Why a 'Paleo-Confederate' Pastor Is on the Rise [View all]

[dalton99a]

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/14/opinion/douglas-wilson-evangelical-hegseth.html
https://archive.ph/UR7kg

Why a ‘Paleo-Confederate’ Pastor Is on the Rise
Aug. 14, 2025, 5:04 a.m. ET
By David French

...

You’re not going to scare me away from the word Confederate like you just said “Boo!” I would define a neo-Confederate as someone who thinks we are still fighting that war. Instead, I would say we’re fighting in a long war, and that was one battle that we lost.

These words were written by Douglas Wilson, whose home church is based in Moscow, Idaho. He has described himself as a “paleo-Confederate” — he believes that Southern slavery was wrong, but that the Confederacy was otherwise “right on all the essential constitutional and cultural issues surrounding the war.”

He’s the founder of a church, a denomination and a publishing house. He’s influential in both the Christian home-schooling and the Christian classical school movements.

Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, belongs to his denomination, and Wilson’s words above are no aberration. They are but small drops in an ocean of ignorant, malicious and unchristian commentary.

He has referred to women he doesn’t like as “small-breasted biddies” and “lumberjack dykes.” He has said: “The sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.”

...