Why Is Pete Hegseth Purging Women From Command? Doug Wilson Is Why.
He preaches holy war, iron discipline, and male dominance. And one of his disciples runs the Pentagon.
Kiera Butler
On a brilliantly sunny day in early May, I found myself in Moscow, Idaho, eating brunch with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s spiritual leader, Doug Wilson.
We dove into the quiche, studded with bits of bacon and onion, prepared by his wife, Nancy, as we sat in the sun-drenched breakfast nook of their compound, high on a hill above rolling farmland. The emerald-green wheat fields below looked like a golf course for giants.
Wilson, a self-proclaimed Christian nationalist, is the 73-year-old senior pastor and founder of Christ Church, a congregation of approximately 3,000 in Moscow. But his influence extends far beyond this small town. Wilson has spoken at high-profile conservative events, including the 2024 National Conservatism conference, where then-Sen. JD Vance was also a headliner. He appeared on a political strategy panel with Russell Vought, President Donald Trump’s Office of Management and Budget director and a key architect of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 conservative blueprint. He’s also the co-creator of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, a global network of 160 congregations—including the one Hegseth attends in Washington, DC. A few months before my visit to Idaho, Hegseth had invited Wilson to the Pentagon to deliver a sermon to troops and officials on the importance of faith in times of war.
A core tenet of Wilson’s beliefs is that a patriarchal society, what he calls “biblical masculinity,” is both a religious mandate and “cultural gluten,” as he wrote in his 2023 book, Mere Christendom. “Without it, the cookie just crumbles to pieces in your hand, and is tasteless on top of that.” In a previous book, Fidelity: How to Be a One-Woman Man, he wrote: “The sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.” For that reason, he went on, the dynamic of a dominant man and a submissive woman is “an erotic necessity.” As Wilson put it in an interview with CNN last year: “Women are the kind of people that people come out of.”
He also has called feminists “a large army of singularly unattractive and bitchy women” and said women serving in the military are “loathsome” to God—an observation that may inform Hegseth’s hostility to women in senior military leadership. In all matters, he believes, wives should defer to their husbands, the “covenant heads” of the family. Women shouldn’t assume church leadership roles, or speak in church, and heads of households, overwhelmingly male, should vote on behalf of their entire families.
For the last two years, as I’ve covered the rise of Christian nationalism, Wilson and I have developed a mildly adversarial email rapport. I ask questions; he answers, sometimes working in a little dig, like calling Mother Jones a “commie publication.”
As Hegseth was bragging about his “kinetic strikes” on narco-terrorist vessels and then launching the attack on Iran, I began to realize that the secretary’s determination to eradicate “woke” from the US military tracks consistently with Wilson’s teaching of a warrior-like Christian faith. So I decided it was time Wilson and I met in person. I invited myself to Moscow, and he graciously accepted. Over the course of my five-day trip, I had unprecedented access to the world he has carefully built, which serves as a model for what he imagines a Christian United States might someday look like.
I would meet happy and prosperous families in Wilson’s realm, but also witness aspects of his faith’s exacting standards and obsession with discipline that align closely with Hegseth’s enthusiastic embrace of US military aggression and shed light on what it means for biblical masculinity to become the so-called Department of War’s defining ethic.
“God has called men to be aggressive leaders. If they fail to follow through, then they are disobeying God.”
For Wilson’s followers, manliness isn’t optional. Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a professor of history at Calvin University in Michigan, has spent much of the last decade studying Wilson and his domain. In his view, “God has called men to be aggressive leaders,” she told me. “If they fail to follow through, then they are disobeying God.”
At first glance, Moscow, home to the University of Idaho’s flagship campus, looks like a quintessential couches-on-porches kind of college town, with ample coffee shops, cozy diners, and homages to the school mascot, a cartoon character named Joe Vandal. I arrived just before graduation, when there was a palpable giddiness in the air. As the breeze picked up white tufts of cottonwood seeds, it looked as though a down pillow factory had exploded. Tattooed and pierced students buzzed about in clusters.
But as I wandered around, I noticed another Moscow, one in which Wilson’s influence is omnipresent. On one downtown corner is a brick building housing New Saint Andrews College, which he helped found, where clean-cut young men in button-downs and khakis and women in crisp blouses and knee-length skirts milled about. Nearby are the offices of Canon Press, his book publisher. One of Wilson’s spinoff churches, King’s Cross, hosts a service inside an old movie theater. Another building, spanning an entire city block, is labeled “Kirker Commons.” (Wilson is heavily influenced by Scottish Calvinist tradition, and his congregants call themselves “Kirkers” after kirk, an old Scottish word for church.)
