The Sunday Interview: Survivors Speak: Christian Nationalism, Patriarchy & Doug Wilson (Pamela Brown of CNN)
Pamela Brown’s CNN documentary exposes Christian nationalism’s rise through Doug Wilson’s CREC-aligned network, where survivors describe systemic abuse—emotional, physical, and sexual—under patriarchal theology framing disobedience as sin. Wilson’s viral claim that women are "vessels for reproduction" reflects a movement blending Reconstructionist doctrine with authoritarian control, from corporal punishment in CREC schools to Project 2025’s anti-pluralist agenda. COVID-19 accelerated its growth, attracting men seeking dominance and women craving rigid gender roles, while critics like Julie Ingersoll warn of democracy’s erosion under "kingdom builder" pipelines. The March 8 film contrasts faith with political extremism, revealing how mainstreaming authoritarianism thrives in the guise of biblical certainty. [Automatically generated summary]
axis mundi welcome to straight white american jesus this This is the Sunday interview.
I am Brad O'Nishi, co-host of this show, author of American Caesar, How Theocrats and Tech Lords Are Turning America Into a Monarchy, founder of Axis Moondy Media.
Today I interview Pamela Brown from CNN, and I'm interviewing her because she has led the efforts to create a documentary coming out in one week about Christian nationalism, Doug Wilson, reformed churches across the country, and the rise to power and the mainstreaming of a very radical form of American Protestantism.
We talk about what it was like to interact with those who are part of CREC aligned churches.
That is the denomination that Wilson helped to found.
What it was like to interview Wilson himself and to visit Moscow, Idaho, and most importantly, in my view, to talk to survivors who were willing to come on camera and to tell the world about their abuse, about their experiences and what they've learned and what they would like us to know since leaving those communities.
I want to say a couple things beforehand, and then we'll get to the interview.
One is the person who, in my mind, has really done the groundbreaking work on this front is Sarah Stancorp, the journalist who wrote a book called Disobedient Women and also wrote a piece for Vice in 2021 that outlined in detail the kinds of abuse that people at Wilson's church have experienced and the ways that the church and Wilson have handled it.
So to me, Sarah is the person who has cultivated not only a sense of what's happening in Moscow, Idaho with Wilson, but also built trust with survivors who have taken the courageous steps to share their stories.
As you can imagine, many of them are probably, and I'm not trying to speak for them, but my guess is, living in fear of retribution, living in fear of those who are not happy that they would be telling their experiences to CNN or any other journalist.
I want to put that out there.
Moreover, if you're a subscriber, I have a couple of minutes at the end here reflecting on my interview with Pamela.
I did enjoy speaking to her.
She has, in my mind, done something that's important, and that is brought material on Christian nationalism and Doug Wilson to what I would call a mainstream network in CNN.
There are people who are going to watch this documentary who have seen Pamela Brown's interview with Doug Wilson from a few months ago, where he talked about his relationship to Pete Hegseth and the new church plant that he is spearheading in Washington, D.C., where Pete Hegseth attends church.
This is the interview where Wilson said women are the kinds of people that people come out of.
That got tens of millions of views.
It was shared widely.
We talked about it on this show and so on.
Pamela Brown has brought that to a mainstream audience, and that's important.
One of the things that's difficult about that, and I'll talk about this in my subscriber content, is every time a mainstream network like CNN talks about Christian nationalism, they get pushback that they are somehow anti-American, anti-God, anti-Christian, anti-religion.
You saw that in the run-up to the 2024 election.
People like Joy Reed and others on MSNBC were willing to go there, and it often led them into places of criticism from within their own network and from the general public.
So I want to talk about that, but you're also going to hear, and I think some of you are going to be very attuned to this, you're going to hear Pamela Brown talk about her experiences with people who are part of the CREC and Wilson-aligned churches.
And she has a much more, I think, positive understanding of at least her experiences with them than I would.
And I think that that's part of the recipe of a journalist from a mainstream network interviewing people who are from a subculture that views the mainstream media as the enemy.
So I have thoughts on that.
You're not going to agree with everything Pamela says here.
I certainly did not.
But I also feel like there's just so much value in bringing this to a network like CNN that doesn't always have this kind of content readily available.
And if you don't believe me, if you're like, I don't know, Brad, I'm not sure.
Well, the two experts that are in this hour-long documentary are Julie Ingersoll, friend and colleague, and Dr. Matthew Taylor, friend and colleague and somebody who's on this show often and who many of you are deeply familiar with.
So they're the ones that provided the expert commentary, the expert insight.
And to me, you know, them being involved just added even more value to a project like this.
So here is my interview with Pamela Brown.
If you're a subscriber, stick around because I got some more to say about this at the end.
Otherwise, thanks for being here.
Go subscribe to our newsletter on Substack.
Think about becoming a subscriber if you're not.
And go subscribe to Reign of Error by Sarah Posner, who's doing this work every week alongside us.
Thanks, y'all.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
I'm Brad O'Nishi and joined today by an extra special guest.
And that is Pamela Brown from CNN, the chief investigative correspondent and anchor at CNN.
