The American people and their government must publicly recognize that Christ is the center of the world or face cultural disintegration, according to pastor Douglas Wilson.

“I’ve said many times, and I’ll say many more times: It is either Christ or chaos,” Wilson said. “If you deny him, then everything at some point is going to start to fall apart.”

Wilson is the senior minister of Christ Church, a Reformed Presbyterian church in Moscow, Idaho, and a founder of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches. Christ Church Hillsdale, an outreach service of the Idaho church, hosted Wilson’s speech on March 8 at the Venue 8 event center.

Wilson said he favors a broad Christian consensus that is asserted by the government.

“It wouldn’t give me any problem at all if Congress passed a resolution saying that Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead, and then the president issued a proclamation,” Wilson said. “No tax money, no coercion, no nothing. It’s just our representatives saying Christianity is true, and that would thrill me. That’s the kind of thing I’m after.”

Wilson said Americans have lost a common Christian culture that used to be taken for granted.

“Up until World War II, we would think and speak of ourselves as a Christian people, a Christian nation,” Wilson said. “The thing that has people spooked and freaked out now — Christian nationalism — was commonplace in my great-grandfather’s day.”

Wilson quoted Supreme Court Justice David Brewer, who wrote in an 1892 case, Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States, that America was a “Christian nation.”

“We did not have a formal establishment the way England did, with the Church of England,” Wilson said. “We had an informal establishment, which meant that we recognized the common Christian consensus.”

Around 75 years ago, Wilson said, America began slowly inching away from Christianity and toward overt secularism. He compared America to the biblical prodigal son who squandered his inheritance.

“When we began being secular, we had centuries of accumulated moral capital, centuries of the heritage of Christendom, and it took us a while to spend it all,” Wilson said. “But spend it all we did — and now we have a justice sitting on that same Supreme Court who could not answer the question ‘What is a woman?’ We’ve lost our way.”

Wilson said he supports a slow and methodical approach to the cultural problems of secularism in America.

“We got into this over the course of decades, and we’re gonna get out of it over the course of decades,” Wilson said. “Through planting serious Christian schools, planting Christian churches, establishing centers of worship, teaching people to think like Christians and to speak like Christians.”

According to Wilson, becoming an online reactionary will simply make America’s problems worse.

“The ‘dank right’ is reactionary blowback,” Wilson said. “That’s reaction, not reformation. The Catholic historian Christopher Dawson once said: ‘The Christian church lives in the light of eternity and can afford to be patient.’ Reformation is patient. Revolution is impatient.”

Wilson said Christians need to be loudly and unapologetically Christian in public.

“When a non-believer says, ‘I don’t accept your Bible, I don’t accept any of that,’ and we blush and put it away — who is it that doesn’t believe?” Wilson said. “We’re the ones that don’t believe. Avowing Christ in public means not being ashamed of him and his word.”

In a Q&A session afterward, Wilson said he thinks state-established churches are constitutional, but a bad idea.  

“The reason why I don’t support church establishment by the state is I think it’s the kiss of death for that church,” Wilson said. “It’s like your spiritual life is turned over to the Department of Motor Vehicles. I think it’s been historically bad for the churches that have been ‘blessed’ by that.”

Anna Vincenzi, assistant professor of modern European history, said she listened to Wilson’s speech because his name came up in conversations with students about Christian nationalism, and she wanted to judge for herself and ask questions.

“I spend much of my teaching talking about the tragically evil consequences of nationalism in the modern West and the risks involved in entrusting the re-Christianization of society to coercion and political takeover,” Vincenzi said. “In the talk, the emphasis was different. Wilson suggested that the re-Christianization of American society will come from the life of church communities and Christian witness, not from politics. I appreciated that aspect, and hope that’s what the rest of the audience also received, though I know that the talk might not be representative of Wilson’s rhetoric or of the Christian nationalist universe.”

Vincenzi added that she still disagrees with Wilson on a variety of issues, especially regarding his long-term plan for how a Christian society works and the extent to which the law should regulate morality.

“Wilson speaks directly to the deep yearning in many of my generation about the direction of the nation,” junior Luke Waters said. “He understands the hour. It is indeed Christ or chaos.”