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OUR VIEW
NSA’s plan for expansion reminds us of a battle plan
New Saint Andrews College, the tiny institution of classical education closely tied to Doug Wilson’s Christ Church, is about to expand from Fourth and Main streets downtown to the former Cadillac Jack’s building about five blocks north.CJ’s will come off the tax rolls in the process. That’s the bad news. The good news is it will not sit vacant. Instead, it will get a big facelift.
It will be filled with music students, as many as 300 of them and as many as 47 teachers. For a college that has a mere 165 students at its Fourth and Main campus, that would be incredible growth. NSA doesn’t expect it will happen overnight.
While the jazz-centric University of Idaho music school is teaching the Great American Songbook, NSA will no doubt focus on the Great American Hymnal and classic works of sacred music.
If the new school draws the same sort of students as NSA now does, they will be distinctively polite and conservatively dressed. They’ll shop and eat downtown during the day and live in the neighborhoods at night, often staying in homes of Christ Church members.
The move is the source of considerable alarm to some who detest Wilson’s theology and fear they are seeing another step in his one-time claim that Moscow was just the right size city for a decades-long takeover campaign — being neither too small to matter nor too big to be practical.
While Pastor Wilson seems proud of his anti-gay, pro-slavery, patriarchal provocateur status, his individual parishioners go out of their way to politely fly below the radar.
Meanwhile, Christ Church, Trinity Reformed Church, Logos School, New Saint Andrews College, Canon Press and a few other members of that ecclesiastical family continue to thrive. In addition, there are several businesses owned or managed by church members sprinkled about downtown, most notably, perhaps, from an employment standpoint, EMSI on Jackson Street.
No doubt you could say the same about businesses owned or managed by members of any other church — or no church at all. None of them, however, have leaders who have proclaimed any intent to take over Moscow at some point.
Whether braggadocio or not, the specter of theocracy on the Palouse bears resistance.
—Lee Rozen, for the editorial board
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Wilson’s “explanation” of the paragraph which has been displayed on this website, describing Moscow and Pullman as “strategic, feasible” locations to “take away from the enemy” (whoever the “enemy” is) has been to, as only “Pastor” Wilson can, haughtily, dismissively, arrogantly say, essentially, that the “Intoleristas” insist on taking those words out of context. He does so with many italicized words, he loves italicized words. So……fine, “Pastor” Wilson. You have an opportunity to fully, in detail, explain to those of us who find your words troubling, how that paragraph really doesn’t mean at all what it sounds like. Yet, to my knowledge, you never truly have. Apparently if we’re just too ignorant to understand the metaphorical nuances involved, that’s our fault. In the meantime, I can only read that paragraph to quite literally detail a game plan for you, “Pastor” Wilson, to become Moscow’s 21st century Boss Tweed. If any Kirker lurking would like to explain how that paragraph truly should not be troubling to those of us who do not wish to see Moscow become a theocracy, I, for one, would welcome the clearing of the air.