HT Heidelblog--Anthony Bradley explains how long Doug Wilson has been doing his thing and how evangelical promotion helped get Wilson where he is today--a brief dig back into what Brad Vermurlen described as a fracture within New Calvinism among White and Black theologians and pastors about whether Wilson was someone who should be part of the New Calvinist scene at all

One of the things that might be worth mentioning straight out the gate is that if you were to dig up Young, Restless and Reformed Doug Wilson's name doesn't show up even once, if Google search engine tools can be trusted.  There was a point at which Wilson had no obvious connection to New Calvinism in the standard-issue book that proposed to describe the movement. Perhaps the connection between Wilson and a figure in New Calvinism just hadn't been more fully explicated yet.  Or maybe, the guy who kept saying Doug Wilson was an influence on him didn't register with journalists about twenty years ago because Wilson was too niche.  Had New Calvinism not decided to back Wilson would we be talking about him here in 2026?  That's the kind of question that can frame Anthony Bradley's recent Substack post, which came to my attention via Heidelblog.

https://heidelblog.net/2026/03/was-dr-frankenstein-surprised-by-his-monster/

If you don’t know who Anthony Bradley is, he is part of the Acton Institute and on staff at Kuyper College. I have only read a book and a half of his so far but I heard about his Substack post via Heidelblog. 

https://anthonybbradley.substack.com/p/doug-wilson-didnt-change-evangelical

… Doug Wilson did not become controversial in the winter of 2026. His ideas have been publicly articulated, widely disseminated, and institutionally endorsed (implicitly and explicitly) for the better part of thirty years. The consternation that erupted in response to the Pentagon prayer invitation tells us less about Wilson than it does about the selective amnesia of evangelical institutions and the audiences they have shaped.

 

The urgent question raised by this episode is not why Wilson holds the theological and political commitments he holds. The urgent question is how he became sufficiently influential within the architecture of American evangelicalism that such an invitation was conceivable in the first place. The answer implicates not only Wilson but the institutions that amplified his voice, defended his orthodoxy, and granted him platforms before their most consequential audiences.

Bradley partly charts how that process took place.  As someone who was part of the former Mars Hill my own take (such as it is) was that Driscoll’s celebrity and enmeshment with a variety of parachurch networks helped leverage Wilson’s reputation.  Wilson influenced Mark Driscoll on the two scripts of adulthood for men and women.  I found Crawford Gribben’s survey of survivalist and Christian reconstructionist groups in the Pacific Northwest useful reading.

I have suggested that Driscoll retained the Gospel of scripts of adulthood, stripped out the postmillennialism and theonomy as extraneous add-ons that wouldn’t fly in the Puget Sound area, and the rest was kind of Mars Hill history. Driscoll met Wilson somewhere way back in the early to mid-1990s and Wilson was given a chance to contribute to The Resurgence between 2006 and 2009.  It may have been a self-reinforcing set of New Calvinist echo chambers along the way, but Wilson was able to establish and expand his brand. 

Through the late 1990s, Wilson’s influence remained largely contained within small Reformed networks organized around homeschooling, classical Christian education, and Reconstructionist theological discourse. His national visibility expanded meaningfully in the early 2000s, as a new evangelical media infrastructure emerged with the capacity to reach audiences of unprecedented scale. Many have called Wilson a “racist.”

 

This infrastructure (anchored by organizations such as Desiring God, The Gospel Coalition, Acts 29, Ligonier Ministries, Crossway, Monergism, American Vision, Association of Classical Christian Schools, Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, among others) created digital platforms capable of placing theological content before millions of readers, listeners, and conference attendees. Within that ecosystem, Wilson’s rhetorical posture proved remarkably effective. His prose was confident, confrontational, and marked by a conspicuous refusal to hedge. For evangelicals who understood Western culture as entering a period of irreversible moral decline, that posture carried significant appeal.

 

One of the pivotal institutional moments in Wilson’s broader evangelical legitimation came through his association with the Desiring God network and its founder, John Piper. In a widely circulated exchange, Piper addressed the controversies surrounding Wilson and concluded that Wilson’s understanding of the gospel itself was orthodox. Piper said although Wilson has controversial views, “He gets the Gospel right,” said Piper. The specific comments are documented and accessible: John Piper on Doug Wilson.

