The case for holy war

0:00Noel King:Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has been talking about the war in Iran in distinctly biblical terms, citing Psalms, the resurrection of Jesus, and the book of Quentin. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to capture and destroy my brother. President Trump is comparing himself to Christ. Vice President Vance is fighting with the Pope. Watching all of this is the increasingly influential pastor Doug Wilson. He co-founded the church that Hegseth attends. Wilson's a Christian nationalist who would like the USA to be a theocracy. He'd also like to help us get there, though he doesn't think it's going to happen anytime soon.

0:38I believe that it is accelerating. I believe that we're making significant gains. I see assembling resources, and I'm encouraged in that labor. But I don't expect to see what we're praying for in my lifetime.

0:51Noel King:Pastor Doug Wilson and how much you should worry about his plans, coming up on Today Explained from Vox. Where do the negotiations with Iran stand? What can a deal actually look like? And does diplomacy still have a chance? I personally believe we will get an agreement. I think there's going to be an agreement forthcoming of one kind or another. I think the world needs that. I think we desperately need to calm things down. I'm Jake Sullivan. And I'm John Feiner. And we're the hosts of The Long Game, a weekly national security podcast. This week, former Secretary of State John Kerry joins us on the pod.

1:27The episode's out now. Search for and follow The Long Game wherever you get your podcasts. This is Today Explained.

1:39My name is Douglas James Wilson. I'm the senior pastor at Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho. So I'm a pastor and I'm a writer.

1:47Noel King:Pastor Wilson, I've heard you say that you are okay being called a Christian nationalist. Yes. Do I have that right? Right. I'm okay with it. It's not a term that I would have picked off the menu myself. But when it was assigned to us, I thought, I can work with that. Because I prefer it to the names I usually get called. He gets called a theocrat, a fundamentalist, an extremist. And Wilson can be extreme. He said that Muslims shouldn't be allowed to hold political office in the U.S. He said that it was better to be a black person in the South during slavery than to be a black baby in a state that allows abortion.

2:25Noel King:He can also sound very rational, as you're going to hear. And we're talking to him because he's gaining influence in a country where many people are disappointed by what secular liberal democracy has gotten us. There's a character in one of Hemingway's stories I've heard who said who was asked how he went bankrupt. And he said, well, at first gradually and then suddenly. So what happened is when COVID hit, was sort of the pressure test or the stress test for us, all the wheels came off. And for a lot of, I call them normies and grillers, a lot of normal Americans were looking around and say, what just happened?

3:07This is crazy. What do you mean drag queen story hour? What do you mean? What are you talking about? This is not what I signed up for. So the things that we'd been talking about for some decades, back to the Bible, Christ is Lord, Christ is risen, and that has political implications, that sounded crazy 20 years ago. And two years ago, it didn't sound nearly as crazy because the world had gone crazy.

3:37Noel King:Let's say we get closer to where you want to be. What would your ideal Christian nation look like? Can you paint me a picture? Yeah, the first, the most obvious differences right away would be things like abortion would be outlawed, Obergefell would be overturned, things like that. Social conservative issues, no-fault divorce would be gone. Those sorts of social conservative reforms would be the most obvious thing that people would be pointing to. That'd be negative. If you wanted to know what would it look like positively, I would say there'd be a lot more liberty, fewer regulations, a lot more ability to move around the country, do what you want to do.

4:23Noel King:All right. So Obergefell is overturned. You don't like gay marriage. What would happen to gay people in this nation that you're envisioning? The way you framed the question, I would say nothing. They would not be able to marry. They would not be able to alter the definition of marriage by marrying a man or another woman. But they would not be, I don't want a sexual Gestapo. Basically, I don't want to persecute or harass homosexuals as such. There would be a number of things that I also don't want the society to in any way approve of that behavior. So, for example, pride parades, no. You know, no pride parades.

5:09That sort of thing would be out. Public expressions of it that way would be out. So basically envision America in 1975, right?

