An Evangelical Pastor in Idaho Has a Yearly Plan to Make People Furious Online. This Time, It Caught Up to Him.

This year, it started with a flamethrower.

At the start of November, 70-year-old Moscow, Idaho, evangelical Christian pastor Douglas Wilson was featured in a video promoting this year’s “No Quarter November,” Wilson’s annual monthlong offensive against enemies of his ministry and his views, pursued mostly through the publication of sharply worded blog posts aimed at ruffling extra feathers. In that promo video, Wilson appears carving a Thanksgiving turkey while promising ways to “apocalypse-proof your family.” He touts half a century of “culture war and culture building.” He warns against “being a wuss.” A red-alert alarm sounds, prompting Wilson to head outdoors and strap on a flamethrower to spray fire at cutouts of social media logos and Disney characters. As flames consumed the feminine silhouettes of Ariel and Elsa, the viewer might conclude this guy was a winner in the culture wars.

Like-minded fellow winners could buy a branded No Quarter November flag from Wilson’s website for $59.99 or a NQN flamethrower for $1,943. As Wilson has claimed, preachers are to be “arsonists in the world.” There seems to be no harm in making money while doing it.

Each autumn, since 2018, Wilson has celebrated NQN and, capitalizing on the added traffic to his websites, offered discounts for his books and other content. Fire is a constant theme. In years past, Wilson has been featured in NQN promo videos sitting atop a burning couch, driving a burning pickup truck, torching an office, and setting a boat aflame with a Molotov cocktail while sitting in that boat and dangling his feet over the water—all while calmly puffing a cigar and promising he’ll tell it like it is in a world “that has become flammable.” In his 2021 ad, he bemoaned that “everything catches fire these days. All you have to do is say something like ‘white babies’ or ‘men shouldn’t have sex with unstable women,’ things that would have passed without comment in a saner time.” He claims not to be incendiary, but ordinary, though living in a “flammable time.”

Despite these annual antics, there are still plenty of people who have, until now, been unaware of Douglas Wilson—and many others who get drawn in due to the Classical Christian education movement he helped found, but who don’t realize he also preaches a brand of Christian patriarchy that appears to perpetuate abuse, encourages corporal punishment of children, and aims for replication across the country—which, to Wilson’s mind, ought to return to its perceived Christian roots.

This November, Wilson’s month of antagonistic blog posts (usually printed later as anthologies sold for $6.95) did not evoke his anticipated fear and trembling. For Wilson watchers and critics, some days online it felt like Wilson’s annual firestorm might have finally reached a critical mass of outside observers—and threatened to consume him instead.

Midmonth, two skirmishes on X (formerly Twitter, and a place where many Christians still gather) sidetracked Wilson. First, Christian writer Karen Swallow Prior found herself in a discussion about the supposedly misleading nature of empathy—a concern of Wilson and his theological kin, such as Joe Rigney, now a fellow at New Saint Andrews (a small college in Moscow that was founded by Wilson in 1994). The conversation turned to the danger of using empathy to evaluate abuse claims. To Prior, Rigney cited a 2023 NQN post by Wilson about “untethered empathy,” in which Wilson told the story of a hypothetical 12-year-old girl claiming to have been raped by her stepfather. In Wilson’s made-up example, the accusation is false, but unquestioning empathy would allow the girl to “do whatever she wants to anyone else, including the baby. Chop it up into little pieces.” The danger of “untethered empathy,” to Rigney and Wilson, is a loss of objectivity, where a victim can require all your allegiance, can become “like God.” This, they say, is a sin.

Prior, who is herself antiabortion (but supports increasing access to child care and offering material assistance to pregnant women, and is an advocate for victims of abuse), responded to the fictional example with a video she’d recently received. Since Rigney had pointed to Wilson’s writing on a hypothetical false rape accusation, “I took the opportunity to ask him what he thought about this true story in this video,” Prior told me.

The video featured Emilie Paige Dye, a 2015 alumna of Logos, the K–12 school Wilson co-founded in Moscow. Dye describes being groomed through attention and inappropriate touching by a Logos teacher, then an elder at Wilson’s Christ Church. Dye has written about how naïve she was at the time: “Because I believed everything purity culture taught me, I knew basically nothing about sex. I hadn’t even googled my questions about my body, fearing that I would stumble on porn and instantly damn myself to hell.”

A school secretary was concerned by the teacher’s behavior with Dye, and in 2014 reported it to school leaders, who, Dye notes, did not escalate the situation to the police at the time. Administrators did see fit to dismiss the teacher from Logos in 2015, but, Dye said, the teacher’s behavior escalated, even as Dye moved away for college. She eventually left the church and cut off contact with the teacher.

On X, Wilson himself chimed in on this discussion about Dye’s allegations, asserting, “We are the ones who called the cops immediately.” (In fact, the police report is dated 2017.) Then, he suggested Dye was responsible for two years of covering up the situation. The idea that a teen, manipulated and abused by her teacher, was responsible for this “cover-up” sparked a predictable wave of moral outrage.

