(soft chiming music) - [Anna] On November 14th, Northwest Public Broadcasting welcomed Boise State Public Radio journalist, James Jimmy Dawson, into our studios in Pullman, Washington.

Jimmy is one of the hosts of the Deep Dive, "Extremely American" podcast from Boise State Public Radio, and National Public Radio.

Season two, explores Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho.

The podcast has hundreds of thousands of downloads.

Jimmy also covers Idaho State government, and a little bit of everything else.

We started with a discussion on why his work focusing on Christian nationalism is more important now than ever.

- I think it's because while Christian nationalism, which, if we want to define it, is a movement that wants a very small and generally conservative subset of Christianity, very fundamentalist to essentially control the levers of power within the United States.

So that means that they hold elected office, they're running the top businesses in the country, they're running the Amazons, the Microsofts, the Google, the Apple.

They are basically in control of everything, and filtering society through that lens.

Meaning that, you know, certainly gay marriage wouldn't exist, homosexuality is a sin.

A lot of them want to repeal the 19th Amendment, which is the amendment that gives women the right to vote, and no fault divorce.

Make sure that people who aren't within that particular fundamentalist, you know, demographic that they have, could not vote, or hold positions of power, things like that.

Again, this is a very small subset of the country, but it's growing.

With the recent results of the 2024 election, there have been people within the Christian nationalist sphere who previously held deputy secretary positions within the first Trump administration, and are almost certainly going to be holding positions as the transition happens in January.

And so they potentially could have the president's ear, influence policy that way.

And, you know, that is something that is a very realistic thing that could happen over the next four years.

- That's so interesting what you said about the administration that is coming in.

I wanted to ask you if you could tell us about how an interview stuck with you for more than a moment in your podcast, and how you think about that now.

- Yeah, I mean there are a lot.

The more you do this, the more you do hold those stories in your head.

For me, if anyone has listened to Made It This Far in the podcast episode five, there's a woman named Christine Cohen, who is the master of fine Arts, creative writing director at New St. Andrews, which is the Christ Church upper higher education arm.

And she's one of a few women in a leadership position there.

The church itself is not necessarily known for elevating women to positions of power because they think that men inherently, by divine right from God are the ones who should be controlling those levers of power.

So it's kind of odd to see that, and it doesn't necessarily crop up very often.

But, she is a really interesting person.

She's written two or three novels by now, young adult novels, fantasy, general genre.

Her background's interesting, she comes from around Spokane, where she attended like a Christ Church affiliated church in school, and she wanted to be a National Geographic photojournalist actually when she was growing up.

But she had to kind of reconcile her faith, which she had had since she was very little in that very conservative arena with wanting to be independent, maybe not have children, maybe get married later, which is very atypical in that community, with wanting to travel the world, and achieve her career goals that she wanted to.

She ended up going to New St. Andrews as a student and meeting her then husband when she was a junior, got married to him, and kind of reorganized her priorities a little bit.

And she had always wanted to be a mother.

It's not like she was rejecting that.

But she told me, she realized she never really wanted to be a journalist, she just wanted to be a writer, specifically for young adult novels.

So all that's to say her first novel essentially follows this younger woman in like a community filled with magic.

They're controlled though by this religious organization societies in that novel.

And she has to rebel against, after finding out that the leaders of that society were manipulating the religion in a way that wasn't true to its tenets, and we're like enriching themselves off of it, all of those things, and, you know, the heroin had to reject it, which as she was telling me in the interview, I was like, huh, wait a second, like, these are kind of the exact same things that your critics talk about all the time.

And unprompted, she said, yeah, and I get all these emails from readers who tell me thanks for giving me the strength to leave my church and fight the patriarchy, and all of these things.

And she's like, that is not what I meant by any of this.

And it's kind of like if you wanna armchair psychology, you know, you can make inferences there, whether or not that's true, but that's a moment that stuck with me for a very long time, and something I heavily advocated putting in the podcast, our editor wanted to cut it, 'cause the scene was getting too long, but Heath and I fought for it to stay in there just because it's such a stark example of that push and pull that I think, you know, from the women we talked to for the story within the Christ Church community and those who had left, that they struggle with.

- Talk more about that, how you fought for it with the editor and how that went.

Because I've experienced similar things, and sometimes you know that that is the nugget that has to be in there.

- Yeah.

So I just wanna say straight up that Morgan, our editor, is a great editor, and we love her a lot, but she's very good at helping us trim the fat.

And she didn't necessarily see it as anything, you know, super revealing about anything.

Whereas it was much more clear in my mind and Heath's mind as we were doing the writing and editing process and trying to convince her of that sort of push and pull, like I said, of your view of yourself, and your view of yourself within a certain society that you inhabit is incredibly important, and maybe the subconsciousness of it is something that people can infer or not infer.

