On a brilliantly sunny day in early May, I found myself in Moscow, Idaho, eating brunch with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s spiritual leader, Doug Wilson.
We dove into the quiche, studded with bits of bacon and onion, prepared by his wife, Nancy, as we sat in the sun-drenched breakfast nook of their compound, high on a hill above rolling farmland. The emerald-green wheat fields below looked like a golf course for giants.
Wilson, a self-proclaimed Christian nationalist, is the 73-year-old senior pastor and founder of Christ Church, a congregation of approximately 3,000 in Moscow. But his influence extends far beyond this small town. Wilson has spoken at high-profile conservative events, including the 2024 National Conservatism conference, where then-Sen. JD Vance was also a headliner. He appeared on a political strategy panel with Russell Vought, President Donald Trump’s Office of Management and Budget director and a key architect of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 conservative blueprint. He’s also the co-creator of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, a global network of 160 congregations—including the one Hegseth attends in Washington, DC. A few months before my visit to Idaho, Hegseth had invited Wilson to the Pentagon to deliver a sermon to troops and officials on the importance of faith in times of war.
A core tenet of Wilson’s beliefs is that a patriarchal society, what he calls “biblical masculinity,” is both a religious mandate and “cultural gluten,” as he wrote in his 2023 book, Mere Christendom. “Without it, the cookie just crumbles to pieces in your hand, and is tasteless on top of that.” In a previous book, Fidelity: How to Be a One-Woman Man, he wrote: “The sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.” For that reason, he went on, the dynamic of a dominant man and a submissive woman is “an erotic necessity.” As Wilson put it in an interview with CNN last year: “Women are the kind of people that people come out of.”
He also has called feminists “a large army of singularly unattractive and bitchy women” and said women serving in the military are “loathsome” to God—an observation that may inform Hegseth’s hostility to women in senior military leadership. In all matters, he believes, wives should defer to their husbands, the “covenant heads” of the family. Women shouldn’t assume church leadership roles, or speak in church, and heads of households, overwhelmingly male, should vote on behalf of their entire families.
For the last two years, as I’ve covered the rise of Christian nationalism, Wilson and I have developed a mildly adversarial email rapport. I ask questions; he answers, sometimes working in a little dig, like calling Mother Jones a “commie publication.”
As Hegseth was bragging about his “kinetic strikes” on narco-terrorist vessels and then launching the attack on Iran, I began to realize that the secretary’s determination to eradicate “woke” from the US military tracks consistently with Wilson’s teaching of a warrior-like Christian faith. So I decided it was time Wilson and I met in person. I invited myself to Moscow, and he graciously accepted. Over the course of my five-day trip, I had unprecedented access to the world he has carefully built, which serves as a model for what he imagines a Christian United States might someday look like.
I would meet happy and prosperous families in Wilson’s realm, but also witness aspects of his faith’s exacting standards and obsession with discipline that align closely with Hegseth’s enthusiastic embrace of US military aggression and shed light on what it means for biblical masculinity to become the so-called Department of War’s defining ethic.
“God has called men to be aggressive leaders. If they fail to follow through, then they are disobeying God.”
For Wilson’s followers, manliness isn’t optional. Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a professor of history at Calvin University in Michigan, has spent much of the last decade studying Wilson and his domain. In his view, “God has called men to be aggressive leaders,” she told me. “If they fail to follow through, then they are disobeying God.”
At first glance, Moscow, home to the University of Idaho’s flagship campus, looks like a quintessential couches-on-porches kind of college town, with ample coffee shops, cozy diners, and homages to the school mascot, a cartoon character named Joe Vandal. I arrived just before graduation, when there was a palpable giddiness in the air. As the breeze picked up white tufts of cottonwood seeds, it looked as though a down pillow factory had exploded. Tattooed and pierced students buzzed about in clusters.
New Saint Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho.Bryce Duffy
But as I wandered around, I noticed another Moscow, one in which Wilson’s influence is omnipresent. On one downtown corner is a brick building housing New Saint Andrews College, which he helped found, where clean-cut young men in button-downs and khakis and women in crisp blouses and knee-length skirts milled about. Nearby are the offices of Canon Press, his book publisher. One of Wilson’s spinoff churches, King’s Cross, hosts a service inside an old movie theater. Another building, spanning an entire city block, is labeled “Kirker Commons.” (Wilson is heavily influenced by Scottish Calvinist tradition, and his congregants call themselves “Kirkers” after kirk, an old Scottish word for church.)
Nearby are other businesses owned by present or former Christ Church members: a Kirker pizzeria, a Kirker bar (they do like to drink, especially whiskey for the guys), a Kirker cafe, and a Kirker real estate office. My tour guide, a former Kirker, pointed out a common hallmark of Kirker families: stylishly dressed young moms pushing strollers, often trailed by a small flock of toddlers.
If you ask members of Wilson’s denomination to describe the distinction between reformed Christians and other evangelicals, they will rattle off a doctrinal list: They believe that people will go to Heaven because of God’s grace rather than good works; they don’t believe in the Jesus-is-coming-look-busy version of the end times; they baptize members as infants rather than wait for adults to choose for themselves. But there are profound aesthetic differences as well. Forget megachurches with jeans-and-goatee pastors telling amusing anecdotes, or worship bands singing about, as one Kirker scoffed, “how Jesus is your boyfriend.” Wilson’s network of churches can feel almost puritanically unadorned—the music consists strictly of hymns and psalms; the sermons can be theologically heady, and even little children are expected to sit through them. Attendees will find these churches “uniformly hostile to the leftist agenda,” a pamphlet produced by Canon Press helpfully notes.
So confident are the Kirkers in their interpretation of the Bible that they believe people who don’t share their specific beliefs are not only going to Hell, but are doomed to earthly suffering. For them, Christian nationalism is redemptive, a lifeboat launched in a sea of drowning souls. One Kirker woman, who requested that I refer to her by her middle name, Linda, said she found upsetting the mere idea of an interfaith event that was happening in town that evening. It’s like saying, “We’re going to pat you on the head, you Baha’i, you Jew; we’re going to be like, ‘It’s okay,’” she said.
Not only would this be “lying,” Linda continued, growing increasingly adamant, “it’s kind of gross, actually, because if you believe that this is right, you wouldn’t want to tell someone, ‘What you believe is also right.’ That really hurts my heart.”
The Kirkers’ world is a fairly closed ecosystem. People who move to Moscow to join the church often send their children to Logos School, a classical Christian academy that Wilson and his wife helped found in 1981. Newcomers often find employment in one of the Kirker entities. If not, they can plug into the network of church-affiliated local businesses, which includes construction companies, an outpost of a major supplier of electrical transformers, and RedBalloon, an anti-woke job board that recently scored a contract with the State Department. Moscow’s Kirker community has swelled since the pandemic—so high is the demand for Logos School that it opened an impressive new campus last year and its roughly $7 million in revenue was almost double the previous year’s.
With so many families flocking to Moscow to attend his church, Wilson wrote an entire book last year with advice for the transplants. A Kirker real estate company is working on new builds for a planned community on the outskirts of town, where I spotted scores of freshly framed skeletons of future homes designed with ample space for large families.
Kirkers make up only about 10 percent of the town’s population of 27,000. But their influence is outsized, locals told me—in May, one Kirker won the Republican primary for the state legislature. Their presence is a particular thorn in the side of the Mormons, who have inhabited Idaho for generations and generally see Wilson’s camp as presumptuous upstarts.