Nearby are other businesses owned by present or former Christ Church members: a Kirker pizzeria, a Kirker bar (they do like to drink, especially whiskey for the guys), a Kirker cafe, and a Kirker real estate office. My tour guide, a former Kirker, pointed out a common hallmark of Kirker families: stylishly dressed young moms pushing strollers, often trailed by a small flock of toddlers.
If you ask members of Wilson’s denomination to describe the distinction between reformed Christians and other evangelicals, they will rattle off a doctrinal list: They believe that people will go to Heaven because of God’s grace rather than good works; they don’t believe in the Jesus-is-coming-look-busy version of the end times; they baptize members as infants rather than wait for adults to choose for themselves. But there are profound aesthetic differences as well. Forget megachurches with jeans-and-goatee pastors telling amusing anecdotes, or worship bands singing about, as one Kirker scoffed, “how Jesus is your boyfriend.” Wilson’s network of churches can feel almost puritanically unadorned—the music consists strictly of hymns and psalms; the sermons can be theologically heady, and even little children are expected to sit through them. Attendees will find these churches “uniformly hostile to the leftist agenda,” a pamphlet produced by Canon Press helpfully notes.
So confident are the Kirkers in their interpretation of the Bible that they believe people who don’t share their specific beliefs are not only going to Hell, but are doomed to earthly suffering. For them, Christian nationalism is redemptive, a lifeboat launched in a sea of drowning souls. One Kirker woman, who requested that I refer to her by her middle name, Linda, said she found upsetting the mere idea of an interfaith event that was happening in town that evening. It’s like saying, “We’re going to pat you on the head, you Baha’i, you Jew; we’re going to be like, ‘It’s okay,’” she said.
Not only would this be “lying,” Linda continued, growing increasingly adamant, “it’s kind of gross, actually, because if you believe that this is right, you wouldn’t want to tell someone, ‘What you believe is also right.’ That really hurts my heart.”
The Kirkers’ world is a fairly closed ecosystem. People who move to Moscow to join the church often send their children to Logos School, a classical Christian academy that Wilson and his wife helped found in 1981. Newcomers often find employment in one of the Kirker entities. If not, they can plug into the network of church-affiliated local businesses, which includes construction companies, an outpost of a major supplier of electrical transformers, and RedBalloon, an anti-woke job board that recently scored a contract with the State Department. Moscow’s Kirker community has swelled since the pandemic—so high is the demand for Logos School that it opened an impressive new campus last year and its roughly $7 million in revenue was almost double the previous year’s.
With so many families flocking to Moscow to attend his church, Wilson wrote an entire book last year with advice for the transplants. A Kirker real estate company is working on new builds for a planned community on the outskirts of town, where I spotted scores of freshly framed skeletons of future homes designed with ample space for large families.
Kirkers make up only about 10 percent of the town’s population of 27,000. But their influence is outsized, locals told me—in May, one Kirker won the Republican primary for the state legislature. Their presence is a particular thorn in the side of the Mormons, who have inhabited Idaho for generations and generally see Wilson’s camp as presumptuous upstarts.
Kirkers told me that they often feel unwelcome in Moscow. They showed me photos of the words “pedo” and “scum” spray-painted on a church affiliate’s campaign signs and a Wilson grandchild’s truck. Several people affiliated with the church mentioned that the church office had received anonymous death threats.
My first evening in Moscow, I attended a prayer event—the one Linda found objectionable—hosted by the town’s Interfaith Association. Folk dancers stepped in time to a local cantor’s version of the Hebrew folk song “Hinei Ma Tov”; Baptist pastor Hannah Brown read a poem she had written about love; a singer performed the Christian rock anthem “Hold Me Jesus.” Jews, Baha’is, and members of progressive churches were present, as were some Catholics and Mormons. The crowd of about 300 held candles and sang spirituals like “This Little Light of Mine.”
Afterward, Brown, who’d helped plan the event, told me that the organizers had not explicitly invited Kirkers because they would not have expected them to participate. One requirement for membership in the Moscow Interfaith Association is that “you have to be open to promoting religious freedom and religious liberty for all faiths, and that’s not something that they are able to really get behind.”
