Investigative Journalism

A core tenet of Wilson’s beliefs is that a patriarchal society, what he calls “biblical masculinity,” is both a religious mandate and “cultural gluten,” as he wrote in his 2023 book, Mere Christendom. “Without it, the cookie just crumbles to pieces in your hand, and is tasteless on top of that.” In a previous book, Fidelity: How to Be a One-Woman Man, he wrote: “The sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.” For that reason, he went on, the dynamic of a dominant man and a submissive woman is “an erotic necessity.” As Wilson put it in an interview with CNN last year: “Women are the kind of people that people come out of.”

He also has called feminists “a large army of singularly unattractive and bitchy women” and said women serving in the military are “loathsome” to God—an observation that may inform Hegseth’s hostility to women in senior military leadership. In all matters, he believes, wives should defer to their husbands, the “covenant heads” of the family. Women shouldn’t assume church leadership roles, or speak in church, and heads of households, overwhelmingly male, should vote on behalf of their entire families.