Prevailing Winds "For the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is there is freedom . . ." 2 Cor. 3:17, TNIV

I had truly hoped that, because neither I nor a couple of other friends who looked again on his blog and couldn’t find Doug Wilson’s odious blather about how to tell if your church’s worship service is “effeminate,” he might have either suffered a pang of remorse, received some sort of rebuke from one of his cohorts, or even felt the conviction of the Holy Spirit and had thus removed it. But, alas — it’s still there, just dated earlier than I had written (my error), and still proudly nestled in between shameless self- and family-promotion and other musings about the very many things on which he is an expert whose opinion ought, thinketh he, to be considered the final word on all matter of issues. These range, if you’ll recall, from architecture to Latin, nutrition to land development, music to sex, home decor to beer, racist theologians to pre-millennialists, and virtually anything else in between, including young-earth creationism, pedophile rehabilitation, soteriology and Lynrd Skynrd. He’s a virtual pea-and-lentil country Renaissance Man, Wilson is, an Oxford Donwannabe with a staggering command of . . . well, ummmm . . . well, of the things in his own mind. Yeah, that’s it. Don’t underestimate what a big deal it would’ve been if, whether motivated by second thoughts of his own, a knuckle-rapping by a colleague, or the conviction of the Spirit, he had removed his Blog and Mablog post. The “Ten Reasons Why” your congregational worship service may not be sufficiently reeking of manliness, while imprudent, immature, and impotent in the strength of its argument, wasn’t anywhere close to the most reprehensible things he’s said or written in the decade I’ve studied him, and it’s safe to say that Wilson doesn’t countenance, much less consider, anyone else’s criticism. Indeed, with an elder board largely made up of men financially dependent on his business enterprises (I’m unable to use “ministries” here), he operates with precious little accountability, and the unfortunate legitimacy he’s gained in the larger Reformed and Evangelical establishment is not sufficient to make him accountable to those who’ve in recent years discovered the puckish witticisms and penetrating socio-religious analysis offered by the Patriarchal Pundit of the Palouse. In short, I can’t think of any mortal whose “Hey, Doug, better roll this one back” would mean a thing to him, and I feel on solid ground in saying, with great sadness, that the counsel and conviction of the Spirit appears to land on a heart hardened and a soul calloused. I wish I’d been right — because then he really would’ve taken the post down, and we could’ve clung to the hope that there were the faintest stirrings of conscience at work. But he didn’t remove the post, and I was wrong. It’s been a very long time since I’ve hoped to be right on something as much as I had my heart set on this. And because my hopes for Doug Wilson rely on the character of the God I worship and not on my “goodness” or his, I will always have hope. Still, the disappointment I feel is nothing, I fear, compared to what I am confident is the continued grieving of the Holy Spirit, whose list of sins against the institution of arrogant, sneering malice Wilson represents numbers far more than ten.