On July 15, when former President Donald Trump first appeared at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, he brought along two new accessories. One was a large bandage covering his ear, which had been nicked by a would-be assassin’s bullet. The other was Ohio’s first-term senator and Hillbilly Elegy author JD Vance, who was about to debut as the GOP vice presidential hopeful.

Two days later, after paying tribute to his wife, Usha—the child of immigrants from India—and their three biracial kids, Vance portrayed a vision of America that resonated deeply with Trump voters. “America is not just an idea,” he said solemnly. “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.”

To many viewers at home, this seemed like the stuff of a boilerplate, patriotic stump speech. But the words “shared history” lit up a far-right evangelical corner of social media. “America is a particular place with a particular people,” Joel Webbon, a Texas pastor and podcaster, wrote on X. “This is one of the most important political questions facing America right now,” posted former Trump administration official William Wolfe. “Answer it wrong, we will go the way of Europe, where the native-born populations are being utterly displaced by third world migrants and Muslims. Answer it right, and we can renew America once more.”

Vance was embracing one of their most cherished beliefs: America should belong to Christians, and, more specifically, white ones. “The American nation is an actual historical people,” says Stephen Wolfe (no relation to William), the author of the 2022 book The Case for Christian Nationalism, “not just a hodgepodge of various ethnicities, but actually a place of settlement and rootedness.” For this group of evangelical leaders, Vance, a 40-year-old former Marine who waxes rapturous about masculinity and women’s revered role as mothers, was the perfect tribune to spread their gospel of patriarchal Christian nationalism.

For years, graying, khaki-clad evangelists have faithfully made the rounds at conservative events. However, as Wolfe, a 41-year-old former Princeton postdoc, writes in his book, these “men in wrinkled, short-sleeve golf shirts, sitting plump in their seats” are yesterday’s Christians. Among younger activists, they inspire the rolling of eyes—they are the embodiment of an ineffective boomer approach to taking over the United States for Jesus.

In their place, a group of young pastors hope to spearhead a Christian nationalist glow-up as they eagerly await a “Christian prince” to rule America. These often bearded thirty- and fortysomethings have suits that actually fit. They are extremely online, constantly posting on myriad platforms, broadcasting their YouTube shows from mancaves, and convening an endless stream of conferences for likeminded followers. Let’s call them, as one scholar I spoke with did, the TheoBros.

For all their youthful modishness, this group is actually more conservative than their older counterparts. Many TheoBros, for example, don’t think women belong in the pulpit or the voting booth—and even want to repeal the 19th Amendment. For some, prison reform would involve replacing incarceration with public flogging. Unlike more mainstream Christian nationalists, like House Speaker Mike Johnson, who are obsessed with the US Constitution, many TheoBros believe that the Constitution is dead and that we should be governed by the Ten Commandments.

In American Reformer, their unofficial magazine, hagiographies of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco appear alongside full-throated defenses of countries that execute gay people. On podcasts, the TheoBros unpack “the perils of multiculturalism,” expose “Burning Man’s wicked agenda,” and peel back the nefarious feminist plot of Taylor Swift. In Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism, one of their seminal texts, he writes that in an ideal Christian nation, heretics could be executed.

The rise of the TheoBros worries more mainstream religious conservatives. Janet Mefferd, a former Christian radio host and journalist who tracks their ascendancy, says her community is alarmed to see an extremist movement gaining traction. “I’m not sure what the endgame is, other than they want to advance Christian nationalism,” she says. “But a lot of us find that terrifying.”

“I’m not sure what the endgame is, other than they want to advance Christian nationalism—but a lot of us find that terrifying.”

The TheoBros’ strategy is bottom-up: They aim to convert small American towns into Christian enclaves. But it is also top-down: Some are working to position themselves close to the locus of federal power. Vance, a Catholic convert married to a Hindu, would seem an unlikely hero for a movement of devout Protestants who believe in a homogeneous America. But over the last few years, his political orbit has increasingly overlapped with that of the TheoBros—so much so that to careful observers, his public echoes of their ideas are beginning to sound less like coincidence and more like dog whistles.

And those dog whistles signal the major themes of this election: hypermasculinity, declining birthrates, ethnonationalism—and no small measure of carefully curated misogyny. If you want to know some of the actors who red-pilled Vance, or at least those who flock to him, you need to meet the TheoBros.

With no meetings, website, or an explicit statement of faith that unifies their beliefs, the TheoBros are not an official organization. They identify with 16th-century French theologian John Calvin, who spawned a rigid and deterministic form of Protestantism. Julie Ingersoll, a University of North Florida religion scholar, traces the current movement back to R.J. Rushdoony, an Armenian American philosopher who popularized the idea of Christian nationalism (and homeschooling) in the early 1970s.

Out of Rushdoony’s movement emerged two camps: the charismatic Christians, now known as the New Apostolic Reformation, and the reformed Protestants, which include the TheoBros. They share the goal of creating a Christian nation, says Ingersoll, but differ on a key point of theology: Adherents of the New Apostolic Reformation believe that God is still speaking directly to people through pastors who have declared themselves apostles and prophets. The TheoBros, meanwhile, believe that God said all he needed to say in the Bible.

Many TheoBros are also proponents of postmillennialism, the idea that believers can hasten Jesus’ return by fighting against the satanic forces of liberal excess. TheoBro Aaron Renn, an Accenture consultant turned Christian pundit, has described our current era as a “negative world,” where Christians are persecuted for their beliefs. Andrew Isker, another Bro, calls it “trashworld.”

Like all self-respecting millennials, the TheoBros have little tolerance for boomers, with the exception of their patriarch, Douglas Wilson, a 71-year-old pastor in Moscow, Idaho. When he was younger, Wilson imagined himself going into the family business—Christian bookstores—but after a stint in the military, he moved to Moscow in 1975 to study philosophy at the University of Idaho, where he became involved with the Jesus People, a kind of mashup of evangelical and hippie culture. He helped found Christ Church, the congregation over which he still presides and that regularly draws crowds of 1,300.

Wilson has since turned the college town into his own Christian kingdom. He helped found New Saint Andrews College, the Canon Press publishing house, and Logos School, one of the nation’s first classical Christian schools, where students exclusively study the Western canon. Wilson embraced Calvinism in 1988 and remade his church from the freewheeling Jesus People hub into something far more sober and buttoned-up, where women couldn’t be church leaders and the only music allowed was hymns and psalms. In the early 1990s, Wilson helped launch the Association of Classical Christian Schools, which had 502 member institutions across the United States as of March 2023.

“The sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.”

His influence over Moscow has not been without controversy. In a 2021 Vice exposé, former members of Christ Church alleged that ministers had encouraged them to stay in abusive relationships. That tracks with Wilson’s 1999 book, Fidelity: How to Be a One-Woman Man, in which he wrote, “The sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.” For that reason, Wilson wrote, the dynamic of a dominant man and a submissive woman is “an erotic necessity.” (Wilson called allegations of the church urging women to stay in abusive relationships “categorically false.”)

Wilson has also promoted another form of dominance. In the 1996 book Southern Slavery: As It Was, Wilson and his co-author argued that the master-slave dynamic was “a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence,” and “there has never been a multi-racial society which has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world” as that of the antebellum South. (In a 2020 blog post, Wilson said he now allows that while “the benevolent master is not a myth, the idea of the horrific taskmaster is no abolitionist myth either.”) When I asked Wilson about his controversial statements, he likened himself to a chef who strategically deploys jalapeno peppers: “Then some of my enemies online have combed through my writings, have gathered up all the jalapenos and put them on one Ritz cracker.”

In July, at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, DC, Wilson shared the stage with Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), and Mike Lee (R-Utah), as well as Vance, who auditioned his “America is a people” bit a week before his star turn at the GOP convention. Wilson agrees with Vance’s suggestion that children should be allotted votes, managed by their parents. “I would like to see elections where households vote,” he told me. Men, as the heads of households, would actually cast the votes. Though he believes that women’s suffrage was “a mistake,” he would allow a special exception for single mothers.

Wilson offered the crowd a few one-liners (“I’m a Presbyterian, not a Lesbyterian”), but mostly, he talked about the persecution of Christians. “It used to be that the sexually troubled had to keep their kinks hidden away in the closet,” he mused. “Now it is the conservative Christian who needs to keep his virtues hidden in the recesses of the closet.” After the National Conservatism Conference, Wilson appeared at the Believers’ Summit, which was headlined by Trump and hosted by the conservative political group Turning Point USA.

But it’s not just conferences and interviews with the likes of Tucker Carlson where Wilson promotes his ideas. He has a blog, a podcast, and a YouTube channel, thanks mostly to the urging of his children and younger colleagues. One example is that every year since 2018, Wilson has been celebrating what he calls No Quarter November: “The month where we say out loud what everyone is thinking.” In a 2023 video, which was the brainchild of one of his sons, Wilson sits at a sumptuously appointed Thanksgiving table, surrounded by his children and grandchildren, and addresses the camera. “If you think of my blog as a shotgun,” he says, “this is the month when I saw off all my typical, careful qualifications and blast away with a double-barreled shorty.” His wife, clad in an apron, brings out a turkey and places it in front of him, and then the tranquil scene is interrupted by a blaring alarm and a glowing red “perimeter breach” sign. Wilson excuses himself, heads to his garage, and straps on a flamethrower. After using it to light a cigar, he aims the fire at cardboard cutouts of Disney princesses Elsa and Ariel, and the logos of Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and Netflix.

Wilson’s willingness to make campy content sets him apart, says Rachel Tabachnick, an extremism researcher who has been studying Christian nationalism for decades. “Instead of a crotchety old guy talking about stoning people, he’s like, super cool,” she says. “He’s witty.”

In subsequent videos, Wilson tackled women’s culpability in rape, the dark side of empathy, and the virtues of “something called the patriarchy—that which, according to our soi-disant and lisping political theorists, must be smashed. Only they say something like ‘thmasth.’”

Wilson has used his platforms to anoint the next generation of ultraconservative reformed Christian pastors, all of whom happened to be men. Mefferd, the conservative Christian journalist, told me that Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism got traction in mainstream Christian circles in part “because Doug Wilson endorsed.” Another Wilson protégé is Joel Webbon, a 38-year-old pastor who hosts a podcast and YouTube show, which he films from a wingback leather chair in a book-lined room.

Webbon wasn’t always reformed—he is an alumnus of a Bible school run by a New Apostolic Reformation affiliated outfit, which he now considers “straight-up heretical.” In his 20s, he broke from the group, moved to Texas, and started his own church. In a video from a few years ago, Webbon credited Wilson with emboldening him to say whatever he wanted—like telling a guest that the Founding Fathers weren’t responsible for the slave trade because Africans had done the actual kidnapping and enslaving.

“Kamala sees happy, large families and hates them. She wants them destroyed. She wants you to never be able to have this. She is a nasty, bitter harridan who hates all that is true, good, and beautiful.”

For Webbon, it was intensely liberating to watch Wilson speak in public without worrying about being canceled. “You stay in your little corner, you stay on your little leash, because you’re like, I don’t know what will happen,” Webbon said. “But when you see some other guy do it, and you’re like—that’s the worst thing that can happen? Vice writes an article about you? [Christianity Today editor-in-chief] Russell Moore won’t invite you to his birthday party anymore? Like, that’s it.” At a recent conference, he registered dismay over immigrants in his community. “It’s like full, straight-up Hindu garb at our neighborhood swimming pool, that my daughter is asking [about and] I’m trying to explain.”

In August, he remarked on his show that “a lot of people are gonna be surprised” when “you’re spending eternity worshipping Christ next to Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee and Jonathan Edwards, and, you know, George Whitefield and Martin Luther King Jr.’s in hell.”

Webbon is so impressed by his own audacity that he maintains an online list of all the controversies in which he’s become embroiled. There, he explains why he called Christian men living in California “stupid” (they could just move to a red state); why he once ordered his wife to stop reading a book on theology (he didn’t want her exposed to beliefs that were different from his own); and why he believes in a patriarchal household structure (the Bible says so). Webbon, who is planning to host a conference in Texas next spring called “Christ Is King: How to Defeat Trashworld!” maintains that a “return to the Constitution is impossible” and that the only viable alternative is the Ten Commandments.

Some of Wilson’s other acolytes are attempting to create their own versions of Moscow, Idaho. Take Brian Sauvé, a 33-year-old Christian recording artist, podcaster, and pastor of Refuge Church in Ogden, Utah. Like Webbon, Sauvé wasn’t always reformed—Refuge began as a charismatic Christian church. After the lead pastor resigned in a scandal, the then-24-year-old Sauvé ascended to take his place, immersed himself in reformed theology, and moved the church in a new direction. Today, he presides over a Moscow-esque ecosystem: a publishing house called New Christendom Press, as well as St. Brendan’s Classical Christian Academy, modeled after those in Wilson’s network. “Can you feel it in the sails?” reads St. Brendan’s website. “The stiff breeze out of Moscow, Idaho? We can.”

On his three podcasts and to his more than 53,000 followers on X, Sauvé regularly states that women’s primary function is to bear children. In July, after Vance’s comments about “childless cat ladies who are miserable” began widely circulating, he posted: “It is desperately sad to think of all the intentionally barren women who will find themselves totally alone in their 50s, realizing their irreversible mistake. They will wish they could trade it all—money, vacations, independence, all of it—for children they can now never have.”

