I have certainly been aware of such people and such views; indeed, at one point, some people I attended church with almost certainly thought this way. But even at that point in my life, the notion that women shouldn’t vote would have struck me as coo-coo for Cocoa Puffs.
That such people have these views is not new. That such people have access to power and are helping shape the national narrative is.
Side note: I am a father of three. My part of the biological contribution took no talent and was far easier than what my wife had to go through. The weird and unnecessary demeaning of women is a tell that goes beyond their perverse theology.
Note that the Secretary of Defense posted the entire interview, with a clear endorsement.
BTW, come for the misogyny, stay for the semi-apologia for slavery and the homophobia.
It is amazing, but telling, that someone who believes that women should submit to men can claim not to be a misogynist. It takes a specific definition to come to that conclusion, shall we say.
Wilson’s view of “theocracy” is also highly flawed. Having the “demos” (the people) govern is not a theocracy by definition, and just calling “the people” a “god” doesn’t make it so, although it is a typical Evangelical move to try and make everything into a religious contest. But really, what he is showing is that he isn’t interested purely in his religious views (which not one is curtailing, by the way); it is about him wanting to dominate politics and therefore all of us.
This all reminds me of something I have commented on before, which is the observation in Jefferson Cowie’s book, Freedom’s Dominion, that a lot of people who claim to believe in “freedom” mean the freedom to dominate others.
There are two views of freedom that are at war in America right now. One is the aforementioned freedom to dominate. People like Wilson and others in the video want the freedom to impose their views on the rest of us (his reference to Saudi Arabia in the interview was telling and damning, given its brutal autocracy) as they currently do on the women in their lives.
The second is a classically liberal, pluralistic view that allows Wilson and his congregants to freely believe as they choose and live as they wish, and allows the rest of us to do the same.
All of this reminds me of an essay I read earlier this week by Thomas Zimmer, which starts thusly:
America is currently experiencing the latest iteration of a very old struggle that has defined the country since its inception. What should this nation strive to be: A land of and for white Christians that supposedly works best when wealthy white men get to exert power and steer the community – or a place where “all men are created equal” and the individual’s status is not determined by what they look like, where they came from, who they pray to (or not), how they identify, and how much money they possess? The answer to this fundamental question of national identity determines who gets to belong and who gets to define the boundaries of what counts as “American,” who gets to shape the public square in their image. These competing visions are best accommodated by fundamentally incompatible political and societal orders: A white Christian ethno-state with strict hierarchies of race, gender, religion, and wealth on the one hand; an egalitarian democracy embracing a pluralistic society on the other.
This encapsulates what Wilson and his ilk want. They want to define America as a “Christian nation” (the same way Saudi Arabia is an Islamic one) and, further, to use their specific definition of “Christian” in doing so.
I would note that there is clearly a profound weakness in their Christianity because there is no evidence that, for example, Pete Hegseth’s faith has made him a good and moral man. Nor is there any evidence that Trump, perhaps the least religious president in my lifetime (despite Franklin Graham’s assurances), is in any way transformed by his connections to the Almighty. I say this to judge them on the basis of their own rules, which would suggest that exposure to the divine via being “born again” ought to change people’s behaviors. Attempts to tell me that King David both sinned and was a “man after God’s own heart” will not convince me that we should look past serial adultery and other allegations of sexual abuse, but it will just confirm to me he vacuity of the defense.*
The reason people like Wilson and his followers are more than happy to embrace Hegseth, Trump, and the like is because they are a pathway to what Zimmer describes above, “A land of and for white Christians that supposedly works best when wealthy white men get to exert power and steer the community.”
They all may tell themselves they are serving a higher calling by seeking to transform society, but it sure is quite the coincidence that what God wants is a system with white, male dominance!
