Most readers do not know who Rev. Douglas Wilson is or what is meant by the metaphor “A Captain in Saul’s Army.” The reader is invited to read background information under a similar title published not quite two years ago.
In summary, Wilson is a well-known “Christian Nationalist” catapulted by his book Mere Christendom which captured the attention of such social influencers as Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson in 2024. Wilson’s book and national acclaim have come after a long and somewhat tumultuous career as a Christian educator and pamphleteer (something like 98 books which allegedly bear his name as the author!).
King Saul is a figure in biblical history well-known as the benefactor and then the nemesis of his future successor: King David. Among other things, I have faulted Wilson – for many years – as an equivocator just as was King Saul. But more so, Wilson is a figure-head of an ideology within Christian theology in which spiritual authority is posited in the institutional church. Just as King Saul demanded allegiance because he was “the Lord’s anointed,” modern Evangelical leaders – even though they eschew the nomenclature of Popery – nevertheless, assign to themselves a similar apotheosis when acting in synod. The very claim that they can have a “confession of faith” by which fellowship can be regulated is proof of it.
Most Americans are tolerant of cults until they impose themselves upon the “civil body politic” then of course – hypocritically – they complain. I say “hypocritically” because every Protestant sect can be described as a “cult,” and they were so from the beginning. The spectacle of American religion is one of a continuous “pot calling the kettle black.”
Wilson is a figurehead in a movement which believes that men who enjoy such a messianic mantle are now entitled to run the country. It is the necessity of “patriotism” and “saving” Western Civilization. These new Messianics have infiltrated and commandeered the Republican Party, and are now in the process of imposing a “confession of faith” (i.e. party platform) that is being enforced as a “religious test,” something specifically prohibited in the US Constitution (Art. VI, Clause 3).
Returning to our biblical story, we are told that King Saul had great success against the Philistines, a coastal confederacy which sought expansion into the hill-country where lived the inferior Israelite tribes. In fact, it has been argued by historians that King Saul was pivotal in inflicting a fatal blow to these Philistinian aspirations.
Whatever unifying institution there was for the Israelite tribes, King Saul was it. The intended national religion never really caught on, as the Book of Judges chronicles. The Saulist monarchy was the only unifying factor, and whatever he said was the true religion, that was it. Contentious priests were summarily slaughtered.
As time went on, Saul began to lose self-confidence and on the eve of a final battle with the Philistines, he felt abandoned by God. In desperation he sought Divine counsel, with no success. He wanted counsel from the recently deceased Prophet Samuel and decided that he could only get such counsel by conjuring his spirit. He found a seer of “familiar spirits” in a place called “Endor” who practiced necromancy. The biblical writer says it became the last straw in Saul’s downward spiral of apostasy: seeking for Divine help through forbidden channels.
Fast forward to September 10th, 2025 and the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the head of the influential organization, “Turning Point: USA.” Douglas Wilson has been known as a close ally of TPUSA and was visibly distressed after Kirk’s murder.
In the aftermath, the battle of succession was engaged with earnest. We have witnessed a fascinating battle between his widow, Mrs. Erica Kirk, in an array against Charlie’s former colleague and confidant, Candace Owens. Symbolically, it has become a classic battle between the false bride and the true bride over Charlie Kirk’s legacy. Candace Owens has supported her “claim to the throne” with a catechism of Charlie’s tweets, text messages as well as reminisces of their shared life experiences.
Mrs. Kirk, on the other hand, invokes her position as the widow and now CEO of the organization.
Along with her barrister-type arguments, Owens has upped the ante with “dreams and visions” in which Charlie now comes to tell her something important: “I was betrayed.”
Mrs. Kirk responds, “Stop. I am the mother of his children.”
In comes Rev. Wilson, who at first cautions Owens from trying to “connect the dots” and then, after attending the latest TPUSA national event – in which he gave a few remarks to the audience – he has come out with yet another blistering podcast blog in which he openly condemns Owens in the strongest language possible for preachers: he calls her “wicked.”
The AmFest event which Wilson passionately defends devolved into a parade of detractors with veiled and thinly-veiled attacks on Ms. Owens for doing the “devil’s work.”
Reformed theologians should ponder who is more “satanic”: whether it is Candace Owens with her unsolicited dreams of Charlie Kirk’s poltergeist-type apparitions or in contrast, the shrine erected at the AmFest event which involved the actual canopy and reconstructed “scene of the crime” to benefit attendees who might want to “channel” this new martyr’s spiritual presence. Owens called it “creepy.”
So, now, to press my biblical analogy: “Who is the true Witch of Endor to conjure our new Prophet Samuel (Charlie Kirk)?” Is it Candace Owens who has found in the “sayings” of Charlie Kirk, his various speeches, tweets, and text messages, a new sacred text? Or is it embodied in Erica Kirk with the institutional power to erect shrines in the memory of her late husband?
In either case, as a neo-Puritan, Wilson has gotten himself mired-down in a pit of his own making: neo-Evangelical shit. If you lay in the shit, don’t be surprised at the flies. Back in the day, Puritanism was an admirable spiritual movement, but it was a cult all the same. So are its spiritual heirs today.
If anything, Wilson has learned to be the penultimate “organization man” (i.e. a cult man) in talking down to house churchists, but in this case, evidently not listening to his younger Groyper cousins – and “halting between two opinions” – he has chosen as his allies whomever might be the best source of future funding. The Puritans loved mammon and their spiritual heirs still do.
American Evangelical religion – the religion of cult followers of popular preachers – has reached another institutional pinnacle. It is only downhill from here.
In other words, to return to our analogy, this God-forsaken movement is about to be slaughtered by the neo-Philistines. The Deep State – or the Dark State – has finally succeeded in capturing and reincarnating itself in the person of Donald Trump. In the name of “America First” and MAGA, the tyrannical practices so feared by Evangelicals and American Alt-Righters are about to come to pass anyway.
The Wilsonians should have sided with the vagabond band of the young David, and not sided with King Saul. A different war of succession is about to commence.
JWS, 1/18/26
