We Need to Talk About Moscow

I want to invite you to imagine that you’re a 13-year-old girl in a Christian home.

You attend a church led by a prominent pastor, who encourages local families to offer room and board to the young men attending the seminary he started in your town.

For the next three years, your family opens your home to a 24-year-old man who secretly grooms and sexually abuses you. You’re too ashamed to say a word until the point at which your silence becomes too costly. You suffer flashbacks and night terrors, panic attacks and stomach ulcers. Your body starts to betray your confidence; it was never meant to handle the trauma that’s been inflicted on it.

So you finally get the nerve to tell your horrified parents, who file a police report that very same day.

Now imagine that your parents alert the pastor to the fact that one of his seminary students is a predator. Imagine that, rather than addressing the issue or protecting the congregation, the pastor keeps it under wraps, lectures your parents about failing to be more attentive, and writes you emails encouraging you to drop your legal pursuit for justice, warning you that it will make your family look bad should you let this thing go public.

Your family is essentially shunned by the church during this ordeal. No one wants to be associated with you. You’re written off as problematic, foolish, troubled.

Imagine now that your pastor wrote letters to the authorities on behalf of your abuser, minimizing the harm you experienced, writing, verbatim, that your abuser “is not a sexual predator”, explaining that you were “physically mature for your age,” and referring to your abuse as “a secret courtship” wherein you were an active and willing participant rather than a child who had been groomed for abuse.

Where would you turn? How much faith would you have in the church? How much faith would you have in God? What message do you think it might communicate to you about your value? You’re only 13. Do you think it would hinder your ability to trust the people representing God? Do you think you might be tempted to seek justice somewhere outside the place that broke you? Perhaps a feminist advocacy group?

So now you’re reeling in a black tunnel of your personal crisis, covered in shame and embarrassment when you discover that your pastor failed to learn a single lesson through the messy ordeal with you. Your church has not chosen to wise up or think to instate any kind of abuse prevention policies, nor have they issued an apology for failing to protect and inform the congregation about the allegations of the predator in their midst – who was eventually convicted in a court of law – for several months. They haven’t offered any support to your family through this time of suffering. In fact, they’ve invested all the time and energy that would have helped you into “rehabilitating” your rapist instead. 

Months come and go, and you’re still binding your wounds when you learn the same thing has happened again in the same town to a different family with a different predator, this one a clinically diagnosed Level III “fixated pedophile,” with a clearly defined high risk of reoffending. Unaware of his criminal record, he’s been welcomed into a flock full of children, where, of course, he abuses children. And again, your pastor writes to the court on behalf of the pedophile, offering his “expert” opinion that the predator is truly repentant. Your pastor formally asks the court for “measured and limited” consequences for this man who, by his estimation, will survive to become a “productive and contributing member of society.”

And not only has your pastor enabled this pedophile, but now you discover that an elder in the church has played matchmaker, pairing the predator with an unsuspecting woman who had turned to church leadership for help in finding a husband. You learn that the pastor performed the marriage ceremony and asked God to bless the union with children. You learn that the pedophile was removed from his home for admitting during a polygraph test that contact with his infant son resulted in sexual stimulation.

And still the pastor refuses to apologize or grieve his complicity. He did nothing wrong. Instead, he writes lengthy blogs explaining away the legitimate concerns being brought to his attention. He shrugs his shoulders and feigns indignation at the mere suggestion that he possibly could have handled anything differently. In his own words, “I’m a pastor. I cover sins for a living.” Official church meeting records indicate some measure of concern that online bloggers are “trying to turn this into a scandal,” as though it were not already a legitimate scandal in its own right.

Meanwhile, his congregation grows. He’s the most intelligent man in town, and everyone knows that intelligence is next to godliness, so you’re not terribly surprised to see the rapid growth of his influence over the Reformed Christian world at large. There’s a lot of bold truth mixed in to his marketing scheme, and boldness sells. It registers as virtue, and heaven knows the world needs more of both. He’s volunteered to be the leader of this new boldness movement, so he can’t very well allow your injuries to sabotage this important crusade. You’re pushed to the side and encouraged to be quiet. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps like a good Presbyterian, and get your emotions in check. They’re dangerous creatures that shouldn’t be given much of an audience.

Now every year around November, the pastor leads a campaign encouraging congregants to wage war on the “sin” of empathy. They call this “No Quarter November,” a time for telling the world to suck it up and be tough and wrestle with “truths” that are hard to hear, especially about all the sinners and reprobates in the world around them. He’s the self-appointed king of the bold new culture warriors: tough, resilient, unafraid to trumpet truth for the greater good. The sexual scandals continue with startling regularity under his leadership, but those pesky little stories are hardly worth mentioning in comparison to all the good he’s doing, right?

Of course, none of this is hypothetical. What I’ve described are well-documented and highly publicized, real life stories that happened to actual people under the leadership of one Pastor Doug Wilson of Moscow, Idaho.

For those who don’t already know, Wilson is a self-ordained Reformed minister who essentially created his own denomination where he surrounds himself with yes-men and answers to no one’s authority. He has a tremendous amount of influence and is linked or in charge of a number of organizations including Canon Press, Cross-Politic, It’s Good to Be a Man, Logos K-12, Greyfriar’s Seminary, New Saint Andrew’s College, the Association of Classical and Christian Schools, Omnibus Curriculum, and others. 

No stranger to controversy, in the early 2000s, the Reformed Presbyterian Church in the United States officially denounced his teaching on Federal Vision as heretical and issued a formal call for his repentance. Also noteworthy, around that time, prominent church members officially brought 94 ecclesiastical charges against him, alleging various unethical practices, including lying, stealing, pastoral tyranny, abuse and manipulation, and the misuse of benevolence funds to pay off gambling debt. When Wilson learned of these charges (which miraculously disappeared the minute the men who brought them left the church), he reportedly responded by saying, “People are going to get splattered; People in the church are going to get hurt; families are going to be destroyed; and when I swing, people shatter."

