But if you will not listen, my soul will weep in secret for your pride; my eyes will weep bitterly and run down with tears.
— Jeremiah 13:17
… in danger from my own people …. And, apart from other things, there is the daily pressure on me of my anxiety for all the churches.
— 2 Corinthians 11:26, 28
God’s people have always needed discernment to distinguish the voices that edify from those that merely impress (Jer. 23:16; 2 Cor. 11:5, 13). Throughout history, the Lord has raised up prophets who proclaimed his word with courage and tears. Jeremiah, John the Baptist, the Lord Jesus, the apostle Paul, and others show that the hallmark of a true prophet is not popularity or rhetorical skill but the burden of declaring God’s hard truth to those most able to hurt them—whatever the cost.
Admirers of Doug Wilson hail him as a modern-day prophet, the voice we need in our cultural moment. Wilson himself has embraced the mantle. In a 2019 post titled “On the Nature of Prophetic Language,” written to defend his use of a vulgar epithet for women, he described his offensive language as “part of a prophetic ministry” and identified it with “the prophetic office.” More recently, when Kevin DeYoung cautioned pastors against choosing prophetic punditry over faithful shepherding (“Brothers, We Are Not Political Pundits”), Wilson reframed the alternative as “a carefully calibrated and calculated irrelevance.” His pretensions are reinforced by associates such as Toby Sumpter, who contends that Wilson and Moscow “mock the prophets of Baal and the schoolmarm Pharisees of our day, just like Jesus did and all of the faithful prophets,” and Joe Rigney, who insists that apart from The Babylon Bee, only Wilson and his circle embody the satirical “prophetic mode of speech.”
Confusing Doug Wilson with a prophetic voice distorts the prophetic office and damages the church. I write with this concern not as an outsider but as one who pastored in the CREC for more than a decade. From that vantage I saw both the appeal of Wilson’s persona and the theological and moral toll it exacts, though one need not be in the CREC to recognize the pattern. My concern now, as it was then, is to guard Christ’s flock from mistaking brand-building provocation for authentic prophetic ministry.
Doug Wilson is not a prophet. He is a gifted writer, a trenchant cultural analyst, and a deliberate provocateur. As one observer memorably put it, “Doug is a Christian shock jock, a cable news host, a Daily Wire program (and I like a lot of what Ben Shapiro says).” Wilson’s approach reflects a right-wing attractional model characteristic of partisan punditry and movements, where the foil of political opponents seldom fades from view. The result is a message that tickles ears, entrenches self-righteousness, and bolsters partisan pride rather than cultivating prophetic witness.
If Wilson positioned himself simply as a cultural commentator, the problems would persist, and whatever good he offers could be found elsewhere without the accompanying liabilities, but at least the genre would be clear. The difficulty is that he holds the office of pastor in a church and denomination unwilling to discipline him for his excesses, however outrageous they become, leaving his rhetorical showmanship to be mistaken for faithful ministry. Worse still, he claims biblical warrant for language that Scripture itself calls ungodly.
Others have raised similar concerns, including Gavin Ortlund (“Should Pastors Use Profanity?”), Kevin DeYoung (“On Culture War, Doug Wilson, and the Moscow Mood”), and Denny Burk (“The Serrated Edge of Doug Wilson”). Burk highlights how Wilson tries to justify shameful talk by appealing to supposed precedent in the prophets, apostles, and Jesus.
Wilson casts himself in a prophetic mold, but his conduct bears little resemblance to the biblical pattern.
Wilson is, by God’s design, not a heavy-hearted man, and that is no inherent flaw. His irrepressible buoyancy is admirable, his quick humor often dazzling. Yet prophets are remembered not for their lighthearted wit but for their weighty burden.
When Wilson attempts to adopt the prophetic posture, wielding his trademark “serrated edge,” the difference from what we see in the prophets is striking. The prophets proclaimed with anguish, sorrow, and a heavy heart; Wilson lampoons with flippancy and glee—never with tears (Phil. 3:18). His disciples mimic the same style, but with more bluster and bravado, and with less brilliance.
