Earlier this week, Christian nationalist pastor Douglas Wilson announced that he is establishing a church in Washington, D.C.
"With the change in administration, we believe that there will be many strategic opportunities with numerous evangelicals who will be present both in and around the Trump administration," Wilson wrote. "These believers are obviously culturally engaged already, but we happen to believe that every form of cultural engagement needs to have a solid theological foundation and support, and we want to help to provide it."
Wilson announced that, initially, the church will not have a permanent pastor but will instead have a rotating team of Wilson-affiliated pastors fly in weekly to deliver sermons. Among those scheduled to preach at Wilson's new church will be Christian nationalist pastor Brooks Potteiger of Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowship, a far-right church located outside of Nashville that counts Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth as a member.
The need for this new church was explained by Joe Rigney, an associate pastor at Wilson's main church in Idaho, during a recent appearance on the "CrossPolitic" podcast, which is itself closely affiliated with Wilson and his church.
As Rigney explained, there are several people, like Hegseth and others, who are currently working in or around the Trump administration in D.C: "We have people there and we want to shepherd them and take care of them."
More importantly, Rigney explained, while there are a lot of evangelicals working in the Trump administration, they do not completely share Wilson's far-right theological vision and so it is imperative for Wilson establish a church there in order to properly "calibrate the Christians" according to his worldview.
"We're all grateful for a bunch of the stuff that the Trump administration has done and the balls that they've carried down the field," Rigney said. "But there's a bunch that they've just absolutely fumbled and are totally blowing."
"At a practical level, there's evangelicals in the Trump administration," he continued, "and the environment they're in is one that wants to say, 'Hey, we're gonna draw the line at transgender and we're not gonna trans the kids, and the boss is all in on that so here we go.' And they're like, 'Yeah, yeah. Look, we're doing it.' But all the sodomites are still there and we're not going to talk about that. And I need a guy there, I need a minister there who's gonna say, 'Oh, but we are. Obergefell is next. We're coming for that,' so that you calibrate the Christians in D.C. by the word of God and not by whatever the present administration can tolerate."
"We're gonna come for feminism. We're going to go after sodomy," Rigney declared. "Those are the sins in that town. Those are sins that are acceptable among both parties in that town. And we want to plant that flag and say the Bible has something to say about this."
Kiera Butler, a journalist who has chronicled the deep connections between Vice President J.D. Vance and the "TheoBros" who surround Wilson, explained Wilson's background in her recent article about his new D.C. church:
Wilson, who is in his early 70s, is the head pastor of the flagship church of the denomination that he helped found, the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC). Wilson is also the unofficial patriarch of the TheoBros, members of a network of mostly millennial, highly opinionated, ultra-conservative men, many of whom also proudly call themselves Christian nationalists. Among the tenets of their particular tributary of Reformed Protestant Christianity is the idea that the United States should be subject to biblical law.
