Over the last few months leading up to the election, I’ve been writing about an ascendant fundamentalist religious movement whose leaders believe that the United States is a Christian nation, that the Constitution is based on the Bible, and that Christians are called to take over the government. These figures have found a powerful ally in President-elect Donald Trump. Just last week, days before the election, I attended one of his campaign events at a church in Georgia, where Trump promised the assembled crowd that he intended to put Christian leaders “directly in the Oval Office.”

He didn’t elaborate on what exactly that would look like, but my past few months of reporting on the Christian right have given me some ideas. Here are a few things I’ll be tracking as Trump’s second term begins.

Erosion of the Establishment Clause

At the Trump event for Christian leaders I attended, one of the most protracted standing ovations came after Kelly Shackelford, head of the Christian law firm First Liberty Institute, proclaimed that the US Supreme Court’s three-part 1971 “Lemon” test for the establishment clause, which codifies the separation of church and state, is “reversed everywhere.”

His hopes may be realized. A few months ago, I wrote about the creeping religiosity of the Supreme Court. In the 2022 Kennedy v. Bremerton School District case, the court ruled that a public high school football coach who lost his job after he prayed during a game had been subject to discrimination. In the 6–3 decision, Justice Neil Gorsuch declared that the court had “long ago abandoned” the Lemon test. In February, Justice Samuel Alito issued an unusual individual statement after the court declined to take up a case filed on behalf of people who had been removed from a jury because of their belief that gay marriage was wrong. Alito wrote that he worried “Americans who do not hide their adherence to traditional religious beliefs about homosexual conduct will be ‘labeled as bigots and treated as such’ by the government.” 

The crusade against the establishment clause will continue as myriad cases challenging the separation of church and state work their way through Trump-appointed judges to get to the Supreme Court.

Increased Funding for “Natural Family Planning”

Over the last few years, Christian anti-abortion groups have spread the false claim that both hormonal birth control and artificial reproduction techniques like in vitro fertilization (IVF) are unhealthy and unnecessary. Instead, they promote what they call an alternative method: “natural family planning.” Essentially, this is a rebranding of rhythm methods, in which women track their menstrual cycles to identify windows of fertility to either prevent or achieve pregnancy. The effectiveness of these methods depends on many factors, including how rigorously the users track their cycles.

During Trump’s last administration, the federal government promoted natural family planning. In 2019, my colleague Stephanie Mencimer wrote about a cycle tracking webinar hosted by the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). And just this year, as I wrote, Senate Republicans put forth a bill that would designate federal funds for “restorative reproductive medicine,” a loose group of therapies relying heavily on cycle tracking to help treat infertility without the use of IVF or artificial insemination. A press release about the bill on the website of Mississippi GOP Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith quotes Dr. Patrick Yeung, a St. Louis gynecologist who “supports the legislation, noting that the status quo of offering symptomatic (band-aid) treatment for pain, or IVF (that bypasses the problem) for fertility is not satisfactory for most women.” The press release doesn’t mention that Yeung is a Catholic anti-abortion advocate who has also referred to birth control as an attempt to “disinvite the author of life” from the “marital embrace.”

Over the next four years, watch carefully as anti-abortion groups shy away from explicitly opposing abortion and IVF—which has proven to be a poor political strategy—and instead promote these “natural” alternatives, while Tump’s HHS further champions these options.  

Further Incursion of Religion Into Schools—and Defunding of Public Education as We Know It

Much of the recent press around explicit Christianity in public schools has focused on some states’ efforts to require Bibles and the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms. While those initiatives are important to track, there’s another way in which conservative activist Christian leaders are aiming to blur the line between church and state. They tout voucher programs, which have spread over the past two years to 29 states, and redirect public school money to fund private schools—with religious schools receiving upward of 90 percent of that money. As I wrote a few months back:

In 2001, Betsy DeVos, who later became the secretary of education under Trump, framed her advocacy for voucher programs and other school choice programs as an effort to “advance God’s kingdom.” In recent years, a super-PAC run by the American Federation for Children, which is DeVos’ school choice advocacy group, has spent millions of dollars to defeat Republican legislators who oppose private school vouchers, according to reporting by Open Secrets. A prerequisite for students and their families to attend some of the schools that currently receive voucher money is that they accept Jesus Christ as their lord and savior. 

Rachel Laser, president of the nonprofit group Americans United for Separation of Church and State, told me about other religious initiatives in the works. One of them is a suite of bills that would allow public schools to employ chaplains. And in Oklahoma, a Catholic school called St. Isidore of Seville is trying become the nation’s first publicly funded religious charter school. The overarching goal of these initiatives, she says, is to “bestow a power and privilege on Christians in our country at the expense of all the other religions in America.” Meanwhile, public education is robbed “of the funding that it’s entitled to.”

For years now, conservative Christians, including DeVos when she was in charge, have been calling for the dismantling of the US Department of Education, and Trump has said he intends to heed their advice. In a conversation this week, Laser told me, “We can count on Trump to attempt to seriously undermine, if not destroy, the Department of Education.”

“We should never have permitted gay marriage to be legalized in the United States of America.”

Attack on Same-Sex Marriage

Chief among the Christian right’s values is “biblical marriage,” the idea that any union other than that between a heterosexual biological male and female is against God’s will. Charismatic Christian leaders repeat these ideas often, and they’ve made it into the political mainstream. Christian broadcaster Mario Murillo, who partnered with fundamentalist Christian superstar Lance Wallnau in hosting a series of pro-MAGA religious rallies, said at a Colorado conference of Christian leaders in 2022, “We should never have permitted gay marriage to be legalized in the United States of America.”

In the coming months, watch for an intensification of the campaign by leading right-wing Christian groups to reverse the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision that legalized same-sex marriage. The powerful think tank Family Research Council says on its website, “Properly understood, ‘families’ are formed only by ties of blood, marriage, or adoption, and ‘marriage’ is a union of one man and one woman.” Perhaps most significantly, Project 2025—the blueprint for Trump’s second term that Trump supporters finally admit really “is the agenda”—calls for the US government to “proudly state that men and women are biological realities” and that “married men and women are the ideal, natural family structure because all children have a right to be raised by the men and women who conceived them.” Naturally, another priority for these groups will be a continued attack on transgender rights.

Hawkish Israel Policy

During his campaign, Trump ran on promises to end the war in the Middle East, and exit polls suggest that some voters believed him. In the majority-Arab community in Dearborn, Michigan, 42 percent of residents voted for Trump, while 36 percent voted for Kamala Harris and 18 percent for Green Party candidate Jill Stein. Yet the likelihood that Trump will help Palestinians is low, considering that many of his key spiritual advisers are fervently pro-Israel. Many of these charismatic Christians see Israel as the linchpin in their end-times scenario of choice. As Rabbi Jack Moline, president emeritus of the religious pluralism advocacy group Interfaith Alliance, recently explained to me, they want to “facilitate the gathering of the exiles back to the Holy Land…which will pave the way for the second coming.”

Trump’s spiritual advisers don’t believe that Palestine is part of that plan. In a 2019 YouTube broadcast, Wallnau excoriated the idea of a two-state solution. “Every time we have given land up of Israel, we have had a curse on our country,” he said. “You watch. Every time a president has taken something away from Israel, the judgment of God inevitably calls down.”

During this election, Wallnau has worked closely with the Trump campaign. In October, for example, he hosted then-vice presidential candidate JD Vance at an event and appeared with Trump a few days before the election in Georgia. In an October 2023 broadcast, Wallnau suggested that Hamas had attacked Israel as a form of retribution for the United States having abandoned Trump. In September, he lit into Harris on X for her support for a two-state solution. “This is why Trump said Israel won’t exist in 3-4 years,” he wrote. “AND that is why the US will be under judgment with President Harris in office.”

This week, the Times of Israel reported, Trump spokesperson Elizabeth Pipko told an Israeli TV interviewer that Trump “wants the wars to end as soon as possible, but he wants it to end with a decisive victory” for Israel.

Meanwhile, you can expect to hear fundamentalist leaders insist that Christian nationalism isn’t real, that it’s a figment of the overwrought progressive imagination. Yet evidence to the contrary abounds. At the event in Georgia, Wallnau elicited whoops of appreciation from the audience when he declared, “In every state and every county…Christ will be glorified!”

Over the last few months leading up to the election, I’ve been writing about an ascendant fundamentalist religious movement whose leaders believe that the United States is a Christian nation, that the Constitution is based on the Bible, and that Christians are called to take over the government. These figures have found a powerful ally in President-elect Donald Trump. Just last week, days before the election, I attended one of his campaign events at a church in Georgia, where Trump promised the assembled crowd that he intended to put Christian leaders “directly in the Oval Office.”

He didn’t elaborate on what exactly that would look like, but my past few months of reporting on the Christian right have given me some ideas. Here are a few things I’ll be tracking as Trump’s second term begins.

Erosion of the Establishment Clause

At the Trump event for Christian leaders I attended, one of the most protracted standing ovations came after Kelly Shackelford, head of the Christian law firm First Liberty Institute, proclaimed that the US Supreme Court’s three-part 1971 “Lemon” test for the establishment clause, which codifies the separation of church and state, is “reversed everywhere.”

His hopes may be realized. A few months ago, I wrote about the creeping religiosity of the Supreme Court. In the 2022 Kennedy v. Bremerton School District case, the court ruled that a public high school football coach who lost his job after he prayed during a game had been subject to discrimination. In the 6–3 decision, Justice Neil Gorsuch declared that the court had “long ago abandoned” the Lemon test. In February, Justice Samuel Alito issued an unusual individual statement after the court declined to take up a case filed on behalf of people who had been removed from a jury because of their belief that gay marriage was wrong. Alito wrote that he worried “Americans who do not hide their adherence to traditional religious beliefs about homosexual conduct will be ‘labeled as bigots and treated as such’ by the government.” 

The crusade against the establishment clause will continue as myriad cases challenging the separation of church and state work their way through Trump-appointed judges to get to the Supreme Court.

Increased Funding for “Natural Family Planning”

Over the last few years, Christian anti-abortion groups have spread the false claim that both hormonal birth control and artificial reproduction techniques like in vitro fertilization (IVF) are unhealthy and unnecessary. Instead, they promote what they call an alternative method: “natural family planning.” Essentially, this is a rebranding of rhythm methods, in which women track their menstrual cycles to identify windows of fertility to either prevent or achieve pregnancy. The effectiveness of these methods depends on many factors, including how rigorously the users track their cycles.

During Trump’s last administration, the federal government promoted natural family planning. In 2019, my colleague Stephanie Mencimer wrote about a cycle tracking webinar hosted by the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). And just this year, as I wrote, Senate Republicans put forth a bill that would designate federal funds for “restorative reproductive medicine,” a loose group of therapies relying heavily on cycle tracking to help treat infertility without the use of IVF or artificial insemination. A press release about the bill on the website of Mississippi GOP Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith quotes Dr. Patrick Yeung, a St. Louis gynecologist who “supports the legislation, noting that the status quo of offering symptomatic (band-aid) treatment for pain, or IVF (that bypasses the problem) for fertility is not satisfactory for most women.” The press release doesn’t mention that Yeung is a Catholic anti-abortion advocate who has also referred to birth control as an attempt to “disinvite the author of life” from the “marital embrace.”

Over the next four years, watch carefully as anti-abortion groups shy away from explicitly opposing abortion and IVF—which has proven to be a poor political strategy—and instead promote these “natural” alternatives, while Tump’s HHS further champions these options.  

Further Incursion of Religion Into Schools—and Defunding of Public Education as We Know It

Much of the recent press around explicit Christianity in public schools has focused on some states’ efforts to require Bibles and the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms. While those initiatives are important to track, there’s another way in which conservative activist Christian leaders are aiming to blur the line between church and state. They tout voucher programs, which have spread over the past two years to 29 states, and redirect public school money to fund private schools—with religious schools receiving upward of 90 percent of that money. As I wrote a few months back:

In 2001, Betsy DeVos, who later became the secretary of education under Trump, framed her advocacy for voucher programs and other school choice programs as an effort to “advance God’s kingdom.” In recent years, a super-PAC run by the American Federation for Children, which is DeVos’ school choice advocacy group, has spent millions of dollars to defeat Republican legislators who oppose private school vouchers, according to reporting by Open Secrets. A prerequisite for students and their families to attend some of the schools that currently receive voucher money is that they accept Jesus Christ as their lord and savior. 

Rachel Laser, president of the nonprofit group Americans United for Separation of Church and State, told me about other religious initiatives in the works. One of them is a suite of bills that would allow public schools to employ chaplains. And in Oklahoma, a Catholic school called St. Isidore of Seville is trying become the nation’s first publicly funded religious charter school. The overarching goal of these initiatives, she says, is to “bestow a power and privilege on Christians in our country at the expense of all the other religions in America.” Meanwhile, public education is robbed “of the funding that it’s entitled to.”

For years now, conservative Christians, including DeVos when she was in charge, have been calling for the dismantling of the US Department of Education, and Trump has said he intends to heed their advice. In a conversation this week, Laser told me, “We can count on Trump to attempt to seriously undermine, if not destroy, the Department of Education.”

“We should never have permitted gay marriage to be legalized in the United States of America.”

Attack on Same-Sex Marriage

Chief among the Christian right’s values is “biblical marriage,” the idea that any union other than that between a heterosexual biological male and female is against God’s will. Charismatic Christian leaders repeat these ideas often, and they’ve made it into the political mainstream. Christian broadcaster Mario Murillo, who partnered with fundamentalist Christian superstar Lance Wallnau in hosting a series of pro-MAGA religious rallies, said at a Colorado conference of Christian leaders in 2022, “We should never have permitted gay marriage to be legalized in the United States of America.”

In the coming months, watch for an intensification of the campaign by leading right-wing Christian groups to reverse the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision that legalized same-sex marriage. The powerful think tank Family Research Council says on its website, “Properly understood, ‘families’ are formed only by ties of blood, marriage, or adoption, and ‘marriage’ is a union of one man and one woman.” Perhaps most significantly, Project 2025—the blueprint for Trump’s second term that Trump supporters finally admit really “is the agenda”—calls for the US government to “proudly state that men and women are biological realities” and that “married men and women are the ideal, natural family structure because all children have a right to be raised by the men and women who conceived them.” Naturally, another priority for these groups will be a continued attack on transgender rights.

Hawkish Israel Policy

During his campaign, Trump ran on promises to end the war in the Middle East, and exit polls suggest that some voters believed him. In the majority-Arab community in Dearborn, Michigan, 42 percent of residents voted for Trump, while 36 percent voted for Kamala Harris and 18 percent for Green Party candidate Jill Stein. Yet the likelihood that Trump will help Palestinians is low, considering that many of his key spiritual advisers are fervently pro-Israel. Many of these charismatic Christians see Israel as the linchpin in their end-times scenario of choice. As Rabbi Jack Moline, president emeritus of the religious pluralism advocacy group Interfaith Alliance, recently explained to me, they want to “facilitate the gathering of the exiles back to the Holy Land…which will pave the way for the second coming.”

Trump’s spiritual advisers don’t believe that Palestine is part of that plan. In a 2019 YouTube broadcast, Wallnau excoriated the idea of a two-state solution. “Every time we have given land up of Israel, we have had a curse on our country,” he said. “You watch. Every time a president has taken something away from Israel, the judgment of God inevitably calls down.”

During this election, Wallnau has worked closely with the Trump campaign. In October, for example, he hosted then-vice presidential candidate JD Vance at an event and appeared with Trump a few days before the election in Georgia. In an October 2023 broadcast, Wallnau suggested that Hamas had attacked Israel as a form of retribution for the United States having abandoned Trump. In September, he lit into Harris on X for her support for a two-state solution. “This is why Trump said Israel won’t exist in 3-4 years,” he wrote. “AND that is why the US will be under judgment with President Harris in office.”

This week, the Times of Israel reported, Trump spokesperson Elizabeth Pipko told an Israeli TV interviewer that Trump “wants the wars to end as soon as possible, but he wants it to end with a decisive victory” for Israel.

Meanwhile, you can expect to hear fundamentalist leaders insist that Christian nationalism isn’t real, that it’s a figment of the overwrought progressive imagination. Yet evidence to the contrary abounds. At the event in Georgia, Wallnau elicited whoops of appreciation from the audience when he declared, “In every state and every county…Christ will be glorified!”

On Friday evening, just as reporters were logging off, the Supreme Court let slip a clue about whether it would take up cases that could determine the outcome of a close election in the coming weeks. Specifically, the hint came in a statement from Justice Samuel Alito. Spoiler: He’s open to it.

Alito’s missive came as the Supreme Court declined to take up a case over mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania. The Republican National Committee had asked the court to throw out a Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision allowing voters who had forgotten to place their mail-in ballot into a secrecy envelope to vote a provisional ballot. By declining to weigh in, the Supreme Court allowed some valid Pennsylvania voters who made a mistake in returning their mail-in ballots to still vote. The RNC had asked the US Supreme Court to stop them.

In response, the justices unanimously declined to disenfranchise these voters and created the impression of a win for Democrats and more expansive voting rights. Technically, this is true. But as a signal of whether the justices intend to meddle in the outcome of the election, the message was muddled by Alito’s writing.

Typically, the justices wouldn’t have considered such a case, because the Supreme Court isn’t supposed to second guess state court interpretations of a state law. But these are not normal times. Last year, the justices decided that second-guessing state courts was within their remit if the state law they were interpreting was election-related. In Moore v. Harper, the Supreme Court gave itself the authority to intervene in state election law matters if a state court’s decision “transgress[ed] the ordinary bounds of judicial review” at the expense of state legislative power. It’s a vague and untested standard, and this is the first election under this new precedent. The Supreme Court now has become a Sword of Damocles hanging over every state court decision concerning election procedures.

The Supreme Court now has become a Sword of Damocles hanging over every state court decision concerning election procedures.

In a statement accompanying the court’s order, Alito agreed with the rest of the justices not to take the case but chalked it up to the facts of the case, which he said constrained the court’s ability to give the RNC their requested relief of banning provisional ballots for spoiled mail-in ballots. Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch joined Alito’s statement. In the past, problems with the facts have not stopped the court’s conservative wing from taking on and deciding any case it wanted to. There’s the website designer who wanted to discriminate against a client who didn’t exist; the football coach who claimed he prayed alone when pictures showed him surrounded by players; and the case against President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plans on behalf of an entity that wanted nothing to do with the case. The Roberts court’s forbearance is not something to take for granted. So was the show of restraint with the Pennsylvania case a sign that the justices will not become involved in the 2024 election?

Probably not.

Alito signaled that he and his two colleagues might reopen this specific dispute and others like it in the coming weeks if another case were presented. He called the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision “controversial” and the issue at stake “a matter of considerable importance.” As legal journalist Chris Geidner noted, this language is “a sure signal from the trio to the RNC, Donald Trump, and other possible litigants” and “clearly a set up.” Should Trump or his allies want to bring a new suit after the election, at least three justices would be open to taking the case. The question is, would a majority be willing to, as this case asked, deny people the right to vote? One framework for looking at a possible answer is by comparing the 2000 election to the 2020 election.

In 2000, the presidential election came down to a few thousand votes in Florida. It wasn’t clear who the winner would ultimately be if all of Florida’s votes were counted, but by mid-December, George W. Bush held a lead of 537 votes. The Florida Supreme Court had ordered a statewide recount of certain ballots, so the Bush campaign asked the Supreme Court to intervene. So when the justices halted the recount in a 5-4 decision, they handed the election to Bush in Bush v. Gore. In effect, they picked the president in what was a tossup situation.

In 2020, on the other hand, there were many entreaties for the federal courts, including the Supreme Court, to throw out ballots and hand the election to President Donald Trump. The efforts to contest the election were coming days and even weeks after it was clear that, with almost every swing state declaring Joe Biden the winner, this was not an undecided election. It was, barring very significant judicial meddling, an insurmountable lead, and despite his protestations, Trump had lost. In such a situation, the Supreme Court stepping in would have risked the court’s reputation. Why help Trump when it would only have given Biden, who would become president, a very good reason to consider court reform?

If tomorrow’s results look like a Bush v. Gore scenario, particularly if the single swing state of Pennsylvania looks like the new Florida, the court’s right flank may be faced with the opportunity to help in Trump’s election. After all, the court has taken multiple steps to help Trump retake the White House, most notably by scuttling his criminal trial over his involvement in the January 6 insurrection. They have also shown a willingness to help the Republican Party in their recent decision to allow Virginia to remove voters from the rolls in a manner contrary to federal law. Interfering again would be a continuation, not an aberration.

But if tomorrow’s results look more like 2020’s, and within a few days, Harris is the clear winner, a majority of the justices might find it unwise to stick their necks out for Trump. Famously, Trump doesn’t like to be associated with “losers.” The justices may feel the same way.

In overturning Roe v. Wade, the US Supreme Court gave state-level judges enormous new power to decide the reproductive fates of tens of millions of people of childbearing age. With the national right to abortion wiped out, states were forced to decide if abortions were legal for their residents as pre-Roe “zombie” laws, trigger bans, and state constitutional protections whipsawed pregnant people trying to receive care. And now, in ten states, abortion-rights ballot measures are going before voters.

It has been up to state courts to sort out this increasingly convoluted mess. Could a 150-year-old law criminalizing abortion be used to prosecute modern-day doctors? The Arizona Supreme Court decided it could. Do frozen embryos count as “children”? The Alabama Supreme Court said so in February. And does a state constitution’s guarantee of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” protect a woman’s right to end her own pregnancy? Last month, a North Dakota state judge decided yes. Meanwhile, over the last year, state supreme courts in Iowa, Florida, and Georgia have all allowed six-week bans on abortion to take effect.

Yet unlike their federal counterparts, these black-robed figures don’t enjoy lifetime appointments. Two years after Dobbs, state supreme courts have become among the most critical battlegrounds of the 2024 elections. Twenty-two states allow voters to elect their state supreme court justices, and several more let voters decide whether to retain justices appointed by the governor. Anti-abortion forces have long understood that controlling who sits on state high courts is critical to cementing and expanding their far-right agenda. Indeed, it was only after the GOP governors of Iowa and Florida packed their supreme courts with conservative justices did those courts overturn prior state precedents and uphold draconian abortion bans.

“State courts have been an under-resourced and overlooked tool for reproductive and gender equity.”

Abortion rights supporters are finally seeing the light. “State courts have been an under-resourced and overlooked tool for reproductive and gender equity,” says Christina Uribe, director of the Gender Equity Action Fund, which channels money to local progressive and reproductive-rights advocacy groups that educate voters about state-level judicial races. “There’s a lot of opportunity here, and a lot of work left to do to make sure people understand the power that state courts have over their daily lives and the power they have to decide who sits on the bench.”

Progressives made the most of that opportunity in last year’s Wisconsin Supreme Court special election, which shattered turnout and spending records in a battle for ideological control of the highest court in a crucial swing state. The victory of an openly pro-choice justice, Janet Protasiewicz, swung control of the court leftward for the first time in 15 years, with consequences for both abortion access and voter rights. The court has the final say over Wisconsin’s congressional maps, for instance, which have been heavily gerrymandered to favor the GOP.

Advocates like Uribe are hoping that concerns over reproductive rights will have the same impact this November. “Abortion turns out to be really highly mobilizing,” she says. (It’s true.) “I do believe voters subconsciously associate the US Supreme Court with ‘they created this mess.’ They don’t want the state court creating more of a mess.”

So which states have supreme court elections to watch? Here are seven states where the outcome on November 5 could influence the future of abortion rights for tens of millions of people.

Ohio

A trio of partisan Supreme Court races are expected to shape how Ohio implements an abortion-rights amendment that passed with broad support last year.

In November 2023, Ohioans voted overwhelmingly to create a state constitutional right to “make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions.” But what does that mean for the state’s six-week abortion ban, which is still on the books? What about the many other incremental restrictions on abortion that lawmakers have passed over the decades? As long as the Republican-dominated state legislature doesn’t repeal these laws—and they haven’t—it’s up to the courts to decide.

So far, in response to lawsuits by abortion-rights advocates, lower-court Ohio judges have permanently blocked the six-week ban and have temporarily blocked a 24-hour waiting period and a rule against physician assistants and nurse practitioners providing abortion pills. But those fights aren’t over—and they will almost certainly be appealed all the way up to the state’s high court, which is now controlled 4-3 by Republican justices.

Ohio Supreme Court terms last six years, and races were nonpartisan until 2021, when GOP state lawmakers voted to add candidates’ party affiliations to the ballot, claiming it was needed to better inform voters (they had just lost three seats to liberal candidates.) This year’s races are uphill battles for Democrats, who need to win all three state seats to gain a majority and potentially determine the outcome of the abortion rights cases. If Republicans win all three, they’ll hold a 6-1 supermajority, with a clear advantage for abortion opponents. 

Michigan

As in Ohio, Michigan’s Supreme Court has the final word on whether old anti-abortion laws will be overturned after voters passed a constitutional amendment enshrining abortion rights in 2022. Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has already signed a package of bills repealing some laws that conflicted with the new amendment. But other restrictions persist, including a ban on Medicaid-funded abortions and a parental consent requirement for minors.

Michigan justices serve eight-year terms, with two seats up for election at a time, and no term limits. Democratic-backed justices currently hold a 4-3 majority on the court, and Republican-backed candidates will need to win both races on the November ballot to flip control. (While Michigan Supreme Court races are ostensibly nonpartisan, candidates are selected at party nominating conventions.) Justice Kyra Harris Bolden, an incumbent appointed by Whitmer, is running against Judge Patrick O’Grady, who was nominated after a Trump ally charged with election tampering dropped out. Meanwhile, law professor Kimberly Thomas is the Democrat vying for an open seat against Republican state representative Andrew Fink. In 2021, Fink supported a city ordinance making it a crime to “aid or abet” abortion in the Ohio city of Hillsdale, the home of an influential conservative Christian college.

Montana

In a red state where voters put a premium on keeping the government out of people’s daily lives, the Montana Supreme Court has often taken a remarkably permissive approach to abortion rights. In a 1999 case, Armstrong v. State, it ruled that the state constitution’s strong language around privacy implies a right to “procreative autonomy.” Based on this precedent, even before Dobbs, state courts struck down a parade of anti-abortion laws:: a 20-week ban, waiting periods, mandatory ultrasounds, parental notification requirements, and prohibition of telemedicine abortion, among others.

But with two of the seven state Supreme Court seats up for grabs this November, reproductive rights advocates are worried the tide could shift, especially with the state attorney general firing shots at Armstrong. Justices serve eight-year terms, and the court is officially nonpartisan, but both retiring justices are seen as left-leaning. Two candidates to replace them, Jerry Lynch and Katherine Bidegaray, have both said they agreed with Armstrong’s reasoning (responding to a Montana ACLU questionnaire). Two others, Cory Swanson and Dan Wilson, have been dubbed part of a “pro-life team for Montana” by the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America—and neither answered the ACLU question.

