I Think Ken Ham Hosted a CULT at the Ark Encounter Last Year

The word "cult" gets thrown around a lot these days. Usually, we use it to refer to a group of people that we don't like, and I think that makes sense. "Cult" has a lot of spooky, creepy, and unsavory connotations to it, and so it serves us well when we use it to sort of point to a group of people and say something is off about them, something is weird, maybe even a little bit dangerous. It makes us think of dark organizations, obsessed with power, shady financial practices, and at its worst, sexual abuse. I tend to think of famous cults like Jonestown, or Heaven's Gate, or Omin Rio.

But it turns out that cults actually have, surprise surprise, diagnostic criteria that sort of clock them as cults. Which is pretty important for us, and more importantly, law enforcement. As cults can do enormous amounts of harm to people, both within and outside of the fold. That's why it's a pretty big deal to point a finger at someone and say, "I think they're running a cult," or "I think they're in a cult." It's a big word with big implications, which is why I don't lightly say that I think Ken Ham hosted a cult at the Ark Encounter last [Music] year.

This video might not be the type of video that you normally see on my channel. In fact, it's not really one that I wanted to make. Normally, I start these videos off and I say, "Hello, my gentle and of course, very modern apes. My name is Erica, and what we do here is we discuss cool topics with regard to biological anthropology, generally including things like primatology. We look at the fossil record a lot, and other living apes, and we learn about our place in the great tree of life. And also, we debunk a lot of pseudoscience, like for instance, young Earth creationism." And that last bit was where this video started, but it's not where it ends this time.

Last year, the Ark Encounter, that big, life-sized Noah's Ark replica in Williamstown, Kentucky, built by Answers in Genesis, and more specifically, Ken Ham, hosted the Fight Laugh Feast conference. And the specific title of this conference was "The Politics of Six Day Creation: Honey, You've Got a Big Storm Coming." Now, this isn't a politics channel, but I do spend a lot of time debunking young Earth creationism and providing resources to those who are sort of in the process of leaving young Earth creationism or considering leaving young Earth creationism. And so, this was immediately interesting to me. I even thought very briefly that I might go to this particular conference. And then I saw the price. More on that later.

But this entire thing was brought to my attention by, by a friend of the channel, Joel Duff, who also runs the Naturalis Historia blog. And he's a wonderful scientist, a fellow creationism watchdog. He hosts a weekly show called "This Week in Creationism," and he's a Christian himself. Joel posted a video on his channel titled "Ark Encounter Host Moscow CT." And the thumbnail says, "Ken Ham Hosts Moscow CT," with a battleship with a crucifix on it. If you don't know Joel Duff, shame on you, you should be subscribed. But this is a pretty extreme statement coming from him. He's a very measured guy. I kind of thought to myself, "Joel, you slide dog with the clickbait."

But then you click on the video, and it starts like this: "Ken Ham hosts Moscow cult." Yeah, I know, it's kind of clickbaity. It's, uh, it sounds really dramatic. Um, is it clickbaity? No, I think it's, I think it's a serious deal. And I, I'm going to try to, uh, I'm going to try to explain what I mean by this. And so, intrigued, I watched the rest of Joel's video, and then I started doing some research on the people who run the Fight Laugh Feast convention. And then I got a subscription to their streaming service, and I watched the Fight Laugh Feast convention. All of the speakers at it. Yeah, I, I think that this organization is a cult in the same way that we might call many organizations cults that most people agree are cults. I think this organization meets enough of that criteria.

I got to tell you, what we have in our trough today is a multi-course meal, a veritable slop without hyperbole. What we are looking at here is a disgusting amalgamation of science denial and anti-intellectualism, Christian nationalism, and a celebration of bigotry of all kinds. All of this combined with reports of rampant sexual abuse, some involving children, and all coming out of a cult that Ken Ham not only welcomed to the Ark Encounter but shared a stage with.

"Well, good morning everyone. It's, uh, great to be here with you. Uh, by the way, a boat is sort of what you do when you go bass fishing. That is a ship. I don't give a [ __ ] about that."

Now, I believe that one of the best ways to neuter evil ideologies is to just relentlessly make fun of them. But make no mistake, there are aspects of this video that are deadly serious, and I hope to cover those with the utmost respect and care.

Now, first things first. I'm sitting here pointing a big Simeon finger at a group of people and saying that they're a cult. To do that, you kind of have to define "cult," don't you? And I mentioned earlier that there are diagnostic characteristics of one. So let's talk briefly about that, and then keep that in mind moving forward for the rest of this video.

This, this list of characteristics comes to us from the International Cultic Studies Association, or the ICSA. Allow me to start by recognizing that the definition of "cult" is not concrete. This is partially because sociological phenomena are often nebulous and difficult to define with 100% clear-cut criteria, and partially because cults exist on a continuum with religion and spirituality generally. That may sound like it's a slam to religion or spirituality, but the truth is, the word "cult" and our conception of cults have undergone a lot of change over the past several decades. In fact, the negative connotation that we have with the word "cult" is sort of a recent invention.

The middle to late 1900s, the word "cult" just comes from the Latin *cultus*, which means "to worship." Very different from its pejorative connotation, which implies some level of deviance. That usage, the modern usage, began to gain popularity first in the 1930s, and by the 1950s, it was pretty well understood. Lots of cults can be identified from the 1950s onward, and this is due in part to the attention brought to the subject by the Christian counter-cult movement of that time. Not the Christian counterculture movement, the counter-cult movement, as in *against* cults. It was primarily composed of Evangelical Protestants, and they were the main watchdogs when it came to religious organizations or political organizations that were sort of different.

Some of the cults identified by this group and the culture at large would be actually dangerous groups. For example, the People's Temple would be started by Jim Jones in 1955, and we all know how that turns out. But there was also a lot of finger-pointing at groups which are well, kind of weird and certainly aberrant as compared to run-of-the-mill Christianity, ultimately pretty harmless. We would see the spiritual success of this attitude in the Satanic Panics that racked the '90s and onward.

But the culture at this time would also point the finger at cults and brainwashing as an explanation for why anyone during that time period would be a communist. This is pretty interesting because it makes sense that the United States at that time, majority Christian and still to this day majority Christian, would use a term that is polytheistic in origin, "cults," used to describe communities of people who are "off" and typically worshiping less popular gods, to describe something else that they find aberrant or deviant. But instead of an alternative religion, which they might find unthinkable, it is an alternative political ideology that they find unthinkable. And instead of demonic possession, a huge influence in getting someone to be pagan or polytheistic in the minds of some of the Christians who were living at this time, it's brainwashing. The only way to trick someone into being a communist, in, like, a secular way. Even the demons aren't communist.

The '50s would also see several alien-related cults, such as the Unarius Academy of Science and the Aetherius Society. The Unification Church out of South Korea started in 1954, and the Branch Davidians saw their start in 1955. There's a reason why the '50s is known for the emergence of several different cults, and why "cult" and its newer connotation saw its origin during this decade as well. Before that, cults had a different definition, and they had a different public perception. While cults have always involved small communities of people that typically have split off from a closely related religion, sharing esoteric knowledge, and having unique practices, cults of the past weren't engaging in mass suicide or attacks on the general public. They were pretty benign, they had no malicious intent, and usually kept to themselves. I can't think of any major crimes committed by the Cult of Dionysus.

The cults of the past 70, 80 years are small, and they do have a focus on esoteric knowledge. But the cults of today are almost universally seen in a negative light, and the characteristics that define a cult are all themselves bad characteristics. To sum it up, the 1950s put a label with staying power on small organizations focused on esoteric knowledge that had a spiritual or religious leaning to them. Even under this new, almost universal negative connotation, cults still exist on a gradient of harm. No one out there is going to propose that the loose collection of oddballs that believe in aliens and past lives and meet once a month is as harmful as Heaven's Gate, or Jonestown, or Omin Rio. Because of this disparity, some cults will have some of these characteristics, and most cults will have most of these characteristics, but do not need all of these characteristics to be considered a cult. In fact, some of the worst cults out there, recognized by everyone to be like the baddest of the bad, are missing some of these 15 characteristics.

So, what are they? What behaviors does a group need to exhibit to be at risk of being considered a cult?

1. The group displays excessively zealous and unquestioning commitment to its leader or leaders and whether they are alive or dead, regards their belief systems, ideologies, and practices as the truth, as law.

2. Questioning, doubt, or dissent are discouraged or even punished.

3. Mind-altering practices such as meditation, chanting, speaking in tongues, denunciation sessions, and debilitating work routines are used in excess and serve to suppress doubts about the group and its leaders.

4. The leadership dictates, sometimes in great detail, how members should think, act, and feel. For example, members must get permission to date, change jobs, marry, or leaders prescribe what kind of clothes they're allowed to wear, where they can live, and whether or not to have children, as well as how to discipline those children, and so forth.