Biblical mockery bore a different spirit. Elijah’s sarcasm on Mount Carmel was tempered by a sober-minded awareness of God’s nearness in judgment. Would the Lord have answered Elijah’s prayer for fire if it had been offered with snark and snickering at his own cleverness? John Piper once exhorted Wilson, “You can’t exalt Christ and commend yourself as clever.”
Our Lord’s denunciations in Matthew 23 exemplify the same balance. Jesus calls the Pharisees “blind guides” (v. 16), “whitewashed tombs” (v. 27), and a “brood of vipers” (v. 33). He closes not with a satirist’s smirk but with lamentation: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” (v. 37). Christ delivers grief-soaked rebukes, never glib or sardonic wit.
Francis Schaeffer modeled this balance in our own day. In The Church Before the Watching World, he warned that the God who judged Israel will also judge our culture:
Will He not judge our culture? Will He not call it adulterous? I tell you in the name of God He will judge our culture unless there is a return to a Christian base for the culture—and that begins with true repentance and renewal in the church.
And in the very next breath, Schaeffer’s prescribed response was not to jeer at the culture but to weep like Jeremiah:
Now what should be our response? Listen to Jeremiah speak in 13:27—“Woe unto thee, O Jerusalem!” Indeed, as redeemed people we should know the joy of Christ, but as we look around us in much of the church and in our culture, can we fail to cry tears? Must we not also have this message? “Woe unto thee, O Jerusalem!” … “Woe to you, O liberal church! Woe to you, O apostate Christendom!” We must say these words while we cry for the individual and while we never fail to treat him as a human being. We must not speak more lightly than Jeremiah. We must not be any less moved.
Schaeffer showed that prophetic rebuke comes with weeping, not wisecracks.
This is the very distinction Wilson and his defenders miss when they cheapen the rhetoric of the biblical prophets. A telling example comes from Gabriel Rench, a CREC deacon in Moscow and co-host of the CrossPolitic podcast. In an August 30, 2024, Facebook post defending a New Saint Andrews College promotional video that included an image of Johnny Cash giving the middle finger, Rench crudely claimed that Jesus “ripped the Pharisees a new one in Matthew 23.” What Christ spoke as heartfelt lament, with prophetic gravity, is crassly recast in Moscow as vitriol. Tears are traded for taunts.
Prophets are not brand-builders. They do not churn out clickbait, market novelty flamethrowers, or traffic in gimmicks and stunts. They do not engage in “Christotainment” reaction videos (“watch me watch someone else”), a form that reached peak irony when Wilson found himself watching himself.
True prophets do the very opposite: they destroy their own brand by confronting the idols within their closest circles. Their path is marked not by empire-building but by costly confrontation leading to loss, humiliation, and often death.
Scripture bears witness to both their affliction and their martyrdom. Jeremiah was beaten and put in the stocks (Jer. 20:1–2). Baruch, sharing in Jeremiah’s ministry, endured pain and sorrow, groaning in weariness, and was exhorted by the Lord not to seek great things (Jer. 45:1–5). Hosea’s marriage to an unfaithful woman dramatized Israel’s infidelity (Hos. 1:2). Paul and Silas were beaten and jailed in Philippi (Acts 16:19–24). Some paid with their lives: Jezebel slaughtered the prophets (1 Kgs. 18:4, 13); Zechariah was stoned in the temple court (2 Chr. 24:20–22); Uriah was executed by Jehoiakim (Jer. 26:20–23); John the Baptist was killed by Herod (Mark 6:14–29). Others of God’s faithful were mocked, flogged, chained, stoned, sawn in two, and exiled (Heb. 11:36–38). Jesus indicted Jerusalem as the city that kills the prophets (Matt. 23:29–35; Luke 13:33–34). Stephen summed up the pattern: “Which of the prophets did your fathers not persecute?” (Acts 7:52).
By contrast, Wilson is building an ambitious enterprise. His path is marked by growth in audience, influence, and book sales. He sharpens his acerbic edge against those safely outside his camp, expanding his tribe in the process. He has shown little capacity to confront the idols nearest him, which is the essence of the prophetic task.
