Douglas Wilson argues Christians must urgently reject cultural delusions—like denial of sin, gender ideology, and attacks on sexual ethics—comparing societal collapse to a burning building needing confrontation over politeness. He critiques evangelical "soft teaching" for producing hard-hearted believers and defends biblical prophetic boldness, even amid violent backlash. Distinguishing moral standards from Puritanical moralism, Wilson dismisses atheist rhetoric like Hitchens’ as shallow while asserting post-millennial optimism: the gospel will prevail despite short-term setbacks. His call to action? Reclaim cultural influence through unapologetic truth, not winsome compromise. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey, it's Andrew Clavin with this week's interview with Douglas Wilson, the pastor of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, a prominent Calvinist theologian.
If you're not familiar with his work, you want to take a look at him on YouTube.
He is absolutely terrific.
I talk about the culture a lot on the show and elsewhere, and I don't think there's any more important cultural issue or cultural mission than reorienting the mind of the West back toward faith.
I would actually go further than that and say if the Western mind can't rediscover God with real faith, there will be no Western culture to speak of, simply a return to the bloody and oppressive paganism of old, which is where I think we're almost at today.
Having said all that, I'm someone who actually believes that the loss of medieval style faith was inevitable.
The rise of science, which was a deeply Christian phenomenon to begin with, created the kind of illusion that the world didn't work the way the Bible seemed to say it did.
And I think it was only natural for scientists who study the way matter works that they and who purposely set aside the idea of human perception and consciousness so they could look at matter as an objective phenomenon.
It was only natural that they would come to believe that matter was all there is.
And I think that that has had a huge effect on our society.
But as much as I think that was natural and inevitable, the facts have changed.
Science has changed.
The scientists to start out with were wrong.
It turns out that matter and consciousness, subjectivity and objectivity, the world and the inner life of human beings are inextricably linked.
And the more we see of creation at its deepest level, the more it actually looks like the first books of Genesis.
So that's why I always want to hear from smart people who believe and who think about God in real ways.
And Douglas Wilson is one of them.
I met him a few years back at a conference in Moscow where he pastors Christchurch, as I said.
I was deeply impressed with his civility, his intelligence, and his cultural awareness, which is very, very rare in the Christian world.
I've read articles attacking him for being sarcastic and pugilistic, as if that were a bad thing.
But personally, that's what the gospels sound like to me.
So he's come to the right place.
Douglas, it's good to see you again.
Thank you for coming on.
Thank you for the opportunity.
It's an honor.
So, you know, I have to say, as I look at our culture right now, if it hasn't hit bottom, it's getting pretty close.
It's a very ugly moment in our culture.
A lot of things have returned.
Racism has become fashionable again.
The absolute disregard for the lives of unborn children, the attacks on sexual ethics and just on the fact that there are two genders, all these things.
What is the role of a Christian in a moment like this?
I think the role of a Christian spokesman is to stop telling lies, to stop going along with delusions, stop going along with misconceptions, and realize that our culture is in free fall and we think we're flying.
And basically, everybody's worried about not hurting someone's feelings.
Hey, if I tell that person over here that he's not flying and he doesn't have a parachute and this is free fall, that might, he might get angry with me.
He might think I'm not being winsome.
We're way beyond that point.
If I'm walking down the street and I see someone's roof on fire and I start banging on their door, my object is to wake them up.
My object is not to, I hope they didn't go to bed late and I hope they're not too tired.
And, you know, look, this clown world that we're in, I keep saying, and now I've seen everything.
And I need to stop saying that.
Right.
Because we haven't seen everything.
I think your intro has it exactly right.
It's we are reverting to paganism.
And basically, the spiritual world, just like the natural world, abhors a vacuum.
And the vacuum that we have created by banishing our Christian language, our Christian categories, our understanding of the fact that we've got our rights from a creator, as the Declaration says, we've banished all that.
And what we've done is we've created a vacuum.
And the strong gods, to use Reno's phrase, are returning.
And Christians are woefully unprepared for that.
We think that we're somehow going to stay in this academic seminar forever and that at some point they're going to give us a chance to talk.
No, that's not what's going on at all.
No, they're actually, it seems like they're actively censoring any reference to God out of the arts and certainly out of public conversation.