5. The group is elitist, claiming a special exalted status for itself, its leaders, and its members. For example, the leader is considered a messiah, a special being, an avatar, or the group and/or leader is on some kind of special mission to save humanity.

6. The group has polarized "us versus them" mentalities, which may cause conflict with society.

7. The leader is not accountable to any authorities, unlike, for example, teachers, military commanders, or ministers, priests, monks, and rabbis of mainstream religious denominations.

8. The group teaches or implies that its supposedly exalted ends justify whatever means it deems necessary. This may result in members participating in behaviors or activities that they would have considered reprehensible or unethical before they joined the group. For example, lying to friends or collecting money for bogus charities.

9. The leadership induces feelings of shame and/or guilt in order to influence and/or control members. Often, this is done through peer pressure and subtle forms of persuasion.

10. Subservience to the leader or group requires members to cut ties with family and friends and to radically alter the personal goals and activities they had before they join the group.

11. The group is preoccupied with bringing in new members.

12. The group is preoccupied with making money.

13. Members are expected to devote inordinate amounts of time to the group and group-related activities.

14. Members are encouraged, urged, or required to live in or socialize only with other group members.

15. And finally, the most loyal members, AKA "The True Believers," feel that there can be no life outside of the context of the group. They believe there is no other way to be, and often fear reprisals to themselves or others if they leave or even consider leaving the group.

We are going to be assessing Doug Wilson's Christ Church conglomerate for each of these characteristics, and we're also going to be making a lot of comparisons to other well-known, recognized cults. Like I said, I don't focus on cults on this channel. I focus on teaching science and debunking pseudoscience like creationism. Ken Ham is a big heavy hitter in the world of young Earth creationism, one of my favorite pseudoscience to debunk, and he hosted Doug Wilson's Christ Church conglomerate at his Ark Encounter this time last year at the Fight Laugh Feast conference. I'm interested in that because while Ken Ham has made every dime of his career by shoveling pseudoscience down the throats of unwitting Christians, I don't think that he's as bad as a cult leader. So why did he share the stage with one?

Let's talk about Ken first. Ken Ham is the Australian young Earth creationist who, through his organization Answers in Genesis, is responsible for both the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter. Ham believes the world was created more or less in its present state by a specific version of the Christian God roughly 6,000 years ago, and that there was a global flood, Noah's flood, roughly 4,400 years ago, which only eight people survived by boarding a wooden boat smaller than the Titanic with two of every kind of animal, and that this flood is responsible for the geologic column from the Cambrian to the Cretaceous, as well as every geologic signal found therein.

Ken Ham pushes these ideas through his website and these attractions, but the real bread and butter appears to be his dominance in the homeschooling industry here in the United States. Now, I have done an excessive amount of work to show why everything that he says is incorrect. The second best-performing video on my channel was actually a trip that I took to the Ark Encounter and the Creation Museum, where I went over every single exhibit in grotesque detail and explained not only that it's wrong, but also how we know that that is the case, both using the scientific literature and and our own intuition.

The Earth is not 6,000 years old, and modern biodiversity is the result of evolution from a universal common ancestor. This is something that can, in fact, be copacetic with all different kinds of faith, which is why many wonderful, excellent scientists who work in my own department where I study human evolution are religious, including Christian. Ken Ham, and in fact, most young Earth creationists hate that fact, which is why if you read their literature or their articles, you will see they consistently try to dichotomize the issue. You can only be either an evil, materialistic, atheist naturalist, or a young Earth creationist. And the fact of the matter is, that is just not how the world works. In fact, most of the United States is Christian, and most of the United States accepts evolution. And that overlap, science-affirming Christianity, becomes a lot stronger when you move out of the Evangelical stronghold of the US and into places like Canada or Europe.

I think it's in part due to this rising number of evolution-accepting Christians that Ken Ham has been steadily shifting his attention away from young Earth creationism and focusing more and more on the culture war. Some would even argue that that's what this has always been about. Hints of this can be found all the way back in 1980, when Ken Ham and his friend John Mackay merged their fledgling creationist organization with that of Carl White's to form the CSF, or the Christian Science Foundation. There is an interesting history there, but for today, all we need to know is that eventually Ham would split from that group and form Answers in Genesis in 1997.

The longer I've been doing this, the more I've been won over by the idea that the culture war stuff came first for Ken Ham, and in fact, that it comes first for most young Earth creationists and creationists generally. These guys don't like the idea of harmonizing scripture with progressive social ideas, and they view the harmony of science, like the ancient age of the Earth or the theory of evolution, with scripture as an earlier version of that, perhaps even an inciting incident, a gateway compromise. The problems with this are severalfold. First and foremost being that a literal interpretation of Genesis has been challenged since the dawn of the church, and without any influence, obviously, from Charles Darwin or Charles Lyell, who wouldn't be born for hundreds of years. Second, even though most Christians do accept evolution and the ancient age of the Earth, there are many Christians who accept both of those things and are also not socially progressive. We'll take what we can get, I guess.

But this is why Ken Ham's strategy is mostly to either ignore those people or just imply that they're not Christians, or that they're not as good of Christians. In this way, Ken is able to effectively dichotomize the entire planet with regard to the science of evolutionary theory and the ancient age of the Earth. You are either a good Christian and rely on the authority of God's word, placing that first in your life, God's word, or you are an atheist and you accept science, and that's just man's word, that's like not real, that's actually like spitting in God's face or whatever. I have talked extensively as to why I believe that this isn't just scientifically unsound, but also hermeneutically unsound, and that's why cooler Christians get to dunk on Ken at every opportunity.

[Music]

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But this little preface on Ken Ham is important for more than just the context of talking about the Fight Laugh Feast conference and "The Politics of Six Day Creation" and Doug Wilson's Christ Church conglomerate. It's important because I think these characteristics that Ken exhibits, this tendency of his to dichotomize and sort of prioritize his interpretation of scripture above everyone else's, I think that's something he shares with Doug. And I think that it's the common ground that they needed to share a stage together, whether it's with regard to the science or the social issues.

Around the time that Ken Ham was forming the CSF, our other person of interest was beginning to guest lecture at his local church in a small town in Idaho called Moscow. His guest lectures would lead to a more permanent position at Christ Church, and from there, Doug Wilson would begin to metastasize. Of our two main characters here, Ken Ham worked fast, but Doug Wilson worked faster. The Logos School came first in 1981, boasting a sort of red-verne, a school that promised classical Christian education. Canon Press came next in 1988, a Christian publishing house. There are a couple of books that are notoriously from this publisher that really tell you all you need to know, such as "The Case for Christian Nationalism" and "Southern Slavery as It Was." More on those later. In 1994, he and his church founded New Saint Andrews College. As a college, it has no majors and conforms to a liberal arts curriculum with a biblical worldview. Since then, Doug Wilson has been building a small empire there in Moscow. His congregants buy businesses and land with Christ Church and its close affiliates having quite the influence on the little town and elsewhere.

The spooky music is because I think they're a cult. Enough games. It's time to talk about the Christ Church conglomerate, Doug's little kingdom in Moscow. I think it's Moscow, instead of Moscow. I've been saying it wrong this whole time, but I'll be right moving forward. When I say "Doug Wilson's Christ Church conglomerate," I'm really talking about a big organization that is effectively composed of several smaller, more discreet organizations. This includes, of course, Doug Wilson and his church, the satellite churches that are attached to that, churches closely related churches that are helmed by friends and/or family. I'm also talking about projects that Doug has started or has a big hand in, such as the Logos School, Canon Press, and of course, New Saint Andrews College.

Are they actually a cult? How many of the criteria do they actually meet? You know what I think, but I want you to be the judge. Let's begin.

In researching for this video, I have had to consume a lot of content by Doug and his little buddies. You want me to be honest with you? I got a [ __ ] headache, and I don't feel good at all. Starting, of course, with their YouTube presence and social media posts, and culminating in watching the entirety of the Fight Laugh Feast conference on their Pub Network streaming service. I imagine a woman signing up for the Pub Network streaming service by Doug and all his buddies is not dissimilar to if you were, like, a black person and signed up for a streaming service created by Uncle Ruckus.

I've also consumed a lot of content created by Doug and his friends, many critics and survivors of his churches and schools. In this latter collection are the books "The Myth of Christian Nationalism," "Jesus and John Wayne," and portions of "Disobedient Women," as well as the Vice article "Inside the Church That Preaches Wives Need to Be Led With a Firm Hand." This year's season of NPR's "Extremely American" podcast, dozens of assorted websites and articles, and hundreds of Facebook posts on exposing Doug Wilson and Moscow, Idaho. None of the information that I'm presenting to you here is new in the sense that I found anything new out. All I'm doing is taking information from numerous different sources and putting it all in one place so that you can digest it as a deliciously poisonous meal.

