Doug Wilson defends appearance at Pentagon, dismisses 1A concerns

Pastor Douglas Wilson lately defended his look at a worship service on the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, final week, and pushed again towards considerations that such public prayer in a authorities house is a violation of the U.S. Structure.

Wilson, the senior pastor of Christ Church (CREC) in Moscow, Idaho, delivered a sermon final Tuesday on the request of Secretary of Warfare Pete Hegseth, who has attended the church plant of Wilson’s denomination, the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Church buildings (CREC), in Washington, D.C.

Beneath Hegseth’s tenure, the Pentagon has offered a month-to-month voluntary Christian worship service for service members, prompting criticism from detractors who fear the providers run afoul of the “separation of church and state,” which is a phrase from a private letter written by Thomas Jefferson.

In a Monday publish on his weblog, “Blog & Mablog,” Wilson stated CNN anchor and chief investigative correspondent Pamela Brown reached out to him after the service to ask if he had any response to criticisms that his “appearance is a broader part of the administration eroding the longstanding separation of church and state in the U.S.”

Wilson posted his reply to Brown, claiming that the “actions taken by the Secretary of War in starting this prayer service are disrupting the ‘longstanding separation of church and state,’ but only if ‘longstanding’ is limited to recent decades.”

“From the Founding of the republic it was not so. Worship services used to be held in the Capitol building, starting before the building was completed, and lasting up until the Civil War. Worshipers in that place included such worthies as Jefferson and Madison,” he added.

Brown has lately been selling her documentary “The Rise of Christian Nationalism,” which she claimed was a “special project” that took her a number of months. The documentary, which is ready to air March 8 on CNN, goals to look at what Brown outlined as “an ideology rooted in the belief that our country was founded as a Christian nation, and that our laws and institutions should reflect Christian values.”

The documentary can also be poised to research the affect of the Affiliation of Classical Christian Faculties (ACCS), a company that has ties to Wilson and whose president, David Goodwin, advised Brown that he helps dismantling the U.S. Division of Schooling and want to see the general public college system go away.

Brown additionally interviewed Wilson final August, throughout which the pastor claimed “every society is theocratic,” including, “The only question is, whose ‘theo’? In Saudi Arabia, theo is Allah. In a secular democracy, it would be ‘demos,’ the people. In a Christian republic, it’d be Christ. … If I went to Saudi Arabia, I would fully expect to live under their god’s rules.” Wilson has raised eyebrows for supporting a repeal of the nineteenth Modification enfranchising ladies and for supporting the criminalization of homosexuality.

In his Monday weblog publish, Wilson went on to clarify that the Institution Clause of the First Modification to the U.S. Structure was merely meant to ban a federally backed state church in a nation of many Christian denominations, however famous that some states retained their established church buildings on the time.

“To establish an official Church of the United States — a thing that Congress is forbidden to do — means that the following sorts of things would happen. A particular denomination of Christians would be selected, say, the Presbyterians, or the Anglicans, or the Congregationalists, and that church would be made the official denomination of the country,” he wrote.

“The bald eagle is the national bird, the national flower is the rose, the national anthem is The Star Spangled Banner, and the national denomination would be whatever church you chose. As a consequence, that church would receive official benefits, such as having their ministers paid by the state. Your tithe would be bundled into your tax payments.”

Wilson warned that whereas having established church buildings is biblically acceptable, such is probably going “not the wisest course of action,” provided that even established church buildings are topic to apostasy.

“You have your established church, and you may laud its [Anglican] heroes like [Hugh] Latimer and [Nicholas] Ridley, and you are living out good deeds yourself, but time flies by, and you turn around to find some dame is the archbishop,” he wrote.

“So while I don’t think hard establishment is a good idea at the state level, an originalist view of the Constitution means that it is not an unconstitutional idea. I would be opposed to such a thing politically, not constitutionally. I would have no constitutional argument against it at all.”

Wilson stated he most well-liked what he described as “a soft establishment [of Christianity] at the national level,” which he argued could be the pure consequence “when you simply acknowledge the existence of a broad Christian consensus.”

Wilson has embraced the “Christian nationalist” label prior to now whereas pushing again towards its pejorative connotations. Throughout an interview with Tucker Carlson in 2024, he positioned the onus for restoring Christianity within the U.S. on preachers “who will stop being ashamed of the name of Jesus, and preach the Gospel as though it’s supposed to spread out into the streets after the service.”

Wilson lately fielded harsh criticism from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who penned a prolonged article in The Atlantic final month likening President Donald Trump to Nero and Caligula whereas suggesting Wilson embodies a brand new “MAGA faith,” which she claimed is morally rotten and finds its roots in misogyny.