Evangelical pastor Douglas Wilson doesn’t mind if you call him a theocrat. He thinks America began as a Christian nation and should become one again.
He wants a society that acknowledges Jesus’ authority over politics and patriarchal authority in the home.
For a long time, his style seemed like a throwback, but in 2025, he’s having a moment in the cultural spotlight. Is he just being hyped by his critics as a Trump-era villain? Or does America’s religious future really lie in a recovery of its zealous Puritan past?
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Ross Douthat: Doug Wilson, welcome to “Interesting Times.”
Doug Wilson: Thanks for having me.
Douthat: So we’re going to try and talk about some pretty meaty things — obviously your vision for America as a Christian nation — but I wanted to start with a conversation about some of your theological beliefs, because I thought it would be helpful to ground the audience for when we turn to politics. And also, I’m just interested.
Wilson: OK.
Douthat: So let’s start off with a pretty basic question. We are both Christians. I’m a Roman Catholic. You are an evangelical Protestant, but specifically a reformed evangelical——
Wilson: Right, Presbyterian.
Douthat: Presbyterian, Calvinist.
Wilson: Yeah. Calvinist — all that.
Douthat: So our traditions have had some pretty sharp differences in the past, like wars-of-religion level. And the people involved in those conflicts thought that there were really serious eternal stakes involved, that, respectively, Catholics and Protestants were leading people into serious error, putting people at risk of damnation.
Wilson: Right.
Douthat: So, simple question: Do you think I’m going to hell?
Wilson: [Chuckles.] That’s not my job.
Douthat: It’s not your job to know — that’s true.
Wilson: So let me reframe the question and then answer it straight up. I believe that there are many Roman Catholics who are saved and going to heaven. I also believe there are many Presbyterians who aren’t.
The last day where the Lord separates wheat from tares, sheep from goats, there’s not going to be denominational lines. I believe that salvation is the gift of God, and as the gift of God, he bestows it on whom he will. And when he does that, the fruit of the spirit is the result.
There are Roman Catholics with whom I can fellowship as brothers in Christ. And there are people who are just in an alien world from me. That doesn’t answer the question about you and me, because we just met. [Chuckles.]
Douthat: That’s fair. We’ll see; I’ll ask it again at the end of the interview.
Wilson: Oh, definitely you’re going to heaven. [Laughs.]
So, God is the one who makes that determination. If we’re to be saved, he’s going to have to do all the saving. The illustration I like to give is if you died and went up to heaven and St. Peter had a desk there with a “justification by faith alone” test, and he gave you a pencil and said: “Here, take the test You need to get 100 on the test, and we’ll let you into heaven.” The way you pass the test is you look at the test and you look at the pencil, and then you give the pencil back. And he says, “Very good.” [Chuckles.]
It’s not test taking, it’s not works of the law, and it’s not doctrinal at works of the law, either.
Douthat: So what is it?
Wilson: It’s Christ. Christ is our salvation. Abandon yourself. Drop it. Let go of yourself. Turn away from sin and self and all the “me,” and look to Christ.
Douthat: But when you do that, what you’re really saying, I think, is that all you can advise people to do is to try and come to a deeper awareness of something that God has decided for them.
Wilson: Correct. But when God decides things like that, God is not a musclebound Zeus, like a Calvinist Zeus in the upper reaches of the cosmos, making people do stuff. A Calvinist Zeus would be problematic. He’d be a bully. So when God determines who is saved and who is not, who turns left and who turns right, in him, we live and move and have our being. God can do that without turning us into puppets.
The charge against Calvinists is that they have a musclebound Zeus, who’s pulling the puppet strings. But I don’t think of it that way at all.
Douthat: Well, that’s one charge against Calvinists. But a different one would be that you have a God who is creating human beings as characters in a larger story that he’s telling, which is something that I personally believe. But he’s creating people who will do terrible things and is also creating people who will be damned.
Wilson: Yes.
Douthat: And so the common critique against Calvinism is: This God — whether or not he’s a nightclub bouncer or Zeus or anything like that — isn’t this a pretty harsh thing for him to do, to sit down and create characters in a story who are going to go to hell?
Wilson: Correct. I would say not harsh, but it’s certainly hard. Paul says in Romans, “Behold, the kindness and severity of God.” The God of the Bible is no buttercup. So when God creates the story in which villains are villains and bad people are bad people, he can do that without sullying his hands.
The way I preach it is that God draws straight with crooked lines. God is so powerful that he can create a narrative, a story in which creatures rebel against him, and they are responsible for that rebellion, and God is in complete control of the whole thing.
Douthat: But why not pull them back? Just to take an alternative theory — an alternative Christian theory would say there are still going to be opportunities for repentance and moments when grace is offered. And if they refuse grace, then yes, God is, as you say, severe and allows them to make that refusal, and may be damned eternally because of it. But there is an opportunity, a path that is open for every human being, even the people who might end up in hell.
Wilson: So we live in one hell of a screwed-up world. There are horrendous things going on right this second, right this minute, all over the globe. There are kids being abused, there are people being trafficked, there are wars erupting, there are rapes, there are murders. This world is a screwed-up planet, and a reasonable sophomore would say: And who put it here? Who’s responsible for all this? Ultimately, fundamentally, who did this?
Well, the answer is God. Basically, there’s no slipping off the point. All orthodox Christians are stuck with the problem of evil. But every orthodox Christian believes that God’s in control and decided to create the world with all of its gunk anyway. So at some level, God’s responsible.
The thing that distinguishes the Calvinist is that the Calvinist acknowledges that and speaks right into the microphone and says: Yes, God is involved.
Douthat: So talk about the political project that comes out of this. The phrase “Christian nationalism” gets thrown around a lot these days. And you have been willing to take full ownership of the phrase.
Wilson: Correct. I prefer that phrase to what I usually get called.
Douthat: Which is a theocrat.
Wilson: Yes.
Douthat: And we’ll get to that. But first, give me your definition of Christian nationalism.
Wilson: Christian nationalism is the conviction that secularism is a failed experiment, that societies require a transcendent grounding in order to be able to function at all. And as a Christian, I believe that that transcendent ground should be the living God and not an idol.
That would be my short-form definition of Christian nationalism. Even shorter would be: Christian nationalism is the conviction that we should stop making God angry.
Douthat: So that’s the first purpose of your political project, for America to stop making God angry.
Wilson: Yes. And most people think that when they are confronted with that project, they think that we want to get our tentacles into everything and start controlling everything. I actually think we need limited government. The government should be significantly smaller than it is, and we need to curtail a lot of the busybodyness that we have. That’s why I would call myself a theocratic libertarian. There is a true libertarian element in this, and yet, the transcendent grounding for what we’re talking about means that we acknowledge the authority of God.