One of the main things that I've learned about Doug Wilson in consuming all of this content is that he's very charismatic, and he is also a gigantic [ __ ]. So, the, the genes that code for eyesight. So, uh, what do you call a partially evolved eyeball? Well, blind, right? Well, and we have to be careful on some things. They ask you how you are, you just have to say that you're fine when you're not really fine, but you just can't get into it because they would never understand. It's not that Doug isn't witty or capable, it's that he seems to think that competence in one area can be like cashed in at any location, and I think that that idea is pretty moronic.

The only other video where I've talked about Doug Wilson so far on my channel was going over his defense of his young Earth creationism. Doug, somebody writes in to ask this question, this very pointed question: "Are you really a young Earth creationist?" "So, yes." "We go moving on." So, um, Doug spent a lot of time talking about a lot of different areas of science, and I am not exaggerating when I say that this man does not know the first thing about biology, let alone evolution. That hasn't stopped him from crowing about how bad and dumb evolution is in several different videos and publishing a booklet about it that's effectively just a coded series of blog posts in which he whacks this poetic about how smart he is and how dumb the scientific community is. The whole thing is also written like a Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox of what a loser might think George Carlin sounds like.

"Everyone who loves God rightly must unite to oppose Coin's name for that continent, which is Gondwana." I am sure he got this name from what he thought was a reputable source, but in this, he is tragically mistaken. It was named by an Austrian geologist in 1885 named Eduard Suess. Jerry Coin did not come up with the name Gondwana. Gondwana sounds like a backwards province of a country that ought not to be allowed to sit at the United Nations Human Rights Council. Damn, bro, you got the whole squad laughing.

I'm a fourth-year PhD candidate in the subject that Doug is trying to talk about and trying to debunk. So I think I'm pretty qualified to say that I truly do believe Kanzi the bonobo could have communicated the basic tenets of evolution better using his lexigram than Doug Wilson. Banana? Very nice. Banana. Banana. Can you find peanuts? Peanut.

Why do some of these other icons that are equally discredited? I mean, Piltdown Man was like a built up out of a, a tooth. Well, a jaw, an orangutan jaw, and a human skull. Truly proud ignorance is bad enough when it's committed to paper, but it's arguably even worse when on video and put through like an Adobe After Effects tutorial. If you want to see me absolutely annihilate everything Doug's ever said with regard to science, explaining using sources and intuitive arguments as to why he's wrong each and every time he broaches the subject, you should check that video out. Remember, I'm not picking on someone here in casual conversation. I'm picking on someone who has chosen to put this out there for people to consume without doing any prior research. It's that latter part, intentionally talking about a subject you know nothing about and then intentionally putting that in front of the eyes of as many people as possible, that I think makes Doug a [ __ ]. Like, dude, just don't put it online. You're allowed to do that. It's your video. Or do a second take, or a Google search, or literally anything.

I also found out that Doug Wilson claims that some of his more offensive or eye-raising quotations that you can find out there are intentionally provocative. If your strategy for garnering attention is be cruel or an idiot through a megaphone, I think you might actually just be one of those things. I don't remember the drunk guy who pooped his pants at the state fair for his biting political commentary. I don't think that Doug Wilson is unintelligent, but I do think that he's overconfident, and I think that predisposes him towards sounding like a [ __ ] a lot. Like the drunk guy who pooped his pants at the state fair, though, morons who talk loudly get a lot of attention. The attention is mostly people pointing and laughing or saying that someone probably needs to call the authorities so this person can see a professional about that. But I think in Doug Wilson's eyes, any press is good press.

It's no secret that a war is being waged in a little town called Moscow, Idaho. In Northern Idaho's dunes of grains and grass, a battle without bullets over the direction of a town. Pastor Doug Wilson leads Christ Church in what he calls a "cold war civil war." "Our rights come to us from God and not from the government." Fighting in, of all places, a college town, Moscow, home to the University of Idaho and just 8 miles from Washington State University, exudes a "live and let live" vibe. Wilson leads his campaign to make Moscow a Christian town. On one side, our regular, run-of-the-mill people of all walks of life, and on the other is Doug Wilson and the Christ Church conglomerate. The people who want to make America a Christian Nation. I'm Heath Drusen, and this is Extremely American.

"Onward Christian Soldiers." This season, we're telling a story about a pastor and his powerful church trying to take over Moscow, Idaho. But it's also about the growing chorus of people like Doug who want to essentially end American democracy as we know it, a movement called Christian Nationalism. Formally, Christian Nationalism is, at its most extreme, the idea that America was founded as a Christian Nation, and that as such, Christianity should be woven into all that the nation is, from law to culture, and that it should enjoy a privileged position in the public square. Slightly less extreme, but far more common, is the idea that America was founded on Judeo-Christian values, and that these values should be similarly prioritized. Doug Wilson is unequivocally the former, and he has said as much himself many times. "I want the authority of the Lord Jesus to be confessed by the House and the Senate, and I want the President to sign it. I trust my bona fides as a Christian nationalist." "There are, in order, I want our society to confess together that Jesus rose from the dead."

"It's not fair. It's not fair that, like, this is even something that I think anyone has to go through. We, meaning all of us over here in Bible Land, were going to be called Christian nationalists. Whatever happened, you say you didn't want to call yourself a Christian nationalist? Yeah, well, Jews didn't want to wear those Star of David badges either."

"Your ideal America, do non-Christians get to hold office?" "Um, no." Wilson has also been extremely vocal about the fact that he wants to make Moscow a Christian town, and that this should be the miniature version of what America could, and in fact should, eventually become within this town. Christ Church seeks to accumulate power and wealth with Doug at the head. It's worth saying here, right off the bat, that Wilson is not trying to make a Christian town. He's trying to make a Doug's version of Christianity town. He has this specific way that he interprets scripture, he has a specific version of the world that he wants to see, and I think the latter is informing the former. But, like, regular Christians for the most part are very weirded out by Wilson and all the things that he attempts to promote. So please do not let this reflect on Christianity generally.

In my opinion, this behavior already checks off our first trait: Number one, the group is elitist, claiming a special exalted status for itself, its leaders, and its members. For example, the leader may be considered a messiah, a special being, or an avatar, and the group and/or leader is on a special mission to save humanity. This is very reminiscent to me of Scientology, the Church of Scientology buying up all of Clearwater and attempting to make Clearwater a Scientology town. The Christ Church conglomerate and Doug Wilson even prioritize specifically downtown in their endeavors.

But I do think that a little bit of extra religious background from Doug's perspective will add some important context. Doug Wilson has been in Moscow for a long time. In the 1960s, Doug's father, James Wilson, brought his family to Moscow and penned a book titled "The Principles of War: A Handbook on Strategic Evangelism." James was a retired Navy man and thought that war strategies may be used to better convert others to Christianity, and a very specific type of Christianity at that.

You may be familiar with the concept in theology known as eschatology. This is the study, colloquially speaking, of the end times. It's doomsday theology and concerns itself most frequently with the Book of Revelation, the last book of the Bible. Revelation is an apocalyptic book, supposedly written by John of Patmos, or the author recounts prophetic visions of the end of the world and the second coming of Jesus Christ. It's an incredibly complicated book, full of intense imagery and symbolism, and its exact meaning chapter by chapter is heavily debated. There are a lot of stances on a lot of things in Revelation, but for our purposes, we need only to understand the differences between premillennialism, amillennialism, and postmillennialism. The millennium in this sense is a period of 1,000 years that is interpreted in different ways.

If you are a regular viewer of mine, you might be thinking, "Ah, jeez, all right, well, I don't come here for this." So I'm going to go ahead and head out. And let me say to you, wait. Trust me, this is interesting, and this is important.

Premillennialists generally believe that before Jesus can return to rule for 1,000 years, a tribulation, or time of great suffering, will occur. Basically, things have to get really bad before Jesus steps in and cleans things up. Some premillennialists hold to the idea of the Rapture, that the saved will be spared from this tribulation, and only non-believers will toil before Jesus comes again. Other premillennialists believe that Christians too will suffer through the tribulation before Jesus intervenes. In both views, Jesus returns, rules for 10,000 years, and then defeats evil once and for all. I'm oversimplifying, so stay with me.

Amillennialists generally believe that we are currently living in an age of suffering and victory, a figurative millennium. Once persecution of Christians reaches a fever pitch, Jesus will step in and defeat evil once and for all.

Postmillennialists believe that Jesus won't return until the millennium is over. His return is essentially triggered by Christians bringing about a golden age of righteousness on Earth, the millennium, where the church will command global culture and prosper. You can pretty easily see that a Christian stance on this issue is going to impact how they interact with the world around them, their government, their culture, their community.

Premillennialists have gotten a lot of flack from certain corners of the internet for essentially trying to bring about the end of the world intentionally. The idea is that things have to get really bad before Jesus steps in, so it is in their best interest, wanting Jesus to return as quickly as possible, to sort of accelerate the problem. I don't think there are very many premillennialists who are actually like that, mostly because you'd have to have a pretty low view of Jesus's intelligence to think he would fall for something like that. But I can see how if one were trying to accelerate the end of the world, you might be called like a death cult or something along those lines.

