Douglas Wilson

Written By COURTNEY HUGGINS

Douglas Wilson: Teacher to Avoid

We first came across Doug Wilson years ago, back when we were sorting through all the Reformed voices online. He's winsome, he's funny, he writes well, and he says a lot of true things about the rot in our culture that made us nod along. We get why people follow him. But the longer we looked, the more we found underneath that we couldn't overlook, and we want to walk you through it honestly.

There are three problems, and then there's a pattern of behavior. We'll take them in order, and we'll let Doug speak for himself as much as possible.

Problem #1: The Federal Vision

In 2007, Doug Wilson signed the Joint Federal Vision Profession, a doctrinal statement put together by leaders of the Federal Vision movement. He wasn't a bystander who wandered into it. He was one of its leading proponents, and the description on his own publisher's video about the movement says he drafted the profession.

Here's what that profession actually says about how we're saved. In its section on justification by faith alone, it states: "We deny that faith is ever alone, even at the moment of the effectual call." It redefines justifying faith as "a living, active, and personally loyal faith."

Read that again. The Bible and our confessions teach that faith justifies as an empty hand, simply receiving Christ. Works come after, as fruit. But this statement says faith is never alone, not even at the very moment God calls a sinner to Himself. That smuggles our own faithfulness into the instrument of justification. It gives lip service to "faith alone" on the front end, then sneaks works in the back door through a final justification based on how faithful we were.

Wilson's own book, "'Reformed' Is Not Enough," says it plainly: "to assert that men fall away because their salvation was contingent upon continued faithfulness in the gospel is not to deny the sovereignty of God at all." So according to Wilson, whether you make it in the end comes down to your continued faithfulness. That's not justification by faith alone. That's probation.

We're not the only ones who saw it. In 2006, the Reformed Church in the United States concluded that Wilson's teaching "seriously undermines the testimony of the Gospel." In 2007, the Presbyterian Church in America unanimously declared Federal Vision views contrary to the Westminster Standards. R.C. Sproul said at the time, "this is the gospel we're talking about."

Even James White saw it clearly once. In 2004, White called Federal Vision rhetoric "blatant, unvarnished sacerdotalism that stands in opposition to the gospel." But around 2019 to 2020, White started doing friendly teaching videos with Wilson, put out by Wilson's own publishing company, Canon Press. We found that heartbreaking, because the theology didn't change. Only the friendships did.

Wilson doesn't call himself Federal Vision anymore. But he hasn't renounced anything in that 2007 statement either. Dropping the label while keeping the substance isn't repentance.

Problem #2: What he teaches about the Trinity

On his own blog, in a post called "Triune Botherations," Wilson wrote this about the Son: "His existence is obedience, eternal obedience, obedience that could not be otherwise. The Father's existence is authority."

In plain English: Wilson teaches that obedience is part of who the Son eternally is, while authority is part of who the Father eternally is. That's not the historic Christian faith. The church has always confessed that Father, Son, and Spirit are co-equal and co-eternal, one in essence. The Son's obedience belongs to His earthly mission, the incarnate Christ voluntarily submitting to the Father to redeem us (Philippians 2). It is not woven into His eternal being.

To be fair, Wilson says he holds to Nicaea and denies there are three wills in God. We're glad he says that. But then he turns around and says "true and ultimate authority/submission must be grounded within the Godhead." You can't have it both ways. If submission is eternal and essential to who the Son is, the Son is eternally lesser in authority than the Father, and that's not the Trinity of the creeds.

Problem #3: The slavery book and the kinism door

In 1996, Wilson co-wrote a booklet called "Southern Slavery As It Was." In it, he and his co-author claimed that slavery in the South "was not an adversarial relationship with pervasive racial animosity" but "a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence," and that there had "never been a multi-racial society which has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world." In his follow-up book, he defended the position that the way slavery ended was a serious mistake with ongoing consequences.

In 2020, after years of pressure, Wilson wrote that he would like to "recast or disavow or explain or contextualize or modify" some of those views. But he never said which ones. And in that same post, he pointed readers to his book "Black & Tan" as containing his current thinking, a book that still argues it was possible for a godly man to own slaves in 1850 without being guilty of a moral outrage. That's not a retraction. That's a rewording.

This matters because of what grew in his wake. Wilson's orbit became a place where kinism, the idea that Christians should favor their own race or ethnicity, found fertile soil. A Reformed Baptist forum put it plainly: kinism is "a feature among the reformed segment of Christian Nationalists that are in the Douglas Wilson camp." Even a confessional Reformed article on Wilson noted "debate in Wilson's circles with certain young men who have adopted racist and anti-Jewish views." His own publishing company put out the flagship book of the Christian nationalist movement. The historiography he spent decades defending became the raw material others built on.

To be fair, Wilson has pushed back more recently. In November 2024, he spearheaded the Antioch Declaration, denouncing racist and antisemitic statements by younger Calvinists. He has videos and blog posts arguing against ethnic pride from Scripture, and he says he has debated kinists for years. We acknowledge that. But here's the honest question, put well by one Reformed writer: Wilson would do well to ask himself how much he contributed to their thinking. You don't get to light the fire, warm your hands by it for decades, and then act surprised at the smoke.

And this fits a larger pattern with Wilson: he stirs the pot on purpose. He's said so himself, writing about pieces that "stirred the pot in what I consider to be necessary ways." He prides himself on having a theology that "bites back." His satirical, jabbing style is so well known that fellow Christians have held a formal debate over whether it's even a legitimate way to do ministry. Scripture warns that strife is a work of the flesh, and that a divisive man is to be warned and then avoided (Titus 3:10). When strife keeps following a ministry around, that tells you something.

The pattern: never stepping down

Here's where our standard comes in, the one we apply to everyone. When a man is shown to be in serious error, what does he do? Does he step down, submit to discipline, press pause? Or does he carry on building?

Look at the record. Two denominations examined the Federal Vision and found it contrary to the gospel and the confessions. Wilson never stepped down. He never submitted to outside discipline. He just stopped using the label.

And it's not only doctrine. His own denomination's investigative committee rebuked his handling of abuse cases connected to his church: a children's ministry worker whose sentencing he tried to soften in a letter to the judge, and whose wedding he later officiated. A seminary student's abuse that he downplayed in writing to the police. In each case, his own leaders said he should have acted with more wisdom and done more. He stayed in the pulpit through all of it and kept expanding: more books, more podcasts, a bigger platform.

We hold Steve Lawson to a similar standard, and we hold Doug Wilson to it. When a brother truly repents, we welcome him with open arms. But repentance means stepping down, not rebranding. A man who will not step down when disqualified has disqualified himself from ever being an elder.

We take no joy in writing this. Doug Wilson says many true things, and that's exactly what makes him dangerous. Error wrapped in truth is the hardest kind to spot. We pray he repents, truly repents, and we pray for the people sitting under his teaching.

Sources

COURTNEY HUGGINS
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