In July 2025, Pastor Doug Wilson announced that “Christ Kirk” was going to plant a church in Washington DC. Not long after, Pete Hegseth, a long-time disciple of Wilson, tweeted to show his support for Wilson. This week, Hegseth invited Doug Wilson to preach at the Pentagon.
Many people are wondering: who is Doug Wilson, and I am glad to see reporters digging to find answers. CNN reporter Pamela Brown interviewed him last fall, and is talking with survivors from his community later this week. I am grateful that Wilson is coming under increased public scrutiny, especially as reporters build on the excellent work of Sarah Stankorb, author of Disobedient Women and the Vice article that broke the story about a culture of abuse in Wilson’s high control church community. Tia Levings, author of the NYT best-selling book, A Well-Trained Wife has shown what family life under these teachings is like. Cait West, author of the book Rift has documented the life of “stay-at-home-daughters” in these communities.
It’s a heart-breaking reckoning to come face to face with the way Christian teaching from Christian pastors in Christian communities has not just enabled but propagated abuse. Examining Doug Wilson & Moscow, Idaho has painstakingly documented survivor stories and excerpts of Wilson’s teaching for years, and I believe many more survivor stories are yet untold.
Wilson’s Christian dominionist teaching hurts children. In patriarchal hierarchies, children are at the bottom. In patriarchal Christian communities, children are often perceived as extensions of parents—arrows in a culture war, numbers for pro-natalist goals, or evidence of God’s blessing on the parent’s chosen way of life. In this post, I want to gather and link all the past work I’ve done to spotlight the harmful parenting teaching that comes out of Doug Wilson’s community. Many of these clips and excerpts are Doug in his own words. Some are stitches, where I connect the dots between themes that Kelsey Kramer McGinnis and I explored in our book The Myth of Good Christian Parenting: How False Promises Betrayed a Generation of Evangelical Families.
At this point, I’ve read dozens of Christian parenting manuals and probably examined as much of Doug and Nancy Wilson’s parenting content then their most loyal fans have consumed. I hope that organizing some of this here will enable people searching for information about Wilson to see the full scope of Doug Wilson’s ideology. I want people to recognize the way it conditions children to expect abuse, calls abuse love, trains children to comfort and attach to the abuser, and blames anyone who tries to leave.
When Doug says his goal is “generational faithfulness,” what he means is that his vision for a theocratic Christian nation rests on parents have many children and training them according to his ideology. His community hasn’t grown because he’s won over the population in Moscow, Idaho. His community has grown because he appeals to Christian families through print and electronic media, resources circulated in Christian homeschooling seminars, and through word of mouth recommendation.
We see this in the fact that Doug, who for many years has been written off as “fringe,” has gained increasing influence at a time when extremist views cater to online algorithms. Canon Press, Cross Politic podcast, and Wilson’s numerous other publishing efforts, online streaming services, and educational programs are strategic efforts to draw in new people and condition the next generation into these theocratic goals. If you want to know why and how Doug remains so popular, look to the family, and the way his resources appeal to parental vulnerabilities, aspirations, and fears.
Ultimately, it’s a betrayal. Because while Doug writes and says a lot of things—and, I mean, a lot—the promises don’t hold, and it’s the families who are left picking up the pieces. The fruit of high control Dominionist parenting teaching is inevitably destructive, robbing people of personhood and agency if they stay in a community, and saddling them with an impossible-to-weigh burden of religious trauma if they leave. It destroys attachment, often intentionally so, which all but guarantees long term relationships marked by inauthentic connection or estrangement. The true “generational legacy” of this parenting framework is abuse and the life-long trauma that comes on its heels.
I hope this compilation will be useful to those now investigating and reporting on Wilson. Even more than that, I hope it will be useful to those within the community who are beginning to doubt. Many concerns about Doug Wilson have been raised before, and Doug’s response has been to create a “controversy library” on his page, where he expounds upon why these concerns should be dismissed. He will try to “own” any concerns and retweet, share, or boast about them as an attempt to deflate any investigation. Both are methods of preemptive thought-stopping, something all the Moscow leaders adopt as an MO to deal with criticism.
