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Doug Wilson, the most well-known leader of the creepy Reformed Christian nationalist movement to which Secretary Shitfaced Pete Hegseth belongs, is on a little media tour right now. There was an NPR interview that made a lot of waves that I meant to tear apart, but didn’t get to it, which is fine, because lots of people did that handily. Now, this man, who looks like a mall Santa on an episode of Law & Order: SVU that Elliott and Olivia bring in for tricking kids into reaching their hands into “Santa’s bag” to pick out a “special gift,” has done his first interview with a gay publication.
Spencer MacNaughton of Uncloseted Media, to be specific. It’s a lot, but it’s worth your time to watch/read, to really understand what kind of guy this is.
The part of the interview that’s perhaps getting the most attention is where Wilson lays out specifically what he envisions when it comes to criminalizing homosexuality, and under what circumstances he’d like to see the death penalty for it in his perfect Christian theocracy. That’s what I’m going to focus on too, but I want to pick it apart in a slightly different, more Moral High Ground way.
Wilson has this rhetorical tic where he’s always careful to explain that he’s not saying he just wants to immediately kill gays. He references the “art of the possible,” and distinguishes between what’s possible now, or in the near future during the early stages of a white Christian fascist takeover vs. “an ideal Christian republic 250 years from now,” which is I imagine where the real hardcore Nazi wet dreams happen. I’m not sure why he thinks making that distinction makes it better, since it just lays bare that their endgame is a vile murderous white supremacist Christian nationalist theocracy, but OK.
Wilson makes clear that “[h]and jobs, oral sex and anal intercourse” between men (but not necessarily women, might address that in a follow-up post) would be illegal under the sodomy laws he envisions, but c’mon, he’s not just going to murder people for that!
“I would say that the main enforcement mechanism would be social expectations and a withholding of societal approval,” he explains. “It would be sort of ‘back in the closet, boys,’ not because of fear of legal retribution, but because this is simply not done.”
Which is funny because that’s how most of the gay sex occurs in the conservative Christian church now and since time immemorial. What happens on manly men’s Bible study camping retreats stays on manly men’s Bible study camping retreats, amirite, Doug? (SIDENOTE: Have you heard about these new man-only Christian gyms where the bros can go by themselves, no girls allowed? Wow.)
But because of his biblical “expertise” — this is a good time to note that Doug Wilson did not go to seminary, is not theologically educated, has a lot more in common with that Faithful Word Baptist Church guy (albeit in a Reformed Presbyterian way) than he does with John Calvin — Wilson believes he has the discernment to understand that “execution, although a lawful penalty for homosexual behavior, was not the minimum penalty; it was the maximum penalty.”
See? It’s only in certain, limited circumstances. He doesn’t want to execute Spencer MacNaughton for having sex with his boyfriend, so relax! (At least not anytime soon, we reckon. Remember that “art of the possible” thing.)
This is where the forked-tongued, demonic, “lying for Jesus” nature of white supremacist Christian nationalism shows up, in the rhetorical sleight of hand Doug Wilson is about to pull, as he explains which “gays” he wants to execute.
“I do want to create a society where the maximum penalty for a Roman Catholic priest molesting or raping an altar boy is solved and addressed with a tall tree and a short rope.”
Huh, OK. What about the conservative evangelical pastors/youth pastors/Christian school teachers/deacons/elders who rape little children and/or traffic in/create child pornography? Also, I thought we were talking about criminalizing gayness. Not the kind of child rape that flows like rivers through the conservative Christian world.
MacNaughton noticed. “Right, that’s pedophilia, though, which is of course different than homosexuality,” he said.
But no. Doug Wilson, who thinks he has the spiritual authority to adjudicate such things, declared that “it’s a species of homosexual behavior.” That such behavior is just part of what “the alphabet people” do. Suggests that’s part of the “+” in “LGBTQ+.”
MacNaughton was like the fuck?
“Absolutely,” said Wilson, taking the child rape that’s so prevalent in conservative Christian leadership, absolving his movement of it entirely, and declaring based on nothing but his own pigfuck bigotry that actually their problem is the gays’ fault.
