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This Evangelical Pastor Wants to Replace Women’s Right to Vote

I’m going to share with you two remarkable quotes, both from the same evangelical pastor. First, here is a reflection from 2009 on the Civil War and the Confederate States of America:

You’re not going to scare me away from the word Confederate like you just said “Boo!” I would define a neo-Confederate as someone who thinks we are still fighting that war. Instead, I would say we’re fighting in a long war, and that was one battle that we lost.

And lest you think this pastor has only a passing interest in the Confederacy, consider these words, from a 2005 book called “Angels in the Architecture”

When the Confederate States of America surrendered at Appomattox, the last nation of the older order fell. So, because historians like to have set dates on which to hang their hats, we may say the first Christendom died there, in 1865. The American South was the last nation of the first Christendom.

These words were written by Douglas Wilson, whose home church is based in Moscow, Idaho. He 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’s the founder of a church, a denomination and a publishing house. He’s influential in both the Christian home-schooling and the Christian classical school movements.

Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, belongs to his denomination, and Wilson’s words above are no aberration. They are but small drops in an ocean of ignorant, malicious and unchristian commentary.

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.”

To simply call him patriarchal is too mild. 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Churches, includes pastors who believe that the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote, should be repealed and replaced by something called “household voting,” where it’s no longer one person, one vote, but one household, one vote.

And who is the head of the household? The husband — a man who might consult with his wife, but would absolutely have the authority to make the final decision.

Wilson’s views on religious diversity are … interesting. In a recent CNN interview, he said, “One of the reasons why we have such problems with assimilating Muslims and Hindus is that there are so many of them.”

Wilson continued: “So if we had a Christian republic, and a Muslim came to Disneyland with his family, we’d have no problems. But when they fill up Dearborn, Mich., that’s just not — it says in Amos 3:3, ‘Can two walk together except they be agreed?’ You cannot put alien world views together, cheek by jowl, and have peace.”

(It’s astonishing, by the way, that he thinks that a “Christian” nation would not be just as contentious as a more diverse society. The wars of religion in the 16th and 17th centuries — and countless other conflicts — attest to the ability of Christians to kill one another in the belief that their faction represents the true faith.)

In a religious movement as large and multifaceted as American evangelicalism, you can — of course — find all kinds of people and pastors, from the most compassionate and kind to the most self-righteous, zealous and even violent.

To say that a pastor like Wilson exists no more condemns all of evangelical Christianity (indeed, Wilson faces vigorous opposition in the evangelical church) than to say that the existence of radical imams condemns all of Islam. A better question is to ask whether a person this cruel and extreme has real stature and influence — and whether his influence is on the wane or on the rise.

As for Wilson, the answer is clear. 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.

Last year, Wilson appeared at the National Conservatism Conference alongside Al Mohler, the much more mainstream head of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and one of the most important figures in the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.

This appearance was celebrated by Wilson’s allies. Writing in a right-wing Christian publication, a theology professor named Mark DeVine described the event as “a welcome end to an almost decade-long S.B.C. elite cancellation of Wilson.”

There are many reasons for Wilson’s rise, but one of them is squarely rooted in politics. When Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, he inherited a recent Republican tradition: The Republican president isn’t just a political leader — he’s a de facto religious leader as well.

Leaders inspire imitators, and all too many people are open to pastors exhibiting the same values as the president they admire so much. Or to put it another way, when George W. Bush was in office, “compassionate conservatism” was en vogue. And now? When Trump runs an administration where it often appears that cruelty is the point, well then, empathy is a sin. It’s not that men like Wilson had no audience before Trump; it’s that there is a new demand for Wilson’s message because it matches the Trumpist spirit of this evangelical age.

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.”

Let’s add a bit of history. Trump and the three previous Republican nominees for president — Mitt Romney, John McCain and Bush — are four very different men. They’ve ranged from interventionist in foreign policy to more isolationist, from supporting and celebrating immigration to calling for mass deportation, to supporting a human life amendment to striking it from the Republican platform, and they’ve gone from high personal character to the lowest in the modern history of the presidency.

Consider even more differences between Bush and Trump. Bush was interventionist; Trump is far more isolationist. Bush expanded the social safety net with Medicare Part D; Trump cut Medicaid. Bush implemented PEPFAR, the successful program to combat AIDS in Africa that has saved more than 20 million lives; Trump has gutted PEPFAR. While both men nominated pro-life judges (a Bush appointee, Justice Samuel Alito, wrote the Dobbs decision), Trump ran on a watered-down platform that removed traditional Republican support for a “human life amendment” to the Constitution that would effectively outlaw abortion.

Bush is a devout Christian. Those words, to put it mildly, are not how one would describe Trump.

And yet, each election cycle, Christians were told it was a spiritual imperative to vote Republican, and that imperative did not change even when the party’s positions — and its people — profoundly did.

That’s one reason evangelicals have been faithful to the party every step of the way. Bush received 79 percent of the white evangelical vote in 2004, McCain received 73 percent in 2008, and Romney received 79 percent in 2012. Trump’s percentages are mostly slightly higher. He received 81 percent of white evangelical votes in 2016, 76 percent in 2020 and 82 percent in 2024.

This should tell us that white evangelical support for Republicans is far more cultural and tribal than it is ideological or (certainly) theological. As Ryan Burge, one of the nation’s foremost statisticians of American religions, has said, white evangelicals “vote for Trump because white evangelicals are Republicans, and Donald Trump is the standard-bearer of the G.O.P.”

As a practical matter, this reality puts the Republican nominee at the center of white evangelical politics. And if he wins, he instantly becomes the most influential political thinker in evangelical America, and his political ideology and temperament become the political ideology and temperament of millions of American evangelicals.

When you live in evangelical America (especially in the South), you experience the sheer power of its culture up close. It’s theologically tolerant and politically intolerant. You can believe many different things about matters as important as baptism, salvation and the role of women in your denomination.

But if you leave the Republican Party, much less publicly criticize Trump? Well, you’ll quickly find that political orthodoxy matters more than you could possibly imagine.

Do you want to know the cultural and political future of American evangelicalism, including the cultural and political future of men like Wilson? When the white smoke rises from Super Tuesday, the Republican Party won’t just choose a new political leader, evangelicals will choose their next political pope, the single-most-influential person in the church.