Heath Druzin
speaker
61 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Heath Druzin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Thanks.
Right. So Christian nationalism is a pretty broad movement. It can mean a lot of different things, but there are some unifying ideologies in the movement. One big example is something called dominionism. Now, that's sort of a jargony term, but really what it means is that Christianity should rule all aspects of life. and that Christ's teachings should be the foundation for all of society.
And, you know, I've been covering extremism since 2018, just looking at how extremism interacts with politics. And a lot of my early coverage was about militias. I covered the COVID lockdown pushback, which was really strong in Idaho especially, and even, you know, elected officials pushing conspiracy theories. Eventually, my reporting turned to Christian nationalism.
When I started in 2018, I think people saw it as a really fringe movement. I certainly did too. And I definitely, even in making this podcast, there was a lot of skepticism as to whether Christian nationalists would ever really matter. But with the election of Donald Trump, I do think that a lot of that skepticism has melted away. The landscape is very different now.
Trump himself has said Christians are, quote, under siege and that the left wants to tear down crosses and that we have to, quote, bring back Christianity in this country. And when Donald Trump says these things, Christian nationalists say that it's their ideology influencing the now president-elect.
Yeah, Moscow, Idaho seems like a really unlikely place to be a center of Christian nationalism in the country. It's a kind of sleepy college town of about 26,000 people in north central Idaho. Kind of an idyllic area, like rolling wheat fields, a lot of agriculture around the town. Real kind of cool, quaint downtown. also a blue dot in a really red state. I live in Idaho. It's very conservative.
I can tell you that firsthand. But Moscow is one of these kind of liberal strongholds, you know, as you'll find in a lot of college towns. So it's a little weird that it's become this kind of center for this unyielding, pretty far-right Christian nationalist church called Christchurch. The pastor of Christchurch is Doug Wilson. He leads a congregation of 800 to 900 people.
He's a Navy veteran in his early 70s and a prolific author of Christian-themed books. He spent most of his adult life evangelizing and developing a conservative Christian education model. And he's kind of built this network from Moscow where he's had a lot of influence.
He and his church members have been able to buy up some key real estate, also working on a housing development on the edge of town. So a lot of their influence is through money and real estate right now. And that's been alarming a lot of people in town because the stated goal of Christchurch, locally at least, is to make Moscow a Christian town.
Doug Wilson and his associates at Christchurch, they want a kind of local theocracy where the political power is held only by people who identify as Christian. Now, they haven't had much luck at the ballot box because it's a liberal town. But what's been fascinating and what kind of drew me to the story is that the fight over the town is, you know, it's really dramatic and interesting.
But you could argue that he actually has more influence nationally. Because Doug Wilson, he's built up, well, what my co-reporter James Dawson on the podcast termed a, quote, Christian industrial complex. He's got this church in Moscow, but he also has churches across the country and across the world.
More importantly, he's built up a Christian educational empire where he's got nearly 500 schools across the country, coast to coast, in nearly every state in the country. And as he told me, he sees his educational enterprises as munitions factories. He likes to use war terminology. So, you know, he sees his students as basically foot soldiers in the culture wars that he wants to win.
And the school system has been really effective, as has his media empire. He's got popular streaming shows. He's got a publishing house called Canon Press that churns out dozens of titles. He himself has written dozens of books, and they've been pretty influential in these circles. Secularism is resting on America like a dense fog.
That's Doug Wilson speaking to me in Moscow, Idaho, for the podcast in 2023.
As far as the Christian nationalist label, they've become more and more comfortable with it. They really don't, for the most part, don't shy away from it anymore, even if they say it's coming from people that they disagree with originally. The way I got access was I just asked, and I was up front with them.
I said, you know, I'm sure you won't like everything in my podcast, and you're going to hear from a lot of people who are really critical of you, but I do want to hear you out, and I want to get your voice in there. So they did end up talking to me, but what I quickly realized is that I think a big reason they talked to me is simply because they're very proud of what they're doing.
When I'm telling you what their plans are, what their ideology is and what they think, I'm not telling you what I think it is. They said it all into my microphone and they were very direct. They want America to be a Christian nation, explicitly Christian nation, just kind of saying it like it is in their mind.
Hey, Gabe. How you doing? I'm talking to Gabriel Wrench, a media personality and activist in Idaho. Most people call him Gabe. Okay. Gabe has a lot of ideas about how America should change. You said it would probably take a long time, but that you would like to see only Christians be able to run for office. So if you're Jewish, if you're Muslim, if you're atheist, certainly.
If I had you right, you said that, yes, you would support eventually them not being allowed to run for office.
Because Gabe is a proud Christian nationalist.
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