Michael Knowles, a Catholic podcaster for Daily Wire, recently gave a softball interview to Christian nationalist Doug Wilson, whose close relationship with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has generated media scrutiny of Wilson’s extremism.
Wilson recently made clear that the Christian Republic he envisions would be Protestant, and that Catholic religious processions would be banned from the public square along with all non-Christian expressions of worship.
If you are thinking that must have made for some fireworks with Knowles, you’d be wrong. Instead, Knowles gave Wilson a chance to wave away his anti-Catholic comments while the two found common ground over their secular progressive enemies.
Knowles started the interview by mocking critical media coverage of Wilson. “To hear the media talk about my guest, is to think that this man is Darth Vader.”
“You’re maybe not public enemy number one,” Knowles said “but you’re certainly up there, and it’s because you advocate Christian nationalism, which seems to mean everything to every person, but whatever it is, the liberals don’t like it. You seem like an amiable fella. What is Christian nationalism and why do these guys hate you so much?”
In response, Wilson gave two short answers: 1) that he is a Christian who loves his country and he doesn’t want to separate those two things, and 2) Christian nationalism is the belief that Americans “should stop making God angry.”
What Wilson did not say, and Knowles did not ask about, is why people find Wilson’s Christian nationalist extremism so threatening. Wilson’s has made no secret of what he would like to see: insert Christian dogma directly into the Constitution, ban non-Christians—even liberal Christians—from holding public office, deny women the right to vote, and more.
Wilson is notorious for having published a book downplaying the brutality of slavery. His press published “A Statement on Christian Nationalism and the Gospel,” which demands that civil authorities “obey and display allegiance” to Jesus Christ and to their interpretation of the Bible.
But in his interview, Knowles let Wilson get away with implying that the term Christian nationalist is just a smear employed by liberals against anyone to opposed “the secular jihad” in any way, like opposing the sexual revolution or marriage equality—which he called “same-sex mirage.”
Wilson made a false straw-man argument suggesting that liberals believe that Christians don’t have the right to express their faith in the public square, and then made a rhetorical leap to compare his critics to the people who crucified Jesus. “If the authorities didn’t want Christianity to be functioning in the public square, they should have thought of that before they crucified Jesus there.”
“Checks out,” agreed Knowles.
Knowles did ask about Wilson’s recent comments about banning Catholic processions, suggesting that he was fully on board with Wilson up to that point, including his plans to ban gay pride celebrations and other “nonsense.”
Wilson said he was simply being honest about what his “ideal Republic” would look like even if it took 500 years to get there. But for now, he would happily partner with conservative Catholics in current political battles.
“Politics is the art of the possible. In the current moment I want to stand with Catholics shoulder-to-shoulder against the secular Klingons,” Wilson said. “I think we’ve got bigger fish to fry.”
Knowles said that he obviously doesn’t agree with Wilson’s long-term vision, and believes the country is more likely to trend toward Catholicism, but agreed that they share a common enemy today:
It seems to me we do have an established national religion. It is liberal progressivism. We have a liturgical calendar with all the secular saints. Whether we’re talking about Martin Luther King or Harvey Milk, we’ve got liturgical seasons, even. I think Pride used to be a week and then a month. Now it’s roughly half a year and growing.
We have prayers and hymns—the Black national anthem that they’re trying to the NFL, that’s part of the liturgy of liberalism.
So we have all these things and if you contradict it, you will be faced with far greater punishment than any medieval inquisition.
So I totally agree with you. There is a common enemy here and we have to band together against it.
Wilson responded by saying:
It’s not whether you’re going to impose a morality. It’s which morality you are going to impose. It’s not whether you have a theocracy. It’s which theo is the god of the system.
Wilson claimed that he could get arrested within 15 minutes in any major city “on the basis of what I was saying alone,” adding, “They wouldn’t call it blasphemy laws, but they’d call it hate crimes or whatever, but it functions as a blasphemy law.” (This is a false religious-right trope; in reality hate-crimes laws specifically target violent crime, not speech, unless it is speech specifically inciting violence. Anyone who has come across bigots will bullhorns knows that there is plenty of freedom in the U.S. for hateful speech.)
Later in the interview, Knowles invited Wilson to promote his new book, “No Such Thing as Bad Words,” in which Wilson acknowledges that he has been criticized by some Christians for using harsh language. The Bible, he said includes passages that prohibit four categories of speech—swearing, cursing, vulgarity, and obscenity—but also includes examples of all those categories being used. That suggests, he said, that there are times when using such “prophetic language” is called for. As an example of what he considers a righteous use of offensive language, he told a story about when he criticized Nadia Bolz-Weber, a liberal Lutheran pastor, and Gloria Steinem, and wrote that “They are shamelessly declaring to the world that they are just a couple of cunts.”
Wilson, who is based in Idaho, exerts influence nationally through the Canon Press publishing house, the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, a network of “classical” Christian academies, a cadre of far-right “theobros” who promote patriarchal Christian nationalist ideology, and through his close relationship with Hegseth, who attends a church that Wilson planted in Washington, D.C. last year to boost his influence over the conservative Christians who work in the Trump administration. Hegseth, who seems bent on using his position to turn the U.S. military into a virtual crusader army, recently invited Wilson to preach at one of the monthly evangelical worship services Hegseth has been hosting at the Pentagon.