But unlike more mainstream conservatives, Sauvé does not even pretend to champion the idea of a Judeo-Christian nation. He posted in July, “[O]ur political system is heavily influenced by Jews who reject Christ and embrace all manner of evils.”

An even more well-connected Wilson emulator is Josh Abbotoy, executive director of American Reformer and managing partner of a venture capital fund and real estate firm called New Founding. A former fellow of the right-wing think tank the Claremont Institute, Abbotoy reported that he recently participated in a Project 2025 presidential transition “strategic planning session” hosted by the right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation. Bucks County Beacon reporter Jennifer Cohn revealed venture capitalist Chris Buskirk was listed as the editor and publisher. In 2022, Buskirk co-founded the Rockbridge Network, a collection of powerful Trump donors including Catholic judicial kingmaker Leonard Leo and Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel. Another co-founder of the Rockbridge Network? None other than JD Vance.

Thiel, Vance’s mentor and former employer, is also a major funder of the National Conservatism movement. Obsessed with global birthrates, Thiel spent $10 million on his protégé’s successful 2022 Senate campaign. In July, shortly after Trump had announced Vance as his running mate, Cohn surfaced a tweet by New Founding’s network director, Josh Clemans: a photo of Vance with several New Founding staffers. The caption read “Our guy.”

New Founding lists as a partner the Society for American Civic Renewal, a secretive fraternal order founded by Indiana shampoo baron Charles Haywood, who describes himself as an aspiring Christian “warlord.” According to founder Nate Fischer, New Founding wants to “form the backbone of a renewed American regime” and that its members “understand the nature of authority and its legitimate forceful exercise.” But its main public-facing project appears to be turning tracts of land in Appalachia into Christian communities. Promotional materials describe a community of “unmatched seclusion” where “simple country faith” protects local culture from rainbow flags and crime. Potential buyers, he advises, should not delay. “Who’s going to grab the land? Is it going to be good, based people who want to build something inspiring, something authentic to the region’s history, or is it going to be Bill Gates and BlackRock and hippies from California?”

One eager customer is 38-year-old TheoBro Andrew Isker—the pastor who interned at Wilson’s church, studied divinity at New Saint Andrews, and co-wrote a book on Christian nationalism with Andrew Torba, the openly antisemitic CEO of the social media platform Gab. In July, Isker announced on X that he planned to move his family of seven to lead a church in a New Founding community in Tennessee. Life in his native Minnesota, he said, had become untenable because of permissive laws around trans rights and abortion, not to mention how hospitable the state has been to refugees. “Minnesota is one of the top destinations for resettling foreign people hostile to our way of life,” he said.

That month, Isker spoke at a Texas conference about the “war on white America” alongside Paul Gottfried, the mentor of prominent white nationalist Richard Spencer. The conference was hosted by the True Texas Project, a far-right group with ties to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

Like many TheoBros, Isker sees much to like in Vance. In early July, before Trump announced his running mate, Isker referred to him as “Senator JD Vance (R-Heritage America).” In late July, he posted a video of Vance and told his 29,000 followers, “You need to double down on childless cat lady discourse. Kamala sees happy, large families and hates them. She wants them destroyed. She wants you to never be able to have this. She is a nasty, bitter harridan who hates all that is true, good, and beautiful.”

One problem is that there simply are not enough TheoBros to populate Christian communities like the one Isker plans to move to. Enter William Wolfe, the founder of the Center for Baptist Leadership, which aims to persuade members of the Southern Baptist Convention that it, the largest of all Protestant denominations in the United States, has fallen prey to the corrupting forces of liberalism. Baptists are only the beginning. Wolfe wants to win over the entire evangelical mainstream, which he and other TheoBros refer to as “Big Eva.” In August, he posted on X, “Once you realize that Big Eva thinks it’s a bigger sin to desire to preserve the customs, heritage, values, and cultural homogeneity of your own nation than to kill the unborn in the womb, you can better understand their moral framework.”

Wolfe served in the Trump administration both as the deputy assistant secretary of defense and as director of House affairs at the Department of State. He is also an alumnus of Heritage Action, a sister organization of the Heritage Foundation, the arch-conservative think tank behind Project 2025, whose chief architect, Russell Vought, posted on X that he was “proud to work with @William_E_Wolfe on scoping out a sound Christian Nationalism.” A few months later, the Bucks County Beacon uncovered a lengthy online manifesto on the goals of Christian nationalists. The document, which listed Wolfe and Joel Webbon as contributing editors and Oklahoma Sen. Dusty Deevers as a co-author, called for “civil magistrates” to usher in “the establishment of the Ten Commandments as the foundational law of the nation.”

The manifesto doesn’t specify exactly how Christian nationalists should achieve these goals. As Tabachnick, the extremism researcher, interprets it, the TheoBros are imagining a utopia where “they are going to be free to be entrepreneurs in all different senses, including the tech world that they’re mixing with so freely.” The key, she said, is that authoritarianism “is required to have the utopian vision.”

Last year, the extremism watchdog group Right Wing Watch posted a video of Wolfe quoting a scripture passage. There are times when “even the God of peace proclaims by his providence, ‘to arms!’” he says. “If we have ever lived in a point of time in American history since then that we could argue that now is a time ‘to arms’ again, I think we are getting close.”

William Wolfe’s Christian nationalism manifesto made the rounds on social media, but in mainstream conservative outlets, it was Stephen Wolfe who brought TheoBro ideas to the wider world. In his book, which was praised by editors at the Federalist and the American Conservative, Wolfe paints America as a “gynocracy” whose government and culture have been feminized by unhappy women leaders. (Sound familiar?) He has stated on X that women should not have the right to vote, and that “interethnic” marriage can be “sinful.”

Wolfe grew up in Napa, California, and his father was an admirer of the right-wing pundit and erstwhile GOP presidential candidate Pat Buchanan. After attending West Point and serving in the Army, Wolfe earned advanced degrees before leaving academia to “do the Wendell Berry thing” in North Carolina with his wife and four kids.

Over the summer, Wolfe, 41, agreed to speak with me on the condition that I refer to him as “Dr. Wolfe” and call him an “expert on Christian nationalism.” The Dr. Wolfe I spoke with was a more muted version of the firebrand I’d watched online. He said his ideal version of America would be led by a Caesar figure. Gay marriage would be strictly prohibited. Women would not be allowed to vote—instead, men would vote for their households.

When I brought up the bit from his book about heretics being killed, he grew annoyed. “I do think it’s permissible, in principle, for a state to suppress theological heresy, but that doesn’t mean that it’s prudent or proper, suitable in every circumstance or every tradition or way of life.” The Founding Fathers, he added, had encouraged religious liberty, so killing heretics would not be appropriate in the United States that we inhabit.

We turned to remarks he had made at a recent conference convened by Brian Sauvé: “I think we need to reflect on this idea of Judeo-Christianity, or Judeo-Christian worldview, or Judeo-Christian whatever, and really eradicate that from our thinking. Because if we say that America is a Judeo-Christian country, then it can’t be a Christian country, okay?” What role, I asked him, would Jews play? After a deep sigh, he told me that they would be allowed to “exercise their religion freely.”

“We need to reflect on this idea of Judeo-Christianity, or Judeo-Christian worldview, or Judeo-Christian whatever, and really eradicate that from our thinking. Because if we say that America is a Judeo-Christian country, then it can’t be a Christian country, okay?”

We spoke a week before Vance’s RNC speech, and Wolfe’s remarks helped me understand what the TheoBros heard in Vance’s phrase about America as a people. The founders, Wolfe noted, intended for their country to be “Anglo-Protestant with an American inflection.” America, he continued, is “a place of settlement and rootedness, but it’s an open ethnicity in which people can become one of us.” Which is to say that, like some others, Wolfe is not necessarily opposed to the idea of nonwhite people in America—as long as they agree to assimilate to the Anglo-Protestant dominant culture.

In this telling, America is not a pluralistic society at all, but rather one in which there exists an uneasy truce between Christians and those they reluctantly tolerate. Toward the end of our conversation, I asked Wolfe what motivated him. “I want Christians to be more assertive and to recognize the Christian heritage of the American way of life, and to seek to restore that,” he said. “This is a Christian country, and we’ve got to work to restore it to what it once was.”

In his keynote address at Sauvé’s conference, titled “Why Multicultural Pluralism Fails and What to Build Instead,” Wolfe called the concept of America as a melting pot “an early 20th-century idea cooked up by a Jew in New York who despised the confident Anglo-Protestant establishment.” WASPs were the “distinct ethnicity” of America, he insisted, and America should only welcome those who aspired to assimilate. As he put it, “This is our homeland, and we welcome you on the condition of conformity.” Or, in the words of JD Vance, America “is a group of people.”

Correction, September 19: An earlier version of this article incorrectly described Chris Buskirk’s role at American Reformer.

On July 15, when former President Donald Trump first appeared at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, he brought along two new accessories. One was a large bandage covering his ear, which had been nicked by a would-be assassin’s bullet. The other was Ohio’s first-term senator and Hillbilly Elegy author JD Vance, who was about to debut as the GOP vice presidential hopeful.

Two days later, after paying tribute to his wife, Usha—the child of immigrants from India—and their three biracial kids, Vance portrayed a vision of America that resonated deeply with Trump voters. “America is not just an idea,” he said solemnly. “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.”

To many viewers at home, this seemed like the stuff of a boilerplate, patriotic stump speech. But the words “shared history” lit up a far-right evangelical corner of social media. “America is a particular place with a particular people,” Joel Webbon, a Texas pastor and podcaster, wrote on X. “This is one of the most important political questions facing America right now,” posted former Trump administration official William Wolfe. “Answer it wrong, we will go the way of Europe, where the native-born populations are being utterly displaced by third world migrants and Muslims. Answer it right, and we can renew America once more.”

Vance was embracing one of their most cherished beliefs: America should belong to Christians, and, more specifically, white ones. “The American nation is an actual historical people,” says Stephen Wolfe (no relation to William), the author of the 2022 book The Case for Christian Nationalism, “not just a hodgepodge of various ethnicities, but actually a place of settlement and rootedness.” For this group of evangelical leaders, Vance, a 40-year-old former Marine who waxes rapturous about masculinity and women’s revered role as mothers, was the perfect tribune to spread their gospel of patriarchal Christian nationalism.

For years, graying, khaki-clad evangelists have faithfully made the rounds at conservative events. However, as Wolfe, a 41-year-old former Princeton postdoc, writes in his book, these “men in wrinkled, short-sleeve golf shirts, sitting plump in their seats” are yesterday’s Christians. Among younger activists, they inspire the rolling of eyes—they are the embodiment of an ineffective boomer approach to taking over the United States for Jesus.

In their place, a group of young pastors hope to spearhead a Christian nationalist glow-up as they eagerly await a “Christian prince” to rule America. These often bearded thirty- and fortysomethings have suits that actually fit. They are extremely online, constantly posting on myriad platforms, broadcasting their YouTube shows from mancaves, and convening an endless stream of conferences for likeminded followers. Let’s call them, as one scholar I spoke with did, the TheoBros.

For all their youthful modishness, this group is actually more conservative than their older counterparts. Many TheoBros, for example, don’t think women belong in the pulpit or the voting booth—and even want to repeal the 19th Amendment. For some, prison reform would involve replacing incarceration with public flogging. Unlike more mainstream Christian nationalists, like House Speaker Mike Johnson, who are obsessed with the US Constitution, many TheoBros believe that the Constitution is dead and that we should be governed by the Ten Commandments.

In American Reformer, their unofficial magazine, hagiographies of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco appear alongside full-throated defenses of countries that execute gay people. On podcasts, the TheoBros unpack “the perils of multiculturalism,” expose “Burning Man’s wicked agenda,” and peel back the nefarious feminist plot of Taylor Swift. In Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism, one of their seminal texts, he writes that in an ideal Christian nation, heretics could be executed.

The rise of the TheoBros worries more mainstream religious conservatives. Janet Mefferd, a former Christian radio host and journalist who tracks their ascendancy, says her community is alarmed to see an extremist movement gaining traction. “I’m not sure what the endgame is, other than they want to advance Christian nationalism,” she says. “But a lot of us find that terrifying.”

“I’m not sure what the endgame is, other than they want to advance Christian nationalism— but a lot of us find that terrifying.”

The TheoBros’ strategy is bottom-up: They aim to convert small American towns into Christian enclaves. But it is also top-down: Some are working to position themselves close to the locus of federal power. Vance, a Catholic convert married to a Hindu, would seem an unlikely hero for a movement of devout Protestants who believe in a homogeneous America. But over the last few years, his political orbit has increasingly overlapped with that of the TheoBros—so much so that to careful observers, his public echoes of their ideas are beginning to sound less like coincidence and more like dog whistles.

And those dog whistles signal the major themes of this election: hypermasculinity, declining birthrates, ethnonationalism—and no small measure of carefully curated misogyny. If you want to know some of the actors who red-pilled Vance, or at least those who flock to him, you need to meet the TheoBros.

