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For Peter Bell and Sarah Bader, creating the “Sons of Patriarchy” is personal.
“Peter and I are kind of the same personality,” Bader said. “I think we see a bully out on the playground, we go, ‘Oh, you’re mine.’”
That bully is Doug Wilson, and his particular brand of Christian Reformed doctrine.
“I’m not stopping until he steps down from the pulpit,” Bell said.
Bell is the producer, writer, editor and host of the podcast.
Bell, himself a Reformed Christian, had heard of Wilson through his studies at Westminster Seminary California, which he defined as an “anti-Doug Wilson seminary.”
However, it wasn’t until he took on an internship in the Tri-Cities of central Washington that he was introduced to what he saw as abuse coming from Wilson’s teachings in Moscow, Idaho.
“I’d heard about the bad theology, but I’d never heard about the abuse,” he said. “I could not believe the stuff I was hearing.”
Wilson leads Christ Church, or Mother Kirk (the old Scottish word for church) in Moscow, and from that church several offshoots populate the region of northern Idaho and central and eastern Washington.
During his internship, Bell stayed with a family who lived about 150 miles west of Moscow, and they exposed to him some of their history with Wilson, stories Bell did not receive permission to share on his podcast.
“Sons of Patriarchy” aims to take stories similar to his host family to expose patriarchy, Christian nationalism, the underlying theologies of these movements and how these beliefs breed all forms of abuse.
The series will also “give voice to those who have suffered the kind of abuse you cannot even begin to imagine in the churches and institutions we are profiling,” according to its Facebook page.
Bader, in charge of social media for the podcast, knows all too well about the abuse. She has been a thorn in Wilson’s empire since she was 13-years-old, when she argued with her teacher while attending Logos School, a classical Christian school Wilson founded. She disagreed with the way slavery was taught. This was the school’s final straw with her, as she’d caused trouble before, and it expelled her.
“I guess then my journey just went forward,” she said. “I moved out of my parents’ house [at 15]. I left the church entirely. I deconstructed. I’m an atheist.”
She had to move out due to her parents’ abuse.
Mondays will feature experts, and Thursdays will reveal the story of survivors of physical, sexual and spiritual abuse.
More and more abuse survivors started “coming out of the woodwork” Bader said, before she and Bell aired their first episode. The number of episodes to produce grew to 32 from the original goal of 15. Half of them are already completed.
One of the more controversial teachings featured in the series will be Wilson’s beliefs about marriage — essentially that women submit and men dominate, as these are their God-given roles.
“Just practically speaking, when you tell a man that you are the leader, authoritarian person in the marriage, and the wife is submissive in all the ways to you as Christ is submissive to the Father, how does that not lead to the man thinking like, ‘I can get away with anything?’” Bell said.
This teaching has had far-reaching consequences including marital rape, wife spanking and physical and verbal abuse, which readers discover in Tia Levings story.
Levings wrote The New York Times bestseller “The Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy,” released in August.
She attended a Tennessee church, which was part of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), a denomination co-founded by Wilson in 1998. She said in an email to FāVS her story exemplifies Wilson’s reach through his books, media and church planting.
Her husband at the time read Wilson’s “Reforming Marriage” and “Federal Husband.”
These books inspired her husband further along toward more control and abuse. For example, her husband wanted her to call him lord, to start asking him for permission to do things, to give him a full accounting of what went on in the household, wear only dresses and more, she wrote in her book.
“My husband (at the time) had specifically sought out a Doug Wilson church after reading his books so that we could worship with ‘like minds’ I write about that experience in my memoir,” Levings said, “which includes a visceral, dangerous escape with my children from what I call ‘church-sanctioned domestic abuse’ because everything my husband did to me was validated and/or taught by our church.”
She told the story in her book of talking to an ashen-looking pregnant mother holding her teething baby at that Tennessee church. When the husbands joined them, the husband of the mother put his arms around her and said to all of them, “Well, it’s time we should be getting home. Mommy’s getting a spanking.”
Levings wrote she could not believe he said those words out loud, but that she now understood why her husband wanted to find a church with ‘like minds.’
Levings is just one of many who will share her story and now expertise in fundamentalism and abuse in the “Sons of Patriarchy.”
Journalist Sarah Stankorb is another expert featured in the “Sons of Patriarchy.” She broke the story of Wilson’s culture of abuse in mainstream media in her 2021 Vice article, “Inside the Church That Preaches ‘Wives Need to Be Led with a Firm Hand.’”
She also authored the national bestseller “Disobedient Women: How a Small Group of Faithful Women Exposed Abuse, Brought Down Powerful Pastors, and Ignited an Evangelical Reckoning,” which was released last summer.
“I was willing to be interviewed because one of the advocates I trust encouraged me to do so, saying she felt like she could trust Peter Bell,” Stankorb said in an email with FāVS. “I understand he is covering a range of topics, but his care for survivors of abuse and mishandling of reports of abuse has been very evident.”
As an investigative reporter, she relates to the feeling of wanting to be the one exposing enough truth to bring justice.
“I think that’s one of the reasons why what Bell is doing has so much potential — he’s trying to cover a lot of different angles,” she said.
Bader has been involved in other podcasts with similar themes, like the NPR and Boise State Public Radio’s “Extremely American” podcast’s season two, which also honed in on Wilson and his teachings.
“I was the fixer for the NPR podcast and the first point of contact,” she said. “I know that people outside of the area thought it was amazing and so terrible (Wilson’s teachings), and it was, but, to me, it actually sounded like an ad for Logos, an ad for Doug Wilson.”
They made him sound like a normal human being and a nice guy, she said, which Bader believes is far from the truth.
NPR had more parameters and bureaucracy than they do, Bell said.
“We’re a little bit rogue. We can say what we want, we can do what we want, and we can hit them a little harder,” he said.
Bader explained they are taking a more frontal offensive approach, matching Wilson’s tone over the years, with one rule guiding them.
“Our only rule is as long as it’s true and as long as we have evidence, we’re going to do it,” she said.
One person very familiar with Wilson is his former University of Idaho philosophy professor and FāVS columnist Nick Gier, who has written about Wilson. He knew him before Wilson wrote his books and before he crossed over into his version of Reformed Christian doctrine and founded his Moscow empire.
Gier, too, was interviewed for “Extremely American” and the “Sons of Patriarchy,” largely to cover the same question: What was Wilson like in his early years?
He remembers Wilson as a smart student, a wonderful debater and someone he respected and considered a friend. Today, he calls Wilson “power hungry” and a “master of deceit and evasion,” and he feels betrayed by and extremely disappointed in him.
At the end of his department’s association with Wilson, Gier remembers encouraging him to use his talents for good.
“I said, ‘You’ve been a good student, and all I want to tell you is, please use your degrees responsibly,’ and, unfortunately, he’s not done that.”
He doesn’t think “Sons of Patriarchy” will do much in bringing Wilson down, other than give him another black eye from which he’ll heal. He only sees financial ruin possibly from a class action lawsuit by those abused by him or through his teachings as the only way Wilson can be stopped.
Bader’s hope is along those same sentiments.
“My hope is that we have warned the church enough that we can stop the flow of money … via homeschooling material, predominantly, and other things,” she said.
Bell’s hope is that the survivors — and Wilson and his acolytes — know that the creators of the “Sons of Patriarchy” see them.
“I love the church with everything that I have, and if you mess with the church, you mess with me,” he said. “People should feel safe in the church.”
This piece is republished from FāVS News.