If Moscow is a tale of two cities, it is also a tale of two Doug Wilsons. Brunch Doug was affable and warm, bearing little resemblance to the pugnacious Online Doug. A teddy bear of a guy dressed in a grandfatherly button-down, he eagerly showed me around his enormous study with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Nancy, too, was a muted version of her online persona. Her viral moments are not as numerous as Doug’s, but there are some bangers: One is a video in which she recalls spanking her preschool-age daughter for not being excited enough to see her at the end of a playdate; another is a passage from her 1997 book, The Fruit of Her Hands, arguing that there is no such thing as marital rape: “Of course, a husband is never trespassing in his own garden, though he can be made to feel as though he is an intruder.” Brunch Nancy, by contrast, gushed about her grandchildren and kept my coffee mug filled.
Between bites of quiche, the couple answered my questions about some of Doug’s more provocative statements in a manner so careful and measured that it was almost boring. Doug’s line about women being “the kind of people that people come out of” had been intended as a joke, one that the liberal media was obviously too sanctimonious to laugh at. The whole wives-being-submissive thing had also been overblown by the media—they could count only a handful of times in their own marriage when Doug had to overrule Nancy. Sure, they spanked their kids, but never in anger, and the children had grown into well-adjusted adults who endorse the discipline they received in their youth.
Wilson’s own childhood was a quiet one. When he was in high school, his pastor father moved the family from Maryland to Ann Arbor, Michigan, and then, after his graduation, they moved to the Moscow area to open Christian bookstores. Before finishing his stint in the Navy, Wilson met Nancy at his parents’ home—she was moving to Moscow to work at his father’s bookstore. The next year, Wilson returned to Moscow, enrolled at the University of Idaho, and worked at the bookstore with Nancy, to whom he eventually proposed.
They married in 1975; by then, Wilson was involved in a new Moscow church. Deeply influenced by the hippie-adjacent Jesus People Movement, he strummed a guitar during services and taught Sunday school. Two years later, he became the pastor of a congregation that would eventually become Christ Church. Over the next decade, though, Wilson grew wary of the wishy-washy elements of evangelicalism—some of his congregants had even begun questioning whether God could be omniscient. He was drawn instead to the more absolutist theology of Calvinism, which emphasizes an all-knowing God who has already preordained who goes to Heaven. His own brother ended up leaving Christ Church over their theological differences and started his own congregation. But for Nancy, the conversion to Calvinism was “wonderful.” She recalled, “I thought, ‘It’s not all gray and muddled anymore.’”
The Wilsons officially became “reformed”—another word for Calvinist—in 1988, and in the following years, Doug’s influence grew. Logos School became a robust K–12 institution, one of the nation’s first classical Christian schools. He started Canon Press, which published his popular homeschool curricula, in 1988 and in the ’90s launched the nationwide Association of Classical Christian Schools and helped found New Saint Andrews College. A series of new churches planted outside Moscow grew into an entire neo-Calvinist denomination, now known as the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches.
During the pandemic, Wilson and other church leaders flouted public health restrictions, organizing maskless outdoor psalm sings. These protests garnered media attention, which helped grow their flock as remote work allowed people to relocate to Moscow. Doug estimates that the church has doubled in size since the pandemic.
At the Wilsons’ compound, it wasn’t hard to see the appeal of the Kirker life. Nancy showed me a display she had made of her 18 grandchildren’s Logos graduation announcements and brought me up to speed on Judah, who had just graduated from New Saint Andrews and planned to work in DC. Belphoebe, sharing a name with a huntress character in Edmund Spenser’s classic poem “The Faerie Queene,” was now a mother of two. All the grandchildren remained devout and were raising their own kids—Doug and Nancy’s great-grandchildren—in the faith.
“You never know how your kids are going to turn out. When we became reformed, it’s like, no, the covenant. You know you are. You’re one of us.”
“We want to keep the covenant and not lose any of the kids or the grandkids or the great-grandkids to this alien way of thinking,” Doug said. In other Christian denominations, Nancy added: “You never know how your kids are going to turn out. When we became reformed, it’s like, no, the covenant. You know you are. You’re one of us.”
In Moscow, Wilson declared in 2024 on a podcast called Abounding Grace Radio, “we have happy families. It’s characterized by psalm singing, by feasting, by joy, by Sabbath dinners, by exuberant worship on the Lord’s day, a liberal arts education.”