We have racked up quite a body count of awful crimes, and I believe the only way out is for us to repent and turn to Christ. This would be things like no more Pride parades, no more drag queen story hours, no more abortion on demand, no more legalized same-sex unions — all of that, done. That’s the repentance part.
Douthat: By law?
Wilson: Yeah, by law, by law. But I’ve been ministering, preaching coming up on 50 years. And when I first began ministering, homosexual behavior was against the law. That was not a totalitarian hellhole. That was not “The Handmaid’s Tale.” It was a free and prosperous country that I was grateful to God to be growing up in. And yet, we as a society disapproved ——
Douthat: Free, except for people who were arrested for sodomy, right?
Wilson: Yeah.
Douthat: It was not a free society for them.
Wilson: Also not free for forgers and burglars and bank robbers — not free for them, either.
Douthat: Right.
Wilson: But every society has a set of standards, and if you don’t have laws at all, you don’t have a society.
Douthat: That is true. I don’t think America is in danger of not having laws. But the question is how far those laws go.
Wilson: Yeah, and by what standard?
Douthat: By what standard, but also how far? So, I’ve read a lot of your work.
Wilson: Well, thank you.
Douthat: I’ve followed your public ministry. And it seems to me — you can take this as a critique or not — you move back and forth between a couple of different modes of engagement on politics. In one mode, you make arguments that are, I think, pretty much in alignment with a kind of mainstream religious conservatism, which basically say that the United States, for most of its history, did not have an established church, but had a kind of soft cultural consensus around Christianity — originally, Protestant Christianity.
Wilson: A soft establishment, right.
Douthat: A soft establishment, and that this broke down in the 1950s and 1960s. There were Supreme Court rulings outlawing school prayer — these kinds of things. And this then led to things like Roe v. Wade, that legalized abortion. And therefore, the goal of religious conservatives should be to do things like overturn Roe ——
Wilson: Yeah.
Douthat: Potentially ban abortion, allow for crèches on town greens ——
Wilson: Yeah.
Douthat: Prayer in some public schools — these kinds of things.
Now, these are obviously views that many, many people disagree with. Some people would call theocratic. But I would say those are views that are sort of within the mainstream of American politics.
Wilson: That’s true. You’re right.
Douthat: But then there is another mode, basically saying: Well, we need to go a bit further. That it wasn’t actually enough for the United States to allow prayer in public schools; it would’ve been better if the government of the United States had acknowledged Jesus as Lord.
Wilson: Right.
Douthat: And it’s not enough not to have same-sex marriage; we should return to laws against sodomy in all 50 states. And there, you are getting toward a view of politics, which, I think, is closer to something called theocracy. But the degree seems to me to make a great difference.
There is a substantial difference between saying there are certain things that Christians are against that the law should ban, and saying: Actually, no, there are many more things that the law should ban, lest we offend God. And to operationalize that, we need to enforce the Ten Commandments through the law.
Do you think we should enforce all 10 commandments through public law in the U.S.?
Wilson: Yes. We should respect all 10 commandments in our civic law. Yes, we should do that.
Douthat: OK. Then what about the crimes themselves? What does it mean for a society to respect the Ten Commandments in law? You’ve already said that you would restore sodomy laws. Would you have laws against adultery and fornication?
Wilson: Yes.
Douthat: And so, someone — an adulterer — would have to pay a fine and be publicly flogged?
Wilson: Well, no, what I would do, and basically ——
Douthat: This is unfortunate news for the current president of the United States, it’s worth noting.
Wilson: Well, and for King David, actually.
Douthat: True enough.
Wilson: One of the things that is important to note here is the nature of the value of prudence and wise judgment as you seek to implement. You don’t find the magic breaker and flip a switch and all of a sudden, ta-da! Christian republic. It just doesn’t happen that way.
So what I would do on adultery is I would get rid of no-fault divorce — that’d be the legal reform I would institute. No-fault divorce has been a disaster, and I think was upstream from the sexual revolution. But there are many things that we could do that would simply go upstream and deal with root issues.
Douthat: But that works because a married couple has shared assets and you can require payments of alimony and these kinds of things. What about fornication or, as the kids call it, premarital sex? You have two college students who commit the sin of fornication — you’re not going to have one pay alimony to the other. What does the law do about that?
Wilson: Actually, earlier, when you asked me about adultery and fornication, what I wanted to do is split the two, because adultery ——
Douthat: Adultery is worse than fornication.
Wilson: Adultery is far, far worse than fornication.
Douthat: I also know many people who will be relieved to hear that as well.
Wilson: And our goal is to relieve them, right?
Douthat: That’s right.
Wilson: So in Mosaic law, there is no express penalty for fornication. There is a penalty for marital fraud. So, if a woman represents herself as a virgin, and she’s not a virgin, then there were civil consequences. But that had to do with things like inheritance and who the father of the baby was — all of that.
Douthat: So we’re going easy on fornication.
Wilson: Well, we’re following the Bible. So what I want to do is I want to be a biblical ——
Douthat: But we’re not completely. I mean, at least in the discussion we just had, you did not advocate stoning adulterers, right?
Wilson: No.
Douthat: So you’re deciding which particular aspects of the Bible should apply.
Wilson: Well, yeah.
Douthat: There are biblical precepts that allow for the stoning of adulterers in the Old Testament.
Wilson: You are correct. Right.
Douthat: And you’re not in favor of stoning adulterers.
Wilson: Well, I’m not against it, either.
Douthat: You are open to it.
Wilson: No, this is the thing: Politics is the art of the possible.
Douthat: Yeah.
Wilson: One of the things that people do is they — and this is what the nice lady from CNN did with asking me about women voting.
Douthat: We’re going to get to some of those questions in a moment, but go on.
Wilson: That’s way down the road. I’ve got bigger fish to fry than things like that. So if you ask me for my ideal theocratic republic, I would say I’m willing to tell you how I envision this, but I do it, remembering our discussion starting with depravity, where I believe that people who think they’re doing the will of God need to check themselves, and ideologues who build utopias are a great manufacturer of hellholes. I don’t want that. I want us to grow into it the way Alfred did. King Alfred brought the laws of Deuteronomy, made them the laws of England, and that was the basis of common law. So he didn’t just bring the content of Mosaic law over; he brought the system of precedent and case law.
I would much prefer to see an Alfred approach, where you take the principles of the law, you apply them, you stand by the principles, and then, using Christian prudence and wisdom, you push in that direction until you get the results that you want. You get to the point where there aren’t any Pride parades and there aren’t any drag queen story hours — OK, good.