Note how he launders it through Catholics too. Extremist Bill Donohue of the Catholic League does this too, blaming all the Catholic Church’s kid-raping problems on gays. He acknowledges that priests have raped a lot of kids, then blames the gays for it, as if it’s gayness, and not the Roman Catholic Church itself that creates the ideal conditions for child rape.
Doug Wilson is doing the same thing here, tossing it off on the Catholics before ultimately blaming gays.
Cute little fuckin’ game, isn’t it?
Wilson added, “I think the LGBTQ+ acronym, that whole chain, is sort of a sexual alliance of people who are defying traditional biblical norms. And pedophilia is one of those things that defies those norms.”
As if the LGBTQ+ movement gives a flying fuck about what Doug Wilson, who has earned zero respect on this planet as far as I can tell, considers “biblical sexual norms.” As if we’re not talking about actual people’s lives here, as if we’re all in cahoots to “defy traditional biblical norms.”
Sorry, but fuck you, you shitmouthed piece of detritus, that’s not how it works. No matter what these human fistulas try to assert, the “P” has never been an accepted part of the LGBTQ+ movement, and you know why? Because it breaks the laws of consent.
And you know who really seems to hate consent?
Shall we talk about Doug’s denomination, the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC) and the little fiefdom he’s run for decades in Moscow, Idaho?
This is not the first time I have written about Doug Wilson or his CREC. As I once put it, the denomination is “kind of a less intellectual/brainy, more outwardly batshit version of the crop of conservative Presbyterian churches that have become so popular these days among white American fascists.”
The “Reformed” side of the evangelical church is the Calvinist, Presbyterian side of things, and people using that term are various levels of theocratic Christian nationalist/Christian fascist. They fancy themselves to be extremely well-read, but again, Doug is kind of the country church version of that, and there’s evidence that a number of the more buttoned-up Reformed theologians think he’s a clown. (Or used to anyway.)
SIDENOTE: You might be thinking, “Fancying themselves as intellectual while being extremely anti-gay/misogynistic? Wow, is this ever Pete Hegseth’s church!” Now get a load of this:
In his book Father Hunger, the pastor writes that a lack of fatherly authority and biblical masculinity (one that does not “simper and lisp”) is the root of various modern failings, including the “poison” of egalitarianism between genders.
Father Hunger? Sounds like fan fiction about the relationship between Pete Hegseth and all the conservative men whose knobs he thinks God hath ordainethed him to slob, starting with Donald Trump.
Anyway, here’s an excerpt from an earlier piece at TMHG:
Wilson has notoriously sick and perverted beliefs about women, having once written that submission from a woman is an “erotic necessity” for a man. He also wrote that the absence of that submission makes men “dream of being rapists.” (Hey, you know what we call men who can’t cum without feeling like they have power over the people they fuck? Rapists.) He and his wife, Nancy Wilson, believe that a husband, by definition, is never “trespassing in his own garden,” by which they mean his wife’s body, therefore marital rape doesn’t exist. […]
You will not be shocked to learn of the history of sexual assault and domestic violence accusations in Doug Wilson’s denomination. And the myriad allegations that he’s actively covered up for pedophiles and kid-touchers in his churches. Oh gosh, how similar he sounds to just every other conservative Christian leader and his president!
Let’s drill down on that a little bit.
Vice reported in 2021 on the sick culture of institutionalized abuse, including spousal rape, in Wilson’s home church in Moscow, Idaho, known as Christ Church, and in its associated organizations. (This is a directory of CREC churches, if you want to see if there’s one near you to warn people about.)
There is the story of Natalie Greenfield, who at age 14 was repeatedly sexually abused by a man in his mid-20s named Jamin Wight, a student at Greyfriars Hall, a pastoral training and mentoring program sponsored by Wilson’s outfit that promises to produce “Pastors with Backbone.”
