The National Conservatism Conference in Washington D.C. last week saw U.S. Senator Josh Hawley speak about how he wants a Christian Nationalist nation. This made headlines across the nation (and we were the first media outlet with the full video).
But there were many more newsworthy panels and discussions which took place during the three-day event. Also at the conference there was a panel on why overturning Roe v. Wade actually made it more difficult to do a nationwide ban on all forms of abortion – which, of course, has always been their goal. As if that wasn’t enough, there was also a panel celebrating how the separation of church and state has failed.
The entire NatCon conference was not explicitly religious, but it was coded as such with much of the politics discussed was within the context of religion. But not just any religion – Protestant Christianity. Catholics were considered separately, as was Orthodox Judaism.
Beyond the pretty standard prayers opening each day, the panels and the booths outside, which many were from religious universities (Liberty, Hillsdale, St. Andrews), the big plenary of the week was the discussion between Albert Mohler and Doug Wilson.
The head of the Southern Baptist Convention, Mohler spoke first. Mohler has been a pivotal figure in Baptist circles since the 1990s when he became President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Over the last couple years his SBC has been embroiled in an enormous sexual abuse scandal, one that he’s been slow to deal with. Mohler has even denied that his longtime friend and former vice-president of the SBC Paul Pressler could have done the assaults he’s accused of, saying “so horrifying that it’s actually very hard to imagine that they could be real.”
Mohler opened his remarks with a reference to the last time he spoke at NatCon in 2022 when he discussed the “impossibility of a secular state.”
You would be wrong if you believed that the Christian right and anti-choice world was happy with the end of Roe v. Wade, they aren’t. Or at least not as happy as you would believe. Mohler described being in rooms with important Christian leaders who were convinced they were winning – but when Roe was overturned they were shocked to see the citizens in Kansas vote for a ballot measure protecting the right to choice.
“And I can tell you that there are those and were those who were quite convinced that this is an argument we were winning, that we were winning it self-evidently that we were not winning it evenly. But, the confidence was that if indeed all those years of work in conservative arguments and conservative organizing and it it would work became a conservative legal recovery, a constitutional recovery, if that led to a reversal of Roe v Wade, we would be ready for it and we would discover a pent up pro-life conviction on the part of the American people, certainly in key states painted red, where we would see pro-life conviction translated into pro-life legislation.
And, of course, what we see is exactly the opposite, beginning in Kansas, but also in my own Kentucky, where all of a sudden the bomb went off, just announcing to us that whatever commitment there was to the pro-life cause, to the sanctity of human life, to the life of the unborn, it, it was much less ontological than we had thought. “
Mohler, not surprisingly, does not see social and moral beliefs as something that changes or evolves as time goes on. It is fixed on his narrow religious beliefs, a set of beliefs that may not even be shared with the person he’s sharing the stage with, another Protestant leader.
“And that leads me to the consideration for today to be conservative is to hold allegiance to certain fixed truths and principles…I would take that further and insist on fixed religious truths as well as traditions. I would underline that these fixed religious truths are grounded in specific acts of divine revelation on which we are entirely dependent. Two points of urgency I want to make. Number one, conservatism is not just another form of liberalism. And then secondly, conservatism is not just liberalism or progressivism arriving later on the schedule with greater respect for the costs and challenges of what is defined as inevitable social and moral progress.”
This is why he was furious with the UK Conservatives, blaming their recent loss on their acceptance of things like marriage equality.
And I would point to an incident just, you know, the taking place now more than a decade ago, when David Cameron, the British prime minister, head of the Tory party, just basically came out and suggested that the party abandoned what had been a very long standing commitment to social conservatism and indeed even to the definition of marriage as the union of a man and a woman.
Like many right-wing Christians, Mohler believes that transgender people just started becoming a thing in the last couple years – which to him is clearly a sign of moral and religious collapse. That fact that historians have documented a more than 2,100 year record of people being accepted as transgender doesn’t seem to matter. The problem is that he doesn’t like that they’re not being killed, or thrown into a mental institution as they previously were.
Mohler loves the word ontology, he uses it regularly as you can see in the pulled quotes from his speech at NatCon, he also uses it continually in his podcasts and writing. His use of it is, essentially, God is real (and thus all of the proclamations from the Bible) because God must be real. In a Youtube video he describes it saying, “Certain things ARE, there is REAL substance to them.”
This of course means because transgender people aren’t specifically in the bible (there’s a bit of an argument about that) and that marriage between a man and a wom[en] is the only way it’s described in the book, then “Marriage is part of creation order” it is not something that is changeable or something that humans created.
After Mohler wrapped up, Douglas Wilson, the right-wing Christian Nationalist pastor of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, took the stage.