Doug is not a premillennialist. That's probably already obvious, but his stance is perhaps equally as harmful, but in a completely different way and for a completely different reason. Doug Wilson is a vocal and self-proclaimed postmillennialist, and this position is the lifeblood of what I think is a cult.

In 2003, Doug Wilson cited his father's book in an annual sermon called "The State of the Church," in which he outlines the plan for a spiritual takeover of Moscow, Idaho. Quote: "The idea of warfare is necessary in order to understand a central part of what is happening here. And by this, I mean the concept of a decisive point. A decisive point is one which is simultaneously strategic and feasible. Strategic means that it would be a significant loss to the enemy if taken. Feasible means that it would be possible to take. New York City is strategic but not feasible. Boville is feasible but not strategic. But small towns with major universities, Moscow and Pullman, say, are both."

Spiritual takeover of a town, necessarily converting the majority of the population of the planet in order to herald the return of the Savior. Huh? Huh? Why? That sounds a whole lot like number two: "The group is preoccupied with bringing in new members." Now, plenty of Christians want to evangelize. The whole group of evangelicals is defined by that task. But for Doug, and for all postmillennialists, taking over the world and converting most of the people in it is straight up a prerequisite for hastening the return of Jesus Christ. And brother, that job begins at home. This isn't normal, run-of-the-mill Christianity we're talking about here. This is Doug Christianity, based off of his pretty harsh interpretations of scripture. And it's important to start with that, to point that out, because this is the cloth from which the Christ Church conglomerate tapestry is woven. Postmillennialism, but a very specific type of conversion is required, a type that just so happens to require a lot of Christian nationalism.

"We can't force people to to have faith in Christ, but we can, as a people, order that. I'd rather have a Christian monarchy than our current state of affairs. We could argue that now is a time to arms again." "Can I pray for you?" "Perfect. Dear God, I thank you for my man right here. I know that he's been making some very bad decisions and he's in a season of stupidity, but you can pull him out of this and use him a little bit."

"How do you make America great again?" "You make America Christian again." "We get called, 'Well, you're Christian nationalists.' You want, you want the kingdom to be the government?" "Yes." "The point of Christian nationalism, my goal is to break American democracy." "This is your sign to stop being cringe. Send this to someone who is cringe."

And a lot of subjugating women. More on all that later. But, you know, that Christian nationalism stuff actually reminds me of three: Number three, "The group teaches or implies that its supposedly exalted ends justify whatever means it deems necessary." This may result in members participating in behaviors or activities that they would have considered reprehensible or unethical before they joined the group. For example, lying to family and friends or collecting money for bogus charities.

Doug has argued quite clearly that all bets are off when it comes to achieving the world that he wants to see. People arguing with him by writing to his editors have quite literally urged Doug to consider that the ends do not justify the means when it comes to acquiring power. This discussion happened in part because of his rants and ravings in pursuit of Christian nationalism. Doug's response actually is that he does believe the ends justify the means, and that Jesus Christ himself would have seized power if that was the right time to do so. And that attitude has spread. It has metastasized to Doug's most fervent supporters. Kristen Kobes Du Mez, the author of "Jesus and John Wayne" and writer of the "Four Our Daughters" documentary, notes that this very clearly extends out from Doug and to other Christian nationalists such as Steven Wolfe and William Wolfe. But if you look inside their own communities, you can see how for decades they have propped up men who have abused power and have excused all kinds of harm, all kinds of abuses, for the sake of that power. The ends justify the means.

The pandemic seems to have really kicked these guys into high gear with regard to their larger plans. The government telling them that they needed to wear masks or stay at home, really just the lockdown in general, robbed all of them the wrong way. Doug and another church pastor, Toby Sumpter, saw several of their congregants arrested during one of the many protests they helped lead. But for these folks, the ends doing whatever they want justify the means, getting people sick. I have so little patience for this as someone who did lose a loved one thanks to COVID. I don't think it's actually your right to infect the elderly or immunocompromised because you don't want to wear a mask in public. People from the 1910s understood this. They lived under health mandates from the government due to the Spanish flu. But then again, I guess that's when men were men.

No one liked the pandemic. The lockdown sucked. The mask mandates sucked. The stay-at-home orders sucked. The whole thing absolutely sucked. But I think that maybe crybabies like Doug Wilson and those like him in their mask mandate and lockdown protests should suck it up. You're selfish, and you got people killed.

Unsurprisingly, attitudes like this, as well as many others, led Wilson and his allies into conflict with most of the political right and all of the political left. This has created a really "us versus them" mentality amongst Doug and his congregants and his allies and their congregants, which, oh yeah, number four: "The group has a polarized 'us versus them' mentality, which may cause conflict with the wider society."

I try not to get political here on YouTube. I use Twitter for that. But despite my pretty far-left leaning political thoughts, I do not hate conservatives or think they are all evil demons. I think a lot of them are dreadfully misinformed on subjects that I happen to be privileged enough to have somewhat of an education in, things regarding like climate change, for instance. But I'm sure there are conservatives out there who feel that way about me with regard to things like, I don't know, the economy. I think that most people can be reasoned with, and that's why I think conversation is going to be important in moving out of the extremely divided state that the nation is currently in now.

Conversation is not going to cure everything. For example, I do not think that I am going to be able to talk someone out of the idea that the 19th Amendment should be repealed. I don't think that that's going to happen. And I'm going to go ahead and say that that holds for many of the positions out there which seek to remove rights, like, for instance, the rights to one's own body or the rights to live. Still, that is not going to apply to most normal people. Meaning, with most normal people, you can just have a conversation, and maybe you can actually get somewhere.

Doug and the Christ Church conglomerate, I do not think they subscribe to the idea that conversation is worth having. Now, I don't personally care about that because I would rather stick pins under each one of my nails and then soak them in lemon juice than have a conversation with Doug Wilson about anything ever. I think he's a complete waste of time. That's an exaggeration. I'd love to dunk on him in real time, but I do think that in Doug's case, this really, like, plays into this "us versus them" mentality, especially given who the "them" is.

Doug thinks the left in general is cancer. The left is the cancer. He thinks environmentalists are a pagan death cult. He thinks Obama is a bloodthirsty maniac. Women leaders are a curse, except when they're leaders in the Bible. Don't ask me how that one works. Doug is going to have a heck of a conversation with Deborah and Queen Esther someday by telephone, because Doug will be in hell. The war on Ukraine is bad, but don't be too harsh on Putin because he also hates the gays. I think it's hard to get more "us versus them" than agreeing with a dictator who started a war on a much smaller country because he agrees with you on gay rights. You're going to co-sign Hitler on that one too, Doug? Like, why would you say that? Even rhetorically, why would you say that? You sound like a bonehead.

Obviously, Doug hates gay people. I do not, not to, I do not want to know whether they are for or against same-sex marriage. I want to hear their case against it. And he loathes trans people. Now, we think it's possible to bridge the gap between gyrating drag queens at the children's story hour and black bumper Mennonites. Hey, fem king, let's keep those thoughts to ourselves. You're twinking out loud right now, and I don't want to hear it.

One of the things that makes Doug so mad about gay people is that he is not allowed to call them slurs and he's not allowed to have them killed. That latter one is a joke, but only kind of. I don't think Doug himself has ever advocated for the death penalty for being gay, but he has rubbed shoulders with a lot of people who have advocated for the death penalty for being gay. I don't like the guilt by association thing, but I'm not really talking about guilt by association here. When I say he rubs shoulders with them, I mean he publishes their books in his own publishing house, Canon Press.

It's hard to know where Doug actually stands on this because I have heard him say that gay people would be allowed to live in his Christian theocracy, they just couldn't get married there. "Be a place for same-sex couples." "What do you mean, legally?" "Yes." "You mean like, uh, marriage?" "Uh, no, no marriage." "But there'd be same-sex couples?" "No marriage." "Even though it's the law of the land in the United States?" "Just like Roe used to be, right?" "I mean, but I've also heard him say that being gay would be criminalized." And of course, he supports people who say that if you are gay, you should be exiled or killed. So I'm kind of at a loss here.

The fortunate thing is that in Doug's mind, if you are gay, there is actually a cure. It's called rediscovering the natural use of women. Godly women want to feed their men. Godly women are designed to make the sandwiches, at the very least. It's a preventative.

Which leads me to number five: "The leadership dictates, sometimes in great detail, how members should think, act, and feel." For example, members must get permission to date, change jobs, marry, or leaders prescribe what types of clothes they can wear, where they can live, and whether or not to have children, how to discipline those children, and so forth.