Vice:
Wilson cast their sexual interactions as the result of a parent-arranged courtship—something Greenfield maintains is untrue—but, according to emails gathered in an extensive analysis of Wilson by researcher Rachel Shubin, the judge seemed to accept Wilson’s narrative and rejected a more stringent plea agreement under charges of sexual abuse of a child. After Wight’s conviction (on a lesser charge of “injury to a child”), Christ Church plant Trinity Reformed emailed congregants thanking those praying for Wight. Following his release, Trinity funded $3,000 toward sending Wight on a Haitian mission trip. In 2013, Wight was charged with attempted strangulation of his wife and later found guilty of domestic battery.
Then there is Steven Sitler, whose wedding Wilson performed. He was a student at New Saint Andrews, the wingnut clown college affiliated with Wilson’s outfit in Moscow.
Sitler [was] convicted of lewd contact with a child under 16, despite Sitler’s parole officer’s objections. (Sitler, on lifetime parole due to the number of victims he confessed abusing, could not be unsupervised with children.) Wilson maintains a unique role in the Sitler saga, saying he encouraged the father who discovered the abuse to report it to the police, but Wilson later welcomed Sitler back to Christ Church (with a chaperone). At Sitler’s wedding, according to one guest, Wilson explained that sometimes people need to get married so the flesh can be contained. Using a wife as a sexual decoy to distract Sitler from children didn’t work. Later, a judge ruled Sitler must be chaperoned around his infant son, due to admitted sexual stimulation resulting from contact with the baby.
Sounds like Doug Wilson had his own little Josh Duggar. Which is really not that uncommon of a thing for conservative churches to have, as we will discuss more below.
There’s so much in the Vice article. There’s Logos, the school affiliated with Christ Church, and the students who reported a male teacher perving all over girl children and touching them inappropriately. And then another teacher accused of sexual abuse. Many students have reported abuse.
There was a former student and Christ Church member called Kamilla Niska, who talked about how weird and gross it was the way Doug and Nancy Wilson (his wife) took an interest in hearing extremely detailed sexual confessions from teenagers she knew. “He just wants to sit there and listen to everything that transpired between these two teen lovers, like all the graphic detail,” she said.
Another former student called Helen Shores talked about a meeting she was pulled into by herself with Wilson, who she says absolutely needed to hear everything about her losing her virginity, in explicit detail. All by herself with pervert Doug? I guess your Covenant Eyes alarm doesn’t go off if you’re having teenagers describe all the sex to you like a dramatic monologue. (To be clear, that’s a mean Mike Johnson joke. We don’t know if Doug Wilson ever has used conservative Christian no-porning software.)
There’s lots of talk about the sort of in-house counseling Wilson’s organizations engage in. The story of Hilary Medina, whose father watched her as a child in the shower and also molested her, which he had confessed to the Wilsons. Doug Wilson’s response was, in part, to tell the father not to be alone with his daughter. Also, Medina “remembers Doug Wilson telling her something she’s never forgotten. If down the road, a bird or something hit the window when she was in the shower, she may think about her dad watching her, and that wouldn’t necessarily mean she was bitter, she was told, but she should confess bitterness right away.”
Gotta confess that lady sin of bitterness, at your father who molested you!
Medina also remembers Nancy Wilson telling her in their subsequent counseling sessions that her father hadn’t done anything illegal. When Medina would mention, for example, a hug where his hand strayed to her butt, Nancy Wilson suggested she give him the benefit of the doubt.
“That’s the Christian thing to do,” she was told.
Sensing a pattern here?
Now, as for Wilson’s denials, I should say, he has them, lots of them, lots of excuses, a whole section of excuses and denials on his website. Bless our hearts, we’ve all just got him all wrong.
Do we, though?
In the interview with Uncloseted Media, Wilson said he views two men having sex as “equally sinful as a man raping a girl” (phraseology from MacNaughton’s question). He said he doesn’t believe in women in combat because he served on a submarine, and if women are on a submarine, that’s a bad idea. “Why shouldn’t I throw catnip into the pack of cats?” (Conservative Christian men don’t like to be told that they have a responsibility not to rape.) He did say “marital rape is wrong” in this interview, but proceeded to explain what he sees as the difference between “violent [marital] rape” and the softer, gentler kinds, I guess, which he says don’t need to be reported to the cops, only to church authorities.
