His View: Racism, rape and the local church pastor

Christ Church pastor Doug Wilson (Daily News, April 20) chides me (Daily News, April 18) for misstating the publication date of his father’s book “The Principles of War: A Handbook on Strategic Evangelism.” The fact that it was originally published in 1964 makes my argument even stronger: Moscow was targeted for spiritual warfare by Jim Wilson far earlier than we thought.

As recently as 2021, in an article in “The Guardian” (Nov. 2), Doug Wilson was still pushing the military model: “We are not yet in a hot civil war, with shooting and all, but we are in a cold war/civil war.”

In a 2018 video, Wilson spoke in the same violent vein: “It’s not the job of the preacher to be a firefighter out in the world. We’re not supposed to be running around putting out other people’s fire. We are supposed to be arsonists in the world.”

In the aftermath of the slavery booklet controversy, Doug Wilson rejected the description “neo-Confederate” in favor of “paleo-Confederate.” The former would mean the reestablishment of the Southern Confederacy under biblical law, but the latter would mean Christian rule by propertied males over the entire country.

On April 24, Wilson released a video in which he describes three options for establishing an American theocracy. First, the president could issue a proclamation that “Jesus rose from the dead”; the Supreme Court, contrary of course to the Founding Fathers, could rule that the U.S. is “a Christian nation”; or “the Apostle’s Creed could be incorporated into the Constitution.”

Wilson also claims that his slavery book co-author Steve Wilkins was not a neo-Confederate, but the facts say otherwise.

In 1994, Wilkins was the cofounder of the racist League of the South (LOS), which is described by a well-documented Wikipedia article “an American white nationalist, neo-Confederate, white supremacist organization.”

Wilson contends that Wilkins left the LOS not because it was racist, but because he had other priorities. LOS president Michael Hill was a regular visitor at Wilkins’ church in Monroe, La., and he once described Blacks as “a compliant and deadly underclass.”

Just before the Charlottesville riot in 2017, Hill tweeted to his LOS members: “If you want to defend the South and Western civilization from the Jew and his dark-skinned allies, be at Charlottesville on August 12.” The LOS is not only racist but antisemitic as well, making them a good match for the neo-Nazis marching there.

On Aug. 16, 2017, Wilson posted an article entitled “In Praise of Our President.” He commended Donald Trump for declaring that there were “fine people” on both sides of the Charlottesville riot.

Aping Trump’s own outrageous rhetorical style, Wilson equates Black Lives Matter with the Klan. Did I miss something? I don’t think there were any lynchings during the largely peaceful Black Lives Matter protests.

Back in 2017, I wrote an article entitled “Sex abuse among evangelicals worse than for Catholics” (bit.ly/4b9CrgN). Wilson’s church has had its own sexual abuse incidents, and the Steven Sitler case is the most notorious.

Sitler was a student at Wilson’s New Saint Andrews College, and a Moscow prosecutor described him as a “serial pedophile” with 20 known assaults. Sitler served 20 months in jail, breaking parole three times. Nevertheless, over the prosecutor’s strenuous objections, a judge allowed Wilson to arrange a marriage to a young woman from Christ Church.

In his book “Fidelity: What it Means to be a One-Woman Man,” Wilson writes: “The sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts” (p. 86). This premise led to Wilson’s concept of the “propriety of rape.”

This principle has enraged even the most conservative Christian women and men.

Here is Wilson’s own words: “Women who genuinely insist on no masculine protection are really women who tacitly agree on the propriety of rape. Whenever someone sets himself to go against God’s design, horrible problems will always result.”

Feminist women, Wilson continues, “helped create a world in which it is easier for unscrupulous men to get what they want than for honorable men to do what they ought.”

It is any wonder that young men hearing Wilson’s sermons on male superiority and being exposed to the hypermasculine atmosphere of New Saint Andrews College (see bit.ly/4b5FxSq) can’t be trusted around young women? Are these the men with whom women should seek protection?

Gier taught religion and philosophy at the University of Idaho for 31 years. For more on Wilson see nfgier.com/986-2. Email him at ngier006@gmail.com.