I was kind of appalled.
In fact, I was absolutely dispirited during COVID when they said, shut down your churches because, and they did.
They just immediately did, with few exceptions, basically accepting the idea that there's nothing worse than death, which I thought was a kind of bad idea for Christians.
So what happened?
Why are the churches so hollowed out?
I mean, you don't collapse inward like that unless something is missing from within.
When did they lose their faith exactly?
Yeah, I think that it's a long story and there are many variables.
But what has happened is that many people, many men were attracted to the ministry because it was an indoor job with no heavy lifting.
And they got to read books and they got to pal around with the nice people.
They congregated in these country clubs that met on Sundays, like specialty organizations for nice people.
Let's have this club for people who take showers.
And we're just going to get together and we're going to have a little, what do you call those TED Talks?
You know, little TED Talk with a Bible verse attached.
And it was pretty smooth sailing.
It was pretty pleasant.
And it was something you could get away with when times were good, when the economy was growing and there wasn't an overt hostility toward things Christian.
You could still get along.
You could bump along pretty nicely.
And a lot of people were attracted to that.
So, but the problem is, this is something I learned from my father, is that soft teaching produces hard people.
Okay.
Hard teaching, dogmatics, doctrine, thou shalt nots of the Ten Commandments, produce tenderhearted people.
Hard teaching, soft people.
Soft teaching produces hard-hearted people.
So if you preach about sin with a feather duster, what you're going to get is a lot of hard hearts.
If you preach about sin with a jackhammer, it's going to be more like the prophets and the minor prophets and the apostles.
And you're going to find, but here's the and here's the secret: if you do that, you're going to get into trouble.
Because no reformation, no cultural analysis that's worth anything is accompanied by the sound of polite golf applause.
Nobody, they'll build, they'll build a statue or memorial to you 200 years later.
But at the time, reformers and prophets are a nuisance, right?
And Jesus talks about this phenomenon.
He says that you build memorials for the prophets, thus testifying that you're descended from the people who killed them.
And that's right.
So dead prophets go very nicely on the marble when you're inscribing the inspirational thing that they said.
But while a prophet is alive, he's a perfect and royal nuisance because he's speaking to the sins that that generation is committing at that time.
And so consequently, a lot of preachers discovered that to be culturally engaged is to be hated.
And they don't have a category for that.
They don't have a theology that is able to process what it means to be hated.
And so in evangelical circles where I am, the watchword has been, we've got to be winsome.
We've got to be winsome.
Well, here's the thing.
It used to be, there's been a real transition.
It used to be that to be a vile person, you had to go and say and do vile things.
But today, a vile person is someone whose behavior makes somebody else do vile things.
And that can always be arranged.
So if I say, you know, a little boy shouldn't become a little girl, I don't think that's possible and I don't think we should try.
And then everybody erupts in a sheet of flame and they say and do vile things.
I'm accused of being vile because I set them off.
But in the old school, in the old days, in order for me to be vile, I had to be the one who said and did vile things.
But that's not the way it is.
That's not the way it is anymore.
I was reading this very long piece.
I'm afraid I can't remember the author, but it was about Douglas Wilson and the Moscow mood.
I'm sure you've seen this piece.
Kevin de Young.
Kevin De Young.
And it was not a hit piece.
I thought he was thoughtful and he certainly praised you to the skies about all the important things.
But what he was basically objecting to was the fact that you're gruff, you're sarcastic, you smoke cigars, you kind of give it to people.
And I find that immensely entertaining and incredibly communicative.
It actually works.
It actually is riveting.
And I thought, what is he complaining about?
Is it just that, that you're not winsome enough?
Yeah.
Well, part of the reason why he had to write the piece, and Kevin de Young is a good guy.
I've appreciated much of what he's done.
Yeah, what's he mean?
Yeah.
Yeah, said it in that context.
But one of the problems, one of the reasons why people like Kevin de Young have had to come out and say that we're not being winsome is because we're being effectively winsome.
Right?
What's happened is over the last three years, when COVID hit and the locksdown hit and the secular state said your church is not essential and the elder board said, yeah, I guess it's not, Then a bunch of parishioners looked at their pastor, looked at their leaders and said, what are we here for then?
What are you doing?
