Idaho Pastor responds to allegations of Christian nationalism
MOSCOW, Idaho (KIFI) – Christian nationalism is proving to be a hot topic in Idaho.
Following The City Club of Idaho Falls' forum on Christian nationalism Tuesday, Local News 8 reporter David Pace reached out to Idaho Pastor Doug Wilson to see if he feels the ideas presented there accurately represent his faith.
You can listen to the full, unedited interview below.
Much of Tuesday’s community forum focused on Christ Church, a Moscow-based congregation of 1,300 people that is part of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC).
“If they said, are you a Christian nationalist? I would say yes, depending on what you mean. So if you mean someone who wants an authoritarian dictatorship and missile parades and dictators with mirrored sunglasses, no, I'm not a Christian nationalist,” Wilson said. “If you're asking whether or not I believe that America should return to her Christian roots, I would say yes.”
The faith has risen in prominence as U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth attends an affiliated church.
“One aspect of Christian theology applied to politics would be the necessity of limited government,” Wilson said. “So the first thing that would happen is that I’d want to defund 90 percent of it [the government].”
Wilson said he does support the separation of church and state – meaning that he does not believe in a state-sponsored church.
“One of the principal objections that the Christian nationalists have to the existing government is that it's aspiring to be God. It's aspiring to deity,” he said. “They want to film you at every traffic stop. They wanted to film you at every intersection. hey want to record every keystroke. They want to listen to every conversation – they're aspiring to omniscience. They want to be God."
"I'm fond of telling people, ‘If there is no God above the state, the state becomes God," he continued. "And I don’t want the state to be God.”
His church believes in “planting churches, training ministers, planting Christian schools and teaching civics to kids.”
Today, there are more than 400 Association of Classical and Christian Schools patterned after Christ Church’s Logos School in Moscow, he said.
Wilson is a proponent of household voting – where each household has one vote, which is how his church operates.
While he has been criticized that this disenfranchises women, he clarified that single women and women who are heads of households do vote in this system and in his congregation.
Wilson addressed controversy and criticism of his teachings on race, marriage and family relations, and said these are often misquoted or taken out of context.
He said he does not, however, apologize for the teachings of the Bible.
You can view our full unedited interview above.