One additional factor: If Montana voters pass a constitutional amendment known as CI-128 that’s also on the November ballot, they’ll enshrine an explicit right to abortion until the point of fetal viability, around 24 weeks. As in Ohio and Michigan, it will be up to the state Supreme Court to interpret the amendment, if it passes.

North Carolina

Over the past few years, conservatives have gradually flipped control of North Carolina’s supreme court, and Republican justices now hold a 5-2 majority. They could extend that margin to 6-1 this year if state Court of Appeals Judge Jefferson Griffin beats incumbent Justice Allison Riggs, who was appointed by Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper to fill a vacancy.

Griffin is seen as a threat to abortion rights. Last year, he was part of a three-judge panel that ruled that a mother’s parental rights could be terminated if her child was in utero at the time she committed a crime—because “life begins at conception.” The ruling was so error-ridden, and the outcry so loud, that it was withdrawn three weeks later.

Now, Griffin could ascend to the state’s highest court for an eight-year term. But even if Riggs keeps her seat, Democrats would need to win Supreme Court races again in 2026 and 2028 to recover the majority. It’s a long game in a state that once served as an abortion-access lifeline to pregnant people in the South— until a single state representative switched parties and gave Republicans the supermajority they needed to enact a 12-week abortion ban over Cooper’s veto last year.

Retention elections in Arizona and Indiana

In Arizona and Indiana, supreme court justices are appointed by governors but must run for a retention election after two years, and then every six or ten years thereafter. (In Arizona, for instance, an initial 2-year term would be followed followed by 6-year terms. Indiana’s initial 2-year term is then followed by a 10- year term.) Usually, these up-or-down votes in the retention election are perfunctory: Only six judges in Arizona’s 112-year history have not been retained, according to the Tucson Sentinel, and it’s never happened at the supreme court level.

Voters this year could buck that trend, as progressive and abortion-rights advocates try to mobilize a “No” vote on retention elections for Justices Clint Bolick and Kathryn King in Arizona; and Justices Mark Massa, Derek Molter, and Loretta Rush in Indiana.

All these justices have signed on to opinions that blocked access to abortion in their states. In Arizona, Bolick and King joined a ruling in April that said the state could enforce its 1864 “zombie” abortion ban—triggering so much public outcry, the legislature soon repealed the old law. In Indiana, the three justices upheld a near-total abortion ban, interpreting the state constitution to only protect abortion when the procedure was “necessary to protect [the pregnant person’s] life or to protect her from a serious health risk.”

While retention elections have been sleepy in the past, the campaigns against these justices have made some sit up and take notice. Supporters of the Arizona judges are trying to stop the judicial elections altogether, by filing their own ballot initiative. Proposition 137 would eliminate the state’s retention election system, and instead allow appointed judges to keep their seats indefinitely unless they are convicted of a crime or a commission finds their performance lacking. If it passes, it would nullify “No” votes against King or Bolick. 

Texas

The Texas Supreme Court has been uniformly Republican since 1998. So it seemed like a safe bet that the three incumbent Republican justices—Jimmy Blacklock, John Devine, and Jane Bland—would easily swat away their trio of Democratic challengers this November. That was until the emergence of Find Out PAC—a committee formed this spring by former US Air Force undersecretary Gina Ortiz Jones to go after the Texas justices who “f*cked around with our reproductive freedoms, and now they’re going to find out,” as the group’s website puts it.

Find Out PAC’s ads draw attention to the justices’ recent rulings against women who were denied abortions amid dangerous pregnancies. Last December, the court ruled against Kate Cox, a pregnant woman who found out her fetus had no chance of survival. Her doctor said carrying the pregnancy to term would put her at high risk for serious medical complications and require her to undergo a C-section, so Cox sought to temporarily block the state’s ban so she could get an abortion. A lower court initially agreed, but the Texas Supreme Court stepped in to block the order. Then, in May, the court unanimously decided that the state abortion ban’s medical exceptions were sufficiently clear, even though a group of women said they were denied abortions despite experiencing serious pregnancy complications. One of the plaintiffs, Amanda Zurawski, had been forced to wait until she was diagnosed with a life-threatening case of sepsis and a fallopian tube infection that affected her future fertility.

The odds are still long in all three races, but the seat considered most likely to flip is currently held by Justice John Devine, who has bragged about being arrested outside abortion clinics; he also missed more than half of oral arguments between last September and February because he was too busy campaigning. “These folks are elected; they can be unelected,” Jones told the Austin-American Statesman. “Republicans understand that the bench is a stepping stone for higher office, while we’re not even fighting for those seats.”

On Wednesday, in a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s decision to remove nearly 2,000 registered voters from the state’s rolls, after two lower federal courts deemed the purge illegal. At least 1,600 voters will now have to fight to get reinstated—with less than a week to Election Day.

“It was a lawless decision in which the Supreme Court did not explain its decision or rationale,” said Anna Dorman, counsel with voting rights advocacy group Protect Democracy.

Two months ago, Youngkin filed an executive order to purge Virginia’s voter rolls, ostensibly in a quest to prevent “noncitizens” from casting ballots. Since then, his administration has unceremoniously kicked thousands of actual citizens off the rolls, an outcome that advocates and election officials warned Youngkin about before he initiated the program. According to Dorman, most people have had their registration revoked due to simple clerical errors on DMV paperwork.

“There has been no prosecutions of any noncitizen for voting in Virginia in the last 20 years, despite Gov. Youngkin’s Election Integrity Unit searching high and low,” Dorman said. “But if there was, this program wouldn’t stop it. Those people can still just sign an affidavit and vote. So the only people actually being hurt by this are eligible US voters who are confused about whether they’re allowed to vote.”

As I reported last week, a judge with the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Youngkin’s purge violated the National Voter Registration Act, a law that stops states from removing ineligible voters from the rolls within 90 days of the election. On Sunday, an appeals court rep9ortedly upheld that decision, according to the Washington Post.

However, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has tossed out those rulings, allowing the governor to remove as many voters as he pleases with little to no explanation of the legal reasoning.

Voting rights advocates warn that the court’s actions tie into Donald Trump’s bigger plan to undermine the results of the 2024 election. As my colleague Pema Levy reported, the conspiracy theory surrounding noncitizens voting in the 2024 election was stoked by Trump’s right-wing donors:

So who’s behind the push to make baseless claims of non-citizen voter fraud a bogeyman? According to a new report, the money funding the groups pushing the lie comes from the same stew of rightwing donors backing Trump, his authoritarian agenda, and the judges who enable him.

The non-citizen voting myth, in other words, is coming from the same activists who may seek to weaponize the lie for political gain this November. 

“This is just another attempt to launder conspiracy theories and lies in the public consciousness,” said Doman. “They’re repeating these lies so many times that even if people don’t necessarily believe any specific instance, they have a generalized sense that there is something amiss in order to deny the election results, if they don’t go their way.”

If you’ve been removed from Virginia’s rolls, all hope is not lost. Because the state allows same-day voter registration, anyone affected can reinstate their registration before voting, either during the early voting period or on Election Day. All they’d have to do is sign an affidavit confirming their citizenship at their polling location.

However, they must cast those votes in person. If you’re one of the many folks who rely on absentee ballots, then your voting options in Virginia’s elections are nonexistent.

“Anyone who wanted to vote absentee has been who has been purged under this program has been disenfranchised,” said Dorman. “That impacts college students, that impacts disabled individuals, that impacts people who just can’t get time off from work. And I think that that is contrary to the purpose of the National Voter Registration Act, which is the law that we sued under here.”

On Wednesday, in a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s decision to remove nearly 2,000 registered voters from the state’s rolls, after two lower federal courts deemed the purge illegal. At least 1,600 voters will now have to fight to get reinstated—with less than a week to Election Day.

“It was a lawless decision in which the Supreme Court did not explain its decision or rationale,” said Anna Dorman, counsel with voting rights advocacy group Protect Democracy.

Two months ago, Youngkin filed an executive order to purge Virginia’s voter rolls, ostensibly in a quest to prevent “noncitizens” from casting ballots. Since then, his administration has unceremoniously kicked thousands of actual citizens off the rolls, an outcome that advocates and election officials warned Youngkin about before he initiated the program. According to Dorman, most people have had their registration revoked due to simple clerical errors on DMV paperwork.

“There has been no prosecutions of any noncitizen for voting in Virginia in the last 20 years, despite Gov. Youngkin’s Election Integrity Unit searching high and low,” Dorman said. “But if there was, this program wouldn’t stop it. Those people can still just sign an affidavit and vote. So the only people actually being hurt by this are eligible US voters who are confused about whether they’re allowed to vote.”

As I reported last week, a judge with the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Youngkin’s purge violated the National Voter Registration Act, a law that stops states from removing ineligible voters from the rolls within 90 days of the election. On Sunday, an appeals court rep9ortedly upheld that decision, according to the Washington Post.

However, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has tossed out those rulings, allowing the governor to remove as many voters as he pleases with little to no explanation of the legal reasoning.

Voting rights advocates warn that the court’s actions tie into Donald Trump’s bigger plan to undermine the results of the 2024 election. As my colleague Pema Levy reported, the conspiracy theory surrounding noncitizens voting in the 2024 election was stoked by Trump’s right-wing donors:

So who’s behind the push to make baseless claims of non-citizen voter fraud a bogeyman? According to a new report, the money funding the groups pushing the lie comes from the same stew of rightwing donors backing Trump, his authoritarian agenda, and the judges who enable him.

The non-citizen voting myth, in other words, is coming from the same activists who may seek to weaponize the lie for political gain this November. 

“This is just another attempt to launder conspiracy theories and lies in the public consciousness,” said Doman. “They’re repeating these lies so many times that even if people don’t necessarily believe any specific instance, they have a generalized sense that there is something amiss in order to deny the election results, if they don’t go their way.”

If you’ve been removed from Virginia’s rolls, all hope is not lost. Because the state allows same-day voter registration, anyone affected can reinstate their registration before voting, either during the early voting period or on Election Day. All they’d have to do is sign an affidavit confirming their citizenship at their polling location.

However, they must cast those votes in person. If you’re one of the many folks who rely on absentee ballots, then your voting options in Virginia’s elections are nonexistent.

“Anyone who wanted to vote absentee has been who has been purged under this program has been disenfranchised,” said Dorman. “That impacts college students, that impacts disabled individuals, that impacts people who just can’t get time off from work. And I think that that is contrary to the purpose of the National Voter Registration Act, which is the law that we sued under here.”

When the US Department of Health and Human Services finalized a rule in May asserting that gender dysphoria can be considered a disability under federal anti-discrimination laws, it codified what the overwhelming majority of courts have found for nearly a decade. The new rule put states on notice: Discrimination against transgender people in employment, education, health care, child care, housing, and elsewhere may violate federal disability protections, and the Biden administration was prepared to fight it.

Now, in a lawsuit led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, 17 states are asking a federal court to strike down the rule in its entirety, including numerous provisions that have nothing to do with trans people. This isn’t a random collection of states; 15 of them have passed restrictions on gender-affirming care, and all have embraced myriad anti-trans policies. 

Among the states’ objections to the new federal rule: They would have to “expend time, money, and resources” to accommodate employees with gender dysphoria, including using the pronouns that align with their identities, eliminating sex-specific dress codes, and letting employees use gender-aligned bathrooms or locker rooms. Nebraska’s attorney general is concerned that his state’s restrictions on gender care put it at risk of disability rights complaints and federal investigations. South Dakota objects to the rule “essentially add[ing] a new category of potentially disabled individuals” whose gender care must be covered by Medicaid.

But gender dysphoria is just part of the 130-page federal rule. It also protects disabled parents’ rights in child welfare cases and prevents hospitals from using disability as a factor in determining who gets care in crisis situations, such as equipment shortages during a pandemic. It adds Long Covid to the list of conditions that may constitute a disability and strengthens protections against unnecessary institutionalization, requiring that care be offered in the least restrictive setting and, ideally, in a patient’s community. 

“The attack is really about the regulatory process of the federal government, and this will impact almost every interaction that a disabled person has with the services and supports that they receive.”

Striking down the entire rule would have wide-reaching implications for all disabled Americans and other marginalized groups who rely on federal agencies’ interpretations of decades-old laws to enforce their rights, says Mia Ives-Rublee, senior director of the Center for American Progress’ Disability Justice Initiative. “They’re utilizing LGBTQ issues as a wedge,” Ives-Rublee says. “The attack is really about the regulatory process of the federal government, and this will impact almost every interaction that a disabled person has with the services and supports that they receive.”

The new rule pertains to two federal statutes passed decades ago to protect people with disabilities on multiple fronts. The Rehabilitation Act of 1973 prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability by the federal government, federal contractors, and—in its Section 504—by any organizations or employers that receive federal funds. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), signed into law in 1990, broadened disability protections into most aspects of public life, including education, access to businesses open to the public, and public transportation. Both statutes define a disability as “a physical or mental impairment” that “substantially limits” one or more major life activities. 

When the Rehabilitation Act and ADA were passed, gender dysphoria was not a recognized medical condition, and both statutes expressly excluded “transvestism, transsexualism,” and “gender identity disorders not resulting from physical impairments” from the definition of disability. But over the decades, medical experts and courts have come to understand that for many people who identify with a gender different from the one assigned to them at birth, there can be profound psychological distress and other major negative effects in their work and social lives. In 2013, gender dysphoria was added to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Since then, lawsuits by individuals—the primary way the ADA is enforced—have forged a body of legal decisions that recognize gender dysphoria as a protected health condition and its exclusion from disability protections as discriminatory, says Ben Klein, senior director of litigation and HIV law at GLBTQ Legal Advocates and Defenders. The exclusion of gender dysphoria “was based on obvious animus toward a disfavored group. That is a concept that judges who look at petitions have easily understood—the bias is so clear,” Klein says. 

The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals broke legal ground in 2022 when it became the first federal appeals court to rule on the issue of whether gender dysphoria could be considered a disability under federal disability protection statutes. The court determined that the basis of a gender dysphoria diagnosis—whether it causes a noticeably negative impact on daily life—distinguishes it from the ADA’s definition of gender identity disorder. (The US Supreme Court declined to hear the case in June 2023, letting the decision stand.) Lower federal courts have found, similar to the 4th Circuit, that gender dysphoria is distinct from gender identity disorder. Others have found that even if gender dysphoria is a gender identity disorder, it results from a physical impairment: a mismatch between a person’s physical body and gender identity that can be remedied through gender care. 

In finalizing its new rule—the first administrative update to Section 504 in half a century—the Department of Health and Human Services alluded to this body of case law, which it said has “shifted the legal landscape of disability discrimination protections.” But none of that matters much to the states that joined the Texas lawsuit, which was filed with little national media attention in late September. 

The lawsuit seizes upon the original exclusionary language in the ADA, claiming that what the medical community now considers gender dysphoria falls under the law’s concept of gender identity disorder. “The Biden Administration is once again abusing executive action to sidestep federal law and force unscientific, unfounded gender ideology onto the public,” Paxton said in a press release announcing the suit. “Texas is suing because HHS has no authority to unilaterally rewrite statutory definitions and classify ‘gender dysphoria’ as a disability.”

Beyond the gender dysphoria issue, the lawsuit also makes broad claims about “new regulatory burdens” and “substantial costs” associated with the rule’s impacts to state Medicaid programs. Alaska, Montana, and Nebraska, for instance, argue that the rule’s “least restrictive setting” requirement will be difficult to implement because of health care worker shortages and their states’ unique geographies. 

“One of the goals of the ADA is to address discrimination and stereotypes, particularly about stigmatized health conditions. Gender dysphoria is the quintessential stigmatized health condition.”

Klein and Ives-Rublee emphasized that both the Rehabilitation Act and ADA were written vaguely with the intent that, over the years, experts working for federal agencies would reexamine and refine the regulations implementing the statutes, as scientific and public understanding of disability evolves. When the ADA was passed, trans identity was pathologized, Klein says. “One of the goals of the ADA is to address discrimination and myths and stereotypes, particularly about stigmatized health conditions,” he tells me. “Gender dysphoria is the quintessential stigmatized health condition.”

The new Texas case is just one of many avenues GOP officials are using to enforce their anti-trans beliefs. As I’ve reported, Republican attorneys general—many from the same states as in the Paxton lawsuit—are also threatening major medical associations with criminal investigations for promoting trans youths’ access to gender care.

Ives-Rublee warns that the Texas suit is also part of a multifaceted attack on the power of federal agencies to interpret civil rights laws, including protections for pregnant workers and access to reproductive health care. This broad conservative effort to rip the teeth out of the administrative state was emboldened by a series of Supreme Court decisions last term, including one that ended courts’ expected deference to federal agency interpretations of vague laws. 

Because the gender dysphoria lawsuit was filed in the federal district court in Lubbock, Texas, any appeal will go to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, home to some of the most radically conservative decisions in recent legal history. If the 5th Circuit sides with the states in this case, it would create a conflict with the 4th Circuit decision that could force the Supreme Court, with its far-right supermajority, to weigh in. “I am almost 100 percent sure this is their intention,” Ives-Rublee says.

Imagine Obamacare is dead and millions of Americans have lost health coverage. Abortion is illegal nationwide, pills to end pregnancies are off the market, and doctors wait until the mother’s death is imminent before attempting lifesaving care. Domestic abusers freely carry guns and government attempts to stop untraceable homemade semiautomatic rifles have been quashed, rendering gun licenses and background checks useless. Environmental regulations founder as climate change worsens. With the sidelining of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Wall Street has returned to its greediest days, making bets that threaten economic stability and preying on consumers with predatory loans and hidden fees. Officials are barred from even asking social media platforms to stem disinformation or calls to violence. Police, unrestrained by federal immigration law, round up, detain, and deport suspected immigrants. Washington can no longer fulfill treaty obligations as states erect barriers along US borders, causing international chaos. And organizing a protest against any of the above may result in you being sued successfully, making free speech an expensive proposition.

These are not mere hypotheticals. The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals—transformed by appointees of former President Donald Trump—has issued decisions greenlighting every one of these eventualities. While some were put on ice by the Supreme Court, others remain in effect in Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, the three states the circuit covers. In those states, women have no right to end pregnancies that threaten their health, the enforcement powers of dozens of federal agencies are in doubt, and protest organizers are vulnerable to legal retribution. Other 5th Circuit decisions, from a ruling hamstringing the SEC and similar agencies to one legalizing bump stocks—the device that enabled a lone shooter in Las Vegas to kill 60 people and injure more than 500 in just 10 minutes—are now the law of the land. This is neither the outer bounds of what this radical court will do, nor the end of its impact on all Americans. It is the beginning.

The US Supreme Court oversees 13 judicial circuits, each with an appeals court that hears federal cases arising within its jurisdiction. Every term, the high court agrees to review only a small number of appeals from the circuits, which leaves those appeals courts with final say on most matters. The 5th Circuit has been a right-leaning enclave for decades, filled with judges from the Republican strongholds it oversees. But after Trump placed six new judges on the 17-member court, the relatively staid conservatism of Reagan and Bush jurists gave way to the slash-and-burn tactics of the MAGA movement. On their watch, the court’s decisions, substantive and procedural, have defied judicial precedents and norms while conforming to a familiar far-right agenda of neutering Democratic policies, gutting abortion rights, and undermining the authority of federal agencies.

“There is a new breed of Republican-­appointed judge,” says Stephen Vladeck, a Georgetown Law professor who has followed the 5th Circuit closely. “Much like the divide between Trump Republicans and Bush Republicans politically, there’s a divide between Trump Republicans and Bush Republicans judicially. And what the 5th Circuit has, more so than any other court in the country, is a critical mass of Trump judges.”

Their goal is to move the law far to the right. In case after case, the 5th Circuit has issued rulings that even this Supreme Court regularly strikes down. “It should be shocking that a very, very conservative appeals court is still losing so often with the most conservative Supreme Court in our lifetimes,” Vladeck says.

But even rulings that are overturned move the Overton Window, dignifying once unimaginable outcomes as acceptable and expanding the public’s notion of what’s possible. “These judges know what they’re doing,” says David Lat, author of the Original Jurisdiction newsletter and a longtime chronicler of the courts. “When they are stepping out on a limb, they know that some of their more extreme positions are not going to stick even with a very conservative Supreme Court. But it’s all part of a larger conservative legal movement.”

“They’re winning the war,” he adds.

“What the 5th Circuit has, more so than any other court in the country, is a critical mass of Trump judges.”

Some 5th Circuit judges have loftier ambitions: At least two of Trump’s appointees are widely seen as auditioning for a spot on the Supreme Court should the former president reenter the White House. In this scenario, being slapped down by SCOTUS is less an embarrassing rebuke than an acknowledgment of a judge willing to take things further. “You could see in the 5th Circuit signs of what a Trump Supreme Court would really look like,” Vladeck says. “That’s terrifying.”

In the final days of the Supreme Court’s latest term, which ended July 1, the Republican-­appointed justices issued two momentous opinions that expose even long-established federal regulations to legal challenges. The first ruling, in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, overturned Chevron deference—a doctrine that had instructed lower courts to defer to federal agencies’ expert interpretations of contested statutes—in effect snatching back that power for itself.

Three days later, the court supercharged its attack on federal authority in a case known as Corner Post by eviscerating the six-year statute of limitations for challenging agency regulations. Now, virtually any litigant with a bone to pick can sue to overturn a regulation, even if it has been on the books for decades. “No matter how entrenched, heavily relied upon, or central to the functioning of our society a rule is, the majority has announced open season,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson warned in a scathing dissent.

These two decisions have already teed up a “massive wave of antiregulatory lawsuits,” says Georgetown Law professor Brian Galle, and most “will be filed in the 5th Circuit.”

This wouldn’t be a new phenomenon. The circuit is already a mecca for aggressive judge-shopping, the practice of filing in a jurisdiction where judges are more likely to rule in your favor. Federal district courts select which judge hears a given case randomly, but in certain parts of Texas, litigants are virtually guaranteed to draw hardliners who will rule against Democratic policies. This means anyone bringing a right-wing lawsuit with radical, nationwide ramifications can be assured not only of a friendly trial judge, but also that the inevitable appeal will be heard by sympathetic ears.

“If you have a challenge to an agency action, you really want to look at filing in this circuit, because they’re interested in the issues and there’s an ever-increasing amount of good precedent for you,” says Dallas appellate attorney David Coale, whose legal blog, 600 Camp, focuses on the 5th Circuit.

Indeed, Republicans who dislike a rule or program that President Joe Biden has enacted regularly turn to Texas. “The Biden administration can basically not even take a breath without being sued somewhere in the 5th Circuit,” Vladeck observes. Texas judge-shopping helped Biden’s critics halt a key part of his student loan forgiveness plan. It’s why challengers to Obamacare’s free services, including contraception and HIV drugs, found plaintiffs who could sue in Fort Worth’s far-right district court, and why a policy group founded by former Trump officials relocated there from Virginia. It’s why, in Amarillo, a DC-based libertarian think tank sued to block appliance efficiency rules and a Wisconsin group took on a gun regulation. It’s also why Elon Musk fought tooth and nail to prevent his Texas lawsuit claiming the National Labor Relations Board is the “definition of tyranny” from being transferred to California.

Among the most potentially consequential examples of 5th Circuit judge-shopping is the effort by anti-abortion activists to reverse FDA approval of mifepristone, a drug used in medication abortions, which account for nearly two-thirds of terminated pregnancies in the United States. A Christian legal group incorporated a plaintiff organization in Amarillo, where Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk—who worked for a Christian law firm before Trump put him on the bench in 2019—is the sole federal judge. After Kacsmaryk issued a stunning opinion that banned mifepristone nationwide, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, rather than bat his ruling down, upheld it in parts. The drug survived only because the statute of limitations for challenging mifepristone’s approval had expired. The Supreme Court reversed the appeals court ruling in June, holding that the plaintiffs had no right to sue, but the case is likely to return to the 5th Circuit soon. Three states have stepped in as new plaintiffs, and thanks to the Corner Post decision, that statute of limitations no longer applies. For legal groups looking to eliminate abortion in the United States, the clearest path runs through the 5th Circuit.

Lisa Graves, who runs True North Research, a watchdog investigating right-wing legal funding, warns that the circuit’s judges “are enshackling the ability of the president to adopt policies that are widely supported and widely needed. And they are doing so with an almost unprecedented arrogance and aggressiveness.”

The 5th Circuit can accomplish its agenda only by upending settled law, and its precedent-breaking rulings gobble up an outsize share of the Supreme Court’s annual docket. It might seem reassuring that SCOTUS overturned 8 of the 11 5th Circuit rulings it reviewed during the most recent term—more rejections than any other circuit. (Fifth Circuit cases also accounted for nearly half of the Supreme Court’s grants of emergency relief, issued when a party asks the court to quickly halt a lower-court decision.) But this pattern of fringe rulings and rebukes serves a broader purpose for the conservative judiciary. It allows the appellate judges to shape national debate on hot-button topics and lets the Supreme Court, by knocking down the 5th’s wackiest rulings, appear more moderate as it trashes precedent and brazenly rewrites the rules of American democracy.

“The issue isn’t so much that the 5th Circuit reaches ultraconservative conclusions, but that it breaks all the rules to get there.”

Within the crop of Trump judges transforming the 5th Circuit, two—James Ho and Andrew Oldham—stand out, not only for their willingness to implement a far-right agenda, but for their perceived ambition to join the Supreme Court.

Temperamentally, they are opposed. Ho is outgoing and adept at making headlines. His opinions read like partisan op-eds. Oldham is quieter, his writing more like a history term paper. But their goals appear broadly similar: a radical remaking of US law that would end abortion rights, restrict the role of the federal government, and elevate the power of individual states. “Ho might be the poster child, but Oldham is the laboring oar, where it’s really his opinions that are doing the most substantive work to try to move things sharply rightward,” Vladeck says. The two men, he adds, are “very different judges working toward the same goals very differently.”

The two judges, who both declined requests to comment, have another reason to hope for a Supreme Court promotion: Ho clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas, Oldham for Justice Samuel Alito, and both have been mentioned as likely replacements for their septuagenarian mentors, who are expected to retire if Trump wins. Both were forged in the fires of Texas’ hard-right partisan combat, a story that began in 1999, when then–state Attorney General John Cornyn created the solicitor general’s office. The federal government has its own solicitor general, a top-tier litigator who represents US interests before the Supreme Court, and Cornyn reasoned that Texas, too, should have such an expert appeals lawyer on staff. Within a few years, the new office was serving an equally important function: grooming the next generation of right-wing judges and politicians.

