In the 1980s, an Idaho newspaper editor named James Shelledy hired a young pastor named Doug Wilson. Shelledy had made his name at the Lewiston Morning Tribune, downriver from Wilson's Moscow, and what he handed the pastor, he now says, was a bullhorn, something that carried well past the hundred or so people in his pews. Shelledy went on to edit The Salt Lake Tribune from 1991 to 2003. On Thursday, in the pages of his old paper, he asked himself whether he would make the same hire today.
The reason he is asking is that the pastor he helped launch is now the spiritual adviser to the Secretary of Defense. Pete Hegseth is a member of a congregation in the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, the denomination Wilson co-founded, a fact the Pentagon's own spokesman confirmed to The Associated Press. Hegseth has welcomed Wilson to preach at the voluntary prayer services he hosts at the Pentagon. Wilson also believes, and has said for years, that the members of Utah's largest church are not Christians.
On Saturday, the Tribune's Tamarra Kemsley asked him what Latter-day Saints would have to change for him to think otherwise. It was the paper's third Wilson piece in nine days, and Shelledy's op-ed sat in the middle of the run, which gives the whole series the odd shape of a newspaper investigating a man its own former editor introduced to the public.
The theological dispute is old and real. In 1820, by his own account, Joseph Smith knelt in a grove near Palmyra, New York, and saw God the Father and Jesus Christ as two distinct embodied beings. The church has published the surviving accounts of that vision, and from it flows the Latter-day Saint doctrine of the Godhead: three divine persons, one in purpose, separate in substance. The Council of Nicaea took the opposite position in the year 325. Wilson is a confessional Reformed pastor, and for him, the Nicene Trinity is the definition of the word Christian, not a doctrine within it.
The church has answered this argument many times, most formally in an essay published among its Gospel Topics essays, a series approved by the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve, which affirms that Latter-day Saints are Christians who belong to neither the Catholic nor the Protestant line but to a restoration. Wilson accepts the self-description and denies the conclusion. When a reader wrote to his blog in 2023 asking how Glenn Beck could sound so Christian on the radio, Wilson answered that the reader was right to call the Mormon gospel "a false gospel." The full exchange is worth reading, both for the reader's letter, which compares listening to Beck to a meal cooked in a sewer, and for the evident patience of Wilson's reply.
For most of Wilson's career, this was a quarrel between Moscow, Idaho, and everyone downstream of Nicaea, and Utah could ignore it. Then came June. Hegseth, who had announced in December that he intended to rebuild the military chaplaincy, cut the department's religious affiliation codes from more than 200 to 31, dismissing the old system as "impractical and unusable." Twenty-one of the new codes were labeled as forms of Christianity. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was not one of them.
Sen. John Curtis said church members are "unequivocally Christian" and demanded a correction. Sen. Mike Lee called the president. Two days later, the Pentagon issued a revised list that resolved the problem by removing the word Christian from every religion on it, and Lee thanked Hegseth for correcting the error. Sarah Posner, who covers the religious right, pointed out what the fix actually was: asked to call the Latter-day Saints Christian, the department chose instead to call no one Christian.
Wilson told the Tribune he had nothing to do with the list, and there is no evidence he did. What the paper's July 2 profile documents is the world he would build if he could. Public office reserved for orthodox Christians, a category that excludes Latter-day Saints by definition. The franchise, he allows, is a harder question, and for now, he is content to have them vote, since abortion and same-sex marriage are "a far greater problem than Mormons voting."
The historian Daniel Williams places him in the line of R.J. Rushdoony, who sought to have Old Testament law written into American law. Kristin Kobes Du Mez told the Tribune that Wilson is not representative of American evangelicalism, but he is significant within it, and that the movement's attention is moving from the question of who can be an ally to the question of who counts as Christian.
The church's senior leadership has not engaged Wilson by name, and its standing position is the opposite of his. President Dallin H. Oaks, at the University of Virginia in 2021, said, "We should not seek total dominance for our own position," and laid out a theory of religious liberty as negotiated fairness among people who disagree. The harder fact is in the pews, where survey data from the Public Religion Research Institute, cited in the Tribune's reporting, finds nearly half of church members either adhere to or sympathize with Christian nationalist views. A large share of the Latter-day Saint electorate is drawn to a political project whose house theologians would strike them from the rolls.
The BYU scholar Daniel Peterson read the Tribune's coverage alongside the First Presidency's recent call for a churchwide fast for religious liberty, and told his readers not to take that liberty for granted. He did not have to explain why the warning applies in this state. The people who settled it had been driven from Missouri under an extermination order and from Illinois after a mob killed their prophet, over the same question Wilson raises now in an even voice, with footnotes: whether their religion belongs in the republic.