In the Kirker families I met, the bliss that Doug described was on full display.
After brunch, I drove to the home of Emily and Nethaniel, a Kirker couple in their 40s whose five children ranged in age from 6 to 13. All attend Logos. Emily—tall, tan, and athletic with long, shiny brown hair—showed me around her Craftsman home. She and Nethaniel, who remodel houses as part of their construction business, had added an airy kitchen.
While her husband did chores, Emily, who requested I not use the family’s last name, set up a table and chairs in the shade of a tree that arched over their sprawling backyard. She told me she’d met her husband 20 years ago, right around the time she joined Wilson’s church as a young adult. “I’m a strong, very resilient woman, and I’m so thankful that I have a man in my life that I can look up to,” she said. “I can unload some of that pressure that I’m not built to carry on him—so it actually makes me softer and more delightful.”
During the nearly four hours I spent at Emily’s house, her five children played harmoniously in the yard: no fighting, tattling, or complaints of boredom. No one whined for a screen or a snack. When the old trampoline began to creak noisily from all the jumping, Emily gave a little call and motioned her kids off—they immediately and cheerfully obeyed.
“I’m a strong, very resilient woman, and I’m so thankful that I have a man in my life that I can look up to. I can unload some of that pressure that I’m not built to carry on him—so it actually makes me softer and more delightful.”
It was, quite honestly, glorious, and I asked Emily her secret. “We’ve got this little mini-Taser we keep inside the house,” she joked. But really, she said, the key was their faith. “When you know who you are and what you’re for, everything else is so much more joyful.”
Another evening, I dined with one of the longest-standing Kirker families, the Mortimores, in their Bauhaus-style home nestled in the woods just outside town. From their back patio, over a dinner of steak fajitas with homemade salsa and guacamole, we watched the sun set over the fields below. Sarah and Tim, now in their early 50s, joined the church a quarter century ago—they loved the idea of raising a family in such a tight-knit community. Now they run a thriving construction business, which helped build the new Logos campus. Their teenage daughters, Grace and Catherine, were students at New Saint Andrews and Logos, respectively. Their son, Eliot, and his fiancée, Lucy, both 20, were due to be married the following weekend.
They were eager to hear my impressions of their community: Did it match what I read in media reports? They marveled at the fact that their very own Doug Wilson had become famous and got a kick out of his online controversies. They knew him as a benevolent guy who handed out Hershey’s Kisses to kids at church, shied away from the spotlight at parties, and rarely included personal anecdotes in his sermons. After dessert was cleared, we debated whether to continue the conversation outside or inside. “You decide, covenant head of the family!” Sarah joked to Tim. We finally settled on the living room, where we watched the hills turn purple through floor-to-ceiling windows.
Throughout the evening, their kids occasionally offered observations and opinions. “It’s a cultural expectation that kids hit a certain age and then they start to not like their parents, and they start to become surly—this is what we expect,” Sarah said. “And to be in a community where that is so rare, I’ve never even seen it.” The key, Tim told me, was simple: “to teach them the standard and to love the standard.” By this he meant, essentially, the idea that right and wrong are objective truths and that all questions are answered in the Bible.
I asked Eliot and Lucy about their plans. After their wedding, the couple would move to Cleveland, where Eliot had secured a tech job. Lucy intended to work until they started having babies and would then become a full-time mom. I asked whether they planned to follow the Christ Church model of marriage.
“She’s under her father’s headship, following her father’s lead,” Eliot explained. “I know she will do that for me. I know she will follow my lead if we’re going to move across the country, and she will do it cheerfully.”
“In a week—which is crazy!—when we stand up at the front of the church, and Pastor Wilson asks, ‘Who will give this woman to marry him?’” he added, “he’s transferring that headship of Lucy to me.”
June, a friend of the Mortimores who had joined us for the evening, seemed to read my mind, saying, “What the mainstream world hears is this little wallflower who’s just getting passed around, and she’s gonna wash some dishes, and she’s gonna change some diapers, and shut up, Lucy!” But it wasn’t like that at all, she said. “The ladies here, they’re a force. They are extremely fulfilled, super-smart, read a ton.”