With no meetings, website, or an explicit statement of faith that unifies their beliefs, the TheoBros are not an official organization. They identify with 16th-century French theologian John Calvin, who spawned a rigid and deterministic form of Protestantism. Julie Ingersoll, a University of North Florida religion scholar, traces the current movement back to R.J. Rushdoony, an Armenian American philosopher who popularized the idea of Christian nationalism (and homeschooling) in the early 1970s.

Out of Rushdoony’s movement emerged two camps: the charismatic Christians, now known as the New Apostolic Reformation, and the reformed Protestants, which include the TheoBros. They share the goal of creating a Christian nation, says Ingersoll, but differ on a key point of theology: Adherents of the New Apostolic Reformation believe that God is still speaking directly to people through pastors who have declared themselves apostles and prophets. The TheoBros, meanwhile, believe that God said all he needed to say in the Bible.

Many TheoBros are also proponents of postmillennialism, the idea that believers can hasten Jesus’ return by fighting against the satanic forces of liberal excess. TheoBro Aaron Renn, an Accenture consultant turned Christian pundit, has described our current era as a “negative world,” where Christians are persecuted for their beliefs. Andrew Isker, another Bro, calls it “trashworld.”

Like all self-respecting millennials, the TheoBros have little tolerance for boomers, with the exception of their patriarch, Douglas Wilson, a 71-year-old pastor in Moscow, Idaho. When he was younger, Wilson imagined himself going into the family business—Christian bookstores—but after a stint in the military, he moved to Moscow in 1975 to study philosophy at the University of Idaho, where he became involved with the Jesus People, a kind of mashup of evangelical and hippie culture. He helped found Christ Church, the congregation over which he still presides and that regularly draws crowds of 1,300.

Wilson has since turned the college town into his own Christian kingdom. He helped found New Saint Andrews College, the Canon Press publishing house, and Logos School, one of the nation’s first classical Christian schools, where students exclusively study the Western canon. Wilson embraced Calvinism in 1988 and remade his church from the freewheeling Jesus People hub into something far more sober and buttoned-up, where women couldn’t be church leaders and the only music allowed was hymns and psalms. In the early 1990s, Wilson helped launch the Association of Classical Christian Schools, which had 502 member institutions across the United States as of March 2023.

“The sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.”

His influence over Moscow has not been without controversy. In a 2021 Vice exposé, former members of Christ Church alleged that ministers had encouraged them to stay in abusive relationships. That tracks with Wilson’s 1999 book, Fidelity: How to Be a One-Woman Man, in which he wrote, “The sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.” For that reason, Wilson wrote, the dynamic of a dominant man and a submissive woman is “an erotic necessity.” (Wilson called allegations of the church urging women to stay in abusive relationships “categorically false.”)

Wilson has also promoted another form of dominance. In the 1996 book Southern Slavery: As It Was, Wilson and his co-author argued that the master-slave dynamic was “a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence,” and “there has never been a multi-racial society which has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world” as that of the antebellum South. (In a 2020 blog post, Wilson said he now allows that while “the benevolent master is not a myth, the idea of the horrific taskmaster is no abolitionist myth either.”) When I asked Wilson about his controversial statements, he likened himself to a chef who strategically deploys jalapeno peppers: “Then some of my enemies online have combed through my writings, have gathered up all the jalapenos and put them on one Ritz cracker.”

In July, at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, DC, Wilson shared the stage with Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), and Mike Lee (R-Utah), as well as Vance, who auditioned his “America is a people” bit a week before his star turn at the GOP convention. Wilson agrees with Vance’s suggestion that children should be allotted votes, managed by their parents. “I would like to see elections where households vote,” he told me. Men, as the heads of households, would actually cast the votes. Though he believes that women’s suffrage was “a mistake,” he would allow a special exception for single mothers.

Wilson offered the crowd a few one-liners (“I’m a Presbyterian, not a Lesbyterian”), but mostly, he talked about the persecution of Christians. “It used to be that the sexually troubled had to keep their kinks hidden away in the closet,” he mused. “Now it is the conservative Christian who needs to keep his virtues hidden in the recesses of the closet.” After the National Conservatism Conference, Wilson appeared at the Believers’ Summit, which was headlined by Trump and hosted by the conservative political group Turning Point USA.

But it’s not just conferences and interviews with the likes of Tucker Carlson where Wilson promotes his ideas. He has a blog, a podcast, and a YouTube channel, thanks mostly to the urging of his children and younger colleagues. One example is that every year since 2018, Wilson has been celebrating what he calls No Quarter November: “The month where we say out loud what everyone is thinking.” In a 2023 video, which was the brainchild of one of his sons, Wilson sits at a sumptuously appointed Thanksgiving table, surrounded by his children and grandchildren, and addresses the camera. “If you think of my blog as a shotgun,” he says, “this is the month when I saw off all my typical, careful qualifications and blast away with a double-barreled shorty.” His wife, clad in an apron, brings out a turkey and places it in front of him, and then the tranquil scene is interrupted by a blaring alarm and a glowing red “perimeter breach” sign. Wilson excuses himself, heads to his garage, and straps on a flamethrower. After using it to light a cigar, he aims the fire at cardboard cutouts of Disney princesses Elsa and Ariel, and the logos of Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and Netflix.

Wilson’s willingness to make campy content sets him apart, says Rachel Tabachnick, an extremism researcher who has been studying Christian nationalism for decades. “Instead of a crotchety old guy talking about stoning people, he’s like, super cool,” she says. “He’s witty.”

In subsequent videos, Wilson tackled women’s culpability in rape, the dark side of empathy, and the virtues of “something called the patriarchy—that which, according to our soi-disant and lisping political theorists, must be smashed. Only they say something like ‘thmasth.’”

Wilson has used his platforms to anoint the next generation of ultraconservative reformed Christian pastors, all of whom happened to be men. Mefferd, the conservative Christian journalist, told me that Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism got traction in mainstream Christian circles in part “because Doug Wilson endorsed.” Another Wilson protégé is Joel Webbon, a 38-year-old pastor who hosts a podcast and YouTube show, which he films from a wingback leather chair in a book-lined room.

Webbon wasn’t always reformed—he is an alumnus of a Bible school run by a New Apostolic Reformation affiliated outfit, which he now considers “straight-up heretical.” In his 20s, he broke from the group, moved to Texas, and started his own church. In a video from a few years ago, Webbon credited Wilson with emboldening him to say whatever he wanted—like telling a guest that the Founding Fathers weren’t responsible for the slave trade because Africans had done the actual kidnapping and enslaving.

“Kamala sees happy, large families and hates them. She wants them destroyed. She wants you to never be able to have this. She is a nasty, bitter harridan who hates all that is true, good, and beautiful.”

For Webbon, it was intensely liberating to watch Wilson speak in public without worrying about being canceled. “You stay in your little corner, you stay on your little leash, because you’re like, I don’t know what will happen,” Webbon said. “But when you see some other guy do it, and you’re like—that’s the worst thing that can happen? Vice writes an article about you? [Christianity Today editor-in-chief] Russell Moore won’t invite you to his birthday party anymore? Like, that’s it.” At a recent conference, he registered dismay over immigrants in his community. “It’s like full, straight-up Hindu garb at our neighborhood swimming pool, that my daughter is asking [about and] I’m trying to explain.”

In August, he remarked on his show that “a lot of people are gonna be surprised” when “you’re spending eternity worshipping Christ next to Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee and Jonathan Edwards, and, you know, George Whitefield and Martin Luther King Jr.’s in hell.”

Webbon is so impressed by his own audacity that he maintains an online list of all the controversies in which he’s become embroiled. There, he explains why he called Christian men living in California “stupid” (they could just move to a red state); why he once ordered his wife to stop reading a book on theology (he didn’t want her exposed to beliefs that were different from his own); and why he believes in a patriarchal household structure (the Bible says so). Webbon, who is planning to host a conference in Texas next spring called “Christ Is King: How to Defeat Trashworld!” maintains that a “return to the Constitution is impossible” and that the only viable alternative is the Ten Commandments.

Some of Wilson’s other acolytes are attempting to create their own versions of Moscow, Idaho. Take Brian Sauvé, a 33-year-old Christian recording artist, podcaster, and pastor of Refuge Church in Ogden, Utah. Like Webbon, Sauvé wasn’t always reformed—Refuge began as a charismatic Christian church. After the lead pastor resigned in a scandal, the then-24-year-old Sauvé ascended to take his place, immersed himself in reformed theology, and moved the church in a new direction. Today, he presides over a Moscow-esque ecosystem: a publishing house called New Christendom Press, as well as St. Brendan’s Classical Christian Academy, modeled after those in Wilson’s network. “Can you feel it in the sails?” reads St. Brendan’s website. “The stiff breeze out of Moscow, Idaho? We can.”

On his three podcasts and to his more than 53,000 followers on X, Sauvé regularly states that women’s primary function is to bear children. In July, after Vance’s comments about “childless cat ladies who are miserable” began widely circulating, he posted: “It is desperately sad to think of all the intentionally barren women who will find themselves totally alone in their 50s, realizing their irreversible mistake. They will wish they could trade it all—money, vacations, independence, all of it—for children they can now never have.”

But unlike more mainstream conservatives, Sauvé does not even pretend to champion the idea of a Judeo-Christian nation. He posted in July, “[O]ur political system is heavily influenced by Jews who reject Christ and embrace all manner of evils.”

An even more well-connected Wilson emulator is Josh Abbotoy, executive director of American Reformer and managing partner of a venture capital fund and real estate firm called New Founding. A former fellow of the right-wing think tank the Claremont Institute, Abbotoy reported that he recently participated in a Project 2025 presidential transition “strategic planning session” hosted by the right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation. Bucks County Beacon reporter Jennifer Cohn revealed American Reformer was funded in part by venture capitalist Chris Buskirk. In 2022, Buskirk co-founded the Rockbridge Network, a collection of powerful Trump donors including Catholic judicial kingmaker Leonard Leo and Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel. Another co-founder of the Rockbridge Network? None other than JD Vance.

Thiel, Vance’s mentor and former employer, is also a major funder of the National Conservatism movement. Obsessed with global birthrates, Thiel spent $10 million on his protégé’s successful 2022 Senate campaign. In July, shortly after Trump had announced Vance as his running mate, Cohn surfaced a tweet by New Founding’s network director, Josh Clemans: a photo of Vance with several New Founding staffers. The caption read “Our guy.”

New Founding lists as a partner the Society for American Civic Renewal, a secretive fraternal order founded by Indiana shampoo baron Charles Haywood, who describes himself as an aspiring Christian “warlord.” According to founder Nate Fischer, New Founding wants to “form the backbone of a renewed American regime” and that its members “understand the nature of authority and its legitimate forceful exercise.” But its main public-facing project appears to be turning tracts of land in Appalachia into Christian communities. Promotional materials describe a community of “unmatched seclusion” where “simple country faith” protects local culture from rainbow flags and crime. Potential buyers, he advises, should not delay. “Who’s going to grab the land? Is it going to be good, based people who want to build something inspiring, something authentic to the region’s history, or is it going to be Bill Gates and BlackRock and hippies from California?”

One eager customer is 38-year-old TheoBro Andrew Isker—the pastor who interned at Wilson’s church, studied divinity at New Saint Andrews, and co-wrote a book on Christian nationalism with Andrew Torba, the openly antisemitic CEO of the social media platform Gab. In July, Isker announced on X that he planned to move his family of seven to lead a church in a New Founding community in Tennessee. Life in his native Minnesota, he said, had become untenable because of permissive laws around trans rights and abortion, not to mention how hospitable the state has been to refugees. “Minnesota is one of the top destinations for resettling foreign people hostile to our way of life,” he said.

That month, Isker spoke at a Texas conference about the “war on white America” alongside Paul Gottfried, the mentor of prominent white nationalist Richard Spencer. The conference was hosted by the True Texas Project, a far-right group with ties to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

Like many TheoBros, Isker sees much to like in Vance. In early July, before Trump announced his running mate, Isker referred to him as “Senator JD Vance (R-Heritage America).” In late July, he posted a video of Vance and told his 29,000 followers, “You need to double down on childless cat lady discourse. Kamala sees happy, large families and hates them. She wants them destroyed. She wants you to never be able to have this. She is a nasty, bitter harridan who hates all that is true, good, and beautiful.”

One problem is that there simply are not enough TheoBros to populate Christian communities like the one Isker plans to move to. Enter William Wolfe, the founder of the Center for Baptist Leadership, which aims to persuade members of the Southern Baptist Convention that it, the largest of all Protestant denominations in the United States, has fallen prey to the corrupting forces of liberalism. Baptists are only the beginning. Wolfe wants to win over the entire evangelical mainstream, which he and other TheoBros refer to as “Big Eva.” In August, he posted on X, “Once you realize that Big Eva thinks it’s a bigger sin to desire to preserve the customs, heritage, values, and cultural homogeneity of your own nation than to kill the unborn in the womb, you can better understand their moral framework.”