In 2002, Cornyn was elected to the US Senate and replaced by Greg Abbott, a right-wing brawler who described his job as “I go into the office, I sue the federal government, and I go home.” Abbott, in turn, brought on a hungry young lawyer named Ted Cruz as his solicitor general and instructed him to insert Texas into every high-profile conservative legal fight in the country. Cruz complied with gusto.

Abbott subsequently hired Ho, who’d worked under Cornyn in the Senate and had helped draft a memo to justify the use of torture after the 2001 terrorist attacks, despite Geneva Conventions prohibitions. Ho would later join a private firm where he took on pro bono cases, including appellate work for the First Liberty Institute, the Christian law firm that employed Kacsmaryk before he became a district court judge. Trump nominated Ho for the 5th Circuit in 2017.

Abbott hired Oldham in 2012 to work in the solicitor general’s office, where he helped challenge the Voting Rights Act and then-President Barack Obama’s immigration and environmental policies. Trump chose Oldham for a 5th Circuit spot in 2018. Stuart Kyle Duncan, another Trump appointee to the 5th Circuit, also worked for the solicitor general under Cornyn. In all, Trump appointed six lawyers from that office to federal judgeships.

When Ho joined the 5th Circuit, he asked Justice Thomas to administer his oath of office. A photograph of the swearing-in shows the pair standing before an enormous stone fireplace in the Dallas library of Harlan Crow, the billionaire Republican donor who has come under scrutiny for lavishing expensive gifts on Thomas that the justice failed to disclose.

Three months later, in his first 5th Circuit opinion (a dissent), Ho defended the right of individuals, including billionaires like Crow, to spend as much money on campaigns as they like. The case involved a voter-enacted contribution limit for Austin City Council races, and Ho aligned himself with wealthy donors against the specter of regulation, arguing that as “government grows larger,” fighting back with unlimited political spending “becomes a human necessity.” Ho’s dissent—which also claimed that the modern federal government would be “unrecognizable” to the founders and that the Supreme Court ruling upholding the Affordable Care Act was wrongly decided—made amply clear what kind of Supreme Court justice he would be.

Ho has sent many such signals. In 2022, he asserted in a concurring opinion that the Supreme Court should revive its decision in the 1905 case of Lochner v. New York, which the court had since overturned. While he framed his argument as pro-labor, the Lochner ruling had struck down a law that protected bakers from being forced to work more than 60 hours a week, ushering in decades of broader worker exploitation. Ho also has made clear that he’s vociferously against abortion, which he has called a “moral tragedy,” and has held that the Constitution guarantees Catholic clergy the right to bury fetal remains against the wishes of the would-be parents.

In 2023, when the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals narrowed Kacsmaryk’s mifepristone ruling, allowing the drug to remain on shelves, Ho wrote he would have fully blocked access. Perhaps most alarming was his proposed theory for why a handful of anti-abortion doctors could bring the suit in the first place. It is a foundational principle of law that a plaintiff cannot merely be a concerned bystander. They must have skin in the game, or standing: an actual or likely injury that a court could remedy. Both Kacsmaryk and the 5th Circuit had accepted the doctors’ dubious claim that they might one day encounter a patient suffering adverse effects from mifepristone and be obliged to help that person in violation of their religious beliefs—despite federal conscience laws that ensure they wouldn’t have to.

In June, the Supreme Court rejected that argument, ruling 9–0 that the mifepristone plaintiffs lacked standing, with Justice Brett Kavanaugh patiently explaining, as though lecturing a first-year law student, that the doctors were not suitable plaintiffs.

Ho had not only supported the rejected ruling, but in a concurrence had gone further to construct a standing doctrine for physicians in abortion cases. “Doctors delight in working with their unborn patients,” he wrote, “and experience an aesthetic injury when they are aborted”—a dystopian perversion of the doctor-patient relationship. Graves worked with Ho about 20 years ago on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and remembers him as “ambitious” and “transactional.” But the idea that a woman must remain pregnant for her physician’s viewing pleasure “shows the veneer is off,” she says. “He’s untrammeled by common sense, he’s untrammeled by restraint. He just thinks that he in that role as a federal judge with a lifetime job can do whatever he wants.”

This past July, Ho went where none of his colleagues had dared. In a concurrence in which he approved of the floating barrier that Abbott, now Texas’ governor, had placed in the Rio Grande to thwart migrant crossings, Ho codified the MAGA rhetoric equating immigration with a hostile invasion. Seven judges warned in a dissent that Ho’s theory “would enable Governor Abbott to engage in acts of war in perpetuity.”

At least two of Trump’s 5th Circuit appointees are widely seen as auditioning for the Supreme Court.

Some of Ho’s boldest politicking happens outside the court. At Georgetown Law in 2022, he defended Ilya Shapiro, a professor the school had put on leave for tweeting, in the runup to Justice Jackson’s Supreme Court nomination, that Biden would select a “lesser black woman.” (“If Ilya Shapiro is deserving of cancellation, then you should go ahead and cancel me, too,” Ho proclaimed.) Seven months later, he announced he would no longer hire clerks from Yale Law School after students there disrupted conservative speakers. In 2023, Ho expanded his no-hire list after Stanford law students clashed with Duncan, his 5th Circuit colleague, during a campus lecture. Earlier this year, having popularized a broader clerkship boycott phenomenon, he joined 12 other Trump-appointed judges in announcing they would no longer hire clerks from Columbia Law School in light of pro-Palestinian campus protests.

As for judge-shopping, Ho defends the practice: “This isn’t about forum-shopping. It’s about forum-shaming,” he argued in an April speech to a local bar association in Texas. “It’s about shaming judges.”

Ho’s behavior on and off the bench has raised his profile and made his politics crystal clear. “He’s citing things like Fox News or other kinds of conservative publications that you would not normally cite,” says one attorney, who, because they argue cases before the 5th Circuit, asked not to be named. “No one else writes in that way.”

Ho already was on Trump’s 2020 Supreme Court shortlist. Then, last year, the extremist group American Family Association Action, which seeks to infuse the judiciary with biblical views, placed him on a list of six Supreme Court picks for a second Trump term.

Oldham, the other potential Supreme Court contender, has likewise made his mark with opinions that push the law into uncharted waters. But it may be his pre-judicial government service that’s most revealing. When Abbott invited Oldham to Texas to join the solicitor general’s office, Oldham considered it to be “God opening a door.” Oldham and Abbott would go beyond arguing that specific actions of the Obama administration were illegal to assert that the existence of the very agencies implementing the policies was unconstitutional. When Abbott became governor in 2015, Oldham joined him as a top legal adviser, and, according to the Texas Tribune, played a significant role in crafting Abbott’s so-called Texas Plan. Abbott envisioned a convention of states, the first since the founders gathered in Philadelphia, to adopt nine constitutional amendments. In some respects, the proposed changes would set America back to pre-1787, when the fledgling republic floundered under the Articles of Confederation, depriving the federal government not only of powers created in response to the Civil War, but also some put in place by the original framers.

In a 2016 speech hosted by the University of Chicago chapter of the Federalist Society, Oldham harped on the “illegitimacy” of the “administrative state.” He also made a villain out of James Landis, a largely forgotten Harvard Law School dean who had helped create and went on to run the SEC.

Landis, Oldham said, was the “architect” and “godfather” of modern regulation, who viewed the Constitution as an “inconvenience” to be discarded. To restore its integrity, Oldham described a “Route A” wherein Congress amends the Constitution to roll back regulatory agencies and grant states new powers. Given Congress’ disinclination to do so, Oldham urged the adoption of “Route B,” the Texas Plan’s convention of states. Unmentioned was what might be called Route C: judges taking it upon themselves to remake the balance of power between the federal government and the states.

During his Senate confirmation hearings for the 5th Circuit, Oldham distanced himself from this work, claiming he was simply representing Abbott, his client. “My perspective as an advocate has no bearing on my perspective as a jurist,” he told the Judiciary Committee. But on the bench, Oldham has essentially copied and pasted the grievances that animated the Texas Plan into judicial opinions. In a 2021 case involving constitutional challenges to SEC authority, Oldham returned to Landis, claiming he was heir to a German intellectual lineage, which, Oldham argued, made modern administrative agencies a foreign import fundamentally at odds with the Constitution’s separation of powers. As he had done previously in a state publication promoting the Texas Plan, Oldham quoted a 2014 book by Columbia law professor Philip Hamburger titled Is Administrative Law Unlawful? (His opinion failed to mention that Hamburger leads the nonprofit that had brought the case under review.) Nicholas Bagley, a professor of administrative law at the University of Michigan, describes the “Germanic trope” as a right-wing “fever dream,” and deems Oldham’s citation a “strategy to give academic respectability to fringe legal views.”

Two years later, Oldham heard another challenge to SEC power in which he and his colleagues, squarely at odds with Supreme Court precedent, ordered the agency to enforce some of its actions in federal court rather than before its in-house judges. The judge who wrote the majority opinion quoted Oldham’s earlier SEC opinion, including some of his writing on Landis. In June, the Supreme Court upheld the ruling, casting doubt on the enforcement authority of dozens of agencies. (Remember Route C?)

An attorney who attended Harvard Law School alongside Oldham recognizes his certitude. “He sees himself as an intellectual and he knows he’s very smart,” says the classmate, who asked for anonymity. “And it doesn’t matter if there’s all this precedent that says something else.”

The 5th circuit has been radically transformed by Trump’s appointees, who make up more than a third of the court. But the change wasn’t always smooth. In a recent Texas immigration case, for example, Oldham was at odds with then-Chief Judge Priscilla Richman, who, when first nominated by President George W. Bush in 2001, was viewed as such an extremist that Democrats blocked her appointment. (Her nomination succeeded during Bush’s second term.) While some of the Bush and Reagan appointees regularly join the Trump judges in decisions that push legal boundaries, others have resisted—sometimes publicly. The divide mirrors the broader struggle between old-school Republicans and Trump diehards. And, just as Trump has taken over his party, his judicial appointees are prevailing.

One case in particular lays bare the court’s transformation. At the height of the pandemic, United Airlines announced an employee vaccine mandate. Several workers sued, arguing that getting the shot would violate their religious beliefs. They asked the court for protection under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. That might sound like a normal request, but legally, it’s cuckoo. Title VII relief comes in the form of damages after a religious violation has occurred. Yet Oldham and another judge found that the courts could grant relief and keep the policy from taking effect. “It totally blew my mind,” says the attorney who practices in the 5th Circuit. Not long ago, it “would have been laughed out of court.”

But it was a dissent in the case that really got people’s attention. Judge Jerry Smith, a conservative Reagan appointee to the circuit, had once hired Ho as his clerk. Smith was also there at Crow’s library for Ho’s swearing-in. But now he warned that nothing, “especially not the law, will thwart this majority’s plans,” adding that Oldham had helped unleash an “orgy of jurisprudential violence.”

“By today’s ruling, the Good Ship Fifth Circuit is afire,” Smith continued. “We need all hands on deck.”

His dissent, perhaps unintentionally, struck the same note as the court’s left-leaning critics: The issue isn’t so much that the 5th Circuit reaches ultraconservative conclusions, but that it breaks all the rules to get there. The last few years have seen the court seize on aggressive procedural maneuvers that give its judges more power. Its expansive view of standing is one key area where, as Vladeck sarcastically puts it, the 5th Circuit has “really covered itself in glory,” with judges repeatedly ignoring precedent so they can rule on cases that excite them. In recent years, the Supreme Court has reversed the 5th Circuit’s decisions on standing five times in politically charged cases, twice unanimously. But the lower court “keeps repeating the same errors,” Vladeck says. “The point is not that they’re getting these things wrong. The point is that they are getting them wrong in a way that is making it possible for them to actually interject themselves even deeper into our social and political debates.”

The 5th Circuit wasn’t always reactionary. Until 1981, its jurisdiction also included Alabama, Georgia, and Florida, and under the leadership of Republican-appointed judges, the court spent the 1960s desegregating the South in the face of violent white supremacism. One of the judges was an Eisenhower Republican felicitously named John Minor Wisdom, for whom the court’s majestic building in downtown New Orleans was dedicated in 1994.

“The 5th Circuit and the US Supreme Court were instrumental in this period of American history where rights were finally actually respected by the federal courts,” says Graves, of True North Research. “In reaction to that, there’s been a concerted effort to take over those courts and put people on the courts who have this fundamental hostility to civil rights and the power of government to protect individual freedoms.”

The transition began with increasingly conservative appointments under President Richard Nixon. But it ramped up under Obama’s tenure, as Senate Republicans stymied many of his judicial nominations, leaving him, in eight years, able to make only three 5th Circuit appointments. Texas’ senators, Cornyn and Cruz, blocked all but one appointment to the court from their state, allowing Trump to tap Ho and another Texan as soon as he entered office. Ultimately, Trump made six appointments in four years.

The decisions now coming out of the Wisdom courthouse are increasingly hostile to its namesake’s legacy. During the 1960s, the court embraced Brown v. Board of Education, which ended the constitutionality of school segregation. At his 2018 confirmation hearing, Oldham refused to say whether Brown was rightly decided.

Justice Thomas spoke that same year at a Dallas Federalist Society event, where he recounted something his former clerk and newly appointed 5th Circuit judge, Ho, had said as he was finishing his clerkship. “‘You know, when I came to this job, I thought it was going to be very complicated,’” Thomas recalled Ho saying. “‘But you know, it’s pretty straightforward, isn’t it?’”

“I think it is,” Thomas concurred, “if you start at the right place.”

That’s a point that could be made of Ho, Oldham, and many of their 5th Circuit colleagues. It’s no mystery where they are headed once you know where they started from.

Imagine Obamacare is dead and millions of Americans have lost health coverage. Abortion is illegal nationwide, pills to end pregnancies are off the market, and doctors wait until the mother’s death is imminent before attempting lifesaving care. Domestic abusers freely carry guns and government attempts to stop untraceable homemade semiautomatic rifles have been quashed, rendering gun licenses and background checks useless. Environmental regulations founder as climate change worsens. With the sidelining of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Wall Street has returned to its greediest days, making bets that threaten economic stability and preying on consumers with predatory loans and hidden fees. Officials are barred from even asking social media platforms to stem disinformation or calls to violence. Police, unrestrained by federal immigration law, round up, detain, and deport suspected immigrants. Washington can no longer fulfill treaty obligations as states erect barriers along US borders, causing international chaos. And organizing a protest against any of the above may result in you being sued successfully, making free speech an expensive proposition.

These are not mere hypotheticals. The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals—transformed by appointees of former President Donald Trump—has issued decisions greenlighting every one of these eventualities. While some were put on ice by the Supreme Court, others remain in effect in Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, the three states the circuit covers. In those states, women have no right to end pregnancies that threaten their health, the enforcement powers of dozens of federal agencies are in doubt, and protest organizers are vulnerable to legal retribution. Other 5th Circuit decisions, from a ruling hamstringing the SEC and similar agencies to one legalizing bump stocks—the device that enabled a lone shooter in Las Vegas to kill 60 people and injure more than 500 in just 10 minutes—are now the law of the land. This is neither the outer bounds of what this radical court will do, nor the end of its impact on all Americans. It is the beginning.

The US Supreme Court oversees 13 judicial circuits, each with an appeals court that hears federal cases arising within its jurisdiction. Every term, the high court agrees to review only a small number of appeals from the circuits, which leaves those appeals courts with final say on most matters. The 5th Circuit has been a right-leaning enclave for decades, filled with judges from the Republican strongholds it oversees. But after Trump placed six new judges on the 17-member court, the relatively staid conservatism of Reagan and Bush jurists gave way to the slash-and-burn tactics of the MAGA movement. On their watch, the court’s decisions, substantive and procedural, have defied judicial precedents and norms while conforming to a familiar far-right agenda of neutering Democratic policies, gutting abortion rights, and undermining the authority of federal agencies.

“There is a new breed of Republican-­appointed judge,” says Stephen Vladeck, a Georgetown Law professor who has followed the 5th Circuit closely. “Much like the divide between Trump Republicans and Bush Republicans politically, there’s a divide between Trump Republicans and Bush Republicans judicially. And what the 5th Circuit has, more so than any other court in the country, is a critical mass of Trump judges.”

Their goal is to move the law far to the right. In case after case, the 5th Circuit has issued rulings that even this Supreme Court regularly strikes down. “It should be shocking that a very, very conservative appeals court is still losing so often with the most conservative Supreme Court in our lifetimes,” Vladeck says.

But even rulings that are overturned move the Overton Window, dignifying once unimaginable outcomes as acceptable and expanding the public’s notion of what’s possible. “These judges know what they’re doing,” says David Lat, author of the Original Jurisdiction newsletter and a longtime chronicler of the courts. “When they are stepping out on a limb, they know that some of their more extreme positions are not going to stick even with a very conservative Supreme Court. But it’s all part of a larger conservative legal movement.”

“They’re winning the war,” he adds.

“What the 5th Circuit has, more so than any other court in the country, is a critical mass of Trump judges.”

Some 5th Circuit judges have loftier ambitions: At least two of Trump’s appointees are widely seen as auditioning for a spot on the Supreme Court should the former president reenter the White House. In this scenario, being slapped down by SCOTUS is less an embarrassing rebuke than an acknowledgment of a judge willing to take things further. “You could see in the 5th Circuit signs of what a Trump Supreme Court would really look like,” Vladeck says. “That’s terrifying.”

In the final days of the Supreme Court’s latest term, which ended July 1, the Republican-­appointed justices issued two momentous opinions that expose even long-established federal regulations to legal challenges. The first ruling, in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, overturned Chevron deference—a doctrine that had instructed lower courts to defer to federal agencies’ expert interpretations of contested statutes—in effect snatching back that power for itself.

Three days later, the court supercharged its attack on federal authority in a case known as Corner Post by eviscerating the six-year statute of limitations for challenging agency regulations. Now, virtually any litigant with a bone to pick can sue to overturn a regulation, even if it has been on the books for decades. “No matter how entrenched, heavily relied upon, or central to the functioning of our society a rule is, the majority has announced open season,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson warned in a scathing dissent.

These two decisions have already teed up a “massive wave of antiregulatory lawsuits,” says Georgetown Law professor Brian Galle, and most “will be filed in the 5th Circuit.”

This wouldn’t be a new phenomenon. The circuit is already a mecca for aggressive judge-shopping, the practice of filing in a jurisdiction where judges are more likely to rule in your favor. Federal district courts select which judge hears a given case randomly, but in certain parts of Texas, litigants are virtually guaranteed to draw hardliners who will rule against Democratic policies. This means anyone bringing a right-wing lawsuit with radical, nationwide ramifications can be assured not only of a friendly trial judge, but also that the inevitable appeal will be heard by sympathetic ears.

“If you have a challenge to an agency action, you really want to look at filing in this circuit, because they’re interested in the issues and there’s an ever-increasing amount of good precedent for you,” says Dallas appellate attorney David Coale, whose legal blog, 600 Camp, focuses on the 5th Circuit.

Indeed, Republicans who dislike a rule or program that President Joe Biden has enacted regularly turn to Texas. “The Biden administration can basically not even take a breath without being sued somewhere in the 5th Circuit,” Vladeck observes. Texas judge-shopping helped Biden’s critics halt a key part of his student loan forgiveness plan. It’s why challengers to Obamacare’s free services, including contraception and HIV drugs, found plaintiffs who could sue in Fort Worth’s far-right district court, and why a policy group founded by former Trump officials relocated there from Virginia. It’s why, in Amarillo, a DC-based libertarian think tank sued to block appliance efficiency rules and a Wisconsin group took on a gun regulation. It’s also why Elon Musk fought tooth and nail to prevent his Texas lawsuit claiming the National Labor Relations Board is the “definition of tyranny” from being transferred to California.

Among the most potentially consequential examples of 5th Circuit judge-shopping is the effort by anti-abortion activists to reverse FDA approval of mifepristone, a drug used in medication abortions, which account for nearly two-thirds of terminated pregnancies in the United States. A Christian legal group incorporated a plaintiff organization in Amarillo, where Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk—who worked for a Christian law firm before Trump put him on the bench in 2019—is the sole federal judge. After Kacsmaryk issued a stunning opinion that banned mifepristone nationwide, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, rather than bat his ruling down, upheld it in parts. The drug survived only because the statute of limitations for challenging mifepristone’s approval had expired. The Supreme Court reversed the appeals court ruling in June, holding that the plaintiffs had no right to sue, but the case is likely to return to the 5th Circuit soon. Three states have stepped in as new plaintiffs, and thanks to the Corner Post decision, that statute of limitations no longer applies. For legal groups looking to eliminate abortion in the United States, the clearest path runs through the 5th Circuit.

Lisa Graves, who runs True North Research, a watchdog investigating right-wing legal funding, warns that the circuit’s judges “are enshackling the ability of the president to adopt policies that are widely supported and widely needed. And they are doing so with an almost unprecedented arrogance and aggressiveness.”

The 5th Circuit can accomplish its agenda only by upending settled law, and its precedent-breaking rulings gobble up an outsize share of the Supreme Court’s annual docket. It might seem reassuring that SCOTUS overturned 8 of the 11 5th Circuit rulings it reviewed during the most recent term—more rejections than any other circuit. (Fifth Circuit cases also accounted for nearly half of the Supreme Court’s grants of emergency relief, issued when a party asks the court to quickly halt a lower-court decision.) But this pattern of fringe rulings and rebukes serves a broader purpose for the conservative judiciary. It allows the appellate judges to shape national debate on hot-button topics and lets the Supreme Court, by knocking down the 5th’s wackiest rulings, appear more moderate as it trashes precedent and brazenly rewrites the rules of American democracy.

“The issue isn’t so much that the 5th Circuit reaches ultraconservative conclusions, but that it breaks all the rules to get there.”

Within the crop of Trump judges transforming the 5th Circuit, two—James Ho and Andrew Oldham—stand out, not only for their willingness to implement a far-right agenda, but for their perceived ambition to join the Supreme Court.

Temperamentally, they are opposed. Ho is outgoing and adept at making headlines. His opinions read like partisan op-eds. Oldham is quieter, his writing more like a history term paper. But their goals appear broadly similar: a radical remaking of US law that would end abortion rights, restrict the role of the federal government, and elevate the power of individual states. “Ho might be the poster child, but Oldham is the laboring oar, where it’s really his opinions that are doing the most substantive work to try to move things sharply rightward,” Vladeck says. The two men, he adds, are “very different judges working toward the same goals very differently.”

The two judges, who both declined requests to comment, have another reason to hope for a Supreme Court promotion: Ho clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas, Oldham for Justice Samuel Alito, and both have been mentioned as likely replacements for their septuagenarian mentors, who are expected to retire if Trump wins. Both were forged in the fires of Texas’ hard-right partisan combat, a story that began in 1999, when then–state Attorney General John Cornyn created the solicitor general’s office. The federal government has its own solicitor general, a top-tier litigator who represents US interests before the Supreme Court, and Cornyn reasoned that Texas, too, should have such an expert appeals lawyer on staff. Within a few years, the new office was serving an equally important function: grooming the next generation of right-wing judges and politicians.

In 2002, Cornyn was elected to the US Senate and replaced by Greg Abbott, a right-wing brawler who described his job as “I go into the office, I sue the federal government, and I go home.” Abbott, in turn, brought on a hungry young lawyer named Ted Cruz as his solicitor general and instructed him to insert Texas into every high-profile conservative legal fight in the country. Cruz complied with gusto.

Abbott subsequently hired Ho, who’d worked under Cornyn in the Senate and had helped draft a memo to justify the use of torture after the 2001 terrorist attacks, despite Geneva Conventions prohibitions. Ho would later join a private firm where he took on pro bono cases, including appellate work for the First Liberty Institute, the Christian law firm that employed Kacsmaryk before he became a district court judge. Trump nominated Ho for the 5th Circuit in 2017.

Abbott hired Oldham in 2012 to work in the solicitor general’s office, where he helped challenge the Voting Rights Act and then-President Barack Obama’s immigration and environmental policies. Trump chose Oldham for a 5th Circuit spot in 2018. Stuart Kyle Duncan, another Trump appointee to the 5th Circuit, also worked for the solicitor general under Cornyn. In all, Trump appointed six lawyers from that office to federal judgeships.

When Ho joined the 5th Circuit, he asked Justice Thomas to administer his oath of office. A photograph of the swearing-in shows the pair standing before an enormous stone fireplace in the Dallas library of Harlan Crow, the billionaire Republican donor who has come under scrutiny for lavishing expensive gifts on Thomas that the justice failed to disclose.

Three months later, in his first 5th Circuit opinion (a dissent), Ho defended the right of individuals, including billionaires like Crow, to spend as much money on campaigns as they like. The case involved a voter-enacted contribution limit for Austin City Council races, and Ho aligned himself with wealthy donors against the specter of regulation, arguing that as “government grows larger,” fighting back with unlimited political spending “becomes a human necessity.” Ho’s dissent—which also claimed that the modern federal government would be “unrecognizable” to the founders and that the Supreme Court ruling upholding the Affordable Care Act was wrongly decided—made amply clear what kind of Supreme Court justice he would be.

Ho has sent many such signals. In 2022, he asserted in a concurring opinion that the Supreme Court should revive its decision in the 1905 case of Lochner v. New York, which the court had since overturned. While he framed his argument as pro-labor, the Lochner ruling had struck down a law that protected bakers from being forced to work more than 60 hours a week, ushering in decades of broader worker exploitation. Ho also has made clear that he’s vociferously against abortion, which he has called a “moral tragedy,” and has held that the Constitution guarantees Catholic clergy the right to bury fetal remains against the wishes of the would-be parents.

In 2023, when the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals narrowed Kacsmaryk’s mifepristone ruling, allowing the drug to remain on shelves, Ho wrote he would have fully blocked access. Perhaps most alarming was his proposed theory for why a handful of anti-abortion doctors could bring the suit in the first place. It is a foundational principle of law that a plaintiff cannot merely be a concerned bystander. They must have skin in the game, or standing: an actual or likely injury that a court could remedy. Both Kacsmaryk and the 5th Circuit had accepted the doctors’ dubious claim that they might one day encounter a patient suffering adverse effects from mifepristone and be obliged to help that person in violation of their religious beliefs—despite federal conscience laws that ensure they wouldn’t have to.

In June, the Supreme Court rejected that argument, ruling 9–0 that the mifepristone plaintiffs lacked standing, with Justice Brett Kavanaugh patiently explaining, as though lecturing a first-year law student, that the doctors were not suitable plaintiffs.