5:24Noel King:America in 1975 was many things, but it was not hewing all that closely to the Bible. You want this new nation to hew to the Bible. I do. In the Old Testament, gay people are stoned. as punishment. So are adulterers. Ah, yes. How are you planning to regulate homosexuality, to regulate adultery, and keep it in line with what the Bible wants? Yeah. So there are numerous theological issues involved in that question, one of them having to do with the transition from the Old Covenant, the Old Testament, to the New Testament, the advent of the Messiah, Christ dying on the cross for our sins, how we deal with sin publicly, the difference between a sin and a crime.

6:10It's a very complicated subject, but the moral code remains the same. Whatever else happens, it's not like times change and the morality changes, but times change and the way you deal with social ills like widespread homosexuality, which I would define as an ill, as a bad thing in society. What I'm arguing for is a public disavowal of this manner of life, not honoring it, not sanctifying it, not trying to pretend that it's marriage, et cetera. So basically, our society disapproved. When I first began ministering, we had formal disapproval of homosexual behavior in all 50 states, and America at that time was not a totalitarian hellhole.

7:03Noel King:It was a deeply unpleasant place, though. Maybe even a hellhole if you were a gay American. Right? We just have to look to history and hear how people testified then to what it was like to live in America as a gay person. One of my favorite sayings is the phrases is that of an inescapable concept. It's not whether but which. It's not whether you make people uncomfortable. It's which people you make uncomfortable. To that end, yeah. This is a good and interesting point that you're making because I hear you saying there would be more liberty. I know that liberty is important to you. Liberty is important to a lot of Americans.

7:44Noel King:Right. But the way this has been laid out, there is more liberty for some people, but there is also less liberty for others. Yeah. Yeah. So, basically, inescapable. It's not whether you impose morality, it's which morality you impose. Okay? And the current imposition of secular, gay-friendly morality makes traditional Christians intensely uncomfortable. But the secular world doesn't care. Some of us haven't moved. And the reason, and this is what a religious extremist is, is a moderate who didn't move for the times. So we haven't budged. And a lot of people were sort of simmering under the transformations of our country over the last half generation or so.

8:38Not liking it at all, not liking it at all. And the Christian nationalist response is something like of a recoil against all this stuff.

8:48Noel King:Okay. The country as you envision it is not where we are now. Right. What does it take? And I imagine you've spent many years thinking about this. What does it take to get us to where you want to be? What it would take is a massive revival, a reformation and revival. So basically, what are we doing? Let's say, what are we doing about it here in Idaho? Well, we're planting churches. We're starting Christian schools. We're publishing books. We're seeking to persuade people. So we're not talking in terms of a hostile takeover. What we're talking about is persuading our neighbors, serving our communities, building good schools, establishing centers of worship.

9:32And if God is kind to us and there's a reformation of Christianity, reformation and revival, then this could possibly happen. Otherwise, not. There's no way that you could take a pristine set of Christian laws and impose it on America as it now is. That's just not going to happen. So, I don't think that non-believers have to worry about us making all the ladies put on red dresses. That kind of nightmarish scenario is not what we're talking about at all.

10:14Noel King:Can I push back on you a little bit there? Sure. Because there is The Handmaid's Tale, yes. Fiction, although some would say these days maybe not. But from what I understand from reading and listening to you, you believe in, if we're talking about voting, you believe in households. You have a man and a woman who are married. They have children. Maybe they don't, but you've got a man and a woman. You believe that the man should cast the vote for the household, meaning by extension, the woman does not vote. No, the man doesn't vote as a man, and the woman doesn't vote as a woman. The household votes as a household.

10:51if the household is headed up by a woman, the household votes through a woman.