Wolfe served in the Trump administration both as the deputy assistant secretary of defense and as director of House affairs at the Department of State. He is also an alumnus of Heritage Action, a sister organization of the Heritage Foundation, the arch-conservative think tank behind Project 2025, whose chief architect, Russell Vought, posted on X that he was “proud to work with @William_E_Wolfe on scoping out a sound Christian Nationalism.” A few months later, the Bucks County Beacon uncovered a lengthy online manifesto on the goals of Christian nationalists. The document, which listed Wolfe and Joel Webbon as contributing editors and Oklahoma Sen. Dusty Deevers as a co-author, called for “civil magistrates” to usher in “the establishment of the Ten Commandments as the foundational law of the nation.”

The manifesto doesn’t specify exactly how Christian nationalists should achieve these goals. As Tabachnick, the extremism researcher, interprets it, the TheoBros are imagining a utopia where “they are going to be free to be entrepreneurs in all different senses, including the tech world that they’re mixing with so freely.” The key, she said, is that authoritarianism “is required to have the utopian vision.”

Last year, the extremism watchdog group Right Wing Watch posted a video of Wolfe quoting a scripture passage. There are times when “even the God of peace proclaims by his providence, ‘to arms!’” he says. “If we have ever lived in a point of time in American history since then that we could argue that now is a time ‘to arms’ again, I think we are getting close.”

William Wolfe’s Christian nationalism manifesto made the rounds on social media, but in mainstream conservative outlets, it was Stephen Wolfe who brought TheoBro ideas to the wider world. In his book, which was praised by editors at the Federalist and the American Conservative, Wolfe paints America as a “gynocracy” whose government and culture have been feminized by unhappy women leaders. (Sound familiar?) He has stated on X that women should not have the right to vote, and that “interethnic” marriage can be “sinful.”

Wolfe grew up in Napa, California, and his father was an admirer of the right-wing pundit and erstwhile GOP presidential candidate Pat Buchanan. After attending West Point and serving in the Army, Wolfe earned advanced degrees before leaving academia to “do the Wendell Berry thing” in North Carolina with his wife and four kids.

Over the summer, Wolfe, 41, agreed to speak with me on the condition that I refer to him as “Dr. Wolfe” and call him an “expert on Christian nationalism.” The Dr. Wolfe I spoke with was a more muted version of the firebrand I’d watched online. He said his ideal version of America would be led by a Caesar figure. Gay marriage would be strictly prohibited. Women would not be allowed to vote—instead, men would vote for their households.

When I brought up the bit from his book about heretics being killed, he grew annoyed. “I do think it’s permissible, in principle, for a state to suppress theological heresy, but that doesn’t mean that it’s prudent or proper, suitable in every circumstance or every tradition or way of life.” The Founding Fathers, he added, had encouraged religious liberty, so killing heretics would not be appropriate in the United States that we inhabit.

We turned to remarks he had made at a recent conference convened by Brian Sauvé: “I think we need to reflect on this idea of Judeo-Christianity, or Judeo-Christian worldview, or Judeo-Christian whatever, and really eradicate that from our thinking. Because if we say that America is a Judeo-Christian country, then it can’t be a Christian country, okay?” What role, I asked him, would Jews play? After a deep sigh, he told me that they would be allowed to “exercise their religion freely.”

“We need to reflect on this idea of Judeo-Christianity, or Judeo-Christian worldview, or Judeo-Christian whatever, and really eradicate that from our thinking. Because if we say that America is a Judeo-Christian country, then it can’t be a Christian country, okay?”

We spoke a week before Vance’s RNC speech, and Wolfe’s remarks helped me understand what the TheoBros heard in Vance’s phrase about America as a people. The founders, Wolfe noted, intended for their country to be “Anglo-Protestant with an American inflection.” America, he continued, is “a place of settlement and rootedness, but it’s an open ethnicity in which people can become one of us.” Which is to say that, like some others, Wolfe is not necessarily opposed to the idea of nonwhite people in America—as long as they agree to assimilate to the Anglo-Protestant dominant culture.

In this telling, America is not a pluralistic society at all, but rather one in which there exists an uneasy truce between Christians and those they reluctantly tolerate. Toward the end of our conversation, I asked Wolfe what motivated him. “I want Christians to be more assertive and to recognize the Christian heritage of the American way of life, and to seek to restore that,” he said. “This is a Christian country, and we’ve got to work to restore it to what it once was.”

In his keynote address at Sauvé’s conference, titled “Why Multicultural Pluralism Fails and What to Build Instead,” Wolfe called the concept of America as a melting pot “an early 20th-century idea cooked up by a Jew in New York who despised the confident Anglo-Protestant establishment.” WASPs were the “distinct ethnicity” of America, he insisted, and America should only welcome those who aspired to assimilate. As he put it, “This is our homeland, and we welcome you on the condition of conformity.” Or, in the words of JD Vance, America “is a group of people.”

Even though Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ended his presidential bid in August, he appears to be as busy as ever—but now, on the campaign trail for former President Donald Trump, where he’s modified the MAGA slogan to MAHA: Make America Healthy Again. Trump has picked up some of Kennedy’s favorite lines, as well: At a recent event, where Kennedy was a featured speaker, Trump bemoaned the epidemic of chronic illness in the United States, which Kennedy long has said he believes is caused by vaccines, toxins in food, and overreliance on medication. Kennedy would be included in a presidential panel, Trump promised supporters, that would focus on “the decades-long increase in chronic health problems, including autoimmune disorders, autism, obesity, infertility and many more.” 

By adopting these talking points and embracing the failed third-party candidate, Trump is making a bid for a much-coveted group of crossover voters. Over his years as an environmental activist and then an anti-vaccine crusader, Kennedy has built up a vast network of allies in the political gray zone where far-left natural health enthusiasts meet libertarian-leaning independents and Republicans who rail against government overreach. In a race that is predicted to be won on razor-thin margins, Trump needs all the voters from that left-meets-right zone that he can get. Kennedy is expected to woo a small but meaningful number of them to team Trump—especially if he succeeds in getting his name removed from the ballots in the two swing states of Michigan and Wisconsin.

One emissary from this political gray area is Zen Honeycutt, the founder and executive director of the anti-GMO organization Moms Across America. In a wide-ranging conversation with Mother Jones this week, Honeycutt described her years of work with Kennedy, and what she sees as a sea change in the political leanings of her group’s core followers in the 13 years since she founded Moms Across America. A decade ago, the group attracted a predominantly left-leaning audience who were concerned mostly about toxins in food and what they saw as the dangerous unknowns of genetically modified organisms. But now, the group appeals to many Independents and Republicans who worry more about government overreach.

Honeycutt is the only full-time employee of Moms Across America, and she’s joined by three part-time staffers. The group’s budget is tiny; in 2022, the last year for which financial information was available, it was around $238,000. But, the group has a robust presence on social media. Over the past seven years, she says, its posts, on subjects ranging from traces of weedkiller in pasta to Honeycutt’s recent meet-and-greet with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, have received 87 million impressions. But more important than her budget is access; Honeycutt has worked closely with Kennedy and continues to do so, and he serves as an advisor of her organization. She is well-positioned to influence policies and programs that he’d champion should he be given the cabinet position Trump has suggested might be a good fit. “A dream come true,” Honeycutt says, “for most of the moms I know out there, a lot of the parents and people who just care about their health.”

Those moms are one group that Benji Backer, a climate activist who founded the right-of-center environmental advocacy group American Conservation Coalition, has run into recently. Backer, who is currently on tour with his new book, The Conservative Environmentalist: Common Sense Solutions for a Sustainable Future, said that at his book-signing events, he has encountered “a surprising amount of these kind of RFK Jr.-supporting previously-liberal, now-voting-for-Trump people in the audience.” Those people used to be just “a different wing of the left-wing,” he said. “And they’re almost all shifting to the right now.”

Those people used to be just “a different wing of the left wing, and they’re almost all shifting to the right now.”

Honeycutt founded Moms Across America in 2011 as a group to oppose genetically modified ingredients in food, which she considered to be potentially dangerous to both human health and the environment. But in the years since, she has weighed in on myriad other health issues, such as staunchly opposing childhood vaccine requirements. She believes, that the shot that protects against measles, mumps, and rubella contains GMOs and traces of pesticides, and that it causes autism. (The theory that vaccines cause autism has been widely debunked.)

On its website, Moms Across America says that exposure to 5G cell phone radiation can cause “learning and behavioral issues, fertility impairment, and cancer;” Honeycutt called 5G cell radiation “the ultimate violation of human rights.” In a video posted on YouTube in June, she warned viewers that lab-grown milk was a harbinger of a plot to replace mothers with baby-growing labs. “They’re going to be developing that, so when you grow a baby in a pod and not in a human mom,” she said, “you’re not going to need breast milk for them.”

The root causes of violent behavior are also within Honeycutt’s range of interests. She referred to a scientist who had supposedly found that what “serial killers and parolees and criminals had in common” was “they just bragged that they lived on junk food.” In a 2023 video for Children’s Health Defense— the anti-vaccine advocacy group that Kennedy helms—Honeycutt told the story of the mother of a child who threatened to “blow up the school with a bomb.” His mother’s response, Honeycutt said, was to put him on a diet of organic food. “She knew that her son would have been one of those kids that would go out and buy a gun and shoot the kids at his school because of his mental health issues,” Honeycutt said. “That’s a very hard thing for a mother to admit. And she said, ‘But he’s not going to do that because—he’s 17 now—he’s been eating organic.’” Honeycutt has also blamed antidepressants for “suicidal and homicidal ideation and increased suicide rates.” Kennedy, too, is critical of antidepressants; in a recent video uncovered by Mother Jones, he talked about his plan to send people who were addicted to antidepressants to government-sponsored wellness farms.

Honeycutt’s work with Kennedy long predates his run for president: Children’s Health Defense lists Moms Across America as a partner organization and has helped fund Moms Across America’s testing of school lunches and fast food for traces of pesticides. Kennedy penned a blurb for Honeycutt’s 2019 book Unstoppable: Transforming Sickness and Struggle into Triumph, Empowerment and a Celebration of Community, describing her as “a modern-day Rachel Carson.” Honeycutt included Kennedy in her 2019 list of men who “are our new dream boats” because of their environmental activism.

Kennedy’s close alliance with Honeycutt continued as he launched his campaign. During a May rally that Honeycutt attended, he introduced her as “a friend for I don’t know how many decades, but a long, long time.” According to Federal Election Commission filings, the Kennedy campaign paid Honeycutt $7,000 for campaign consulting. Another Moms Across America staffer received $1,750 from the campaign for “design services.” Honeycutt donated $996.15 to Kennedy, and several Moms Across America board members made contributions totaling upwards of $10,000. Honeycutt told Mother Jones she “was able to advise [Kennedy] just before he would go on TV, sometimes about [the weedkiller] glyphosate,” she recalled. “He would message me to give an update on glyphosate, because I’ve been focused on it for so long.”

As with so many of the voters whose concerns about health and government overreach are moving them to support Republicans, Honeycutt herself used to be a staunch Democrat. From her home in California, “I marched in the parade for gays to be able to get married,” she recalled. But she became disillusioned with what she saw as government overreach around school vaccine requirements. Mostly for that reason, she, her husband, and their three sons relocated a few years ago to a farm in North Carolina. Since then, she said, she has heard from “thousands and thousands” of other parents who had become disillusioned with what she described as “the fascism of the Democratic party,” such as “mandatory vaccines or maybe medication down the road.” she said. “We already have mandatory chemotherapy that kids have to get—you can get your kid taken away from you if you don’t give them chemo if they have cancer.” For these reasons, many former Democrats she has talked to “have found in the Independent party or the Republican party a home they can connect with around their personal health freedoms.”  

Many former Democrats she has talked to “have found in the Independent party or the Republican party a home they can connect with around their personal health freedoms.”  

In a follow-up email to Mother Jones, she shared more of her theories about why formerly left-leaning voters were now tacking right. “The right cares about the ability to reproduce and procreate,” she wrote. “These chemicals are causing a reproductive health crisis.” Parents, she said, were concerned that “masking, schools becoming vaccine administration centers, and WiFi access points (close and constant radiation)” were “causing our children to be depressed, violent, and suicidal are all factors of why more and more parents” were leaving the Democratic party.

But other forces influenced these formerly left-leaning families, Honeycutt said. Parents also didn’t want their children to be “indoctrinated with education from public schools that influence their sexual identity,” she wrote. “There has been a massive uptick in homeschooling, and most cite the information being taught (the inclusion of sexual information in grade school) to students as a main factor.”

Honeycutt told Mother Jones that she was grateful to the Biden administration for its advocacy around organic foods and funding school lunches. Yet, she said that on the issues Moms Across America cares about, Harris has remained largely silent. “I have not heard her speak about pesticides or regenerative organic agriculture or children’s chronic illness,” she said. The Democrats’ focus on climate change is an unfortunate distraction. “There’s a lot of funding that’s going towards climate change issues that is questionable, and it could be simply going towards making these corporations wealthier,” she said.

Backer, the conservative environmental activist, said that he had noticed this wariness of climate initiatives among some Kennedy fans he had met at his book signing events. “A couple of them were kind of like, ‘well, I used to believe in climate change, but now I’m kind of skeptical of the science,’” he said. Kennedy’s message of environmentalism without climate change resonates with some conservatives whose environmental priorities are “largely based on a connection to nature, a connection to the land, the connection to food, like something personally related to the environment, rather than parts per million in the atmosphere. And RFK has tapped into that in an interesting way.”

