The church is increasingly drawing people to the area who are attracted to the idea of northern Idaho as a conservative “redoubt” against American modernity, and by the church’s “reconstructionist” position, which holds that the world will need to be governed according to their interpretation of biblical morality before Christ returns to earth.

A Guardian investigation has revealed that a controversial church whose leader has openly expressed the ambition of creating a “theocracy” in America has accumulated significant influence in the city of Moscow, Idaho.
Christ Church has a stated goal to “make Moscow a Christian town” and public records, interviews, and open source materials online show how its leadership has extended its power and activities in the town.
Church figures have browbeaten elected officials over Covid restrictions, built powerful institutions in parallel to secular government, harassed perceived opponents, and accumulated land and businesses in pursuit of a long-term goal of transforming America into a nation ruled according to its own, ultra-conservative moral precepts.
The rise of Christ Church may be playing out in a small Idaho city but it comes at a time when the US is roiled by the far right, including Christian nationalism, and when social conservatives are seeking to roll back basic tenets of US life such as legal abortion, as well as dominating powerful national institutions, such as the supreme court.

While the church’s previous controversies have centered on its founder and pastor, Douglas Wilson, a new generation of male church leaders – including Wilson’s son – have found ways to expand the church’s reach in Moscow and beyond, even gaining footholds in mainstream popular culture in the broader US.

In recent months, Christ Church has advocated for resistance to Covid mandates in Moscow, and Wilson has attempted to give theological ballast to opposition to restrictions and vaccination programs, as well as warning of political violence.
Last month, a video version of a post by Wilson at his well-read blog was removed from YouTube. The blogpost, entitled “A Biblical Defense of Fake Vaccine IDs”, was based on a conspiracy theory asserting that the vaccine response was a “power play” on the part of the Biden administration, which intended to leave the restrictions in place permanently.
Wilson further claimed that “we are not yet in a hot civil war, with shooting and all, but we are in a cold war/civil war” and urged readers to “resist openly, in concert with any others in your same position”, claiming that this would not be “rebellion against lawful authority” but “an example of a free people refusing to go along with their own enslavement”.
The post was met with outrage, including from other prominent evangelicals.
That was not the only time that Wilson’s activities and positions have led to criticism from other evangelicals, and associations with Wilson have led to crises in other churches.
In recent months, members and clergy resigned from Minneapolis’s Bethlehem Baptist church, and staff resigned from its associated Bethlehem College and Seminary (BCS), in part over the appearance of newly appointed BCS president Joe Rigney on Man Rampant, a video series hosted by Wilson and streamed on platforms including Amazon Prime. The show promotes Wilson’s long-held position that men need to assert themselves in society.

Christ Church was founded in Moscow in the 1990s, and experts who have studied the church estimate the size of the congregation and its offshoot churches at about 2,000, or 10% of the city’s total population.

But they also say that the church is increasingly drawing people to the area who are attracted to the idea of northern Idaho as a conservative “redoubt” against American modernity, and by the church’s “reconstructionist” position, which holds that the world will need to be governed according to their interpretation of biblical morality before Christ returns to earth.
Christ Church’s previous controversies have garnered national attention.
Recent reporting focused attention once more on the church’s – and Wilson’s – handling of a series of sexual abuse cases, and the theological subordination of women.
In 2005, Wilson asked a judge for leniency in the case of Stephen Sitler, a former student at a Christ Church-aligned college, New Saint Andrews College (NSAC). Sitler was at that time convicted of sex offenses involving children.
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Written by A.W. Workman |
Tuesday, January 10, 2023
When the city of man begins to creak and groan we may naturally feel a good deal of fear or disorientation. I don’t think there’s any way around this. But this creaking is also an opportunity for humility, for renewed faith in the New Jerusalem, and for identification with the historical and global Church. In this way, no matter if the cracks get worse or if they get patched, we will be able to maintain hope, to serve our brothers and sisters and even the perishing, and to point to what is coming.