Doug's got opinions on women and their roles in society, and he feels that those opinions are divinely supported. Wilson is a big proponent of the idea of headship, which is this idea that men should be the head of their household, and that authority also extends to church, and it extends to the government. Can women vote? It depends. So, in our church, in our polity, households vote, and in Doug's world, the head of the household is almost always a man. Okay? But that means ultimately, it's the man's decision, unless a woman's husband has died, or she is unmarried, or, yeah. If you've ever seen that really tacky image with the umbrellas where it's like, God is the biggest umbrella, and then he rules over man, and man rules over women, and women rule over their kids, and they add little additional things to kind of soften the blow, but really, what we're describing here is a hierarchy that comes from headship. Under Doug's

Headship ideology: men should rule over women in virtually every capacity possible, and women are required to serve them dutifully. This is divinely commanded. In his opinion, this extends, of course, to the 19th Amendment. Doug does not think that women should be allowed to vote, for example.

When women were granted the right to vote, the nation had already accepted the lie that a nation is nothing more than a collection of individuals. And so the matter was framed this way: men as individuals can vote, so why cannot individual women do the same? We were so muddled. We thought we were giving the franchise to women when we were in fact taking it away from families.

This is interesting to me because we've all been aware for a very long time of Conservative Christian groups that are complementarian in nature. So, you know, they have the role for the men and the role for the women. And one of the roles for men is like leadership, but typically in those groups, this doesn't extend like outside of the family or outside of the church. Like in civic life, men and women are still equal under the law, and that's something that's okay with them.

It's weird to me to propose that the 19th Amendment is responsible for like the decomposition of society, especially given where that falls temporally speaking. But I digress. Doug will defend himself by saying that he isn't actually proposing necessarily the repeal of the 19th Amendment. He's proposing the institution of family voting. So instead of men voting and women voting, families vote as like a block.

Okay, but you are a feral supporter of headship. So if families are voting and the man is the head of the family, who is actually voting? You can drag that part out of him, and some reporters or interviewers have before. He's really not trying to hide it that much. I think he just wants to soften on the whole repeal the 19th Amendment.

Some of his close friends, though, like Joel Weber, um, are not as gentle as Doug is. And just for the record, you know, yeah, I think the 19th Amendment should be repealed. I think that because, well, first and foremost, because I'm a Christian. When I say not as gentle, I mean they're rhetorically stupider because this just sounds insane. And optics, like those are 100% the reason why most normal Christians are like, Doug Wilson and his ilk, gross.

Paul says in Corinthians that, uh, the man was not made for the woman, but the woman for the man. It, um, Adam was made for dominion, for the garden, and to turn the world into a garden. Adam was created with a mission, and Eve was created to tend the gardener. So that's right. He was, he was created to tend the garden. She's created to tend the gardener, to tend the garden. God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful, multiply, fill the Earth, and subdue it. Rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and every creature that crawls on the Earth." Them. Doug, I don't think he went to school nowhere. If he went to school, he didn't learn nothing.

It turns out a cold repeal of the 19th Amendment just isn't very popular outside of your echo chamber of calling a spade a spade misogynists. I don't know that most of these guys would consider themselves necessarily to be misogynist because they think what they're doing is like saving theological Feminine Mystique, preserving true Womanhood. The reason scripture includes such instructions is that there's a very real possibility that a number of young women, if left of their own devices, would not do a good job. Not to put too fine a point on it, they might fail in their calling of Domesticity.

Just as boys need to be instructed on how to be a man, so also girls need instruction on how to be a wife and mother. And, uh, I think that sounds brain-damaged. Of course, others are more honest in their motivation. Uh, Weber very clearly just wants the 19th to be repealed so that the political people that he doesn't like can't get elected. If we had a Christian Nation and women could vote, then within 50 years, we would no longer have a Christian Nation. If the solution to your political problem is taking away rights, baby, just repeal them.

Speaking of rights, Doug has also attempted to walk back some, but not all, of his more psychotic race takes. Let me tell you about some of those. Doug has said, among other things, that slavery wasn't that bad. Slavery as it existed in the South was not an adversarial relationship with pervasive racial animosity because of its dominantly patriarchal character. It was a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence. There has never been a multiracial society which has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world. Black families were never stronger than under slavery. The husband was the head of the house, and there was a strong familial bond between family members. This kind of bond is not the product of widespread promiscuity. One could argue that the black family has never been stronger than it was under slavery. It was certainly stronger under the southern slave system than it is today under our modern destructive welfare state.

Slaves probably weren't raped by their masters. Such arguments overlook the real and potentially large costs that confronted masters and overseers who sought sexual pleasures in the slave quarters. It would have been much easier and less risky for owners of large plantations to keep a mistress in town than to risk the possibility of the destruction of his own family by taking up with a slave woman.

It's important for Christians to defend slavery. If those who hate the word of God can succeed in getting Christians to be embarrassed by any portion of the word of God, then that portion will continually be employed as a battering ram against the godly principles that are currently under attack. Godly men could own slaves. The answer to that question for anyone who believes the Bible is that it was possible for a godly man to own slaves, provided he treated them exactly as the scripture required, and that slavery is not evil. Our humanistic and democratic culture regards slavery in itself as a monstrous evil. Malamin and it acts as though this were self-evidently true. The Bible permits Christians in slave-owning cultures to own slaves, provided they are treated well. You are a Christian. Whom do you believe? The book he co-authored, Southern Slavery as It Was, was with Steve Wilkins. According to Nick Gear of Idaho University, Wilkins was a pastor of Auburn Avenue Presbyterian Church in Monroe, Louisiana, and the founding director of the Neo-Confederate League of the South, declared a white supremacist hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The League's President, Michael Hill, who attends Wilkins's church, proposed that an independent Neo-Confederacy of 15 states would have the duty to protect the values of Anglo-Celtic culture from Black Americans who were "a compliant and deadly underclass." Uh, hm. I'm going to go ahead and say that this also isn't guilt by association because brother co-authored a book with this person. Yikes. And I'm like, oh, that's cool, man, because grandfather's going to try to get me to join the Confederacy again.

Doug has self-identified with the label paleo-Confederate, which Gear infers means returning to a United States where "only propertied males voted, the appointment of senators, the repeal of at least the 14th and 16th Amendment, and a loose confederation of autonomous states." I see why Doug might want to walk back some of these statements. They look really bad. But I do think that it's extremely interesting that those positions he is a lot more careful about and aims to walk back in the sense that they're not so extreme, or at least they don't sound quite as extreme. But the stuff about women, he is just unapologetic about that.

The result is something called the patriarchy, that which, according to our soy-desant and lisping political theorists, must be smashed. Only they say something like "smash." The problem is that it's not possible to smash the foundation without also destroying the house. Do it. Do it. Look, look at me. Do it.

So Doug Wilson doesn't think that women should have the right to vote. He disguises it kind of in this family block voting, like voting through your husband thing. I feel that that is the world's lamest cover. But given his view of women, he probably thinks that most women just would genuinely fall for that. In Doug's America, women also can't hold office. They can't hold any type of civic authority over men. And so, not only is biblical masculinity not the disease, it is the solution. God has determined that men should occupy the positions of leadership in each of the basic governments that he has established among men. These governments would be those of our civic life (Isaiah 3:12), our life together in the church (1 Timothy 2:12), and in the family (1 Corinthians 11:3). The rumors are true. I will be drinking an enormous amount of alcohol tonight, just like I did last night.

He does recognize that there are cases of that happening in the Bible, but he thinks that those are anomalous. Which, well, that's awfully convenient. Obviously, women cannot hold positions of authority in Doug Wilson's church, the Christ Church conglomerate in general. Actually, they can't even sit on the school board at the Logos School Association. Ideally, what women are doing is being at home, being pregnant, and making the men's sandwiches. Godly women want to feed their men. Godly women are designed to make the sandwiches. This is your sign to stop being sexist. Send this to someone who is sexist. The definition of sexist is characterized by or showing discrimination, prejudice, or stereotyping. Has this ever happened to you? I am a woman. Ah, women are stupid. Women are dumb. Women are weak. They all cheat. You guys can't hold a job. Godly women are designed to make the sandwiches.

Doug is just a concentrated, distilled amalgamation of every high school boy between 2005 and 2012 that I knew who thought like, "Make me a sandwich," or like, "Cool story, babe," or like, "Really funny," or biting social commentary. The difference being, of course, that those boys grew up to be mostly normal people, and Doug is still here being unfun. For what it's worth, that's part of my big issue with sexist jokes is that often they're just not that funny. Like, there are a lot of things that you can make fun of women. There are a lot of things that you can make fun of with men. But, like, if you're going to make those jokes, please be funny about them. Make it worth it. Otherwise, it just sounds like you're like, unable to get a girlfriend or you're unhappy in your marriage. Both of which are not funny. They're just kind of sad.