Kennedy himself has dichotomized the issues clearly: Climate is a concern of the left, and the right is worried about environmental contamination. “The Democrats obsess about counting CO2, while neglecting urgent issues such as the chemicals in our food, soil, and water,” he posted on X last month. “I have found to my surprise that many people on the Trump team, including President Trump himself, care about the same environmental issues I do.” Ditto for Moms Across America’s supporters: “They’re like, ‘Oh, climate change,’” Honeycutt said. “’Well, what about stop poisoning us?’”

Trump’s actual record on removing toxins from the environment is dubious. Among the more than 100 environmental rules that his administration rolled back, his Environmental Protection Agency took away California’s ability to set strict emission standards, lifted rules that limited mercury emissions from power plants, and allowed more toxic waste from power plants in waterways. Whether the next Trump administration will prioritize vanquishing GMOs and pesticides remains to be seen.

But for Honeycutt, Trump’s alliance with Kennedy is an encouraging sign. “I’m very hopeful that if Kennedy gets any type of position in the future administration, that he will actually make changes,” she said. One could be on regulations around vaccines. “Kennedy is one of the only ones who has brought it to the forefront,” she said. “The fact that Trump is willing to listen to him about that makes a huge difference for a lot of voters.”

Even though Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ended his presidential bid in August, he appears to be as busy as ever—but now, on the campaign trail for former President Donald Trump, where he’s modified the MAGA slogan to MAHA: Make America Healthy Again. Trump has picked up some of Kennedy’s favorite lines, as well: At a recent event, where Kennedy was a featured speaker, Trump bemoaned the epidemic of chronic illness in the United States, which Kennedy long has said he believes is caused by vaccines, toxins in food, and overreliance on medication. Kennedy would be included in a presidential panel, Trump promised supporters, that would focus on “the decades-long increase in chronic health problems, including autoimmune disorders, autism, obesity, infertility and many more.” 

By adopting these talking points and embracing the failed third-party candidate, Trump is making a bid for a much-coveted group of crossover voters. Over his years as an environmental activist and then an anti-vaccine crusader, Kennedy has built up a vast network of allies in the political gray zone where far-left natural health enthusiasts meet libertarian-leaning independents and Republicans who rail against government overreach. In a race that is predicted to be won on razor-thin margins, Trump needs all the voters from that left-meets-right zone that he can get. Kennedy is expected to woo a small but meaningful number of them to team Trump—especially if he succeeds in getting his name removed from the ballots in the two swing states of Michigan and Wisconsin.

One emissary from this political gray area is Zen Honeycutt, the founder and executive director of the anti-GMO organization Moms Across America. In a wide-ranging conversation with Mother Jones this week, Honeycutt described her years of work with Kennedy, and what she sees as a sea change in the political leanings of her group’s core followers in the 13 years since she founded Moms Across America. A decade ago, the group attracted a predominantly left-leaning audience who were concerned mostly about toxins in food and what they saw as the dangerous unknowns of genetically modified organisms. But now, the group appeals to many Independents and Republicans who worry more about government overreach.

Honeycutt is the only full-time employee of Moms Across America, and she’s joined by three part-time staffers. The group’s budget is tiny; in 2022, the last year for which financial information was available, it was around $238,000. But, the group has a robust presence on social media. Over the past seven years, she says, its posts, on subjects ranging from traces of weedkiller in pasta to Honeycutt’s recent meet-and-greet with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, have received 87 million impressions. But more important than her budget is access; Honeycutt has worked closely with Kennedy and continues to do so, and he serves as an advisor of her organization. She is well-positioned to influence policies and programs that he’d champion should he be given the cabinet position Trump has suggested might be a good fit. “A dream come true,” Honeycutt says, “for most of the moms I know out there, a lot of the parents and people who just care about their health.”

Those moms are one group that Benji Backer, a climate activist who founded the right-of-center environmental advocacy group American Conservation Coalition, has run into recently. Backer, who is currently on tour with his new book, The Conservative Environmentalist: Common Sense Solutions for a Sustainable Future, said that at his book-signing events, he has encountered “a surprising amount of these kind of RFK Jr.-supporting previously-liberal, now-voting-for-Trump people in the audience.” Those people used to be just “a different wing of the left-wing,” he said. “And they’re almost all shifting to the right now.”

Those people used to be just “a different wing of the left wing, and they’re almost all shifting to the right now.”

Honeycutt founded Moms Across America in 2011 as a group to oppose genetically modified ingredients in food, which she considered to be potentially dangerous to both human health and the environment. But in the years since, she has weighed in on myriad other health issues, such as staunchly opposing childhood vaccine requirements. She believes, that the shot that protects against measles, mumps, and rubella contains GMOs and traces of pesticides, and that it causes autism. (The theory that vaccines cause autism has been widely debunked.)

On its website, Moms Across America says that exposure to 5G cell phone radiation can cause “learning and behavioral issues, fertility impairment, and cancer;” Honeycutt called 5G cell radiation “the ultimate violation of human rights.” In a video posted on YouTube in June, she warned viewers that lab-grown milk was a harbinger of a plot to replace mothers with baby-growing labs. “They’re going to be developing that, so when you grow a baby in a pod and not in a human mom,” she said, “you’re not going to need breast milk for them.”

The root causes of violent behavior are also within Honeycutt’s range of interests. She referred to a scientist who had supposedly found that what “serial killers and parolees and criminals had in common” was “they just bragged that they lived on junk food.” In a 2023 video for Children’s Health Defense— the anti-vaccine advocacy group that Kennedy helms—Honeycutt told the story of the mother of a child who threatened to “blow up the school with a bomb.” His mother’s response, Honeycutt said, was to put him on a diet of organic food. “She knew that her son would have been one of those kids that would go out and buy a gun and shoot the kids at his school because of his mental health issues,” Honeycutt said. “That’s a very hard thing for a mother to admit. And she said, ‘But he’s not going to do that because—he’s 17 now—he’s been eating organic.’” Honeycutt has also blamed antidepressants for “suicidal and homicidal ideation and increased suicide rates.” Kennedy, too, is critical of antidepressants; in a recent video uncovered by Mother Jones, he talked about his plan to send people who were addicted to antidepressants to government-sponsored wellness farms.

Honeycutt’s work with Kennedy long predates his run for president: Children’s Health Defense lists Moms Across America as a partner organization and has helped fund Moms Across America’s testing of school lunches and fast food for traces of pesticides. Kennedy penned a blurb for Honeycutt’s 2019 book Unstoppable: Transforming Sickness and Struggle into Triumph, Empowerment and a Celebration of Community, describing her as “a modern-day Rachel Carson.” Honeycutt included Kennedy in her 2019 list of men who “are our new dream boats” because of their environmental activism.

Kennedy’s close alliance with Honeycutt continued as he launched his campaign. During a May rally that Honeycutt attended, he introduced her as “a friend for I don’t know how many decades, but a long, long time.” According to Federal Election Commission filings, the Kennedy campaign paid Honeycutt $7,000 for campaign consulting. Another Moms Across America staffer received $1,750 from the campaign for “design services.” Honeycutt donated $996.15 to Kennedy, and several Moms Across America board members made contributions totaling upwards of $10,000. Honeycutt told Mother Jones she “was able to advise [Kennedy] just before he would go on TV, sometimes about [the weedkiller] glyphosate,” she recalled. “He would message me to give an update on glyphosate, because I’ve been focused on it for so long.”

As with so many of the voters whose concerns about health and government overreach are moving them to support Republicans, Honeycutt herself used to be a staunch Democrat. From her home in California, “I marched in the parade for gays to be able to get married,” she recalled. But she became disillusioned with what she saw as government overreach around school vaccine requirements. Mostly for that reason, she, her husband, and their three sons relocated a few years ago to a farm in North Carolina. Since then, she said, she has heard from “thousands and thousands” of other parents who had become disillusioned with what she described as “the fascism of the Democratic party,” such as “mandatory vaccines or maybe medication down the road.” she said. “We already have mandatory chemotherapy that kids have to get—you can get your kid taken away from you if you don’t give them chemo if they have cancer.” For these reasons, many former Democrats she has talked to “have found in the Independent party or the Republican party a home they can connect with around their personal health freedoms.”  

Many former Democrats she has talked to “have found in the Independent party or the Republican party a home they can connect with around their personal health freedoms.”  

In a follow-up email to Mother Jones, she shared more of her theories about why formerly left-leaning voters were now tacking right. “The right cares about the ability to reproduce and procreate,” she wrote. “These chemicals are causing a reproductive health crisis.” Parents, she said, were concerned that “masking, schools becoming vaccine administration centers, and WiFi access points (close and constant radiation)” were “causing our children to be depressed, violent, and suicidal are all factors of why more and more parents” were leaving the Democratic party.

But other forces influenced these formerly left-leaning families, Honeycutt said. Parents also didn’t want their children to be “indoctrinated with education from public schools that influence their sexual identity,” she wrote. “There has been a massive uptick in homeschooling, and most cite the information being taught (the inclusion of sexual information in grade school) to students as a main factor.”

Honeycutt told Mother Jones that she was grateful to the Biden administration for its advocacy around organic foods and funding school lunches. Yet, she said that on the issues Moms Across America cares about, Harris has remained largely silent. “I have not heard her speak about pesticides or regenerative organic agriculture or children’s chronic illness,” she said. The Democrats’ focus on climate change is an unfortunate distraction. “There’s a lot of funding that’s going towards climate change issues that is questionable, and it could be simply going towards making these corporations wealthier,” she said.

Backer, the conservative environmental activist, said that he had noticed this wariness of climate initiatives among some Kennedy fans he had met at his book signing events. “A couple of them were kind of like, ‘well, I used to believe in climate change, but now I’m kind of skeptical of the science,’” he said. Kennedy’s message of environmentalism without climate change resonates with some conservatives whose environmental priorities are “largely based on a connection to nature, a connection to the land, the connection to food, like something personally related to the environment, rather than parts per million in the atmosphere. And RFK has tapped into that in an interesting way.”

Kennedy himself has dichotomized the issues clearly: Climate is a concern of the left, and the right is worried about environmental contamination. “The Democrats obsess about counting CO2, while neglecting urgent issues such as the chemicals in our food, soil, and water,” he posted on X last month. “I have found to my surprise that many people on the Trump team, including President Trump himself, care about the same environmental issues I do.” Ditto for Moms Across America’s supporters: “They’re like, ‘Oh, climate change,’” Honeycutt said. “’Well, what about stop poisoning us?’”

Trump’s actual record on removing toxins from the environment is dubious. Among the more than 100 environmental rules that his administration rolled back, his Environmental Protection Agency took away California’s ability to set strict emission standards, lifted rules that limited mercury emissions from power plants, and allowed more toxic waste from power plants in waterways. Whether the next Trump administration will prioritize vanquishing GMOs and pesticides remains to be seen.

But for Honeycutt, Trump’s alliance with Kennedy is an encouraging sign. “I’m very hopeful that if Kennedy gets any type of position in the future administration, that he will actually make changes,” she said. One could be on regulations around vaccines. “Kennedy is one of the only ones who has brought it to the forefront,” she said. “The fact that Trump is willing to listen to him about that makes a huge difference for a lot of voters.”

In a virtual event last week that was billed as a “Latino Town Hall,” presidential candidate and anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. unveiled his plan to overhaul addiction treatment programs. Speaking during a live recording of the Latino Capitalist podcast, Kennedy described opioid, antidepressant, and ADHD “addicts” receiving treatment on tech-free “wellness farms,” where they would spend as much as three or four years growing organic produce.

SCOOP: RFK Jr. suggests creating "wellness farms" to "reparent" those struggling with addiction by growing organic food and taking away screens.

But it's not just addiction. He says it'll also be a place for people with ADHD and depression to get off SSRIs and antidepressants. pic.twitter.com/3oUmznEGwP

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) July 24, 2024

How to pay for these farms? Kennedy had an answer. With money generated through a sales tax on cannabis products, Kennedy said, “I’m going to dedicate that revenue to creating wellness farms—drug rehabilitation farms, in rural areas all over this country,” he said. “I’m going to make it so people can go, if you’re convicted of a drug offense, or if you have a drug problem, you can go to one of these places for free.”

On the farms, he said, residents would grow their own organic food—which would help them recover from addiction, “because a lot of the behavioral issues are food related. A lot of the illnesses are food related.” The idea that addiction is connected to consuming non-organic food is not backed by robust science—but it’s in line with many other unfounded claims that Kennedy has made in the past about pesticides and non-organic food causing chronic disease, behavioral problems, and autism.

Cell phones and other screens, he said, would be prohibited. “We’re going to re-parent people and restore connection to community,” he promised. “We have a whole generation of kids who are dispossessed, they’re alienated, their marginalized, their suicide rates are exploding; the second largest killer for young people is drug addiction.” Kennedy has suggested in the past that 5G cell phone technology could cause health problems.

The range of people receiving such treatment could potentially include wide swaths of the population, since the wellness farms wouldn’t just be for people addicted to illegal drugs, but also for people who are taking antidepressants and ADHD medications. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, approximately 11 percent of Americans ages 12 and older take antidepressants, and about 4 percent of Americans between the ages of five and 64 take medication for ADHD.

