WASHINGTON DC—This past Sunday, Pastor Jared Longshore looked out at his congregants, gathered to hear him deliver the first sermon of a new church within sight of the U.S. Capitol. The group included Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth as well as a prominent conservative think tanker and assorted Republican political operatives.
Longshore began with a choice. “The option before you is quite plain,” he said. “It is Christ or chaos, Christ or destruction.”
It was a dramatic note to start on. But Christ Kirk, the Moscow, Idaho church that launched its D.C. branch this past weekend, has grand ambitions. Under the leadership of minister Doug Wilson, a Reformed Christian, the church is seeking to spread its hardline vision of Protestantism nationally. It has prominent adherents and allies in the second Trump administration. The D.C. church is a project of Christ Kirk Moscow, itself a part of a growing, international network of churches that Wilson founded called the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC).
I attended what the CREC called the “planting” of a D.C. church on Sunday after spending months growing increasingly fascinated with Wilson and his influence on the New Right that is ascendant in Trump’s Washington. America is full of people with big, apocalyptic visions and hardline views on how the country can redeem itself. But Wilson is a rare bird: along with the CREC, he’s built a small, theocratic empire in Moscow, Idaho, far away from D.C. And yet, through his own sermons, those of affiliated pastors like Longshore, and a publishing house, Christ Kirk (also known as Christ Church) has managed to bridge the geographic divide and gain a following among right-wingers across the country. It’s spawned what some call the “Moscow Mood” — a postmillennialist view that the Christian right should employ a new level of aggression in fighting to dominate the culture, and use the government to enact policies in accordance with its religious teachings.
The new D.C. church is an opportunity to put all of America in the Moscow Mood. Planting a church in the nation’s Capitol follows naturally from the organization’s vision: just as a member must incorporate their religious belief into every aspect of their personal life, so too must they fight for the group’s favored ideas in politics and culture: banning homosexuality, embracing more patriarchal family structures, ending abortion, and removing female soldiers from combat roles. In a phone interview after the sermon, Longshore told TPM that he wants a Christian government in the most direct sense: all government officials must “acknowledge that Christ is Lord and then actually listen to what he is telling them to do.” That would include the need to “execute the wrath of God against the wrongdoer,” he said.
Longshore put a version of this to Hegseth and others congregating in D.C. on Sunday.
“We understand that worship is warfare,” Longshore intoned at one point during his sermon. “We mean that.”
The militaristic language isn’t only meant to attract attention. This segment of the Christian right, like many others, believes that it is fighting a lonely, rear-guard action in modern America. Its adherents see themselves as the underdogs, besieged on all sides by a secularism that’s violent and bent on destroying the remnants of a Christian America that they’re trying to revive. Despite evidence suggesting that the Christian right’s influence remains on an upward swing — the end of Roe, a cemented, hard-right, Christian SCOTUS majority, rising church attendance among young men — you can hear it in their rhetoric: they exist within “a lapsed nation, a fallen nation, a nation that was Christian to the core, nearly to a man when it was founded,” Longshore said in his sermon. But they are not necessarily of it.
That mix of aggression and entitlement is where Christ Kirk tends to come in for criticism from more winsome members of the Christian right. For these critics of the group, it’s not the militaristic vocabulary so much as what it suggests about the group’s view of religious pluralism: should the CREC have one seat at a table of religious equals in the culture? Or are they after something else entirely? Where would other Christians — such as Mormons — who don’t subscribe to their outlook fit in their vision of a future government? Are liberals as well as conservatives welcome?
There are a few hints about how Christ Kirk Washington D.C. might answer that question in a pamphlet that the group distributed at its Sunday service. It notes that the church’s “voting practices will generally follow a conservative/libertarian pattern, and when our people don’t vote, it is generally because the available options don’t go far enough.”
“So if your Volvo has a COEXIST bumper sticker right next to the Hope and Change sticker, it will probably be pretty lonely out there in the church parking lot,” the document reads. (I am undoubtedly worse in this rubric: I arrived at the service via public transit.)
I asked Longshore about this in a phone interview after the service; he said that slapping “COEXIST” sticker means sharing foreign, incompatible values. “The issue that that person’s going to face when they come to hear the preaching of the word is the first commandment: have no other Gods before me. So you can’t actually worship Allah and worship the triune God at the same time.”
The COEXIST line gestured toward something deeper in what the CREC talks about when it talks about belief: the service’s attendees on Sunday were trying to enact their vision of a more traditional, patriarchal America not only through how they worship, but also in other aspects of their lives. To put this more simply, the congregants were very trad. It’s part of what unites Christ Kirk with the extremely online elements of the New Right. Think men wearing checkered shirts and suspenders, some in blazers, women in long, flowing dresses, and families with more kids than you can count on one hand. All of this in a relatively small room that grew increasingly stuffy in the summer heat.