Soon the conversation shifted from the power of the women to the unhappy fate of transgender people. Lucy, who had been quiet up until that point, motioned for Eliot to pass her one of my wireless microphones. “Kids that are growing up in pagan homes that have absolutely no standard, and they’re told, ‘Do what your heart desires, follow your heart, do whatever you think is best for you,’” she said in a quiet but deliberate voice. “We have a goal for raising a family and one day building a kingdom, and our children are going to be our greatest thing that we’ve ever done. And then we’ll go to Heaven and live eternally, and they have absolutely no plan afterwards.”
But how do you teach children to love “the standard”? For Kirker families, part of the answer lies in doling out harsh and immediate consequences and their belief in corporal punishment. Linda likens discipline to a violin string. “When you put it on the pegs, and you start cranking the peg until it’s nice and tight, it’s pulled almost to its limits, only then can it sing,” she said. “That’s kind of like with little children: If you don’t give them boundaries, they get really antsy.”
In his parenting videos on YouTube, Wilson and his team advise parents to mete out physical punishment liberally (but not publicly), especially in the first five years of a child’s life. At first, a mother may use her fingers to flick a baby on the cheek or hand—say, if the baby bites while nursing. By toddlerhood, a parent should use a dedicated implement, like a wooden spoon or a rod. At one point, Wilson, chuckling, told me about putting his 2-year-old son to bed with the wooden spanking spoon in the crib with him to remind him to stay put.
After a spanking, Kirker children must ask God to forgive them and are not permitted to sulk; they are expected to rejoin the family with a spirit of good cheer. In one 2021 parenting video, Ben Zornes, the pastor of a Wilson-affiliated church in Moscow, explained: “If you fuss and scream, it’s going to be more spanking. If you’re gonna mope and you’re going to be sad afterwards, it’s going to be more spankings.”
“Boys need to get knocked down, and knocked down a lot, and your sons need to get knocked down by people who don’t love them nearly as much as you do. Why? Because the world is a cold place, and he needs to be tough.”
Home isn’t the only place Kirker kids get swats. At church, children can be taken out of the service and disciplined in a dedicated “training room.” Logos administrators also employ corporal punishment. In Idaho, like most states, the practice is still legal in private schools—only five states explicitly forbid it.
Infractions that might merit a spanking include hitting, biting, talking back, or fighting with a sibling. But simply not meeting the family’s expectations is another one. In that same parenting video, Toby Sumpter, a pastor at Christ Church, recalls watching a friend carry his 3-year-old out for a spanking; afterward, the child returned to the room, walked over to the vacuum cleaner, and kicked it. The father later explained that his son was afraid of the vacuum cleaner, so they’d required him to kick it every time he passed by. He was spanked because he had forgotten to do so.
Boys in particular require such tough love, Wilson says. “Boys need to get knocked down, and knocked down a lot, and your sons need to get knocked down by people who don’t love them nearly as much as you do,” he says in one 2021 parenting video. “Why? Because the world is a cold place, and he needs to be tough.”
It is also the job of parents to discourage boys from “anything that is frilly, playing with dolls, anything that looks like effeminacy or growing effeminacy,” Wilson told me. “You want to say, ‘We don’t want you to grow up in a way that sets you up for failure, and we’re going to teach you not to go down that road.’”
Discipline for effeminacy isn’t often necessary because the kids learned to enforce masculinity standards themselves. At one point, my conversation with the Mortimore kids turned to the casual use of slurs, like “retarded” and “gay.” I said I probably wouldn’t use those terms even to tease, because I would be afraid of hurting people’s feelings. Eliot said he didn’t have that worry. “For ‘gay,’ yeah, we would use it in our circles,” he explained, “because we don’t have gay people in our community, so we’re not worried about offending.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
He stopped, as though he’d never considered the possibility before. “That’s a great question,” he said.
The Kirkers’ beliefs about masculinity go beyond just discouraging effeminacy in boys. Rather, it’s central to their philosophy for building a more durable Christianity. As Kristin Kobes Du Mez, the historian, put it to me, they believe “American culture, the American church, and American evangelicalism have all become wussified, led by effeminate men who are not even leading…and as a result, the church and society are in a shambles,” she said. “So you need to work from the ground up. You need to work with young boys and teach them how to fight, how to be aggressive.”
In the offices of Canon Press, I met lead pastor Joe Rigney, who once presided over a Wilson-affiliated church in St. Paul, Minnesota—one that made national news in January when protesters outed one of its pastors as an ICE officer. Rigney is also the author of the 2025 book Leadership and the Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits, in which he argues that a fixation on empathy has led mainstream evangelicals astray.