I’m going to create these wellness farms where they can go to get off of illegal drugs, off of opiates, but also illegal drugs, other psychiatric drugs, if they want to, to get off of SSRIs, to get off of benzos, to get off of Adderall, and to spend time as much time as they need—three or four years if they need it—to learn to get reparented, to reconnect with communities.

Last year, Kennedy posited during a Twitter spaces event with Elon Musk that antidepressants could be to blame for school shootings.

The Kennedy campaign didn’t respond to Mother Jones’ request for comment on the remarks that Kennedy made during this event.

On Monday morning, less than 24 hours after President Joe Biden announced his exit from the 2024 presidential race and anointed Vice President Kamala Harris as his heir apparent, far-right influencers took to social media to hurl racial epithets at the first mixed-race, female presidential candidate in history.

Here’s a sampling:

• “The leading Democrat presidential candidate’s mother was named Shyamala Gopalan,” Stew Peters, a former bounty hunter and current live streamer, posted to his 620,000 followers. “That should be enough for disqualification.” In recent months, Peters has amped up his vitriol against Indians and Americans of Indian descent.

• Andrew Torba, the CEO of the far-right media platform Gab, singled out a potential running mate for Harris, Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, who is Jewish. Torba referred to Shapiro as a “demon” in a post to his 400,000 followers on X.
• Nick Fuentes, the white nationalist “groyper” influencer, was bi-partisan in his post on X to 377,000 followers, “If Trump had been assassinated last week, the presidential election would be between Nikki Haley and Kamala Harris…Two nonwhite liberal women who could never win a national primary by popular vote. What a nightmare.”

• To his 169,000 followers on X, Auron MacIntrye, a pundit on the far-right media platform Blaze, warned, “They’re literally going to spend the next few months running the DEI candidate and calling everyone who opposes her sexist Hitler.”

• Adding his voice to the chorus was self-appointed prophet Lance Wallnau, a leader in the New Apostolic Reformation, a loose network of charismatic pastors who claim that God speaks to them. In a broadcast that the extremist watchdog group Right Wing Watch captured, Wallnau called Harris “the spirit of Jezebel in a way that will be even more ominous than Hillary because she’ll bring a racial component and she’s younger.” In this, he was referring to the notion that the Biblical character Jezebel is the embodiment of a false prophet.

• As Media Matters has reported, a subset of far-right pundits also has retooled the “birther” conspiracy theory that former president Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States and applied it to Harris. “Is Kamala Harris eligible to be president under the US Constitution’s “Citizenship Clause?” mused Tom Fitton, president of the rightwing activist group Judicial Watch, to his 2.6 million followers on X.

So far, following President Biden’s endorsement of Harris to replace him as the Democratic presidential nominee, she is the frontrunner, raking in record amounts of campaign contributions. It’s probably safe to say that if she secures the official party nomination, the racist attacks will likely show no signs of abating.

On the final day of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, I arrived at the Pfister Hotel ballroom 10 minutes before the God and Country Prayer Breakfast was supposed to start. I arrived a bit early just in case I encountered any trouble, since a few hours before the Faith and Freedom Coalition, the influential Christian political group that was hosting the breakfast, had denied my request for a press credential. While I didn’t have any trouble walking into the event, once I arrived, an organizer informed me that the hundreds of seats in the cavernous main breakfast room were already taken. She ushered me and a handful of others into an extremely air-conditioned overflow room, where, over chilly bacon and scrambled eggs, we watched a live stream of the proceedings on a big screen. My tablemate was an older gentleman who boasted that he had once hosted a Trump fundraiser at his “car club” and raised $2 million. We commiserated about being relegated to this outpost.

In the end, the surroundings hardly mattered as everyone could listen to stories of personal miracles that God had performed in the lives of one speaker after another. Trump’s vice presidential pick, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, had asked Jesus to help him with a bout of insomnia the night before his prime-time RNC speech—and it worked! House Speaker Mike Johnson’s sons had been saved from a near-drowning experience by a passing paraglider who had been sent by God. Trump’s former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Dr. Ben Carson once performed a complex and risky surgery and was sure he had lost the patient—but the next morning, that patient was sitting up in bed and telling jokes.

But the speeches weren’t all personal testimony. Many were peppered with the language of Christian nationalism and the shadowy charismatic movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation. In personal testimonies chock full of miracles and Bible verses, speakers assured the crowd that God was guiding their presidential candidate, and would help them accomplish their political goals—especially a complete end to abortion.

The first speaker of the morning was Paula White, who served as a spiritual adviser during Trump’s first term. White, who warned followers in 2020 that “Christians that don’t support President Trump will have to answer to God,” is closely associated with the New Apostolic Reformation, a charismatic evangelical Christian movement led by a loose network of self-appointed prophets and apostles. Many claim that God speaks directly to them, often in dreams, and believe that Christians are called to wage a spiritual battle for control of the United States. Though their beliefs in the more mystical and supernatural realms of Christianity are unconventional, adherents have made recent inroads into conservative politics, including, as I reported recently, the Supreme Court. In Saturday’s assassination attempt, White said, “We witnessed a miracle.” Her speech included a prayer that God’s “supernatural power” would protect Trump in the months and years to come.

White wasn’t the only speaker at the breakfast associated with the New Apostolic Reformation. There was also another former Trump spiritual adviser Jentezen Franklin, head pastor of the Free Church in Gainesville, Georgia, who has written a popular book about diet and spirituality, Fasting: Opening the door to a deeper, more intimate, more powerful relationship with God. At the breakfast, Franklin told a story from the Old Testament, in which Moses took blood from a ram and put some on Aaron’s right ear, right thumb, and right big toe. In doing so, Aaron would be able to listen, act, and walk in faith.

God had done exactly the same thing with Trump, Franklin said, at the assassination attempt last Saturday. After taking a bullet in the ear, Trump reached up with his hand and got blood on his thumb. Then, before he was ushered to safety, he asked for his shoes—an echo, in Franklin’s mind, of the bloody toe in the Bible. God, Franklin said, had told Trump, “‘I’m going to step into your shoes. I’m going to get in and work with your hands.'” He added, “I really believe that God has given Trump new ears.” He led the audience in a prayer asking. “Can we pray for the president to have new ears? I want him to have spiritual Mickey Mouse ears.” Then he could hear “if God would move him in the right direction to defend this nation.”

What exactly was that right direction? Some of the speakers hinted that it might have to do with a particularly important goal for many conservative Christians: ending abortion. As my colleague Abby Vesoulis wrote, the topic of reproductive rights has been a third rail so far at the Republican National Convention—and that’s because the cause of ending abortion, while it’s important to many of the party’s Christian conservatives, is also deeply unpopular among voters and with Trump himself. Which is the likely reason abortion language isn’t part of the official party platform. Abortion is also an issue on which former President Trump and his running mate disagree: While Trump has said that he supports a woman’s right to choose, Vance doesn’t believe abortion should be performed under any circumstances.

Unsurprisingly, Vance didn’t mention any disagreement with Trump on this subject during his convention speech on Wednesday evening, nor did he say the word “abortion” at the prayer breakfast. But after telling the story of how he rejected the “arrogance” of atheism and returned to Christianity in 2019, he pivoted to subtly assuring the crowd that he was working on abortion. “There have been a lot of rumblings in the past few weeks that the Republican Party is not going to be open to social conservatives,” he said. “And really from the bottom of my heart, I will say that social conservatives have a seat at this table, and they always will.” He added, “We have to advance the ball one yard before we advance the ball 10 yards before we advance the ball 50 yards.”

“From the bottom of my heart, I will say that social conservatives have a seat at this table, and they always will.”

Michael Whatley, the co–chair of the Republican National Committee, was not so subtle. “I am proud to be the most pro-life chair in the history of the Republican party,” he said. “I am here to tell you today that as long as I am the chair of the Republican National Committee, this party is going to be a pro-life, pro-family, pro-faith party.”

Toward the end of the program, Kari Lake, the frontrunner in Arizona’s Republican primary for the US Senate, described a moment during the pandemic that changed her life. She was reading the Bible and realized that “the news I was reading was a lie.” Lake, who had been working as a TV news anchor, began to question her whole career. Seeking guidance on whether to quit her job, she opened her Bible and without looking, put her finger down on a passage that read, “If you bring nothing into this world, it is for certain that you take nothing out.” For Lake, God was speaking directly to her, saying, “‘Don’t worry about that big paycheck, I’ve got you covered. I’ve got a bigger plan for you.’”

“Just because culture pushed him out, he’s not a smaller God, he’s still the Almighty God that saved the president,” she continued. “I’m looking forward to being Christian soldiers with you as we go into this next four years.”

After breakfast, outside the hotel, some of those Christian soldiers used words like “wonderful” and “humbling” to describe the morning’s program. Christina, an attendee who traveled from Dallas to the convention after having been invited by one of her state’s delegates, said she found Vance’s speech at the breakfast especially meaningful. “It brings me back to my own life,” she said. “It’s a comforting feeling.” I asked her what role she thought faith should play in government. “I think it should come back,” she said.

The speakers at the convention appeared to be committed to doing just that—even if they weren’t talking about it during the main convention program. Whatley, the Republican National Committee co-chair, said that during a meeting about the official platform that took place the previous week, “We put together a very strong pro-life platform that we moved on to the convention.” Then, he said, “I kicked all the staff out, and I kicked all the guests out, and I closed the doors. And I told everybody we are going to have an absolutely amazing convention.”

On the final day of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, I arrived at the Pfister Hotel ballroom 10 minutes before the God and Country Prayer Breakfast was supposed to start. I arrived a bit early just in case I encountered any trouble, since a few hours before the Faith and Freedom Coalition, the influential Christian political group that was hosting the breakfast, had denied my request for a press credential. While I didn’t have any trouble walking into the event, once I arrived, an organizer informed me that the hundreds of seats in the cavernous main breakfast room were already taken. She ushered me and a handful of others into an extremely air-conditioned overflow room, where, over chilly bacon and scrambled eggs, we watched a live stream of the proceedings on a big screen. My tablemate was an older gentleman who boasted that he had once hosted a Trump fundraiser at his “car club” and raised $2 million. We commiserated about being relegated to this outpost.

In the end, the surroundings hardly mattered as everyone could listen to stories of personal miracles that God had performed in the lives of one speaker after another. Trump’s vice presidential pick, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, had asked Jesus to help him with a bout of insomnia the night before his prime-time RNC speech—and it worked! House Speaker Mike Johnson’s sons had been saved from a near-drowning experience by a passing paraglider who had been sent by God. Trump’s former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Dr. Ben Carson once performed a complex and risky surgery and was sure he had lost the patient—but the next morning, that patient was sitting up in bed and telling jokes.

But the speeches weren’t all personal testimony. Many were peppered with the language of Christian nationalism and the shadowy charismatic movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation. In personal testimonies chock full of miracles and Bible verses, speakers assured the crowd that God was guiding their presidential candidate, and would help them accomplish their political goals—especially a complete end to abortion.

The first speaker of the morning was Paula White, who served as a spiritual adviser during Trump’s first term. White, who warned followers in 2020 that “Christians that don’t support President Trump will have to answer to God,” is closely associated with the New Apostolic Reformation, a charismatic evangelical Christian movement led by a loose network of self-appointed prophets and apostles. Many claim that God speaks directly to them, often in dreams, and believe that Christians are called to wage a spiritual battle for control of the United States. Though their beliefs in the more mystical and supernatural realms of Christianity are unconventional, adherents have made recent inroads into conservative politics, including, as I reported recently, the Supreme Court. In Saturday’s assassination attempt, White said, “We witnessed a miracle.” Her speech included a prayer that God’s “supernatural power” would protect Trump in the months and years to come.

White wasn’t the only speaker at the breakfast associated with the New Apostolic Reformation. There was also another former Trump spiritual adviser Jentezen Franklin, head pastor of the Free Church in Gainesville, Georgia, who has written a popular book about diet and spirituality, Fasting: Opening the door to a deeper, more intimate, more powerful relationship with God. At the breakfast, Franklin told a story from the Old Testament, in which Moses took blood from a ram and put some on Aaron’s right ear, right thumb, and right big toe. In doing so, Aaron would be able to listen, act, and walk in faith.

God had done exactly the same thing with Trump, Franklin said, at the assassination attempt last Saturday. After taking a bullet in the ear, Trump reached up with his hand and got blood on his thumb. Then, before he was ushered to safety, he asked for his shoes—an echo, in Franklin’s mind, of the bloody toe in the Bible. God, Franklin said, had told Trump, “‘I’m going to step into your shoes. I’m going to get in and work with your hands.'” He added, “I really believe that God has given Trump new ears.” He led the audience in a prayer asking. “Can we pray for the president to have new ears? I want him to have spiritual Mickey Mouse ears.” Then he could hear “if God would move him in the right direction to defend this nation.”

What exactly was that right direction? Some of the speakers hinted that it might have to do with a particularly important goal for many conservative Christians: ending abortion. As my colleague Abby Vesoulis wrote, the topic of reproductive rights has been a third rail so far at the Republican National Convention—and that’s because the cause of ending abortion, while it’s important to many of the party’s Christian conservatives, is also deeply unpopular among voters and with Trump himself. Which is the likely reason abortion language isn’t part of the official party platform. Abortion is also an issue on which former President Trump and his running mate disagree: While Trump has said that he supports a woman’s right to choose, Vance doesn’t believe abortion should be performed under any circumstances.