Ho had not only supported the rejected ruling, but in a concurrence had gone further to construct a standing doctrine for physicians in abortion cases. “Doctors delight in working with their unborn patients,” he wrote, “and experience an aesthetic injury when they are aborted”—a dystopian perversion of the doctor-patient relationship. Graves worked with Ho about 20 years ago on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and remembers him as “ambitious” and “transactional.” But the idea that a woman must remain pregnant for her physician’s viewing pleasure “shows the veneer is off,” she says. “He’s untrammeled by common sense, he’s untrammeled by restraint. He just thinks that he in that role as a federal judge with a lifetime job can do whatever he wants.”

This past July, Ho went where none of his colleagues had dared. In a concurrence in which he approved of the floating barrier that Abbott, now Texas’ governor, had placed in the Rio Grande to thwart migrant crossings, Ho codified the MAGA rhetoric equating immigration with a hostile invasion. Seven judges warned in a dissent that Ho’s theory “would enable Governor Abbott to engage in acts of war in perpetuity.”

At least two of Trump’s 5th Circuit appointees are widely seen as auditioning for the Supreme Court.

Some of Ho’s boldest politicking happens outside the court. At Georgetown Law in 2022, he defended Ilya Shapiro, a professor the school had put on leave for tweeting, in the runup to Justice Jackson’s Supreme Court nomination, that Biden would select a “lesser black woman.” (“If Ilya Shapiro is deserving of cancellation, then you should go ahead and cancel me, too,” Ho proclaimed.) Seven months later, he announced he would no longer hire clerks from Yale Law School after students there disrupted conservative speakers. In 2023, Ho expanded his no-hire list after Stanford law students clashed with Duncan, his 5th Circuit colleague, during a campus lecture. Earlier this year, having popularized a broader clerkship boycott phenomenon, he joined 12 other Trump-appointed judges in announcing they would no longer hire clerks from Columbia Law School in light of pro-Palestinian campus protests.

As for judge-shopping, Ho defends the practice: “This isn’t about forum-shopping. It’s about forum-shaming,” he argued in an April speech to a local bar association in Texas. “It’s about shaming judges.”

Ho’s behavior on and off the bench has raised his profile and made his politics crystal clear. “He’s citing things like Fox News or other kinds of conservative publications that you would not normally cite,” says one attorney, who, because they argue cases before the 5th Circuit, asked not to be named. “No one else writes in that way.”

Ho already was on Trump’s 2020 Supreme Court shortlist. Then, last year, the extremist group American Family Association Action, which seeks to infuse the judiciary with biblical views, placed him on a list of six Supreme Court picks for a second Trump term.

Oldham, the other potential Supreme Court contender, has likewise made his mark with opinions that push the law into uncharted waters. But it may be his pre-judicial government service that’s most revealing. When Abbott invited Oldham to Texas to join the solicitor general’s office, Oldham considered it to be “God opening a door.” Oldham and Abbott would go beyond arguing that specific actions of the Obama administration were illegal to assert that the existence of the very agencies implementing the policies was unconstitutional. When Abbott became governor in 2015, Oldham joined him as a top legal adviser, and, according to the Texas Tribune, played a significant role in crafting Abbott’s so-called Texas Plan. Abbott envisioned a convention of states, the first since the founders gathered in Philadelphia, to adopt nine constitutional amendments. In some respects, the proposed changes would set America back to pre-1787, when the fledgling republic floundered under the Articles of Confederation, depriving the federal government not only of powers created in response to the Civil War, but also some put in place by the original framers.

In a 2016 speech hosted by the University of Chicago chapter of the Federalist Society, Oldham harped on the “illegitimacy” of the “administrative state.” He also made a villain out of James Landis, a largely forgotten Harvard Law School dean who had helped create and went on to run the SEC.

Landis, Oldham said, was the “architect” and “godfather” of modern regulation, who viewed the Constitution as an “inconvenience” to be discarded. To restore its integrity, Oldham described a “Route A” wherein Congress amends the Constitution to roll back regulatory agencies and grant states new powers. Given Congress’ disinclination to do so, Oldham urged the adoption of “Route B,” the Texas Plan’s convention of states. Unmentioned was what might be called Route C: judges taking it upon themselves to remake the balance of power between the federal government and the states.

During his Senate confirmation hearings for the 5th Circuit, Oldham distanced himself from this work, claiming he was simply representing Abbott, his client. “My perspective as an advocate has no bearing on my perspective as a jurist,” he told the Judiciary Committee. But on the bench, Oldham has essentially copied and pasted the grievances that animated the Texas Plan into judicial opinions. In a 2021 case involving constitutional challenges to SEC authority, Oldham returned to Landis, claiming he was heir to a German intellectual lineage, which, Oldham argued, made modern administrative agencies a foreign import fundamentally at odds with the Constitution’s separation of powers. As he had done previously in a state publication promoting the Texas Plan, Oldham quoted a 2014 book by Columbia law professor Philip Hamburger titled Is Administrative Law Unlawful? (His opinion failed to mention that Hamburger leads the nonprofit that had brought the case under review.) Nicholas Bagley, a professor of administrative law at the University of Michigan, describes the “Germanic trope” as a right-wing “fever dream,” and deems Oldham’s citation a “strategy to give academic respectability to fringe legal views.”

Two years later, Oldham heard another challenge to SEC power in which he and his colleagues, squarely at odds with Supreme Court precedent, ordered the agency to enforce some of its actions in federal court rather than before its in-house judges. The judge who wrote the majority opinion quoted Oldham’s earlier SEC opinion, including some of his writing on Landis. In June, the Supreme Court upheld the ruling, casting doubt on the enforcement authority of dozens of agencies. (Remember Route C?)

An attorney who attended Harvard Law School alongside Oldham recognizes his certitude. “He sees himself as an intellectual and he knows he’s very smart,” says the classmate, who asked for anonymity. “And it doesn’t matter if there’s all this precedent that says something else.”

The 5th circuit has been radically transformed by Trump’s appointees, who make up more than a third of the court. But the change wasn’t always smooth. In a recent Texas immigration case, for example, Oldham was at odds with then-Chief Judge Priscilla Richman, who, when first nominated by President George W. Bush in 2001, was viewed as such an extremist that Democrats blocked her appointment. (Her nomination succeeded during Bush’s second term.) While some of the Bush and Reagan appointees regularly join the Trump judges in decisions that push legal boundaries, others have resisted—sometimes publicly. The divide mirrors the broader struggle between old-school Republicans and Trump diehards. And, just as Trump has taken over his party, his judicial appointees are prevailing.

One case in particular lays bare the court’s transformation. At the height of the pandemic, United Airlines announced an employee vaccine mandate. Several workers sued, arguing that getting the shot would violate their religious beliefs. They asked the court for protection under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. That might sound like a normal request, but legally, it’s cuckoo. Title VII relief comes in the form of damages after a religious violation has occurred. Yet Oldham and another judge found that the courts could grant relief and keep the policy from taking effect. “It totally blew my mind,” says the attorney who practices in the 5th Circuit. Not long ago, it “would have been laughed out of court.”

But it was a dissent in the case that really got people’s attention. Judge Jerry Smith, a conservative Reagan appointee to the circuit, had once hired Ho as his clerk. Smith was also there at Crow’s library for Ho’s swearing-in. But now he warned that nothing, “especially not the law, will thwart this majority’s plans,” adding that Oldham had helped unleash an “orgy of jurisprudential violence.”

“By today’s ruling, the Good Ship Fifth Circuit is afire,” Smith continued. “We need all hands on deck.”

His dissent, perhaps unintentionally, struck the same note as the court’s left-leaning critics: The issue isn’t so much that the 5th Circuit reaches ultraconservative conclusions, but that it breaks all the rules to get there. The last few years have seen the court seize on aggressive procedural maneuvers that give its judges more power. Its expansive view of standing is one key area where, as Vladeck sarcastically puts it, the 5th Circuit has “really covered itself in glory,” with judges repeatedly ignoring precedent so they can rule on cases that excite them. In recent years, the Supreme Court has reversed the 5th Circuit’s decisions on standing five times in politically charged cases, twice unanimously. But the lower court “keeps repeating the same errors,” Vladeck says. “The point is not that they’re getting these things wrong. The point is that they are getting them wrong in a way that is making it possible for them to actually interject themselves even deeper into our social and political debates.”

The 5th Circuit wasn’t always reactionary. Until 1981, its jurisdiction also included Alabama, Georgia, and Florida, and under the leadership of Republican-appointed judges, the court spent the 1960s desegregating the South in the face of violent white supremacism. One of the judges was an Eisenhower Republican felicitously named John Minor Wisdom, for whom the court’s majestic building in downtown New Orleans was dedicated in 1994.

“The 5th Circuit and the US Supreme Court were instrumental in this period of American history where rights were finally actually respected by the federal courts,” says Graves, of True North Research. “In reaction to that, there’s been a concerted effort to take over those courts and put people on the courts who have this fundamental hostility to civil rights and the power of government to protect individual freedoms.”

The transition began with increasingly conservative appointments under President Richard Nixon. But it ramped up under Obama’s tenure, as Senate Republicans stymied many of his judicial nominations, leaving him, in eight years, able to make only three 5th Circuit appointments. Texas’ senators, Cornyn and Cruz, blocked all but one appointment to the court from their state, allowing Trump to tap Ho and another Texan as soon as he entered office. Ultimately, Trump made six appointments in four years.

The decisions now coming out of the Wisdom courthouse are increasingly hostile to its namesake’s legacy. During the 1960s, the court embraced Brown v. Board of Education, which ended the constitutionality of school segregation. At his 2018 confirmation hearing, Oldham refused to say whether Brown was rightly decided.

Justice Thomas spoke that same year at a Dallas Federalist Society event, where he recounted something his former clerk and newly appointed 5th Circuit judge, Ho, had said as he was finishing his clerkship. “‘You know, when I came to this job, I thought it was going to be very complicated,’” Thomas recalled Ho saying. “‘But you know, it’s pretty straightforward, isn’t it?’”

“I think it is,” Thomas concurred, “if you start at the right place.”

That’s a point that could be made of Ho, Oldham, and many of their 5th Circuit colleagues. It’s no mystery where they are headed once you know where they started from.

One August evening, I drove through the cornfields and dairy farms of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, to attend a government-­themed prayer night at Ephrata Community Church. The sprawling house of worship looks like an office park and houses a cafe and an indoor playground in addition to a large sanctuary. This event, however, was in a converted barn across the parking lot called Gateway House of Prayer. For the last 15 years, it has been open 24 hours a day for the faithful to worship when the main church is closed, with parishioners keeping watch in shifts.

It was a Thursday night. Gradually, about 22 congregants, mostly seniors, all of whom were members of the community, filtered in. Over the next two hours, the group prayed, sometimes quietly and sometimes very loudly, and sometimes in strings of syllables, a charismatic Christian tradition known as speaking in tongues. Of the prayers that I could understand, many were what you’d hear in any church—gratitude for God’s goodness or entreaties for family members going through hard times.

But interspersed were more unsettling messages: frequent references to the “enemy,” to a battle between good and evil, to a “spiritual war” playing out in our country. One prayer leader encouraged attendees to join a pair of “prophets” who were taking daily Communion for 90 days at exactly 4:14 p.m. Why so precise? The answer can be found in two Old Testament verses: Esther 4:14, which says Christians are called to speak up in the face of persecution, and Nehemiah 4:14, which “is about fighting,” the prayer leader said, “on behalf of our sons, our daughters, our families.”

The devotees she mentioned were leaders in the New Apostolic Reformation, a charismatic evangelical Christian movement led by a loose network of self-appointed­ prophets and apostles, who claim that God speaks directly to them, often in dreams. They believe that Christians are called to wage a spiritual battle for control of the United States. In the vanguard of an ascendant Christian nationalist movement, they are seeking an explicitly Christian command of public schools, social policy, and all levels of the government, including the courts. Some scholars claim NAR is the fastest-growing spiritual movement in the United States. Evangelical writer C. Peter Wagner described it as the most significant shake-up in Protestantism since the Reformation. Its laser focus on starting a spiritual war to Christianize America has led the Southern Poverty Law Center to call NAR “the greatest threat to US democracy that you have never heard of.”

“It’s the transformation of an entire society…something so transcendentally revolutionary that most people never even thought about something like this.”

Estimates of Christians influenced by NAR vary widely, from 3 million to 33 million. But the number of adherents isn’t the extent of its influence; its main tenets have moved beyond the confines of churches and into the political mainstream, largely thanks to traveling apostles and prophets who preach at evangelical churches all over the world. Fred Clarkson, a senior research analyst with the extremism watchdog group Political Research Associates, described the New Apostolic Reformation as a seismic cultural shift. “It’s the transformation of an entire society with this certain kind of Christo-centric worldview,” he told me. “We’re talking about something so transcendentally revolutionary that most people never even thought about something like this.”

Donald Trump’s former national security adviser Mike Flynn has hosted NAR leaders on his “ReAwaken America” tour, and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has worked with its apostles. Just this past weekend, GOP vice presidential hopeful Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) appeared in Pennsylvania at an event hosted by Lance Wallnau, a Texas business strategist-turned-NAR superstar. Wallnau, who has called Kamala Harris a “Jezebel” and speculated that people on the political left may be controlled by demons, helped develop Project 19, a right-wing political initiative to win 19 key counties in swing states for Trump.

I asked Clarkson for a metaphor to describe how New Apostolic Reformation concepts have spread beyond the confines of the movement. At first, he suggested the cellular process of osmosis, or perhaps a tea infusion, but neither accounts for the intentionality of the movement’s leaders. “How do you infuse your Christian ideas into Babylon?” he asked, referring to an ancient city that rejected God. “That’s the nature of their thinking. It can be deeply subversive. It can also be utterly in your face.”

Since 2016, many NAR prophesies have concerned Trump, whom adherents see as having been divinely chosen to lead the country. Trump’s introduction to the movement came in 2002 when he invited Florida apostle Paula White-Cain to be his personal minister after seeing her preach on television. By the time he became president, he had acquired a handful of other NAR spiritual advisers: most notably, a South Carolina–­based apostle named Dutch Sheets and prophet Cindy Jacobs, who helms an influential ministry in Texas. Throughout his presidency, Trump’s NAR counselors were mostly ignored by White House reporters, dismissed as latter-day versions of evangelical pastor Billy Graham with Richard Nixon, or Jeremiah Wright with Barack Obama. Yet “these are the key religious people around Donald Trump and the people who brought him the presidency,” Clarkson said. “They’re the people who influenced his presidency and the people who are leading the religious wing of his reelection campaign.”

As the 2020 election drew near, their role became more important. White-Cain warned her followers that Christians who don’t support Trump will “have to stand accountable before God one day.” Shortly after Trump’s defeat, Sheets became an influential figure in the “Stop the Steal” campaign, leading rallies across the country. He warned that the results of the presidential election were “going to be overturned and President Trump is going to be put back in office for four years.” Around the same time, White-Cain gave a speech imploring religious Americans to “strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike until you have victory.”

Eight days before the Capitol insurrection of January 6, 2021, a group of apostles held a strategy meeting with Trump and his advisers. In a January 1 blog post, Sheets shared a dream from a prophet named Gina Gholston, in which she described “moving toward the Capitol, not at a full gallop, but at a steady, determined, fast trot. As we began, written in white letters on the ground in front of us were the words, ‘DON’T STOP.’” A year after the insurrection, Sheets recounted a dream in which Trump had told him that he would be a “political martyr” because, he had said, loosely quoting the Bible, “‘God has put the tools in me to tear down, root up, and confront the system.’”

NAR leaders have targeted the Supreme Court, too. In 2018, during Justice Brett Kav­anaugh’s contentious confirmation hearings, Sheets urged his followers to ask God to grant them “a majority of Justices who are Constitutionalists, literalists (meaning they believe the Constitution is to be taken literally, exactly as it is written), and who are pro-life.” He prayed for “another vacancy on the Court soon,” which he felt was “coming quickly.” In a broadcast, Wallnau, the NAR leader who recently hosted Vance in Pennsylvania, described the accusations of rape against Kavanaugh as a spiritual attack.

The apostles’ visions for the Supreme Court didn’t get much mainstream attention—until the New York Times broke a series of stories about flags displayed at the homes of Justice Samuel Alito. Outside his main residence was an upside-down American flag, a symbol associated with the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election. At his vacation home in New Jersey, the Times’ Jodi Kantor later reported, flew an “Appeal to Heaven” flag—belonging to Alito’s wife, Martha-Ann—showing a lone pine tree, a Revolutionary War symbol that had been revived and popularized by none other than Sheets. Rolling Stone found the same flag fluttering outside the Maine vacation home of Leonard Leo, the deep-pocketed conservative judicial kingmaker whose largesse has extended to several justices and their families.

Meanwhile, NAR apostles have ensured that their teachings have spread into local civil societies. In Redding, California, the 11,000-member Bethel Church now funds the local police force and trains public school teachers. In Pasadena, Korean American apostle Ché Ahn’s Harvest Rock Church bankrolled local candidates, including one for state Senate. The Remnant Alliance, an NAR-affiliated group, teaches Christians across the nation to run for school boards.

And then there is Lancaster, Pennsylvania, a county of 550,000 people spread out over a patchwork of fertile farmland, where I traveled to understand what this kind of local transformation looks like. Since the mid-1600s, Pennsylvania has been known for religious fervor. First came the Quakers, followed shortly after by the Anabaptists, or “plain” people. Ephrata, for example, was a hub for the Brethren, but the area is also known for Mennonites and particularly the Amish. Today, Lancaster also has become an NAR hub. A popular sports event venue hosts far-right Christian conferences. NAR-affiliated churches control the school boards. One local group holds Bible study in public schools; another baptizes students in portable troughs in front of public high schools.

At the prayer night I attended, spiritual warfare rhetoric was on full display. An elderly woman described Lancaster public schools as being “so infiltrated with evil,” she prayed that “school boards would open up their eyes and ears and stop just screaming things that they think are good. If they did their homework, they’d see they’re not good.” Another woman announced that she had a vision of a claw machine. Instead of cheap prizes at the arcade, her claw—which symbolized the demonic influence of secularism—had picked up people’s minds so that they “can’t discern what’s right and wrong.” Her metaphor became an entreaty to God: “And I want to say…drop those minds and take them back for the Lord.” Someone blew a shofar, the ram’s horn that ancient Israelites used to call their armies to battle.

“We declare that this gender confusion would be stopped in the mighty name of Jesus!”

“We declare that this gender confusion would be stopped in the mighty name of Jesus!” cried another man, clad in the iconic Trump campaign T-shirt bearing the mugshot of the former president emblazoned with the word “wanted”—not for a crime but for another term in office. “We say, ‘Fight, fight, fight, hallelujah!’” he said. “We take the example of Donald Trump!” The group broke out in a chorus of “Fight, fight, fight!”

The New Apostolic Reformation may be influential, but it’s also hard to pin down. With no single leader, annual conference, or website outlining statements of belief, it isn’t a distinct Protestant denomination, like Baptists or Presbyterians, but a vast and amorphous network of prophets and apostles who oversee their own ministries, issue prophetic declarations, and journey to churches all over the world to spread their ideology. Though many adherents fit the stereotype of the white, male Christian nationalist, some of the most prominent American apostles are African Americans and women; some of the most powerful global apostles come from African nations. But in Lancaster, the churches are overwhelmingly white.

The term “New Apostolic Reformation” was coined in the 1990s by the influential evangelical writer Wagner, who emphasized that he was not the movement’s leader—because it had none. It was instead a coming together of several smaller sects that shared a belief that God appointed apostles and prophets who possessed special “gifts of the spirit,” like the ability to perform miracles, for instance, or speak in tongues. In what became known as the “fivefold ministry,” NAR churches organized themselves into five areas of leadership: apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers. Leaders were urged to “use their influence to create an environment in which the blessings and prosperity of the Kingdom of God can permeate all areas of society,” to conquer “the Seven Mountains: Religion, Family, Education, Government, Media, Arts & Entertainment, and Business.”

It was Wallnau who popularized this doctrine of Christian dominion, which is sometimes known as the Seven Mountain Mandate, or 7MM. According to a recent Denison University poll, between March 2023 and January 2024, the percentage of Christian Americans who believed in the Seven Mountain Mandate increased from just under 30 percent to 41 percent. The concept routinely appears in conservative political discourse. Alabama Chief Justice Tom Parker, who championed fetal personhood in a February 2024 ruling, said in an interview with a prominent NAR apostle that “God created government” and “that’s why he is calling and equipping people to step back into these mountains.”

Promoting a Christian nation has seeped into some of the Supreme Court justices’ opinions. In the 2019 case American Legion v. American Humanist Association, the court ruled in favor of the American Legion, which had erected a 40-foot cross on public land in Maryland. Alito wrote that taking down the cross would be “aggressively hostile to religion.” In the 2022 Kennedy v. Bremerton School District case, the court ruled 6–3 in favor of a public high school football coach who lost his job for routinely leading prayers during games. Writing for the conservative majority, Justice Neil Gorsuch unilaterally declared that the court had “long ago abandoned” a decades-old precedent that established that government employees can’t advance a particular religious ideology.

After the court declined in February to take up a case filed on behalf of people who had been removed from a jury because of their belief that gay marriage was wrong, Alito wrote in an unusual personal statement that he worried “Americans who do not hide their adherence to traditional religious beliefs about homosexual conduct will be ‘labeled as bigots and treated as such’ by the government.”

“There’s very little question that [Christian nationalist] views are very much reflected in where this Supreme Court majority is on religion and church and state.”

The perception that Christians are being persecuted by the government is a potent rallying cry of the Christian nationalist movement. Elliot Mincberg, a Supreme Court scholar and fellow with the pro-democracy organization People for the American Way, said, “There’s very little question that [Christian nationalist] views are very much reflected in where this Supreme Court majority is on religion and church and state.”

Clarkson has watched as the ideas popularized by NAR—the Seven Mountain Mandate, the fivefold ministry, and the concept of spiritual warfare—have infiltrated churches that aren’t officially connected to the movement. “There are so many Christianities, and they change over time—this is a perfect example,” he said. “People don’t necessarily know where every belief they hold came from.”

NAR also appropriates Jewish imagery. Two days after I heard one shofar at Ephrata, I attended an all-day “prayer burn” at a barn in the countryside where several attendees blew them. Others wore tallitot, or Jewish prayer shawls. A group of tween dancers carried a chuppah, a four-posted canopy often used in Jewish weddings. The group sang in Hebrew as they danced the hora, a standard feature in Jewish celebrations. Then, one of the NAR leaders I recognized from Ephrata took the microphone and began to speak about Jesus. “He’s the Lord of hosts,” she said. A cacophonous roar of shofars came from the crowd.

When I asked an attendee about all the Jewish references, she explained that it was simply a way to acknowledge the shared heritage between Christians and Jews. But that’s not the whole story, as Clarkson later reminded me. Many NAR adherents believe “that they have a special role as Christians in the end-times to deliver Israel”—a time when Jews will finally recognize Jesus as their Savior.

Lancaster has been home for centuries to the plain people, the Amish, the Mennonites, and the Brethren who, to various degrees, eschew machines and other trappings of modernity. But its demographics have shifted markedly over the last few decades. About 7 percent of Lancaster’s senior citizens are people of color, compared with a quarter of the youth. The gap between registered Democrats and Republicans has also narrowed.

Much of this purpling is taking place in the cobblestone streets and stately brick buildings of Lancaster City, which has welcomed 5,000 refugees to its population of 58,000 over the last 20 years. When I visited, I encountered a street festival in full swing. Young people grabbed overflowing plates of chicken tikka from an Indian food truck, and a crowd around the main stage danced to the music of a Liberian hip-hop artist.

“The way that you’re going to heal society is that you’re going to eliminate many government functions.”

City officials may embrace this diversity, but county leaders don’t. In February, the Lancaster City Council passed a law prohibiting police and city employees from asking people about their immigration status; county commissioners promptly declared Lancaster a “non-sanctuary” county. In June, after the City Council passed a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, County Commissioner Josh Parsons called the move a “propaganda victory for Hamas.” Lancaster’s overwhelmingly Republican state representatives tend to side with the county, even publicly denouncing the city’s efforts to welcome immigrants.

These state representatives regularly interact with NAR leaders. In May, two of them met with Sean Feucht, an NAR-aligned pastor who travels the country holding prayer rallies on the steps of state Capitol buildings. Also present at the meeting was a local self-proclaimed prophet named Abby Abildness, who works with the state’s prayer caucus group inside the Capitol to promote Christian initiatives in government. She has spoken candidly about her desire to blur the boundaries between church and state. “We need them and they need us,” she said, “because we can’t go write those laws.”

NAR influence in Lancaster churches began appearing in the early 2000s, but the Covid culture wars accelerated its spread. Six years ago, when Rebecca Branle, the owner of a local bike shop and mother of three, moved to Ephrata, she knew her family might stand out because they didn’t attend church. “We weren’t religious like everyone else, but I didn’t think it was that big of a deal,” she recalls. But in 2020, the pandemic hit, and once-negligible differences became “flash points.” After Branle posted a rainbow flag and a Black Lives Matter sign on her property, someone shot a bullet through the barn window, and in another incident, someone left a single slab of ­granite outside; “Look Behind You” was written on it in permanent marker, accompanied by a smiley face with the eyes crossed out. In smaller print appeared “Gays will burn in hell” and “You can repent.” She was scared for her family’s safety, but also confused: “Especially this community of people who say they’re so religious, suddenly this kind of talk is okay with them?”

The pandemic frightened many evangelical church leaders as well, but not because of the illness. Closing churches and mask mandates, which some considered offensive to God, were the real concern. Some pastors called vaccines the “mark of the beast.” To them, the pandemic’s major lesson was that government had become too powerful—and Christians had neglected to exert influence over that mountain.

Don Lamb, an ebullient, redheaded pastor whose complexion turns ruddier when he gets excited, felt the impact of Covid profoundly. We sat in the basement of LifeGate­­ ­church in the small Lancaster enclave of Elizabethtown, population 12,000, and Lamb described how once his congregation of 150 “were just doing our things, staying within our four walls, preaching the gospel.” But when mask mandates came into effect, “it was authoritarian into the nth degree, and so that awoke the church to say, ‘We need to be involved here.’” In sermons, Lamb and his brother and co-pastor, Doug, urged their congregation to oppose not only pandemic restrictions but also mail-in ballots, critical race theory, “pronoun protocols,” and other culture war issues. When Joe Biden won the 2020 election, the Lambs believed that his victory was the result of coordinated election interference by the left.

“Who gets to define the vision of society—only the liberals and secularists? That’s what makes us more determined to fight.”