What our society needs to do is say: This is normal sexuality. This is wholesome. This is what we encourage. We formally disapprove of these activities. And you have laws that would enable you to close down the bathhouses. But that’s the kind of thing that I ——
Douthat: OK. How does that then apply to questions of religious practice? So you’ve said and argued, I think that you think, that the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution would allow for the U.S. Congress to make a generic profession of Christian belief.
Wilson: Yes.
Douthat: It just wouldn’t allow for them to establish a reformed Christianity or Catholic Christianity as the established church of the U.S.
Wilson: Right.
Douthat: OK. So you’re in a world where Congress has made that kind of profession: They’ve said Christ is king; the Ten Commandments are up in courthouses. But you still have obviously a range of Christian belief, and you have plenty of non-Christian belief — you have Jewish belief, you have Muslim belief, you have Hindu belief, you have Buddhist belief — and then you have nonbelief. And out of these categories, some of them certainly, from your perspective, fall afoul of some of the first few commandments of the Ten Commandments.
Wilson: Yeah.
Douthat: So how does the law of a moderate Christian theocracy approach non-Christians?
Wilson: This is a horse-and-cart thing. Because there’s no way that we’re going to get a Christian republic and Congress affirming the Ten Commandments and confessing — if the Senate and House released a statement saying, “We believe Jesus rose from the dead,” and the president signed it — there’s no way we’re going to get to that end result without a massive reformation revival among the people already.
Basically, if I just tried to superimpose that Christian theocracy on the United States as it is now, then I’ve got a monster problem in Dearborn, Mich., with all the Muslims. I’ve got a monster problem there. And it would be a problem that I could not solve. Because you can’t jam these things down in a top-down way. It’s got to be church planting, evangelism, persuasion.
Douthat: OK, so you’ve done all that ——
Wilson: Yeah.
Douthat: And 87 percent of the United States are solid Westminster Confession Calvinists. Eighty-seven percent. You’ve done it.
Wilson: Just imagine how wonderful that would be.
Douthat: But there is still that unregenerate 13 percent of the United States, some of whom are papists — Catholics — and a lot of whom are atheists, Muslims, Jews, Hindus and so on.
And all along the way, through this process of conversion, it seems perfectly reasonable for people who hold those beliefs to look at what’s going on and say to you: Once we hit 87 percent, what happens to my liberties?
Wilson: “What are your plans for us?”
Douthat: Yes.
Wilson: So I would say, because I’m a Burkean Conservative ——
Douthat: Uh-huh. I’m skeptical, but go on.
Wilson: I really am a Burkean conservative. That means that you play with the hand that you’re dealt. OK? What are you working with?
One of the things is that America was founded as a Protestant Christian country. At the founding we were 98 percent Protestant, in every direction.
Douthat: A lot of people didn’t go to church. A lot of unregenerate people, including some people writing our founding documents — but baptized Protestant, yes.
Wilson: But the point I was driving to is that there were periods of reformation — the Great Awakening and the Second Great Awakening — and there was a great expansion of the church in the 19th century. When it came to it, America kept her Protestant ethos and incorporated successfully Catholics and Jews. That’s something that we know how to do. We’ve done it before — it’s been done. I’m grateful for that.
I’m not trying to reinvent anything. I’m trying to say, I want to go back to where we were getting a C plus. We were doing OK.
Douthat: It wasn’t offensive to God that there were these Catholics with their icons and these Jews who didn’t acknowledge Jesus’ lordship?
Wilson: Well, there’s a difference between a sin and a crime.
Douthat: With that, I agree. Yes.
Wilson: OK. And one of the big problems that budding theocrats have had is an inability to distinguish sins and crimes. That was something that tripped up the Puritan interregnum in England after the English Civil War.
Douthat: Yes.
Wilson: Basically, someone says: Oh, I’ve got this system of doctrine, and everything that’s in the Bible that I think that God doesn’t like, we have to make a law.
So, I call myself a theocratic libertarian, and theocratic means, if we outlaw something, I want a Bible verse, ideally the Ten Commandments, if we make something against the law. But if it has to do with the manufacturing and sale of widgets, or the thoughts a person thinks, or the beliefs that they have, I’m a libertarian.
Douthat: So you’re a libertarian on how people worship, but you’re not a libertarian on who they sleep with. Is that right?
Wilson: Yes.
Douthat: But couldn’t you argue it in reverse, that maybe God cares more about how you worship than whether you’ve committed a particular sexual sin?
Wilson: I do believe that God cares more about how we worship. I do believe that’s the first table of the law.
Douthat: Yeah, it starts with that. It ends with adultery, but it starts with worship.
Wilson: But the fact that God cares more about that does not mean that we are competent to deal with all the ins and outs of it.
For example, Paul says that greed is idolatry, but I don’t want covetousness police. There’s certain things that the civil magistrate cannot do.
Douthat: Why is it easier for the civil magistrate to arrest people for sexual crimes than it would be for them to arrest them for other things? Just because it’s a more concrete act?
Wilson: Yeah. The jealous wife has evidence.
Douthat: I’m curious, because it seems to me that someone who wanted to, let’s say, do a skeptical read of your view, it would be that, in the current climate, you feel like you have an affinity for Catholics like me, and even some affinity for monotheists who don’t accept the Gospel.
Wilson: Right.
Douthat: And you want us to like you and feel like we’re on the same team.
Wilson: Yes.
Douthat: And you don’t feel that way about, let’s say, feminists and gay people. So you’ll say: Well, of course in the theocratic republic, we’ll leave the Catholics alone, but we’ll arrest some people committing sodomy. But in your heart, you might want to arrest the Catholics, too.
Wilson: No.
Douthat: No?
Wilson: No.
Douthat: OK. I’m just raising that possibility.
Wilson: All right, so this is something that Switzerland did, and this maybe illustrates what you’re getting at here. In my biblical republic, if Muslims were here — not citizens, but residents — if they were traveling merchants or whatever, and you had a number of Muslims in the same town and they wanted to get together and pray together, would that be a problem? No. Would they be allowed to build a minaret? No. Church bells? Yes.
Douthat: Yep.
Wilson: Minaret? No.
Douthat: But synagogues, yes.
Wilson: Yes, but they’re not trying to own the public space by ——
Douthat: I see. OK, OK. So the emphasis, right.
Wilson: Basically, the society would acknowledge that Jesus rose from the dead — and again, this is down the road, like 500 years from now.
Douthat: Yep.
Wilson: We’d acknowledge that Jesus is Lord. And we would say: This is a Protestant Christian country. And we have successfully worked out how to relate to Catholics and Jews — we have a long history of that. We do not know how to take three million Muslims who want to live under Shariah law and put them in the middle of Michigan. We don’t have the mechanism or the wisdom.
Douthat: Do you think most American Muslims right now want to live under Shariah law?
Wilson: The ones in Dearborn do.