Back to Zimmer:
Until very recently at least, the Right was indeed losing the fundamental struggle over what kind of country “America” should strive to be. The idea of a “crisis of liberal democracy” has dominated the political and broader public discourse over the past decade. But in crucial ways, it is the conception of “real America” as a white Christian patriarchal homeland that has come under enormous pressure. Socially, culturally, and – most importantly, perhaps – demographically, the country has moved away from the rightwing ideal since the middle of the twentieth century. It is not just a figment of the reactionary imagination that America has become less white, less religious, and more pluralistic in basically every dimension. As a result, the conservative hold on power has become tenuous. In a narrow political sense, they may be in charge right now – in the White House, in Congress, at the Supreme Court. But it is not just political power the Right seeks. They desire cultural domination and affirmation. In the cultural sphere, the public square, and across many societal dimensions like the family, the shift in power away from white male conservatives has been more pronounced. The Right has engaged in a comprehensive counter-mobilization in response – a radicalization fueled not by a feeling of strength, but by a sense of weakness.
Again, freedom to dominate, not freedom of a population to, you know, be free.
Here is a lengthy Politico piece that is very much worth your time: Doug Wilson Has Spent Decades Pushing for a Christian Theocracy. In Trump’s DC, the New Right Is Listening.
In terms of why his claims of not being a misogynist are dubious (he said, understatedly for effect), well…
In particular, Wilson’s critics argue that some of his past writings about sex — including his statements that “the sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party,” and his description of heterosexual sex as “A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts” — amount to a tacit defense of marital violence. “These pastors told me a wife is not allowed to tell her husband no,” a former kirker who said she was the victim of marital abuse told Vice in 2021.
I will also note this:
Beyond these near-term goals, Wilson has floated some more fundamental changes to America’s political system: Amending the Constitution to include reference to the Apostles’ Creed, restricting office holding to practicing Christians and changing voting practices to award votes by household, with the default vote-holder being the male head of the household. His long-term goal, he said, is to inspire a grassroots Christian reformation that would excise the whole idea of secularism from American law and society.He admits that this reformation would represent a “huge” departure from America’s current political order, and that even some of his more modest reforms could only be brought about via constitutional amendment — or, if that fails, civil strife.
“I’m fond of saying that reformations never happen to the polite background sound of golf applause,” Wilson said. “It would be tumultuous.”
Would it be violent, I wondered?
“Well,” he said, chuckling, “that depends on the bad guys.”
Hilarious!
What that means, of course, is that if the “bad guys” submit, there will be no violence. But if they choose to resist, well, what else can the “good guys” do but break a few skulls?
There is plenty more, but I will leave it there for now.
I also commend Zimmer’s piece to be read in full.
*I want to stress the notion that I am evaluating them on their own terms, not arguing that those terms are correct. As I have noted many times, earlier in my life, I would have reasonably been described as a conservative Evangelical, so I speak their language and I understand what they are arguing. The logic of being “Born Again” suggests a direct connection to the divine. There is the “indwelling” of the Holy Spirit (one part of the triune Godhead) in the life of a believer, or so the theory goes. It is the kind of thing that is supposed to have the power to, for example, miraculously free a person of a serious drug addiction or to turn around a life of crime. So, if that is the way it is supposed to work, it would be nice to see better people fronting for all of this stuff than we are getting.
The bit about David is a constant Evangelical dodge that is deployed to explain why Christians should be able to trust flawed humans in the now. After all, in the Biblical story, David lusted after a woman and had her husband sent to the front lines so he would likely be killed in the hope that that would allow him to claim said woman. And yet, even after all of that, the text proclaims that “David was a man after God’s own heart”! Cool, right? I suppose it often sounds reasonable to some in the context of a Sunday morning sermon, as we all would like to think we can mess up and still be right with God, but the notion that it is some dictum that papers over accepting a serial adulterer and business cheat as the standard bearer for rightwing Christianity is quite the stretch.
Put another way, it is clear that the real issue is no spirituality as they themselves define it. It is about whether you are part of their tribe or not, and whether you can further their power goals.