But women have another duty outside of child-rearing and making the sandwiches, according to the Christ Church conglomerate, and that's eagerly awaiting for their husband to return home so that they can perform one of their most important jobs: being his sexual outlet. Doug Wilson has not minced words on this one. Ladies and gentlemen, the sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts. We cannot make gravity disappear because we dislike it. And in the same way, we find that our banished authority and submission come back to us in pathological forms. This is what lies behind bondage and submission games, along with the very common rape fantasy. Men dream of being rapists, and women find themselves wistfully reading novels in which someone ravishes the soon-to-be-made willing heroine. Hey, yo, what the [ __ ]?

Now, you might be like me and think, "Ooh, someone should call for a wellness check on Doug Wilson's female relatives." But actually, his wife, Nancy, and his daughter, Rebecca, concur, albeit for different reasons. In the book, The Fruit of Her Hands, Nancy talks about the head of the household, the husband, and what the husband is to be to a wife. "A head is given to a woman for protection, safety, and shelter. We must not run from the safety of our own head to what looks like better shelter to us. This is dangerous temptation, and women succumb to it in many different ways. Sometimes they fall by reading Christian books or listening to Christian teachers. But surely that cannot be wrong, you say? Yes, it is, if they begin to look to someone else as their head. Women are readily deceived. What a great protection it is to have a head to submit to rather than being swayed by our own emotions, whims, and fears."

I have chewed on this for a little while, and I think that Nancy might actually find this arrangement satisfying. And far be it from me to shame someone for their sexual proclivities or fantasies or whatever. Part of the reason that I say this, imply it really is, because whenever Nancy is talking about the concept of like total submission to your husband outside of the context of sex, including condoning marital rape, by the way, of course, a husband is never trespassing in his own garden, though he can be made to feel as though he is an intruder. Leave your husband. [Music] Leave. She seems to be either an analizing women or being really sad. It's, it's a bummer to listen to.

Let me play you a clip from Nancy's podcast that I first heard on Extremely American. We reached out to Doug's wife, Nancy, to get her take. She's a prolific writer in her own right. She declined an interview, but she said a lot publicly in her podcast, Femina. Nancy Wilson tells her listeners about her view of women's role in the family. "I was saying that we want to read our story right and realize we are the minor character. We're not the main character in this little house I live in. My father-in-law is the main character. I mean, he's the main character, of course, in my marriage. My husband's the main character. And yet, I absolutely know that this is where I'm supposed to be. I wasn't supposed to be the leading lady." All of that, she says, is God's will for women. But if I get my role confused, and if I start thinking I'm the main character, then I'm going to be set up to be mighty discontent. Like, really, I need a better situation than this. My heart breaks for Nancy here. This is one of the saddest things that I have ever heard. Now, if she's satisfied with this arrangement, you know, that's on her. She's a grown-up. She can make her own decisions. But for what it's worth, I have heard the same thing from women in extremely abusive relationships, women in sex cults, and women who are from extremely oppressive patriarchal nations. They say that actually they like this, that they're fine. Are they editing Gibbon? Notice here, Doug's daughter's name is actually Rachel, not Rebecca. I call her Rebecca multiple times in the next section. Sorry, Rachel.

Doug's daughter, Rebecca, has more vocally praised the world she has stuck in. Now, to me, to use some modern parlament here, I think Rebecca might be a bit of a pick-me in identity and politics. She quips, "It's not true that women don't lead in scripture. They repeatedly lead men to hell and death." Essentially, this is a woman who is willing to put down other women in order to increase or secure her own status within a hierarchy. So if I were you, I'd actually like put on a bonnet or some sort of hair covering. Yeah, it's, it's required of all the girls, not me, because I'm like, really close to supreme leader. So on the day of departure, the men are supposed to go first. But, like, don't be weirded out if I go with them, just because, like, I'm not super close with, like, any of the women. Now, I don't like Rebecca. I do not like her. I do not like the things that she has done. I think they have caused a lot of harm. But I do understand why she has done what she has done. Doug Wilson is ambitious and power-hungry, and Rebecca is a lot like her father. She is also ambitious and power-hungry. She has a world that she wants to see. She likes being in charge. But unfortunately, Rebecca is a woman in the world that Rebecca lives in, the world that her dad helped create, she can never be as he is. She can't even desire it. Rebecca is constrained by what she is. She's constrained by her very being. And so, instead of simply leaving that community, she does what she can within it and simply lords the power that she does have over those that she can lord that power over, in this case, other women. It's like being declawed, defanged, neutered, ball-gagged, and sealed in an abandoned coal mine under two miles of human [ __ ]. It is a fate worse than death. This doesn't make anything that Rebecca has done any less evil, but it at least makes her comprehensible. It's an explanation for her actions, not a justification.

I think that this is all very tragic. But the tragedy does not end there. We're looking at a community that was founded in part on the idea that God literally created women to be subordinate to men in just about every way. To me, that sounds like an abuser's paradise. We've got Doug Wilson's rapist and wife-beater kingdom over here. Because who's she going to report to? In Sarah Stancor's Vice article, an anonymous woman going by Jean discusses the frequent marital rape committed by her husband. When she spoke to other women attending Christ Church and affiliated churches, they told her that they were experiencing the same thing. When Jean sought help from pastors at Trinity Reformed, she was told that a wife is not allowed to tell her husband no. By the time she filed for divorce, her husband, Wilson, had officiated the wedding. Of course, harassment from other church members was frequent. Women who do leave, of course, stand to lose it all: their community, their family, their friends, their reputation, which is why it's an extremely difficult step to make. Still, some have done it and turned around and devoted their lives to helping other women leave the abusive situations that they are stuck in. Extremely Americans Heath Drusen and James Dawson interviewed Sarah Bayen, a woman and former member of Christ Church, who helps other women escape abusive relationships. According to Bayen, abuse is rampant, and the church is not interested in helping. Her work is dangerous. For several years, Sarah operated mostly in the shadows. Then in 2021, she went on a local pastor's YouTube show. "Hello, my name is Pastor Kevin, and I am with my friend Sarah Bader." During the episode, Sarah talked about helping abused women, and she pulled no punches. "Christ Church is not a church. Um, it is a cult." The episode quickly started spreading around the Christ Church universe. [Music] [Applause] Calls started pouring in from more Christ Church women. Sarah says she and the pastor got upwards of 40 pleas for help, and other concerned members of the community joined me, and we just worked together to help remove them from the situation, get them across state lines, help them, advise them of their rights. There were a handful of extreme cases: domestic violence, women who said they were raped by their husbands. Thankfully, we do have a network of other women who have already left that are always willing to help and put up women. Christ Church harassment is rampant. They, I, if I go out in public, they record me, they take pictures, they post videos of me on their personal Facebook pages. So it's kind of, it's stalking. We've had to change where I work. Sarah says she and her allies are concerned things could eventually escalate. Almost all of us either carry or have people that carry that we are always with. Are you packing right now? Yeah. Well, I believe that that checks this box, number six: Group members display excessively zealous and unquestioning commitment to its leader, whether he is alive or dead, with regard to his belief systems, ideology, and practices.

Men who think like Doug run every facet of a society like this. And, well, you know how women are. Girls are even worse. Sarah Stan Corbin reviewed 12 former and current church members and Logos students and reviewed court and medical documents, church correspondence, and business filings. What she reports on in that Vice article is pretty grim. Michaela Peterson was a student at Logos, Doug Wilson's flagship K-12 school, often pointed to as a model for classical education. She describes inappropriate touching from a teacher and describes the teacher telling the class, "You see, everything has a male and a female part. The projector cord is the male, and you stick his penis in the outlet's vagina," as he stroked the cord and pushed it into the socket. Emily Page Die was also a student at Logos. Emily was groomed and sexually assaulted by her Bible and logic teacher, James Nance. James Nance was also serving in leadership at Christ Church. He was actually an elder. The grooming and sexual assaults occurred between 2013 and 2014, but the police report was not filed until 2017. Evidently, on Twitter, Doug crowed about calling the police immediately. Those timelines do not match up. Mr. Dy discussed the Wilson's impact on her life in an email exchange that she had with Stan Corb. She doesn't mince words: "Throughout the entire experience, the Wilsons have dehumanized and attacked me for the crime of being a victim of sexual abuse. They accused me, a 17-year-old who didn't even know what a vagina was, of seducing a 53-year-old teacher." Natalie Greenfield was 14. Jamon White, a Grif Fire's Hall student in his mid-20s, began sexually abusing her at that age. Wilson, who still refers to the molestation as a consensual underage relationship, Doug still calls Jim's relationship with a 14-year-old girl an underage consensual relationship, went to bat for White and asked the judge for leniency. Stan Corb notes that, "After White's conviction on a lesser charge of injury to a child, Christ Church Plant Trinity Reformed emailed congregants thanking those for praying for White. Following his release, Trinity funded $3,000 towards sending White on a Haitian mission trip." In 2013, White was charged with attempted strangulation of his wife and later found guilty of domestic battery.