Douthat: OK. We’ll table that as a debatable point. I’m going to repeat the question: Do you think most American Muslims right now want to live under Shariah law?
Wilson: I would say the Muslims who come here to assimilate are coming to assimilate to a Christian country, and I have no objection to that.
Douthat: Aren’t they coming to assimilate to a country that has fallen away from Christianity and is engaged in all kinds of public debauchery?
Wilson: [Chuckles.] No, we’re talking about my ideal republic.
Douthat: Oh, OK. All right.
Wilson: So basically, we’ve painted ourselves into a bad corner. America is a regular country, like other countries, and regular countries have borders. And if you assimilate at too rapid a rate any kind of alien worldview, you’re going to have trouble.
I believe that Muslims and Hindus could be assimilated in an ideal republic at decent rates of speed, and that assimilation would be hand in glove with evangelization, because people would be coming to fit into this Christian society. But right now, they’re coming in a parasitic way, I believe, to devour a rotting empire, and that’s because we don’t know who we are. We don’t know what we stand for. We don’t know what we think. And so consequently, you’ve got that 90-foot-tall Hindu statue in Texas.
Douthat: Right. That should be illegal, in your view.
Wilson: Oh, yeah. Well, I think that sort of thing — there shouldn’t even have to be a law.
Douthat: Right.
Wilson: There was no law, if you go back to 1945 America ——
Douthat: There was no law then against building ——
Wilson: And it was unthinkable then.
Douthat: Well.
Wilson: Right. So that’s my point. There are a number of things ——
Douthat: I think if you look at 19th-century American history honestly, while there were not large numbers of Hindus, I think a lot of very strange religious experiments were quite thinkable. America has always had a certain kind of room for whatever the equivalent of building ——
Wilson: Yeah. America’s always had room for religious weirdos. And the 19th century ——
Douthat: Yes. Present company — and I include myself in this — very much included.
Wilson: Nineteenth-century America was a monkey house of communes and different things — that’s all true. But the 90-foot statue, those sorts of things, are taunts. It’s not, “Here’s our freedom, we’re just trying to worship in our own quiet little way.” It’s sort of, “I wonder how far we can push this before somebody says something.”
Douthat: OK. So there’s a “no taunting the Christian majority” soft policy.
Wilson: Right.
Douthat: Let’s talk about women for a moment. I’ve been pressing you on what would be forbidden, both on a shorter timeline and in the 500-year path to the Calvinist Republic. Let’s talk about what would be permitted.
Your theology takes a fairly — not fairly, it takes a straightforwardly patriarchal view of the family, of male headship.
Wilson: Correct.
Douthat: This is obviously drawing on some fairly explicit things in the New Testament. You’re not pulling it out of the ether. But there is a set of questions about what that implies for women’s participation in society.
You mentioned earlier a CNN interview you did which asked about women voting, and you said ideally in families ——
Wilson: Households.
Douthat: Households would cast a vote, and the decider would be the husband.
Wilson: Right.
Douthat: Single women, if they were heads of household, would have a right to vote.
Wilson: Correct.
Douthat: So what else would be permitted to husbands in their exercise of patriarchal authority? They would have the right to control and dispose of property? Of their wives’ property, I mean.
Wilson: I would say, actually, no. I appreciate and would defend the old Christian practice of endowing the wife.
Douthat: And the husband, in spite of being head of the household, would not have access to that money?
Wilson: Yeah, that’s hers. So basically, I believe that it would be wise and prudent for us to have a system of endowment for the wife. That would mean that if a husband just thought he found someone cuter, he would take a serious financial hit.
Douthat: What about discipline in the household? Do you think that husbands, as heads of households, should be, again, permitted under the law to use forms of physical coercion?
Wilson: Of the wife?
Douthat: Of the wife.
Wilson: No, absolutely not. No. Call the cops.
Douthat: No physical coercion whatsoever?
Wilson: No. No.
Douthat: OK.
Wilson: So basically, as a pastor, I’ve seen all kinds of things, and marital problems can get pretty messy and pretty tangled pretty quickly. But I believe that the husband does not have the authority, legally, to exercise any kind of corporal discipline of his wife. No, absolutely not.
Now, what happens when the cops are called because there’s a domestic thing, and he hit her, but she had been hitting him for five minutes? [Chuckles.] You’ve got those sorts of situations. But the Islamic idea of a husband beating his wife, and it’s OK? It’s just simply not OK.
Douthat: But it’s not only an Islamic idea.
Wilson: Right.
Douthat: If you look at the history of the Christian West, you have situations where the law has given the husband pretty much total control over the property of his wife for reasons of headship and patriarchal authority, and at least cultures where it is customary to sort of accept or wink at the use of physical force by husbands against wives.
Wilson: I can say, in our church, basically, if any husband — and like you said, we’re patriarchal — and I can envision someone moving to Moscow because “I think they’re patriarchal and that must line up with my idea of patriarchy.” And if someone like that joined our church and we found out that he was beating his wife, he would be excommunicated. We’d put him under discipline.
Douthat: So let me put it to you — and I suspect you’ll dispute this — that this seems like a situation where a Christian culture can learn something from the experience of the liberal era, more secular era, a more feminist era, in terms of what it’s willing to accept and what it’s not.
Wilson: Mm-hmm.
Douthat: That there is a way in which it seems like in saying, no, I wouldn’t accept that — again, things that many Christians accepted in the past — you are accepting to some degree that, if we pass out of this more secular era into a more Christian era, we will look back and say: Well, it was bad that we lost the faith and good that we recovered it, but it was also good that, in the course of the 20th century, we decided that it was rotten for husbands to beat their wives and maybe a good idea for wives to control some of their own property. Would that be fair?
Wilson: Yeah, I think wives controlling their own property is an ancient custom among Christians, but to ——
Douthat: No, and I’m not arguing that all Christians everywhere supported wife beating or anything remotely like that. I am saying that there is a particular 20th-century shift around these issues that is driven by what are seen as liberal and feminist concerns.
Wilson: Yeah. I wouldn’t call them liberal and feminist, but I’d say there are certain Western developments that I like.
Douthat: OK.
Wilson: And the way I’ve put this same issue is: I’ve been arguing for a mere Christendom, or a Christendom 2.0, OK? Christendom 1.0 had some bugs in it. I don’t want a rerun of Christendom 1.0 — don’t want that. The Christians screwed it up in different areas. “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition,” as Monty Python taught us — and I don’t want the Spanish Inquisition again, OK? I want a Christendom that learns lessons from history. And some of those lessons that you learn from history, maybe the person who wrote that book or influenced this legislation, they may have been a feminist or liberal or whatever, but what’s important is whether it’s just and prudent and right. And if it is and it aligns with the Bible, then I’m more than happy to go with it.