On January 6, 2021, Don Lamb and several parishioners went to the rally outside the US Capitol. What was meant to be a peaceful gathering, he said, became violent only after police “were already throwing or launching flash-bang grenades at the audience.” He believes that the protesters who breached the building were set up and that the chaos could have been avoided. “We could have surrounded the Capitol with 100,000 Christians arm to arm just saying, ‘Grace, Amazing Grace,’” he said, “and there would have been no protesters who would have broken that line.”

Lamb follows Lance Wallnau, and he subscribes to the Seven Mountain Mandate. Trump, he told me, “was providentially given the stage of America.” Yet he doesn’t consider his church to be part of NAR. The term “Christian nationalism” irks him. The real problem with our nation, he says, is “liberal nationalism’s” obsession with cancel culture, identity politics, and elite institutions. “Who gets to define the vision of society—only the liberals and secularists?” he asked me. “That’s what makes us more determined to fight.”

Don and Doug Lamb often refer to the persecution of Christians in their sermons. The previous Sunday, Doug began by urging his congregation to love their neighbors, even those with whom they disagreed. But by hour’s end, he was berating Muslim immigrants in England who have “taken over the entire country” instead of assimilating. When a Muslim visits, he said, “They’re not coming as a guest. They want to take over your house.” He likened this to the futility of seeking peace with those who follow Satan—like gay people who “destroyed the church in America,” he said. “You can’t compromise the truth and have peace with people who are diabolically opposed to what you believe.” Later, Lamb clarified that a better way to phrase this sentiment might have been: “You shouldn’t compromise the truth to be at peace with those who oppose you.”

Some LifeGate congregants appear to be using those messages to inform local politics. In 2021, three church members won seats on the Elizabethtown school board, flipping it to a conservative majority. This past June, the school board voted to work with the Independence Law Center, a Christian law firm that has worked with school boards to ban transgender athletes in the county. A tertiary branch of the Family Research Council—a group that has long advocated against the separation of church and state—the law center has deep ties to NAR and is steeped in Washington’s extreme conservative religious right.

After our conversation, Don took us on a tour of his church. In the cozy, sunlit sanctuary, someone had left a flyer on a pew. The heading read, “Practical areas to prepare to speak out to societal issues.” The fourth item advised Christians, “People don’t care that you are a Christian, a citizen, or even a female…you are the enemy! Note: This would not happen to Muslims, Atheists, or BLM groups.” Lamb later told me that “You are the enemy of their agenda” would have been more accurate.

Branle, the Ephrata resident whose barn was vandalized, understands how it feels to be seen as the enemy. When she emailed local police about veiled threats she had received, an officer responded: “Can you elaborate on specifically what you perceive the threat to be? This appears to be a statement of opinion, which is protected speech.” After reporting a few more incidents to police, “I just stopped talking to them,” she said. “It felt a lot like it wasn’t helping.”

Groups affiliated with NAR are also the quiet heartbeat of institutions serving Lancaster’s neediest residents. TNT Youth Ministry, an evangelical group, provides classroom volunteers and field trip chaperones, and it runs Bible studies in local public schools. Another NAR-adjacent ministry, REAL Life Community Services, boasts that it is the “only full-time social services department” in one town.

Community service is a typical mission of faith groups the world over. But for Christians who believe they are called to influence the government, the objective is not spurred by faith alone. Rachel Tabachnick, an extremism researcher who studies NAR, notes that many of its adherents believe that “the way that you’re going to heal society is that you’re going to eliminate many government functions.” The church, not the government, will decide “whether to feed you or house you or clothe you.”

While in Lancaster, I visited the Blessings of Hope food distribution center, a Walmart-size grocery store that collects surplus food from manufacturers and makes it available to food pantries throughout the region at a deep discount. Rows of shelves filling the cavernous warehouse were crammed with giant bags of nacho cheese, dried chow mein noodles, gefilte fish, and onion ring mix. An army of volunteers, mostly women, many wearing the traditional haube hair covering for married ­Mennonite women, unloaded pallets of boxes.

David Lapp, a 42-year-old father of 12 and CEO of Blessings of Hope, was in charge. He grew up Amish and speaks with the German-­inflected lilt typical of the plain communities in the region. In the early 2000s, he and his eight brothers began to read more about evangelical Christianity. By 2006, after the Amish officially excommunicated them for straying from the church’s teachings, they began to follow NAR leaders, including prophet Andrew Wommack, who believes there is “a demonic deception that is blinding” those who spoke out against Trump. They have helped convert several Amish people, introducing them to Wommack’s work. Several of the Lapp brothers founded Blessings of Hope in 2006, and it has become a massive operation spread across five warehouses, providing 50,000 meals a day. Their work has drawn national attention: Ivanka Trump toured the distribution center during the 2020 campaign.

Lapp still dresses in the style of the Amish, with a handmade collared shirt, suspenders, and a bowl cut, because “we felt like God asked us to keep the traditional garb more as a bridge back to our people.” He sees his work as a divine calling. His organization’s closest competitor, he said, is the behemoth nonprofit Feeding America, which he described as “more of a government-run, government-funded organization” whose church participants “are not allowed to share the gospel when they’re giving out food.” Lapp, who believes in the Seven Mountain Mandate, sees publicly funded food pantries as a missed opportunity for the church. When government administers social services, he said, “they’re going to miss the hearts of the people.”

Back at Ephrata Community Church, I attended a Saturday evening service in the main building. Toddlers danced in the aisles as the worship band jammed. Some of the congregants had brought shofars in zippered carrying cases. After a somewhat banal sermon, I met executive pastor Jim Ehrman, who told me that he had only recently learned about NAR. Ephrata Community Church, he explained, had long had a “loose affiliation” with apostle Randy Clark, but “we don’t have a reference for it other than a group we care about was accused of being that.” I pressed further. Wasn’t his church about to host John Bevere, an NAR-affiliated pastor who has warned against the practice of tolerance?

“I had no idea he would have been associated with it,” Ehrman said. As far as the Seven Mountain teaching was concerned: “We do agree [the mountains] are there, but we’re very much like, ‘No, it’s who you are and how you carry yourself into those.’ There’s not some…mandate to take over.” When I told him about the prayer night, he seemed bemused. All the talk of spiritual warfare I had seen was “just the frame and the language they pick up,” he said.

Was Ehrman just being coy about his church’s connections to the New Apostolic Reformation, or was he genuinely naive to a movement that was so powerful and pervasive? In a sense, it didn’t matter. Another imperfect metaphor for the influence of NAR is climate change. Like it or not, it’s happening. The question for many pastors is how to steer their congregations through an increasingly chaotic and extreme religious landscape.

For Ehrman, the label was unimportant. What mattered was that armies of angels were indeed battling with the principalities of darkness. “There are literally unseen beings who are at odds with the work of God…on this earth,” he said. “And we believe that they are trying to influence things as well.”

Additional reporting by the Lancaster Examiner.

One August evening, I drove through the cornfields and dairy farms of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, to attend a government-­themed prayer night at Ephrata Community Church. The sprawling house of worship looks like an office park and houses a cafe and an indoor playground in addition to a large sanctuary. This event, however, was in a converted barn across the parking lot called Gateway House of Prayer. For the last 15 years, it has been open 24 hours a day for the faithful to worship when the main church is closed, with parishioners keeping watch in shifts.

It was a Thursday night. Gradually, about 22 congregants, mostly seniors, all of whom were members of the community, filtered in. Over the next two hours, the group prayed, sometimes quietly and sometimes very loudly, and sometimes in strings of syllables, a charismatic Christian tradition known as speaking in tongues. Of the prayers that I could understand, many were what you’d hear in any church—gratitude for God’s goodness or entreaties for family members going through hard times.

But interspersed were more unsettling messages: frequent references to the “enemy,” to a battle between good and evil, to a “spiritual war” playing out in our country. One prayer leader encouraged attendees to join a pair of “prophets” who were taking daily Communion for 90 days at exactly 4:14 p.m. Why so precise? The answer can be found in two Old Testament verses: Esther 4:14, which says Christians are called to speak up in the face of persecution, and Nehemiah 4:14, which “is about fighting,” the prayer leader said, “on behalf of our sons, our daughters, our families.”

The devotees she mentioned were leaders in the New Apostolic Reformation, a charismatic evangelical Christian movement led by a loose network of self-appointed­ prophets and apostles, who claim that God speaks directly to them, often in dreams. They believe that Christians are called to wage a spiritual battle for control of the United States. In the vanguard of an ascendant Christian nationalist movement, they are seeking an explicitly Christian command of public schools, social policy, and all levels of the government, including the courts. Some scholars claim NAR is the fastest-growing spiritual movement in the United States. Evangelical writer C. Peter Wagner described it as the most significant shake-up in Protestantism since the Reformation. Its laser focus on starting a spiritual war to Christianize America has led the Southern Poverty Law Center to call NAR “the greatest threat to US democracy that you have never heard of.”

“It’s the transformation of an entire society…something so transcendentally revolutionary that most people never even thought about something like this.”

Estimates of Christians influenced by NAR vary widely, from 3 million to 33 million. But the number of adherents isn’t the extent of its influence; its main tenets have moved beyond the confines of churches and into the political mainstream, largely thanks to traveling apostles and prophets who preach at evangelical churches all over the world. Fred Clarkson, a senior research analyst with the extremism watchdog group Political Research Associates, described the New Apostolic Reformation as a seismic cultural shift. “It’s the transformation of an entire society with this certain kind of Christo-centric worldview,” he told me. “We’re talking about something so transcendentally revolutionary that most people never even thought about something like this.”

Donald Trump’s former national security adviser Mike Flynn has hosted NAR leaders on his “ReAwaken America” tour, and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has worked with its apostles. Just this past weekend, GOP vice presidential hopeful Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) appeared in Pennsylvania at an event hosted by Lance Wallnau, a Texas business strategist-turned-NAR superstar. Wallnau, who has called Kamala Harris a “Jezebel” and speculated that people on the political left may be controlled by demons, helped develop Project 19, a right-wing political initiative to win 19 key counties in swing states for Trump.

I asked Clarkson for a metaphor to describe how New Apostolic Reformation concepts have spread beyond the confines of the movement. At first, he suggested the cellular process of osmosis, or perhaps a tea infusion, but neither accounts for the intentionality of the movement’s leaders. “How do you infuse your Christian ideas into Babylon?” he asked, referring to an ancient city that rejected God. “That’s the nature of their thinking. It can be deeply subversive. It can also be utterly in your face.”

Since 2016, many NAR prophesies have concerned Trump, whom adherents see as having been divinely chosen to lead the country. Trump’s introduction to the movement came in 2002 when he invited Florida apostle Paula White-Cain to be his personal minister after seeing her preach on television. By the time he became president, he had acquired a handful of other NAR spiritual advisers: most notably, a South Carolina–­based apostle named Dutch Sheets and prophet Cindy Jacobs, who helms an influential ministry in Texas. Throughout his presidency, Trump’s NAR counselors were mostly ignored by White House reporters, dismissed as latter-day versions of evangelical pastor Billy Graham with Richard Nixon, or Jeremiah Wright with Barack Obama. Yet “these are the key religious people around Donald Trump and the people who brought him the presidency,” Clarkson said. “They’re the people who influenced his presidency and the people who are leading the religious wing of his reelection campaign.”

As the 2020 election drew near, their role became more important. White-Cain warned her followers that Christians who don’t support Trump will “have to stand accountable before God one day.” Shortly after Trump’s defeat, Sheets became an influential figure in the “Stop the Steal” campaign, leading rallies across the country. He warned that the results of the presidential election were “going to be overturned and President Trump is going to be put back in office for four years.” Around the same time, White-Cain gave a speech imploring religious Americans to “strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike until you have victory.”

Eight days before the Capitol insurrection of January 6, 2021, a group of apostles held a strategy meeting with Trump and his advisers. In a January 1 blog post, Sheets shared a dream from a prophet named Gina Gholston, in which she described “moving toward the Capitol, not at a full gallop, but at a steady, determined, fast trot. As we began, written in white letters on the ground in front of us were the words, ‘DON’T STOP.’” A year after the insurrection, Sheets recounted a dream in which Trump had told him that he would be a “political martyr” because, he had said, loosely quoting the Bible, “‘God has put the tools in me to tear down, root up, and confront the system.’”

NAR leaders have targeted the Supreme Court, too. In 2018, during Justice Brett Kav­anaugh’s contentious confirmation hearings, Sheets urged his followers to ask God to grant them “a majority of Justices who are Constitutionalists, literalists (meaning they believe the Constitution is to be taken literally, exactly as it is written), and who are pro-life.” He prayed for “another vacancy on the Court soon,” which he felt was “coming quickly.” In a broadcast, Wallnau, the NAR leader who recently hosted Vance in Pennsylvania, described the accusations of rape against Kavanaugh as a spiritual attack.

The apostles’ visions for the Supreme Court didn’t get much mainstream attention—until the New York Times broke a series of stories about flags displayed at the homes of Justice Samuel Alito. Outside his main residence was an upside-down American flag, a symbol associated with the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election. At his vacation home in New Jersey, the Times’ Jodi Kantor later reported, flew an “Appeal to Heaven” flag—belonging to Alito’s wife, Martha-Ann—showing a lone pine tree, a Revolutionary War symbol that had been revived and popularized by none other than Sheets. Rolling Stone found the same flag fluttering outside the Maine vacation home of Leonard Leo, the deep-pocketed conservative judicial kingmaker whose largesse has extended to several justices and their families.

Meanwhile, NAR apostles have ensured that their teachings have spread into local civil societies. In Redding, California, the 11,000-member Bethel Church now funds the local police force and trains public school teachers. In Pasadena, Korean American apostle Ché Ahn’s Harvest Rock Church bankrolled local candidates, including one for state Senate. The Remnant Alliance, an NAR-affiliated group, teaches Christians across the nation to run for school boards.

And then there is Lancaster, Pennsylvania, a county of 550,000 people spread out over a patchwork of fertile farmland, where I traveled to understand what this kind of local transformation looks like. Since the mid-1600s, Pennsylvania has been known for religious fervor. First came the Quakers, followed shortly after by the Anabaptists, or “plain” people. Ephrata, for example, was a hub for the Brethren, but the area is also known for Mennonites and particularly the Amish. Today, Lancaster also has become an NAR hub. A popular sports event venue hosts far-right Christian conferences. NAR-affiliated churches control the school boards. One local group holds Bible study in public schools; another baptizes students in portable troughs in front of public high schools.

At the prayer night I attended, spiritual warfare rhetoric was on full display. An elderly woman described Lancaster public schools as being “so infiltrated with evil,” she prayed that “school boards would open up their eyes and ears and stop just screaming things that they think are good. If they did their homework, they’d see they’re not good.” Another woman announced that she had a vision of a claw machine. Instead of cheap prizes at the arcade, her claw—which symbolized the demonic influence of secularism—had picked up people’s minds so that they “can’t discern what’s right and wrong.” Her metaphor became an entreaty to God: “And I want to say…drop those minds and take them back for the Lord.” Someone blew a shofar, the ram’s horn that ancient Israelites used to call their armies to battle.

“We declare that this gender confusion would be stopped in the mighty name of Jesus!”

“We declare that this gender confusion would be stopped in the mighty name of Jesus!” cried another man, clad in the iconic Trump campaign T-shirt bearing the mugshot of the former president emblazoned with the word “wanted”—not for a crime but for another term in office. “We say, ‘Fight, fight, fight, hallelujah!’” he said. “We take the example of Donald Trump!” The group broke out in a chorus of “Fight, fight, fight!”

The New Apostolic Reformation may be influential, but it’s also hard to pin down. With no single leader, annual conference, or website outlining statements of belief, it isn’t a distinct Protestant denomination, like Baptists or Presbyterians, but a vast and amorphous network of prophets and apostles who oversee their own ministries, issue prophetic declarations, and journey to churches all over the world to spread their ideology. Though many adherents fit the stereotype of the white, male Christian nationalist, some of the most prominent American apostles are African Americans and women; some of the most powerful global apostles come from African nations. But in Lancaster, the churches are overwhelmingly white.

The term “New Apostolic Reformation” was coined in the 1990s by the influential evangelical writer Wagner, who emphasized that he was not the movement’s leader—because it had none. It was instead a coming together of several smaller sects that shared a belief that God appointed apostles and prophets who possessed special “gifts of the spirit,” like the ability to perform miracles, for instance, or speak in tongues. In what became known as the “fivefold ministry,” NAR churches organized themselves into five areas of leadership: apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers. Leaders were urged to “use their influence to create an environment in which the blessings and prosperity of the Kingdom of God can permeate all areas of society,” to conquer “the Seven Mountains: Religion, Family, Education, Government, Media, Arts & Entertainment, and Business.”

It was Wallnau who popularized this doctrine of Christian dominion, which is sometimes known as the Seven Mountain Mandate, or 7MM. According to a recent Denison University poll, between March 2023 and January 2024, the percentage of Christian Americans who believed in the Seven Mountain Mandate increased from just under 30 percent to 41 percent. The concept routinely appears in conservative political discourse. Alabama Chief Justice Tom Parker, who championed fetal personhood in a February 2024 ruling, said in an interview with a prominent NAR apostle that “God created government” and “that’s why he is calling and equipping people to step back into these mountains.”

Promoting a Christian nation has seeped into some of the Supreme Court justices’ opinions. In the 2019 case American Legion v. American Humanist Association, the court ruled in favor of the American Legion, which had erected a 40-foot cross on public land in Maryland. Alito wrote that taking down the cross would be “aggressively hostile to religion.” In the 2022 Kennedy v. Bremerton School District case, the court ruled 6–3 in favor of a public high school football coach who lost his job for routinely leading prayers during games. Writing for the conservative majority, Justice Neil Gorsuch unilaterally declared that the court had “long ago abandoned” a decades-old precedent that established that government employees can’t advance a particular religious ideology.

After the court declined in February to take up a case filed on behalf of people who had been removed from a jury because of their belief that gay marriage was wrong, Alito wrote in an unusual personal statement that he worried “Americans who do not hide their adherence to traditional religious beliefs about homosexual conduct will be ‘labeled as bigots and treated as such’ by the government.”

“There’s very little question that [Christian nationalist] views are very much reflected in where this Supreme Court majority is on religion and church and state.”

The perception that Christians are being persecuted by the government is a potent rallying cry of the Christian nationalist movement. Elliot Mincberg, a Supreme Court scholar and fellow with the pro-democracy organization People for the American Way, said, “There’s very little question that [Christian nationalist] views are very much reflected in where this Supreme Court majority is on religion and church and state.”

Clarkson has watched as the ideas popularized by NAR—the Seven Mountain Mandate, the fivefold ministry, and the concept of spiritual warfare—have infiltrated churches that aren’t officially connected to the movement. “There are so many Christianities, and they change over time—this is a perfect example,” he said. “People don’t necessarily know where every belief they hold came from.”

NAR also appropriates Jewish imagery. Two days after I heard one shofar at Ephrata, I attended an all-day “prayer burn” at a barn in the countryside where several attendees blew them. Others wore tallitot, or Jewish prayer shawls. A group of tween dancers carried a chuppah, a four-posted canopy often used in Jewish weddings. The group sang in Hebrew as they danced the hora, a standard feature in Jewish celebrations. Then, one of the NAR leaders I recognized from Ephrata took the microphone and began to speak about Jesus. “He’s the Lord of hosts,” she said. A cacophonous roar of shofars came from the crowd.

When I asked an attendee about all the Jewish references, she explained that it was simply a way to acknowledge the shared heritage between Christians and Jews. But that’s not the whole story, as Clarkson later reminded me. Many NAR adherents believe “that they have a special role as Christians in the end-times to deliver Israel”—a time when Jews will finally recognize Jesus as their Savior.

Lancaster has been home for centuries to the plain people, the Amish, the Mennonites, and the Brethren who, to various degrees, eschew machines and other trappings of modernity. But its demographics have shifted markedly over the last few decades. About 7 percent of Lancaster’s senior citizens are people of color, compared with a quarter of the youth. The gap between registered Democrats and Republicans has also narrowed.

Much of this purpling is taking place in the cobblestone streets and stately brick buildings of Lancaster City, which has welcomed 5,000 refugees to its population of 58,000 over the last 20 years. When I visited, I encountered a street festival in full swing. Young people grabbed overflowing plates of chicken tikka from an Indian food truck, and a crowd around the main stage danced to the music of a Liberian hip-hop artist.

“The way that you’re going to heal society is that you’re going to eliminate many government functions.”

City officials may embrace this diversity, but county leaders don’t. In February, the Lancaster City Council passed a law prohibiting police and city employees from asking people about their immigration status; county commissioners promptly declared Lancaster a “non-sanctuary” county. In June, after the City Council passed a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, County Commissioner Josh Parsons called the move a “propaganda victory for Hamas.” Lancaster’s overwhelmingly Republican state representatives tend to side with the county, even publicly denouncing the city’s efforts to welcome immigrants.

These state representatives regularly interact with NAR leaders. In May, two of them met with Sean Feucht, an NAR-aligned pastor who travels the country holding prayer rallies on the steps of state Capitol buildings. Also present at the meeting was a local self-proclaimed prophet named Abby Abildness, who works with the state’s prayer caucus group inside the Capitol to promote Christian initiatives in government. She has spoken candidly about her desire to blur the boundaries between church and state. “We need them and they need us,” she said, “because we can’t go write those laws.”

NAR influence in Lancaster churches began appearing in the early 2000s, but the Covid culture wars accelerated its spread. Six years ago, when Rebecca Branle, the owner of a local bike shop and mother of three, moved to Ephrata, she knew her family might stand out because they didn’t attend church. “We weren’t religious like everyone else, but I didn’t think it was that big of a deal,” she recalls. But in 2020, the pandemic hit, and once-negligible differences became “flash points.” After Branle posted a rainbow flag and a Black Lives Matter sign on her property, someone shot a bullet through the barn window, and in another incident, someone left a single slab of ­granite outside; “Look Behind You” was written on it in permanent marker, accompanied by a smiley face with the eyes crossed out. In smaller print appeared “Gays will burn in hell” and “You can repent.” She was scared for her family’s safety, but also confused: “Especially this community of people who say they’re so religious, suddenly this kind of talk is okay with them?”

The pandemic frightened many evangelical church leaders as well, but not because of the illness. Closing churches and mask mandates, which some considered offensive to God, were the real concern. Some pastors called vaccines the “mark of the beast.” To them, the pandemic’s major lesson was that government had become too powerful—and Christians had neglected to exert influence over that mountain.

Don Lamb, an ebullient, redheaded pastor whose complexion turns ruddier when he gets excited, felt the impact of Covid profoundly. We sat in the basement of LifeGate­­ ­church in the small Lancaster enclave of Elizabethtown, population 12,000, and Lamb described how once his congregation of 150 “were just doing our things, staying within our four walls, preaching the gospel.” But when mask mandates came into effect, “it was authoritarian into the nth degree, and so that awoke the church to say, ‘We need to be involved here.’” In sermons, Lamb and his brother and co-pastor, Doug, urged their congregation to oppose not only pandemic restrictions but also mail-in ballots, critical race theory, “pronoun protocols,” and other culture war issues. When Joe Biden won the 2020 election, the Lambs believed that his victory was the result of coordinated election interference by the left.

“Who gets to define the vision of society—only the liberals and secularists? That’s what makes us more determined to fight.”

On January 6, 2021, Don Lamb and several parishioners went to the rally outside the US Capitol. What was meant to be a peaceful gathering, he said, became violent only after police “were already throwing or launching flash-bang grenades at the audience.” He believes that the protesters who breached the building were set up and that the chaos could have been avoided. “We could have surrounded the Capitol with 100,000 Christians arm to arm just saying, ‘Grace, Amazing Grace,’” he said, “and there would have been no protesters who would have broken that line.”

Lamb follows Lance Wallnau, and he subscribes to the Seven Mountain Mandate. Trump, he told me, “was providentially given the stage of America.” Yet he doesn’t consider his church to be part of NAR. The term “Christian nationalism” irks him. The real problem with our nation, he says, is “liberal nationalism’s” obsession with cancel culture, identity politics, and elite institutions. “Who gets to define the vision of society—only the liberals and secularists?” he asked me. “That’s what makes us more determined to fight.”

Don and Doug Lamb often refer to the persecution of Christians in their sermons. The previous Sunday, Doug began by urging his congregation to love their neighbors, even those with whom they disagreed. But by hour’s end, he was berating Muslim immigrants in England who have “taken over the entire country” instead of assimilating. When a Muslim visits, he said, “They’re not coming as a guest. They want to take over your house.” He likened this to the futility of seeking peace with those who follow Satan—like gay people who “destroyed the church in America,” he said. “You can’t compromise the truth and have peace with people who are diabolically opposed to what you believe.” Later, Lamb clarified that a better way to phrase this sentiment might have been: “You shouldn’t compromise the truth to be at peace with those who oppose you.”

Some LifeGate congregants appear to be using those messages to inform local politics. In 2021, three church members won seats on the Elizabethtown school board, flipping it to a conservative majority. This past June, the school board voted to work with the Independence Law Center, a Christian law firm that has worked with school boards to ban transgender athletes in the county. A tertiary branch of the Family Research Council—a group that has long advocated against the separation of church and state—the law center has deep ties to NAR and is steeped in Washington’s extreme conservative religious right.

After our conversation, Don took us on a tour of his church. In the cozy, sunlit sanctuary, someone had left a flyer on a pew. The heading read, “Practical areas to prepare to speak out to societal issues.” The fourth item advised Christians, “People don’t care that you are a Christian, a citizen, or even a female…you are the enemy! Note: This would not happen to Muslims, Atheists, or BLM groups.” Lamb later told me that “You are the enemy of their agenda” would have been more accurate.

Branle, the Ephrata resident whose barn was vandalized, understands how it feels to be seen as the enemy. When she emailed local police about veiled threats she had received, an officer responded: “Can you elaborate on specifically what you perceive the threat to be? This appears to be a statement of opinion, which is protected speech.” After reporting a few more incidents to police, “I just stopped talking to them,” she said. “It felt a lot like it wasn’t helping.”

Groups affiliated with NAR are also the quiet heartbeat of institutions serving Lancaster’s neediest residents. TNT Youth Ministry, an evangelical group, provides classroom volunteers and field trip chaperones, and it runs Bible studies in local public schools. Another NAR-adjacent ministry, REAL Life Community Services, boasts that it is the “only full-time social services department” in one town.

Community service is a typical mission of faith groups the world over. But for Christians who believe they are called to influence the government, the objective is not spurred by faith alone. Rachel Tabachnick, an extremism researcher who studies NAR, notes that many of its adherents believe that “the way that you’re going to heal society is that you’re going to eliminate many government functions.” The church, not the government, will decide “whether to feed you or house you or clothe you.”