I implore those who have questions to not scroll past. Instead, please pause and reflect, consider the words that are being said, listen to your own internal misgivings, reach out to the family and friends who have warned you about Wilson. You do not need to stay. You do not need to raise your children according to these principles. You do not need to stay stuck, feeling ashamed that you fell for this. You can leave, and there are people who will help.
Below you will find embedded videos and links to create my own library of sorts, not of “controversies,” but of reality—a representation of what Doug teaches, the theology that undergirds it, and the impact it has.
The content is organized with embedded video clips at the top, links to longform video analysis next, and links to articles I’ve written at the end. You can find many of these archived on my YouTube or in my Instagram highlights as well. Please feel free to share widely. Together, we can keep exposing Doug Wilson and free some people up.
Clips of Doug’s teaching in his own words:
Doug on “winning” —a compilation of his teaching aligned to his “No Quarter November” promo video:
Doug and Nancy Wilson’s stand-up bit on “spanking” their toddler 35-50X:
Doug recommending parents institute “reigns of terror”:
Doug’s recommended “spanking” tools:
Doug describing how children need to purified from “backlogged sin”:
Doug on the importance of instant obedience and a “happy face”:
Doug Wilson recommending parents avoid CPS:
Doug on love-bombing children:
Doug on how children must “reconcile” with the parent who hit them:
Doug describing his “liturgy” for spanking:
Nancy Wilson describing spanking her daughter into being happy to see her:
Doug explaining why he hates security blankets:
Doug explaining why spanking children isn’t “biblical” but we should do it anyway:
Who is Doug Wilson and What is Canon Press?
Doug Wilson describing his childhood:
Doug’s efforts to go global:
Rachel Jancovik (Doug’s adult daughter) describing how kids love spanking:
Nate Wilson (Doug’s adult son) describing force-feeding his daughter the hamburger she vomited up:
Doug Wilson on his choice to officiate at the wedding to a known pedophile:
The Cross Politic podcast, an arm of Doug’s media company, recently produced an episode on the importance of spanking. Yes, they all talk about spanking children a lot. Here are some clips, and you can find my full response here.
Excerpts from podcast interviews I’ve done on Doug’s teaching. Find the full episodes here and here.
Multipart series I’ve done analyzing Doug’s theology and teaching:
Does God “spank” people? Part 1, Part 2, Part 2.5, Part 3, Part 4
Are children “arrows”? Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6
Doug’s vision for Generational Faithfulness: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
Stitching Rachel’s and Nate’s ideas about “Alpha Dog Parenting,” Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
My full YouTube response to CrossPolitic’s episode Save America; Spank Your Kids
My full YouTube response to Doug Wilson’s ideas about theocracy and punishing homosexuals
Doug Wilson’s prosperity Gospel parenting promises, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
Thoughts on Doug’s book Future Men
Thoughts on Doug’s Book Why Children Matter
Thoughts on Rachel’s book Loving the Little Years
Examining the concept of parents needing to “win”
Doug Wilson and spiritual pyramid schemes
A consideration of the impact of this teaching.
A consideration on the impact of Doug’s advice to let infants “cry it out”
Articles I’ve written related to Doug Wilson
Op-Ed: How Doug Wilson’s child-rearing tips baptize parents into Christian nationalism
Manipulative Babies, Cry-it-out Methods, and What that Says about our Theology
A Twitter about the “Moscow mood”
Estrangement in Evangelical Families
The Politics of Evangelical Siblinghood
Read what people are saying about The Myth of Good Christian Parenting!
Join me and Kelsey Kramer McGinnis for conversations about the book.
Order your own copy now!
Thank you for taking the time to compile all of these ugly, wicked teachings. They tell on themselves if we only have ears to hear it.
Hi Marisa, I just found your blog after reading your book and am so grateful for your work. I’m a new believer (five years) and was always a gentle parent with my daughter who’s 14 now. I was so shocked to discover this dark world of Christian parenting and couldn’t understand how the most loving of paths - following Jesus - could be using such abusive parenting methods.
I really appreciate the way you are shedding light on all this and the connection to nationalism etc.
I am from the UK and I reviewed your book for a UK website I write for - https://www.premiernexgen.com/parenting/rethinking-christian-parenting-the-book-challenging-discipline-myths-in-the-church/20814.article
I don’t think it’s quite as extreme in the UK but I still come across people who read Dobson when their kids were small.