10:56Noel King:So a single woman, I'm a single woman, I would vote for myself. Yeah, you'd be a household of one. A household of one. A household of one. So what we're after is we believe that the family is a molecular unit, and we believe that a healthy society is built up of molecules rather than an atomistic society where each individual is a BB and you put all the BBs in a sack and it's like a beanbag chair. And then you grease the BBs with ubiquitous porn and a lot of cannabis and none of the BBs are sticking together. The households don't stick together. Marriages don't stick together. What we're trying to do is recognize, governmentally recognize the molecule, right and and and we do it it's nothing to do with xx xy chromosomes because the family doesn't have chromosomes that's not what it is so that's the first thing but we would like to model this kind of governance in our churches for a century or so and then have people say oh that's a great that's a great way of doing it where it's not like uh repealing the 19th amendment is number one on my agenda.

12:10It's like number 27.

12:11Noel King:Is it on your agenda? Okay. No, 27. Okay. I'll be in heaven before we get to it. So I hear you saying that you don't want people to worry. Right. That you want to convince and not to scare. I'm a reasonable guy. Right. But you can see how this might worry women. My sister is a married woman. Right. This would worry her. Right. It makes the job of convincing hard. Let's just take your sister, a married woman. If she and her husband agreed to vote for candidate Smith, all they've done is multiplied his vote tally by two. If they differ, if they're not going to vote for the same candidate, they might as well stay home and have a nice romantic dinner because they're just going to go cancel each other's vote out.

12:57Hmm.

12:58Noel King:The way to get the changes that you want is, in part, evangelizing. And I hear you and I believe you are entirely sincere. Also, you can influence people who make policy, who have power in America. Right now, the seat of power in America, Washington, D.C., President Donald Trump. Do you like President Trump's leadership? Two-thirds of the time, I like it a lot. Okay. A third of the time, I think, what is he doing? Why that? Why now? What do you like? What don't you like? Tell me. One of the things I think that is a good thing to compare Trump to is sort of America's got cancer and Trump is chemo.

13:45Trump is a radical chemo treatment. And chemo is toxic. Chemo basically has a system where it kills the cancer before it kills the patient. And it's a very rigorous sort of thing. And I like the progress that Trump has made on a lot of the cancer. And I'm aware of some of the damage that's done to the healthy tissues by his management style, his leadership style. But politics is the art of the possible.

14:16Noel King:I hear you saying, President Trump is getting us closer to the Christian nation that I want. He also acts in ways that contradict what Christ preaches in the Bible, and he is often, I would say, and he's a bad role model, right, the way he speaks. Do you have any reservations, being a pastor, about letting Trump off the hook? Oh, yeah. If I did let him off the hook, then I would have reservations about that, but I really haven't. So I don't think in the congregation I pastor, we don't have any Trumpkin wild-eyed supporters where no matter what Trump does, it's always good. When Trump misbehaves, everybody laughs.

15:04We budgeted for that. That's bad. Okay. And we know it's bad, and we say it's bad. But we're also, we don't have Trump derangement syndrome. when he does good things that thrill us, we're thrilled. I don't mind saying that there are a whole range of issues where Trump's behavior has thrilled me and others that I just heartily disapprove of. And I don't think I'm setting a poor example for our people when I say what I think about both of those categories.

15:39Noel King:Pastor Doug Wilson, co-founder of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, CREC. Did you know Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth belongs to a CREC church? We're going to ask Pastor Wilson how he sees his influence on Hegseth and about that Trump Jesus meme.

16:04Support for this today comes from Built Rewards. Are your rewards built? Are they kind of scrawny like me? The roof over your head is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, monthly expense for most of us. Built makes it possible for you to earn something back on that expense. And it's B-I-L-T. I should note, not B-U-I-L-T. They started out by rewarding members on just their rent. Now, as of 2026, Bilt says members can also earn points on mortgage payments, too, wherever they live. You can earn points on each housing payment that you can put towards travel partners like United and Hyatt, rides with Lyft, Amazon.com purchases, and more.

16:42Bilt members also get access to what they call a neighborhood concierge. They say it works like a personal assistant baked into where you live. It can make restaurant reservations, book fitness classes, and now find new local spots all while giving rewards. Renting and now owning a home can feel a whole lot better with Built. You can join the membership for where you live at joinbuilt.com slash explained. That's J-O-I-N-B-I-L-T dot com slash explained. Make sure to use our URL so they know we sent you.

