Why declare the U.S. a theocracy when you can just revise history?

If you’re looking for a Christian cult in the U.S.—or at least a fairly close analogue to one—you’d be hard-pressed to look beyond Moscow, Idaho, the home of Pastor Doug Wilson and his Christ Church.

(Follow above article link to view photos/PDFs/video that accompany this article.)

This is a place that held a massive, indoor, maskless service for over a thousand people in July of 2020, in the thick of the pandemic and well before vaccines were available. Members of the church staged a protest outside City Hall that year in opposition to local COVID restrictions.

Then there’s the patriarchy of it all. A church staffer once tweeted to men, “Make sure your wife votes exactly as you do.”

A VICE article about the church’s inner workings found that “women are told they must defer to church leaders and cannot say ‘no’ to their husbands, men are taught to strictly control their homes, and those who speak out can be isolated and harassed.”

The church, at that time, had only about 900 members in a town of 25,000 people, but it was still a significant number. (It’s not too different from preacher Andrew Wommack, in Colorado, who has attempted to take over local government with his church members.)

Wilson is still at it, and he’s become one of the leading advocates of Christian Nationalism. Just last week, in an interview with right-wing propagandist Tucker Carlson, the host described Wilson as the “Christian nationalist they warned you about.”

On Wednesday, Wilson released a video expanding on things he said in that interview, including the claim that he’s a Christian Nationalist. Right Wing Watch notes that Wilson attempted to have it both ways, saying he opposed the idea of forcing his faith on others as if non-Christians were (to quote someone else) “not entitled to political equality.” Of course he’s for religious freedom. Of course non-Christians would be allowed to exist and thrive in America. But…

Wilson then argued things would be way better for everyone—“way better than what we are dealing with now”—if we just took some key steps toward effectively declaring the U.S. a Christian Nation.

It’s not theocracy, you see; it’s just about revising history to reflect his personal mythology.

Among the options Wilson floated was having the president issue a proclamation acknowledging that “Jesus rose from the dead and Congress could authorize the funds to have that proclamation printed and bound, read in the all the schools, and posted in all the federal courthouses.”

Another option would be for the Supreme Court to take up a religious liberty case and use its decision to declare that this is “a Christian nation and [has] been such from the beginning.”

Or, Wilson suggested, “the Apostles’ Creed could be incorporated into the Constitution.”

He implied that all of that would be legally fine because it didn’t “establish a particular Christian denomination as being the mascot of the government.” (Shoving Christianity on people? Fine! Shoving Methodism on everyone? Never.)

Needless to say, doing any of those things would upend decades of case law declaring all those things establishments of religion because they all declare Christianity as the country’s official religion.

He’s not entirely pulling these ideas out of nowhere, though. We shouldn’t have “In God We Trust” in public schools and courthouses, either, but it’s permitted because it’s considered the U.S. Motto. In other words, we’ve already accepted a declaration of theism as our national slogan, giving people the ability to post it in public spaces. So why not go a step further and give a declaration of Christian belief some sort of governmental stamp of approval, then push that into schools? (I would love to say that goes too far, but when conservative judges sit all over the federal judiciary, it’s plausible that they’d let it slide.)

It’s also hard to believe a majority of the Supreme Court—even this Supreme Court—would go along with a blatant “Christian nation” statement when it would undercut other arguments they’ve made (that were radical enough) about how, say, local governments could allow large Christian crosses to stay up on public property because of tradition (because they’d been up for a long time) and no other reason.

As for the Apostles’ Creed, the idea that such a over-the-top religious text could just be shoved into the Constitution in any kind of way—and jump through all the requisite hoops for a Constitutional change—make even less sense than his other claims. (Why he thinks 38 states would go along with it is anyone’s guess.) Even if there’s no new amendment added to the document, there’s no public push to work the ideas in there in some kind of roundabout way, either.)

The bottom line is that Wilson is a Christian Nationalist, wants the country to function as a theocracy (even if it doesn’t use that word), and sells this harmful nonsense to his gullible followers… even though the process to get there defies all logic.

Later in the video, he said he could be pushed away from Christian Nationalism—at least the terminology if not the ideas—if, for example, advocates of it “blew up the Washington Monument” or were antisemitic. He would distance himself from bad actors. But Wilson says that like he’s a good actor! He’s not! He’s a religious leader who has pushed people to make awful, life-threatening decisions about their lives.

Christian Nationalism is bad enough on its own, but decent Christians ought to reject it precisely because Doug Wilson is pushing it.