While in Lancaster, I visited the Blessings of Hope food distribution center, a Walmart-size grocery store that collects surplus food from manufacturers and makes it available to food pantries throughout the region at a deep discount. Rows of shelves filling the cavernous warehouse were crammed with giant bags of nacho cheese, dried chow mein noodles, gefilte fish, and onion ring mix. An army of volunteers, mostly women, many wearing the traditional haube hair covering for married ­Mennonite women, unloaded pallets of boxes.

David Lapp, a 42-year-old father of 12 and CEO of Blessings of Hope, was in charge. He grew up Amish and speaks with the German-­inflected lilt typical of the plain communities in the region. In the early 2000s, he and his eight brothers began to read more about evangelical Christianity. By 2006, after the Amish officially excommunicated them for straying from the church’s teachings, they began to follow NAR leaders, including prophet Andrew Wommack, who believes there is “a demonic deception that is blinding” those who spoke out against Trump. They have helped convert several Amish people, introducing them to Wommack’s work. Several of the Lapp brothers founded Blessings of Hope in 2006, and it has become a massive operation spread across five warehouses, providing 50,000 meals a day. Their work has drawn national attention: Ivanka Trump toured the distribution center during the 2020 campaign.

Lapp still dresses in the style of the Amish, with a handmade collared shirt, suspenders, and a bowl cut, because “we felt like God asked us to keep the traditional garb more as a bridge back to our people.” He sees his work as a divine calling. His organization’s closest competitor, he said, is the behemoth nonprofit Feeding America, which he described as “more of a government-run, government-funded organization” whose church participants “are not allowed to share the gospel when they’re giving out food.” Lapp, who believes in the Seven Mountain Mandate, sees publicly funded food pantries as a missed opportunity for the church. When government administers social services, he said, “they’re going to miss the hearts of the people.”

Back at Ephrata Community Church, I attended a Saturday evening service in the main building. Toddlers danced in the aisles as the worship band jammed. Some of the congregants had brought shofars in zippered carrying cases. After a somewhat banal sermon, I met executive pastor Jim Ehrman, who told me that he had only recently learned about NAR. Ephrata Community Church, he explained, had long had a “loose affiliation” with apostle Randy Clark, but “we don’t have a reference for it other than a group we care about was accused of being that.” I pressed further. Wasn’t his church about to host John Bevere, an NAR-affiliated pastor who has warned against the practice of tolerance?

“I had no idea he would have been associated with it,” Ehrman said. As far as the Seven Mountain teaching was concerned: “We do agree [the mountains] are there, but we’re very much like, ‘No, it’s who you are and how you carry yourself into those.’ There’s not some…mandate to take over.” When I told him about the prayer night, he seemed bemused. All the talk of spiritual warfare I had seen was “just the frame and the language they pick up,” he said.

Was Ehrman just being coy about his church’s connections to the New Apostolic Reformation, or was he genuinely naive to a movement that was so powerful and pervasive? In a sense, it didn’t matter. Another imperfect metaphor for the influence of NAR is climate change. Like it or not, it’s happening. The question for many pastors is how to steer their congregations through an increasingly chaotic and extreme religious landscape.

For Ehrman, the label was unimportant. What mattered was that armies of angels were indeed battling with the principalities of darkness. “There are literally unseen beings who are at odds with the work of God…on this earth,” he said. “And we believe that they are trying to influence things as well.”

Additional reporting by the Lancaster Examiner.

One August evening, I drove through the cornfields and dairy farms of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, to attend a government-­themed prayer night at Ephrata Community Church. The sprawling house of worship looks like an office park and houses a cafe and an indoor playground in addition to a large sanctuary. This event, however, was in a converted barn across the parking lot called Gateway House of Prayer. For the last 15 years, it has been open 24 hours a day for the faithful to worship when the main church is closed, with parishioners keeping watch in shifts.

It was a Thursday night. Gradually, about 22 congregants, mostly seniors, all of whom were members of the community, filtered in. Over the next two hours, the group prayed, sometimes quietly and sometimes very loudly, and sometimes in strings of syllables, a charismatic Christian tradition known as speaking in tongues. Of the prayers that I could understand, many were what you’d hear in any church—gratitude for God’s goodness or entreaties for family members going through hard times.

But interspersed were more unsettling messages: frequent references to the “enemy,” to a battle between good and evil, to a “spiritual war” playing out in our country. One prayer leader encouraged attendees to join a pair of “prophets” who were taking daily Communion for 90 days at exactly 4:14 p.m. Why so precise? The answer can be found in two Old Testament verses: Esther 4:14, which says Christians are called to speak up in the face of persecution, and Nehemiah 4:14, which “is about fighting,” the prayer leader said, “on behalf of our sons, our daughters, our families.”

The devotees she mentioned were leaders in the New Apostolic Reformation, a charismatic evangelical Christian movement led by a loose network of self-appointed­ prophets and apostles, who claim that God speaks directly to them, often in dreams. They believe that Christians are called to wage a spiritual battle for control of the United States. In the vanguard of an ascendant Christian nationalist movement, they are seeking an explicitly Christian command of public schools, social policy, and all levels of the government, including the courts. Some scholars claim NAR is the fastest-growing spiritual movement in the United States. Evangelical writer C. Peter Wagner described it as the most significant shake-up in Protestantism since the Reformation. Its laser focus on starting a spiritual war to Christianize America has led the Southern Poverty Law Center to call NAR “the greatest threat to US democracy that you have never heard of.”

“It’s the transformation of an entire society…something so transcendentally revolutionary that most people never even thought about something like this.”

Estimates of Christians influenced by NAR vary widely, from 3 million to 33 million. But the number of adherents isn’t the extent of its influence; its main tenets have moved beyond the confines of churches and into the political mainstream, largely thanks to traveling apostles and prophets who preach at evangelical churches all over the world. Fred Clarkson, a senior research analyst with the extremism watchdog group Political Research Associates, described the New Apostolic Reformation as a seismic cultural shift. “It’s the transformation of an entire society with this certain kind of Christo-centric worldview,” he told me. “We’re talking about something so transcendentally revolutionary that most people never even thought about something like this.”

Donald Trump’s former national security adviser Mike Flynn has hosted NAR leaders on his “ReAwaken America” tour, and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has worked with its apostles. Just this past weekend, GOP vice presidential hopeful Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) appeared in Pennsylvania at an event hosted by Lance Wallnau, a Texas business strategist-turned-NAR superstar. Wallnau, who has called Kamala Harris a “Jezebel” and speculated that people on the political left may be controlled by demons, helped develop Project 19, a right-wing political initiative to win 19 key counties in swing states for Trump.

I asked Clarkson for a metaphor to describe how New Apostolic Reformation concepts have spread beyond the confines of the movement. At first, he suggested the cellular process of osmosis, or perhaps a tea infusion, but neither accounts for the intentionality of the movement’s leaders. “How do you infuse your Christian ideas into Babylon?” he asked, referring to an ancient city that rejected God. “That’s the nature of their thinking. It can be deeply subversive. It can also be utterly in your face.”

Since 2016, many NAR prophesies have concerned Trump, whom adherents see as having been divinely chosen to lead the country. Trump’s introduction to the movement came in 2002 when he invited Florida apostle Paula White-Cain to be his personal minister after seeing her preach on television. By the time he became president, he had acquired a handful of other NAR spiritual advisers: most notably, a South Carolina–­based apostle named Dutch Sheets and prophet Cindy Jacobs, who helms an influential ministry in Texas. Throughout his presidency, Trump’s NAR counselors were mostly ignored by White House reporters, dismissed as latter-day versions of evangelical pastor Billy Graham with Richard Nixon, or Jeremiah Wright with Barack Obama. Yet “these are the key religious people around Donald Trump and the people who brought him the presidency,” Clarkson said. “They’re the people who influenced his presidency and the people who are leading the religious wing of his reelection campaign.”

As the 2020 election drew near, their role became more important. White-Cain warned her followers that Christians who don’t support Trump will “have to stand accountable before God one day.” Shortly after Trump’s defeat, Sheets became an influential figure in the “Stop the Steal” campaign, leading rallies across the country. He warned that the results of the presidential election were “going to be overturned and President Trump is going to be put back in office for four years.” Around the same time, White-Cain gave a speech imploring religious Americans to “strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike until you have victory.”

Eight days before the Capitol insurrection of January 6, 2021, a group of apostles held a strategy meeting with Trump and his advisers. In a January 1 blog post, Sheets shared a dream from a prophet named Gina Gholston, in which she described “moving toward the Capitol, not at a full gallop, but at a steady, determined, fast trot. As we began, written in white letters on the ground in front of us were the words, ‘DON’T STOP.’” A year after the insurrection, Sheets recounted a dream in which Trump had told him that he would be a “political martyr” because, he had said, loosely quoting the Bible, “‘God has put the tools in me to tear down, root up, and confront the system.’”

NAR leaders have targeted the Supreme Court, too. In 2018, during Justice Brett Kav­anaugh’s contentious confirmation hearings, Sheets urged his followers to ask God to grant them “a majority of Justices who are Constitutionalists, literalists (meaning they believe the Constitution is to be taken literally, exactly as it is written), and who are pro-life.” He prayed for “another vacancy on the Court soon,” which he felt was “coming quickly.” In a broadcast, Wallnau, the NAR leader who recently hosted Vance in Pennsylvania, described the accusations of rape against Kavanaugh as a spiritual attack.

The apostles’ visions for the Supreme Court didn’t get much mainstream attention—until the New York Times broke a series of stories about flags displayed at the homes of Justice Samuel Alito. Outside his main residence was an upside-down American flag, a symbol associated with the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election. At his vacation home in New Jersey, the Times’ Jodi Kantor later reported, flew an “Appeal to Heaven” flag—belonging to Alito’s wife, Martha-Ann—showing a lone pine tree, a Revolutionary War symbol that had been revived and popularized by none other than Sheets. Rolling Stone found the same flag fluttering outside the Maine vacation home of Leonard Leo, the deep-pocketed conservative judicial kingmaker whose largesse has extended to several justices and their families.

Meanwhile, NAR apostles have ensured that their teachings have spread into local civil societies. In Redding, California, the 11,000-member Bethel Church now funds the local police force and trains public school teachers. In Pasadena, Korean American apostle Ché Ahn’s Harvest Rock Church bankrolled local candidates, including one for state Senate. The Remnant Alliance, an NAR-affiliated group, teaches Christians across the nation to run for school boards.

And then there is Lancaster, Pennsylvania, a county of 550,000 people spread out over a patchwork of fertile farmland, where I traveled to understand what this kind of local transformation looks like. Since the mid-1600s, Pennsylvania has been known for religious fervor. First came the Quakers, followed shortly after by the Anabaptists, or “plain” people. Ephrata, for example, was a hub for the Brethren, but the area is also known for Mennonites and particularly the Amish. Today, Lancaster also has become an NAR hub. A popular sports event venue hosts far-right Christian conferences. NAR-affiliated churches control the school boards. One local group holds Bible study in public schools; another baptizes students in portable troughs in front of public high schools.

At the prayer night I attended, spiritual warfare rhetoric was on full display. An elderly woman described Lancaster public schools as being “so infiltrated with evil,” she prayed that “school boards would open up their eyes and ears and stop just screaming things that they think are good. If they did their homework, they’d see they’re not good.” Another woman announced that she had a vision of a claw machine. Instead of cheap prizes at the arcade, her claw—which symbolized the demonic influence of secularism—had picked up people’s minds so that they “can’t discern what’s right and wrong.” Her metaphor became an entreaty to God: “And I want to say…drop those minds and take them back for the Lord.” Someone blew a shofar, the ram’s horn that ancient Israelites used to call their armies to battle.

“We declare that this gender confusion would be stopped in the mighty name of Jesus!”

“We declare that this gender confusion would be stopped in the mighty name of Jesus!” cried another man, clad in the iconic Trump campaign T-shirt bearing the mugshot of the former president emblazoned with the word “wanted”—not for a crime but for another term in office. “We say, ‘Fight, fight, fight, hallelujah!’” he said. “We take the example of Donald Trump!” The group broke out in a chorus of “Fight, fight, fight!”

The New Apostolic Reformation may be influential, but it’s also hard to pin down. With no single leader, annual conference, or website outlining statements of belief, it isn’t a distinct Protestant denomination, like Baptists or Presbyterians, but a vast and amorphous network of prophets and apostles who oversee their own ministries, issue prophetic declarations, and journey to churches all over the world to spread their ideology. Though many adherents fit the stereotype of the white, male Christian nationalist, some of the most prominent American apostles are African Americans and women; some of the most powerful global apostles come from African nations. But in Lancaster, the churches are overwhelmingly white.

The term “New Apostolic Reformation” was coined in the 1990s by the influential evangelical writer Wagner, who emphasized that he was not the movement’s leader—because it had none. It was instead a coming together of several smaller sects that shared a belief that God appointed apostles and prophets who possessed special “gifts of the spirit,” like the ability to perform miracles, for instance, or speak in tongues. In what became known as the “fivefold ministry,” NAR churches organized themselves into five areas of leadership: apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers. Leaders were urged to “use their influence to create an environment in which the blessings and prosperity of the Kingdom of God can permeate all areas of society,” to conquer “the Seven Mountains: Religion, Family, Education, Government, Media, Arts & Entertainment, and Business.”

It was Wallnau who popularized this doctrine of Christian dominion, which is sometimes known as the Seven Mountain Mandate, or 7MM. According to a recent Denison University poll, between March 2023 and January 2024, the percentage of Christian Americans who believed in the Seven Mountain Mandate increased from just under 30 percent to 41 percent. The concept routinely appears in conservative political discourse. Alabama Chief Justice Tom Parker, who championed fetal personhood in a February 2024 ruling, said in an interview with a prominent NAR apostle that “God created government” and “that’s why he is calling and equipping people to step back into these mountains.”

Promoting a Christian nation has seeped into some of the Supreme Court justices’ opinions. In the 2019 case American Legion v. American Humanist Association, the court ruled in favor of the American Legion, which had erected a 40-foot cross on public land in Maryland. Alito wrote that taking down the cross would be “aggressively hostile to religion.” In the 2022 Kennedy v. Bremerton School District case, the court ruled 6–3 in favor of a public high school football coach who lost his job for routinely leading prayers during games. Writing for the conservative majority, Justice Neil Gorsuch unilaterally declared that the court had “long ago abandoned” a decades-old precedent that established that government employees can’t advance a particular religious ideology.

After the court declined in February to take up a case filed on behalf of people who had been removed from a jury because of their belief that gay marriage was wrong, Alito wrote in an unusual personal statement that he worried “Americans who do not hide their adherence to traditional religious beliefs about homosexual conduct will be ‘labeled as bigots and treated as such’ by the government.”

“There’s very little question that [Christian nationalist] views are very much reflected in where this Supreme Court majority is on religion and church and state.”

The perception that Christians are being persecuted by the government is a potent rallying cry of the Christian nationalist movement. Elliot Mincberg, a Supreme Court scholar and fellow with the pro-democracy organization People for the American Way, said, “There’s very little question that [Christian nationalist] views are very much reflected in where this Supreme Court majority is on religion and church and state.”

Clarkson has watched as the ideas popularized by NAR—the Seven Mountain Mandate, the fivefold ministry, and the concept of spiritual warfare—have infiltrated churches that aren’t officially connected to the movement. “There are so many Christianities, and they change over time—this is a perfect example,” he said. “People don’t necessarily know where every belief they hold came from.”

NAR also appropriates Jewish imagery. Two days after I heard one shofar at Ephrata, I attended an all-day “prayer burn” at a barn in the countryside where several attendees blew them. Others wore tallitot, or Jewish prayer shawls. A group of tween dancers carried a chuppah, a four-posted canopy often used in Jewish weddings. The group sang in Hebrew as they danced the hora, a standard feature in Jewish celebrations. Then, one of the NAR leaders I recognized from Ephrata took the microphone and began to speak about Jesus. “He’s the Lord of hosts,” she said. A cacophonous roar of shofars came from the crowd.

When I asked an attendee about all the Jewish references, she explained that it was simply a way to acknowledge the shared heritage between Christians and Jews. But that’s not the whole story, as Clarkson later reminded me. Many NAR adherents believe “that they have a special role as Christians in the end-times to deliver Israel”—a time when Jews will finally recognize Jesus as their Savior.

Lancaster has been home for centuries to the plain people, the Amish, the Mennonites, and the Brethren who, to various degrees, eschew machines and other trappings of modernity. But its demographics have shifted markedly over the last few decades. About 7 percent of Lancaster’s senior citizens are people of color, compared with a quarter of the youth. The gap between registered Democrats and Republicans has also narrowed.

Much of this purpling is taking place in the cobblestone streets and stately brick buildings of Lancaster City, which has welcomed 5,000 refugees to its population of 58,000 over the last 20 years. When I visited, I encountered a street festival in full swing. Young people grabbed overflowing plates of chicken tikka from an Indian food truck, and a crowd around the main stage danced to the music of a Liberian hip-hop artist.

“The way that you’re going to heal society is that you’re going to eliminate many government functions.”

City officials may embrace this diversity, but county leaders don’t. In February, the Lancaster City Council passed a law prohibiting police and city employees from asking people about their immigration status; county commissioners promptly declared Lancaster a “non-sanctuary” county. In June, after the City Council passed a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, County Commissioner Josh Parsons called the move a “propaganda victory for Hamas.” Lancaster’s overwhelmingly Republican state representatives tend to side with the county, even publicly denouncing the city’s efforts to welcome immigrants.

These state representatives regularly interact with NAR leaders. In May, two of them met with Sean Feucht, an NAR-aligned pastor who travels the country holding prayer rallies on the steps of state Capitol buildings. Also present at the meeting was a local self-proclaimed prophet named Abby Abildness, who works with the state’s prayer caucus group inside the Capitol to promote Christian initiatives in government. She has spoken candidly about her desire to blur the boundaries between church and state. “We need them and they need us,” she said, “because we can’t go write those laws.”

NAR influence in Lancaster churches began appearing in the early 2000s, but the Covid culture wars accelerated its spread. Six years ago, when Rebecca Branle, the owner of a local bike shop and mother of three, moved to Ephrata, she knew her family might stand out because they didn’t attend church. “We weren’t religious like everyone else, but I didn’t think it was that big of a deal,” she recalls. But in 2020, the pandemic hit, and once-negligible differences became “flash points.” After Branle posted a rainbow flag and a Black Lives Matter sign on her property, someone shot a bullet through the barn window, and in another incident, someone left a single slab of ­granite outside; “Look Behind You” was written on it in permanent marker, accompanied by a smiley face with the eyes crossed out. In smaller print appeared “Gays will burn in hell” and “You can repent.” She was scared for her family’s safety, but also confused: “Especially this community of people who say they’re so religious, suddenly this kind of talk is okay with them?”

The pandemic frightened many evangelical church leaders as well, but not because of the illness. Closing churches and mask mandates, which some considered offensive to God, were the real concern. Some pastors called vaccines the “mark of the beast.” To them, the pandemic’s major lesson was that government had become too powerful—and Christians had neglected to exert influence over that mountain.

Don Lamb, an ebullient, redheaded pastor whose complexion turns ruddier when he gets excited, felt the impact of Covid profoundly. We sat in the basement of LifeGate­­ ­church in the small Lancaster enclave of Elizabethtown, population 12,000, and Lamb described how once his congregation of 150 “were just doing our things, staying within our four walls, preaching the gospel.” But when mask mandates came into effect, “it was authoritarian into the nth degree, and so that awoke the church to say, ‘We need to be involved here.’” In sermons, Lamb and his brother and co-pastor, Doug, urged their congregation to oppose not only pandemic restrictions but also mail-in ballots, critical race theory, “pronoun protocols,” and other culture war issues. When Joe Biden won the 2020 election, the Lambs believed that his victory was the result of coordinated election interference by the left.

“Who gets to define the vision of society—only the liberals and secularists? That’s what makes us more determined to fight.”

On January 6, 2021, Don Lamb and several parishioners went to the rally outside the US Capitol. What was meant to be a peaceful gathering, he said, became violent only after police “were already throwing or launching flash-bang grenades at the audience.” He believes that the protesters who breached the building were set up and that the chaos could have been avoided. “We could have surrounded the Capitol with 100,000 Christians arm to arm just saying, ‘Grace, Amazing Grace,’” he said, “and there would have been no protesters who would have broken that line.”

Lamb follows Lance Wallnau, and he subscribes to the Seven Mountain Mandate. Trump, he told me, “was providentially given the stage of America.” Yet he doesn’t consider his church to be part of NAR. The term “Christian nationalism” irks him. The real problem with our nation, he says, is “liberal nationalism’s” obsession with cancel culture, identity politics, and elite institutions. “Who gets to define the vision of society—only the liberals and secularists?” he asked me. “That’s what makes us more determined to fight.”

Don and Doug Lamb often refer to the persecution of Christians in their sermons. The previous Sunday, Doug began by urging his congregation to love their neighbors, even those with whom they disagreed. But by hour’s end, he was berating Muslim immigrants in England who have “taken over the entire country” instead of assimilating. When a Muslim visits, he said, “They’re not coming as a guest. They want to take over your house.” He likened this to the futility of seeking peace with those who follow Satan—like gay people who “destroyed the church in America,” he said. “You can’t compromise the truth and have peace with people who are diabolically opposed to what you believe.” Later, Lamb clarified that a better way to phrase this sentiment might have been: “You shouldn’t compromise the truth to be at peace with those who oppose you.”

Some LifeGate congregants appear to be using those messages to inform local politics. In 2021, three church members won seats on the Elizabethtown school board, flipping it to a conservative majority. This past June, the school board voted to work with the Independence Law Center, a Christian law firm that has worked with school boards to ban transgender athletes in the county. A tertiary branch of the Family Research Council—a group that has long advocated against the separation of church and state—the law center has deep ties to NAR and is steeped in Washington’s extreme conservative religious right.

After our conversation, Don took us on a tour of his church. In the cozy, sunlit sanctuary, someone had left a flyer on a pew. The heading read, “Practical areas to prepare to speak out to societal issues.” The fourth item advised Christians, “People don’t care that you are a Christian, a citizen, or even a female…you are the enemy! Note: This would not happen to Muslims, Atheists, or BLM groups.” Lamb later told me that “You are the enemy of their agenda” would have been more accurate.

Branle, the Ephrata resident whose barn was vandalized, understands how it feels to be seen as the enemy. When she emailed local police about veiled threats she had received, an officer responded: “Can you elaborate on specifically what you perceive the threat to be? This appears to be a statement of opinion, which is protected speech.” After reporting a few more incidents to police, “I just stopped talking to them,” she said. “It felt a lot like it wasn’t helping.”

Groups affiliated with NAR are also the quiet heartbeat of institutions serving Lancaster’s neediest residents. TNT Youth Ministry, an evangelical group, provides classroom volunteers and field trip chaperones, and it runs Bible studies in local public schools. Another NAR-adjacent ministry, REAL Life Community Services, boasts that it is the “only full-time social services department” in one town.

Community service is a typical mission of faith groups the world over. But for Christians who believe they are called to influence the government, the objective is not spurred by faith alone. Rachel Tabachnick, an extremism researcher who studies NAR, notes that many of its adherents believe that “the way that you’re going to heal society is that you’re going to eliminate many government functions.” The church, not the government, will decide “whether to feed you or house you or clothe you.”

While in Lancaster, I visited the Blessings of Hope food distribution center, a Walmart-size grocery store that collects surplus food from manufacturers and makes it available to food pantries throughout the region at a deep discount. Rows of shelves filling the cavernous warehouse were crammed with giant bags of nacho cheese, dried chow mein noodles, gefilte fish, and onion ring mix. An army of volunteers, mostly women, many wearing the traditional haube hair covering for married ­Mennonite women, unloaded pallets of boxes.

David Lapp, a 42-year-old father of 12 and CEO of Blessings of Hope, was in charge. He grew up Amish and speaks with the German-­inflected lilt typical of the plain communities in the region. In the early 2000s, he and his eight brothers began to read more about evangelical Christianity. By 2006, after the Amish officially excommunicated them for straying from the church’s teachings, they began to follow NAR leaders, including prophet Andrew Wommack, who believes there is “a demonic deception that is blinding” those who spoke out against Trump. They have helped convert several Amish people, introducing them to Wommack’s work. Several of the Lapp brothers founded Blessings of Hope in 2006, and it has become a massive operation spread across five warehouses, providing 50,000 meals a day. Their work has drawn national attention: Ivanka Trump toured the distribution center during the 2020 campaign.

Lapp still dresses in the style of the Amish, with a handmade collared shirt, suspenders, and a bowl cut, because “we felt like God asked us to keep the traditional garb more as a bridge back to our people.” He sees his work as a divine calling. His organization’s closest competitor, he said, is the behemoth nonprofit Feeding America, which he described as “more of a government-run, government-funded organization” whose church participants “are not allowed to share the gospel when they’re giving out food.” Lapp, who believes in the Seven Mountain Mandate, sees publicly funded food pantries as a missed opportunity for the church. When government administers social services, he said, “they’re going to miss the hearts of the people.”

Back at Ephrata Community Church, I attended a Saturday evening service in the main building. Toddlers danced in the aisles as the worship band jammed. Some of the congregants had brought shofars in zippered carrying cases. After a somewhat banal sermon, I met executive pastor Jim Ehrman, who told me that he had only recently learned about NAR. Ephrata Community Church, he explained, had long had a “loose affiliation” with apostle Randy Clark, but “we don’t have a reference for it other than a group we care about was accused of being that.” I pressed further. Wasn’t his church about to host John Bevere, an NAR-affiliated pastor who has warned against the practice of tolerance?

“I had no idea he would have been associated with it,” Ehrman said. As far as the Seven Mountain teaching was concerned: “We do agree [the mountains] are there, but we’re very much like, ‘No, it’s who you are and how you carry yourself into those.’ There’s not some…mandate to take over.” When I told him about the prayer night, he seemed bemused. All the talk of spiritual warfare I had seen was “just the frame and the language they pick up,” he said.

Was Ehrman just being coy about his church’s connections to the New Apostolic Reformation, or was he genuinely naive to a movement that was so powerful and pervasive? In a sense, it didn’t matter. Another imperfect metaphor for the influence of NAR is climate change. Like it or not, it’s happening. The question for many pastors is how to steer their congregations through an increasingly chaotic and extreme religious landscape.

For Ehrman, the label was unimportant. What mattered was that armies of angels were indeed battling with the principalities of darkness. “There are literally unseen beings who are at odds with the work of God…on this earth,” he said. “And we believe that they are trying to influence things as well.”

Additional reporting by the Lancaster Examiner.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A right-wing organization is attacking efforts to educate judges about the climate crisis. The group appears to be connected to Leonard Leo, the architect of the right-wing takeover of the American judiciary who helped select Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominees, the Guardian has learned.

