MOSCOW'S CALVINIST COLLEGE

MAKES THE NEW YORK TIMES

For much more on Wilson see these two links

By Nick Gier, Professor Emeritus, University of Idaho (ngier@uidaho.edu)

 New St. Andrews College (NSA), a Calvinist school in the heart of downtown Moscow, was founded by Douglas Wilson, a former student of mine. We only ask that our student's use their degrees responsibly, but I'm afraid that Wilson has become the notorious TV preacher with everything except the big hair and the wide screen.

Over the last 15 years, Wilson has established a religious empire that includes NSA, 200 Classical Christian K-12 schools, Canon Press in Moscow, a seminary Grey Friars, and his own denomination, the Confederation of Reformed Evangelical Churches.

NSA was just featured in The New York Times Magazine (9-30-7).  The article is entitled "Onward Christian Scholars" and the author is Molly Worthen.  Worthen has written an excellent and balanced analysis, and I would like to expand on some of the topics she covered.

NSA students are bright and hard working, and I once spent about 60 hours advising an NSA student on his senior thesis on Buddhism.  I'm afraid, however, that some of their instructors do not meet NSA's requirement that their students have good moral character.

NSA President Roy Atwood is quoted as saying that Wilson and Co. "are not interested in political takeover," but the facts tell another story.  Wilson makes much of the fact that he doesn't like Bush and is against the war in Iraq.  Worthen quotes him as declaring: "They voted for Bush; I'd vote for Jefferson Davis."

Wilson repeatedly tells his critics that he is not a neo-Confederate, but the ties are just too close for him to deny it.  In 1994, he and Steven Wilkins wrote a booklet entitled Southern Slavery as It Was, in which they celebrate the Antebellum South as the greatest multiracial society in human history.

Wilkins is a conservative Presbyterian minister in Louisiana who was a founding director of the neo-Confederate League of the South (LOS).  LOS president Michael Hill, who attends Wilkins' church, proposes that an independent neo-Confederacy of fifteen states would have the duty to protect the values of Anglo-Celtic culture from black Americans, who are "a compliant and deadly underclass." 

I am pleased that Worthen was able to get Wilson to come clean on his relationship with R. J. Rushdoony, the founder of Christian Reconstructionism, a movement with a very explicit political agenda.  Both Wilson and Rushdoony are postmillennialists, which means that Christians must first, on their own initiative, set up godly governments before Christ will come. 

There will be no quick Rapture; rather, there will be a long war against non-believers, the end of which Wilson once described as a Christian tsunami crashing into pagan lawn chairs on a beach.

Central to the Reconstructed Christian state is the administration of Old Testament law.  Four years after the fact, Wilson conveniently announced that he was misquoted in a local paper about allowing banishment for homosexuals rather than their execution. 

Worthen's article has Wilson on the record again with this exact same administration of Old Testament law.  This is just one of many examples of Wilson's duplicity and deception.

For many years I have had the mistaken impression that Wilson's father, Jim Wilson, was not responsible for his son's theological waywardness.  But Worthen's article reminded me of The Principles of War: A Handbook on Strategic Evangelism written by Jim Wilson. Worthen also noted that NSA coffee mugs have the Latin motto, which translates as "for the faithful, wars shall never cease."

Worthen quotes Jim Wilson as being disappointed that his son undermined the opportunity of a surprise attack.  Some years ago Son Wilson did follow his father's military strategy of choosing an appropriate target (Moscow was just the right size), but then foolishly publicized his battle plan.

In a debate that I had with Wilson in January, 2007, I tried to get him to clarify his position on "covenantal" lying, which allows the use of deception to advance the Gospel.  Wilson responded that this was permissible only if he and his congregations were in fact at war.

We now have more than enough evidence that the war is on, and we now know the real reason for Wilson's evasiveness and deceit over the years.

Nick Gier taught religion and philosophy at the University of Idaho for 31 years.  Read the full story about Wilson's religious empire at www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/Wilson.htm.