The Moscow-Pullman Daily News gave him one last front-page story before the New Year. The headline, like those that preceded it, warned the community about a fixated pedophile who is stockpiling chaperones so that he can live in the same house as the child he fathered. Yes, it’s insane. But there it is.
It was an unscripted headline, unlike those he provokes for attention. He defends mankind from same-sex marriage but he can’t protect a Kirk infant from its own father. He presided over the marriage and insists he’d do it again — next week. And now you’re saddled with a mortgage in a soft market and a pastor who apparently does not understand right from wrong.
If you would have known these facts, you wouldn’t have moved. You would have concluded, with pretty much the rest of the world, that the so-called “work” in Moscow is a sociopathic freak show. They send convicted child-abusers on missionary trips and they marry serial pedophiles knowing they intend to sire children. Of course, he doesn’t post this madness on his website. He hides it in order to create an optical illusion of the Promised Land. But Moscow is the mirage — and suddenly your former “happy-clappy” PCA church looks like a bastion of biblical orthodoxy.
Then there’s the problem of the so-called foolish parents who trusted a Greyfriars’ student. It’s all lies but he needs a scapegoat. He understands that if Jamin Wight really did repeatedly rape Natalie, then the Kirk is under the judgment of God, because he wrote, “Violent rape is a judgment of God upon a people.” (Same thing with Sitler, whom he insists is not a child rapist.) So they were in a “sexual relationship,” and since this implies consent, it therefore could not be “violent” — the predetermining qualifier for the “judgment of God.” However, this obligates him to defend a 23-year-old man who fisted a 13-year-old girl as not violent. And the truth is, he may not know better.
Worse, everything he falsely accused Natalie’s parents of doing is infinitely truer of Ed Iverson — the Kirk elder who introduced the serial pedophile to the graduate of New Saint Andrews College with the hope the two would marry. Natalie’s parents trusted a man who attended Kirk elders’ meetings. Iverson trusted a man who snatches babies from their cribs to rape them in the bathroom. But he doesn’t rail on Iverson. Not a word.
When you strip away the deceit, the obvious stares you in the face. It’s always someone else’s fault. He never did anything wrong. It wasn’t insane. His conscience is clean. He’d do it again. Etc., etc., etc.
Which is why the headlines will continue. They never go away. They wane now and then but they never go away. And though it’s difficult to imagine a worse circumstance than a serial pedophile fighting for the right to live with the child for whom he entertains deviant sexual desires, it will get worse. It always does.
You’re right, no one would move to Moscow for Christ Church if they knew who Doug Wilson is. But they didn’t know. In the same way, no one would have moved to Jonestown, Guyana, if they knew who Jim Jones was and what was coming down the road. But they were deceived. They were so deceived about Jonestown that they actually referred to it as “the Promised Land.” The deception can be great. Even an intelligent man like Congressman Leo Ryan thought Jonestown looked okay until someone stabbed him. Then he wanted to get out, but it was too late.
The problem with fake utopias is that it’s harder to get out than it is to get in. The Control Freak always wants to control people just like the devil wants to enslave people. Jonestown was surrounded by miles of jungle and armed guards. And there was little contact with the outside world. It was practically impossible physically to escape.
Moscow is more subtle because Wilson is more subtle than Jones was. There are no physical barriers to leaving. But there are enormous psychological, emotional, and financial barriers. How do you move if you’re working for Christ Church, Canon Press, or New Saint Andrews? What if you have a mortgage that is partially paid for with rent money from NSA boarders? Where are you going to move to? What kind of job are you going to have? How do you explain to your children why they are being shunned as you are making the transition? What if your spouse doesn’t want to move with you?
If you put your house up for sale before you move — and you would probably have to — you will be identified as a traitor. Then what?
It’s not easy to leave the Kirk and Moscow. I know because I did it. I stayed longer than I should have because I didn’t know where to go and what else to do, and staying was easier for a time. But if you value your soul, you need to get out. As Ulysses says in his latest post, “it will get worse. It always does.”
My family has lived here since 1883, and this “grand plan” of Wilson regarding my hometown has been a thorn in my side since I read his words regarding Moscow (and Pullman) as being a “strategic and feasible” location to, I believe he put it, “wrest from the enemy”. As a Moscow resident of Swedish Lutheran stock, and of a family whose presence here now numbers 133 years, I’ve often wondered who Mr. Wilson’s “enemies” are in this apparent desire to become Moscow, Idaho’s 21st century of a (of course) sanctimonious, pious Boss Tweed. Are the townspeople such as me, who are not of his flock “the enemy”?
@CNW: Yes. Anyone who does not submit to his will is his enemy. Therefore, he must sack Moscow & Pullman, to make some kind of theological point:
I found that that book is available online for free. I’m reading through it now and it’s really eye-opening as to how Wilson’s worldview was shaped.
“The cult really strives to preserve a state of mind with defendable borders. As in the [Peoples] Temple, most significant violations of the cult borders are defections by ‘traitors’ and investigations by the outside ‘enemy.’ ”
—Raven: The Untold Story of the Rev. Jim Jones and His People by Tim Reiterman and John Jacobs, Tarcher/Penguin, 1982, page 280.