 

The theological and rhetorical function of Piper’s endorsement cannot be overstated. Within Reformed evangelical culture, Piper’s imprimatur carries enormous weight. For many observers, the argument was effectively settled: if Wilson’s understanding of the gospel was sound, disagreements about other matters (his views on errant slavery, on the Confederacy on Christian nationalism, on civil authority) could be treated as secondary. The exchange circulated widely and introduced Wilson to audiences well beyond the communities that had previously followed his work.

What Wilson and Driscoll both mastered over the last twenty-five years was a motte and bailey stunt posting practice.  You go and say the most incendiary thing possible and that gets everyone’s attention (let’s just assume that for the sake of this point). Then what the provocateur does as bloviate about “context” and “issues” and how he’s just trying to express a reasonable and normal position that has been forgotten in this crazy clown world and it might have something to do with how good women like to make sandwiches or maybe he hasn’t had a platform to sound off on these kinds of issues before and all that is preparation to tell you about Pastor Mark TV.    A month of No Quarter November posts will wrap up with give-aways.  If you give away enough PDFs of the content you can probably bank on a few people deciding to spend money on stuff they could, really, just keep getting for free.

That not everyone even within Calvinist circles has liked Wilson’s message is something Anthony Bradley reiterated, as he has since roughly 2008.  For anti-Calvinists and people who know nothing about just how diverse Reformed traditions are, self-ordained preening gasbags like Doug Wilson and Mark Driscoll present themselves as if they are recovering and retrieving lost treasures of Christian reflection when they haven’t.  Their retrievals, such as they are, are selective.

 

By the way, Dr. R. Scott Clark, Professor of Church History and Historical Theology at Westminster Seminary has been issuing warnings since 2008 on his website alone. That's nearly 20 years of "Hey folks, DW is not someone to listen to..." Dr. Clark’s warnings have been largely ignored for nearly twenty years.

 

Doug Wilson did not rise to national prominence on his own. He was published. He was defended. He was invited. He was platformed repeatedly, by institutions whose credibility in the broader evangelical world was substantial. Understanding how that happened, and why it continued for as long as it did, is not merely an exercise in historical accountability. It is a prerequisite for any serious institutional self-examination. That examination is long overdue.

The New Calvinism era helped to make Doug Wilson who who he is today. The entire movement got played like a fiddle.

Now let me switch over to the self-ordained gasbag himself.  Wilson’s gimmicks are best understood when you see them.  At some point you have to look at how these kinds of things work.

https://dougwils.com/books-and-culture/s7-engaging-the-culture/a-pinch-of-incense-to-the-genius-of-democracy-2-2-2.html

He does not know it, and almost certainly would never admit it, but Anthony Bradley wants to live in a world where black men can get lynched because of white women’s tears. He has what should be considered the mother of all woke intersectionality problems.

But because it is an intersectionality thing, there is another logical option for him, one that is every bit as bad. This would be him wanting to live in a world where he turns callously away from a rape victim in tears, refusing to countenance her story at all because the political cost would be far too high. This is because her accusations involved a couple of black men, and the summer was already hot and volatile.

Either way he goes, it is bad juju.

This is the self-impressed kid who is ready to chuckle at his own joke before he’s told it to you. Or, to take up a play from Wilson’s bag of tricks, this is the catty gossipy church lady with the inside scoop taking you aside after the church service is over before you head out to the afternoon lunch to explain why this Tony guy just doesn’t understand what bad juju he has because, you know …

Not so long ago I read a book by Anthony Bradley criticizing the trajectory of Black liberation theology.  Now I’ve found that his criticisms were interesting but not as interesting as those of Alistair Kee and Victor Anderson (whose Beyond Ontological Blackness was originally published back in 1997).  The above was written by Doug Wilson even though he had nice things to say about Eric Mason’s book Woke Church. Why?  Because in Wilson’s reading of Mason, Mason interpreted the Epistle to Philemon in a way that is congruent with Doug Wilson’s own reading. 

