Christian nationalists aim to remake the U.S. in their image, starting with this Idaho town

Doug Wilson spent decades wandering in the American wilderness, a pastor searching for congregants, followers, even sparring partners who could give him a platform to present his new vision for his country and its churches.

Little about Mr. Wilson suggested he would find what he was looking for. He was a walking and talking anachronism, possessed of a thick beard and a dense theology that drew on the thoughts of 16th-century Protestant Reformers. His church hymnals brimmed with 18th-century songs, their lyrics written to bolster the very British empire the U.S. violently rejected at its birth.

He insisted on holding beliefs that, each year, grew further out of step with the mainstream: Women should not be allowed to vote, with the ballot reserved for households, generally those led by men; gay people should practise celibacy; the United States should be a Christian nation, hostile to those of other faiths, its towns stripped of minarets and Hindu statues.

Those who disagreed with him he called “intoleristas.” Women whose dress and views he found objectionable he ridiculed as “cartoon twinkies,” “sluts,” “harridans,” “small-breasted biddies” and worse, all the while preaching a gospel that, he said, wants women to be ”domestic and enjoying it.”

Even geography placed him at the fringe. He built his church in Moscow, a small city in the rural reaches of eastern Idaho, a place distant from the nearest city or even the nearest interstate.

For decades, Mr. Wilson was a Christian nationalist in a nation that paid him little heed.

Yet the Idaho preacher is no longer a voice in the wilderness. In the 1990s, he counted three congregations in the Calvinist denomination he founded, the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches. He’s now at 170, with a global church body in the tens of thousands, including in Canada. Podcasters and YouTubers are bringing his brand of Christianity to new audiences. Developers are acquiring land in places such as rural Tennessee to build communities filled with people who share those views. Young couples − the men mostly bearded, the women mostly in long dresses − are crowding church sanctuaries.

One is in Washington, D.C., a new church whose congregants include U.S. Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth and more than a dozen members of the Trump administration, many of them from the Pentagon. In February, Mr. Wilson was invited there to pray − the Christian nationalist now at the heart of the country’s power.

Mr. Wilson calls it all a new moment for the U.S., as the philosophies he developed in Idaho take root in the capital and far beyond. The Washington service “has only been going for a little over a year. Which means, as church plants go, this is wildly successful. So − very pleased. Very happy,” he said. And “even though Trump is not himself an evangelical Christian, the administration is crawling with them,” he added. “A number of them are also from our circles.”

It is the time, he said, of “the Moscow mood.”

Mr. Wilson and the expanding ranks of those swept up by that sentiment see godlessness as a fundamental sickness of the American people. The cure, they believe, can only be found in drawing this country, and others, into close adherence to the dictates of a Christian God.

To do that, they are proposing a wholesale restructuring of American democracy, stripping away rights that have taken centuries to establish while bringing a halt to immigration and sharply curtailing the number of women in positions of authority.

Those ideas have found favour among people who think their country would be better off if it went back to the way they say it was. Across the U.S., a third of Americans either adhere to or sympathize with Christian nationalism, the Public Religion Research Institute found in a report released earlier this year. More than half of weekly churchgoers share those views, which are held by fully two-thirds of white evangelical Protestants.

Mr. Wilson has tapped into a politically potent notion, that the U.S. has changed too much, too fast − in its embrace of people whose gender does not fit a neat binary, in the spaces it has made for those who do not bend the knee to a Christian God. It is a nostalgia-steeped outlook not dissimilar from the sentiments that propelled Donald Trump into office − twice.

Mr. Trump, too, has sought to repudiate elements of the postwar order, the lengthy era of international liberalism that brought free trade, global institutions of health and development and a social reordering around equal rights.

The rise of Mr. Wilson’s church points to a desire among some to go further. His followers want to revive obscenity laws to mandate modesty of dress for women and prohibit, among other things, the wearing of bikinis around children. They want to ban pornography, force new would-be citizens into a lengthy probation period and overturn the Civil Rights Act, the landmark legislation that outlawed many forms of discrimination. Some are open to the idea of executing adulterers.

Tens of millions voted for Mr. Trump’s promises to restore America to some form of the past, casting ballots in protest against demographic change through immigration and social change through policies to protect minority interests.

But the Moscow mood, catchy as it has proven to some, is also testing the limits of that revolt. How far are voters willing to turn back the clock? At what point will they balk? That question will inform the direction of U.S. politics in the coming years − and more immediately in the midterm elections this November.

