The second-floor meeting room on Pennsylvania Avenue is unassuming, but it’s filling up fast when I walk in on Sunday morning. Young mothers in long floral dresses are assembling well-scrubbed toddlers on the rows of seats, men (in suit and tie) chat near the doorway, coffee cups in hand. I am seated next to a couple of other reporters, who take notes throughout the service.
It involves the sequence of a traditional Presbyterian liturgy: the Lord’s Prayer, hymns accompanied by piano and a scripture reading. What is out of the ordinary – and why there is a standard procedure for media showing up on Sunday – is that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and family are regular attendees, and the congregation is under the authority of a pastor who openly refers to himself as a Christian nationalist. He has recently drawn media attention to himself by reiterating his belief that the 19th Amendment should be repealed.
This particular political stance is consistent with his theology of gender and the way that his small denomination (the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches) is structured. Midway through the service a young couple comes to the front of the room to take vows of membership. Only the husband speaks the “I do’s.” His wife nods along beside him. She gives an extra emphatic nod when he vows that he speaks on behalf of his “household.” For the uninitiated, this “household” language comes from New Testament accounts of whole households being baptized after receiving the gospel. It is also the foundation of Doug Wilson’s belief that women should not vote on an individual basis. They would, in theory, have a vote, as long as they are married. In marriage, the two become one flesh, after all.
Doug Wilson, pastor at Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, first hit the conservative Christian scene in the early 1990s, writing books about everything from education to American slavery and founding private schools, a college, a seminary, a publishing house, and the CREC itself. His website, Blog and Mablog, keeps a tally of all the fish he has attempted to fry in the past three decades. He has tagged one post, which he calls his “Controversy Library”; it consists of links and articles where he solidifies, in strong language, why he maintains some of his most questionable stances. Those include: not all slavery was bad, women can’t handle careers in politics, and, of course, the 19th Amendment was a mistake.
However, he’s a pragmatist and has said that the 19th Amendment is “not a top priority,” especially since his political causes still need all the votes they can get. “I have no interest in cutting the conservative vote in half at the very same time that the left is pushing to expand the franchise to every illegal alien in southern California,” he posted on his blog.
He’s also an individualist, which would explain his decision to break from tradition and start his own denomination. He sees President Trump as useful rather than perfectly aligned, and has been careful to separate himself from certain faces of Christian nationalism. “If Nick Fuentes successfully got himself appointed the king of the Christian nationalists, then I’m not a Christian nationalist anymore,” he said. Regardless, his view of the connection between church and state is unchanging– it prioritizes similitude rather than separation. In the “Christian nation” Wilson envisions, public spaces would only maintain Christian activities (“Church bells? Yes. Minarets? No,” he quipped to NPR).
To focus on that effort, Wilson and his compatriots started the DC church last year. The founding of the church has been explicitly politicized – as Wilson posted on his site in 2025, “with the change in administration, we believe that there will be many strategic opportunities with numerous evangelicals who will be present both in and around the Trump administration,” and Christ Church DC needed to be at the heart of the action.
Hence a rapid establishment of the congregation, even though they didn’t have an official pastor until the Sunday this July, when I attend the church. The focus has never been on the church itself, but on the work that could be instigated by having a presence on Capitol Hill. As Wilson described to NPR, although his denomination and its political viewpoints have only represented a small minority in the country up till now, with the establishment of Christ Church DC, “our theopolitical vision is closer to getting a hearing.”
It’s still a long game to be played; “I wouldn’t just impose a hard theocracy on the country, as it now is,” he told CNN. “You can’t do that. Politics is the art of the possible.” And it seems that political possibilities are more important than his religious convictions.
The adherents assembling under Wilson are still few in number and don’t find camaraderie with many other conservative Protestant churches which believe that, although Christians should be involved with politics, the goal of the church is aimed towards preaching the gospel and not towards the capture of a particular government. Much larger denominations, like the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), have issued reports rejecting several theological positions associated with Wilson and leaders within the CREC. But the growth of Christ Church DC can’t be ignored.
In the past year, the group meeting each Sunday has grown to over 200, Pete Hegseth and his family have begun attending, and Hegseth even invited Wilson to speak at the Pentagon in February.
Wilson has discredited claims that he has any authority in Hegseth’s decision making, and Hegseth’s office has made official statements that the Defense Secretary still fully supports the 19th Amendment. It’s a bit of a dance.
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