Now if you followed that link and don’t know who “Thabiti” is, this is the part where I dig back into New Calvinist history a little. 

A few years ago Brad Vermurlen published a book with Oxford University Press.  It was called Reformed Resurgence: The New Calvinist Movement and the Battle Over American Evangelicalism. The price is a bit on the high side but it’s one of the only books I’ve read that discussed Mars Hill that I would actually recommend (the other is by Jessica Johnson).  In that book Vermurlen proposed that the  New Calvinists were demographically marginal within evangelicalism but what they had was a powerful media presence and brand definition.  They may have turned out to be a self-reinforcing insular coterie but they made each other famous.  I recall one day venting my frustration to a college buddy about something John Piper was saying that was getting discussed in my social circle and my friend, who was a Christian studies major said, “Who’s John Piper?”  I was both frustrated and relieved, because if my friend had no idea who John Piper was that was a sign that the guy was only famous on his own dorm floor, if you can follow my meaning.  The rest of the dorm had no idea who the guy was.

Something else Vermurlen mentioned was that there were Black and White clergy in the New Calvinist movement.  The “Thabiti” Wilson referenced earlier is Thabiti Anyabwile, a Gospel Coalition contributor in the past and author of The Decline of African American Theology: From Biblical Faith to Cultural Captivity.  

Brad Vermurlen has a blink and you miss it reference in Reformed Resurgence where he mentioned Black pastors like Eric Mason, Thabiti Anyabwile and Anthony Bradley and a historian named Jemar Tisby.  The short observation was that, as The Gospel Coalition began to platform Douglas Wilson, Black pastors and theologians who were part of the New Calvinist scene from roughly 2008 through 2012 began to part ways with their white counterparts, men like John Piper, for instance. 

To date I have not seen anyone really dig into the split within New Calvinism, maybe because only Brad Vermurlen noted the fracture and because other academics have done the Jesus and John Wayne route of focusing on complementarians for egalitarian reasons.  Fighting about those scripts of adulthood for men and women is sexier than diving into the minutiae of an intra-New Calvinist split where Black clergy and theologians maybe nobody outside the New Calvinist scene might have even heard of felt they were shown the door by Piper bros and Wilsonites because Wilson had to keep being Wilson. 

This is the part where I feel obliged to remind readers that I was part of Mars Hill from about 1998 to 2008; I met Mark Driscoll, Mike Gunn, and Lief Moi (who was a friend of mine in the years after we both left that church); and I’ve been in Presbyterian and Reformed settings for about the last twenty years. The reason I could even know who Anyabwile or Bradley are is because I was in the New Calvinist scene.  Eventually I figured out that we were pointlessly reinventing wheels and that shifting to an actually Reformed denomination made more sense (and there were a lot of other reasons I felt obliged to leave Mars Hill). 

So when I discuss Doug Wilson being Doug Wilson I have kept intermittent tabs on this scene for decades. Wilson presents himself as a man willing to say hard words to people in easy chairs but even the modest passage I have quoted shows a straightforward part of the man’s rhetoric, that if we indulge in using his own kinds of cliches and rhetorical flourishes, he’s the catty gossipy teenage girl whose whole conversation hinges on you understanding all the insider scoops and gossip for any of the would-be witticisms to land as anything other than self-involved chuckling at one’s own jokes. 

Doug Wilson claimed that Anthony Bradley didn’t know that he wanted to live in a world where black men could be lynched for white women’s tears.  Doug Wilson doesn’t know it but he is the kind of cessationist who will stand by a man who has published a few books with Charisma House, which is, as we all know, not Banner of Truth or Canon Press.

Of course, I’m referring to Doug Wilson’s showing up on The Mark Driscoll Show for Episode 13. Driscoll has said Wilson is the Christian Nationalist liberals are afraid of.

 

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2026/01/doug-wilson-is-christian-nationalist.html

https://x.com/PastorMark/status/2002066460831793380

Pastor Mark Driscoll

@PastorMark

Hanging out with the one and only @douglaswils @canonpress

9:20 AM · Dec 19, 2025

Well, yes, thank God there’s only one.  We don’t need a second Doug Wilson.

https://x.com/PastorMark/status/2002269723762069647

Pastor Mark Driscoll

@PastorMark

I’ve known Pastor Doug for my entire adult life. He’s a really good man with a really good family.