Wilson also teaches at the College that he founded, New Saint Andrews College. St. Andrews was not surprisingly recruiting at the National Conservatism Conference. According to their admissions standards, “The college seeks Christian students eager to pursue their studies in the context of a vibrant Christian community.”
Wilson, who has been tracked for decades by the Southern Poverty Law Center, is extremely anti-feminist saying that women “were created to be dependent and responsive to a man,” and believes that kids of non-Christians are “foul – unclean.” It gets worse from there, but essentially Wilson wants a male-led Christian Nationalist state (Catholics, you may need to convert first). There’s actually a handy website built by someone documenting everything that Wilson believes, from slavery not being that bad, to wanting to abolish the Department of Education.
Pastor Douglas Wilson is not one to mince words, which likely doesn’t surprise you but he opened with calling the left “neo-pagans” hellbent on destroying the Christian world so that “like a leftist Pecos Bill, they might ride that tornado into a utopian tomorrow, unburdened by what has been.” It’s a hell of an opener, but he says his beliefs are a fusion “made up of the free market guys, the social conservatives and the anti-communist hawks.”
As with many conservative Christians, they believe that they are the ones persecuted in America, not the LGBTQ community of course, “it used to be that the sexually troubled had to keep their kings hidden away in the closet. Now it is the conservative Christian who needs to keep his virtues hidden in the recesses of the closet.”
Getting a bit snarky about recent news, Wilson decided to use the phrase, “an appeal to heaven,” referencing the flag that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s wife flew outside their beach house. After some laughter from the crowd he said, “I hear there’s been some trouble over it recently, and I’m not currently… sometimes [it’s] hard to follow East Coast customs.”
Pastor Wilson wrapped up his talk with a message to the former President, clearly a call back to the Appeal to Heaven flag comment, “my appeal to Donald Trump would be this on Inauguration Day. As you love God, as you love your country, and as you love your own soul, give explicit glory to the God of heaven and do it in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord.”
It might be difficult to tell the differences between these men from a lefty or less religious perspective. As a person who is far more familiar with conservative Catholicism, and grew up in that religion, that’s definitely true for me. What these two leaders both represent is the death of the “Third Way,”and the idea that the church can exist outside of culture and politics. Mohler took over the Southern Baptist Convention, which represents 13 million people and 46,000 churches, and in his time he’s swayed the SBC to back away from having women pastors, they’ve voted in opposition of IVF and is on the record of saying that gender transition is “a blatant attempt to undermine the very order of creation.”
Wilson’s congregation may not be anywhere near the size of the SBC but his reach within Conservative Christian thought is enormous. Beyond his college that he founded in Idaho, his video discussions on scholarly aspects of religious study have hundreds of thousands of views. He is revered personally in a way that even Mohler is not.
This historic discussion was only a little over an hour in a hotel ballroom in the Washington DC Hilton but the getting Mohler and Wilson in the same room, neigh on the same stage together is a big thing in the world of evangelical protestantism. Having them discuss the future of the country and religion – even at the end briefly shake hands was epic for a lot of people.
READ: Q&A: Katherine Stewart Unpacks Senator Josh Hawley’s Speech – ‘The Christian Nationalism We Need’
Mohler at the end of the discussion between the two of them noted on how much they agreed but how much was still to be discussed. Before closure he made sure though to bring up Christian Nationalism – the previous nights speech from Senator Josh Hawley was going viral – and he wanted their takes on it public.
His take was to “maximize the Christian commitments of the state of the civilization,”at the same time separating that of the “saint and the citizen,” explaining that “ I’m not claiming that everyone in the state, ever every citizen, is going to be a confessing Christian. I’m going to say that does not mean they’re not obligated to the acknowledgment of the Christian structure of this civilization and its commitments.” So non-practicing Christians and maybe Catholics and Jews will be able to live and partcipate in Mohler’s state but they must live under the state religious doctrine.
Wilson on the other hand, claimed to not want a specifically Christian Nationalist state, saying “I’m opposed to establishment of religion at the state level. I don’t think it’s unconstitutional, but I think it’s a bad idea.”
He didn’t seem to either want to or be able to elaborate on the why, other than to talk about the many waves of sects of Christianity that immigrated into what would become the United States. He made sure to point out that there is no way to have a Christian nation without the Baptists due to their historical importance to America. All of that said, in the past Wilson has said that he’d like to turn his town, Moscow, Idaho into a Christian community. He also has called to “abandon the idea of secularism, and replace it with the biblical doctrine of three distinct governments—family, church, and state, all of them under the authority and lordship of Jesus Christ.”
The difference between Mohler and Wilson’s take on Christian Nationalism seems to come down to formality – Mohler would like a formal state and Wilson would like to keep his small town religion (that of course has control of women and no LGBTQ+ people).
