Pastor Douglas Wilson of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, made waves online after arguing against women’s right to vote in a video last week.
In the video, Wilson seemed to frame the ratification of the 19th Amendment as a repudiation of the institution of the family and a man’s duty to represent his family in the public sphere.
Wilson has long been a controversial figure—both inside and outside the evangelical movement—for his charitable views of Christian nationalism and American chattel slavery, how his church has handled allegations of sexual abuse, and his methods for engaging culture, referred to by some as the “Moscow mood.”
“The problem can be called by many names,” Wilson said at the beginning of the video. “The men of our generation have had a failure of nerve. They have abdicated their responsibilities, and we are consequently in the midst of a crisis of leadership.”
“Men have fallen, to use the biblical term, into the sin of unbelief,” Wilson added. Wilson said that men have not kept God’s covenant and thus “have no way of comprehending the cultural chaos, which surrounds us.”
Wilson went on to argue that “God always deals with men by way of covenant.”
“These covenants are a solemn bond, sovereignly administered with attendant blessings and curses,” Wilson said before highlighting the covenants God made with Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and David in the Hebrew Scriptures.
“[These covenants] are all part of the one great, unfolding covenant of grace, which finds its final, great fulfillment in the passion and work of the Lord Jesus Christ,” Wilson said. He then argued that humanity is fundamentally oriented to operate by means of covenants—particularly the covenant of marriage, the “institution of the church,” and the “civil order.”
Wilson said that these institutions have been established “by the hand of God” and that “the covenanted institutions of church and civil society are made up of covenanted family units.” He further argued that families “constitute a molecular strength in the makeup” of the institutions of church and civil government.
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“Because of the crisis of masculinity in the home, that representation is not being offered by our households, and if it were being offered, it would be received by our civil order only with laughter and by an ignorant theological indignation in our churches,” Wilson said. “In short, we all, from top to bottom, are in high rebellion against God’s design for family and culture.”