Douthat: So, just to take a related example, one of the controversies of many that you’ve been mixed up in has to do with slavery, and whether slavery is absolutely forbidden by the Bible, absolutely forbidden to Christians, or whether it is critiqued, but allowed for.
Wilson: Right.
Douthat: And you think it is critiqued, but allowed for.
Wilson: Right.
Douthat: On this, on a straightforward reading of the New Testament, I would agree with you. I would say, pretty clearly, there is a pretty clear path from the message of the Bible to the abolition of slavery. But there is no moment in the New Testament when Jesus insists on the manumission of slaves.
Wilson: Right.
Douthat: Paul says, “Slaves, obey your masters and the Lord.” So I think it’s true that the Bible alone does not say an absolute no to slavery.
But I also think that it is possible for Christians to develop their thinking in ways that are rooted in Scripture that lead to the statement, “No, this should be absolutely forbidden.”
Wilson: I would say not only leads to it, but necessarily leads to it. So I believe the logic of Scripture — if you preach the Gospel, you’re preaching the gospel of liberty, and you can’t preach the gospel of liberty to centuries of clanking chains, right? The Gospel brings liberty.
The issue there is: What do you do in the middle of a pagan slave-owning society? Paul didn’t arrive in Rome and start circulating petitions about slavery. He was playing the long game, and he taught masters and slaves how to treat one another.
I believe that the logic of the Gospel necessarily overturns institutions like slavery. I think it’s fine for us to impose our morality. I’m glad that slavery is gone, and good riddance. So I’m glad that slavery is forbidden in the law.
Douthat: But I guess what I’m driving at is that there are things in the experience of history — which as a Calvinist, you think is a story being written by God ——
Wilson: By God, yes.
Douthat: That teach us certain things, right?
Wilson: Yeah, absolutely.
Douthat: And it seems like a lot of people in the 21st century, looking back at those bugs in the software of Christendom, would say that one of the lessons that we can learn from the wars of religion or the Spanish Inquisition or anything else is that Christians should be very, very careful about trying to suppress wrong belief and overcriminalize sin.
And I guess you would say: That’s right, but you can go pretty far.
Wilson: Yeah.
Douthat: And I would say: Seems like you’re going way too far, and underlearning the actual lessons.
Wilson: But aren’t you wanting to criminalize slavery?
Douthat: I am wanting to criminalize slavery.
Wilson: You’re the ones wanting to criminalize slavery.
Douthat: That’s a fair comeback. Yes. But what I’m arguing is that the reason that Christians now think that we should abolish slavery wherever we find it is not simply based on a straightforward reading of the New Testament. It’s based on the experience of being Christians in history.
And part of the reason that people — secular liberals and many Christians as well — react so strongly when you say, “Well, I’m not for or against stoning adulterers,” is that, independent of what Jesus did when people wanted to stone a woman — independent of that, one of the lessons that most people in 21st-century America take from the last 500 years of experience is that there’s lots of things that Christian republics have done that God passed a judgment on, which is maybe why we have a more secular society, and it seems like you want to maybe bring back a few too many of those things that God already judged and found wanting.
Wilson: OK, what I want to do is, on slavery, I don’t want to bring any of that back.
Douthat: Right. No, I’m not accusing you of wanting to bring back slavery, but you do want to bring back certain penalties and restrictions and attempts — again, to use the distinction you yourself used — to sort of regulate sin through the law.
Wilson: Now, one of the things I want to do is say: I’m really glad that slavery’s gone, and good riddance. And I want to say that the Southern slave owner, who read the books of Ephesians and Colossians and 1 Timothy and treated his slaves decently, remembering that he had a master in heaven who he studiously tried to obey — what Paul said slave owners were supposed to do — I would say he was not an orc, and he is part of the reason why slavery ended. In other words, I would say he’s a good guy. There were horrific slave owners that treated their slaves every bit as badly as the abolitionists said, but there were also decent human beings who were muddling along in a corrupt and fallible human institution.
Basically, what I want to do is agree with you about the part where the Kingdom of God is like yeast that is dropped into the loaf, and it gradually works through the whole loaf, permeating the whole. So when Paul preached the Gospel in Rome, the gladiatorial games didn’t end the following week — it took centuries. But the yeast worked through the loaf, such that the gladiatorial games were ended eventually, slavery was ended eventually, concubinage was ended eventually — all of which was good Gospel progress and postmillennial. That’s the way it works.
Douthat: Right. But can’t part of that Gospel progress, under the sovereignty of God, be having certain societies — and we’ll say, Catholicism under the Inquisition — for God to say, this goes too far, it imposes too much, it becomes too tyrannical, and therefore, I will pass judgment on it, and if you, Doug Wilson, want to bring those things back, you are making a mistake — as a Christian — because God has already said that, again, to use an example, imposing sodomy laws on all 50 states, whatever you think of the morality of same-sex behavior, was a mistake.
Wilson: Right. So, this is the thing that I’m wanting to drive at. First, I’m willing to grant in principle that if someone comes to me with an open Bible and an open history book and he says: Doug, I think you ought to rethink your views on penal codes for homosexuality or whatever — let’s have a Bible study. I’d say: I’m open — let’s have a Bible study. I’m really open to that.
I don’t want to take any guidance at all from the secular society around us. And the reason I don’t is they killed 60 million babies. I don’t want to hear any more lectures from these people about slavery. You were better off being a Black person in Charleston, S.C., in 1850, when they had an operating slave market than being conceived as a Black baby in New York City or Baltimore today.
Consequently, the thing I don’t want to admit ——
Douthat: Just to clarify what you’re saying, you’re saying you were better off being a slave than being aborted in the womb.
Wilson: Correct. Better off being allowed to live as a slave than to be chopped up. Basically, the thing that just gets my motor running is the idea that we are some sort of moral exemplars that get to judge other societies. So I do want ——
Douthat: But can’t. I mean ——
Wilson: Let me agree with you.
Douthat: No, go on.
Wilson: I want to agree with you here, because I really do want Christendom 2.0 to have learned the lessons of criminalizing things that were sins, not crimes; being officious; Cromwell’s men, prowling the streets of London, trying to smell who was having ——
Douthat: Right, banning Christmas.
Wilson: Christmas dinners.
Douthat: Yes. You’re against that.
Wilson: Yeah. That kind of officiousness is not what I want at all. But neither do I want any of our reforms to be based on the universal rights of man. So, I read books by feminists, and I want to be able to learn from anybody. My point is, I don’t want to have anything based on the false doctrines that they’re espousing. I want everything that I teach to be consistent with the Bible and to be derived from the Bible. I want to be able to make a biblical case for it.