Unsurprisingly, Vance didn’t mention any disagreement with Trump on this subject during his convention speech on Wednesday evening, nor did he say the word “abortion” at the prayer breakfast. But after telling the story of how he rejected the “arrogance” of atheism and returned to Christianity in 2019, he pivoted to subtly assuring the crowd that he was working on abortion. “There have been a lot of rumblings in the past few weeks that the Republican Party is not going to be open to social conservatives,” he said. “And really from the bottom of my heart, I will say that social conservatives have a seat at this table, and they always will.” He added, “We have to advance the ball one yard before we advance the ball 10 yards before we advance the ball 50 yards.”

“From the bottom of my heart, I will say that social conservatives have a seat at this table, and they always will.”

Michael Whatley, the co–chair of the Republican National Committee, was not so subtle. “I am proud to be the most pro-life chair in the history of the Republican party,” he said. “I am here to tell you today that as long as I am the chair of the Republican National Committee, this party is going to be a pro-life, pro-family, pro-faith party.”

Toward the end of the program, Kari Lake, the frontrunner in Arizona’s Republican primary for the US Senate, described a moment during the pandemic that changed her life. She was reading the Bible and realized that “the news I was reading was a lie.” Lake, who had been working as a TV news anchor, began to question her whole career. Seeking guidance on whether to quit her job, she opened her Bible and without looking, put her finger down on a passage that read, “If you bring nothing into this world, it is for certain that you take nothing out.” For Lake, God was speaking directly to her, saying, “‘Don’t worry about that big paycheck, I’ve got you covered. I’ve got a bigger plan for you.’”

“Just because culture pushed him out, he’s not a smaller God, he’s still the Almighty God that saved the president,” she continued. “I’m looking forward to being Christian soldiers with you as we go into this next four years.”

After breakfast, outside the hotel, some of those Christian soldiers used words like “wonderful” and “humbling” to describe the morning’s program. Christina, an attendee who traveled from Dallas to the convention after having been invited by one of her state’s delegates, said she found Vance’s speech at the breakfast especially meaningful. “It brings me back to my own life,” she said. “It’s a comforting feeling.” I asked her what role she thought faith should play in government. “I think it should come back,” she said.

The speakers at the convention appeared to be committed to doing just that—even if they weren’t talking about it during the main convention program. Whatley, the Republican National Committee co-chair, said that during a meeting about the official platform that took place the previous week, “We put together a very strong pro-life platform that we moved on to the convention.” Then, he said, “I kicked all the staff out, and I kicked all the guests out, and I closed the doors. And I told everybody we are going to have an absolutely amazing convention.”

On Monday night, Harmeet Dhillon, National Committeewoman of the Republican National Committee for California, offered a prayer to close Monday night’s Republican National Convention proceedings. The prayer, which Dhillon, who is Sikh, recited in Punjabi, seemed to have a universal message—the English translation of one line reads, “In your grace and through your benevolence, we experience peace and happiness.”

Yet despite this seemingly unobjectionable message, Dhillon’s prayer set off a firestorm in the far-right corners of Christian Twitter. After Dhillon’s prayer, Andrew Torba, CEO of the far-right social media platform Gab, ranted to his 400,000 followers on X, “Last night you saw why Christian Nationalism must be exclusively and explicitly Christian. No tolerance for pagan false gods and the synagogue of Satan.” Republican Oklahoma state Sen. Dusty Deevers seemed to agree. “Christians in the Republican party nodding silently along to a prayer to a demon god is shameful,” he posted. Lauren Witzke, the former producer of far-right livestreamer Stew Peters, added her voice to the chorus. “How about you get deported instead, you pagan blasphemer,” she posted to 159,000 followers. “God saves our president and the RNC mocks him with this witchcraft.”

I asked a handful of delegates what they thought about Dhillon’s prayer, and, given the ascendant Christian nationalist movement among Republicans, about their stances on the separation of church and state more broadly. Most of them told me that they believed that the United States should be a Christian country, but that they didn’t oppose the idea of people of other faiths practicing their religions.

Brenda King, an alternate delegate from Colorado, said she believed divine intervention saved former President Trump from the attempted assassination last Saturday. She “loved” the idea of posting the 10 Commandments in public school classrooms, though she also believed that “an absolute religion should have nothing to do with government.”

Christy Haik, a delegate from Louisiana and the president of the state’s delegation group, was the only delegate I talked to who told me explicitly she did not approve of Dhillon’s prayer. “It made me feel uncomfortable for a lot of reasons,” she said. “The first reason is that I’m not really sure what she was saying and she could have been doing some kind of incantation.” Haik, who said she was “at the Capitol on January 6^th to support our constitution,” told me she thought “that there was never supposed to be a separation of church and state. The Founding Fathers did not intend that. It’s all gotten a little prostituted along the way.”

Dan Musholt, a delegate from Canton, Missouri, said he didn’t see a problem with Dhillon’s prayer, but like Haik, he believed that “the doctrine or the principles that the Christians believe in was the basis for the founders to put things together,” he told me. Of the United States, he said “I think, you know, if you’re not a Christian, then this may not be the place to be.”

On the second day of the Republican National Convention, I made my way back to Milwaukee’s symphony hall to attend a town hall hosted by the conservative parents’ rights group Moms for Liberty. This wasn’t my first Moms for Liberty event—I’ve attended the annual summits for the past two years. Back in 2022, Betsy DeVos, who served as former President Donald Trump’s Secretary of Education, delivered the line that got the loudest applause. “While I know that everything we did was with the interest of kids in mind and policies that would really give as much power back to the states and local communities as we possibly could,” she said, “I personally think the Department of Education should not exist.”

At the time, that statement felt a little bit edgy—like DeVos was saying the quiet part out loud. But two years later at yesterday’s event, many of the panelists expressed that same sentiment as a a foregone conclusion. “The fundamental problem that we have in the United States was the creation of the federal Department of Education,” Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-WY) told the crowd of maybe 400 or so mostly white women. In his remarks, erstwhile GOP presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy said, “We’re not just going to reform the Department of Education, it means we’re going to get there and actually shut it down.”

Does that mean that a ragtag group of moms singlehandedly turned the abolition of a behemoth government agency into a run-of-the-mill conservative talking point? Not exactly. On that issue and many others, Moms for Liberty has had a major assist from powerful conservative groups that share their goals—and are shaping the Republican agenda for 2024.

Founded in 2021 by three former school board members in Florida, Moms for Liberty rode the rising tide of anti-mask sentiment in the tumultuous year after schools were closed during the pandemic. The group’s leaders capitalized on the backlash to the Black Lives Matter movement after the murder of George Floyd. In fact, Moms for Liberty was one of the most prominent early groups to criticize the teaching of ant-racist curriculum in schools, which they incorrectly referred to as “critical race theory.” The group also vociferously opposed LGBTQ-inclusive lessons, and its members led campaigns to rid classrooms and school libraries of books deemed inappropriate.

Over time, Moms for Liberty grew in both membership and influence. Today, the group counts 130,000 members across chapters in 48 states. The organization groomed some members to run for local school boards, gradually expanding their influence throughout communities. Last year, all of the Republican presidential candidates, including former president Donald Trump, spoke at their annual conference in Pennsylvania.

In its marketing, Moms for Liberty comes off as a group of like-minded people, mostly women, who all happened to come together because of a shared concern for children. Founders Tiffany Justice and Tina Deskovich, the website says, are just a couple of “moms on a mission to stoke the fires of liberty.” But as I’ve previously reported, the organization’s connections to the Republican party run deep. Its conferences have been sponsored by the GOP training group the Leadership Institute and the conservative powerhouse think tank the Heritage Foundation. Earlier this week, after the RNC Heritage Foundation event, Moms for Liberty national director Catalina Stubbe told me that her group is “very close friends” with Heritage, which was one of the sponsors of today’s event, and whose president Kevin Roberts spoke on one of the panels.

Considering the group’s cozy relationship with Heritage, the RNC town hall panelists’ focus on abolishing the US Department of Education shouldn’t be surprising. Project 2025, the 920-page conservative policy roadmap that Heritage spearheaded, calls for the complete elimination of the Department of Education, along with the codification of parents’ rights laws similar to those in Florida, which strictly limit teachers’ use of LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum and books.

After the event, I spoke to Lydia Dominguez, a Moms for Liberty member running for school board in Clark County, Nevada. Dominguez, the mother of two teenage boys, told me that she believed schools “are being oversaturated by national agendas.” What kinds of national agendas? I asked. “They’re having CNN in the classroom,” she said. “They’re pushing national topics such as the transgender topics, sexualized content.”

She believed schools “are being oversaturated by national agendas…They’re having CNN in the classroom,” she said. “They’re pushing national topics such as the transgender topics, sexualized content.”

Monica Kepes serves as the secretary of a Moms for Liberty chapter in Washington County, Wisconsin. “I think the big bureaucratic institutions are instituting a lot of stuff that comes down through the education system,” she said. “I think the bigger you get, the more power there is, the more chance corruption and all that kind of stuff.”

At Moms for Liberty’s upcoming 2024 summit, which will take place next month in Washington, DC, it seems unlikely that the group will be able to muster a repeat performance of the star-studded speaker roster from last year. So far, this year’s list appears to be a grab bag of not especially famous ultra-conservative pundits, C-list comedians, and culture warriors. One reason for this lackluster lineup could be the fallout from a series of scandals in 2023. A group from a chapter in Kentucky posed for a photo with the white nationalist group the Proud Boys. (Those members were later removed from the group.) Last year, a chapter leader in Indiana quoted Hitler in a newsletter. On the last evening of the annual summit a few months later, Justice, the co-founder, said in a speech, “One of our moms in a newsletter quotes Hitler…I stand with that mom!”

But the most damaging setback came in late 2023, when Christian Ziegler, chair of the Florida GOP, was accused of raping and illegally filming a woman who had been involved in a sexual relationship with him and his wife, Bridget Ziegler, a founding member of Moms for Liberty. As I wrote at the time, the situation was especially awkward because Ziegler helped craft Florida’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” parents’ rights law, which forbids teachers in the state from talking about same-sex relationships. “The irony is crazy because you have this woman and her husband who are so concerned with preventing children from hearing anything that doesn’t totally align with their values,” one Florida mom told me at the time. “And then it’s like, I’m having to explain a three-way to a 12-year-old this week.” (Christian Ziegler has been cleared of rape charges; in March, the Florida state attorney’s office declined to criminally charge him for illegally filming the sexual encounter because of insufficient evidence.)

Unsurprisingly, no one mentioned the sex scandal (or any of the other ones) at the town hall event. But on one panel, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis took a victory lap about a bill Ziegler helped to create. “It used to be…you didn’t have to worry about your kid going to kindergarten and being told that they should change their gender,” he said. “We put the kibosh on that in Florida—we said, ‘We are not going to be indulging in things like gender ideology in our schools.’” The crowd whooped with approval.

The Republican Party seems to agree. Its official platform, released last week, calls for funding cuts for schools that embrace “woke” policies like LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum. This serves as a reminder that even though Moms for Liberty’s star appears to have dimmed over the past year, the reverberations from its movement will be felt for years to come. Moms for Liberty, cofounder Tina Descovich told the crowd, “is here to fight, fight, fight, and win, win, win.” She paused. “And winning we are.”

On the second day of the Republican National Convention, I made my way back to Milwaukee’s symphony hall to attend a town hall hosted by the conservative parents’ rights group Moms for Liberty. This wasn’t my first Moms for Liberty event—I’ve attended the annual summits for the past two years. Back in 2022, Betsy DeVos, who served as former President Donald Trump’s Secretary of Education, delivered the line that got the loudest applause. “While I know that everything we did was with the interest of kids in mind and policies that would really give as much power back to the states and local communities as we possibly could,” she said, “I personally think the Department of Education should not exist.”

At the time, that statement felt a little bit edgy—like DeVos was saying the quiet part out loud. But two years later at yesterday’s event, many of the panelists expressed that same sentiment as a a foregone conclusion. “The fundamental problem that we have in the United States was the creation of the federal Department of Education,” Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-WY) told the crowd of maybe 400 or so mostly white women. In his remarks, erstwhile GOP presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy said, “We’re not just going to reform the Department of Education, it means we’re going to get there and actually shut it down.”

Does that mean that a ragtag group of moms singlehandedly turned the abolition of a behemoth government agency into a run-of-the-mill conservative talking point? Not exactly. On that issue and many others, Moms for Liberty has had a major assist from powerful conservative groups that share their goals—and are shaping the Republican agenda for 2024.

Founded in 2021 by three former school board members in Florida, Moms for Liberty rode the rising tide of anti-mask sentiment in the tumultuous year after schools were closed during the pandemic. The group’s leaders capitalized on the backlash to the Black Lives Matter movement after the murder of George Floyd. In fact, Moms for Liberty was one of the most prominent early groups to criticize the teaching of ant-racist curriculum in schools, which they incorrectly referred to as “critical race theory.” The group also vociferously opposed LGBTQ-inclusive lessons, and its members led campaigns to rid classrooms and school libraries of books deemed inappropriate.