17:18Noel King:Support for Today's Plain comes from Found. If you're a small business owner, you may know that wrestling with your finances can get messy. A bank account here, QuickBooks there, taxes and invoicing apps. Before you know it, you're buried in expensive tools behind on books, unsure where your business really stands. But that's where Found comes in, says Found. Found says they can help eliminate your finance clutter, giving you one platform that handles banking, bookkeeping, invoices, taxes. That means no more paying for multiple subscriptions or dealing with clunky apps. Found says you can send invoices for free and pay your contractors everything all from one app.

17:55Noel King:You can take back control of your business today. You can open a Found account for free at found.com. That's F-O-U-N-D dot com. Found is a financial technology company. It is not a bank, guys. Banking services are provided by LeadBank, member FDIC. You can join the hundreds of thousands who've already streamlined their finances with Found.

18:21Support for the show comes from Shopify. Every thriving business starts with a series of what-if questions, Shopify says. There's what if I fail? But you should also consider this one, what if you don't? I like that thinking, glass half full kind of thinking. There's only one way to find out, and you can make it happen with help from Shopify. They say millions of businesses around the world rely on Shopify for e-commerce, from businesses just getting started to household name brands. It can help you with everything from payment processing to analytics to website design. You can choose from hundreds of templates to create great-looking websites.

18:52Their email and marketing tools can help you get your name out there and stay connected with customers. And if you ever need help, Shopify's 24-7 award-winning customer support has got your back. I like the 24-7. That's nice. You can turn those what-ifs into a thriving business with Shopify today. You can sign up for your$1 per month trial today at Shopify.com slash explained. You can go to Shopify.com slash explained. That's Shopify.com slash explained.

19:33Noel King:Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth attends a CREC church, and that's why I think people mention you in the same breath. Correct. The Secretary of Defense has had opportunities, ample opportunities of late, to speak publicly in front of the American people. Do you hear your church's teachings when he speaks? Yes. How so? Yes. So basically, let me flip it around. I don't hear anything from him that contradicts what we teach. And I believe that he's a consistent Christian gentleman. I like what he's doing. I like the job he's doing. But I've not heard anything that contradicts what we would teach from the pulpit.

20:16Noel King:He has spoken of the war in Iran in religious terms. He also suggests that God is on America's side, right? God is rooting for America in this war. So I think the thing that people struggle with is the idea that God would be on board when you see civilian casualties like this school in Iran with the children, 150 people, maybe even possibly even more, killed. That happens, and then the Secretary of Defense says, God's on our side. Can you help us understand why that feels right to you? Yeah, so the first thing I would say is that no answer should try to pretend that war isn't horrible. Okay, in any war, horrible things will happen.

21:07But when you look at a regime that killed, what, 35 ,000 to 40 ,000 of their own people in the last month or so, if you're looking at a regime where a woman can be executed for having been raped, right, The values, we have a lot of problems, a lot of moral problems. We are not a moral paragon. We've got all kinds of problems. But if you put the Western civilization that we have and the Islamic Sharia state that they have in Iran, I believe that it's not a morally ambiguous situation at all.

21:48Noel King:The war has certainly divided Christians. Pope Leo, tweeting from the Vatican, wrote, God does not bless any conflict. Anyone who is a disciple of Christ, the Prince of Peace, is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs. What do you make of his statements? I'd say he needs to read his Old Testament more. Psalm 144, verse 1, blessed be the Lord, my rock, who trains my fingers for battle. Um, there is basically, uh, Pope Leo before he was the Pope, uh, was just sort of an ordinary democratic, um, uh, leftist critic of Trump. Right. And, and, and the, in the recent, in the recent spat that the Trump and the Pope had, it was just Trump being Trump dealing with a political opponent, which is what the Pope was being.

22:38Um, I don't think the Pope was being, uh, acting in the role of a religious leader exegeting the scripture there. I think he was just stating his political convictions.