10:47 PM · Dec 19, 2025

Ten days later ...

Doug Wilson is the Christian Nationalist Liberals are Afraid of | The Mark Driscoll Show | Ep 12

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBjwVKOu7Q4

Premiered Dec 29, 2025

 

https://x.com/douglaswils/status/2014730967831945242

Douglas Wilson

@douglaswils

For those who have expressed concern over the fact that I will be speaking at conference where Mark Driscoll will also be speaking . . . please keep in mind that I recently spoke at a conference which also platformed Nicki Minaj.

8:04 AM · Jan 23, 2026

Bad juju is for others and not for him.

https://x.com/douglaswils/status/2030297843848691993

Douglas Wilson

@douglaswils

I just spoke at the Clear Truth conference in Ohio, and noticed that some photos of me and Mark Driscoll together are now circulating, along with some earnest exhortations to "mark and avoid." Apparently it is now required to mark and avoid those who disregarded earlier exhortations to mark and avoid people who disregarded other exhortations to mark and avoid.

7:01 AM · Mar 7, 2026

By now Mark Driscoll would seem like the kind of a person a self-identified cessationist would want to avoid.  Let me revisit my own documentation of Driscoll’s claims (and I have to quote myself because Team Driscoll purged and redacted so much material it makes it harder to go cite primary source accounts). 

Dream Divination in the Ministry of Mark Driscoll: A Survey of Primary Source Accounts

6-29-2005 Mark Driscoll, "But I still believe that God kills people, and sometimes I pray for it." as background to Driscoll's approach to church governance at Mars Hill

Now that one, amazingly, I forgot about until I read Jessica Johnson’s book Biblical Porn and read her mention of the claim. 

I had to slog through hours of the 2008 spiritual warfare teaching seminar Mark Driscoll gave to a Mars Hill only staff meeting, which is how I ended up hearing the entire session in which “I see things” got claimed.  I also went to the trouble of transcribing about 75% of it for sake of posterity.  Therefore ,… I asked “If Mark Driscoll really `saw’ things like sexual molestations, did any of his visions lead to arrests?”

2-5-2008 spiritual warfare Part 3 part 3 commentary 2: "I see things" but did the things Driscoll saw ever lead to arrests?

No, almost certainly “of course not”, for two simple reasons. The first is that confabulation is commonplace in recovered memory sessions and second the alleged incidents would have been past any statute of limitations if they had happened when Driscoll alleged they happened.

For more context on the recovered memory context for “I see things” head over to this post.

2-5-2008 spiritual warfare Part 3 part 3 commentary 1, getting the "i see things" out of the way, leveraging recovered memories & the possible political significance of "i see things" in the wake of the 2007 firings.

Claiming to have the superpower of seeing things within early 2008 was no claim made in a vacuum.  Driscoll had just had two elders run through kangaroo court trials for objecting to changes in the bylaws.  Driscoll had also, as we have seen earlier, claimed in 2005 that he prayed and God slayed.  The claim “I see things” was contingent on counselee participation and while cold reading is a bad way to put things warm or hot read would be easy to do in a setting like the one Driscoll used in pastoral counseling.

2-5-2008 spiritual warfare Part 3 part 3: explaining counselee participation and the "i see things" aside.

In other words, Doug Wilson has had twenty years within which to think about whether or not a guy like Driscoll breaches so many taboos for a cessationist as to “mark and avoid”.  Wilson not only does not mark and avoid, he pokes fun at those who advise that he mark and avoid this Mark Driscoll.  If we playfully run with his kind of rhetorical games somebody might have to say that you have to hang out with Mark Driscoll because the intoleristas can’t tolerate him. 

Driscoll didn’t get his capacity for self-aggrandizing stunts out of nowhere. He had a great prototype to follow in Doug Wilson.  Wilson, for his part, has never been able to say that Mark Driscoll’s shown the kind of vices that should preclude the man from consideration for ministry and it might be because self-ordained shock jock preachers with a history of plagiarism scandals and a need for controversy may just need each other.