works.
In this way, Wilson can be deeply disorienting. The true
ideologue speaks with wholeness—the totality of their words, demeanor, and
actions all say the same thing. Completely given to their ideas and the
promotion of them, their personal presence and posture reflect this unity, even
if that means coming across as a little unhinged. But Wilson seems able to
emotionally disconnect himself from many of his ideas as well as from other
disturbing realities. In the NPR interview, Wilson discussed atrocities like rape
and genocide as if they existed only in theory.
This ability to remain undisturbed while discussing
deeply disturbing things is both a practiced posture and a necessary one. Over
the last eight years, Wilson has been a main
promoter of the idea of “the sin of empathy” within theologically
conservative spaces. As before, the idea is not original to Wilson, but Moscow
has been effective in pushing the conversation forward as a paradigm that can be
used to justify
increasingly extreme policies of the hard right, including President
Trump’s mass deportation campaign.
As the argument goes, empathy is disordered insofar as it
asks you to experience the feelings of another person or put yourself in their
shoes. Instead, the morally and intellectually superior person is the one who
is able to remain detached. You can grieve with them, but it must be a
theoretical grief in the sense that the grief does not affect your supposed
objectivity. And those who might be emotionally moved by the implications of
eliminating no-fault divorce or disenfranchising non-Christians—moved to the
point of action—deserve to be mocked for their naïveté and failure to remain
unmoored.
The danger of this approach is that people’s actual lives
become reduced to thought experiments. In the NPR interview, Wilson attempted to clarify previous
statements around “the propriety of rape.” To do so, he likened violent sexual
assault with having a wallet stolen because it was left open in a dangerous
neighborhood—seemingly oblivious to how such words both objectified women’s
bodies and might affect women who had been raped. Discussing the Supreme
Court’s 2015 Obergefell decision making same-sex marriage legal across
the country, Wilson kept referring to legal partnerships and civil protections
against discrimination as the “LGBTQ thing.”
Wilson’s ability to separate the theoretical and actual
also explains how he could devote his first book to a philosophical
exploration of American slavery, writing that it was a “normal sinful
situation” rather than an “apocalyptic evil.” The cover image is of a “black
and tan,” a mixed drink made by pouring a darker beer over a lighter one. This
same indifference explains how Wilson could guide a young woman who was a New St. Andrew’s student to
marry a convicted pedophile who was a part of their church community (and who had abused children
within the church as an NSA student himself). Not only did Wilson mishandle the previous cases of sexual abuse, he
diagnosed the groom’s behavior as “temptation,” with the theoretical cure being
sexual expression in marriage. The groom was later removed from the home when a
judge ruled he could not live with his infant son due to failed polygraphs and
further violations.
If being a pastor is akin to being a doctor, Wilson is
the doctor willing to experiment on his patients. And now, it seems, the nation
itself.
Over the last decade, there’s been a lot of conversation
about how journalists should cover Trump. How do you seriously report on the
words of a man who doesn’t seem to take his own words seriously? Similar
questions apply to Wilson. How should we interpret the words of a man who
operates in the theoretical? How seriously should we take his suggestions about
repealing the 19th Amendment?
Part of the answer lies in understanding Wilson’s own
posture, but the rest also lies in understanding the context that allows
someone like Wilson to flourish.
Over the last 30 years, Wilson has steadily built a
presence within conservative evangelicalism, but for the most part, it’s been a
contrarian and controversial presence. Much like Trump, he functioned as an
outsider, which meant his presence was also somewhat contained. In the NPR
interview, however, Wilson noted that in the last five years, his ideas have
been getting “a much more significant hearing than we ever have before, where
people are actually listening to what we say.” It’s a stretch to think that
this is the natural outworking of the superiority of Wilson’s political vision
any more than to believe that Trump’s business acumen landed him the
presidency. But Wilson, like Trump, is particularly suited to this moment.
I first encountered Wilson’s writings in the early 2000s
in the form of books and magazines. But as the digital age came, and then
snowballed, we were inundated with more information—more words—than we could
process. The people with an advantage in that setting are people who don’t take
their own words as earnestly as other people take them. For Trump, that means a
kind of showmanship; for Wilson, it means playing the theorist.
While the rest of us are drowning in the flood of
information, trying to figure out what it all means, people like Wilson
and Trump skim along the surface. Why? Because understanding and being
understood are not necessarily the goal. Wilson does not sit for an interview
to try to convince you of his ideas. He sits for an interview because “all
press is good press,” as the saying goes. He gets a hearing, and regardless of
whether you subscribe to his ideas or get lost trying to debate them, he wins.
You get bogged down while he continues doing what he’s doing.
In an even more ironic twist, evangelicals are
particularly vulnerable to the flood of information because the tradition
places a disproportionate weight on words. Unlike traditions that
prioritize embodied practices like prayers, fasting, penance, and good works,
as an Enlightenment tradition, evangelicals often prioritize the mind, belief,
and study. But this reliance on words also means that evangelicals are uniquely
susceptible to the abuse of words. In a weird twist, evangelicals are more
likely to follow the person who talks or writes about the
importance of virtue than the person who is actually virtuous.
So what are we to do with men like Doug Wilson and his
use of “radical ideas”? I don’t think the answer is to ignore them. I have seen
firsthand the damage Wilson’s ideas wreak on the naïve and inexperienced—on
those whose earnestness exceeds his own. I also don’t think the answer is to
take Wilson’s words at face value. Not exactly.
While it is important to believe people when they tell
you who they are, they tell us who they are through both words and deeds. So,
it seems to me, the wisest response to someone like Wilson—whose wizardry
depends on the smokescreen of the theoretical—is to engage the actual.
And when you pull back the curtain to reveal the man
behind it, you find someone with a history of speaking philosophically about
the goodness of common life while also undermining it. You find a man who was
raised within mainstream evangelicalism who intentionally chose marginality.
You find a man who speaks a lot about submission to authority while refusing to submit himself. You find a man who easily
discusses the most extreme hypotheticals, seemingly unmoved by how they would
actually affect the person sitting in front of him.
Wilson is not dangerous because he is an ideologue. He is
dangerous because he’s comfortable entertaining radical ideas to further pragmatic
ends, knowing that if they go wrong, he can always retreat to the safety of the
theoretical. In this way, Wilson finds a natural home among the protected class
of lawmakers and bureaucrats in Washington who seem beyond the reach of
voters—who increasingly engage in the work of public policy as if it were a
game or reality show, who are insulated from the consequences of their choices,
who remain theoretically detached while others suffer and even die under their
watch.
As I observe Doug Wilson, I can’t help but think of my
friends who followed him decades ago. They had their reasons, and most of them
had less to do with Wilson than with their own wounds and personal histories.
Wilson’s paradigms offered an escape from reality and the need to deal with the
truth of their actual lives. And like any other coping mechanism, it worked
until it didn’t. But today, as they continue to pick up the pieces of their
shattered marriages and families, Wilson preaches at the Pentagon.
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