The Washington, DC-based nonprofit Environmental Law Institute (ELI)’s Climate Judiciary Project holds seminars for lawyers and judges about the climate crisis. It aims to “provide neutral, objective information to the judiciary about the science of climate change as it is understood by the expert scientific community and relevant to current and future litigation,” according to ELI’s website.

The American Energy Institute, a right-wing, pro-fossil fuel think tank, has been attacking ELI and its climate trainings in recent months. In August, the organization published a report saying ELI was “corruptly influencing the courts and destroying the rule of law to promote questionable climate science.”

ELI’s Climate Judiciary Project is “falsely portraying itself as a neutral entity teaching judges about questionable climate science,” the report says. In reality, the American Energy Institute claims, the project is a partner to the more than two dozen US cities and states who are suing big oil for allegedly sowing doubt about the climate crisis despite longstanding knowledge of the climate dangers of coal, oil, and gas usage.

In a PowerPoint presentation about the report found on its website, the group says the Climate Judiciary Project (CJP) is “wholly aligned with the climate change plaintiffs and helps them corruptly influence judges behind closed doors.”

“Their true purpose is to preview the plaintiffs’ arguments in the climate cases in an ex parte setting,” the presentation says.

“The idea that [the Environmental Law Institute] is corruptly influencing the court from the left…is complete disinformation.”

Both the report and the PowerPoint presentation link the American Energy Institute to CRC Advisors, a public relations firm chaired by right-wing dark money impresario Leo. Given his outsize role in shaping the US judiciary—Leo helped select multiple judicial nominees for former president Donald Trump, including personally lobbying for Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment—his firm’s role in opposing climate litigation is notable.

“He was greatly responsible for moving our federal court systems to the right,” said David Armiak, the research director for Center for Media and Democracy, a watchdog group tracking money in politics, of Leo. CRC Advisors’ work with the American Energy Institute, Armiak said, seemed “to delegitimize a group that’s seeking to inform judges or the judicial system of climate science, something that [Leo] also opposed with some of his other efforts.”

The American Energy Institute report’s document properties show that its author was Maggie Howell, director of branding and design at CRC Advisors. And the PowerPoint’s document properties lists CRC Advisors’s vice president, Kevin Daley, as the author.

Neither CRC Advisors nor Leo responded to requests for comment.

In an email, the institute’s CEO, Jason Isaac, said: “American Energy Institute employed CRC Advisors to edit and promote our groundbreaking report on the corrupt relationship between our federal court system and leftwing dark money groups.”

But Kert Davies, the director of special investigations at the nonprofit Center for Climate Integrity, who shared the report and PowerPoint with the Guardian, said ELI is “far from leftwing.”

The institute’s staff include a wide variety of legal and climate experts. Its board includes executives from Shell Group and BP—oil companies that have been named as defendants in climate litigation—and a partner at a law firm that represents Chevron. Two partners with the firm Baker Botts LLP, which represents Sunoco LP and its subsidiary, Aloha Petroleum Ltd, in a climate lawsuit filed by Honolulu, also sit on ELI’s leadership council, E&E News previously reported.

“ELI’s seminars are giving judges the ABCs of climate change, which is a complicated subject that they ought to know about,” said Davies. “The idea that they’re corruptly influencing the court from the left…is complete disinformation.”

Asked for comment about ELI’s connection to oil companies, the American Energy Institute CEO, Isaac, said that “all of those companies have embraced and/or are pushing political agendas” that are “contrary to the best interest of Americans, American energy producers, and human flourishing,” including environmental, social, and governance investing and diversity, equity and inclusion.

Isaac described oil and gas as keys to prosperity. “I live a high-carbon lifestyle,” he said. “I wish the rest of the world could, too.”

“They are the appeasers, the ones feeding the crocodiles,” he said. He did not respond to questions about the extent of the relationship between the American Energy Institute and CRC Advisors.

In a statement, Nick Collins, a spokesperson for ELI, called the American Energy Institute report “full of misinformation and created by an organization whose leadership regularly spreads false claims about climate science,” and described the CJP curriculum as “fact-based and science-first, developed with a robust peer review process that meets the highest scholarly standards.”

The American Energy Institute’s attack on the judicial climate education program comes as the supreme court considers litigation that could put big oil on the hook for billions of dollars.

Honolulu is one of dozens of cities and states to sue oil majors for allegedly hiding the dangers of their products from the public. Hawaii’s supreme court ruled that the suit can go to trial, but the defendants petitioned the US Supreme Court to review that decision, arguing the cases should be thrown out because emissions are a federal issue that cannot be tried in state courts.

This past spring, far-right fossil fuel allies launched an unprecedented campaign pressuring the Supreme Court to side with the defendants and shield fossil fuel companies from the litigation. Several of the groups behind the campaign have ties to Leo.

In June, the Supreme Court asked the Biden administration to weigh in on the defendants’ request. Biden officials could respond as soon as this week. “It’s doubtful that AEI’s timing of their report release was a coincidence,” said Davies.

The Supreme Court may soon weigh in on another case, too: In April, 20 Republican state attorneys general filed “friend of the court” briefs asking the court to prevent states from being able to sue oil companies for climate damages. All of the signatories are members of the Republican Attorneys General Association, to which Leo’s Concord Fund is a major contributor.

In the weeks since its publication, the American Energy Institute report attacking ELI has received a surge of interest from right-wing media. Fox News featured the report, as did an array of conservative websites. On Thursday, The Hill published an op-ed by Ted Cruz attacking the ELI project. Other right-wing groups have previously questioned the motives of ELI.

CRC Advisors has counted Chevron, one of the plaintiffs in Honolulu’s lawsuit, as a client. In 2018, the Leo-led PR firm also worked on a campaign aimed at exonerating the Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh from accusations of sexual assault.

Davies said it “would not be surprising” if CRC Advisors had a “large role” in the creation or promotion of the report attacking ELI’s judiciary trainings. “They’re known for running campaigns for corporate interests and rightwing interests,” he said.

In addition to his work with the American Energy Institute, Isaac also serves as a fellow at Texas Public Policy Foundation—a think tank backed by oil and gas companies that has recently garnered scrutiny for its role in drafting the ultraconservative policy playbook Project 2025.

A former Republican Texas state representative, Isaac has dedicated much of his career to disputing climate research and promoting misinformation to justify deregulation of the fossil fuel industry. Isaac recently responded to a Twitter post about Climate Week by the EPA, calling the conference on climate change “nothing more than a celebration of people suffering from mental illness, #EcoDysphoria, with those attending insisting the rest of us catch it.”

On a September 25 episode of the right-wing Wisconsin talk radio program “The Vicki McKenna Show,” Isaac offered a defense of the fossil fuel industry, describing oil and gas as keys to prosperity. “I live a high-carbon lifestyle,” he said. “I wish the rest of the world could, too.”

Formerly known as Texas Natural Gas Foundation, the American Energy Institute on its face appears to contribute little more than public relations work in defense of the fossil fuels industry. The group publishes blog posts defending carbon emissions and denouncing the push for climate action. It has also produced a handful of longer reports promoting laws that restrict environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing and opposing the widespread adoption of electric vehicles.

Among its board members are Steve Milloy, who served on Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency transition team, once ran a tobacco industry front group, and is a well-known climate denier. Milloy did not respond to a request for comment.

According to the group’s most recent tax filings, the American Energy Institute, which lists four staffers and a CEO on its website, is not a lavish operation. The group brought in about $312,000 in revenue in 2022 and appears to fund its operations at least partly by selling merchandise—among other products, branded T-shirts, tote bags, and beer koozies emblazoned with the words, “I Embrace The High Carbon Lifestyle.”

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A right-wing organization is attacking efforts to educate judges about the climate crisis. The group appears to be connected to Leonard Leo, the architect of the right-wing takeover of the American judiciary who helped select Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominees, the Guardian has learned.

The Washington, DC-based nonprofit Environmental Law Institute (ELI)’s Climate Judiciary Project holds seminars for lawyers and judges about the climate crisis. It aims to “provide neutral, objective information to the judiciary about the science of climate change as it is understood by the expert scientific community and relevant to current and future litigation,” according to ELI’s website.

The American Energy Institute, a right-wing, pro-fossil fuel think tank, has been attacking ELI and its climate trainings in recent months. In August, the organization published a report saying ELI was “corruptly influencing the courts and destroying the rule of law to promote questionable climate science.”

ELI’s Climate Judiciary Project is “falsely portraying itself as a neutral entity teaching judges about questionable climate science,” the report says. In reality, the American Energy Institute claims, the project is a partner to the more than two dozen US cities and states who are suing big oil for allegedly sowing doubt about the climate crisis despite longstanding knowledge of the climate dangers of coal, oil, and gas usage.

In a PowerPoint presentation about the report found on its website, the group says the Climate Judiciary Project (CJP) is “wholly aligned with the climate change plaintiffs and helps them corruptly influence judges behind closed doors.”

“Their true purpose is to preview the plaintiffs’ arguments in the climate cases in an ex parte setting,” the presentation says.

“The idea that [the Environmental Law Institute] is corruptly influencing the court from the left…is complete disinformation.”

Both the report and the PowerPoint presentation link the American Energy Institute to CRC Advisors, a public relations firm chaired by right-wing dark money impresario Leo. Given his outsize role in shaping the US judiciary—Leo helped select multiple judicial nominees for former president Donald Trump, including personally lobbying for Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment—his firm’s role in opposing climate litigation is notable.

“He was greatly responsible for moving our federal court systems to the right,” said David Armiak, the research director for Center for Media and Democracy, a watchdog group tracking money in politics, of Leo. CRC Advisors’ work with the American Energy Institute, Armiak said, seemed “to delegitimize a group that’s seeking to inform judges or the judicial system of climate science, something that [Leo] also opposed with some of his other efforts.”

The American Energy Institute report’s document properties show that its author was Maggie Howell, director of branding and design at CRC Advisors. And the PowerPoint’s document properties lists CRC Advisors’s vice president, Kevin Daley, as the author.

Neither CRC Advisors nor Leo responded to requests for comment.

In an email, the institute’s CEO, Jason Isaac, said: “American Energy Institute employed CRC Advisors to edit and promote our groundbreaking report on the corrupt relationship between our federal court system and leftwing dark money groups.”

But Kert Davies, the director of special investigations at the nonprofit Center for Climate Integrity, who shared the report and PowerPoint with the Guardian, said ELI is “far from leftwing.”

The institute’s staff include a wide variety of legal and climate experts. Its board includes executives from Shell Group and BP—oil companies that have been named as defendants in climate litigation—and a partner at a law firm that represents Chevron. Two partners with the firm Baker Botts LLP, which represents Sunoco LP and its subsidiary, Aloha Petroleum Ltd, in a climate lawsuit filed by Honolulu, also sit on ELI’s leadership council, E&E News previously reported.

“ELI’s seminars are giving judges the ABCs of climate change, which is a complicated subject that they ought to know about,” said Davies. “The idea that they’re corruptly influencing the court from the left…is complete disinformation.”

Asked for comment about ELI’s connection to oil companies, the American Energy Institute CEO, Isaac, said that “all of those companies have embraced and/or are pushing political agendas” that are “contrary to the best interest of Americans, American energy producers, and human flourishing,” including environmental, social, and governance investing and diversity, equity and inclusion.

Isaac described oil and gas as keys to prosperity. “I live a high-carbon lifestyle,” he said. “I wish the rest of the world could, too.”

“They are the appeasers, the ones feeding the crocodiles,” he said. He did not respond to questions about the extent of the relationship between the American Energy Institute and CRC Advisors.

In a statement, Nick Collins, a spokesperson for ELI, called the American Energy Institute report “full of misinformation and created by an organization whose leadership regularly spreads false claims about climate science,” and described the CJP curriculum as “fact-based and science-first, developed with a robust peer review process that meets the highest scholarly standards.”

The American Energy Institute’s attack on the judicial climate education program comes as the supreme court considers litigation that could put big oil on the hook for billions of dollars.

Honolulu is one of dozens of cities and states to sue oil majors for allegedly hiding the dangers of their products from the public. Hawaii’s supreme court ruled that the suit can go to trial, but the defendants petitioned the US Supreme Court to review that decision, arguing the cases should be thrown out because emissions are a federal issue that cannot be tried in state courts.

This past spring, far-right fossil fuel allies launched an unprecedented campaign pressuring the Supreme Court to side with the defendants and shield fossil fuel companies from the litigation. Several of the groups behind the campaign have ties to Leo.

In June, the Supreme Court asked the Biden administration to weigh in on the defendants’ request. Biden officials could respond as soon as this week. “It’s doubtful that AEI’s timing of their report release was a coincidence,” said Davies.

The Supreme Court may soon weigh in on another case, too: In April, 20 Republican state attorneys general filed “friend of the court” briefs asking the court to prevent states from being able to sue oil companies for climate damages. All of the signatories are members of the Republican Attorneys General Association, to which Leo’s Concord Fund is a major contributor.

In the weeks since its publication, the American Energy Institute report attacking ELI has received a surge of interest from right-wing media. Fox News featured the report, as did an array of conservative websites. On Thursday, The Hill published an op-ed by Ted Cruz attacking the ELI project. Other right-wing groups have previously questioned the motives of ELI.

CRC Advisors has counted Chevron, one of the plaintiffs in Honolulu’s lawsuit, as a client. In 2018, the Leo-led PR firm also worked on a campaign aimed at exonerating the Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh from accusations of sexual assault.

Davies said it “would not be surprising” if CRC Advisors had a “large role” in the creation or promotion of the report attacking ELI’s judiciary trainings. “They’re known for running campaigns for corporate interests and rightwing interests,” he said.

In addition to his work with the American Energy Institute, Isaac also serves as a fellow at Texas Public Policy Foundation—a think tank backed by oil and gas companies that has recently garnered scrutiny for its role in drafting the ultraconservative policy playbook Project 2025.

A former Republican Texas state representative, Isaac has dedicated much of his career to disputing climate research and promoting misinformation to justify deregulation of the fossil fuel industry. Isaac recently responded to a Twitter post about Climate Week by the EPA, calling the conference on climate change “nothing more than a celebration of people suffering from mental illness, #EcoDysphoria, with those attending insisting the rest of us catch it.”

On a September 25 episode of the right-wing Wisconsin talk radio program “The Vicki McKenna Show,” Isaac offered a defense of the fossil fuel industry, describing oil and gas as keys to prosperity. “I live a high-carbon lifestyle,” he said. “I wish the rest of the world could, too.”

Formerly known as Texas Natural Gas Foundation, the American Energy Institute on its face appears to contribute little more than public relations work in defense of the fossil fuels industry. The group publishes blog posts defending carbon emissions and denouncing the push for climate action. It has also produced a handful of longer reports promoting laws that restrict environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing and opposing the widespread adoption of electric vehicles.

Among its board members are Steve Milloy, who served on Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency transition team, once ran a tobacco industry front group, and is a well-known climate denier. Milloy did not respond to a request for comment.

According to the group’s most recent tax filings, the American Energy Institute, which lists four staffers and a CEO on its website, is not a lavish operation. The group brought in about $312,000 in revenue in 2022 and appears to fund its operations at least partly by selling merchandise—among other products, branded T-shirts, tote bags, and beer koozies emblazoned with the words, “I Embrace The High Carbon Lifestyle.”

In 2014, at an elegant gala inside the Supreme Court’s gilded Great Hall, a tuxedoed Justice Clarence Thomas turned to me and voiced his approval for my work. I glanced over to where Chief Justice John Roberts and his wife, Jane, were entertaining two of my associates, trustees of the Supreme Court Historical Society, a private, nongovernmental entity for which Roberts served as honorary chair. At that moment, I knew the secretive operation I had run, aimed at emboldening Thomas and his conservative colleagues to render the strongest possible decisions in favor of our right-wing Christian agenda, had succeeded.

My organization, Faith and Action in the Nation’s Capital, had created an initiative we called “Operation Higher Court” that trained wealthy couples as “stealth missionaries,” befriending Thomas and his wife, Ginni; Samuel and Martha-Ann Alito; and Antonin and Maureen Scalia—­lavishing­ them with meals at high-end restaurants and invitations to luxurious vacation properties. Alongside these amenities, our ministry offered prayers, gift Bibles, and the assurance that millions of believers thanked God for the decisions this trio of justices rendered on abortion, health care, marriage, and gun ownership.

The Supreme Court was the pinnacle of my success, but I had started with Congress, advanced to the White House, and only then took on the judicial branch. Under the banner of Faith and Action, our mission, in evangelical parlance, was “to bring the Word of God to bear on the hearts and minds of those who make public policy in America.” Backing me were some 50,000 donors, spread across the country, along with hundreds of church leaders and several prominent lawmakers. The goal was to convert a “secular culture” into a God-fearing, foundationally Christian, socially conservative, and politically Republican one. To achieve it, we raised tens of millions of dollars, mobilized activists, and lobbied lawmakers relentlessly. We accomplished all of this from the headquarters I procured in Washington, just across the street from the Supreme Court.

In effect, we were like other lobbyists and pressure groups, only our visits to offices included saying a prayer or reading a Bible verse with the occupant. Clergy, often arrayed around the stately benches where members of both houses of Congress sit during official proceedings, accompanied us to more formal meetings. Our large public events, like the annual National Memorial for the Pre-Born and Their Mothers and Fathers or the US Capitol Bible Reading Marathon, would turn government venues into temporary church sanctuaries. “Christian nationalist” was yet to become a common expression, but my allies and I were that in every way. We believed America was founded as a Christian nation and needed to be preserved as such.

Besides establishing a national organization aimed at making America part of a revivified Christendom, I chaired the National Pro-Life Religious Council, which dedicated itself to ending Roe. After Norma McCorvey recanted her pro-abortion stance as Jane Roe, Faith and Action supported her financially. I consulted for the American Center for Law and Justice, an ultraconservative legal advocacy organization; campaigned for George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, and John McCain; and helped Roy Moore, then Alabama’s chief justice, physically install a Ten Commandments monument in the state Supreme Court building.

When President George W. Bush nominated Roberts for chief justice, I was in a private box seat at the Senate confirmation hearing. At Alito’s confirmation, I was the guest of Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, the three-time Senate Judiciary Committee chair. And when Donald Trump chose Neil Gorsuch after Scalia’s death, not only was I present for the hearing, but a month before, I had coordinated prayers for Gorsuch and his family in a nearby chapel. On more than one occasion, I knelt in prayer alongside Mike Pence (when he was a member of Congress from Indiana) and other lawmakers in the vanguard of the new right.

My efforts were rewarded handsomely. I spoke at many of the largest churches in the country and at events that drew thousands of attendees. I grew accustomed to being picked up by executive limousines, flying in private jets, and eating in the finest restaurants.

We in the religious right helped foster a political culture that has produced the likes of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), and former President Trump. It also gave rise to the Mississippi Republican legislators who challenged Roe v. Wade, handing Justice Alito the opportunity to write the opinion that destroyed it. My task was to convince religious leaders, officials on every level of government, and big-money benefactors that our nation was literally going to hell and the only way to rescue it was a mass conversion to Christian sensibilities. Preachers and politicians might be able to persuade some people, but the force of law would be necessary to coerce others.

Much to my present regret, we succeeded.

My three siblings and I were raised to respect people of all religions—and none. In my late teens, I searched for a faith and found it in a little country church where I accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior. Almost immediately, I felt called to give my life to Christian service. A few years later, in the late 1970s as a young minister in Rochester, New York, I received a disturbing call from a woman demanding to know my position on abortion. I hadn’t given it much thought, I said, and she excoriated me. Unsettled, I looked for information on the Christian view of abortion. I found a 1978 sermon titled “Abortion-on-Demand: Is It Murder?” by the Reverend Jerry Falwell Sr., a celebrated Southern Baptist preacher and host of the popular Old Time Gospel Hour. He called for ending legal abortion. “Christians ought to join forces together on this one issue and, whatever it takes, put it through,” he said. “[T]he question of abortion on demand threatens our nation.”

America could either choose God’s way and enjoy prosperity or take the devil’s path to destruction. God’s way meant wives were to dutifully submit to their husbands “as unto the Lord”; children were to obey their parents; and everyone was to attend church, Sunday school, and Bible study. Prayer and Bible reading needed to be returned to public school classrooms. Children should be taught that sex is strictly for married couples; young people must remain virgins until their wedding night; and intercourse, while enjoyable, was principally for procreation.

Falwell’s gospel differed distinctly from the one I had initially responded to, the one with a compassionate Jesus who blessed the poor, the forgotten, and the persecuted. Falwell’s message, while sprinkled with side references to marginalized people, implied they may have caused their own problems. Instead of calling upon believers to be peacemakers and to love one another, as Jesus did, Falwell’s Christians were modern­-day­ crusaders conquering an evil, secular world. I embraced his challenge, feeling I could remedy the ills that beset our country, from drug use to premarital sex.

By 1983, I was fully engaged with our new national evangelical political influence and had a front-row seat at the annual convention of the National Association of Evangelicals, where, for the first time, a sitting president addressed this body of leaders. In that now-famous “Evil Empire” speech, named for his reference to the former Soviet Union, President Ronald Reagan ticked off everything I had come to see as threats: secularism, promiscuity, and government interference with churches while barring school prayer and restricting students’ religious speech. “Abortion on demand now takes the lives of up to one and a half million unborn children a year,” Reagan continued. “Human life legislation ending this tragedy will someday pass the Congress, and you and I must never rest until it does.” He framed a perfect argument for this audience, saying, “There is sin and evil in this world, and we’re enjoined by Scripture and the Lord Jesus to oppose it with all our might.”

He framed a perfect argument for this audience, saying, “There is sin and evil in this world, and we’re enjoined by Scripture and the Lord Jesus to oppose it with all our might.”

I was all in.

Thus inspired, I was primed for my second conversion. Pat Robertson—a popular Christian television personality, media mogul, and, for many of us, divinely anointed prophet—was my guide. Robertson’s vision for the country was the first to dominate electronic media, starting with the Christian Broadcasting Network, the international television enterprise he’d founded in the early 1960s. In 1977, adding education to his list of divine objectives, he founded Regent University. With the American Center for Law and Justice in 1990, he created an organization to counter what he perceived to be the excessively liberal ACLU. The enemies of America were secular humanists, he argued; to defeat them, we needed to restore “Judeo-Christian traditions.” With our favorite president and most revered prophet urging us to fight for the soul of our nation, fight we would. Naturally, we got behind Robertson’s 1988 presidential campaign.

In 1987, my twin brother, Paul, the pastor of a large church in suburban Buffalo, New York, held a funeral for fetal remains that one of his parishioners found in a waste container outside a local medical building. He convinced me to join him and others in blockading the facility’s doors. This is how I became part of what we referred to then as the Rescue movement, a loose network of activists determined to shut down reproductive health care services. At first, our actions mimicked nonviolent tactics—like the sit-ins of the civil rights era—but the tone changed markedly during the Clinton years, when movement leaders became more aggressive. Physical confrontations between pro-choice and anti-abortion protesters became more common. Then, the shootings began—three deadly incidents targeting abortion providers within two years. Even as I publicly expressed concern and shock over the violence—while emphatically distancing our movement from any responsibility—I realized we had unleashed forces we might never be able to control.

In my corner of the movement, male leaders began sporting broad-brimmed cowboy hats, oversized belt buckles, Western boots, and sometimes empty holsters, indicating that they had ready access to firearms. The once laser-focused anti-­abortion message was ­replaced by a mishmash of screeds asserting strictly binary gender roles, opposition to LGBTQ rights, and denunciation of “feminazis” and “Jezebels”—like Hillary Clinton.

Though I was uncomfortable with some of the more extreme methods and rhetoric, I remained committed to what I saw as an effort to reclaim morality. I also felt called to expand my ministry to all three branches of government, so in 1994, I relocated to Washington. First, I distributed plaques of the Ten Commandments to Republican members of Congress, encouraging them to unapologetically champion a Judeo-Christian agenda. I also invited a controversial Alabama judge to DC, where I staged a national news conference for him in the Capitol.

Roy Moore had defied a federal court order to remove his hand-carved replica of the Ten Commandments from his courtroom. I recruited co-sponsors for a congressional resolution co-authored by then–Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions that passed the House but stalled in the Senate. It stated, “The public display, including display in government offices and courthouses, of the Ten Commandments should be permitted.” When Moore was elected chief justice, I helped him set in place a large granite Ten Commandments monument inside the Alabama Judicial Building. He later refused to move it, in direct defiance of a federal court order. (Later, as a Senate candidate, Moore would be accused by multiple women of sexual assault and misconduct, allegations he denied.)

When religion is placed at the service of a political party, it corrupts both. To claim that one political figure uniquely represents God’s will is a form of anti-Christian idolatry.

In Washington, I also occasionally administered Holy Communion and delivered sermons in the Congressional Prayer Room, offered invocational prayers at functions in the Capitol complex, and linked arms with groups like the Family Research Council, the Heritage Foundation, and the formidable Council for National Policy. The CNP—a nearly clandestine cabal of conservative religious, business, and political movers and shakers—assembled some of the country’s wealthiest and most powerful figures in closed-door sessions, where we heard from insiders like Supreme Court spouse Ginni Thomas and Richard Viguerie, the doyen of conservative fundraising. He held forth during cocktail hours, regaling listeners with stories of how the Red-baiting 1950s Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy inspired him to battle the communists bent on taking over America.

By the winter of 2001, many other religiously motivated public interest groups were working the executive and legislative branches, so I decided to concentrate on the judiciary. In confidential meetings of top anti-abortion activists known as the 115 Forum (named for a hotel meeting space), we discussed how the federal judiciary, especially the Supreme Court, was the obstacle to any progress we had made in the other two branches. Something had to be done about what some derisively called “Article Threes,” the judges and courts authorized under that section of the Constitution. Supporting federal and state legislative efforts could only take us so far. We needed to get to these jurists personally.

First, I befriended a couple of lower-level federal judges. Sen. Hatch introduced me to others. But a culmination of my efforts was an invitation to members of the prestigious Judicial Breakfast Group from “The Chambers of Justice Clarence Thomas” announcing me as the speaker. The subject would be the Ten Commandments. I concluded my talk by asking the 50 or so judges in the room to proudly incorporate their Christian beliefs into their jurisprudence.

Federal judges and especially Supreme Court justices, unlike politicians, never need to shake hands across a rope line. Accessing their world required creativity. I found it through the little-known Supreme Court Historical Society. Founded by the late Chief Justice Warren Burger, the independent nonprofit holds an annual dinner hosted by the chief justice and attended by most associate justices. Tickets are strictly controlled. By establishing a close relationship with the society’s staff, I managed to secure seats each year for several of my donors, whom I would coach on how to connect with the justices attending the event. As a result, two of my most active participants, Don and Gayle Wright of Dayton, Ohio, ingratiated themselves with the Alitos, Scalias, and Thomases.