Women are naturally more empathetic than men, Rigney told me, a disposition that makes them unsuitable for church leadership, combat, and, in most cases, roles like CEOs of companies and professors at colleges. (All but three of the New Saint Andrews faculty are men.) “Women being the glue that often holds communities together through relational connection, nurture, care, hospitality—that’s a really great thing,” he said. But public life requires a man’s steely resolve. “Behind a lot of our political dysfunctions, whether it’s on things like abortion or the LGBT stuff or immigration, the throughline is that we can’t enforce boundaries because empathy overrides what’s truly good.”
“Behind a lot of our political dysfunctions, whether it’s on things like abortion or the LGBT stuff or immigration, the throughline is that we can’t enforce boundaries because empathy overrides what’s truly good.”
The idea of empathy as a sin is having a moment. Conservative Christian podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey published a book, Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion, elaborating on the same theme. JD Vance hinted at the notion of misplaced empathy in 2025 when he talked about the Christian idea of ordo amoris, Latin for rightly ordered love. “I think it’s a very Christian concept that you love your family and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens, and then after that, prioritize the rest of the world,” he said in a Fox News interview. “A lot of the far left has completely inverted that.” (Pope Francis disagreed with Vance’s interpretation, describing the concept instead as “love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”) In an appearance last year on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Elon Musk famously said, “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”
Hegseth, too, has waged war against empathy, Wilson told me. “The woke military, the DEI military—all of that was possible because people had accepted as an ethical responsibility to be empathetic, to step into other people’s shoes without judgment,” he said. “Hegseth has emphasized the job of the military is lethality, developing a warrior ethos, not to feel sorry for the guy who wishes that he could wear a dress.”
Ostensibly, Wilson was referring to one phrase in Hegseth’s proclamation at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia, last year, “No more dudes in dresses…we’re done with that shit!”—a statement that has a distinctly Wilsonian ring to it. Since becoming defense secretary in January 2025, de-wokifying the military has been the focus of Hegseth’s tenure. He has ended affirmative action and trans-inclusive policies, dissolved the Pentagon committee that supported female troops, and blocked female and Black military leaders from being promoted. But it is in Hegseth’s unapologetic assertions of hypermasculinity that Wilson’s influence is most apparent. In his Quantico speech, he reaffirmed his commitment to the military being “tough as shit” so it could “completely destroy” adversaries.
In his 2024 book, The War on Warriors, Hegseth writes that the Geneva Conventions are unfair because the United States and Europe are the only ones that follow them. Instead, “America should fight by its own rules,” he declares. The nation’s soldiers should be “the most overwhelmingly lethal as they can be.”
Hegseth also bemoans a defense force infected, he writes, with the “fucking scary” disease of progressivism, which “will not stop until trans-lesbian Black females run everything!” He warns, “Sometime soon, a real conflict will break out, and red-blooded American men will have to save their elite candy asses.” In July, Hegseth announced an initiative to screen troops for low testosterone and offer hormone replacement therapy to those found deficient.
It wasn’t until after Wilson entered his life that Hegseth became obsessed with decrying the woke US military. He and his wife found their way to Wilson’s denomination in 2018, and by 2022, he had moved his family to Nashville so his children could attend the Jonathan Edwards Classical Academy, a school in Wilson’s network. In 2023, when Hegseth was still a Fox News host, Nashville Christian Family magazine ran a profile of him in which he mentioned being a member of a “Bible and book study” that focused on Wilson’s book My Life for Yours: A Walk Through the Christian Home.
Hegseth, a Princeton grad, has since said he’d never send any of his seven children to Harvard, but rather to New Saint Andrews. On an episode of the podcast CrossPolitic that aired shortly before Hegseth became secretary of “war,” he railed against Godless America, lamenting that liberals “used patriotism to untether us from timeless truth, from the Bible.” He also praised classical Christian schools for providing “a comprehensive worldview that prepares them for the battle to come, because we’re in a spiritual battle, and otherwise we’d be sending our kids in as fodder.”