Over time, Moms for Liberty grew in both membership and influence. Today, the group counts 130,000 members across chapters in 48 states. The organization groomed some members to run for local school boards, gradually expanding their influence throughout communities. Last year, all of the Republican presidential candidates, including former president Donald Trump, spoke at their annual conference in Pennsylvania.

In its marketing, Moms for Liberty comes off as a group of like-minded people, mostly women, who all happened to come together because of a shared concern for children. Founders Tiffany Justice and Tina Deskovich, the website says, are just a couple of “moms on a mission to stoke the fires of liberty.” But as I’ve previously reported, the organization’s connections to the Republican party run deep. Its conferences have been sponsored by the GOP training group the Leadership Institute and the conservative powerhouse think tank the Heritage Foundation. Earlier this week, after the RNC Heritage Foundation event, Moms for Liberty national director Catalina Stubbe told me that her group is “very close friends” with Heritage, which was one of the sponsors of today’s event, and whose president Kevin Roberts spoke on one of the panels.

Considering the group’s cozy relationship with Heritage, the RNC town hall panelists’ focus on abolishing the US Department of Education shouldn’t be surprising. Project 2025, the 920-page conservative policy roadmap that Heritage spearheaded, calls for the complete elimination of the Department of Education, along with the codification of parents’ rights laws similar to those in Florida, which strictly limit teachers’ use of LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum and books.

After the event, I spoke to Lydia Dominguez, a Moms for Liberty member running for school board in Clark County, Nevada. Dominguez, the mother of two teenage boys, told me that she believed schools “are being oversaturated by national agendas.” What kinds of national agendas? I asked. “They’re having CNN in the classroom,” she said. “They’re pushing national topics such as the transgender topics, sexualized content.”

She believed schools “are being oversaturated by national agendas…They’re having CNN in the classroom,” she said. “They’re pushing national topics such as the transgender topics, sexualized content.”

Monica Kepes serves as the secretary of a Moms for Liberty chapter in Washington County, Wisconsin. “I think the big bureaucratic institutions are instituting a lot of stuff that comes down through the education system,” she said. “I think the bigger you get, the more power there is, the more chance corruption and all that kind of stuff.”

At Moms for Liberty’s upcoming 2024 summit, which will take place next month in Washington, DC, it seems unlikely that the group will be able to muster a repeat performance of the star-studded speaker roster from last year. So far, this year’s list appears to be a grab bag of not especially famous ultra-conservative pundits, C-list comedians, and culture warriors. One reason for this lackluster lineup could be the fallout from a series of scandals in 2023. A group from a chapter in Kentucky posed for a photo with the white nationalist group the Proud Boys. (Those members were later removed from the group.) Last year, a chapter leader in Indiana quoted Hitler in a newsletter. On the last evening of the annual summit a few months later, Justice, the co-founder, said in a speech, “One of our moms in a newsletter quotes Hitler…I stand with that mom!”

But the most damaging setback came in late 2023, when Christian Ziegler, chair of the Florida GOP, was accused of raping and illegally filming a woman who had been involved in a sexual relationship with him and his wife, Bridget Ziegler, a founding member of Moms for Liberty. As I wrote at the time, the situation was especially awkward because Ziegler helped craft Florida’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” parents’ rights law, which forbids teachers in the state from talking about same-sex relationships. “The irony is crazy because you have this woman and her husband who are so concerned with preventing children from hearing anything that doesn’t totally align with their values,” one Florida mom told me at the time. “And then it’s like, I’m having to explain a three-way to a 12-year-old this week.” (Christian Ziegler has been cleared of rape charges; in March, the Florida state attorney’s office declined to criminally charge him for illegally filming the sexual encounter because of insufficient evidence.)

Unsurprisingly, no one mentioned the sex scandal (or any of the other ones) at the town hall event. But on one panel, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis took a victory lap about a bill Ziegler helped to create. “It used to be…you didn’t have to worry about your kid going to kindergarten and being told that they should change their gender,” he said. “We put the kibosh on that in Florida—we said, ‘We are not going to be indulging in things like gender ideology in our schools.’” The crowd whooped with approval.

The Republican Party seems to agree. Its official platform, released last week, calls for funding cuts for schools that embrace “woke” policies like LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum. This serves as a reminder that even though Moms for Liberty’s star appears to have dimmed over the past year, the reverberations from its movement will be felt for years to come. Moms for Liberty, cofounder Tina Descovich told the crowd, “is here to fight, fight, fight, and win, win, win.” She paused. “And winning we are.”

Toward the end of the sweltering first day of the Republican National Convention yesterday, I hiked a few blocks away from the red-clad crowds and MAGA merch to Milwaukee’s ornate symphony hall. There, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson was going to deliver the keynote address at a daylong “Policy Fest” hosted by the arch-conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation. Earlier in the day, participants were able to attend sessions covering the border, the Department of Defense, the economy, and of course, Project 2025, the 920-page political roadmap for the next Trump administration that the think tank helped draft. On the other hand, Carlson, who now hosts a show on his own network, had a much broader remit: The title of his presentation was “The Good Life.”

Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance had been named as Trump’s running mate a few hours before, and the crowd, which didn’t come close to filling Milwaukee’s ornate symphony hall, murmured approvingly when Tucker referred to him. “I’m not gonna make the case for J.D. Vance,” he said. “I’m gonna tell you what I just saw, which is that every bad person I’ve ever met in a lifetime in Washington was aligning against him.” Not only is Vance a “nice guy,” Carlson explained, “he’s like one of the only members of the Senate with a happy marriage.” The crowd chuckled appreciatively.

Then I expected to hear the now-familiar trope that Democrats hate Vance because he’s a normal, American Dream embodiment of a salt-of-the-earth guy. But Carlson didn’t just trot out the usual complaints about Democrats being elitist. With a quick pivot to the assassination attempt on Trump, he explained how the political left is the latest incarnation of an ancient evil. “The assassination attempt against President Trump reminded a lot of people this weekend, a lot of people, there is a spiritual battle underway.” He added, “There are forces within every society—because they reside in the human heart—that are against people. They are dedicated to the destruction of people and the civilizations that people build.”

Motivating those on the political left, Carlson told the crowd, were “forces of chaos and destruction which are fundamentally anti-human.”

The idea that we are in the midst of a spiritual war between good and evil is not only a talking point for Carlson, but a central conviction among adherents of the New Apostolic Reformation, the ascendant loose network of charismatic pastors and self-appointed apostles and prophets who believe that the faithful are being called to fight for Christian control of the United States. It’s an unusual point of departure for Carlson, a lifelong Episcopalian, one of the more staid Protestant denominations.

Carlson has described his complicated relationship with the Episcopalian church, but recently he has hosted prominent people in the far-right Christian universe on his show. His guests have included former Claremont Institute fellow and Christian pundit Santiago Pliego; Megan Basham, a journalist who writes about Christianity for the conservative publication The Daily Wire; and far-right Idaho pastor Doug Wilson. In his interview with Wilson, Carlson argued that “Christian nationalism” was a phrase used by Democrats to “make Christianity seem like a threat to the country.”

At the Heritage Foundation event, Carlson further refined this point. Motivating those on the political left, Carlson told the crowd, were “forces of chaos and destruction which are fundamentally anti-human.” He added, “The group that makes them angry…I guess we would say now is Christians. Christian nationalists—the people who pray outside abortion clinics, people who celebrate Easter, not ‘Trans Visibility Day’—these are the real enemies.” The idea that Christians suffer persecution is also central to the beliefs of the New Apostolic Reformation. “What group do they dislike most?” he asked. “What group are they absolutely terrified of, and hoping to eliminate? Well, it’s Christians.”

After Carlson’s speech, I caught up with a few of the audience members as they adjourned to the Heritage Foundation happy hour next door. I asked them about what they saw as the role of religion in government.

One of the attendees was Catalina Stubbe, the national director of the rightwing parents’ rights group Moms for Liberty, who had come to the Heritage event because Moms for Liberty is “very close friends with the Heritage Foundation.” What did she think about the separation of church and state, I asked. “Our country was based and founded on biblical values,” she said. “I don’t understand why people want to separate something that is not only beautiful and well-made, but also defends the individual as a human being.”

I also talked to former Texas state senator Don Huffines, who made headlines in 2022 for refusing to fire a staffer who admitted to being a member of the white nationalist Groyper movement. Carlson’s speech, he said, had been a highlight of the day. Like Stubbe, he saw no reason to separate church from state. “All the founders of our country automatically understood that Christianity and biblical studies were vastly important to what they were creating,” he told me. “So we’ve been really off track from where we were originally.”

Another Texas attendee was Rochelle Brooks, a GOP delegate who was decked out in a bright red dress, an American flag scarf, and a cowboy hat festooned with Trump pins. Brooks said she believed that people misunderstood the Founding Fathers’ concept of the separation of church and state. “They’re saying the state can’t create a religion,” she said, “they’re not saying you have to exclude religion from the state.” She liked Trump because “he didn’t play identity politics,” which, as a Black woman, she found “demeaning and degrading.” I asked her if she thought Trump was a godly candidate. “He hasn’t done anything against my values and my beliefs,” she said and paused. “It’s not for me to judge him.”  

In the hours after the assassination attempt on former president Donald Trump Saturday evening at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, X became an even more chaotic space than usual, incandescent with posts from Americans of all political persuasions trying to make sense of what happened—and what it portends for the upcoming presidential election. I was watching one group in particular: the ascendant Christian nationalists who have, in the last 48 hours, become even more convinced that the event proves that Trump has been anointed by God. But their observations were wide-ranging, and here are a few of the recurring themes I’ve noticed.

Most striking was the preponderance of posts claiming that the fact that the bullet only grazed the former president’s ear was evidence of divine intervention. In a tweet to his 2.2 million followers, for example, former Trump Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson wrote, “I firmly believe with all my heart that God was watching over President Trump. As I said back in 2016 and again recently, I think President Trump is called for this moment.”

Moving from the idea of divine intervention to Trump’s actual divinity, many of the tweets and memes likened him to Jesus. I noticed several comparing him to a lion, the Christ figure in C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia.

Some prominent Christian nationalists have claimed that the assassination attempt was unsurprising, given that it had been predicted by several self-appointed prophets. Sean Feucht, a pastor who has organized a series of prayer rallies on the steps of statehouses called “Let Us Worship” told his 125,000 followers on X that the assassination attempt had been foretold by a YouTuber who calls himself the Prophet Brandon in March. MorningStar Ministries, a church closely associated with the charismatic New Apostolic Reformation movement, also claimed that Chris Reed, another self-proclaimed prophet, had predicted the shooting.  

While some of the most prolific posters don’t have particularly large followings on X, they are connected to powerful people and institutions. One example is evangelical pundit William Wolfe. A former Trump appointee and former staffer at the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, Wolfe has been opining to his just over 40,000 followers on X about the imperative for Christians to fight back. “The Left is absolutely committed to using political violence to secure their desired outcomes,” he posted after the shooting. “Time to wake up, you evanjellyfish, and know what time it is.”

Wolfe also went hard at the media:

You might think you hate the media enough but you don’t pic.twitter.com/0ueEzZTFRO

— William Wolfe (@William_E_Wolfe) July 13, 2024

Auron MacIntyre hosts a show on the conservative Christian Blaze media network and spoke last week in Washington, DC, at the National Conservatism Convention. Fellow speakers included Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), Utah Sen. Mike Lee, and vice-presidential hopeful Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio). “The left is about to pretend that they oppose political violence after spending years encouraging it,” MacIntyre posted. “There should be a mass arrest of antifa BLM related criminals. They should get decades in prison.”

Expanding their aperture to those charged with protecting presidents—and some of the concerns about security lapses at the Trump rally—other Christian influencers have tweeted about the impropriety of women working in the Secret Service. “It is perverse and scandalous that we permit women in the Secret Service,” conservative Catholic commentator Michael Knowles posted to his 1.1 million followers. An anonymous Christian account with 50,000 followers posted, “Female secret servicewoman are a disgrace to our nation and evidence of God’s judgment on our people.”

Not to be outdone, Andrew Torba, the Christian nationalist CEO of the social media platform Gab, added some antisemitic context to this theme:

Yeah it’s almost as entertaining as watching a Jew try to hit a nail with a hammer. https://t.co/j5e2XXhkrB

— Andrew Torba (@BasedTorba) July 14, 2024

Yesterday, Politico reported that pastors across the country delivered sermons about God’s protection of Trump, noting that several of them emphasized tolerance. “We need to recognize and respect the fact that other people around us—that may have views different than we might have—are not wrong, but probably listening to God just as well as you are,” said a pastor named Doug Andersen at the Church on the Way in Los Angeles. That open-minded message stands in stark contrast to some dark corners of X, where Christian posters urged followers to consider their political opponents to be depraved enemies. One example is a recording of a Sunday sermon from a reformed Baptist church Midlothian, Virginia, that has been making the rounds on X. “I’m not praying for unity,” the pastor, Steve Gentry, told his congregation. “There are certain people in our nation we simply cannot unite with.”