Topic
What Doug Wilson says about churches, leaders and abuse
Douglas Wilson has firm views on how churches should be run, how pastors should be criticized (carefully, and preferably not at all), and how churches should handle abuse. Here they are, in his own words.
Performing a Convicted Child Molester’s Wedding Was the Right Call
Not only did I conduct that wedding, but I would do it again tomorrow.
[Pamela Brown: “You helped a pedophile.”] Yeah. Well, I conducted the marriage ceremony, but I did do that, so. But I didn’t set them up. I didn’t arrange it for it. I didn’t — all the things you hear online that I did in that situation. [Pamela Brown: “So why would you marry off a pedophile?”] Because it was legal. He is a professing Christian. The woman he married understood his background, you know, understood what she was getting into. I didn’t arrange it. It was not an arranged marriage. It was not pressured.
He was convicted and served time... 5 years after he was out he met a young lady, was introduced to her by someone else. They got engaged and asked me to do the ceremony, which I was happy to do and I would do it again.
The Church, Not the State, Should Decide Whether to Report a Child Molester, and Pastors Should Defy Subpoenas
Actually, counseling is not confidential, at least not in this sense. Biblical counseling in the context of the church could always (conceivably) lead to very public church discipline. This is why a pastor should never promise absolute confidentiality. He should always (of course) be discrete, but there will be times when he has a moral obligation to inform the elders of his church, or in drastic circumstances, the civil magistrate. If a man has molested children who are in his home, then those children must be protected from him. Unfortunately, we live in a time when the social workers who rescue the children might treat them as unbiblically as their foster father did. […] But there is a sense in which there is a biblical confidentiality. The decision to inform the civil magistrate is a decision which is made by the church and not by the magistrate. A worthy pastor would defy any subpoena which tried to force information from him.
Suicide Is Morally Identical to Murder
Of course it would cause you to doubt their salvation, right, they just murdered somebody, right? Suicide is prohibited in Scripture under the commandment “you shall not commit murder.” I have no more right to take my own life than I have the right to take someone else’s.
First, not to be ambiguous about it, the sin of suicide is the sin of murder... Like if someone blows their brains out as opposed to downs a bottle of pills and then 10 minutes later starts repenting, but it's too late... And if you shoot yourself there's no time for repentance.
Accusing Doug of Protecting Pedophiles Makes You the Pedophile
People who are currently accusing me of being a friend of pedophiles are themselves on the verge of becoming friends of pedophiles.
Christian Leaders Who Sympathized With a Report on Abuse in His Church Should Resign
Every Christian leader, pastor, board member, writer, thought-influence, or teacher who read that Vice article and then publicly voiced their solidarity or sympathy with it—in any way, shape, or form—has disqualified themselves. They are DQed, flat out. They need to step down. Not only are they DQed on moral grounds, but they might as well step down now before the methods and procedures they have internalized and endorsed come back around when it is time to devour them.
Criticizing Leaders Like Doug Sends You to Hell
And revilers. God calls you to repent of the kind of venom that you spew at ministers of the gospel of free grace who stand against the sexual corruptions of this evil generation. You need to repent of all the venomous comments you made over the last week, directed at us, and there were quite a few of them. If you don’t repent, you are lost forever. Revilers will not enter the kingdom of heaven.
Christians Are Obligated to Give Offense and to Ridicule the Other Side
This means, following the many examples of Scripture, that there is a different kind of religious controversy, where the central point is to give offense. Failure in such controversy would be reckoned as a failure to give offense in the way Scripture requires, and for the reasons given in Scripture.
Abuse Allegations Against Doug’s Church Aren’t Worth Answering
As many of you know, last week Vice magazine published a hit piece aimed at our church and church community. […] To this point we have not seen a need to get into the details in order to answer these scurrilous charges point by point. As I have said in a few other contexts, this would be like trying to chase the crows away from the road kill. One of the things we want to avoid is that of providing the reaction that these people were trying to provoke.