Eating out just hasn’t felt worth it these past couple months that we’ve been back in the US. While restaurants in the states are open again, most are understaffed and alarmingly expensive. The lack of staff usually means pretty poor service, and even the quality of food usually strikes us as not what it used to be. Hearing others in the US voice similar sentiments means it’s not just those of us who have been living overseas who notice these differences. The food service industry is creaking, trying to lurch back to what it was before the pandemic. There is this sense that—convenience though it is—we can’t count it like we used to.
Food service is not the only system struggling to regain its pre-pandemic efficiency. International air travel has still not recovered either. We’ve never had the kind of travel difficulties that we’ve experienced over this past year. Even business behemoths like Amazon seem past their, ahem, prime. More seriously, crime has also skyrocketed in many American cities, with the understanding in some places that if you are the victim of certain crimes, you are on your own.
The strange thing about all this for highly-educated millennials like us is that we’ve hardly ever known the systems around us to get worse, perhaps with the exception of our elected government. By and large, we’ve only known the infrastructure and services offered in the West to (eventually) get faster, more efficient, and more user-friendly. This was also the worldview of our parents’ generation. Progress in the systems we rely on for life necessities or conveniences has been assumed. The pandemic and its aftermath have challenged this assumption and, whether temporary or long-term, the systems around us are showing their weakness.
Systems don’t last forever. The prophecy of the twelve eagles was right—Rome would fall. The Roman legions would leave places like Britain in 409 and never come back. Which meant the structures of empire that the Romanized residents of Londinium (London) relied upon would have slowly but surely broken down. A thousand years later the Portuguese would successfully sail to India – thereby causing the economic collapse of the Central Asian silk road. Trade routes that were kept safe by the wealth and power of regional regimes would become frequented by violent robbers and be slowly abandoned by the caravans. Empires rise. Empires decline. At some point a certain generation realizes that things are breaking faster than they can be repaired, and life is likely going to get a lot worse before it someday gets better.
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Written by Steve Karp, M.D. |
Wednesday, December 29, 2021
All things COVID will eventually pass.  Few things last forever. But at some point, physicians may pay a price for their poor judgment in suspending critical thinking.  The question is, who will judge them?

In “normal” times, the practice of medicine has many challenges, some from within and some from outside the profession.  If you let it, much of your daily practice follows specialty guidelines, insurance company criteria, hospital formularies, and other annoyances.  None of those entities have any liability when it comes to our patients.  For the most part, liability lies with the treating physician.
Each specialty plays a particular role in a patient’s care and specialists often view issues from different angles while wearing their tunnel-vision glasses.  For instance, some physicians view elevated cholesterol as an indicator to assess other potential underlying medical issues, while a cardiologist will just write a prescription for a statin drug, just as a cat reflexively chases a mouse.
What changed overnight and across the board, was an anti-science attitude across all specialties to everything related to COVID.  A viral infection is not something requiring government management, rather, its encounter is part of a physician’s daily medical practice.  The government has seemingly accomplished what medical insurers, medical boards, and hospitals tried, but had not yet succeeded at: complete mind control of physicians.  And with that, the last vestige of respect I had for my profession died.
I’m often in attendance at medical meetings where the fine points of immunotherapy and monoclonal antibodies are discussed as part of the treatment for cancer patients.  For physicians, it is their version of science in regard to a drug’s indications, mechanisms of action, dosing, management of side effects, and the studies justifying one drug or combination over another, the latter often supported by questionable statistical analysis.
After the science-lite discussion ends, the personal chitchat begins regarding COVID and vaccines, and the point is reached where any remaining rationality becomes akin to that heard among nursery school attendees.
The tone becomes one of acceptance of the government line, all medical knowledge and cognitive abilities having vaporized.  There is no talk about the fine points of the various PCR tests, the science of personal isolation or masking, the appropriate use of indoor ventilation systems and their management, the changing of standard and long-extant medical definitions, the introduction of gene therapy used as vaccines.
Expecting any discussion regarding electron microscopy’s effect on clinical medicine, techniques of viral isolation and culturing, or the number of Nobel Prize-winning ideas now scientifically abused is not within anyone’s ken. Instead, the conversation becomes who got their booster, when they are next due, how they interact, or not, with those around them so as to stay safe, how they worry about their child being exposed, and much other utterly time and life-sucking conversational trivia.
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