And just thrilled to have you, Pamela.
So thanks for joining us.
Thank you.
I'm so happy to be here and talk about this.
So you, you know, we're here to talk about, as I just told folks, you spent the last, I don't know how many months doing investigative work on Doug Wilson and Christian nationalist churches and interviewing survivors.
You have a new documentary coming out one week from today.
It was supposed to be out already, but there's been blizzards and other things that have meant it's been rescheduled.
So it will come out, God willing, in about a week.
And, you know, as I thought about this, you know, you interviewed Doug Wilson a couple of months ago, an interview that frankly went viral.
I think people who listen to this show are the kinds of folks that watch, but it reached an audience that was probably never familiar with Wilson, had never heard of him, had never sort of understood his connections to Pete Hegseph.
And now you have a new documentary that not only digs back into Wilson's work, but also survivors of abuse in Christian nationalist spaces.
Doug Wilson's Impact00:04:43
What piqued your interest here?
I'm just wondering, is this a world where you have personal experience?
Is this, you know, how did you get your radar on this topic?
Well, I was raised Christian in Lexington, Kentucky, and from a very Christian family.
And my kids go to a Christian school.
But I've always been interested in faith and religion and different faiths and how people have their deeply held beliefs and why that is.
And so one day, it was, I think it was April of last year.
My husband knows I'm just interested in learning about religion.
And he gave me this essay.
And he said, if you want to understand what Pete Hegseth and others might be doing in the administration, read this essay.
And it was about Christian reconstructionism.
And it's basically this movement to reconstruct society and all different government and within schools to make it more Christian, right?
To reflect a very rigid view of the Bible.
And so I read this essay and it really piqued my interest.
And I wanted to dig deeper into it because that's what I do as a journalist.
And I found Doug Wilson through that interest and just talking to some colleagues about wanting to dive into this.
We just sort of had one of those brainstorming sessions and we came across Doug Wilson who leads the CRAC network that Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, is a part of.
And Pete Hegseth moved to Tennessee to send his kids to one of the classical Christian schools within the association.
And so I thought, gosh, it'd be really interesting to go out there and talk to him and understand his worldview that's having such a big influence on one of the most powerful Trump administration officials.
So we reached out and to his credit, he responded right away, but made clear he viewed us as being on the other side of the barrier.
You know, I think he had some preconceived notions about quote unquote mainstream media, which sadly a lot of people do.
And I just wish they could understand how we really operate.
But I told him over and over again, I said, look, this is not, I'm not coming in to do a hit piece.
I'm not coming in to be adversarial.
I think it's really important to understand you and understand your church network that's having sort of a moment right now.
And it's becoming more mainstream.
And so through some back and forth, we worked it out to fly out to Moscow, Idaho and sit down with him.
And his people were, to their credit, lovely to work with.
And they created a space for us to interview him and some of the pastors within his network and a couple that moved to Moscow to be part of the church network because I really wanted to understand the whole gender role ideology and how that works in practice.
And I interviewed a man who moved there from Africa.
And so it was a very busy day.
We had a flight out later that day because I had to do the overnight flight to get picked for an important interview.
So it was just like wham, bam, you know, in and out.
But the conversation with Doug Wilson was fascinating on many levels.
I remember getting to the car after and being like, okay, we got to write down like the key points, you know, of all these different things he said.
And I knew there was this one moment that I was like, this is going to get a lot of attention.
And I didn't fully realize how viral it would go.
And it was the moment when I asked him about a woman's role in society.
Yeah.
And he said, women are the kind of people that people come out of and just stopped right there.
And there's a pause.
And I honestly thought he would continue to talk, but he didn't.
He just stopped.
There was a very authentic moment there.
Like my eyebrows are raised.
And I was like, wait a second, are we just vessels?
And then he went on to explain in his words that, oh, no, it's not like animals.
You know, they also reproduce.
That doesn't take any talent.
But once the child is here, the mother is the CEO of the home.
And it's such a beautiful responsibility.
And we don't think women should throw their kids in daycare, as he put it.
And then I, of course, was like, well, I'm out here.
I'm a journalist working.
I've got three kids.
Like, how do you view that?
And he was like, well, that's totally wrong.
You know, so we had, we had some very authentic exchanges, right?
And I think because I went in there with an open mind and a curiosity rather than a judgment or like, I'm going to go in there and nail him.
It was a very open conversation.
Yeah.
And to me, that's, that's how you should be as a journalist.
That's just my philosophy, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So anyway, we, we put that out.
It came out a few months after because we had to put the story together and it went viral.
Indeed, it tens of millions of views, many millions.
And I've never had a story go so viral.
Pete Hegseth retweeted it.
It was a thing.
Controlled Communities00:13:59
Yep.
No.
And then he kind of reached out to me after that, who had left similar church systems, his and others, and said, we want to have our story told too.
All right, let's do a documentary on this because that was just supposed to be focused on him and his network and like the influence on Hegseth and how he's getting closer to the seat of power opening at Virgin D.C.
But I thought we need to do more here.