He admitted he’s had to call the cops maybe five times or so because of rapes that happened within his church/sphere of influence.
Then he proceeded to object to MacNaughton’s suggestion that this kind of thing “disproportionately happens in conservative Christian communities.” He thinks the statistics are “false.”
But let’s be honest here: It’s not fucking normal to have to call the cops five times because somebody else under your purview, spiritual or otherwise, has gone rapin’ again. And considering his self-described standards for what warrants reporting, imagine how many times he should have called and didn’t.
Moreover, what kind of normal man, in any profession, has to have an entire long section of his website where he denies having done anything wrong in the all the child rapes and other kinds of rapes that he’s been closely adjacent to? (And is that type of man usually the spiritual leader for a masculine-insecure Defense security who once had to pay off a woman who credibly accused him of violent rape?)
As I alluded to above, Doug Wilson loves to wink and play cute (see: that NPR interview) with the kind of Christian theocracy he wants, argues that it won’t be so bad after all, it’s just that Christianity will be the state religion, and only Christians (the fascist Doug Wilson kind) will be able to hold office, and most women won’t be allowed to vote. Also, if they get raped it’s probably because they “refuse[d] the protection of good men.” (Who are definitely not rapists themselves, you betcha!)
But hey, if it’s a gay person, we execute them, right? At least in certain cases!
Except that we’ve established that, even in Doug Wilson’s vile, two-faced, sonofoabitch example, the person he brings up as worthy of execution is a religious leader who hurts a child. He tries to fob it off on those Catholics and blames it on the gays, instead of owning up to the elephant in the room holding Occam’s Razor, which suggests that there is something about institutional conservative Christianity that is an absolute breeding ground for child rape and exploitation, and also all the other kinds of rape.
If you know about this, you know. If you’re new, catch up here.
But I’m making a list and checking it twice of alllllll the pastors and religious leaders who make the news for being accused/tried/convicted/sued/jailed/etc. for sexually abusing kids in any way, shape or form. The completed list for 2025 (above) featured 215 separate stories. Oh, but it’s not disproportionate in conservative Christian communities, Doug?
I’m not the only one doing this work, but one thing about my list that’s different is that I’m paying special attention to exactly what sects and denominations where this abuse crops up, so we can start to observe the correlations.
I wasn’t doing the list in 2022, but I should note that a former deacon from Christ Church named Alex Lloyd pleaded guilty on child pornography charges in 2022. CREC hasn’t shown up on my list yet, but that’s only because they haven’t had a specific scandal that made the news in 2025. (The mid-year update for 2026 will be out soon.)
The word “Reformed” comes up in shitloads of cases, though.
Again, Doug Wilson swears up and down that he never did anything inappropriate with the way he handled any of the 15 million times somebody in one of his congregations or schools or pastoral training programs or colleges started feeling rapey, despite accusations to the contrary.
But fuck that shit anyway, because that in and of itself is a distraction from the real issue, which is that patriarchal theocratic organizations like his — and the entire conservative Christian church, protestant and Catholic — are inherently danger zones for incidences of child rape and sexual abuse. It’s not simply disproportionately represented. As writer Cait West, herself a survivor of a family brainwashed by Doug Wilson’s teachings, argued in 2022, it’s “inevitable.”
Mind you, I’m not saying that it’s happening at every single conservative Christian organization, church, school, college, think tank, summer camp, or “holy yoga” studio right now, nor am I to be clear making any accusation that I have any knowledge of anything currently going on in Doug Wilson’s organizations or things affiliated with them.
But it will be the least shocking thing in the world if/when another story drops.
It’s like being in the South on late summer afternoons and evenings when there are storms nearby. There aren’t always tornadoes on the ground.
But there’s always a goddamned tornado watch, because the conditions are always fucking present.
But tell us more about the sinful gays, Doug Wilson, you motherfucker.
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