Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism--and What Comes Next

by Bradley Onishi

Doug Wilson has been building a Christian supremacist empire in Moscow, Idaho, since the late 1970s. Over the last half century, he has made it his goal to make the town of twenty-five thousand into a Christian town where the schools, city government, and businesses are controlled by evangelicals. Wilson is the controversial founder of Christ Church, a congregation that is more than a church. In Moscow, Christ Church has established a day school, a liberal arts college, and a media center from which Wilson spreads his message via radio, podcast, and his prolific writing. He has written over thirty books. His homeschooling network includes nearly two hundred schools across the country. Crawford Gribben, a scholar of religion who has written extensively about the church and Wilson, observes: “Followers believe that abortion rights and same-sex marriage, among other evidences of what they would see as moral decline, will eventually be repealed. Their goal is simple—the conversion of the people of Moscow to their way of thinking as the first step toward the conversion of the world.” Wilson has made waves in the past for his views on slavery. In Southern Slavery as It Was, coauthored with Steve Wilkins, Wilson argues that “slavery as it existed in the South . . . was a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence. There has never been a multiracial society which has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world.” The authors go on to say t...