Doug Wilson has become the biggest advocate of the Lost Cause in the 21st Century and he has made more gains in the last year than any advocate for the Confederate version of the Civil War and Reconstruction since the 1960s. A staunch ally of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, he is the founder of a new right-wing Christian Nationalist denomination and an organizer of “Classical Christian Schools.”
The incentive to study the Lost Cause version of American history? Taxpayer money for kids who attend Christian schools. This year Texas is rolling out a billion dollars in funding for families to use in sending their children to these state-supported private schools. Other states are doing the same and approximately half of all children in the United States will have access to these programs.
According to ABC News:
Those suburban Texas schools are part of a larger network, the Association of Classical Christian Schools, which has ties to the Trump administration and was founded by Doug Wilson, a conservative Idaho pastor and writer. The schools offer a liberal arts education, with an added emphasis on virtue and a biblical worldview.
The annual ACCS conference in June in Atlanta buzzed with talk of the historic shift in school funding, which bolsters a conservative Christian push to remake the education landscape. Critics worry it will drain public schools, which educate students of all religious backgrounds and political persuasions. When students leave their public school, state money allocated to educate each student goes away too.
Conservatives are banding together to leverage these expanding taxpayer-funded scholarships. Last year, ACCS formed a coalition with some powerful conservative groups, including Turning Point Education and the Heritage Foundation. Their goal is to convert or create 5,000 new classical Christian schools in the next decade with 1.5 million students nationwide.
The aim, according to ACCS President David Goodwin, is to take a share of public funding and educate future leaders through Christian schools. “It sounds like a very ambitious goal, but this money has never been there before,” he said.
The Association of Classical Christian Schools calls its campaign the “Battle for the American School.” It’s a riff on the 2022 bestselling book Goodwin co-wrote with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who sent his children to ACCS schools before joining President Donald Trump’s cabinet. Their book, “Battle for the American Mind,” extols classical education and critiques the prevailing public school model.
Doug Wilson is not someone many Americans had heard of before 2025. I had done some research on him as an advocate for racist immigration laws, but apart from people like me and some far-rightwing church believers, he was pretty much unknown to the average American. That is until this year.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is a member of Doug Wilson’s religious movement, the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC). Wilson made his name as a minister operating out of Moscow, Idaho at a church he built into a model for conservative Protestants. Over the last eight months he had given long interviews with major news outlets like CNN. The interview with CNN focused on the marginalized role of women in Wilson’s hoped for theocracy in America. He discusses the repeal of the 19th Amendment for the good of the family. This set off a fair amount of controversial attention. What really had not received much attention are his views on slavery and race and the Civil War.
In one of his books on slavery and the Civil War, Wilson wrote:
“How could men have supported slavery? The question is especially difficult when we consider that these were men who lived in a pervasively Christian culture. We have all heard of the heartlessness—the brutalities, immoralities, and cruelties—that were supposedly inherent in the system of slavery. We have heard how slave families were broken up, of the forcible rape of slave women, of the brutal beatings that were a commonplace, about the horrible living conditions, and of the unrelenting work schedule and back-breaking routine—all of which go together to form our impression of the crushing oppression which was slavery in the South. The truthfulness of this description has seldom been challenged.
The point of this small booklet is to establish that this impression is largely false.”
Slavery, according to Wilson, brought the races together:
“Slavery as it existed in the South was not an adversarial relationship with pervasive racial animosity. Because of its dominantly patriarchal character, it was a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence. There has never been a multi-racial society which has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world. The credit for this must go to the predominance of Christianity. The gospel enabled men who were distinct in nearly every way, to live and work together, to be friends and often intimates. This happened to such an extent that moderns indoctrinated on “civil rights” propaganda would be thunderstruck to know the half of it.”
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