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 toddlers on the rows of seats, men (in suits and ties) chat near the doorway, coffee cups in hand. I am sitting next to a couple of other reporters, who take notes throughout the service.
The focus has never been on the church itself, but on Capitol Hill
The Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches worships using the 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media attention by reiterating his belief that the 19th Amendment – recognizing the right of women to vote – should be repealed.
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 dos.” His wife nods along beside him. She gives an extra emphatic nod when he vows that he speaks on behalf of his “household.” This “household” language comes from the New Testament, when whole households baptized after receiving the gospel. It is the foundation of Doug Wilson’s belief that women should not be given a vote of their own. In marriage, the two become one, 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. He founded private schools, a college, a seminary, a publishing house, and the the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches itself. His website, Blog and Mablog, keeps a tally of all the fish he has attempted to fry in the past three decades. His “Controversy Library” consists of links and articles where he solidifies, in strong language, why he maintains some of his most questionable stances. These include: not all slavery was bad, women can’t handle careers in politics, and, of course, that 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 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.
Wilson 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 has said. Regardless, Wilson’s knows what he thinks of the separation of church and state. In the “Christian nation” Wilson envisions, public spaces would only maintain Christian activities (“Church bells? Yes. Minarets? No,” he said to NPR).
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.” Christ Church DC needed to be at the heart of the action.
The focus has never been on the church itself, but on Capitol Hill. As Wilson said to NPR, although his denomination and its political viewpoints only represent 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.”
Still, he’s realistic when it comes to implementing Christian nationalism. “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.”
Wilson’s adherents are still few in number and don’t find camaraderie with many other conservative Protestant churches. Much larger denominations, like the Presbyterian Church in America, have issued edicts rejecting several theological positions associated with Wilson and leaders within the CREC. But Christ Church DC is growing.
In the past year, the Sunday service has grown to more than 200 congregants. Pete Hegseth and his family have begun attending, and Hegseth even invited Wilson to speak at the Pentagon in February. Wilson has denied that he has any control over Hegseth’s decision making, and Hegseth’s office has said that the Defense Secretary still fully supports the 19th Amendment. It’s a bit of a dance.
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