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Doug Wilson’s Religious Empire Expanding in the Northwest

While hosting a conference featuring his defense of "Southern Slavery," Douglas Wilson exposes the radicalism of his growing "Christian" empire.

MOSCOW, Idaho — The flyers showed up one day last fall, scattered around the sprawling campus of the University of Idaho at Moscow and looking for all the world like a routine advertisement for a couple of visiting scholars.

“Meet the Authors!” the one-page announcements shouted, referring readers to an upcoming February conference on campus that would be featuring speakers Douglas Wilson and Steven Wilkins, the co-authors of Southern Slavery, As It Was. There followed five excerpted “highlights” from their book.

“Slavery as it existed in the South … was a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence,” the excerpts read in part. “There has never been a multiracial society which has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world. …

“Slave life was to them [slaves] a life of plenty, of simple pleasures, of food, clothes, and good medical care.”

This flyer was no advertisement. It was a call to arms.

In the months that followed, sparked by the flyers anonymously distributed by antiracist activists, an uproar erupted that convulsed the campus, the town, and even the community around Washington State University, another huge school some eight miles away in Pullman, Wash.

Before it was over, the presidents of both universities had condemned Wilson and Wilkins’ book in unsparing terms, dozens of newspaper articles, editorials, advertisements and letters to the editor had been printed, major demonstrations had been held, new antiracist groups had formed, and a whole array of counter-events had been organized for the Wilson/Wilkins event.

Few who lived on the Palouse, as the region is known, avoided the boiling controversy.

The reason for the powerful reaction wasn’t just that the two men had written a repulsive apologia for slavery and the antebellum South. More important was the fact that one of them, Doug Wilson, had been in Moscow for 30 years.

And during those three decades, largely beneath the radar of his neighbors, Wilson had built a far-flung, far-right religious empire that included a college, an array of lower schools, an entire denomination of churches, and more.

At the same time, with longtime collaborator Wilkins, Wilson was developing a theology that married an enthusiastic endorsement of the antebellum South with ideas of religious government — an ideology now at the center of the neo-Confederate movement.

Doug Wilson, it seems, was raising a religious army.

Back to the Future

The racism and sorry scholarship that informed Southern Slavery, As It Was — and that set off the recent hullabaloo in Idaho — did not spring full-blown from the minds of Doug Wilson and Steve Wilkins. In fact, these ideas were born long before.