I felt a strong obligation to do more and we and we did.
Well, that was going to be my next question.
Why does this seem so important at the moment?
And I think one answer you've already given is the, you know, Wilson is mainstream.
He's gone from Moscow, Idaho, an outpost in a rural part of the country to the heart of D.C.
And that's happened over decades.
But Wilson's mainstreaming via Hegseth and others is a huge story.
But there's another story that I think the upcoming documentary really focuses on.
And that's on survivors of abuse in Christian nationalist churches.
And, you know, the churches that the women came from who are in the dock have rigid patriarchal theologies.
Women must submit to their husbands.
Younger sisters need to submit to older brothers.
Pastors have broad authority over their flocks and everyone under them.
I mean, most of our listeners are familiar with these traditions and spaces, but would you just give us a basic idea of what you found in terms of what is expected of women in these church cultures?
Yes, this is such an important part of the story.
And I interviewed so many courageous women who are survivors who say that they are deconstructing and they left these communities.
And I've learned how hard it is to leave these communities because they're so insular.
And many of these women were brought up from a very young age.
I mean, they were stay-at-home daughters.
Their whole upbringing was about becoming a traditional wife and a stay-at-home mother.
This is what they were taught.
They were taught that our community, our belief system, this Christian patriarchal theology, this is the right way.
Everything else is bad and evil.
You know, a lot of them.
And again, it's not all a monolith and I want to be clear, but for these women, they had abusive experiences, whether it's emotional abuse, physical abuse as a child with the parent, because there is a view that your parent is the earthly representation of God.
And so disobedience against a parent, no matter how small, is disobedience against God.
And so I spoke to one woman who was physically abused by her parents repeatedly as a child.
Spoke to a woman who was emotionally abused by her husband because of this pressure and this expectation to submit.
And for these women, their whole warning is it can be taken to an abusive extreme.
Like you're not submitting enough.
You need to be punished.
You know, because if a woman is viewed in a certain scenario as not submissive enough to the husband, then that's disobedience to God because under the hierarchy, the husband has authority over the wife.
I interviewed a very courageous young woman who was sexually abused by her brother because again, in that hierarchy, the brother has authority over the sister.
And she didn't understand that it was abuse at the time because she was always told, you know, this is how it is.
And your brother has the authority.
And so she didn't, and she was never taught about her body.
That was never part of the discussion.
So she didn't understand it was sexual abuse in for many years.
And so I felt compelled to share these survivors' stories and talk about what they went through when they were inside these communities and how difficult it was to leave and deconstruct.
And many of them, it's a spectrum.
Many of them say that they're actually closer to Jesus and closer to in their Christian faith and more devout than they were when they were in the community because they feel like they could be themselves and develop their own relationship with Jesus rather than be pressured and forced into these lifestyles where they felt like they had no sense of agency.
A lot of them talked about when they were in, they developed health issues, panic attacks, chronic disease because of just that suppression of who they are, the expectations of them.
And they said, look, I know that there's going to be many families within these communities who are going to say, well, that's not my experience.
My husband's not abusive.
And this isn't, this isn't really how it is.
But they experienced it firsthand.
And their whole thing is, look, it may not be everyone's experience, but the system and the hierarchy and the rigidity of it can lead to abuse.
This is what can happen.
And they're really sounding the alarm on that.
One of the things that seems to go together here is that if you have churches that have rigid patriarchal structures where men have unquestionable authority, then it's really difficult to hold them accountable.
Who are the ones that are going to hold them accountable for when their behavior turns abusive?
And then I think together with that, you have these women who are stay-at-home daughters who have been groomed from a young age, who have been married at age 18, 19, or 20.
They don't know another system.
They don't know another culture.
And I guess, you know, for me, as I watch the documentary and as I've done this work over the last decade, the difficulty in leaving is extreme.
How do you go elsewhere when you have no other resources, no other social life?
True.
No other window into the outside world, no other job training or occupational options.
I mean, you know, it really constricts people.
And so as I watch the documentary, I just was reminded once again of what kind of courage and bravery it takes for these survivors, not only to get on camera and talk to you, but also just to leave in the first place.
Did you get that sense interacting with them?
I mean, just to leave in the first place, anytime you're shifting in your identity, that's scary and hard because there's nothing that drives anxiety more than uncertainty.
And that is like the pinnacle of uncertainty, going from this identity that was created for you since you were a child, right, into adulthood, and then basically recreating your identity.
And first of all, having the wherewithal to understand this isn't right, something's not right here.
I don't like this, paying attention to that little voice, and then taking the steps to get out and maybe not being in a situation where you have the financial means to, or you're concerned you're going to lose custody of your children, or you're concerned you're going to lose all of your friends and family who are within that insular community.
It takes a tremendous amount of bravery and courage.
And so I do commend the women who not only sort of figured out what was best for them and leaving, but being able to deconstruct and going through this process, which, as you know, Brad, does not happen overnight.
It takes a long time.
Many of them are still going through it.
And then to speak out and use the microphone because a lot of their friends and family are still within these communities.
And so there's a risk there too.