But it makes it much more interesting to the audience we thought, than cutting it out.

- I want you to tell us a little bit about Doug Wilson, the leader of Christ Church.

And I wanna know who is he, and why is it important for us to know about him?

- I think that no matter what kind of a position you take on him, his views, his church, what he's been doing his entire life, he's a very interesting man.

He grew up in a military family, excuse me, grew up in Annapolis, Maryland, his father had been kind of an evangelical bookstore owner, but also military vet taught at the Naval Academy in Annapolis.

And then kind of moved a few places across the country.

And when he was either 18, or about to turn 18, they moved to Moscow, so that his dad, Jim Wilson, could open an evangelical bookstore.

And he was getting ready to go into the Navy and he even started his pastoral career right then, the house that they were renting had this garage where Jim Wilson invited all of the kids from the high school that was like across the street who were smoking cigarettes off campus to come on in and, you know, get right with Jesus.

And they did, 'cause they had free soda, and let them smoke inside the garage, and not get in trouble with the cops.

But then they like helped paint all these very seventies inspired murals in the garage, which was, I got to see it still exists in Moscow.

It's not where it originally was.

They paid movers to uproot it and move it about a mile and a half north of town, but all the murals are still in place.

And he went to the navy, came back, went to U of I for a philosophy degree, and was, you know, arguing in defensive Christianity with his professors.

And that's kind of where he developed his debate style.

Started the church in the mid seventies after he graduated.

Basically got thrown into it when the other pastor left for a different opportunity when he was like 24 or something.

And he had just been the song leader.

Then he started holding services, like wherever he could, in the park, in this auto repair shop, all kinds of places.

And eventually just grew and grew and grew.

But he's a pretty tall guy if you've never seen him, big beard always wears like a collared shirt, tucked into jeans.

Very folksy, very much in with pop culture.

If you ever read his stuff or watch his videos, or listen to his podcasts, tons of pop culture references.

And you can see why he is a very engaging and influential person within his church and the movement.

- That's really interesting.

I really like the detail about the mural.

When you were standing there in front of the mural, what were you thinking?

- Just that I couldn't believe it was so well preserved 50 years later, right?

I mean, all the words, they had a bunch of scripture passages, stuff, painted up on the wall.

If you guys know R. Crumb, that's a very old reference, I don't expect any of you to know that.

But the keep on trucking guy with the huge nose, just like, you know, walking down the road, they have one of those, they had a bunch of Jesus portraits, and it's just a time capsule.

The person who owns it now was using it to store old farm equipment.

You know, it hadn't been used for its original purpose for decades.

- Wow.

I wanted to ask you, how do you feel doing all this deep diving on this project, now that you've put it to bed?

- Still think I'm decompressing, honestly.

You know, it was a year of my life just for the actual production part of it.

Whereas I had been thinking about the story for like 20 years, right?

Like I had family members who went to Logos, the K-12 Christ Church school.

My parents actually, back when Doug was starting it had friends who were part of it and approached my parents to try to join it.

They did not end up joining it, obviously.

But it's just been around my, you know, my family and my life this entire time.

And now that it's out in the world, it's definitely a weird thing, but it's, I don't know, you're still, you're still trying to reconcile it and come up for air, 'cause we just launched it in the summer and it's only been a few months.

- Yeah, just getting a little bit of sleep maybe.

- Yeah.

- What gave you the biggest struggle in trying to bring this work in this podcast?

- Making sure that we had all of the nuances, right?

Because again, by no means is every Christian a Christian nationalist?

I think that that term gets very overused by people who are agnostic or atheist, or just in general, less conservative in their social values.

Certainly Christ Church is at the epicenter of Christian nationalism for sure.

But there are a lot of people that we talk to who are Christians within the community of Moscow, and like around the country obviously who reject a lot of what Doug Wilson's teaching, but who still want to be part of the church.

I mean, it kind of goes back to Christine Cohen's novel, right?

Where it's like, oh yeah, you hate the figurehead at it, but you know, at the center of it, but you like everything else about it.

Trying to get those nuances in, I would say, getting people to talk to us wasn't really a problem, thankfully, that's something that was very surprising.

We only had two people maybe turn us down for interview requests.

So they were willing and ready to explain their views to people who find it completely abhorrent.

- I think that's really interesting.

I had so many people turn me down for my podcast, and so with a equally heavy subject, I just think that that's incredible that you were able to get that access, that was amazing.

You told me a little while ago about a letter that you had received, and I just wondered if you could talk a little bit about that letter, and what it was like to receive it, it was from, from- - Oh, from, okay, yeah, yeah.

So I think that we got a letter sent to us shortly before we were publishing from a defamation focused law firm outside of D.C.

It was the same law firm that handled the dominion voting lawsuit against Fox News, and won that gigantic settlement.

