The Cornerstone Church in Toledo, Ohio in 2013 (ThePianoMan76/Wikimedia Commons)
On Sunday night, March 22, CNN aired reporter Pamela Brown's documentary "The Rise of Christian Nationalism." And one of the far-right Christian nationalists Brown examined was Pastor Doug Wilson, who preaches at Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho.
For most of his life, Wilson — now in his early seventies — was a marginal figure within Christianity. And his views are extreme even by religious right standards. Wilson, a proponent of "Christian reconstructionism" and "dominionist theology," believes that women should never have been given the right to vote, that wives should be totally submissive to their husbands, and that the federal government should be a Christian fundamentalist theocracy based on strict biblical law.
But in recent years, Wilson has become increasingly prominent in the GOP and the MAGA movement. And he is a close ally of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Criticism of Wilson is coming not only from politicians and activists — it is also coming from Christian ministers.
In a late March article published by Religion News Service (RNS), reporter Tracy Simmons stresses that some of Wilson's foes are residents of Moscow, Idaho — including the Rev. Hannah Brown, pastor at The United Church of Moscow.
Brown told RNS, "It's a very specific, very conservative, very fundamentalist version of what Christianity is. As somebody who leads a church and calls myself a Christian, that's not the Christianity that I believe."
Another Moscow resident who finds Wilson's views disturbing is 90-year-old Joanne Muneta, chair of the Latah County Human Rights Task Force.
Muneta told RNS that after watching Brown's CNN documentary, she felt "so sad."
Muneta argued, "When I think of all the teachers who devote their careers to bringing up children who think for themselves, who have confidence, who are kind — they want to erase that…. All the effort and pride from the '20s to the '50s to get women’s suffrage, and they're just going to say, 'Oh no, we didn’t mean that.'"