I'm really in awe of their courage to talk.
And, you know, again, they were very clear on we understand this isn't everyone's experience here.
Doug Wilson would argue that those men who are abused, they are going against the preachings.
And I asked them all about this.
He said, if you are the victim of abuse, you should call the cops.
I asked them about these women about that.
And he said, well, you don't call the cops.
You keep everything insular.
It's about going to the church elders.
And I spoke to a woman who is still in one of these reformed Christian patriarchal communities who's staying to help domestic abuse victims, women, because she knows if she leaves that they won't seek help from the outside.
And so she goes to the church elders with these women and tries to get them help.
But sometimes she says she has to bring her husband because they won't take her seriously as a woman.
Yeah.
So it's really important to shine a spotlight on that, I think.
Back, and I'm reminded of a piece that my colleague Sarah Stancorp wrote back in 2021 for Vice.
And, you know, there was somebody from Wilson's church who said, you know, look, if a woman refuses to have sex with her husband, she could be excommunicated.
And, you know, that has always stuck with me because if you can be excommunicated for simply saying to your husband, hey, I don't want to have sex right now.
Think about all the other things and all the other situations where, you know, authority and authoritarian leadership in the home is leveraged upon a wife, a mother, a woman, and so on.
And so, you know, I guess centering the survivors in the age of the Epstein files seems really, really important.
I think sometimes the memes and the jokes and the endless online Epstein kind of discourse sometimes leaves behind the fact that there are people who are survivors of real abuse and are undergoing lifelong trauma.
And that came through to me too, when I watched the documentary in terms of the survivors you've interviewed and the people that are doing their best to find a healthy, balanced equilibrium after leaving these churches.
Well, and it was interesting because several of the women are with their husbands still.
For some of them, it was like they left with their husband.
Their husband's also deconstructing, which was a dynamic I didn't actually expect.
It's not just women who like left their entire families behind.
And of course, it gets complicated when you have kids and you have a woman who wants to leave and then the man wants to stay in, they have kids, and that can lead to a whole host of issues.
But yeah, and we did actually talk about marital rape.
I did ask Doug Wilson about that and with this hierarchy and the structure and the idea that the husband has authority over the wife.
And he says, I don't condone marital rape.
He said that to me and I brought that up to the women.
I'm a journalist.
You know, I bring up all psych and I get responses.
And they said, well, he can say that all he wants, but that's not like the practice.
That's not what the thinking is.
And so I thought it was really important because I got Doug Wilson's side of things, obviously, with that interview.
There was an extended interview online.
But to hear some of the women who were once within his church network or adjacent ones where they were influenced by his teachings, to hear what they had to say is such an important part of the whole story, hence the name of the documentary.
Yeah, it is.
And one of the things that comes through in your interviews across denominations, across regions, is the theme of control.
And my experience with Christian Reconstruction, with Christian Dominionism is there's an explanation that, look, God provided order to the earth.
He provided a social hierarchy when it comes to human life.
And you hear some of the folks who are in the traditions in the doc talk about this.
Oh, this has given me an anchor.
It's given me certainty.
It's given me stability.
Like the one side of the coin is stability and certainty, and that comes from hierarchy.
If you ask anyone who lives in a kingdom, they're like, we have a pretty certain social order.
There's a king and then everyone's below that king.
And we kind of just go from there.
The flip side, though, is that when you interviewed these folks, these women, you know, across regions, across denominations, across churches, the thing that emerged was the primary interest, the primary motif is control.
And I'm wondering, you know, if that surprised you, I'm wondering if that, you know, came through to you in ways that maybe, you know, we won't see in the documentary things that were on the cutting room floor, just in terms of the overwhelming drive to control a woman's life in every aspect.
Well, there is a moment in there where I say, there's a through line with all these different denominations I've been studying.
And then one of the women jumps in and says the through line is control.
She said it herself.
And certainly that is one of the takeaways.
It was interesting, though, and I've thought a lot about this.
You know, I went to a community in Taylor, Texas that's within Doug Wilson's church network.
And they were lovely.
They have a tight-knit community.
They could not have been more generous and kind and open.
And I give them great credit for letting us come, Phil, because again, it's not easy.
I mean, they look, they probably thought, oh, mainstream media, you're coming in to do a hit job.
But they did say because of my interview with Doug Wilson, they felt like that would be fair.
And so they let us come in.
But they, you know, seemed like they have a sense of community that you can't find in a lot of places in America that people are craving.
And the women I spoke to who are in these submissive relationships say, look, the burden's off me.
He's the provider.
He makes the executive decisions.
I glorify the home.
It's really liberating.
And so it's very, it was very interesting for me as a journalist to explore all sides of that because the women who I talk to who are still in say that they're flourishing, that it's great.
And this is the natural order.
And again, and I think the women who I interviewed who are survivors would say, well, there's some scenarios.
Maybe their husband just isn't the, you know, is actually a really good man and isn't taking that authority to an abusive extreme.
And they were lovely.
I just want to reiterate that, like they were lovely and I really am grateful to them for letting us in.
But they've seen the darker side of it.