Wilson has no shortage of critics. But because his strongest opposition comes from afar, where he aims his attacks, the objections never threaten his platform; they only fuel it, as he often boasts.
Internal rebuke could carry weight, but the record there is dismal. The CREC’s 2017 attempt at accountability—which faulted his “offensive and inappropriate” rhetoric, especially his “unnecessarily provocative language, including derogatory or calloused language about women”—proved toothless. Far from restraining him, it left him unchecked in behavior plainly inconsistent with the biblical requirement to be above reproach (1 Tim. 3:2; Titus 1:6–7). In the years since, he has doubled down, escalating his provocations and refusing to repent while enjoying more denominational support than ever, especially since Covid. Amid this growing influence, he and the other elders at Christ Church in Moscow recently re-declared that should the CREC ever try to draw them into a judicial appeal process, they would be “unwilling to submit.” Meanwhile, his colleague Toby Sumpter seeks to have the denomination “rescind” and “apologize” for the 2017 rebuke of Wilson’s inappropriate language and online conduct—steps Sumpter presents as necessary before his congregation and Wilson’s could once again trust the CREC enough to submit to its authority.
When the concentric circles closest to you—your family, your church, the movement you lead—tolerate, celebrate, and reward your incendiary rhetoric against those in outer circles, you are not acting in line with the prophets, regardless of whatever else you might achieve. God’s spokesmen level their hardest words where the risk is greatest, against those who can wound them, and they pay the price.
Jeremiah was thrown into a cistern and threatened with death by the powerful men he rebuked. John the Baptist was imprisoned and beheaded by the ruler he confronted. Jesus was rejected by his family and crucified by the religious leaders he offended. Stephen was stoned to death by the Sanhedrin for exposing their hardness of heart.
Hus was burned at the stake by his ecclesiastical authorities for defying their corruption. Luther was condemned and banned by the pope and empire for challenging them with the truth. Bunyan was jailed by local magistrates for preaching the gospel.
Edwards was dismissed by his own congregation for refusing to compromise God’s Word.
The prophet’s calling is not brand-building but truth-telling at great personal cost.
Mistaking edginess for prophetic boldness, Wilson invokes the prophets as prooftexts for his rhetoric and ridicule. The prophet’s word, however, is double-edged: sharpness on one side, burden on the other.
Wilson’s devotees absorb the same error, corrupting both themselves and others. What begins as admiration for Wilson’s ingenuity develops into settled allegiance to an aberrant ethical system that inverts biblical categories, insidiously turning vices into virtues and virtues into vices (Isa. 5:20–21)—especially in matters of speech, attitude, and cultural engagement, where a loose tongue masquerades as Christian liberty, humility is undervalued, and costless defiance parades as faithfulness.
The serrated style has produced not seasoned discernment but juvenile mimicry. Wilson’s successors display the swagger of pretenders instead of the maturity of prophets. Whether in Gabriel Rench’s crass parody of Matthew 23, in the adolescent banter of the CrossPolitic show, or in Wilson’s promotion of figures like Stephen Wolfe and Joel Webbon, the Moscow ethos has bred a culture of posturing, derision, and poor judgment—traits at odds with the sober-mindedness, love, and soundness in faith that Scripture enjoins (Titus 2:2). Rather than cultivating prophetic gravity, Wilson has normalized pugnacious folly, and his “sons” bear the mark.
Nor has he exercised discernment regarding an errant voice from his own generation, Gary DeMar (“Uncle Gary,” as Moscow calls him), whose hardened refusal to affirm the return of Christ and the resurrection of the dead continues to be welcomed on Moscow’s stage. This kid-glove treatment of a false teacher in their midst belies any claim to prophetic fidelity (1 Cor. 15:12–14; 2 Tim. 2:17–18), coming from a movement that boasts of its prophetic boldness.