Until now, the most fervent Christian nationalists have demonstrated an inability to win even the lowest political offices in the country. Their expansion efforts have encountered stiff local opposition. Mr. Wilson has been dismissed as obsolescent, misogynistic and perhaps even heretical. Critics have suggested the country Mr. Wilson envisions resembles a nation under Taliban rule. It’s a movement that represents “the patriarchy run wild,” said Nicholas Gier, an emeritus professor of politics at the University of Idaho in Moscow who taught Mr. Wilson when he was a student.

Mr. Wilson, though, sees his project as altogether less radical, a mere return to a moment before the dawn of the progressive age. “It sounds to me like 1942 America,” he said. “We have lost so much. In the mid-20th century, before everything went to pieces, we were a decidedly Western, industrialized Christian nation.”

He is determined to get that back.

It’s “about Christian nationalism,” he said, “and returning America to our Christian roots.”

On a Sunday morning in a northern suburb of Nashville, the congregation gathers at Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowship. Visitors are greeted with a smile and a hymnal. In the past, they might also have been met with a view of Mr. Hegseth, who called this church home before leaving Tennessee to become one of the most influential men in the country.

But even without the Defence Secretary, this church and others that belong to Mr. Wilson’s denomination possess another kind of power: youth. The pews are filled with young couples and children. The septuagenarian Mr. Wilson jokes that the average age in his churches is 12.

It is a striking paradox: the youth of a new generation, brought together by belief in old ways.

One of them is Joshua Haymes, the Oklahoma-raised son of a Southern Baptist preacher. A half-decade ago, he was a young man in ministry, trying to build a new church in Los Angeles, an attempt to spread the Christian gospel in a liberal city.

Then the pandemic took hold, bringing with it lockdowns and restrictions that angered him. The response of the mainstream church made him angrier still. Many congregations stopped meeting in person, heeding government calls to slow the spread of the coronavirus. Mr. Haymes wanted them to resist. Those who failed to do so, he concluded, wanted to be nice rather than right.

“That was the church’s opportunity to be a stalwart, to hold the line on biblical truth in the midst of all the cultural upheaval and the cultural chaos. And they didn’t,” he said.

That’s when he took notice of Mr. Wilson, who spurned mandates to cancel in-person services during the pandemic.

Public health authorities called those actions reckless and lawless. Mr. Haymes saw a church leader with a steely faith and found himself longing for something far from the novelties of modern society, distant from the “concerts and TED talks” of mainstream evangelical churches. He moved to Tennessee to join Pilgrim Hill.

“Give me something old. Give me something rooted in history. Give me something that’s been true for a long time,” he said.

It was, for Mr. Haymes, a quick mental trip from that religious awakening to a political one.

“At its founding, this country is Protestant. It’s our history, it’s our heritage,” he said. “But it’s been squandered.”

The notion that the United States was fundamentally a Christian project is far from settled fact, contradicted by, among other documents, the U.S. Constitution, which makes no mention of Christianity and directs only that Congress leave religion alone.

Mr. Haymes has no such concerns.

“I believe this is the theology that can save America,” he said.

He has dedicated himself to spreading that word, with podcasts, videos and regular social media commentary that reaches a combined digital audience, he says, in the hundreds of thousands. To those prepared to listen, he proposes how a Christian America could right liberal wrongs.

He calls the Civil Rights Act an unconstitutional rewrite of American life that forced racial integration on the country. Immigration, he says, should be completely halted for 20 years, “maybe 100.” Prospective citizens should be subject to a “thin ice policy” − they would be quickly deported for any infraction seen as degrading “our culture, our way of life.” Voting rights should be limited to “married, land-owning men who can trace their citizenship back three generations.”

The death penalty should be immediately applied, through public execution, to those found guilty of murder, rape, child molestation and, possibly, adultery.

When it comes to the law of the land, the only guardrails, he said, ”are the holy scripture, in my view.”

Not far from Nashville, another group is working to build that vision in wood and concrete. They’re also provoking a backlash.

The drone camera passes over a burbling creek and onto Tennessee farmland drenched in green, fringed with forest and bursting with birdsong. It is empty, but inviting, a place Josh Abbotoy hopes will one day become a rural home for a group of like-minded Christians.

At its heart, the plans suggest, will be a church pastored by Andrew Isker, a man who studied at a school founded by Mr. Wilson in Moscow and who worked alongside the Idaho pastor. Any parishioners willing to buy in can build their own home alongside that church, creating a community that turns Sunday gatherings into everyday life.

What Mr. Abbotoy is selling is a transfiguration into real estate of the ideas that have drawn others to Mr. Wilson’s church, a search for old patterns in a new age.