And I think understanding that darker side and understanding this moment we're in as a country as a country is important because these aren't just fringe communities that are just like going off and like living their, you know, in the way that they believe is right.
Why Corporal Punishment Is Seen as Good00:09:55
Doug Wilson and others want to impose Christianity on the country and reconstruct the country.
And you're seeing him now, you know, Gibby leading a prayer service at the Pentagon, right?
Now, there are many Americans who would applaud that who say that I spoke to, who say, look, America's gotten so far away from Christian values.
We need to get back to that.
We need to get back to the Christian values.
There was a lot of nostalgia and some of the very conservative Christians I spoke to of we used to live by Christian values and now we've gotten so far away and it's a clown show.
That was one way Doug Bolson put it.
And so if we could just get back to that, we'll all be better off.
But then I kept going back to pluralism and what about the people of different faiths and religious liberty and the First Amendment.
And one person I interviewed in Taylor said, well, you can't really live in harmony with pluralism if you have these competing worldviews.
And they really believe it's a David versus Goliath.
Secularism and non-secularism are basically two different religions and one's going to win out.
And they're David and the other side is Goliath.
And they think that Goliath is bad for society, you know?
And so I lay that all out.
And I think I hope people will Come to an understanding of this movement and dynamic in the country, whether they think it's good, bad, or not, that's not for me to decide.
It's just for me to lay it out for people to understand.
Yeah, you know, as somebody who spent way more time in his life than he ever thought he would reading Doug Wilson's books and writing about them, you know, pluralism is not something he's a fan of.
And he often recalls this past Christian identity of the United States.
And I think that's instilled in many of the folks who are in CREC churches and other conservative reform places.
It's hard, you know, for me, and these are my words, to think about a United States in 2026 that has hundreds of millions of people who are not Christian in the way the CREC would imagine one needs to be a Christian to be the right kind of child of God.
How do we live with each other?
How do we live next to each other?
How do we thrive together?
And, you know, it's clear in the documentary that, you know, there's no sense of wanting to do that other than our worldview is the correct one.
Yes.
The others, the Hindu, the Muslim, the agnostic, the atheist, the secular person, they have the wrong one, and we need to do something about that.
And so, you know, I think that's.
And I pressed on that repeatedly because I, as just a journalist with an open mind and talking to people about all different faiths and traveling the world, you know, you meet all kinds of people and people who were born in Pakistan and they have a deeply held view.
And a lot of it was informed by where they're born.
And so I kept coming back to that to the folks I was interviewing who were in these communities.
Like, how can you say you have it right and they're wrong and this is the one right way?
And they said, well, you know, we don't want to, we, we believe this is best for civilization and we want to do it peacefully.
We don't want to impose on it.
It has to be in the heart.
We don't want to do it through violence, but through the gospel and from sharing.
But the bottom line is they do want to impose it on American society.
Not in a violent way, they say, but like they want to oppose it.
And I think that to me is a distinction.
They don't want to live it just in their communities.
Like I'm a practicing Christian and my community have created this community to practice my faith.
It's no, we need to make this an official Christian nation.
And they, and they believe and they have their arguments and their go-tos of why they believe America was founded as a Christian nation.
Yeah.
There is some debate among scholars about like how much Christian values, you know, obviously they played a big role in the founding of this country.
But there's a debate in terms of how much the founders really wanted this to be a Christian country.
And a lot of the historians we spoke to widely rejected the idea that they wanted to establish America as an official Christian nation.
Otherwise, they would have made that explicit in the Constitution.
Yeah.
It's not in the Constitution.
And we can go, we've done that history on this show many times.
And I'll refer folks later to those episodes.
I want to get to, we've talked a lot about survivors who are women who are who are people who are married to men in these churches who are part of these churches as wives.
I want to talk about kids.
You went to a school in Tyler and there's a couple of pretty clear images of a paddle at a school.
And as a dad of preschool-aged kids, that was hard for me to watch because here are folks in this classical Christian school that is a CREC school talking about spanking.
I'm wondering how that came across to you as you were in the room with folks explaining why corporal punishment is actually what God wants and is a good thing.
Yeah.
So it's not something that happens in my kids' Christian school.
But again, you know, my job as a journalist is to unpeel the layers and try to understand.
And so I was really trying to understand the obedience and discipline aspect.
A lot of this is authority, obedience, discipline.
a lot of the structure is around that.
And so I was really curious, like, what do you do if a kid acts out of hand?
Because if there was this idea that child acts against an authority figure, like a parent or teacher, then that's an act of disobedience against God.
What do you do?
And they were very open with me.
And I'm grateful to that.
And they said, look, you know, nine times out of 10, we try to solve it and remedy it, but if we can't get there, we'll call up the parent and say, do you want to come pick up your child and discipline your child?
Or do you want us to use the paddle here?
And so the teacher would administer the spanking with the paddle.
And they said after, they said, every time, in their words, I believe it was a beautiful reformation.
Like we never leave the room with the child crying.
Usually they come back around and sink in harmony with God.
And so that's how they put it.
And I put that out in a documentary.
