(FāVS News) — Days after challenging Pastor Doug Wilson to a public debate, Peter Bell, producer and host of the podcast “Sons of Patriarchy,” made a social media confession that has forced a reckoning within the community he helped build around exposing abuse in patriarchal churches.
Bell, whose podcast investigates Wilson’s Moscow, Idaho-based church movement, said in a since-deleted Aug. 23 Facebook post that he struggled with pornography addiction for nearly two decades, was fired from multiple jobs for lying and experienced marital separation during his podcast’s first season last year.
The confession came shortly after Bell appeared at a Moscow community event Aug. 8 at the Kenworthy Performing Arts Center, where he and others spoke about the impact of Wilson’s teachings. The podcast producers scheduled their first Moscow visit to coincide with Grace Agenda, a weekend conference hosted by Wilson’s Christ Church that serves as a major recruiting event for the church. After the Kenworthy event, Bell and “Sons of Patriarchy” staff approached Wilson at the conference, and Wilson agreed to a one-on-one conversation with the podcast host, who has spent months documenting abuse allegations within Wilson’s Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches.
Bell acknowledged to FāVS News that the timing of his Facebook post was deliberate.
“With the recent airing of the CNN interview with Doug Wilson” — a profile that examined Wilson’s Christian nationalist moveme …