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We Should All Fear Pete Hegseth’s Anti-Woman Pastor [1]
['Sarah Stankorb', 'Writer Reporting On Religion', 'Politics']
Date: 2025-08-13 15:41:27.473000-04:00
Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images
“Women are the kind of people that people come out of.”
That’s according to Douglas Wilson, an influential pastor and self-described Christian nationalist who recently sat for an interview with CNN’s Pamela Brown that was full of shockingly retrograde sound bites. One of Wilson’s fellow pastors told Brown, “In my ideal society, we would vote as households, and I would ordinarily be the one to cast the vote”; another straight-up endorsed repealing the 19th Amendment. Social media quickly lit up with memes of the “say what now?” expression on Brown’s face in response to Wilson’s comments and disbelief that a pastor in his orbit would so boldly declare that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote. Defense secretary Pete Hegseth, though, approvingly retweeted Wilson’s interview, adding the mission statement for the pastor’s church: “All of Christ for All of Life.”
The statements Wilson and his fellow pastors made in this interview — and that Hegseth appears to support — are more than ominous suggestions. In their churches, these men are already modeling what it would be like to live under Christian nationalism and for women to live under more deeply entrenched patriarchy. Wilson serves as the spiritual authority for the Moscow, Idaho–based Christ Church, nicknamed the Kirk, as well as a denomination he started, called the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), which totals over 130 churches across four continents. His congregants treat his words not as opinion but as logical extrapolations from scripture – including when he argues in his book, Her Hand in Marriage, that a woman’s submission to her husband protects her from having to submit to other men. Women who insist on no masculine protection, Wilson writes, “are really women who tacitly agree on the propriety of rape.”
In the same CNN segment, Wilson’s fellow pastors Toby Sumpter and Jared Longshore elaborated to Brown the practice of householder voting, where the “head” of each family — who is usually male, unless the head of household is a widow — votes on its behalf. This is already the norm in churches like theirs. Cait West, who grew up in churches influenced by Wilson, described in her memoir Rift how, as head of household, her father voted for her in congregational meetings. In her experience, the cultlike deference to male church leaders trickled down to the family unit: “In the case of Christian (or biblical) patriarchy, the cult leader is each family’s father, deemed prophet, priest, and king of the household,” she writes.
That infrastructure of submission creates a high-control religious situation in which women who fail to submit at home can be brought before church elders for discipline. In his book Federal Husband, Wilson argues that the first time a wife does not do the dishes, her husband should gently remind her, but if she “continues to rebel,” then he should call in the elders. As ridiculous as this may seem, it’s no small threat for a woman whose entire social circle may consist of her congregation to come under church discipline, which is a sign of lost favor with the church, and in turn, God.
In her memoir A Well-Trained Wife, Tia Levings, who belonged to a CREC church, claims that she and her husband began using “domestic discipline” — meaning he spanked her — after he read Wilson’s books, including Reforming Marriage, where Wilson writes that “wives need to be led with a firm hand.” Wilson does not implicitly advocate wife-spanking in his books, although he does endorse spanking children. But Levings says her husband drew his authority from Wilson’s writing and further justified it with other material he was reading about corporal punishment. Levings believes her now-ex-husband’s authoritarian control was made more dangerous as he spiraled with paranoia and anger. In one of the worst of her ex’s rages, she writes how he spewed, “He should kill me; he should kill all of us; he should send us to our maker.”
While Wilson has maintained that he doesn’t “condone rape,” his writings muddy the waters around consent for his followers. He wrote in Fidelity that our modern culture’s lack of proper roles of authority and submission results in pathologies such as bondage games and rape fantasies. Per Wilson, this is why “men dream of being rapists, and women find themselves wistfully reading novels in which someone ravishes the ‘soon to be made willing’ heroine.” In his opinion, “the sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party.” He writes that “a man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants,” while a “woman receives, surrenders, accepts” and that “true authority and true submission are therefore an erotic necessity.”
In years of reporting on survivors from Wilson’s world, including for my book Disobedient Women, I have heard from multiple current and former Christ Church members, or Kirkers, that they did not believe they could say no to their husbands’ sexual entreaties. These women described domestic or sexual violence within a structure in which they felt unable to refuse their husbands or challenge wrongdoing; some allege their abuse was mishandled by pastors who served as their counselors. One woman told me that Wilson advised her in marriage counseling to become a master of female sexuality in order to keep her husband. She said her husband had been threatening to sleep with someone else if she didn’t sleep with him, during a period in which he oscillated between manic behaviors and had hit and threatened her. When I reached out to Wilson for this story, I asked about his reporting habits around abuse and women who say his theology created a situation in which they felt compelled to submit to sex. He wrote that my questions were “a gross misrepresentation of what we both teach and do” and that he would be happy to explain how to “anyone who asked in good faith.” He did not respond to further requests for comment but did elaborate a bit further when Brown asked about whether his religious beliefs support sexual or spousal abuse: “If there is sexual abuse or violent abuse, other forms of misbehavior, I believe that other authorities, sometimes the cops, sometimes the elders of the church, sometimes other family members, extended family members, need to intervene to protect the woman or to protect the children.”
It’s tempting to wave off Wilson and these damaging patriarchal beliefs as being on the far fringe of mainstream Christianity. This is a pastor who not only called women’s votes into question, but also told CNN’s Brown that he would like to see homosexuality recriminalized and that he believes some slave owners were “decent human beings.”
But Wilson is no longer a marginalized figure. He’d already established something of a fiefdom that includes a college, a seminary, and a K–12 school in Moscow that draw Kirkers to the region. He also founded the Association of Classical Christian Schools (ACCS), which now boasts over 500 schools, including one attended by Hegseth’s children. Hegseth said in 2024 on the Wilson-adjacent podcast CrossPolitic that such classical Christian schools could help lead an “educational insurgency,” while Sumpter described them as “boot camps for winning back America.” And Wilson has been getting closer and closer to power centers in Trump’s Washington over the last year. He had his first speaking engagement at National Conservatism, an event that’s influential in nationalist circles and regularly features J.D. Vance. In July, Hegseth attended opening Sunday at CREC’s new church in Washington, D.C., where Longshore preached that “worship is warfare.” And now, Wilson’s landed on CNN, broadcasting the message that he and his fellow CREC pastors have been preaching for years: that women need to submit to men and shouldn’t be guaranteed the vote, lest exercising their rights lead to a total breakdown of their family units and our society as a whole. Except it’s no longer a scatter of thousands of congregants or casual readers of Wilson’s books, but the entire nation that’s receiving that message — and a close ally of the president is amplifying it.
While the Defense Department did not respond to a request for comment, the Pentagon emailed a statement to NPR that said Hegseth is a proud member of a church affiliated with CREC and that “the Secretary very much appreciates many of Mr. Wilson’s writings and teachings.” Some of those “teachings” that Hegseth promotes systematically target and harm women, as Wilson’s former followers have told me. They lost their friends and their faith and became estranged from their families in leaving his church, and they’ve been trying to warn the rest of us for years about his insidious ideology. It’s time to take their stories seriously, before Wilson, Hegseth, and their ilk realize their project of shaping America into their vision of Christian patriarchy.
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[1] Url:
https://www.thecut.com/article/pete-hegseth-christ-church-doug-wilson-women-voting.html?utm_campaign=nym&utm_medium=s1&utm_source=twitter
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