And I'm sure people will have some strong opinions on that.
But they believe that that's what the Bible dictates, that you're supposed to punish a child and use corporal punishment.
As you know, Doug Wilson has not shied away from discussing that.
And obedience and discipline is a big part of their philosophy.
Yeah.
You know, there's a lot of, there's a lot of distinctions between something like Christian Reconstruction and Doug Wilson's brand of Christian nationalism from what we might call the old religious right, which is mentioned in the in the doc, the anti-abortion movement of the 80s, the Paul Weiricks, the Jerry Falwells, the moral majority.
But I think one of the through lines there for those of us who grew up in this culture in the 80s and 90s is corporal punishment was taught as godly as as a way of disciplining children.
And you can go back to James Dobson and focus on the family and others, but that's not a rupture or a distinction.
That's a through line that's been there for quite a while.
I think that that's, I think that's a really fair point.
And something else I want to pick on and what you said is just how far back this goes.
This isn't something that just came about overnight.
This has been building, especially from the 60s with a lot of the social change and the rapidity of that social change.
I think a lot of people who are more on the conservative side, they didn't like what they were seeing in society and that social change.
And so it drew them closer to these communities that do give more structure and certainty.
One of the women I spoke to who last said, it's the God of certainty.
Like they give you this black and white blueprint for how to live life, right?
And that seemed to speed up that interest in these communities seemed to speed up during COVID, like peak uncertainty.
Like, oh my gosh, what are we doing here?
And it was scary for a lot of people.
And the pastors I spoke to, including Doug Wilson, said they saw their, the numbers just skyrocket because he, he claims it's because of some of the COVID policies and the blue states and masking and vaccines and all of that.
But also I think people were looking for that blueprint.
And then there's this dynamic in society right now where I think men feel a little bit lost.
They're falling behind with their at school and when it comes to work and they're just falling behind.
And I think these communities, These Christian Orthodox, Christian patriarchal communities gives them a feeling of, oh, you're important.
Here's the blueprint for how to live.
Men are dominant.
It's great to be a man.
And that must be so appealing to men who feel lost, I imagine.
And men who like to control other people.
That's me talking now.
I want to have the free path.
I'm not.
I'm not trying to put words in your mouth.
These are my words.
Everybody, everybody listening.
These are Brad's words.
I mean, for me, as a man who was part of these cultures, I saw a lot of men around me when I was 18 and 19 and 20 who taught me to be masculine by thinking of myself as in control, as somebody who made others submit, you know?
And I think for me, that's always stuck with me as we need to find a way as a society to appeal to men and boys and masculinity in a way that gives people a story and a sense of importance and value without, and this is again, me talking, without them needing to resort to an authoritarian household or control over someone else's agency or the demand for submission.
And I'm really glad that you and the doc focus on COVID as a moment.
And I think that's something that's been a little bit undercovered.
I agree with you, Brad.
Yeah.
There's an equation to me that goes, the more societal change and flow, the more appeal fundamentalisms have to people.
Societal Change and Fundamentalism00:11:10
And I think COVID was one of those moments of like, everything is upside down.
I am, my world is just crumbled.
I need certainty.
I need order.
I need, I need hierarchy.
Where can I find it?
I can find it in a very conservative reformed church.
And I'm really glad that that comes out in the dock.
And yeah, did you expect that going in?
I didn't expect it to be such a big deal in terms of being a pivotal moment for that movement.
And I just realized time and time again that it was.
And I don't think it's been covered.
Like COVID was a huge turning point for these communities.
And Doug Wilson admitted himself.
He was like, my views have become more mainstream without me moving at all.
And I think COVID was really the catalyst for that in a large way.
Because we haven't really examined as a society how much COVID has impacted.
We've talked it.
We talked about it with our friends, maybe, but we haven't really looked at that holistically.
And I could tell you, when it comes to this Christian nationalist movement, it was a huge turning point.
I also think it's important to remember as we're having this discussion, Brad, because I've been getting some comments from people who are Christians who are getting the wrong idea about this documentary.
It's not about persecuting Christians.
Like I said, I'm raised Christian.
My kids go to a Christian school.
I think I'm very, very much influenced and try to live my life by Christian values, right?
I think that's important.
And I respect people's deeply held beliefs.
I do.
I respect that.
And like I said, we all reach our worldview or our deeply held beliefs for whatever reason.
I don't know, would I have the same views if I didn't grow up in Lexington, Kentucky, and my family is from Texas?
I don't know, but that's where I am.
It's not about Christianity as a religion.
It's about the way that this movement, this idea of reconstructing society in America to be Christian is aligning with this administration in an unprecedented way with some of the things that they're doing as well, with like Project 2025 and dismantling the education department and that kind of thing.
It's a look at that.
Now, I think to understand the movement, you have to go and look at their beliefs, which we do in depth and we talk to the survivors, as you point out, but it's also important to look at how it's shaping democracy right now.
I could not agree more.
I think the way that I have put this to audiences around the country who've been sort of skeptical of me when I come to speak at their church is, look, loving God and loving your country, that's great.