We have seen this story play out time and time again, not just at the Christ Church conglomeration, but with other organizations that have similar ideas about the role of women. Because, get this, science has something to say about the rates of abuse in the general public versus in other communities. And it turns out that religiosity is not a very good predictor about who is going to abuse their spouse. But a specific type of religiosity actually is. In 2015, Hiest and Kidm found that one of the best predictors of intimate partner violence, specifically men beating their wives, was the institution or normalization of male headship or authority over women. In 2024, Luga and Jones similarly found that Bible overclaiming, particularly among men, was associated with intimate partner violence over all other categories. Think about that for a second. The best predictor for domestic abuse is the exact setup that Doug Wilson has created and perpetuated in his own church, the one that he claims is ordained by God.

This is going to be a really simple answer or explanation for me, right? I think Doug Wilson wants power at all costs. And I think that, for whatever reason, power over women specifically is quite high on that list of priorities. Now, I am obviously a card-carrying feminist, right? I believe in equal opportunity for men and women in the culture and in the eyes of the law. Doug Wilson's sexism here, it's not run-of-the-mill complementarianism, right? He is considered sexist by the people that I think are sexist themselves. He is an extremist extremist. I mean, again, I can't stress this enough. It's the most asinine part. The setup that Doug proposes, the one that he claims is ordained by God because it protects women from evil men, is the most likely setup. It is the best predictor of intimate partner abuse. His setup is the problem. The abuse is coming from inside the church. So, you know, Doug is either a fool or he is truly monstrous. I think the latter is honestly more likely. I find that to be more compelling.

To Wilson and his colleagues, women are not peers. They are livestock. Right? Just admit that you want to own them. At least that would be honest. I am grateful every single day that Doug's ideology is grossly unpopular within the population at large. But people like him are also why I own a gun and why my husband owns a gun. I have a Glock, and, um, I've had it for quite some time.

Unsurprisingly, children have even less power. And I'm talking about structurally speaking. This is even outside of the rampant sexual abuse. Doug's church obviously is not big on sparing the rod. I'm sure you guys remember that Doug owns a school or started a school or whatever. How could you forget, given there was so much sexual abuse there that we just talked about? But it turns out the school is also known for its corporal punishment policies. Survivors of the school discuss how these punishments usually played out with female teachers being responsible for punishing girl students and male teachers being responsible for punishing boy students. Allegedly, sometimes the female teachers were not around or available to punish girl students, leaving a male teacher or administrator to administer the spanking. Former Logos School attendee Lorena Honus outlines it like this: "So if you misbehave enough, then you go to the principal's office, and you get a talking to, and you're in trouble, and that's embarrassing. It's a, a shameful type of thing, right? But if, if you go to the next level and you really piss off a teacher, then the female teacher, Mrs. Jordan, would take the female student to the principal's office, and you would bend over the principal's desk while he watched, and she would beat you with a wooden paddle, a large wooden paddle, and she was not gentle. Um, if she was busy and couldn't do it herself, Matt Whitling, the principal, would do it, even if it was a female student. He wasn't supposed to, but he did it twice to me, and I know multiple times to another female student as well who has come forward publicly to speak about it."

I know you're wondering if Logos teaches young Earth creationism, and they do. But did you know that Rodriguez and Henders found that biblical literalism is associated with increased risk of child abuse? Weird how this all fits together. Former students also allege that romantic relationships between the students were prohibited and met with swift punishment. My brother was actually kicked out of Logos for kissing a girl in the park. Kissing, kissing a girl in the park. They were both expelled, and he was made to pay the rest of her tuition for the year. That's really weird. Wow. That sounds a whole lot like number seven: The leadership induces feelings of shame and/or guilt in order to influence and/or control members. Often this is done through peer pressure and subtle forms of persuasion. So, yes, unfortunately, Logos School has both adult men molesting young girls and also beating the children with paddles and expelling them for kissing kids their own age. But at least the babies are safe, right? I mean, these guys are pretty vly pro-life. You would think that they would be very pro-protecting born babies, wouldn't you?

Actually, in 2004, Steven Sitler was attending the Christ Church College and boarding with a nearby church family. In March of 2005, Sitler molested several children while staying with them, some of the family and others of family friends. The family eventually went to Doug, who suggested they go to law enforcement. But it turns out Steven had gone to Doug months before and confessed to molesting over 15 kids. Steven knew Doug because his dad was a deacon at Christ Church, and according to some, a very wealthy one. Before Sitler was sentenced in 2005, Doug wrote a letter to the judge asking for leniency. Sitler would get life with parole but would be released in under two years. Then, despite being considered by his therapist to be a fixated pedophile and a level three sex offender, Wilson would preside over the marriage of Sitler to a New St. Andrews student, knowing they were planning on having children. Sitler would have a son, one he is legally not allowed to be alone with due to his admittance of sexual arousal by the baby. Wilson, to this day, says he would marry the couple again. What the [ __ ]? You're telling me he didn't tell the congregation about it and wrote to the judge and asked for leniency for a known confessed pedophile with over a dozen victims? So, to me, in my opinion, that doesn't just make Doug implicit in pedophilic activity, but it might actually make him an accomplice at that point.

Doug's response to this criticism is literally, "No, you." I'm shocked that the mothers and fathers in that congregation didn't beat him senseless along with Steven Sitler on that revelation. Doug's actually got a section on his little blog, a controversy library, where he goes over the criticism that he has received for a lot of the stuff that we just talked about, even the Sitler case. Personally, I don't find his defense convincing at all, and it actually makes me very angry that he even tries to defend this instead of just being like, "I made a serious, serious mistake. I had a category five lapse in judgment." But the fact that the controversy library exists where he tries to defend himself and his actions, along with dragging his feet and going to the police in the first place, kind of makes me think of number eight: The leader is not accountable to any authorities, unlike, for example, teachers, military commanders, or ministers, priests, monks, and rabbis of mainstream religious denominations. I think that trait could be rephrased on the website as: The leader or congregation doesn't think that they should be held accountable by authorities for their actions. Because in the case of pretty much every cult that I can think of, the leaders were held accountable, or police tried to hold them accountable, or would have had they not, you know, killed themselves. But the leaders didn't think that they should be held accountable, or the people following them didn't think that they should be held accountable. They held this view that they were above the law. And I think, given what Doug has said and what he has done, he kind of feels a little bit that way, in my opinion.

So those are just a few of the examples of what has been called pretty consistently rampant sexual abuse at the Christ Church conglomerate. What's been hidden until now is that their views of what men and women should be like in the new America are already triggering one of the most shocking sexual abuse scandals in our history. When you've created a culture where manhood and Womanhood is defined by submission and authority, you have created a culture where authority goes unchecked and easily becomes abuse. Many of them were outlined in that Vice article, but you can read about those cases and several more in many places. Now, Doug has thoughts on that Vice article. Actually, he says that anyone who is sympathetic towards the victims or the individuals involved in writing the article in general, "You better repent, or else you might end up in hell." And hey, that reminds me a little bit of number nine: Questioning, doubt, and dissent are discouraged or even punished.

So I'm a primatologist. I got my Master's of Research in Primate Biology, Behavior, and Conservation. And it's really interesting to me because Doug Wilson, the Christ Church conglomerate as a whole, and that attitude wherever it appears in the United States, reminds me a lot of Hamadryas baboons (Papio hamadryas). This is a very unique clade of cercopithecoid monkeys. They are unique because they are violently patriarchal. They live in multi-level societies, groups of, you know, hundreds, up to hundreds of individuals. But within these groups of hundreds of individuals, you have smaller groups that are composed of a single male and his harem of females and males. Violent control of the females by biting them and attacking them and hurting them, which is something that they can do because they are much larger. Hamadryas baboons are sexually dimorphic. Harem masters, or the male in a smaller polygynous group of Hamadryas baboons, will cow his females in order to effectively force their support should he be challenged by an incoming male who wants to take over his harem, and also to prevent any of them from leaving. Younger males that want to start their own harems, who are smaller than resident males in polygynous groups that are already established, must do so by abducting single young females who stray too far from the group, basically holding them hostage as like a seed for their new harem that they're seeking to create. They must steal them. Female Hamadryas baboons lead pretty poor lives filled with abuse from much larger, more powerful males that are also allied with one another. Does that sound familiar?