The company Mr. Abbotoy founded, RidgeRunner, has bought a handful of properties in Kentucky and Tennessee with space to build a hundred homes. Customers are coming, he said, half of them “from California. Bunch of them are from the Bay area.”

“The more virtual your work is, the more you feel a need to counterbalance that with a lifestyle that’s very authentic and stripped-down,” he said.

Gainesboro would seem an ideal place for Mr. Abbotoy. The small town of 1,000 is the seat of Jackson County, which in 2024 cast more than 80 per cent of its votes for Mr. Trump.

Mr. Isker, the Idaho-trained pastor who has already moved here, is, like the U.S. President, unafraid of standing against mainstream thought. He advocates televised “public corporal punishment,” wants to eliminate no-fault divorce and calls postsecondary education “a gay race communism factory for young women.” He wants women out of the military, likens universal suffrage to “civilizational su*c*de” and once wrote on social media: “Repeal the 20th Century.”

Mr. Abbotoy has expressed similar views. On social media, he has suggested the time has come for Christian dictatorship. “Basically, America is going to need a Protestant Franco,” he wrote on X. Christianity, he added, should be ”America’s public orthodoxy.”

But in person he offered a warmer taste of why some find repealing modernity so palatable.

He met with a reporter in a “barndominium” he had recently acquired in Gainesboro, a simple building equipped with a podcast studio, a heady selection of whiskey and a few containers of moonshine, from which he pours a round and reflects on early settlers.

“They started making this stuff, like, as soon as they showed up here,” he said between sips of the clear firewater, a musty concoction still made locally and traded between friends. “It’s, like, what are the first things? ‘I’m going to build a church, a school and a still.’”

How, he wondered, could anyone find fault with that?

If anyone should find that vision compelling, it is Rayn Galloway. She is a 38-year-old, white Tennessee woman raised in the Jackson County community of Nameless, where her father fashioned the first fire truck out of a school bus and cattle water tank. She voted three times for Mr. Trump. She believes her husband is the head of their household. She operates a fireworks business, too.

“By God, I sell pyro. I’m as ’Murika as it gets,” she said. And “I am a submitted wife. If you wanted to pretend I was a white Christian nationalist, I would be a poster child.”

But Ms. Galloway has instead become a committed opponent. As people like Mr. Isker have moved into the place she calls home, she has spent the better part of 100 hours listening to podcasts and reading books by the movement’s public faces − and has grown profoundly uncomfortable with what she has found.

“They want to take us back to pre-Civil War-era America. And I look at pre-Civil War America and say, ‘Wow, don’t think you really realize what that means,’” she said.

She grew up in a church attended by Ghanaians and Ugandans. She cannot fathom telling them, “You don’t belong here, because this is a white nation.” Nor does she believe the law should harshly reject abortion or homosexual relationships. “Do I think that people who love people of the same sex deserve to be imprisoned, or their lives torn apart? Absolutely not.”

The Christian nationalists say they want to restore things to the way they were. But Ms. Galloway has personal experience of what that means. She grew up in a homesteading family. The walls of her family home were not completed until she reached the fifth grade.

“What they’re selling to everybody, I pretty much lived it,” she said. “Like, you are trying to pretend to be like me − but you’re a poseur.”

Her dislike for the new arrivals is so strong that she has contemplated running for local office to block those moving to the area from positions of influence. It would not take much: County commissioners have won primary elections with as few as 56 votes.

But even small acts of protest can have consequences. Across Gainesboro and nearby towns, a group of local residents, some with lengthy historical ties to the area, have become determined to make their communities unwelcoming to Christian nationalism.

At one point, people staged a sit-in at the Gainesboro Dairy Queen, occupying seats on a morning the newly arrived Christian nationalists had set to join a Bible study meeting. The chamber of commerce refused membership to RidgeRunner. The chair of the local county’s Republican Party has been critical. Local investors have bought up properties to keep them from falling into RidgeRunner hands, three people from the community told The Globe and Mail.

“Their beliefs are so foreign from the general public,” said Jane Forkum, a retired teacher in Gainesboro. “We’re all real uneasy.”

The Christian nationalists can, however, also point to local support.

Tyrone Bowman, a local resident who works in manufacturing, sees his Tennessee home as a sanctuary from problems in bigger cities, where “they want to have a copy of the Quran in the library, but you can’t have a Bible. That’s backwards.”

When he looks to the people RidgeRunner is working to attract, “Christian values is something they bring here,” Mr. Bowman said. “And I can’t see how it’s a bad thing.”