The allure of Wilson is understandable. He styles himself as a fearless truth-teller in a church riddled with effeminate liars and cowards, as if he alone were left (cf. 1 Kgs. 19:10, 14). This pose attracts those eager to rally behind a lone warrior. Many drawn to him are convinced he is a present-day prophet called to push boundaries, a leader in a war where traditional rules of engagement no longer apply. As a result, what is obscene or brazen is overlooked or uncritically received as godliness. His rogue persona comes to be seen not only as acceptable but also as admirable, even necessary. It is especially compelling for men in search of a leader or father figure. More than a few have looked to Wilson’s example for permission to scorn, to use coarse talk, and to indulge a sense of superiority over liberals, cultural adversaries, and the Reformed and evangelical mainstream.
Wilson’s style entertains, scratches an itch, scores culture-war points, and often helps churches grow numerically when they identify with it. But what passes for bravery is something else entirely: something that does not require the sacrificial resolve of a prophet. Often it amounts to little more than fan service.
When Christians confuse Wilson’s provocation and unwholesome talk for prophetic ministry, they end up applauding a counterfeit courage and giving cover to sin. Cleverness is mistaken for wisdom, snark for moral conviction, and conceit for masculine strength. Triumphalism is confused with confidence in the truth. The failure of Wilson’s followers to discern this inversion of virtue and vice is sobering. Thus their understanding of the mind of Christ becomes warped, and they lose sight of the true nature and cost of speaking God’s truth to God’s people.
Much is made of manly courage. But if a man reserves his strongest words only for outsiders, it is not courage at all. Prophets did speak to the nations, but they saved their heaviest blows for the idols closest to home, and they bore the cost. When the fiercest edge cuts elsewhere, it is not prophetic steadfastness but crowd-pleasing performance. Catering to the crowd is never prophetic.
The problem runs deeper than tone or target; it is a matter of faulty method. Denny Burk has laid bare Wilson’s exegetical naïveté and theological superficiality. One example Burk highlights is Wilson’s claim in A Serrated Edge that σκύβαλα (“rubbish” or “dung”) in Philippians 3:8 carries the same shock value as the s-word in English, a reading that lacks linguistic and contextual support. (See Moisés Silva, “σκύβαλον,” New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology and Exegesis, vol. 4, 2014: 325–26.) This is not about whether modern writers may sometimes use strong terms but about Wilson’s exegesis. His reading of Philippians 3:8 collapses under the weight he puts on it, and the same flawed method carries through elsewhere in his handling of the biblical text. What follows builds on Burk’s critique and presses it further.
Wilson and his disciples seek scriptural warrant for their brand of coarse language. Wilson argues that “the prophets, the apostles and our Lord Jesus all exhibit a vast array of verbal behavior, including tenderness, love, insults, jokes, anger, and more,” and he concludes that if Scripture is to be our standard, the same range of expression must be found in our own speech (A Serrated Edge, 2003: 17). The questions, however, are whether Scripture actually contains the particular kind of verbal behavior Wilson wishes to legitimize, and more fundamentally, whether his appeal to precedent as a pattern for imitation can be regarded as hermeneutically sound.
God’s word does display breadth of expression. The prophets, the apostles, and Christ himself spoke at times with tenderness and at times with severity. But Wilson and those around him distort this reality, treating what the church has long recognized as filthiness, foolish talk, and ungracious speech as though they had divine warrant.
Two examples illustrate how Wilson and his followers distort Scripture to justify their “salty talk.” The first example comes from Wilson’s interpretation of Colossians 4:6: “Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt.” Douglas Moo explains that the phrase “seasoned with salt” signifies “gracious, warm, and winsome words” spoken “in a manner that will make the gospel attractive” (Colossians and Philemon, 2008: 331). Wilson, however, stands the phrase on its head, reinterpreting it to mean “seasoned with the occasional red hot chili pepper.” Among those peppers are not only his jabs and taunts but also his infamous use of the c-word for women, which he presents as a righteous application of Paul’s injunction to season with salt. In this way, Wilson turns an exhortation to gracious, gospel-adorning speech into a call for occasional obscenities and barbs. What Paul gave as a safeguard against corrosive patterns of speech that discredit the gospel is twisted into a license to indulge in them.
