MOSCOW, Idaho (FāVS News) — Joann Muneta expected to be angry, as she usually is when a major news outlet turns its cameras on pastor Doug Wilson and the Christian nationalist movement growing in her backyard. But after watching CNN’s latest documentary air Sunday night (March 22), the 90-year-old Moscow activist felt something she hadn’t expected.

“I was so sad after it was over,” said Muneta, who has lived in Moscow for 65 years and is chair of the Latah County Human Rights Task Force. “Usually I get angry. But this time I was just so sad.”

CNN anchor and chief investigative correspondent Pamela Brown’s hourlong documentary, “The Rise of Christian Nationalism,” aired on “The Whole Story with Anderson Cooper.” It was Brown’s second major report on Wilson, whose reach now extends from his Christ Church pulpit in Moscow to the halls of power in Washington. For many in Moscow’s surrounding Palouse region, their reaction was familiar even when the emotions were not.

The episode included accounts from women who are former members of Christian nationalist congregations, sharing stories of religious trauma, rigid gender roles and, in some cases, abuse. For Muneta, it was those women whose stories cut deepest.

“I’m sad for those women who are traumatized,” she said. “I’m sad for the children being brought up. And I’m sad for our country that has to put up with this when we have better things to be doing.”

She paused on a phrase from the documentary — “religious trauma.” Two words, she said, that should never belong together.

‘Not the Christianity I know’

The Rev. Hannah Brown, pastor of The United Church of Moscow, moved to town last year knowing she’d be leading a congregation in the shadow of a movement that claims the same faith while arriving at radically different conclusions.

“It’s not just a Christian nation, it’s their version of what a Christian nation is,” Brown said. “It’s a very specific, very conservative, very fundamentalist version of what Christianity is. As somebody who leads a church and calls myself a Christian, that’s not the Christianity that I believe.”

The documentary gave Brown and Muneta specific examples to grapple with. Wilson has publicly described his belief in a patriarchal society where women are called to marry, bear numerous children and submit to their husbands as spiritual authority. Women are also banned from leadership positions in his church.

Sierra McIlwain, a former military member who attends a Texas congregation connected to Wilson’s network, described her own transformation as an example of that theology at work. 

“All of the self-dependence, self-reliance, all of the military stuff — none of them have even come close to how challenging and rewarding being a wife and a mother is, submitted under Christ,” she said in the CNN interview.

Brown was struck by one woman’s testimony in the documentary — a former member of a Christian nationalist church, described on the show as the belief that a nation’s laws and government should promote Christian values.

“It is a privilege to be a wife and a mother,” the woman said. “But it’s not a privilege if you’re forced to be one.”

“If it is a woman’s choice to stay at home and to be a wife and a mother and that is something she finds fulfilling — power to her,” Brown said. “But when that choice is taken away, that is not freedom.”

Muneta, who came of age during the women’s rights movement, finds Wilson’s worldview a deliberate erasure. She cited a quote she has kept from Wilson’s writings: “Women inescapably need godly masculine protection against ungodly masculine harassment. Women who refuse protection from their fathers and husbands must seek it from the police. But women who genuinely insist on no masculine protection are really women who tacitly agree on the propriety of rape.”

“All the effort and pride from the ’20s to the ’50s to get women’s suffrage,” Muneta said, “and they’re just going to say, ‘Oh no, we didn’t mean that.'”

The documentary featured Jonah Kirby, a Texas church member, describing what he called “household federalism” — the idea that the family, rather than the individual, should be the basic unit of civic representation, with the husband casting a single household vote. When Brown pressed on whether this would require repealing the 19th Amendment, Kirby suggested a middle road.

“I think maybe amend the amendment,” he said.

David Goodwin, president of the Association of Classical Christian Schools, also makes an appearance on the episode to represent Wilson’s long-held conviction that secular institutions should never be entrusted with the education of Christian children.

“I think it is a sin because in most areas, the education is coming from the state,” said Goodwin. “And that was not what God intended from the beginning. They don’t raise children in the fear and admonition of the Lord.”

Wilson’s Logos School in Moscow, founded in 1981 to offer a “grammar, logic, and rhetoric” curriculum rooted in Reformed theology, has served as the model for Goodwin’s national organization.

For Muneta, who spent decades watching Moscow’s public schools shape generations of independent, curious kids, the statement was both new and clarifying.

“When I think of all the teachers who devote their careers to bringing up children who think for themselves, who have confidence, who are kind,” she said. “They want to erase that.”

And on pluralism, Christ Church Moscow member E.J. Ripple told Brown, “We cannot ultimately live together in harmony with conflicting worldviews.” Muneta wrote that one down.

What Moscow already knows

For Muneta, there’s a gap between how national coverage tends to frame Wilson — as a rising, ominous force — and the reality on the ground in Moscow, where residents have been living with his influence for decades.

Wilson has been expanding his evangelical church in Moscow since the 1970s into what is now an international network of more than 150 churches, as well as Christian schools, a college and a publishing company. His church community in Idaho has roughly doubled in size since 2019.

But Muneta is quick to point out what the camera doesn’t always catch. Moscow votes 3-to-1, sometimes 4-to-1, against Christ Church-affiliated candidates in local elections. That, she said, is almost never covered.

“Moscow is Doug Wilson’s town? No,” she said. “That’s not true.”

She described a countermovement that isn’t formally organized but is very much alive — Indivisible chapters, the Human Rights Task Force, the Moscow Interfaith Association — groups that have, if anything, grown closer because of Wilson’s presence. When the pandemic hit, mainline Moscow churches organized a mutual aid network to care for the elderly and vulnerable while Christ Church defied lockdown orders and held an outdoor protest in September 2020. This year, a Moscow interfaith gathering is being planned, tentatively for May 7, National Day of Prayer, with music, poetry and Scripture readings centered on love.  

“The answer to what Doug Wilson is saying is to show how people can work together,” Muneta said. “And that love is the answer.”

On the front lines

Brown said her congregation has been watching Christian nationalism encroach not just locally but nationally, and that fear is understandable. But it’s not the only option.

“I’m angry about it. I’m sad. But I’m not scared,” she said. “And I think in a time like this, being able to step in and say — I’m not OK with this, but I’m also not scared — that is something that is comforting for people.”

“It doesn’t have to be us versus them,” she said. “I care about this community. I care about all people. What does it look like to care for people no matter where they’re coming from?”

That includes, she emphasized, people still inside Christ Church. The documentary showed women helping former members leave and rebuild. Brown called it an opportunity for the wider community to be available — as neighbors, as safe places.

“I’m hopeful that this exposure will help people recognize the signs of Christian nationalism in their own spaces,” she said. “And I’m hopeful that we’ll begin to see a lot of people who are in Christian nationalist churches as victims, in some ways — and that there’s a lack of understanding, and maybe a move toward greater compassion.”

What the CNN documentary made clear, Muneta said, is that Moscow is just the most visible front in a much broader battle.

“It shows that the church is out to undermine democracy everywhere in this country,” she said, referring to Christ Church. “And we had better learn what our treasures of democracy are — freedom to vote, freedom to have public schools, freedom to have libraries, freedom to choose our own lifestyle, harmony with our neighbors. Those are the things we get from democracy.”

Muneta, for her part, believes Moscow will endure.

“Christ Church can own every brick on Main Street,” she said, “but it’ll never own the soul of Moscow. Because it’s too strong and too loving.”