But basically saying, we've been retained by Doug Wilson, and he thinks that you're gonna just spout lies about us, and we want you to either not publish the podcast, or we want total editorial control, and like legal review of this, which of course we kind of laughed at.

But because no, we have our own legal review, it's fine, dude.

But it is always, especially, for Heath in particular, as an independent journalist, that's one of the risks that you take on, and a lot of independent journalists carry liability insurance, just in case you do get sued, even if it's completely baseless, you're spending tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars on legal fees, depending on how long it drags out.

And so it's not, you know, the greatest thing to get those threats of a lawsuit.

But it's also something that if you stand behind your work, and you know it was fact checked, and went through a legal review, then, you know, go ahead and push the big publish button.

We got another letter from them the day before it was set to publish, asking again for legal review, which we turned down, and we haven't heard from him since, 'cause nothing is, nothing's illegal about it.

- Yeah, that's such a great story.

I wanted to ask, did being male reporters give you any advantage in this story, in particular, the subject matter you were tackling?

- I would assume so, just because in those spheres, men are generally viewed as someone that people in power can talk to more openly than necessarily women who, in their worldview have to go through their husband, who is the head of the household, and do all of those things.

Ideally, they would like just households to vote.

So if you're in a married family, the husband would vote for you, ideally after considering the wife's opinion, but the husband can do whatever he wants.

So I would assume that we did have an advantage there.

There have been a couple women who have written extensively on Christ Church, who got decent access to Doug, thinking specifically of Rachel Schumann, who wrote a 500 page report on two rapes that went on within Christ Church in 2005.

But she was also a member of the Christ Church world.

Her church was outside of Portland, but it was affiliated with Christ Church.

And so I assumed that that's how she got access.

Doug sent her back like 50, 70 emails, something like that throughout the whole reporting process of that.

But you know, it's hard to imagine that it would've been as easy or easier as a woman for sure.

- Wow.

Can you talk about the outward appearance of members of Christ Church, and just like, are you able to distinguish them from the population at all?

- Well, I mean, Moscow, yeah.

Generally you've got like a lot of hippies over there, right, who are, you know, if I wasn't in this, I'd be in flannel right now.

So they're walking around in flannel and jeans.

Christ Church members generally, not always, but are like more clean cut.

They like big beards, but that's not an oddity in Moscow, right?

Wear like really nice shirts, maybe a jacket sometimes.

But if you know where they hang out generally in Moscow, which is like north of Third Street on Main Street, that's where a lot of their properties are, you can kind of spot them.

But it's, you know, otherwise they look like normal members of the community.

It's not like they have a big sign on them saying, I go to Christ Church.

- Yeah.

Can you tell me about the first time that you interviewed Doug?

- Hmm, we went to his office, which is this long strip of buildings on Jackson in Moscow.

I mean, you guys are too young, but if you knew where the old Moscow Pullman Daily news offices were, that's where it was.

And, you know, welcomed us back into his office, he had a guitar on a stand, he had tons of books in his office.

We went into a different conference room to try to have a little bit better audio, it was super echoey anyway, and it was not fun as an audio producer.

But you take what you can get, right?

But it was just kind of surreal to sit in that room for an hour and a half, two hours, whatever it was, and hear him talk about, and or defend the things that he's done that I have heard about for so many years.

Read about it online, read, I mean, read his defense of it, he's not shy about it, has a whole portion of his blog dedicated to it.

Controversy Library is what it's called.

But just for him to, yeah, very matter of factly say yes.

You know, there was this 20 something year old border in a house, and there was a 14-year-old daughter with the host family, and they had a consensual underage relationship when he raped her.

You know, and just very matter of factly, flew out of his mouth, you know, with no trouble, is just an astonishing thing to listen to in the moment.

But you gotta keep your composure, you know, as a reporter, we push back on it, of course, but it's not like I can imagine a lot of activists just immediately flying into a rage, like within the first 15 minutes of talking to him.

But that's not our role as journalists.

- Yeah, those are some heavy words that you said.

I just wonder, you know, as you said, you just dropped this in the summer at your last episode, and what's one of the things that you've taken away from this experience of creating your podcast?

- I mean, I knew it coming into it, but it's a lot harder than it, than you think it will be.

I mean, you can put out a podcast if you just have a bunch of people around talking and, you know, just kind of going back and forth Bsing, whatever, right?

That's a whole lot easier to produce than a narrative driven story arc over the course of eight episodes.

I would say that that's a big takeaway, but it's also a lot of fun.

Even if you're in those kind of troughs of depression, where it's just like you're eating it day in and day out, you know, you're getting the writer's block, you're getting completely uninspired, hearing the same thing for the millionth time as you're playing back that tape, or reading through the transcript.

But ultimately it's totally worth it, I would say.

- That's Jimmy Dawson, thank you so much for coming on with us today.

Thank you for being with us.

(audience clapping) (upbeat music)