Wilson’s interpretation does not merely misrepresent Paul’s words; it also embraces an ancient pagan understanding of “seasoned with salt”—an understanding that identified “salt” with wit, and not a harmless wit but one that regularly degenerated into the crudeness Paul denounces in Ephesians 5:4. J. B. Lightfoot observes in his comments on Colossians 4:6,
Heathen writers also insisted that discourse should be ‘seasoned with salt’ …. They likewise dwelt on the connexion between χάρις [“grace”] and ἅλɛς [“salt”] …. Their notion of ‘salt’ however was wit, and generally the kind of wit which degenerated into the εὐτραπελία [“coarse jesting”] denounced by St Paul in Ephes. v. 4.
Far from drawing on apostolic teaching, Wilson has revived a corrupt heathen convention of wit, calling evil good and ascribing to Paul what the apostle condemns. Lightfoot’s historical and exegetical analysis underscores Kevin DeYoung’s pastoral concern: “much of the appeal of Moscow is an appeal to what is worldly in us.”
The second example comes from Wilson’s ally Gabriel Rench. In his post mentioned above, he rendered Ezekiel 23:20 as “[their] junk was hung like a donkey and ejaculated like horses,” then accused critics of failing to do “the spade work” in “the original languages.” Yet “hung” is nowhere represented in the original, “ejaculated” turns a static Hebrew noun into an action, and בָּשָׂר (“flesh”) is a euphemism that cannot accurately be translated as “junk.” In Rench’s version, Ezekiel’s graphic yet restrained metaphor is debased into crude slang and then attributed to the prophet. Wilson himself once wrote, “A godly satirist should look carefully (and regularly) at the effect he is having on younger Christians who know him and desire to imitate him (2 Cor. 11:1).”
In addition to this kind of blatant mishandling of God’s word, Wilson and his imitators treat the variety of biblical voices as a repertoire of binding precedents. Wilson asks, “What standard do we use” to sort out the “vast array” of biblical expression? He answers, “When this standard is a scriptural one, the same range of expression will be found in those who imitate the Scriptures, and that range will exhibit scriptural proportions” (A Serrated Edge, 2003: 17). In other words, every righteous expression in Scripture becomes fair game—and is to be imitated in scriptural proportions.
But this way of reasoning produces flimsy appeals to precedent and reduces quickly to absurdity: if bare precedent truly sets the pattern for ministry, why not “lament and wail … stripped and naked” like Micah (Mic. 1:8)—even if only once, to keep scriptural proportions? Why not go “naked and barefoot for three years as a sign and a portent” like Isaiah (Isa. 20:3)? While still pastoring in the CREC last year, I pressed the reductio publicly, asking, “Where are Moscow’s naked prophets?” Moreover, if faithfulness in speech really requires imitating the full range of biblical expression, then consistency would also demand publishing intimate poetry drawn from personal experience in the manner of Solomon’s Song (cf. Song 4:5; 7:2–3, 7–8). Moscow’s selectivity exposes the specious hermeneutical project for what it is: a pretext.
Trivializing and cherry-picking Scripture—this is The Moscow Method.
Prophetic precedent gives no license to vile slurs, contemptuous ridicule, or corrupting talk of any kind. Rather, it summons us to speak words that build up and give grace to those who hear (Eph. 4:29). This is the pattern for faithful ministry in every age. As Richard Hooker wisely cautioned, “There will come a time when three words uttered with charity and meekness shall receive a far more blessed reward than three thousand volumes written with disdainful sharpness of wit” (p. 11).
The way forward for Wilson is not more escalation or equivocation but repentance. Scripture speaks with unmistakable clarity: “Let there be no filthiness nor foolish talk nor crude joking, which are out of place” (Eph. 5:4). No rationalization can sanctify the salty talk of the heathen or the ungracious speech that Scripture forbids. Until Wilson turns from indecent provocation, from lampooning rather than lamenting, from profiting rather than paying, and from mockery rather than meekness (2 Tim. 2:24–25), his prophetic pretensions ring hollow and his serrated edge remains a scandal to the gospel.