Here in Moscow, we're at the tail end of a massive refugee column.
People are moving here, moving here, chased here by blue state governors, chased here by pastors and elders who flaked on them, let them down, wouldn't stand up, shepherds who wouldn't fight for the sheep.
So, and this is the double twist irony, the reason Kevin de Young had to critique our lack of winsomeness is that we've moved into an era where fighting is winsome.
When I came back from Moscow, I said to a more liberal friend, gee, I was really impressed at how happy and healthy the young people seemed.
They seemed really well adjusted.
It was like kind of, since I was living in LA at the time, it was kind of like visiting sanity.
Cannot Tell, Right Side Up World00:05:50
And his immediate reaction was, well, yes, but not if they're gay.
And I thought, well, you know, I'm in the arts.
I grew up in New York.
I've known and been friends with and loved many gay people.
My son is gay.
And I did think to myself, well, you know, okay, so you've got 95% of your people happy.
But, you know, that's pretty good record.
But on the other hand, I do meet a lot of gay people who are shattered by the fact that they have been ejected from their evangelical world.
I guess my question is, is there some way that the sexual ethos of Christianity is not communicating itself in a loving way?
Or is that just not possible?
No, I do actually think it's possible.
So, for example, when he said, not if they're gay, if he had said that to me, I could say, well, suppose I told you the names of some of my parishioners who are oriented that way, whose temptations are that way, that direction.
Okay.
In other words, if he said, well, they're all white-bred heterosexuals out there in Idaho, and nobody's ever been tempted to think or do an untoward thing, right?
No, I'm a pastor.
People get into gnarly things.
I minister to all kinds of people in all kinds of situations, and they are part of the community here, right?
So someone is not banished from our community because of their temptations.
So think of it this way.
I sometimes illustrate this, and this is true of heterosexuals, everybody, homosexuals, heterosexuals.
I said, suppose God put a little TV screen above your head and showed everybody else your thoughts.
I can tell you that more than two or three people would be chased out.
Absolutely everybody would say, ah, we're all.
Now, I believe that the, I believe the Bible.
I believe that homosexuality is a sinful, it's a result of the fall.
It's a sinful pattern not to be indulged.
It's that I believe all of that.
I also believe that there are numerous heterosexual sins that everybody else in the congregation is going to be afflicted with, struggle with.
And so my message as a pastor is this, God saves sinners.
That's the message.
God saves sinners.
And I can't declare that because of the cross and resurrection of Christ, say that God saves sinners and then say to a handful of people, except for you.
Okay, now, the conditions are the same for everyone, and that's repent and believe.
So if you want to be an evangelical Christian, you repent and believe.
You come to scripture.
You don't dictate to the Bible what it's going to say.
You come to the scripture in order to submit to it.
And when you submit to it, it's going to tell you things you didn't want to hear.
It's going to tell homosexuals things they didn't want to hear.
It's going to tell heterosexuals things they didn't want to hear.
It's going to tell white guys things they didn't want to hear.
It's going to tell black people things they didn't want to hear.
The Bible's not here to flatter us.
We're sinners.
We need the gospel, and all of us need the gospel.
And so when you talk about how the morale is high and the people are cheerful and so forth, yeah, that's true because we live in God's world.
And that world is a right side up world.
There's a definition to it.
We know where we are.
And I'd much rather be someone who falls down periodically in a right side up world than to live in a world where the whole world has fallen down and the whole world doesn't know what direction's up.
The whole world can't define normal.
So if we live in a time when our established authorities, our Supreme Court justice is not a biologist and hence can't tell me what a woman is.
Well, if you can't tell me what a woman is and you can't tell me what a man is, then you can't tell me what a human is.
And if you can't tell me what a human is, then you can't tell me what human rights are.
How on earth can you tell me what human rights are if you don't know what a human being is?
Right?
And that's the world we live in.
So I would much, let me back up for a minute.
When you have a right side up world, when people, let's say the world was right side up back in the 1890s, and when it's right side up and someone does something awful and grotesque or bad stuff, are there righteous types?
Are there Pharisees who get out of line and hammer the person wrongly?
And the woman caught in adultery.
That world was a right side up world when the Pharisees wanted to stone that woman caught in adultery.