Dye told me via email, “Throughout the entire experience, the Wilsons have dehumanized and attacked me for the ‘crime’ of being a victim of abuse. They accused me, a 17-year-old who didn’t even know what a vagina was, of seducing my 53-year-old teacher.”

I have been covering Wilson since 2021, when I first learned about how the pastor’s theology around women’s submission had horrific, if predictable, impacts on women in his church and church “plants” (new churches that are offshoots of the original).

For Vice, I detailed a range of cases reported out of Moscow, either from women raised in Christ Church or who attended Logos, or whose lives were affected by the Wilsons’ teachings about male-female relationships. The people who spoke to me included women who understood a wifely duty of sexual availability meant they could not refuse their husbands, girls touched inappropriately at Logos, students whom the Wilsons asked intrusive questions about their sexual activity, and one girl coached in counseling by the Wilsons to forgive her father for inappropriately touching her and watching her shower. In my recent book, Disobedient Women, I explored this culture where women are taught that in sex (as Wilson writes in his 1999 book, Fidelity) “a man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.” Authority and submission are, in his view, “an erotic necessity.” I tried to understand how Wilson’s drive for Christian nationalism (political dominion) overlaps with his urge toward Christian patriarchy (relational dominion).

In reporting for both projects, I learned how frightened former Christ Church members feel about speaking out, drawing Wilson’s ire. That’s why the pushback to Wilson during this year’s No Quarter November surprised me.

Often, within his Christ Church and Logos, Wilson inserts himself in a counseling role (for which he is untrained) along with his wife, Nancy Wilson, who writes about Christian womanhood, Christian motherhood, and Christian grandmothering for Canon Press, the Moscow-based publishing house founded by Douglas. In many patriarchal, evangelical communities, pastors’ wives (and sometimes daughters, such as Wilson’s) are permitted to teach and lead other women. And it was Nancy Wilson who most prominently drew the internet’s critical eye this November.

Within days of his squabble with Prior, an Instagram reel posted in October of this year circulated among Wilson’s critics. The text introducing this reel read, “Spanked Kids Are Happy Kids,” and it featured Rachel Jankovic, Douglas and Nancy Wilson’s daughter. (Jankovic also publishes with Canon Press.) Jankovic gushed about how childhood spanking resulted in her positive adult relationship with her parents and her “affection for that discipline.”

Marissa Burt, who is currently writing a book about the history and theology underlying popular Christian parenting teachings, wrote on X, “I think much of the rhetoric in Wilson’s family life teaching gaslights the community to redefine high control practices as ‘joy.’ ” An X user calling themselves “Poison in Moscow ID” replied, “Here is Nancy Wilson spanking her 3-4 year old for not being excited to see her,” linking a video of Nancy Wilson describing how when Rachel was young and visiting a friend, the child hadn’t been eager to go home and failed to greet Nancy warmly at pickup. Nancy detailed how after she took Rachel home, “I did give her a spankin’,” and explained next time, the child needed to cheerfully greet her with a “Hi, Mom!” The next pickup, Nancy says, was “beautiful.” Doug Wilson can be heard chuckling over the response.

The video of Nancy Wilson describing how to demand joyful greeting from children through spanking has thus far netted 3.1 million views on X. The clip went viral enough to merit a post on Newsweek; Wilson apologist  and pastor Toby Sumpter labeled the brouhaha #spankinggate. Canon Press dropped a response clip from the docuseries Future Men (released by Canon+, a streaming service featuring Wilson and his family’s books and video content), in which Sumpter argues for the need to spank boys. Sumpter, also senior pastor at Christ Church plant King’s Cross, acknowledges that some might be concerned hitting will breed violence, but “are you going to trust modern psychotherapists and counselors, or are you going to trust God and his word?”

In a series of posts this month, online watchdog Examining Doug Wilson and Moscow pointed out an interesting similarity in Wilson’s responses, first to my original 2021 investigative piece detailing a culture of abuse and then to the current uproar over his family’s teaching on spanking. Then, he wrote that every Christian leader, pastor, writer, board member, or thought leader who read my article “and then publicly voiced their solidarity or sympathy with it—in any way shape or form—has disqualified themselves.” They should step down. To those who made “venomous comments” in response to the article, he advised: “If you don’t repent, you are lost forever.” Now, concerning the upset over Nancy Wilson’s spanking advice, he wrote that the clash over spanking was a “proxy collision between two different ways of looking at the world—the Christian way or the pagan way,” and that a very large number of evangelical leaders need to become … Christians. “Am I questioning your salvation?” he asked. “Well, yes. Yes, I am.”