Douthat: Right. But couldn’t you also say that parts of modern liberal ideas about human rights and parts of modern feminist ideas about the equality of men and women are themselves, in a context where liberal society descends from Christian society, connected to Scripture itself? I don’t see why you have to separate it out and say, well, I don’t want to just draw on feminist principles. Some feminist principles can be Christian principles, can’t they?
Wilson: Yeah. The Venn diagrams can overlap, yes.
Douthat: OK.
Wilson: But they can also be wildly divergent.
Douthat: Yes, I completely agree.
Let’s talk about your influence for a moment.
Wilson: You’re not going to call me an influencer, are you?
Douthat: I am, actually — with apologies. Better than calling you a thought leader, the ultimate insult.
Wilson: [Chuckles.] Yeah.
Douthat: As you can probably tell, I find this a very, very interesting conversation.
Wilson: I can tell, yeah.
Douthat: I had some uncertainty about whether it made sense to invite you to have the conversation.
Wilson: Understandable.
Douthat: No, not because of the extremity of your perspective, but because, for as long as I’ve been writing about American Christianity, there has been a habit for liberal critics of conservative Christianity to elevate figures who seem to have extreme views, who will describe themselves as theocratic, and say: This person is influential. This person shows where religious conservatism is going.
And you’ve been getting a certain amount of attention in the second Trump presidency. But a lot of it has taken that form of people saying: Look how bad religious conservatism is. Look at this awful theocrat, Doug Wilson.
Wilson: Right.
Douthat: How influential are you?
Wilson: More influential than I used to be, and at significantly higher levels.
Douthat: That answer will make my producers very happy about the booking decisions we’ve made.
Wilson: So our community of churches — and you asked me directly, I don’t want to be tooting my own horn; this is just the way I see it — our church community in Moscow has doubled. For a couple years there, pretty much every Sunday at church, I would meet someone who would say: Well, we’re here now. And they were chased there by blue state governors, or by pastors and elders who flaked on them. They didn’t have the Christian leadership they thought they had. There’s just a lot of things that have contributed to that.
Douthat: Describe the community that you built in Moscow, Idaho.
Wilson: So Moscow, Idaho, is about 25,000 people. It’s a university town. It’s eight miles away from Pullman, Wash., another university town. Washington State University and University of Idaho are eight miles apart. And our community of churches is now about 3,000 people, which is about 10 percent of the population, so it’s a significant part of the local population.
Because we were under embargo from more respectable evangelical outlets or publishers or whatnot, we were sort of forced into the position of building our own platforms. I edited a magazine for 20 years, Credena/Agenda. We started our own publishing house. That publishing house has a streaming service, Canon Plus. And that has sort of accumulated mountains of content, which has started to get traction around the country. I’ve written a number of books, some of which have made their way by various means to people of influence in important places. So the reach is significant now.
And also, the time in which we’re saying these things is different.
Douthat: Interesting times.
Wilson: Yes, interesting times. Italicized interesting times.
Twenty years ago, I was saying many of these same things. And the reaction of a normie, let’s say — normies and grillers, they go to church on Sunday.
Douthat: Right, and they grill and they’re happy in American suburbia. And they don’t think much about how biblical stoning precepts should be applied.
Wilson: Yeah. And they listen to me talk about something and they go: Jeepers! Good grief! Send him back, somebody!
And what happened in the last five years is that virtually every respected institution in the United States disgraced itself. The health industry, the military, the Supreme Court, Congress — everybody face planted, boom. What that left is that a lot of normies were gobsmacked, saying: What happened to the America I grew up in? Everything blew up. Nobody’s making sense. And it’s the lockdowns, it’s the vaccines, it’s the trannies, it’s just — it’s clown world.
And we’re still talking — we got our platform — and they said: That doesn’t sound nearly as radical as all the respectable types. In fact, 20 years ago, Wilson was predicting this. He was saying that we were in free fall, and this is where we are going to land.
So we have garnered a lot of attention for that reason. That’s one piece of it. The other piece of it, and this is — well, I’ll just say it.
Douthat: Just say it.
Wilson: I’ll just say it. I’ve met Pete Hegseth once — one time.
So I’ve written a lot on education. We planted a classical Christian school. There are hundreds of classical Christian schools around the country now that are following that model. And David Goodwin, who is the head of A.C.C.S. — Association of Classical Christian Schools — is a friend of mine. And Pete Hegseth did a Fox News thing on education and met David Goodwin. They wound up writing “Battle for the American Mind” together.
Hegseth knew about me from all the stuff I’d done on education. And then he moved to Nashville in order to put his kids in a classical Christian school, unconnected to me. And I was in Nashville and preached at the church that he had joined, all independent of me. But that church is in our denomination — there’s maybe 150 to 170 churches in the denomination I started. So I met him one time at church, and we had a pleasant exchange. He knew who I was, I knew who he was, and we met at church.
And then one other time, I met Russ Vought, who’s the head of the. …
Douthat: The head of the Office of Management and Budget.
Wilson: Right. And I met him one time. We were on a panel discussion here in D.C.
And then, a few months ago, I was talking to a reporter who called me, and she was asking: You’re coming to Washington, D.C. Are you going to be meeting with influential people?
And I said: Well, you guys, mostly — A.P. and Politico.
But this is all downstream of what I call “assuming the center.” We live in confused and confusing times, and whatever else you say about us, it’s a consistent message that we understand and we’ve been articulating for decades. And people like that kind of direction.
Douthat: But it’s also spoken into a world where the institutional failure that you were describing extends to most Christian churches.
Wilson: Yeah, that’s part of it. Yes.
Douthat: And you are, in certain ways, as Christianity has shrunk, as the practice of Christianity has declined in the United States, communities like yours effectively become bigger fish in that smaller pond.
Wilson: That is correct.
Douthat: So it’s both that there are people confused and baffled and dismayed by the world, who find the consistency of your perspective appealing. But then it’s also — and I see this in my own life and interaction with fellow Christians — people inside Christianity who feel beleaguered and defeated, and then here’s this guy, Doug Wilson, and he’s willing to come on a New York Times podcast and say “trannies.” He’s just ——
Wilson: Is that bad? [Laughter.]
Douthat: Well, no, no, I mean, don’t act demure. You have an entire style, and you have defended this style at length, saying basically that it is perfectly Christian to speak the language of insult, to call people — I just wrote down a few — “lumberjack dykes,” “small-breasted biddies,” “gaytards,” and then some other phrases that I’m not going to use. And that’s part of the appeal too, right?
Wilson: That is, that’s correct.
Douthat: You are, in your own distinctive way, very online and speaking some of the language of that kind of world.
Wilson: Yes. [Long pause.]
