The man who led a congregation that gave birth to the religious movement Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth now follows has a few principles for you to understand. A former Navy man, they’re informed by his career in the armed forces. But the kind of warfare he envisions isn’t always physical: it’s spiritual.
That man is Jim Wilson, father of Idaho pastor Doug Wilson. The younger Wilson now leads a Christian movement that Hegseth has repeatedly praised. But his church was an offshoot of a congregation led by the elder Wilson, who wrote a book in the 1960s called “The Principles of War: A Handbook on Strategic Evangelism” that informs much of how this movement of Christian Nationalists is trying to accomplish its goals.
The militaristic language appears everywhere in their approach. When Doug Wilson, current pastor of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, gave a sermon with Hegseth in the pews earlier this year, Wilson emphasized that one’s spiritual experience is akin to war: “You are going into conflict,” he said. At Christ Church D.C., the group’s Washington project, the pastor there (again with Hegseth attending) told those gathered that “we understand that worship is warfare. We mean that.”
It goes further than the military analogies that show up throughout evangelical Christianity and in other denominations, where terms like “spiritual warfare” are used as a metaphor for prayer, rooting out sinister thoughts or seeking God’s will in one’s life.
At Christ Church, what’s contemplated is a single-minded effort to Christianize America, and then the world: decisions around where to plant churches, who to recruit, and how to communicate are all, in theory, envisioned in the same way that one might plan a military operation.
The elder Wilson laid this out in “The Principles Of War,” explaining the goal of proselytizing as a directive from “our commander in chief,” a reference to Jesus Christ.
This style of thinking informed why the elder Wilson chose rural Idaho as a place to start his church, Doug Wilson once blogged. In this case, the principle at stake is that of finding a “decisive point”: a means to preach that will achieve maximal influence.
“A decisive point is one which is simultaneously strategic and feasible,” Doug Wilson wrote. “Because it is strategic, it hurts the enemy significantly if you take it. If it is feasible, it is possible to take.”
Jim Wilson ultimately chose Moscow, Idaho as the place to be.
“My father decided that decisive points in North America were small towns with major universities in them,” Doug Wilson explained.
The analogy here with Christ Church’s recent, new church in D.C. — the movement refers to standing up these new congregations as “planting” a church — is hard to miss, though Wilson himself has said that he doesn’t see his group achieving their ultimate goal — a Christian theocracy — for a methuselean 250 years.
What strikes me about the military metaphors is less the fact that the Secretary of Defense is a member of a church in the denomination that Wilson founded, and more the sense of urgency that undergirds it all. In a phone conversation on Wednesday, Wilson tried to walk the line here over the implications: “In physical war, you die — you lose. In spiritual war, you die — it’s an early promotion,” he said. The decisions in Obergefell and Lawrence v. Texas, legalizing marriage equality and banning anti-sodomy laws, respectively, were both examples of spiritual defeats, he said. Roe, Wilson said, is an example of one that led to mass martyrdom.
When I asked if this meant that, for his movement, the ends justify the means, Wilson replied that it did not.
“God has given us his law and our marching orders. We can’t lie, cheat, steal, murder, you know — we can’t say, ‘oh, the, the stakes are too high,’” he said. Some in The Lord of the Rings, Wilson said, thought that the ring should be used to defeat Sauron; “but wiser heads knew that that would be to become Sauron.”
The military (and Lord of The Rings) metaphors are, to some extent, cosplay. One of the principles that Wilson’s father outlined is “mobility.”
“Within the church, there must be an ability to move to the place or to the people where the offense will take place,” Jim Wilson wrote. “We must convey our firepower where it will be used.”
Doug Wilson told TPM that he’s applied the concept: “That’s why I blog the way I do.”
All of this is metaphorical and slippery until it’s not.
What Christ Church and its related denomination — the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches — hold in common is an intense focus on building patriarchal families. An extremely traditional view of gender relations runs through the entire endeavor; some pastors believe that female suffrage should end. The group holds that women in combat is a sin on the same level as abortion or same-sex marriage.
To Julie Ingersoll, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Florida, the militaristic language and patriarchy are all part of the same pitch.
“They’re trying to flatter men back into church,” she said. “There’s this idea that men don’t go to church, women go to church. But if you’ve convinced men that they’re leaders in these places, really important and all of this stuff, and you give them what looks like power, they’re gonna be more inclined to participate.”