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Moscow, Idaho

C hrist Church pastor Doug Wilson is ready for the trolls when they come.

For two days after the murders, everyone had been united in shock. But he’d known that wouldn’t last. “It took two days for the old fault lines to reappear,” he said.

So now he’s sitting back and reading the online hate mail linking his congregation to the murders. “We get slandered regularly and so it’s just all in a day’s work,” he said of the speculations and accusations.

Ever since Wilson’s father started Christ Church in Moscow, in the 1970s, the institution has been a bête noire for the town. Wilson accepted, with equanimity, the seeming local consensus: He and his church are an irritating, possibly even evil, cultlike presence in their midst.

“I know they think I kick puppies on my lunch hour,” he said matter-of-factly during one such lunch hour as he sat in his book-lined, windowless office in downtown Moscow, Diet Coke on the desk.

Partly the friction stems from money. The church is so rich that even though it has around three thousand members—perhaps 10 percent of the town’s population—it’s bought up most of Moscow’s prime real estate and filled Main Street with church-owned schools and businesses: New Saint Andrews, the church college; the K-12 Logos School; the Sword and Shovel bookstore; Bucer’s coffeehouse.

The church even has its own bar: Tapped.

Wilson knows that most Muscovites refuse to patronize these businesses. He quite enjoys hearing about their resistance, especially one comment: “It’s a shame, too, because they’ve got all the best stuff.”

The Kirkers, as members of Christ Church are known—a reference to the church’s local nickname, “Mother Kirk”—stand out for their blond Caucasian looks and preppy attire.

The men wear button-down shirts and jackets; the women all wear skirts—a distinction that feeds into the perception of misogyny.

The liberal town finds the church’s attitudes toward women antiquated at best, repugnant at worst.

UI professor Kelly Quinnett remembers a 2019 campus talk entitled “Toxic Matriarchy,” given by conservative pastor Christopher Wiley, with a Q and A session moderated by Pastor Wilson, in which Wiley argued that modern society was suffering because women “have basically gotten too much power.” Quinnett was livid that they’d hold such a discussion on the UI campus.

During COVID, the police and the Kirkers clashed badly, and lawsuits are still flying.

Three of the Kirkers were arrested in September 2020 when congregants gathered outside city hall, unmasked, and sang psalms in protest of the city’s mask mandates.

Donald Trump even tweeted about it, writing DEMS WANT TO SHUT YOUR CHURCHES DOWN, PERMANENTLY.

HOPE YOU SEE WHAT IS HAPPENING. VOTE NOW!

But just a few weeks later, two of Wilson’s teenage grandsons, Seamus and his older brother, Rory, who was a scholarship student at Columbia, were detained and charged with multiple misdemeanors for placing hammer-and-sickle SOVIET MOSCOW stickers on city utility poles in the middle of the night.

They were dressed in hijabs and flip-flops at the time.

Their father, Wilson’s son Nate, a screenwriter, was asleep.

But he was phoned, awoken, and then arrested, charged with helping to make the stickers.

The charges against him and his younger son were dropped, but the Columbia scholarship student, Rory, wound up being convicted of one charge of affixing a sticker to a pole.

He’s appealed the ruling, and the appeal is on the desk of Judge John Judge. The litigation has cost his family north of six figures.

So as Doug Wilson reads all the news reports criticizing the Moscow Police Department for its handling of the murders, he senses an opportunity. This could be great PR for the church. And very helpful for his grandson’s litigation.

He starts to type his weekly newsletter to his congregation.

There are three things to remember. The first is that the police are currently engaged in a crucial task that God has assigned to them, and we should be doing nothing but praying for their success in it.

But then he gets to point two—the opportunity for the litigation around his grandsons.

Second, you are all aware of the fact that it was this same police department that arrested some of our members for singing psalms legally…

and lawsuits are in progress. But this is all being pursued biblically and out of true principle, and does not want to unjustly tar those good cops who had nothing to do with it.

So if we give way to any carnal gloating or glee over the fact that our police department is now receiving very critical attention from all over the world (which it is), then we have become part of the problem.

Finally, he focuses on the larger PR opportunity the murders offer to the church and the community. It’s imperative that his congregants do not screw it up.

And last, we need to take a few steps back and look at the big picture.

Our little town keeps finding itself in the limelight, and it has to be acknowledged that something strange is happening…

Meet the Press came and did a story on what was happening here in Moscow, tagging our town as the place where the Christian Nationalism thing is going on.

And then these sensational murders happened.

When he’s finished, Wilson sits back, pleased with his handiwork.

He knows there will be eye rolls in the town, but who cares? The pastor describes himself as having very thick skin.

He regularly invites local law enforcement and other civic leaders to lunch in a back room of the church. They refrain from talking about the lawsuits, but he subtly and unsubtly reminds them of the church’s importance in the community.

It’s not unhelpful, Wilson thinks, that the church owns the building that houses New Saint Andrews College, which has a CCTV camera positioned above the Grub Truck.

He gathers that there’s video on it of Maddie and Kaylee walking toward the truck with a guy in a hoodie, talking about someone named Adam on the night of the murders.

It’s been handed over to the police—a useful reminder to law enforcement of the upside of the church’s presence in Moscow.

Until recently, that building had sat there empty, no camera.

Wilson tells people that Moscow was on a downhill trajectory until Christ Church and its businesses came along.

But Wilson would like to be much more than just an economic solution for Moscow. “Our desire is to evangelize the town,” he said.

So the murders, though tragic, are an opportunity for him to step in and preach the need for his church to fill the moral and spiritual vacuum.

The house where the students were murdered, 1122 King Road, was in “a seedy area,” Wilson said, “not somewhere I’d want my daughters living”—making the point that seediness, which stems from godlessness, brings about trouble. And, in this case, murder.