Do you want me to defend it? I’m not trying to be politically incorrect for the sake of being politically incorrect. And I’m not resorting to that kind of language — the language that you referred to — because I want to be an ecclesiastical Howard Stern or some sort of shock jock.
Douthat: That actually was in my notes. I am not joking. The Howard Stern comparison.
Wilson: Yeah. So what I’m doing when I use — I’m a wordsmith. I write a lot. I use words. And when I take certain words out with a sharp pointy edge or a blade, it’s a weapon to be used in a particular situation for a particular purpose in a particular time. It’s not for the — [gasps] — he said a naughty word. That’s not ——
Douthat: Right. But don’t you think some of your fans take it that way?
Wilson: Yes. Yeah. But this is the problem with mass communication of any sort. So if you write for 10,000 people, somebody’s going to misunderstand what you’re saying or what you’re doing or what you’re up to. And it is true that the language that I’ve used occasionally — so I’ve written millions of words, and you can go through and pick out all the jalapeños and you can make them into a jalapeño paste and you can put them all into one cracker and get a completely different effect than what is happening in real time in these real battles.
Douthat: I’ll ask a related question, which is that you aren’t the only person who people find appealing because you’re seen as speaking forthrightly and saying politically incorrect things and using the words the libs don’t want you to use. You share that space with people who also call themselves Christian nationalists, for whom that does mean a white nationalism or an antisemitic nationalism. And I think one of the interesting things that listeners should be aware of is that, in addition to your wars against the secular liberals and milquetoast Christians and so on, lately you’ve also been engaged in this kind of extended conflict with people who want a formally racialized form of Christianity.
Wilson: Correct. That was actually my first internet controversy many years ago, with the kinists, white identitarians — I call them skinists. And I’ve been in polemical firefights with antisemites and actual misogynists, not people who are accused of being that way.
Douthat: Do you think you’re going to win that fight?
Wilson: I do.
Douthat: Because one of the things that has tended to happen in the recent past, the 20th-century past, is that when you have periods of liberal weakness or liberal collapse, there are forms of conservative religion that try and fill that void. But there are also consistently forms of identitarian politics, racist politics, fascist politics that fill that void, and you can see versions of this, obviously in 1930s Europe.
I’m not sure that the record of the 20th century proves that, in the battle to define post-liberalism, it’s guaranteed that the colorblind Calvinists are coming ——
Wilson: Are going to win.
Douthat: Well, I mean ——
Wilson: We may not win, but we’re going to go down fighting. And that matters because we’re Bible people. In other words, I want to fight against racial vainglory, ethnic vainglory or ethnic malice because the Bible prohibits it — in Christ, there’s neither Jew or Greek, slave nor free, Scythians and Colossians or Barbarian — and it’s one of the centerpieces of the New Testament.
I believe that Christian pastors should fight, and they should fight sin. And it’s not just sin on the left. It’s not just the progressive leftism. It’s also, I call it, the “dank right.” And then there are people who say that they have no enemies to the right, but that’s just telling the devil what direction to attack you from.
Douthat: This will be my last — maybe my last — attempt in my crusade to get you to say something nice about liberalism.
Wilson: OK.
Douthat: It does seem like some of these forces on the dank right that you’re talking about — racists and antisemites and so on — that they have been kept at bay, in part, by the same society that you were condemning in no uncertain terms earlier in the conversation, for abortion and other sins. And it seems to me that that itself should make you think: Yes, there are particular sins and particular evils that are part of the liberal moment or the late 20th-, early 21st-century America, and Christians should condemn them, but every society has particular sins. And it should be possible for even a Christian theocrat to say: Maybe liberalism did an OK job suppressing racism and antisemitism, even as it was doing some other bad things.
Wilson: No, I grant the point in principle. I don’t believe that classical liberalism gets everything wrong. I really don’t believe that. And I enjoyed very much the country I grew up in, and I received many benefits from that era. So that point’s granted.
But on the dank right, I believe that the liberal treatment of young white males has been one of the causes for this recoil and eruption. What you had was a toxic combination of a bad economy of young men being told repeatedly that they are the cancer of the planet, that their masculinity is toxic, that their skin is the blight of the world, and their heterosexuality is a hate crime.
Douthat: Mm-hmm.
Wilson: They’ve been kicked in the head for years and years and years, and they took it ill. And then when you combine it with no economic opportunities and all of the Trumpian issues, they got pretty surly and erupted.
Just to interject here: I’m expecting a good bit of it to go away — there’s a big “if” here — if there’s a Trump economic boom. I don’t know that there will be, but if there is one — if his presidency is considered a successful one and there’s economic breathing room that’s created — I think a lot of this goes away.
I think a lot of the churn is economic frustration, no opportunities, and who do we blame? Well, there’s always Jews. We can always blame the Jews. But in the meantime, I’m just explaining how that came about, not defending it. It still needs to be attacked. It still needs to be rebuked.
Douthat: Right. And here I’m going to try and pull us toward our conclusion by going back toward where we began and reminding you that everything you’ve just deplored, that progressives and liberals did unkindly to white men, obviously happened for the greater glory of God, right?
Wilson: Yep.
Douthat: Like all things that happen, which yields a big-picture question that I’d like to get your reflection on. From the point of view of the non-Calvinist, it seems like the Calvinist perspective on history, that it’s not just in God’s hands in a general way; it’s in God’s hands in this absolute way ——
Wilson: Right, down to the minutiae.
Douthat: It seems like that could yield a kind of political quietism, that Christians shouldn’t sully themselves with politics. Why would you bother trying to use the state to punish adulterers or anybody else, when God decided whether they were going to commit adultery in the first place?
But obviously that’s not true, because every time you get a Calvinist surge in Western life ——
Wilson: There’s an activist surge.
Douthat: There’s an activist component. And I know that you’re a moderate theocrat compared to Calvin’s Geneva or Puritan New England, but you are still willing to own that label.
So tell me, why does a belief in predestination and divine sovereignty — this profound divine sovereignty — yield this activist, at least somewhat theocratic form of politics, where you’re trying to build the Christian republic?
Wilson: Right. Because the sovereign God tells us to. So it’s not just God ——
Douthat: Well, that’s right. OK. Yes. That’s right. God decided.
Wilson: God decided, but he didn’t just give us the world, he gave us the manual — the user’s manual — in his word. And in that manual, it tells us to feed the hungry. It tells us the pure and undefiled religion is this, to visit widows and orphans in their affliction. We’re told to be activists.
So if I said, because God foreordains everything, I’m going to just sit here on the couch, then what I’m doing is I’m disobeying the sovereign God that I say that I believe in.
Douthat: OK. But the sovereign God in the New Testament says, “Go and make disciples of all nations.”
Wilson: Yes.