In 2005, the Idaho State Tax Commission revoked Canon Press’ 501(c)(3) status after catching Wilson using it to funnel money via royalties to himself.

This coming March, Wilson plans to co-host a panel with at least four other men who’ve publicly and pompously stated they don’t even think women should be allowed to vote. The conference is titled “Seven Doctrines for Ruling the World.” That’s their objective: world domination. 

Suffice it to say, there has been ample cause for concern for a very, very long time. Abuse survivors and advocates have been pleading with evangelicals for years to require accountability for the egregious abuse of power that’s been enabled time ad nauseam in the Moscow empire. But these voices are largely ignored or written off as egalitarian hit jobs designed to destroy the ministry of a godly man and usher in Marxism to destroy the church. In many ways, it reeks of the same denialism that defined the latter years of Ravi Zacharias’ ministry; there was ample evidence, but no one really wanted to consider it. 

So when Kevin DeYoung published an article on Monday tackling some of the long-ignored issues in Wilson’s ministry, I was truly grateful. Wilson loyalists aren’t particularly known for listening to women who dissent, so maybe someone inside the good old boys’ club would be more successful in inviting some of the accountability that’s been demonstrably lacking for the past 20+ years. I especially appreciated Kevin’s willingness to name some of the rampant misogyny in the way Wilson routinely speaks about women, a chauvinism that always seems to find cover under the guise of “context.”

But many of us are still waiting around for someone to explain what context could possibly legitimize a Christian minister’s choice to call wayward women “cunts” or “bitches” or “lumberjack dykes” or “small breasted biddies” or “easy lays” or “harpies” or “herpes on heels.” 

Similarly, what context makes it appropriate for a pastor to write soft core porn about sex robots – as he did in his 2020 novel “Ride Sally, Ride” – wherein the characters call each other “pussies” and speak in graphic detail about deviant sexual fantasies? With dozens of written references to women’s breasts and “thigh high boots” and “blonde bombosity,” cluttering his writing, even an occasional reader of the Wilson blog is bound to pick up on the aggressive sexual ideations. 

There’s no appropriate context for any of the misogynistic things he routinely says to rally his base. No Douglas, women were not made to “make the sandwiches” as you’ve claimed. Promiscuous women are not less valuable than promiscuous men, as you’ve also claimed. And no, it is not appropriate to call a disciplinary meeting with the elders on the occasion that your wife doesn’t show enough manufactured joy at the prospect of doing the dishes. 

I won’t even delve into the abhorrent things he has to say about American slavery or the litany of borderline heretical things he preaches in regard to the Federal Vision debacle because there’s more than enough material here already to convince any rational person with a shred of intellectual honesty that there’s trouble in Moscow. 

Having followed Wilson's antics for years I'm fairly acquainted with his bitingly sarcastic rhetorical flourishes, and I'm sure he'll have a silver-tongued, manipulative, and downright dismissive explanation for the well-documented cases I've just cited. But the truth speaks for itself, and it's not pretty if you actually look.

Worst of all, he somehow manages to always get away with it. There’s always an excuse or a justification, and the loyalists are always willing to swallow it whole. The question is why.

Wilson is the master of spin, as is glaringly evident both in this video series (which is essentially a sophisticated PR cleanup job from a sympathetic interviewer who knows how to act like he’s asking tough questions while letting Wilson off the hook) and in his response to DeYoung.

What people are really angry about, Wilson insists, is the fact that God’s forgiveness extends even to pedophiles. It’s grace that’s offensive, and they should take it up with God, not him. He’s the merciful one. If only everyone else could be so compassionate.

Of course that’s not at all what actually troubles people. The real problem is cheap grace devoid of loving accountability, safeguards, wisdom, or complete truth.

Pawning a pedophile off on a naive woman and performing their marriage ceremony with a prayer the union will produce children is like placing an alcoholic in the middle of Oktoberfest and feigning shock when he falls off the wagon. Publicly declaring that you’d gladly do it again even knowing that a child would be assaulted? That’s not compassion. It’s hubris, and it’s hateful. Believing that a fixated pedophile with more than 25 victims in his history is somehow magically cured of his demons after a few sessions with your unqualified counsel… well what do we call this? It sure isn’t wisdom.

The Bible names clear and unapologetic standards for the conduct of those in pastoral ministry. The standard is this: “above reproach” and “well thought of by outsiders.” What kind of mental gymnastics are required to convince a thinking person that a guy who harbors predators, shames their victims, denigrates women with misogynistic slurs, hurls insults at the lost, withholds comfort from the hurting, and preaches world domination instead of servant leadership is in any way eligible for this duty?

Since it’s “No Quarter November,” and we’re officially in the business of confronting wickedness, however unpopular our stance, I will respectfully suggest that maybe it’s time the chickens come home to roost on the Moscow movement. Maybe instead of waging war on everyone else’s sin, they would be well advised to wage war on their own. 

In the decades of substantial output from their various outlets, schools, churches, media releases, podcasts, and publishing ventures, it seems to me that the single element of godly leadership that’s been demonstrably lacking in all of it is the humility that leads to repentance. When David knew He had grieved God’s heart, he flooded his bed with tears. He didn’t wage a flamewar on empathy and pretend the invitation to repent was a personal attack on his ministry.

If it’s world domination Wilson is after, he will need to take the Jesus road. It’s the meek who will inherit the earth.