On Friday, former CNN anchor Don Lemon was arrested in Los Angeles for covering a protest that disrupted services at Cities Church in Minneapolis on January 18. The arrest drew widespread attention because of its infringement on Lemon’s First Amendment rights; journalism groups, including the National Association of Black Journalists, condemned it.
What got lost in the flurry of coverage was the connection between Cities Church and a Christian nationalist movement that has gained increasing clout and has strong connections to the Trump administration. Cities Church was founded in part by a pastor named Joe Rigney, a close associate of Doug Wilson, whose Christian nationalist fiefdom centered in Moscow, Idaho, has gained a national following.
Wilson is outspoken in his ultra-conservative beliefs. Well into his seventies, he is the unofficial patriarch of the TheoBros, a loose network of mostly millennial, extremely online Christian nationalist pastors, podcasters, and shitposters.
As I wrote about Wilson in 2024:
He has argued that the master-slave dynamic was “a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence,” called the trope of the dominant man and a submissive woman “an erotic necessity,” and opined that women never should have been given the right to vote. When I asked him about his most provocative statements, he compared himself to a chef who cooks with jalapeño peppers: “Some of my enemies online have combed through my writings, have gathered up all the jalapeños, and put them on one Ritz cracker,” he told me.
Wilson and his movement have ties to the Trump administration. US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth attends a Tennessee church in the denomination that Wilson founded, the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, and he has been spotted at Wilson’s newest CREC church in Washington, DC.
In a piece last week for the Christian publication World, Rigney—the pastor at Cities Church and author of the recent book The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits—wrote that he served for eight years at Cities Church before leaving for his current role at Wilson’s flagship Idaho church. In the piece, Rigney accuses Lemon of breaking the law by disrupting a religious gathering and calls on his fellow Christians to “grow in our ability to resist such intimidation.” He adds that Christians should “learn the tactics of God’s enemies and resist them with fortitude and joy, refusing to appease and placate the lawless mob.”