Douthat: He does not say, “Go and build a Christian republic.” That is a second-order implication that you are drawing from the Great Commission.
Wilson: Yeah. “Disciple all the nations, baptizing them, teaching them to obey all that I’ve commanded.” The Christian nationalism is third in that lineup. You disciple the nations, you preach the Gospel, you baptize them. And then down the road, when the king or the emperor says ——
Douthat: Well, you also, render unto Caesar. You also respect secular, civil, pagan authorities.
Wilson: Right.
Douthat: And there is a conspicuous absence in the New Testament — I agree that there’s a presence in Deuteronomy, there’s a presence in the Old Testament — but there’s a conspicuous absence of anything like Shariah law, anything like a blueprint for the Christian republic.
Wilson: Agreed.
Douthat: And yet, Calvinists in particular are drawn there, right?
Wilson: Right, but we have the Old Testament. It’s not just starting from scratch with the New Testament. Calvinists, historically, have been embedded in and immersed in Old Testament teaching. In Christian common law, Christian political theory, there’s a great deal of dependence on the Old Testament.
Douthat: OK. I’m going to act like a liberal, though, and psychologize this for a moment.
Wilson: OK.
Douthat: Have you ever read “God Owes Us Nothing” by Leszek Kolakowski?
Wilson: No.
Douthat: He’s a Polish philosopher, and it’s a book about essentially the Calvinist form of Catholicism — Jansenism, in France.
Wilson: I like Jansen.
Douthat: This is associated with Blaise Pascal, the mathematician and philosopher.
So he wrote about Jansenism and compared it to the zeal of the Jansenists to the zeal of 20th-century communists, who also believed in a kind of predestination. Communists thought the dialectic of history made it inevitable that their revolution would win, and yet they worked incredibly hard — extra hard — and if you work extra hard, you can prove to yourself that you were predestined for glory or for the worker’s paradise all along.
It seems to me, as a Catholic, that that speaks to the genuine strength, that Calvinism has generated really interesting and dynamic societies — for a short period of time. But then it burns out. And as a Catholic, I look at that story and I say: Look, here’s a man, Doug Wilson. He comes to me and he says: Good news, the knowledge of God is going to cover the world. We’re going to have billions of Christians — Christians beyond number.
Wilson: That’s right.
Douthat: And by the way, the institution that’s going to do this is an increasingly influential, but pretty small scale set of Calvinist institutions that, conveniently, you yourself helped found in Idaho.
Wilson: What a coincidence.
Douthat: And I’m sitting here, I’m a member of a church that has, give or take, 1.3 billion Catholic Christians spread around the world, and it seems to me that maybe, if you want the conversion of the world, why don’t you swallow your pride and come on over the Tiber to us?
Wilson: That’s right. So thank you for the invitation. I appreciate it.
Douthat: It’s a necessary part of this kind of conversation.
Wilson: I was not expecting the altar call, but thank you for it. The thing I would point out is the Christian Church is 2,000 years old. The Protestant Reformation as a distinct thing has been in existence for 25 percent of the church’s history. In the course of that time, the Protestants — with Calvinists at the center of it — have built a very great civilizatioDouthat: The United States of America.
Wilson: Well, no, the civilization would be, roughly speaking, the European — all the countries that have ——
Douthat: I think we’re getting some stolen valor here, Doug.
Wilson: Wait, wait. Hear me out. So basically, if you got a map of the world, and you colored in all the countries that had a significant Reformation heritage — Netherlands, Great Britain, United States, Australia, South Africa — you’re looking pretty much at the first world. I don’t think that’s coincidental. It’s not a stolen valor thing to say: You guys got Dante; we’ve got Bach.
Douthat: Well, no, I don’t think it’s stolen valor to say that Protestantism — and Calvinist Protestantism in particular — played an essential role in the building of the modern world. I don’t think it’s at all false to say that through Protestantism, various important critiques and correctives to medieval Catholicism entered the world. I also don’t think that it’s wrong to say that some of the things I’ve been defending to you about liberalism in this conversation come out of the Protestant inheritance.
I’m from New England. My ancestors include various Congregationalist ministers. I would be a poor descendant of those people if I just said everything they did was outside of God’s plan — I don’t think it was. But I do think that what you see in those last 500 years of history is that Calvinism burns brightly as a movement of moral reform and correction, but when it burns out, it yields the landscape that you yourself are sitting here deploring.
In the United States, the great Calvinist institutions — like my own alma mater, Harvard University — are now the heartbeat of ——
Wilson: Woke city.
Douthat: Woke city. Right. And so I guess my last appeal to you is to consider that, in the fun that you plainly have in pushing toward Puritan New England and saying maybe we’ll have the stocks, maybe we’ll stone some adulterers and so on, you are setting in motion the same cycle, where people come to you because you offer a zealous and intense form of Christianity, but the zeal gets out of hand and the hangover is wicked.
Wilson: So I can agree with much of that. Cotton Mather, just to quote a New Englander, said, “Faithfulness begat prosperity, and the daughter devoured the mother.” So what happens is, I believe, as a historical fact, that in times of affliction and hardship and nine miles of bad road, Calvinists generally shine. I also believe that there’s a blessing that comes from that, and the blessing frequently devours them. So yeah, the warning is well taken.
In our current mode, we’re building, we’re founding, we’re establishing — we’re doing all that. How will our great-grandchildren do? I’m a great-grandfather now. When those kids are 25 years old, how much of what we have done will they take for granted? The transition from generation to generation is always the challenge.
And because Calvinists have been so successful and they work so hard, they oftentimes bequeath substantial resources to their grandchildren and great-grandchildren. And, as it says in Deuteronomy, “Jeshurun waxed fat, and kicked.”
Douthat: But maybe, if in that work, they restrain themselves slightly from certain excesses of zeal and intolerance, they might be so fortunate as to see their great-grandchildren become, not secularists, but merely Roman Catholics.
Wilson: But here’s the good news: I am holding back. [Laughs.]
Douthat: All right. On that note, Doug Wilson, thank you for joining me.
Wilson: Thank you.
Thoughts? Email us at [email protected].
This episode of “Interesting Times” was produced by Raina Raskin, Victoria Chamberlin, Andrea Betanzos and Sophia Alvarez Boyd. It was edited by Jordana Hochman. Mixing and engineering by Pat McCusker and Sophia Lanman. Cinematography by Marina King, Valeria Verastegui and Nathan Taylor. Video editing by Jan Kobal, Dani Dillon and Arpita Aneja. Original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker and Aman Sahota. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair, Michelle Harris and Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Video directed by Jonah M. Kessel. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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Ross Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for The Times since 2009. He is also the host of the Opinion podcast “Interesting Times.” He is the author, most recently, of “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.” @DouthatNYT • Facebook
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