The Sunday opening also served as a pageant of Christ Kirk’s influence and its aspirations. Hegseth, a proud follower of Wilson, attended. He arrived minutes before Longshore began the service, preceded by several bodyguards. He nodded along throughout the service and attempted to mingle — before being enveloped by churchgoers as he departed. Nick Solheim, Chief Operations Officer of American Moment, a Vice President JD Vance-backed organization founded in 2021 that’s helped recruit right-wing staffers to serve in the Trump administration, was there as well. The service itself took place in a building — formerly D.C.’s Capitol Lounge — owned by a firm linked to the Conservative Partnership Institute. That detail is almost too on the nose: CPI is a conservative nonprofit that Mark Meadows founded in 2021. Since then, it’s played a leading role in developing and readying younger MAGA cohorts for a second Trump term, much like the efforts of American Moment.
Longshore’s sermon sounded at times like a spiritual component to that project. Two large American flags adorned the main sanctuary space; on a wall off to the side hung a “Don’t Tread on Me” flag next to a Betsy Ross flag. At one point, the pastor invoked the Department of Government Efficiency’s dubious and discredited finding that Social Security had paid out billions to dead people as a broader metaphor for America’s spiritual demise.
“The problem is that men are dead in our father Adam; you can throw a lot of programs at a dead man,” Longshore said. “DOGE helped us to discover that we pumped a lot of social security to dead people.”
Extending the metaphor, Longshore argued that supposedly faulty federal programs came from a false idol: worshipping rule by the people over rule by God.
“You exalt the demos. And what does the demos do? It starts to try to raise the dead through giving him Social Security. You can’t raise the dead,” Longshore remarked. At another point, he suggested that equality only should be applied through a Christian lens: “If you get rid of God, you lose all sense of what equality is.”
Longshore told TPM after the sermon that the problem he was trying to address in was an “emphasis on democracy.” That, he said, leads to falsity: people start “trusting the mind of man to determine how things should go,” while “ultimately God is the one who has spoken.”
This may seem like a cynical way to use spirituality to justify partisan politics. The difference is that, for these true believers, there’s no difference between following your faith and waging a spiritual battle. It’s quite literally a culture war; they’re another army in that fight for America’s soul.
The title of the sermon was “Grace and Peace for Washington.” But with all the political references and militaristic language, it was hard for me not to wonder: peace on whose terms?
Two protestors harangued churchgoers before the service, one carrying a sign that read “Christ Church is Not Welcome.” Longshore addressed it during the sermon, calling the demonstrator “sweet” before musing: “Do you not think that our God can humble that protestor? And she can be a sweet saint with us right here? That’s exactly what we’re going for.”
The CREC, with Wilson at its helm, has been incredibly successful in selling its vision. It’s a small denomination, but one that can count Hegseth as a member and, now, a D.C. satellite church as part of its network. Wilson himself will come to the capital in September for a conference CREC is hosting called “Christ or Chaos.”
Relative to the reach of a small-town Idaho church that Wilson began to lead in the 1970s, this degree of influence is enormous. Hegseth led a prayer service at the Pentagon with Brooks Potteiger, his Nashville pastor and a CREC member, in May. The same month, the DOJ sued a small Idaho town for allegedly discriminating against Christ Kirk when it refused the church a permit.
But its success is all qualified.
The CREC’s most prominent adherent in Washington, Hegseth, has been plagued by scandals since his nomination. He squeaked through confirmation after Vice President Vance cast a tiebreaking vote amid questions around the nominee’s infidelity and allegations of excessive drinking. Since then, Hegseth’s tenure has seen an unauthorized halt in aid to Ukraine that the White House later reversed, the Signal scandal, an abortive attempt to brief Elon Musk on China war plans, and public infighting. Even for the Trump administration, that’s a lot of dysfunction.
And in spite of the uniquely favorable environment for their brand of Christian nationalism (Longshore is fine with the term), the church’s adherents have to contend with the reality of a secular, pluralistic country: a conservative Supreme Court, for instance, legalized gay marriage 10 years ago, a decision that’s become widely accepted.
Despite America’s recent institutional lurch to the right, there’s little to indicate that their vision for a more traditional society shares the same degree of public support that Trump enjoyed in November 2024; trad outfits make for good memes and TikToks, but it’s hard to imagine the lifestyle becoming part of a societal transformation.
Longshore acknowledged the tension to TPM. But to him, we’re living through the end times — of secular liberalism, which has “run its course.”
“If you go all the way back to the Black Lives Matter riots, and if you look at COVID, it’s becoming apparent that the ideas that became enshrined in law back in 1965, the civil rights legislation, all of that, it seems to have borne some rotten fruit,” he added.
The church opening fell on Sunday, July 13 — the one year anniversary of the first failed assassination attempt on President Trump. That event brought the already simmering Christian nationalist ideas in the Trump campaign to a boil. Trump has cast his survival as granting him a divine right to rule; Roger Stone, nobody’s idea of piety, expounded on this theme on Sunday with a social media post linking the timing of the shooting with a verse from the Book of Ephesians: “Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes”
Longshore did not mention the anniversary at all during the service. He built his sermon around Ephesians, referencing at one point the same “armor” verse as Stone. But he took it in a different direction. As Longshore closed his sermon, he addressed “the broader people here on our nation’s capital.”
“Guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus or you’ll be left to cover up your nakedness with manufactured fig leaves,” he said, before recounting a list of Christ’s tribulations that may sound oddly familiar: he was “beaten, bloodied, slandered, abandoned, and falsely tried at a kangaroo court”; he “went straight into the lion’s den of our twisted perversions to be twisted on a tree for them.”