But others are skeptical.

In the nearby town of Celina, where RidgeRunner has donated to a veterans’ monument, Mayor Luke Collins was so worried about what the company represents that he marched into its office to demand answers.

“I just asked them point blank if they hated Black people, if they hated Jewish people. They told me they didn’t hate anybody, that they were in the business of selling property,” Mr. Collins said. He came away convinced.

“They may be Nazis,” he said, but “I didn’t see it.”

Still, “I’ve got four daughters, and anybody that thinks that women shouldn’t have the right to vote, they are selfish.”

It was, after all, the state of Tennessee that cast the deciding vote to adopt the 19th Amendment. Now some here struggle to understand how the desire to overturn it is sprouting here.

“It’s just regressing 100 years of progress,” said Kent Birdwell, whose family is among the oldest in the area. His great-grandfather and great-uncle opened a community bank in 1916. The family’s land sits near one of RidgeRunner’s Tennessee properties.

A registered Republican, Mr. Birdwell worries that his family home has become a testbed for a new generation determined to wipe away decades of social achievement. He can sense the Moscow mood − and it worries him.

“If the community doesn’t become more aware and have the courage to speak up, we’re going to replace Moscow before we know it,” Mr. Birdwell said.

“Since they haven’t been successful there, they’re going to try to be successful here.”

In the fall of 1985, a young preacher put his name on the ballot for city council in Moscow, Idaho. Doug Wilson had already made a name for himself trying, unsuccessfully, to ban pornography from local stores. He wanted council to force shopkeepers to hide any porn they were selling. The city, he said, should also create a legal definition of obscenity, a step toward regulating smut.

Mr. Wilson was one of six candidates. When the votes were counted, he came in last.

The young pastor turned his attention to building up his church community instead, constructing what Politico once called a ”theocratic regime,” an empire with Moscow as its capital.

But after a half-century in pursuit of a Christian nation, Mr. Wilson has little to show for his efforts in the local political firmament. No church member sits on Moscow city council or the county commission. Local politicians cannot recall a church representative being elected to any public office.

“Up until now, they’ve been unknowns outside of church and school circles,” said Kenton Bird, a retired journalism professor in Moscow who has followed local politics for many decades.

And if “you can’t do it in Moscow, Idaho, how are you going to take America back?” asked Michael Horton, a professor of theology at Westminster Seminary in California. He believes the outlook for Mr. Wilson’s ambitions depends “largely on the MAGA movement and power in Washington in the current administration.”

And he’s not convinced it’s here to stay. “I wonder if the whole thing will just fall apart after this administration.”

Other churches, too, are rebuking Mr. Wilson’s beliefs. Christian nationalism is “in opposition to the gospel of Jesus Christ,” the Reformed Church in America declared in mid-June. ”We are called to influence the public square through persuasion rather than coercion,” the church said.

At the same time, the political imprint of Christian nationalism is growing clearer. For now, at least, the Moscow mood is gaining strength. It’s happening in legislatures like the one in Boise, which has already passed legislation obligating teachers to inform parents if they spot signs of gender transition in their children. And the state has called on the Supreme Court to overturn the decision that legalized gay marriage.

It means that in Idaho, like elsewhere, moves toward Christian nationalism are “already happening,” Mr. Gier said.

Some candidates, too, are finding new strength. In late May, Colton Bennett, an Idaho conservative who has been openly supported by Mr. Wilson, won a primary election to become a Republican candidate for the state legislature. He declined to answer when asked whether he belongs to a congregation affiliated with Mr. Wilson, saying his supporters “go to a variety of churches and some go to no church at all. I am grateful for the support of all these people, religious and otherwise,” he said.

But Mr. Gier called Mr. Bennett’s election “a major victory for them.” In this part of Idaho, he is expected to “cruise to easy victory.”

Mr. Wilson, for his part, says having the church on city council is not yet a goal − although it will be.

“The plan is to establish Moscow as a Christian town within the next 50 years. I would say we’re right on schedule,” he said. By that point, he expects half of the local population to be in church on Sunday, one of many steps toward building the U.S. as a superpower of Christendom.

At the beginning, his church numbered 30 people in Moscow. It now counts 100 times that in the region. Kids attend Christian schools, study Christian textbooks and play Christian football under the guidance of Christian coaches − all of them men, “because the boys wouldn’t listen” to women, Mr. Wilson said.

He recalled building his vision from books in the 1980s. “Now, I can see it with my eyes,” he said.

“I can see how it could take shape, because I see it taking shape.”

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