Hegseth’s 2022 co-authored tome, Battle for the American Mind, is essentially a book-length extension of that metaphor. “Charging the ‘commanding heights’—the leftists’ educational Death Star—with Nerf guns will not suffice,” he writes. “We don’t want martyrs, we want victors.” Classical Christian education is our only hope to “give our kids and grandkids at least a fighting chance to save America and Christendom,” Hegseth concludes. He exhorts parents to “join the insurgency!” Children educated in this way, he believes, might stand a chance at defending their nation—because the wokes have failed miserably.
Hegseth is so fanatically macho that he can come off as camp. Was his talk of “trans-lesbian Black females” a parody—or deadly serious? I had the same question when I saw Canon Press’ slickly produced No Quarter November video series, which Eliot Mortimore assisted with. In one scene, Wilson dons a flamethrower and obliterates what he views as symbols of candy-ass leftist culture: cardboard cutouts of Disney princesses, a Mister Rogers-esque set, and a surveillance drone.
The impact of the Hegseth-Wilson military leadership style was brought home during Wilson’s address at the Pentagon, which referenced Lt. General Lewis Burwell “Chesty” Puller, the most-decorated Marine in history, famous for dramatically thrusting out his chest, and for his unwavering commitment to crushing America’s enemies. “When you learn how to stand firm in the Lord and in the strength of his might,” Wilson told the troops, “you are going to start sounding to your wife like a spiritual version of Chesty Puller…‘We’ve been looking for the enemy for some time now. We’ve finally found him. We’re surrounded. That simplifies things.’”
At the end, Hegseth clapped Wilson on the back. “Thank you for your leadership, for your mentorship, for the things you’ve started, the truth you’ve told, your willingness to be bold,” he told the pastor. “It’s the type of thing we’re trying to exercise here.”
The Kirker culture of extreme masculinity, nonetheless, can be a positive force. “Especially for little boys, you are told that you are strong and that you will be a leader, that you are a leader,” Kobes Du Mez said. But not conforming or questioning “these teachings to any extent, that’s not going to go well for you as a man.”
A male former Kirker I talked with, who didn’t want me to use his name for fear of retaliation, told me, “A lot of the harm is propagated through boys and men. But it starts out harming boys.”
I also spoke with Cy Whitling, a 32-year-old former Kirker now living in Bellingham, Washington. Whitling’s father was the principal at Logos School when he was growing up and is now its superintendent. The oldest of seven, Whitling described “a very pugilistic childhood.” Boys were encouraged to identify with the war heroes they learned about in history; boxing class was not optional. From the time he was 10, guns hung above his bed. Young Cy “would go to sleep dreaming of somebody breaking into the house so I could shoot them.”
Effeminacy in any form was stamped out. “If I [sat] with my legs crossed like a girl, I got a bunch of spankings, because it was ‘gay,’” he recalled. Boys who spent too much time on their appearance were bullied; high school gym class included coach-sanctioned games of “Smear the Queer.”
Boys who spent too much time on their appearance were bullied; high school gym class included coach-sanctioned games of “Smear the Queer.”
Whitling eventually distanced himself from Christ Church and came out as bisexual. He hasn’t spoken to his family since 2019, but the effects of his Kirker upbringing linger. He doesn’t plan to have children because “the experience I had with being a child did not prepare me to be the kind of parent that I would want to be.”
Still, he considers himself relatively unscathed compared to some of his former classmates. “I could go through and name the two kids with behavioral divergences in every class,” he said. “They got 90 percent of the spankings, and their life was definitely hell—and I definitely helped to make it hell.”
Some of the boys who don’t fit the Kirker mold grow into men who overcompensate by wielding a cruel authority over their wives and children. Sarah Bader, an ex-Kirker who now works to help get women out of the church, has witnessed this dynamic firsthand. Men are required to “be successful, look successful, be fit, be a man, be part of this army for Doug—for God,” she said. “A lot of these men have suffered greatly, and we’re seeing a total breakdown of those who can’t quite perform well enough to be the masculine man.”
Another problem with enforcing one set of standards, of course, is that men aren’t all the same, Kobes Du Mez said. “If you have a loving, decent man who uses that authority, or actually doesn’t even use that authority sometimes, it’s going to hit very differently than when a husband and father is abusive or bullying or selfish.”
Bader says she has talked with hundreds of women who have experienced abuse in churches in Wilson’s denomination. Helping them get out in places like Moscow can be difficult because of how deeply intertwined the church is with life there. Multiple sources told me, for example, that Christ Church members or affiliates have served on the town police force, which can make Kirkers reluctant to file reports of abuse. For those who leave the church, it’s “hard to get a job, it’s hard to get a rental,” Bader told me. “It’s an unsafe place.”
