Moscow's the home of an authoritarian misogynist that rules over his realm. So is Moscow, Russia, but this story is about a bizarre, reactionary "church" / cult which has put down roots in Moscow, Idaho, according to a fascinating and chilling report from VICE:
"Depending upon whom you ask, the town either hosts a Calvinist utopia or a patriarchal cult in which women must submit or face discipline at home and at church. At the center of it all is notoriously controversial Douglas Wilson, the firebrand pastor who has been presiding over his Mother Kirk fiefdom for more than 40 years.
To learn about Christ Church’s culture of abuse and social control, VICE has interviewed 12 former and current church members and Logos students, and reviewed court and medical documents, church correspondence, and business filings. Ex-kirkers describe a punitive community in which women are told they must defer to church leaders and cannot say 'no' to their husbands, men are taught to strictly control their homes, and those who speak out can be isolated and harassed." (our emphasis)
The story of former church cult member "Jean" and the coerced sex (i.e., rape) in her married life is horrific, replete with a drunken husband demanding and forcing sex on his petrified wife. Here's one depraved example of what this hyper-fundamentalist, Christofascist "church" has produced:
"One night, after their first was born, her husband came home drunk after she was asleep. He pulled her over, lifted her nightgown. She told him 'not tonight,' that she was tired. He got angry. She tried clawing away, then pushing him away with her arms. He pinned her down, so she used her legs to kick him. That’s when he unbuttoned his pants. 'When he was done, he passed out drunk and I locked myself in the bathroom and cried.' She was bruised and her insides bled.
She called a kirker friend about it the next day. The friend attended a Christ Church plant—a seedling congregation based in Christ Church’s doctrine and culture—and 'she said the same thing was going on in her marriage.' Marital rape, it seemed, was normal. So, Jean didn’t report it. Jean’s husband raped her over and again a couple of times a week for about a decade, either with violence or by waiting until after she took a prescription sleeping pill." (our emphasis)
It's no wonder that the male monsters in his congregation are out of control: Douglas Wilson is quite the clerical criminal:
"...pastor Doug Wilson is a radical provocateur, even among outspoken Christian conservatives, and appears to relish Twitter wars and blog battles. In the 1970s, he became pastor of Christ Church, which is now influential within the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, a denomination Wilson helped found that includes more than 100 churches nationally. In 2003, 94 ecclesiastical charges were brought against Wilson by his denomination—from improperly using church funds to pay off students’ casino debts to “carnal threatening” of others—but the charges were ultimately dropped. Last year, Wilson published a novel called Ride, Sally, Ride about a Christian man who runs his neighbor’s sexbot 'wife' named Sally through a trash compactor, and YouTube recently removed Wilson’s video making a moral argument for fake vaccine passports. (our emphasis)
Sounds completely wholesome to us. You can be assured that in the past couple of decades at a minimum, Wilson and his flaky flock fulminated against fundamentalist Islamic groups like the Taliban and al Qaeda without the faintest sense of irony or hypocrisy. Add hate speech about the LGBTQ community and you get the picture. Cracks in the cult are widening, as more women resist and report the abuse they've been subjected as a result of the sexual exploitation philosophy of Douglas Wilson, who would already be in the slammer in a just world.
(photo: We can suggest a place to put that lit cigar)