It's possible to sin in a right side up world, but the sin that happens in a right side up world is nothing compared to what we're doing culturally, collectively together now.
Right now, if you the nihilism, the abyss that we're staring into right now is going to put all the Pharisaism, all the medievalism into the shade.
Debating Christopher Hitchens00:05:39
So when you want to turn this culture around, if you think there's a chance of doing that, and I'll get to that in a minute, but before we get to that, you famously debated Christopher Hitchens.
And I admire you for doing this because I've met Hitchens.
He was a tremendously charming, incredibly erudite, eloquent man.
And to debate him takes a lot of guts because he's going to be good with an audience.
But is there anything in the whenever I whenever I read Hitchens, I thought the minute he started talking about atheism, I thought his material became very silly, very shallow, which was not his usual mode.
Was there anything in Hitchens or Dawkins that gave you pause, that made you think, yes, I have to come up with an answer for this to reach the people?
No, the reason that Hitchens was so formidable, and he was very formidable, I've debated a number of atheists and Hitchens was the top in terms of you had to watch your step all the time.
But it wasn't because his arguments were steel reinforced as opposed to the other atheists that I encountered.
His arguments were standard-issue atheist stuff from Voltaire on down.
It was just standard stuff.
There wasn't anything new about it.
What was new was that Hitchens was so witty and so affable and so funny and so quick on his feet that you had to watch yourself all the time.
So if you pinned him, if you pinned him, he knew how to act like he had not been pinned.
He knew how to turn it into a joke.
He knew how to deflect and get the audience to laugh.
He was just a master at, he was just a master at that.
But when it came to the substance, he was exposed.
He was as vulnerable as the others.
He was just a very talented, exposed atheist.
Did you ever feel that you had reached him?
Yes, I believe I got through.
There's a book by Larry Taunton.
It was a very good book called The Faith of Christopher Hitchens.
And he's not claiming that Hitchens converted or anything, but Larry Taunton debated him also.
And his experience lined up very much with mine.
And that was when Hitch issued his book, God is Not Great.
This is how I wound up debating him: he threw out a come one, come all challenge on his book release tour.
I'll debate anybody.
So he toured, I think he opened his book tour in Arkansas somewhere, and he debated a rabbi, rabbi, he would debate Al Sharpton, and he debated me.
We wrote a written debate in Christianity Today that got some traction.
That turned into a book.
The book release tour for that was what was filmed for the documentary.
Okay.
And so I believe that Christopher Hitchens had serious questions about Christianity.
I think he had serious questions about it.
And he was not in a position, given his fan base, to start having lunch with the Archbishop.
Because that would excite comment and people would ask hard.
So what he did, I think it was a very clever move.
In order to spend a lot of time hanging out with Christians, he issued this debate and did spend a lot of time hanging out with Christians.
So it wasn't just what was on camera.
I shared meals with him and engaged with him.
It was a very, he was never rude to me except on stage.
We got along great.
It hit it off very, very well.
And I had a good relationship with him.
And after he was diagnosed with cancer, I wrote him a letter.
I had a few after the debate thing.
I had another encounter with him.
But when he was diagnosed, I wrote him a letter and attached it to an email and said, Christopher, I have no way of knowing if you open this or not.
I'm just, I wanted to give it to you.
And in that attachment, I just laid out the gospel for Christopher Hitchens.
And I told him in the email that I won't know if you open it or not, but you'll be sorry if you don't because there's some really good writing in there.
And, you know, you know, so I gave that to him.
And I believe that Christopher Hitchens, despite the glib deflections that he could conduct on stage and did, was a serious thinker who had serious questions.
Right.
And I saw at least a couple of instances in interviews after his diagnosis.
Hey, have you rethought this God thing?
He would say things like, well, if you hear that Christopher Hitchens has repented on his deathbed, then you know that the cancer got to my brain or the medications work, the medications worked me over.
But what that told me was that he was worried about it.
He was concerned that he might do that.
And so he was preparing a story for his people because he didn't want to let down the side.
But I think he was a serious enough thinker to know that some of his arguments were pretty shallow.
Two Mile Limit Concerns00:04:47
Yeah, they seem that way to me.
You know, you're one of the very few Protestants, I have to say, who is conversant with the arts.
