Sure his theology is bad, but he has great taste in TV!

In my recent post An invitation to Pastor Wilson’s defenders I challenged Wilson’s defenders to do any of the following:

1. Point out any instances where I criticized Wilson without providing a direct quote.
2. Point out any time that I have misquoted Wilson or misrepresented what he wrote.
3. Defend any of Wilson’s positions that I had criticized.

There were no takers.

This was true even though I provided 8 different examples of Wilson’s bad teaching for his defenders to back him up on.  All 8 examples were so bad that none of Wilson’s defenders wanted to even try to defend them.

What I received instead were calls for me to become friends with Wilson.  Presumably once I did that I, like his defenders, would become comfortable overlooking his bad teaching.

When the call for friendship didn’t convince me, next his defenders offered his taste in black and white TV shows as a reason to overlook his bad teaching.  MKT wrote:

Like Wilson or not, he posted this on a recent blog. It’s one of the finest moments in TV history, and would make everyone from radical feminists to self-proclaimed conservative complimentarians hysterical if they saw it. If you can’t watch the whole thing, just watch the first minute and last 2-3 minutes.

This is the kind of misdirection Wilson’s defenders love most. Here is Wilson, supporting headship for a make-believe man!  Surely one day soon this will translate into Wilson supporting headship for real life men.  But it doesn’t work that way.

Again, Wilson’s defenders can’t bring themselves to even try to defend his bad teaching.  What they want is for me (and you) to pretend the bad teaching doesn’t exist, or at least pretend that it doesn’t matter.

Likewise, in response to Every Woman’s Battle, commenter Warthog wrote:

To be fair, Wilson wrote that over 20 years ago. He has moved substantially in your direction since then. https://dougwils.com/books-and-culture/s7-engaging-the-culture/smash-the-matriarchy.html

In the post Warthog was responding to I quoted Lori Alexander where she rightly pointed out that Satan tempts women into blaming their husbands for their feelings of discontentment.  I agreed with her and added that our entire culture is doing Satan’s work here, including Christian pastors.  To prove this point I gave three examples of pastors doing just that.  Wilson was one of the three.  Note that Warthog doesn’t even try to defend Wilson’s bad teaching.  He merely wants us to ignore it and assume that Wilson has stopped teaching women their husband is the source of their discontentment, referencing the same recent Lone Ranger post from Wilson that MKT did.

Yet Wilson’s much loved Lone Ranger post includes reinforcements for his past bad teaching.  As Wilson explained, the message of the Lone Ranger episode he shared was that the woman’s pathetic husband was responsible for her discontentment:

On this privileged occasion, I recall taking in an episode of The Lone Ranger. The theme of this particular show was about that time when there was this mousy little man, hen-pecked to the outer limits of human endurance, and through a series of circumstances, the Lone Ranger adopted this poor man and made him something of a protégé. The end result of this crash course in masculinity was that the little man headed on home, and the happy ending to the whole saga was him pulling out his revolver and shooting his wife’s dishes off her shelves. It makes me happy just thinking about it. Fade to black, and with her thinking something along the lines of finally!

For reference, here is the opening of Lori Alexander’s post:

Divorce always begins with seeds of discontentment planted in our minds by ourselves or others. Feminism flourished because it appealed to wives’, mothers’, and homemakers’ discontentment. “We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: ‘I want something more than my husband and my children and my home.’” (Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique)

Lori Alexander wants wives to remember that the discontentment comes from within.  Despite what the Serpent is telling them, it isn’t men’s fault they are discontented.

Wilson on the other hand wants us to know that women’s discontentment really does come from men, and besides, it is only the hairy legged feminists who are currently in rebellion.  Women who have children aren’t in rebellion and long for the patriarchy:

So whatever is happening, we are not actually being ruled by fruitful women (a state of affairs that fruitful women actually detest), but rather by men with a homosexual ethos who have recruited a horde of childless and gullible women to serve as their honey-trap shock troops. Such women are those who have accepted the flattering vanities of career “advancement” in place of a truly satisfying life as the active mother of a teeming and energetic pack of yard apes. These duped women have somehow been persuaded that the good opinion of the bureaucrats in HR is somehow far more valuable than the good opinion of the yard apes. It isn’t, by the way.

Moreover, Wilson never stopped teaching what Warthog assures us Wilson no longer believes.  He wrote the book decades ago, but he still sells it today.  Warthog didn’t offer his opinion on why he thinks Wilson still sells a book teaching something Wilson now believes to be wrong*.  But any defense in this matter would really be an indictment.  Does Warthog think Wilson is too proud to admit that what he taught was wrong?  Or could it be that Warthog is accusing Wilson of being too corrupted by the desire for money to stop selling the book?

I’ll try to rescue Wilson from his defenders here and note that I don’t think he has changed his (relevant) theology since he first wrote Reforming Marriage.  I don’t have the link handy, but I have seen a video online where he uses the introduction to the book almost entirely verbatim as a sermon, and the sermon was dated just a few years ago.  However, Wilson could help his defenders stop indicting him in this regard by clarifying if he still stands by what he wrote in Reforming Marriage or if he no longer believes that a woman’s discontentment is proof that God is displeased with her husband.

*And not just wrong in one small part.  The introduction explains that the entire book is based on the premise that if a husband loves his wife as he should, the wife will be happy.