I'm not here to talk about that.
If you think that loving your God means you get more of the country than everyone else and you get to shape it in a way that imposes your faith on others, that now sounds to me not like the separation of church and state and the First Amendment and the pluralistic democracy we're meant to have.
It sounds like one group sitting around the American roundtable saying, hey, I know we're at a roundtable here, but we're always going to have a higher chair than you and a higher position just because of our faith and our identity that way.
That to me is Christian nationalism.
This is not about Christianity in terms of, as you just said, persecuting anyone's religious tradition.
It's about a religious tradition as it impinges on democracy, at least for me.
That end goal of Christian authoritarianism.
And again, not all of them, it's hard to, Brad.
And I learned it's a cultural movement and not every, it's not a monolith necessarily.
Like, not everyone has the exact same even type of faith under the Christian umbrella.
There's, there's Protestants, there's Pentecostals, there's, you know, Orthodox Catholics.
But for some of those who have those Christian nationalist goals, it is what you just painted.
It is that.
And that's just a reality.
I want to get to Wilson and his mainstreaming.
I want to ask you one more question about schools, just because I think there's people out there that are going to be interested in this.
I have folks from my hometown who asked me like, hey, Brad, there's a new classical Christian school in town.
Can you tell me anything about that?
And there's so much that seems so alluring about classical Christian schools.
Hey, we're going to read, we're going to read classic texts.
We're going to read Plato and Thomas Aquinas, and we're going to maybe learn some Latin and some Greek when we get to high school.
And this seems like a really good, rooted way to do education.
And as somebody who spent his life doing all of those things, hey, I like all of that.
I'm not sure everyone realizes, though, that most times when you see a classical Christian academy, it's largely in the brand of the kind of schools that you were visiting and interviewing people at that are reformed, CRC attached.
There's a real kind of branding of classical Christian schools as one thing.
And then behind them is a theology that is often more in line with everything in the documentary.
Did that come across to you at all?
I'm not trying to characterize every classical Christian school out there.
People are going to email me.
I'm not doing that, but there is a trend.
Well, they're all under an association.
And I interviewed David Goodwin, who is the leader of that association.
There's around, I think, like 500 of them across the country.
And of course, they would have different ways of discipline, for example.
I'm pretty sure not all of the music habitable to speak the children.
Like, you know, they're all going to have their own ways of doing things.
But as David Goodwin put it, the overarching goals is to create deeply Christian children.
So everything is taught through a biblical lens.
And he says we want to enculturate kids.
We want to make them Christian kids and we want them to go out and do things in society that will make this more Christian nation.
I mean, he didn't shy away from that because he believes that this country has gotten away from teaching kids about, you know, Christian values and the Bible and that we would all be better off with these classical Christian schools and essentially doing away with public schools eventually.
Now, he said there were certain circumstances, of course, where it's not a sin to send your child to a public school.
But in his view, if you're a Christian parent, you don't really have justification sending your kids with public school because they're not teaching your child to be in fear and admonition of the Lord.
That's what he said.
And that's in the piece.
And so, you know, there are a lot of really interesting parts of the classical Christian school education.
I think a lot of parents are drawn to it too because they don't.
You I know the one in my neighborhood doesn't use technology exactly.
People love that, oh my gosh.
That's what I mean and yeah, they probably go.
I mean very bright kids.
I have, I have friends who send their kids to some of these schools and they're very, very bright kids and great kids.
So no judgment there.
But it is very much part of a system that is aligned with Doug Wilson and CREC to produce Christians who will go out and be kingdom builders.
Yeah no, I think that's my point and I appreciate you.
You pointing out like, if I'm a 31 year old dad, 31 year old mom, I have a five year old or a, I'm a 41 year old dad and I have a 12 year old.
Hey, there's a school down the road here.
They don't use technology, they're not on IPads all day.
They're gonna learn about, you know, classic Christian texts, classic books.
This sounds kind of cool, this is neat.
This is the kind of education I want my kids to have.
But I think a lot of times it's hard for those parents to see that these are, as you just said, CREC or Doug Wilson or Christian Nationalists, aligned educational spaces that have a very certain ethos.
I know we need to wind down here.
Let me ask you a big question before we go, and and just let me just you know you've done so much work on the, the interview with Wilson and now this documentary.
What's one thing you want to make people?
Make sure that people learn from watching this, this piece.
I think people just need to understand the dynamic that's happening in their country, whether they like it or not.
It's happening and it's happening fast and it can reshape democracy in a way that we haven't seen.
I also hope Brad, that it might give people an understanding of one another with different belief systems.
That's important to me too, because the folks I interviewed in Taylor Texas they, like I said they were lovely and I interviewed you know the survivors as well, and I hope maybe people in these other communities might listen to the survivors and think oh wow, that's I need to listen to that, that's interesting, or maybe I should pay close attention to what that survivor is saying.
I'm kind of feeling the same way, like I'm tired of this environment we're in where we vilify everything good guy, bad guy.
I think if we just take a beat to try to understand one another and why we believe the way we believe things, we would have more respect for each other and I hope I'm able to do that in some way in this doc as well.