And one of the things I can't help noticing, and it kind of drives me a little crazy.
Here's the Daily Wire.
They made, I had nothing to do with it, but they made a silly, very fairly funny sex comedy about transgenderism called Ladyballers.
And it had some sex jokes.
It was a sex comedy.
It had sex jokes.
We got a lot of letters from Christians.
Oh, you know, why are you making these sex jokes?
Because it's a sex comedy.
That's how you make those things.
And I find this kind of, you know, Oliver Cromwell Puritanism in Christians whom I believe in their spare time are still watching Game of Thrones.
You know, something that's actually explored and are only holding Christians to a certain kind of inhuman purity.
Is there a way into the arts?
The arts are certainly very degraded right now.
They're almost at a standstill, as far as I can tell.
Is there a way for Christians to get into the arts and not become that way?
Not become fussy.
So, right.
So the thing I think we have to get is we have to make a distinction between being moral and being moralistic.
Okay.
So being moral means that there's an up and a down in the universe.
There's a right and a wrong in the cosmos.
God has established it.
We want to live in accordance with his standard and not our own.
That's morality, which we cannot attain to apart from the grace of God.
So that's a fixed standard.
But there are adjuncts or additions that we make to that.
And that's often what I call moralism.
Moralism is either morality pursued a particular way or it's the adjuncts to morality, our extensions from morality.
The illustration, I was in the submarine service, and I was a quartermaster, which meant navigation.
And one time we were doing an operating area and we had to stay in this square on the operating area.
And we had a standard two-mile limit inside that just to make sure we didn't get outside.
And then we had a bad navigation fix.
And so the navigator put a two-mile limit inside that.
And then a young, unexperienced officer came up on the watch that evening and he was nervous about the navigator doing it.
So he put another two-mile limit inside that.
And pretty soon we're sailing around this tight little, tight little box.
Well, that's moralism, right?
The Bible says not to get drunk.
Drunkenness is a sin.
God rejects it.
Don't get drunk.
Well, some people have said, okay, if you don't ever drink, you won't get drunk.
That's a two-mile limit, right?
If you don't know anybody who drinks, that's another two-mile limit.
And so what happens is that we become fussers.
But being a fusser is not the same thing as being righteous.
God calls us to holiness.
He calls us to righteousness, which is not the same thing as never doing something that would offend your Victorian great-grandmother.
Great answer.
Are you hopeful at all?
I mean, I hear a lot of people, especially on the evangelical side, they talk about the end of days.
I have to tell you, recently, I talked to atheists and they talk about the end of days.
I talk to people who don't believe in anything and they use the words demonic and evil.
It's a real phenomenon that's taking place.
I'm almost out of time, so I just want to hear your prediction.
I'll just say that very quickly.
I belong to an eschatological school of thought having to do with the end times that's called post-millennialism that is profoundly optimistic about the future of our planet.
We believe that the gospel is going to be victorious over time and the nations are going to come to Christ.
It's a profoundly optimistic eschatology, which I hold.
That doesn't mean that you can't screw it up in the short term.
That doesn't mean you can't have some very bad troughs short term.
But I don't think that's the course of human history at all.
Human history, I think, is a profoundly optimistic enterprise.
And one of the reasons I believe this, and I'll just finish with this, is that in the long run, stupidity doesn't work.
Yes, it's always the one thing we have.
It's the one thing we have going for us, isn't it?
We can hang on to that.
Human Optimism00:00:46
Where can people find you?
Where's the best place for people to find your work?
Okay.
I blog at dougwills.com, D-O-U-G-W-I-L-S.com.
And we've arranged it so that pretty much everything I'm involved with, New St. Andrews College and Christchurch and Cannon Press, it's all on that front page.
If you go to my blog, you can find an avenue to pretty much everything I'm engaged with.
Well, thank you so much for coming on.
It's great talking to you.
I hope you'll come back.
I could talk to you for a much longer time, but I'm out of time.
I would love to.
Thank you.
All right.
Thanks, Aust.
Good to see you.
All right.
Great conversation.
Love talking to the guy.
Always interested in what he has to say.
And I hope you will come on Friday to the Andrew Clavin Show and hear what I have to say, which is always fascinating, as you know.