In a seeming scramble to distract from NQN Blowback One (the resurfaced abuse allegations) and NQN Blowback Two (the spanking clip), Wilson went on the attack, aiming a blog post at Anthony Bradley, a fellow at the Acton Institute for the study of religion and liberty, a Judeo-Christian free market think tank. Bradley had weighed in on Rigney and Prior’s original thread about empathy. Bradley, a thinker who writes about faith, race, and education (and who is Black), in Wilson’s telling became a representative of the mob. Wilson noted that weeks prior, Bradley had shared a historical image of a lynching of two Black men by a mob after false allegations were made against them. And now, Wilson argued, Bradley had “showed up to support a Twitter swarm that was inflamed by the report of a rape.” Wilson wrote, “Anthony Bradley wants to live in a world where black men can get lynched because of white women’s tears.”

I asked Bradley what he thought of Wilson’s attack, and he told me he first laughed and then felt sorry for Wilson. The generous response is informed by Bradley’s reading of German psychoanalyst Karen Horney. He described for me an expansive personality type that can be narcissistic, that “believes themselves to be fighting for a cause … to have a role to play in reining in chaos.” They do so by creating a world around them that feeds their need for affirmation, validation, and self-importance, often attracting other self-effacing personality types who look up to them.

When we spoke over the phone, I asked Bradley if he’d seen Wilson’s flamethrower video for the month. He hadn’t but answered, “I wish you could see my face.” If someone had told him “this is the way a 70-year-old, so-called respected church leader is behaving,” he said, “I would assume you were describing an actor who was promoting some sort of comedy sketch.”

Wilson has built quite a sphere of influence, so vast that it can be difficult to keep up. His constant stream of words can distract from Wilson’s other past controversies, including (but by no means limited to) plagiarism allegations and co-writing a bizarrely nostalgic 1996 book about American chattel slavery. Wilson is also known for his rhetorical turns and the use of sharply sexual or gendered language, describing women as “small-breasted biddies,” “twinkies in tight tops,” “harridans, termagants, harpies & crones,” “tits,” “cunts,” and so on. He has a webpage dedicated to explaining away his various scandals, despite written record of many. (Wilson did not respond to a request for comment for this piece.)

This month, he tried to spin things, once again. Wilson sat for a nearly hourlong video with his now-adult children, N.D. Wilson, Rachel Jankovic, and Rebekah Merkle, who reminisced about their happy childhoods and voiced appreciation for their parents’ parenting style. It was an effort to show how normal the family is, how the outcry over spanking was laughable. Crisis management continued with a promotional message for a $110.70 bundle of books by Wilson and his family, sent out by Canon Press. The ad read, “Apocalypse-Proof Your Family,” “Pastor Wilson’s family hasn’t had a single apostacy across four generations,” and “What’s in the Wilson Family Secret Sauce? It’s not gentle parenting, or joyless legalism, or modern psychology.”

The grifty language was greeted with enough dismay that Wilson himself offered a rare apology for the ad, via blog post, writing, “It really did come off like a child-rearing version of the prosperity gospel. And some of it wasn’t exactly true.” Current Canon Press CEO Brian Kohl apologized for the “weird” message, concluding: “We did a bad job there for a sec. We will now return to our normal soaring heights.”

One unanticipated outcome of all the attention on Wilson is that Examining Doug Wilson and Moscow seems to finally be attracting awareness to the undercurrent of abuse within Wilson’s world. One admin, whom I referred to with the biblically inspired pseudonym “Priscilla and Aquila” in Disobedient Women due to safety concerns stemming from threats for EDWAM’s efforts, told me, “Really, I think I’ve felt all along that eventually enough data will be out there that people will have no choice but to get it.” Priscilla and Aquila added that they hoped “so many horrified, normal Christians will be looking in, that the ones who were kind of mesmerized by him will start to kind of wake up. And I think I’m seeing that.”

Possible evidence to that effect came when conservative theologian and Reformed Theological Seminary professor Kevin DeYoung published a piece late in November acknowledging that the output from Wilson in terms of publishing, schools, and churches is vast. To DeYoung’s mind, it draws some Christians to move to Moscow, Idaho, because they are drawn by the “cultural aesthetic and the political posture that Wilson so skillfully embodies.” DeYoung, former board chair of the Gospel Coalition, did not want to critique Wilson’s theology, historical interpretations, and arguments for Christian nationalism, and did not mention abuse, but instead worried over the “long-term spiritual effects of admiring and imitating the Moscow mood.” It was a critique of tone. Given the rest of Wilson’s history, DeYoung’s criticism could be read as strategic, a way to reach soft Wilson supporters—or perhaps, if you look back at Dye’s or other survivors’ stories, it was just milquetoast, another way to spin things.

Wilson offered a rare concession and tweeted that DeYoung had written a “thoughtful critique” and asked those “ ‘in my corner’ to treat both it and him with respect.” Wilson showed himself as open to criticism (to someone with influence that could matter deeply in his circles). Time will tell if the entreaty from DeYoung results in a more genteel, less incendiary Wilson. For now, Sumpter and Canon Press have started tagging promotions #MoscowMood. And in an end of month wrap-up video, Wilson called this November “the best.”

Perhaps there’s a lesson here: play with fire enough and you stop noticing when you’ve gotten burned.