The mission of Issues in Perspective is to provide thoughtful, historical and biblically-centered perspectives on current ethical and cultural issues.

The Founders of this nation argued that democracy could survive only if citizens could restrain “their passions, be obedient to a shared moral order and point their lives toward virtue. They relied on religious institutions to do that moral formation. As John Adams put it, ‘Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.’” Indeed, Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1830s concluded that “For the Americans, the idea of Christianity and liberty are so completely mingled that it is almost impossible to get them to conceive of one without the other.”

Do these two observations about early America stipulate that Christianity should be the state religion of America?  Should America embrace a blending of Christianity and the government of the US?  Pastor Doulgas Wilson believes we should. Douglas Wilson, whose home church is based in Moscow, Idaho has described himself as a “paleo-Confederate”—he believes that Southern slavery was wrong, but that the Confederacy was otherwise “right on all the essential constitutional and cultural issues surrounding the war.” He is the founder of a church, a denomination (the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches), and a publishing house, and he is influential in both the Christian home-schooling and the Christian classical school movements. [Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, belongs to his denomination.  Tucker Carlson is one of his fans as well.]

Columnist and Christian attorney, Daivd French, summarizes some of his teachings:

• He has referred to women he doesn’t like as “small-breasted biddies” and “lumberjack dykes.” He has said: “The sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.”
• The body of churches he co-founded, the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, includes pastors who believe that the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote, should be repealed and replaced by something called “household voting,” where it’s no longer one person, one vote, but one household, one vote.
• Ultimately—many years in the future—non-Christians would be barred from public office. “You want all the office-holders to vow to uphold the Constitution. And if the Constitution is Christian, then yeah,” Wilson said. That would mark a significant departure from the Constitution’s instruction that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust.”

French argues that “his influence is growing. Hegseth made that plain this month when he posted his support for Wilson after Wilson reiterated to CNN his support for Christian nationalism. The words Hegseth used—’all of Christ for all of life’—are a common saying in the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches.”

There are many reasons for Wilson’s rise, but one of them is squarely rooted in politics. For example, most would agree that President Trump is a profane, authoritarian man who delights in attacking his critics. “Wilson is also a profane, authoritarian man who similarly delights in personal attacks. He created something he calls ‘No Quarter November,’ a month when he grants Christians the right to ‘hoist the Jolly Roger and just go to war with the world.’ His aggression is referred to as the ‘Moscow mood.’”

Aaron Zitner of the Wall Street Journal interviewed Wilson and provides several salient points about his worldview as a “Christian nationalist:”  “As the flames creep toward him, Wilson calmly puffs on a cigar, turns to the camera, and makes his point: ‘We don’t live in a sane time,’ he says. He and his allies are ‘normal people,’ but the secular world treats the Christian nationalist vision he promotes as if he were an arsonist. It’s a vision in which same-sex relations are illegal, Muslims are barred from the public square and the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote, is repealed. In the 2021 video, posted online, Wilson promises to keep delivering his biblical truths, even if they set the world aflame.”

Wilson is bucking the tide of declining religiosity in America; he is winning followers and influence with a hardline evangelical message: “We don’t parcel out bits of the Bible with a teaspoon,” Wilson said in an interview. “No, we want the lordship, the authority of Jesus Christ to be operative, to have some difference in our lives, in our thinking, every day of the week, everywhere we go.”  I would agree with that proposition, but how exactly does Wilson understand this?   “For Wilson, which means obedience to Christ should be paramount in public life as well as family life. Tucker Carlson approvingly called him ‘the person most closely identified with that phrase, Christian nationalism.’”

As mentioned above, Wilson’s most powerful admirer in the Trump administration is Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. He has spoken highly of Wilson and belongs to one of the 150 churches in the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), the Calvinist denomination that Wilson cofounded in 1998. A Pentagon spokesperson confirmed that Hegseth is a member of a CREC church and said, “The secretary very much appreciates many of Mr. Wilson’s writings and teachings.”

How did Wilson develop his brand of Christian nationalism?  Zitner briefly summarizes: “Wilson grew up in Annapolis, Md., and was raised in the Southern Baptist church. His father was an evangelist, opening Christian bookstores as outposts and eventually moving the family to Idaho. Wilson said his plan, after a stint in the Navy, was to follow his father’s path by opening his own Christian bookstore. But he was swept into a church that was influenced by the ‘Jesus people’ youth movement of the 1960s and 1970s, in part a Christian answer to the hippie movement of the time. I played the guitar, and I was the song leader,’ he said. When the pastor left, Wilson took his place. Reading widely in Christian literature, he eventually switched to Calvinism, which, broadly speaking, focuses on Christ’s sovereignty, rather than a personal experience of God.  In 2007, Christopher Hitchens, the public intellectual and opponent of organized religion, published the book ‘God Is Not Great’ and challenged those who disagreed to debate his claim that ‘religion poisons everything.’ Wilson stepped up, and the two set off on debates in 2008 that became a documentary and a book.

Wilson’s home church in Idaho, Christ Church, was founded in 1975, and the network of CREC churches started to grow. But he has created other avenues for spreading his vision, all of them based in Idaho. The Logos School was founded in 1981, and later an association for promoting and accrediting Christian academies. A publishing house, Canon Press, was founded in 1988; its website lists more than 50 books written by Wilson. A college, New Saint Andrews, came in 1994.

Does Douglas Wilson and his version of Christian nationalism represent Jesus Christ well? Should conservative evangelicals embrace him and his agenda? Let’s review the priorities of Jesus.  He began His public ministry by proclaiming, “Repent for the kingdom is at hand.”  This kingdom demands first loyalty among His followers. He inaugurated His kingdom during His three-year ministry on Earth, as he plundered the kingdom of darkness (e.g., His healings, casting out demons, and His resurrection from the dead).  It is a kingdom with clear values (see the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5-7).  Furthermore, He adamantly rejected the role of a political messiah, for His kingdom would not come by force or violence.  As He taught in His parables (e.g., the mustard seed), His kingdom would grow slowly, person by person, but would eventually overcome evil, Satan and death.   The Kingdom of God is not about political power wielded to support a political ideology of Christian nationalism.  Jesus seeks to transform people from the inside out by softening their hearts, informing their conscience and releasing His power within their lives.  His death, burial and resurrection accomplish all this when it is appropriated by faith in Him.  Jesus defies all historical and political precedent and practice.  His followers represent Him—not a political Party or an ideology such as Christian nationalism.

Evangelical Christian columnist Michael Gerson once wrote: “When we are caked with the mud of political struggle, and tired of Pyrrhic victories that seed new hatreds, and frightened by our own capacity for contempt, the way of life set out by Jesus comes like a clear bell that rings above our strife.  It defies cynicism, apathy, despair and all ideologies that dream of dominance. It promises that every day, if we choose, can be the first day of a new and noble manner of living.  It’s most difficult duties can feel much like purpose and joy. . . . [Before the consummation of the kingdom] Christians seeking social influence should do so not by joining interest groups . . . animated by hatred, fear, phobias, vengeance or violence.  Rather they should seek to be ambassadors of a kingdom of hope, mercy, justice and grace. . . It is a revolutionary ideal set by Jesus of Nazareth, who still speaks across the sea of years.”

See David Brooks in the New York Times (27 September 2025); David French in the New York Times (13 August 2025); Aaron Zitner in the Wall Street Journal (27-28 September 2025); and Michael Gerson in the Washington Post (4 September 2022).