NPR Asked Pastor Doug Wilson Why He’d Repeal Women’s Right to Vote. He Said, “Because It’s A Good Idea.”

Wilson entered the national spotlight after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth invited him to give a roughly 15-minute sermon inside the Pentagon in February 2026, carried on internal Pentagon TV. Reporters quickly flagged that the self-described Christian nationalist wants to repeal the 19th Amendment, and NPR’s Leila Fadel just sat down with him for an interview in his home, Moscow, Idaho.

On the record, Wilson said repealing women’s right to vote is “a good idea,” that a Muslim woman couldn’t hold office in his Christian America, defended a 2016 passage on “the propriety of rape” by comparing women who reject patriarchy to a man who leaves his wallet on the dashboard, and once wrote that slavery in the American South was often “a relationship based upon mutual affection.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had a self-described Christian nationalist pastor give a roughly 15-minute sermon inside the Pentagon in February 2026, carried on internal Pentagon television, as part of a monthly Christian worship service Hegseth started at the building around May 2025. The pastor is Doug Wilson, who leads Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, founded Canon Press, and heads the CREC church network. Its Washington, D.C. plant is attended by figures in the Trump administration, including Hegseth.

In a July 6, 2026 NPR report by Leila Fadel, religious studies scholars described Wilson’s once-fringe teachings as “entering the mainstream.” Fadel sat down with him in Moscow.

Wilson co-authored a 1996 booklet, “Southern Slavery, As It Was,” which argued slavery in the American South was often “a relationship based upon mutual affection.” Historians widely condemned it as whitewashing chattel slavery, and the University of Idaho published a rebuttal titled “Southern Slavery As It Wasn’t.” Wilson disputes being characterized as “pro-slavery” and says he is not calling to reinstate it.

Asked why he wants to repeal the 19th Amendment, Wilson said, “Because it’s a good idea,” then added, “I wouldn’t just impose a Christian hard, a hard theocracy on the country, as it now is. You can’t do that. Politics is the art of the possible.”

Wilson told Fadel he wants to replace individual voting with “household voting,” a system his church already uses, in which the head of household casts the vote. Asked who that would typically be, Wilson answered, “The man.” Widows and other female heads of household would still vote.

Fadel asked what happens to a Muslim woman who isn’t married and heads her own household in his Christian America. Wilson said she wouldn’t hold office because she “couldn’t vow to uphold the Christian Constitution.” On non-Christian worship in public, he told Fadel, “church bells, yes. Minarets, no,” because “the public space would belong to Christ.”

Pressed on a 2016 book in which he wrote that women who walk away from “the protections of fathers and brothers” are giving “a tacit, implicit in principle, not overt acceptance of the propriety of rape,” Wilson defended the passage with an analogy: a man who leaves his wallet on the dashboard in a bad neighborhood is “arguing for the propriety of theft.” He said he opposes rape and was describing consequences, not endorsing them.

On homosexuality, Wilson has taught that execution or exile are permissible Old Testament penalties. He told Fadel execution is “the maximum penalty,” not the minimum, and that a civil magistrate could instead “deal with the social problem of public sodomy and pride parades” without “shooting people.”

Wilson downplayed direct influence on Hegseth, saying the two have “met a few times, texted some,” and that “pastors should stay in their lane.” Asked to describe his ideal Christian country, he answered, “It would look like fluffy clouds and unicorns, and everybody would be happy.” He puts the timeline at about 250 years and calls the path “a radical experiment in democracy.”

Of the current moment, he told Fadel his theo-political vision is “closer to getting a hearing” than at any point in the 40 years he’s been preaching it.

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