You know, one of the yeah, I will say one of the things I appreciate is the folks who are in the church in Tyler are they come across as people doing their best to make sense of of human life in the 21st century.
And you know there's a lot of ways for me personally where I have come out of that culture and I disagree strongly with where they've landed, but doesn't mean they're bad people if you disagree with them and that's.
But I hope people see not everyone is a bad person.
I've had many texts with the pastor since I left and he'll send me these long texts about, you know, with Bible verses.
And he's been lovely.
He's like, I hope we can sit.
I hope that we can continue this conversation over coffee.
And I'm like, that's really refreshing that you're not adversarial.
You're not trying to shove something down my throat, you know, that you want to approach it in a respectful way.
And I think a lot, a lot of people can.
can learn from from his approach, even if you disagree with their belief system, like vehemently.
That doesn't mean not everyone who believes it is a bad person.
You shouldn't be, you shouldn't vilify them and vice versa.
That's my view.
Yeah, it's hard because, and I'll just, you know, again, these are my words, not yours.
And I'm not trying to put these on you or the doc.
This is me talking now.
It's, it's hard when, you know, folks like that are so vehement that, you know, there's a recent interview between Tucker Carlson and Doug Wilson where Tucker basically says, asks us about Muslims and he says, is the problem of with the Muslims in Europe the Muslims or is it the or criminals?
And Doug Wilson's basically like, well, the Muslim, Muslim and criminal are the same thing.
You know, or when it comes to anti-LGBT rhetoric or, you know, anti, you know, if somebody's an atheist, agnostic, humanist, you know, there's a world where Wilson says, look, I don't want them to be able to hold office.
The vilifying of that.
And that's never, I don't think he needs to vilify anyone.
Yeah.
And he's used some really derogatory terms about LGBTQ people.
Yeah.
In interviews, he did one with the New York Times.
And I just, I, I don't like the vilification and I don't really want to be a part of that.
That's not my, that's not how I roll.
A Little Bit Crazy00:03:23
You know what I mean?
For sure.
I actually have not seen that entire interview he did with Tucker.
I need to go watch that.
I have not.
It's been a little bit crazy over here, but I do want to go watch that because maybe we need to include in the doc.
I don't know.
It's a wild ride.
You know, if you, if, if you have a spare hour and a half and you really want to, I'll just say spend it that way.
It's, it, it's a wild ride.
But Pamela, so thankful for your time.
I'm thankful for, you know, the work you're doing here.
I know that we discuss all the time on this show that it's difficult on mainstream networks to approach Christian nationalism because you're always going to get people who think, as you've said today, you're attacking Christianity, you're attacking God, you hate America, you, you know, and that's clearly not the case.
And some people will never, no matter what, they already have their preconceived notions and they're going to think what they're going to think.
And there's nothing I can do about that.
All I can say is that's not what this is.
Now, there are plenty of critics and we have varying viewpoints in this doc, Brad, who, you know, some people believe this is politics wrapped in religion.
It's using religion to cloak the politics.
I mean, we have varying viewpoints.
You know, that's my job to put that out there.
I'm not taking a position though by putting any viewpoint out there.
But people don't really, in this day and age of polarization, people don't understand that.
And they have their preconceived notions of mainstream media.
But all I can do is seek the truth, tell the truth, and let people decide for themselves what they want to believe.
So barring unforeseen breaking news and other things, the doc should come out in a week.
Can you tell us, you know, we can find that on CNN.
Is it going to go to streaming as well?
Are there other places?
Yes.
So it'll air, hopefully, March 8th, 8 p.m. ET on CNN linear.
Linear means like your television, if you still have it.
And if not, it'll go up on CNN All Access, I believe the next day.
So you could find it.
You have to get a subscription, but you can find it there on All Access.
I really hope people watch.
I hope it sparks discussion.
And I hope that, you know, I mean, that's one person told me early in my career, Brad, you know, if you're not stirring the pot and stirring discussion, you're not really doing your job.
And so that's sort of how I look at this project because it is a hot button issue and people get real sensitive about it.
And, you know, but that's not the point.
It's a step back to look at this movement that's impacting America right now in the moment we're in in a very consequential moment.
Well, and our two favorites are in there: two friends of the show, two dear friends of mine, Matt Taylor and Julie Ingersoll.
So you'll get to see them.
And they're amazing as always, and articulate, insightful, unflinching.
So, you know, they are worth the price of admission, always, friends.
All right, y'all.
Thanks for being here.
We will catch you next time.
Thanks, Brad.
All right, y'all.
Thanks for listening.
If you're a subscriber, stick around.
I'm going to talk for a few minutes about some thoughts I have about the documentary and what Pamela talked about here, especially at the end.
So if you're not a subscriber, you can get access.
It costs $3.65 a month to get signed up.
You can check all of that out in the show notes.
And that's what makes this show go and makes us able to do this work.
We are bringing you content four times a week, doing our best to take an unflinching look at Christian nationalism, religious extremism, authoritarianism, and so much more as an independent network.