No, the one accusation that's out there about marital rape is an accusation that is coming from a stone-cold liar. [Spencer Macnaughton: "So, you deny those allegations that have been..."] Yeah, I deny that we've ever sanctioned marital rape. That's just flatly false... Basically, we have an aggressive stance toward this thing. Reports to the contrary, notwithstanding. This is an area where we are lied about routinely... [SM: "Why do you think it disproportionately happens in conservative Christian communities?"] I think that's false. I don't think it disproportionately happens. [SM: "You don't?"] I don't. [SM: "So the statistics are just kind of false?"] Yeah. Yeah.
[Pamela Brown: “As you well know, there have been claims that you have minimized or sort of brushed under the rug sexual abuse and violence.”] Yes, there have been claims of that nature, and I say, look at them go. Let them say what they say. It’s simply false.
[Aaron Zitner: "There are a number of women who say that the church was insufficiently active in policing and preventing abuse... What should we know about those accusations?"] If we zoom out and look at those accusations generally, as a group, there are a number of them where they're just telling lies. It is just, let's throw whatever we can at Christ Church and see what sticks. Sometimes the lies are whole cloth. Sometimes the lies are partial truths represented as the whole truth, which is an untruth. I would say to my critics, knock yourself out.
Empathy Is a Sin
Not only is untethered empathy “a” sin, but it is the primal sin, the root of all our sin, the ur-sin. How so? Back to the Garden. [...] If you follow Milton’s reasoning on this topic, as I do, the reason Adam ate the forbidden fruit was because he didn’t want to lose Eve. He was forced to choose between the authoritative Word from God and his feeling of identification with his wife.
This deadly process begins by empathizing with people without any obligation to find out whether their claims are objectively accurate or true. This leads to emotional tyranny, which in its turn leads to actual tyranny.
To review, empathy is when you identify with someone completely, doing so without judgment. I’ve used the illustration before of someone drowning in the river. Sympathy throws him a rope, always keeping a footing on the bank of objective reality. With empathy, however, the requirement of no judgment means that you have to take a header into the river yourself in order to drown alongside the person you are identifying with... Once you’ve detached from objective standards, not only do you have trouble distinguishing one crime from another, at the end of the day, you have trouble distinguishing one kind of empathy from another. Empathy, toxic empathy, suicidal empathy, psychotic empathy—it’s all one.
If you empathize with a woman who says that her stepfather molested her when she was a child, you must accept her account without judgment, which means that you must accept it without evidence. You must not budget for the possibility that her account might be false. It also means that you must reject without mercy any attempt on the part of the stepfather to produce exculpatory evidence.
Empathy is just a noisome belch pretending to be a cool morning breeze off a mountain lake.
Hosting a Holocaust Minimizer Is in “the Same Category” as Talking to a Liberal Journalist
[Phil Williams: "So, why associate with someone who expresses those views?"] Associated with you? You're a liberal journalist. I'll hang out with anybody. [PW: "So, someone who minimizes the Holocaust and wants to diminish Jewish influence is the same as hanging out with a journalist?"] Well, no, I wouldn't say it's the same thing, but it's the same category. So, for example, Anthony came to Moscow and visited, and we showed him hospitality just like we show hospitality to all kinds of people who come and we don't vet their views before they come.
Doug and His Followers Will Save Western Civilization
“Who do you think you are? Saviors of Western civilization?” So in a word, yes. This is my assertion.
Modern Evangelicalism Is a “Wretched, Money-Grubbing Business” Run by People “Dumber Than a Bag of Hammers”
Modern evangelicalism, taken as a whole, is a wretched, money-grubbing business that has sold its soul for a market share.
A Christian Can Be Sinning by Refusing to Divorce a Spouse
He requires the men to divorce their wives, and everything about the passage indicates that Ezra was in the right to do so. One of the ways we can see that we have taken in the secularist ethic surrounding us is that we think that Ezra overreacted, not realizing that relationships are more important than righteousness. But this is, of course, entirely false, and there are times when a Christian would be in sin for refusing to divorce a spouse.
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