In a 2021 article for Vice, journalist Sarah Stankorb chronicled the stories of 12 women who said Christ Church leaders, including Wilson, looked the other way when they reported physical abuse and sexual assault at the hands of their husbands. Since then, several more women have come forward to tell their stories. Logos students have reported being groomed and, in some cases, molested by members of the faculty. A Moscow man who helps Kirker women escape from abusive situations told me that he regularly hears about marital rape. “A lot of our cases are like, ‘My husband wants to have sex five times a day, and I’m not allowed to say no,’” he told me.
Some Kirker women have spoken out on Sons of Patriarchy, a podcast about Wilson’s spiritual empire produced by Bader and theologian Peter Bell. Women tell of being warned by Logos teachers that their developing bodies are dangerous and that friendliness could be misconstrued as flirtation. One former Logos student, Emilie Dye, described being groomed by a teacher in his 50s, Jim Nance. Another alumna reported being groomed by her English teacher. Both women alleged that the church failed to protect them. In 2005, church member Steven Sitler was convicted of child sex abuse after he was convicted of lewd conduct with a minor. In 2022, another church member, Alex Lloyd, was convicted of possessing child pornography. In Sitler’s case, Wilson wrote to the judges asking for “measured and limited” sentencing because Sitler had repented for his sins.
Wilson denies that he sanctions abuse; in the case of Dye, he told me, Nance was dismissed from Logos after his infractions were discovered. In the case of Sitler, he has written, church leaders quickly turned the case over to police. Sitler was arrested and sentenced to life in prison, but he was released on probation after just a year and allowed to return home, where the court later discovered he had been sexually aroused by his infant son.
When I asked the Wilsons about these cases, they agreed that child sexual abuse was horrific and that Lloyd’s case was “really sad.” But Nancy expressed irritation with the media’s fixation on the issue. It was hypocritical, in her view, because “we have this culture where they have transvestites doing library hours for kids,” which no one in the secular world seemed to mind. I pointed out that drag queens weren’t molesting children. “No,” Doug replied, “they’re just grooming them.”
A few weeks after my visit to Moscow, I told Whitling about my conversation with the Mortimores. I mentioned the moment when Eliot said he didn’t mind using the word “gay” in a derogatory way because there were no gay Kirkers. He paused. “Man, I knew Eliot when he was a little kid,” he said, his voice catching. “Makes me really sad. Sorry.”
The campus of Logos School features an imposing brick chapel abutting a barnyard; in addition to serving as the school worship hall, it’s also where Christ Church meets on Sundays. Sitting in the back row, I saw mothers in long flowered dresses with infants strapped to their chests; older sisters distributing bottles to babies and crayons and paper to preschoolers; dads marching restive toddlers out to the hall.
It was Mother’s Day, but you wouldn’t have known it from the sermon. Wilson preached on the Old Testament Book of Esther, the story of the Jewish queen who stood up to a wicked Persian tyrant. The story, he said, offered a valuable lesson for how to be “a beleaguered minority in a heathen empire.” Religious pluralism, he told the congregation, was an “idol,” and Christians should focus on “getting rid of it.”
After a time, the congregation rose and joined together to sing Psalm 28, which asks God to punish Christians’ enemies. “Render to them what they deserve, because they do not regard the works of the Lord nor the operations of his hands,” they sang. “He shall destroy them and not build them up.”
I thought of the Chesty Puller quip Wilson shared during his Pentagon sermon: “They’re on our left, they’re on our right, they’re in front of us, they’re behind us…they can’t get away this time.” But it wasn’t Chesty speaking at the Pentagon—it was Wilson: Wilson’s rigid definition of a warrior, Wilson’s quest to infuse the military with his muscular version of Christianity, Wilson’s laser focus on aggression as a hallmark of successful men and a successful American republic.
After the service, Wilson descended from the pulpit. He greeted a few congregants, smiling and shaking their hands. Then he went over to play the role for which he is famous among Kirker children. Seated on a stool by the main entrance, the benevolent Santa, he distributed Hershey’s Kisses from a large metal bucket. Children swarmed around him as their parents spilled out onto the patio, blinking in the bracing sunlight of a spring day in Idaho.