But this kind of patriarchal iron fist is seriously uncommon in cercopithecoid primates. And that's despite the fact that a lot of cercopithecoids are as dimorphic as Hamadryas baboons, where males are like twice the size of females, or sometimes even more sexually dimorphic than what we see in Hamadryas baboons. So why is this the case? Well, in other cercopithecoids, females form closely related matrilineal groups of individuals who are sisters and aunts and mothers and daughters and granddaughters and cousins and nieces. And they defend themselves from the power of an individual male. They exert control as a group to protect themselves. In Hamadryas baboons, males prevent this because they steal young females away from groups before they can get to know other closely related females. But in most cercopithecoids, the cheek pouch monkeys, female coalitions completely prevent this from happening because, turns out, numbers tend to trump one individual big guy. These powerful matrilineages are able to prevent abductions, prevent coercive sexual activity, and prevent infanticide as a group together. They're even able to overthrow their resident alpha male should he not do enough for them in protecting the group, securing resources, or chasing off marauders. As a result, in those groups, males are less violent, they're less aggressive, they don't try to throw their weight around. And in order to keep the females happy, especially in other multi-level groups, they smoothe the females instead of beating them. Geladas (Theropithecus gelada) are structured socially identically to Hamadryas baboons, with the sole exception of they do not have prevention of matrilineal formation. So females are able to form those coalitions. And in these groups, males and females, their relationship between one another are expectedly completely different than what we see in Hamadryas baboons. Female coalitions are extremely powerful, and a male will smoothe his females in order to get their support if another male comes along and tries to replace them. He relies on those females' help in order to deter would-be takeovers. The bottom line is, in most cercopithecoids, despite sexual dimorphism, females are able to exert control within their groups as a unit. They work together to prevent being dominated by an individual male. So Moscow ladies, it's time to get in touch with your Catherene roots. Honestly, the only difference between Doug Wilson and a male Hamadryas baboon is that Doug has wimpier canines, and Hamadryas baboons don't own a publishing house that makes them a ton of money.

Well, now, wait a second. That reminds me of number 10: The group is preoccupied with making money. Now, the Christ Church conglomerate is missing five out of the 15 characteristics that define a cult, at least using the traits that we mentioned. For instance, I do not believe that they are engaging in mind-altering practices such as meditation, chanting, speaking in tongues, denunciation sessions, and debilitating work routines to suppress doubts about the group and/or its leaders. But that doesn't mean the Christ Church conglomerate isn't a cult, because many cults that we recognize, particularly the alien cults such as Realism, don't have this characteristic. I also don't think that the Christ Church conglomerate requires members to cut ties with family and friends, although they do appear to require members to radically alter their personal goals and activities that they had before they joined the group, especially if you're a woman. Cutting ties with friends and families, though, is often lacking in cults that prioritize getting new members, such as multi-level marketing schemes and the Unification Church, and yet we certainly recognize the latter as a cult. I don't know that the Christ Church conglomerate expects its members to devote inordinate amounts of time to the group and to group-related activities. Folks who have been involved with the Christ Church conglomerate can certainly correct me here, and I have no doubt that there are people out there who could make the argument that they do require inordinate amounts of time to be donated to them. Still, I couldn't find anything substantial online to support this idea, so I'm going to play it safe and not allow them to check this box. Still, cults do not require this characteristic to be considered a cult because there's a lot of variation there. Some members of the Church of Scientology put dozens and dozens of hours into the church each week, whereas others do the bare minimum, but Scientology is a cult nonetheless. Please don't sue me, Tom Cruise. I'm little. I also don't believe that the Christ Church conglomerate encourages or requires members to live and/or socialize only with other group members. But then again, this kind of goes hand-in-hand with what we said previously. Cults which are focusing a lot of time on garnering new membership, on pulling more people into the fold, are probably not going to turn around and then be super isolationist to seclude themselves from everyone else. Even Heaven's Gate let their members go home on Mother's Day. Finally, I see no evidence that the most loyal members or the true believers of the Christ Church conglomerate feel that there can be no life outside the context of the group, that they believe there is no other way to be, and often fear reprisals to themselves or others if they leave or even consider leaving the group. I see no evidence that the most loyal members feel that way because some of the most loyal members have successfully left. Now, could the church continue down their current trajectory and reach this point? Absolutely. I think they could. This is supported by the notion that there is already severe reprisal for those who do leave the group in the form of harassment and threats, and I imagine that that's also present for those who are actively considering leaving. I just think that this one is also a gradient, and I don't know that I feel comfortable saying the Christ Church conglomerate has reached that particular point in its extremeness. It's worth noting here that of the many extreme cults that have existed, like Heaven's Gate, the People's Temple, or Omin Rio, those cults did not have this characteristic at the beginning either. It was sort of acquired as they neared the end of their tenure. So this means that at the end of our journey here, the Christ Church conglomerate has at least 10 out of the 15 characteristics that we listed at the beginning, or roughly 66% of them. Now, again, there is no minimum number that a group has to meet in order to be considered a cult. It's kind of a gray area, both between early cults and extreme cults, and between what is a cult and what is just a run-of-the-mill religious denomination. But this is my YouTube channel, and this is my video, and so I am allowed to tell you, thank you, First Amendment, that I think that Doug Wilson's group is a cult. And the reason I think that is because of both the number of characteristics that he has met and also which of those characteristics he has met. So I have to ask a question: Why did Ken Ham share a stage with this man? Ken Ham may not agree with all, or even most, of what Doug Wilson says. Certainly, the highly educated female members of his staff there at Answers in Genesis don't. But what he does agree with Doug on is that the progressives simply must be stopped. And for him, that's enough.

Doug Wilson's group, the Christ Church conglomerate, is heinous and is directly responsible or complicit in some of the most vile things imaginable. This group is dangerous, mostly to the people who are still stuck in the fold, and particularly the women and children who are stuck there. But from an outsider perspective, Doug Wilson is just like a creepy old man. He reminds me of the uncle at the family reunion that tries to be cool with the kids and the teens by, like, giving them cigarettes or beers or something, but ultimately, he has bad breath and truck nuts on his car, and so the younger people want to stay away from him. Like, no amount of flamethrowers is going to erase the fact that that uncle's friend from work hit on a 14-year-old and said it was because she was flirting with him. As a young person who knows many other young people, Doug is irrelevant outside of his immediate circle of influence. Regular people do not know his name. They know about the dumb nonsense that he or his acquaintances spew through a megaphone on social media. Did you see that some lunatic wants the 19th Amendment repealed on Twitter? Did you guys hear about about that pastor that used all of the slurs? Did you guys know that some Christians don't think slavery was that bad? Obviously, progressive Christians, but really many conservative ones too, find him putrid without ever hearing his name. Doug Wilson's followers are hateful, aging men or anxious younger men, and their population is actually quite small in the grand scheme of things. It's like a little tumor. It's not necessarily causing that much harm now, but it has the potential to do a great deal of harm, which is why we need to make sure we still have eyes on it. Now, Doug Wilson is in his '70s, which means he will not live to see his nauseating ideology take hold. Much of his ideology will die with him. There will always be vile strongholds like Moscow and the Christ Church conglomerate in general, and their closely related allies, and those people, those women will suffer. But all cults wane. That's why they're cults and not religions. I think in the long run, Doug's crusade will be unsuccessful, and he and people like him will be relegated to the dustbin of history, a footnote in the odd 2020s. But it's our duty to make sure that that happens. So stay on your toes, reasonable people.

Now, there are many counterarguments to this entire video that Doug could make. He could argue that his group doesn't meet all of the criteria, so it shouldn't be considered a cult. Or he could argue that his group doesn't meet the right criteria and thus it shouldn't be considered a cult. I think that both of those are pretty indefensible because there are known cults, appreciated cults, that meet less criteria than his group meets. And I would argue that the criteria that his group does meet are some of the most severe. He could argue that my name for his loose association of organizations, the Christ Church conglomerate, isn't a real concrete entity. But I would counter by saying many cults are loosely organized like Doug's is. He could argue that I'm just simply way off, way out of bounds, and that everything that I've said here is just fundamentally untrue. And to that, I say I have been abundantly clear that my conclusions here are my opinion. I have outlined for my viewers a series of objective events, and I have given them a list of criteria that have been created by experts on what cults are. I have drawn some lines to connect some dots, and I have told you what I think. And I think that Doug Wilson is running a cult. You must make up your own mind.

But back to why we're really here. Ken Ham hosted this organization, the Christ Church conglomerate, at the Ark Encounter this time last year at the Fight Laugh Feast conference, outlining the politics of six-day creation. In the past two videos, I have explained to you why I think Doug Wilson and his organization are completely clueless on science and how that probably impacts a lot of their conclusions on a lot of other things in life. And in this video, I have outlined why I think the organization is a cult and the type of harm that they have already perpetuated. So in the next video, what we're going to do is we're going to look at what they actually said at that conference. We're going to go through each and every video, and we are going to assess them. We're going to look at their science, we're going to look at their politics, and we're going to look at their theology in the next video. And while doing so, we are going to make fun of them a whole lot, because I have no patience for cults, and I think they should be ridiculed. It's going to take a long time to get through each one of their talks. So I'll just take this moment to say, if you like what I do, please consider supporting my channel in the free way, which is liking, commenting, and subscribing. And if you want to support me in a more financial way, you can go over to my Patreon and become a patron. Patrons get their names at the end of every video, and they get early access to videos. They got early access to all of these videos on Doug Wilson and the Fight Laugh Feast convention. So, uh, consider it. And in the meantime, my gentle and of course, very modern apes, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for being such a curious primate, and I'll see you next time. [Music] [Music] You [Music] [Music] [Music] When you