When I trained my donors to interact with conservative justices on the court, I told them to reinforce for their powerful new friends how important their decisions were to the country’s future, and how critical Judeo-Christian values are to America’s success. I encouraged them to underscore how millions of citizens thanked God for their presence on the top court.

In a notable instance, the Wrights were tipped off about a pending decision before it was announced to the public. As I later told the House Judiciary Committee, “Gayle relayed that she had learned the outcome of the Burwell v. Hobby Lobby case while at the meal with the Alitos, that it was in Hobby Lobby’s favor, and that ‘Sam is writing it.’” The ruling would affirm that companies with religious objections were not required to provide contraceptive coverage in their health insurance packages. I also told the House committee that Gayle had shared the news with me and that I told the president of Hobby Lobby, Steve Green—his parents were donors to my organization—that they had won the case. The Green family found themselves in the enviable position of using the advance notice to prep their spokespeople so they could be ready at the microphone outside the court following Alito’s reading of the majority opinion. They could shape the public narrative, a distinct advantage over their opponents.

When word of our campaign eventually broke in the New York Times, Justice Alito responded, “I never detected any effort on the part of the Wrights to obtain confidential information or to influence anything that I did in either an official or private capacity, and I would have strongly objected if they had done so.” He added, “I have no knowledge of any project that they allegedly undertook for ‘Faith and Action.’” Gayle Wright denied obtaining or passing along any such information. Steve Green declined to comment to the Times, and his mother told the paper he hadn’t been notified in advance. Let’s just say this is not how I remember what had happened.

It took years for the scales to fall from my eyes. A major turning point occurred when I took a leave of absence from Faith and Action to pursue a late-in-life doctorate. Part of my research involved the German Christian movement of the 1930s, which supported the Nazi Party. One of the most respected Bible scholars of that period, Paul Althaus, declared Hitler’s ascent to the chancellorship to be a “gift and miracle from God.” I began to suspect that we evangelicals were similarly allowing our faith to be co-opted for political purposes. Devastating consequences seemed inevitable for evangelicalism and for our country.

These fears were reinforced when I attended a tribute banquet for Pat Robertson around 2010. Virtually every evangelical luminary was there. When Robertson introduced his guest of honor, Donald J. Trump, I was shocked. In Bible college, my preaching instructor had suggested that the New York playboy was a perfect illustration for what it meant to not live as a Christian. I asked a friend of Pat’s why Trump was there. They both were “members of the billionaires’ club,” he explained. “Besides, he may make a good president someday.” Trump worked the room, filled with the biggest names on the religious right, garnering hearty applause.

When Robertson introduced his guest of honor, Donald J. Trump, I was shocked. In Bible college, my preaching instructor had suggested that the New York playboy was a perfect illustration for what it meant to not live as a Christian.

Another reckoning came after working with Abigail Disney on a film about American evangelicals’ love affair with firearms. The Armor of Light won an Emmy, but many of my colleagues labeled me a sellout to liberal gun grabbers. Pastors told me my appearance in the film created tensions in their congregations. When I visited one church as a guest preacher, my host forbade me from mentioning guns in his pulpit. “I have 50 armed people sitting out there every Sunday,” he warned, “and I don’t know what they’ll do if they get mad at you.” He gave me a wry smile. “Seriously.”

Meanwhile, as a Republican presidential candidate, Trump displayed pomposity and an ugly denunciation of the most vulnerable, both of which are diametrically opposed to the Christian virtues of humility, kindness, love for neighbors, and care for strangers. In June 2016, when his campaign invited scores of my closest friends and longtime colleagues to meet with him in New York, I declined. My contacts texted me from the gathering, reporting on the deal they were striking with him. Trump essentially promised to appoint anti-abortion federal judges and Supreme Court justices in exchange for our constituents’ loyal support. James Dobson, founder of the enormously influential Focus on the Family, assured attendees that Trump was a “baby Christian.”

When I arrived at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Trump’s nomination was a fait accompli. Sitting at a luncheon table with evangelical leaders, I expressed bewilderment over our support of him. Repeatedly, I was assured he would advance our cause. After Trump’s acceptance speech, I decided to leave the fold.

It took two years to extract myself. I dismantled the organization I had spent more than two decades building, walking away from a multimillion-dollar donor base. ­I called countless people to explain why I was leaving the movement I’d helped lead. ­I reached out to others to beg their pardon for the harm I had inflicted. I repented in prayer for my errors and the damage they caused. Then, I privately dedicated the rest of my life to doing as much repair as possible.

Following the insurrection of January 6, when Christian banners, Bibles, and prayers in Jesus’ name appeared in the assault on the Capitol, I felt even greater urgency in warning my fellow evangelicals of the grave danger Trump and his MAGA cult posed to Christianity and US democracy.

My change of course so late in life has been painful, disorienting, and costly. Besides losing decades-long friendships and enduring menacing threats, my wife and I have faced a significantly reduced income. I’ve even driven Uber to cover household expenses. One night, I picked up an organizer of the National Prayer Breakfast, an event in which I had once played a significant role. I was wearing a mask and said little, but then, with trepidation, I realized I would be dropping him at the home of a congressman I had worked with closely for more than 20 years. When my passenger got out, I was relieved to have gone unrecognized. Still, I’ve never questioned the decisions that brought me to that moment.

In my third conversion, I realized that when religion is placed at the service of a political party, it corrupts both. To claim that one political figure uniquely represents God’s will for the body politic is a form of anti-Christian idolatry. To elevate one set of spiritual beliefs above another and do it by force of law removes a nonnegotiable tenet of evangelical faith—free will. We are born again when we choose to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, not when we’re forced to do so.

Because it is immoral, I believe Christian nationalism is inevitably doomed. But in the meantime, the pain, suffering, and injury it will inflict will be enormous—just consider women facing difficult pregnancies, trans children seeking care, librarians attacked for certain books. “We want to fill our culture again with the Christian spirit. We want to burn out all the recent immoral developments in literature, in the theater, and in the press—in short, we want to burn out the poison of immorality, which has entered into our whole life and culture as a result of liberal excess.” This may sound familiar—maybe some overheated Republican talking points. In fact, it’s what Adolf Hitler promised the German people in 1933.

In 2014, at an elegant gala inside the Supreme Court’s gilded Great Hall, a tuxedoed Justice Clarence Thomas turned to me and voiced his approval for my work. I glanced over to where Chief Justice John Roberts and his wife, Jane, were entertaining two of my associates, trustees of the Supreme Court Historical Society, a private, nongovernmental entity for which Roberts served as honorary chair. At that moment, I knew the secretive operation I had run, aimed at emboldening Thomas and his conservative colleagues to render the strongest possible decisions in favor of our right-wing Christian agenda, had succeeded.

My organization, Faith and Action in the Nation’s Capital, had created an initiative we called “Operation Higher Court” that trained wealthy couples as “stealth missionaries,” befriending Thomas and his wife, Ginni; Samuel and Martha-Ann Alito; and Antonin and Maureen Scalia—­lavishing­ them with meals at high-end restaurants and invitations to luxurious vacation properties. Alongside these amenities, our ministry offered prayers, gift Bibles, and the assurance that millions of believers thanked God for the decisions this trio of justices rendered on abortion, health care, marriage, and gun ownership.

The Supreme Court was the pinnacle of my success, but I had started with Congress, advanced to the White House, and only then took on the judicial branch. Under the banner of Faith and Action, our mission, in evangelical parlance, was “to bring the Word of God to bear on the hearts and minds of those who make public policy in America.” Backing me were some 50,000 donors, spread across the country, along with hundreds of church leaders and several prominent lawmakers. The goal was to convert a “secular culture” into a God-fearing, foundationally Christian, socially conservative, and politically Republican one. To achieve it, we raised tens of millions of dollars, mobilized activists, and lobbied lawmakers relentlessly. We accomplished all of this from the headquarters I procured in Washington, just across the street from the Supreme Court.

In effect, we were like other lobbyists and pressure groups, only our visits to offices included saying a prayer or reading a Bible verse with the occupant. Clergy, often arrayed around the stately benches where members of both houses of Congress sit during official proceedings, accompanied us to more formal meetings. Our large public events, like the annual National Memorial for the Pre-Born and Their Mothers and Fathers or the US Capitol Bible Reading Marathon, would turn government venues into temporary church sanctuaries. “Christian nationalist” was yet to become a common expression, but my allies and I were that in every way. We believed America was founded as a Christian nation and needed to be preserved as such.

Besides establishing a national organization aimed at making America part of a revivified Christendom, I chaired the National Pro-Life Religious Council, which dedicated itself to ending Roe. After Norma McCorvey recanted her pro-abortion stance as Jane Roe, Faith and Action supported her financially. I consulted for the American Center for Law and Justice, an ultraconservative legal advocacy organization; campaigned for George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, and John McCain; and helped Roy Moore, then Alabama’s chief justice, physically install a Ten Commandments monument in the state Supreme Court building.

When President George W. Bush nominated Roberts for chief justice, I was in a private box seat at the Senate confirmation hearing. At Alito’s confirmation, I was the guest of Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, the three-time Senate Judiciary Committee chair. And when Donald Trump chose Neil Gorsuch after Scalia’s death, not only was I present for the hearing, but a month before, I had coordinated prayers for Gorsuch and his family in a nearby chapel. On more than one occasion, I knelt in prayer alongside Mike Pence (when he was a member of Congress from Indiana) and other lawmakers in the vanguard of the new right.

My efforts were rewarded handsomely. I spoke at many of the largest churches in the country and at events that drew thousands of attendees. I grew accustomed to being picked up by executive limousines, flying in private jets, and eating in the finest restaurants.

We in the religious right helped foster a political culture that has produced the likes of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), and former President Trump. It also gave rise to the Mississippi Republican legislators who challenged Roe v. Wade, handing Justice Alito the opportunity to write the opinion that destroyed it. My task was to convince religious leaders, officials on every level of government, and big-money benefactors that our nation was literally going to hell and the only way to rescue it was a mass conversion to Christian sensibilities. Preachers and politicians might be able to persuade some people, but the force of law would be necessary to coerce others.

Much to my present regret, we succeeded.

My three siblings and I were raised to respect people of all religions—and none. In my late teens, I searched for a faith and found it in a little country church where I accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior. Almost immediately, I felt called to give my life to Christian service. A few years later, in the late 1970s as a young minister in Rochester, New York, I received a disturbing call from a woman demanding to know my position on abortion. I hadn’t given it much thought, I said, and she excoriated me. Unsettled, I looked for information on the Christian view of abortion. I found a 1978 sermon titled “Abortion-on-Demand: Is It Murder?” by the Reverend Jerry Falwell Sr., a celebrated Southern Baptist preacher and host of the popular Old Time Gospel Hour. He called for ending legal abortion. “Christians ought to join forces together on this one issue and, whatever it takes, put it through,” he said. “[T]he question of abortion on demand threatens our nation.”

America could either choose God’s way and enjoy prosperity or take the devil’s path to destruction. God’s way meant wives were to dutifully submit to their husbands “as unto the Lord”; children were to obey their parents; and everyone was to attend church, Sunday school, and Bible study. Prayer and Bible reading needed to be returned to public school classrooms. Children should be taught that sex is strictly for married couples; young people must remain virgins until their wedding night; and intercourse, while enjoyable, was principally for procreation.

Falwell’s gospel differed distinctly from the one I had initially responded to, the one with a compassionate Jesus who blessed the poor, the forgotten, and the persecuted. Falwell’s message, while sprinkled with side references to marginalized people, implied they may have caused their own problems. Instead of calling upon believers to be peacemakers and to love one another, as Jesus did, Falwell’s Christians were modern­-day­ crusaders conquering an evil, secular world. I embraced his challenge, feeling I could remedy the ills that beset our country, from drug use to premarital sex.

By 1983, I was fully engaged with our new national evangelical political influence and had a front-row seat at the annual convention of the National Association of Evangelicals, where, for the first time, a sitting president addressed this body of leaders. In that now-famous “Evil Empire” speech, named for his reference to the former Soviet Union, President Ronald Reagan ticked off everything I had come to see as threats: secularism, promiscuity, and government interference with churches while barring school prayer and restricting students’ religious speech. “Abortion on demand now takes the lives of up to one and a half million unborn children a year,” Reagan continued. “Human life legislation ending this tragedy will someday pass the Congress, and you and I must never rest until it does.” He framed a perfect argument for this audience, saying, “There is sin and evil in this world, and we’re enjoined by Scripture and the Lord Jesus to oppose it with all our might.”

He framed a perfect argument for this audience, saying, “There is sin and evil in this world, and we’re enjoined by Scripture and the Lord Jesus to oppose it with all our might.”

I was all in.

Thus inspired, I was primed for my second conversion. Pat Robertson—a popular Christian television personality, media mogul, and, for many of us, divinely anointed prophet—was my guide. Robertson’s vision for the country was the first to dominate electronic media, starting with the Christian Broadcasting Network, the international television enterprise he’d founded in the early 1960s. In 1977, adding education to his list of divine objectives, he founded Regent University. With the American Center for Law and Justice in 1990, he created an organization to counter what he perceived to be the excessively liberal ACLU. The enemies of America were secular humanists, he argued; to defeat them, we needed to restore “Judeo-Christian traditions.” With our favorite president and most revered prophet urging us to fight for the soul of our nation, fight we would. Naturally, we got behind Robertson’s 1988 presidential campaign.

In 1987, my twin brother, Paul, the pastor of a large church in suburban Buffalo, New York, held a funeral for fetal remains that one of his parishioners found in a waste container outside a local medical building. He convinced me to join him and others in blockading the facility’s doors. This is how I became part of what we referred to then as the Rescue movement, a loose network of activists determined to shut down reproductive health care services. At first, our actions mimicked nonviolent tactics—like the sit-ins of the civil rights era—but the tone changed markedly during the Clinton years, when movement leaders became more aggressive. Physical confrontations between pro-choice and anti-abortion protesters became more common. Then, the shootings began—three deadly incidents targeting abortion providers within two years. Even as I publicly expressed concern and shock over the violence—while emphatically distancing our movement from any responsibility—I realized we had unleashed forces we might never be able to control.

In my corner of the movement, male leaders began sporting broad-brimmed cowboy hats, oversized belt buckles, Western boots, and sometimes empty holsters, indicating that they had ready access to firearms. The once laser-focused anti-­abortion message was ­replaced by a mishmash of screeds asserting strictly binary gender roles, opposition to LGBTQ rights, and denunciation of “feminazis” and “Jezebels”—like Hillary Clinton.

Though I was uncomfortable with some of the more extreme methods and rhetoric, I remained committed to what I saw as an effort to reclaim morality. I also felt called to expand my ministry to all three branches of government, so in 1994, I relocated to Washington. First, I distributed plaques of the Ten Commandments to Republican members of Congress, encouraging them to unapologetically champion a Judeo-Christian agenda. I also invited a controversial Alabama judge to DC, where I staged a national news conference for him in the Capitol.

Roy Moore had defied a federal court order to remove his hand-carved replica of the Ten Commandments from his courtroom. I recruited co-sponsors for a congressional resolution co-authored by then–Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions that passed the House but stalled in the Senate. It stated, “The public display, including display in government offices and courthouses, of the Ten Commandments should be permitted.” When Moore was elected chief justice, I helped him set in place a large granite Ten Commandments monument inside the Alabama Judicial Building. He later refused to move it, in direct defiance of a federal court order. (Later, as a Senate candidate, Moore would be accused by multiple women of sexual assault and misconduct, allegations he denied.)

When religion is placed at the service of a political party, it corrupts both. To claim that one political figure uniquely represents God’s will is a form of anti-Christian idolatry.

In Washington, I also occasionally administered Holy Communion and delivered sermons in the Congressional Prayer Room, offered invocational prayers at functions in the Capitol complex, and linked arms with groups like the Family Research Council, the Heritage Foundation, and the formidable Council for National Policy. The CNP—a nearly clandestine cabal of conservative religious, business, and political movers and shakers—assembled some of the country’s wealthiest and most powerful figures in closed-door sessions, where we heard from insiders like Supreme Court spouse Ginni Thomas and Richard Viguerie, the doyen of conservative fundraising. He held forth during cocktail hours, regaling listeners with stories of how the Red-baiting 1950s Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy inspired him to battle the communists bent on taking over America.

By the winter of 2001, many other religiously motivated public interest groups were working the executive and legislative branches, so I decided to concentrate on the judiciary. In confidential meetings of top anti-abortion activists known as the 115 Forum (named for a hotel meeting space), we discussed how the federal judiciary, especially the Supreme Court, was the obstacle to any progress we had made in the other two branches. Something had to be done about what some derisively called “Article Threes,” the judges and courts authorized under that section of the Constitution. Supporting federal and state legislative efforts could only take us so far. We needed to get to these jurists personally.

First, I befriended a couple of lower-level federal judges. Sen. Hatch introduced me to others. But a culmination of my efforts was an invitation to members of the prestigious Judicial Breakfast Group from “The Chambers of Justice Clarence Thomas” announcing me as the speaker. The subject would be the Ten Commandments. I concluded my talk by asking the 50 or so judges in the room to proudly incorporate their Christian beliefs into their jurisprudence.

Federal judges and especially Supreme Court justices, unlike politicians, never need to shake hands across a rope line. Accessing their world required creativity. I found it through the little-known Supreme Court Historical Society. Founded by the late Chief Justice Warren Burger, the independent nonprofit holds an annual dinner hosted by the chief justice and attended by most associate justices. Tickets are strictly controlled. By establishing a close relationship with the society’s staff, I managed to secure seats each year for several of my donors, whom I would coach on how to connect with the justices attending the event. As a result, two of my most active participants, Don and Gayle Wright of Dayton, Ohio, ingratiated themselves with the Alitos, Scalias, and Thomases.

When I trained my donors to interact with conservative justices on the court, I told them to reinforce for their powerful new friends how important their decisions were to the country’s future, and how critical Judeo-Christian values are to America’s success. I encouraged them to underscore how millions of citizens thanked God for their presence on the top court.

In a notable instance, the Wrights were tipped off about a pending decision before it was announced to the public. As I later told the House Judiciary Committee, “Gayle relayed that she had learned the outcome of the Burwell v. Hobby Lobby case while at the meal with the Alitos, that it was in Hobby Lobby’s favor, and that ‘Sam is writing it.’” The ruling would affirm that companies with religious objections were not required to provide contraceptive coverage in their health insurance packages. I also told the House committee that Gayle had shared the news with me and that I told the president of Hobby Lobby, Steve Green—his parents were donors to my organization—that they had won the case. The Green family found themselves in the enviable position of using the advance notice to prep their spokespeople so they could be ready at the microphone outside the court following Alito’s reading of the majority opinion. They could shape the public narrative, a distinct advantage over their opponents.

When word of our campaign eventually broke in the New York Times, Justice Alito responded, “I never detected any effort on the part of the Wrights to obtain confidential information or to influence anything that I did in either an official or private capacity, and I would have strongly objected if they had done so.” He added, “I have no knowledge of any project that they allegedly undertook for ‘Faith and Action.’” Gayle Wright denied obtaining or passing along any such information. Steve Green declined to comment to the Times, and his mother told the paper he hadn’t been notified in advance. Let’s just say this is not how I remember what had happened.

It took years for the scales to fall from my eyes. A major turning point occurred when I took a leave of absence from Faith and Action to pursue a late-in-life doctorate. Part of my research involved the German Christian movement of the 1930s, which supported the Nazi Party. One of the most respected Bible scholars of that period, Paul Althaus, declared Hitler’s ascent to the chancellorship to be a “gift and miracle from God.” I began to suspect that we evangelicals were similarly allowing our faith to be co-opted for political purposes. Devastating consequences seemed inevitable for evangelicalism and for our country.

These fears were reinforced when I attended a tribute banquet for Pat Robertson around 2010. Virtually every evangelical luminary was there. When Robertson introduced his guest of honor, Donald J. Trump, I was shocked. In Bible college, my preaching instructor had suggested that the New York playboy was a perfect illustration for what it meant to not live as a Christian. I asked a friend of Pat’s why Trump was there. They both were “members of the billionaires’ club,” he explained. “Besides, he may make a good president someday.” Trump worked the room, filled with the biggest names on the religious right, garnering hearty applause.

When Robertson introduced his guest of honor, Donald J. Trump, I was shocked. In Bible college, my preaching instructor had suggested that the New York playboy was a perfect illustration for what it meant to not live as a Christian.

Another reckoning came after working with Abigail Disney on a film about American evangelicals’ love affair with firearms. The Armor of Light won an Emmy, but many of my colleagues labeled me a sellout to liberal gun grabbers. Pastors told me my appearance in the film created tensions in their congregations. When I visited one church as a guest preacher, my host forbade me from mentioning guns in his pulpit. “I have 50 armed people sitting out there every Sunday,” he warned, “and I don’t know what they’ll do if they get mad at you.” He gave me a wry smile. “Seriously.”

Meanwhile, as a Republican presidential candidate, Trump displayed pomposity and an ugly denunciation of the most vulnerable, both of which are diametrically opposed to the Christian virtues of humility, kindness, love for neighbors, and care for strangers. In June 2016, when his campaign invited scores of my closest friends and longtime colleagues to meet with him in New York, I declined. My contacts texted me from the gathering, reporting on the deal they were striking with him. Trump essentially promised to appoint anti-abortion federal judges and Supreme Court justices in exchange for our constituents’ loyal support. James Dobson, founder of the enormously influential Focus on the Family, assured attendees that Trump was a “baby Christian.”

When I arrived at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Trump’s nomination was a fait accompli. Sitting at a luncheon table with evangelical leaders, I expressed bewilderment over our support of him. Repeatedly, I was assured he would advance our cause. After Trump’s acceptance speech, I decided to leave the fold.

It took two years to extract myself. I dismantled the organization I had spent more than two decades building, walking away from a multimillion-dollar donor base. ­I called countless people to explain why I was leaving the movement I’d helped lead. ­I reached out to others to beg their pardon for the harm I had inflicted. I repented in prayer for my errors and the damage they caused. Then, I privately dedicated the rest of my life to doing as much repair as possible.

Following the insurrection of January 6, when Christian banners, Bibles, and prayers in Jesus’ name appeared in the assault on the Capitol, I felt even greater urgency in warning my fellow evangelicals of the grave danger Trump and his MAGA cult posed to Christianity and US democracy.

My change of course so late in life has been painful, disorienting, and costly. Besides losing decades-long friendships and enduring menacing threats, my wife and I have faced a significantly reduced income. I’ve even driven Uber to cover household expenses. One night, I picked up an organizer of the National Prayer Breakfast, an event in which I had once played a significant role. I was wearing a mask and said little, but then, with trepidation, I realized I would be dropping him at the home of a congressman I had worked with closely for more than 20 years. When my passenger got out, I was relieved to have gone unrecognized. Still, I’ve never questioned the decisions that brought me to that moment.

In my third conversion, I realized that when religion is placed at the service of a political party, it corrupts both. To claim that one political figure uniquely represents God’s will for the body politic is a form of anti-Christian idolatry. To elevate one set of spiritual beliefs above another and do it by force of law removes a nonnegotiable tenet of evangelical faith—free will. We are born again when we choose to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, not when we’re forced to do so.

Because it is immoral, I believe Christian nationalism is inevitably doomed. But in the meantime, the pain, suffering, and injury it will inflict will be enormous—just consider women facing difficult pregnancies, trans children seeking care, librarians attacked for certain books. “We want to fill our culture again with the Christian spirit. We want to burn out all the recent immoral developments in literature, in the theater, and in the press—in short, we want to burn out the poison of immorality, which has entered into our whole life and culture as a result of liberal excess.” This may sound familiar—maybe some overheated Republican talking points. In fact, it’s what Adolf Hitler promised the German people in 1933.

More than two years since the overturn of Roe v Wade, legal battles over abortion laws are as chaotic as ever. But occasionally, the challenges playing out state by state result in a string of good news for abortion rights. That was the case this week, with a cluster of court decisions that will expand abortion access in Nevada and North Dakota, and allow Missouri and Nebraska voters to weigh in on the issue in November.

On Thursday, District Court Judge Bruce Romanick in Bismarck, North Dakota, issued a powerful opinion siding with abortion providers who challenged a state law that had deemed their practice a felony.

In his order, which takes effect in two weeks, Rominick ruled that the North Dakota constitution’s protections for life, liberty, and the right to pursue happiness include the right to choose abortion. “A woman’s choice of whether or not to carry a pregnancy to term shapes the very nature and future course of her life, on nearly every possible level,” he wrote. “The Court finds that such a choice, at least pre-viability, must belong to the individual woman and not to the government.” He also struck down the ban for its vagueness, concluding that, at present, North Dakota doctors could be prosecuted if other physicians second-guessed their decision to provide an emergency abortion.

Virtually all abortions have been illegal in North Dakota since April 2023, when Republican Gov. Doug Burgum signed a ban with exceptions only to save the life of the pregnant person, or for rape and incest survivors within the first six weeks of pregnancy. North Dakota’s only abortion clinic moved across the state line to Minnesota in 2022, soon after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, meaning most people seeking to end a pregnancy will have to leave the state.

But Romnick’s decision should make it easier for doctors to provide emergency abortions to patients with severe pregnancy complications—care that that is often withheld in abortion-ban states, with dire consequences. “It is now much safer to be pregnant in North Dakota,” Center for Reproductive Rights lawyer Meetra Mehdizadeh said in a statement on Friday.

Also on Thursday, a Nevada court order requiring the state Medicaid program to cover abortion became final after the state government declined to appeal an earlier ruling. Nevada will become the 18th state to allow Medicaid funds to cover abortion, the Associated Press reported.

That ruling is the result of a challenge brought under Nevada’s Equal Rights Amendment, which added language banning sex discrimination, along with many other types of discrimination, to the state constitution. Voters there supported the ERA by a nearly 18-point margin in 2022.

In their lawsuit, a Nevada abortion fund and the ACLU argued that the ban on Medicaid coverage amounted to sex discrimination because it denied low-income Nevadans who can become pregnant the ability to make decisions about their future. Back in March, a Clark County District Judge Erika Ballou had agreed—though her decision didn’t become final until this week.

”There was a time when we got it wrong and when women did not have a voice,” one judge wrote. “This does not need to continue for all time.”

“The court made clear that the state cannot withhold coverage for essential, sex-linked health care from low-income Nevadans,” ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project staff attorney Rebecca Chan explained in a statement. “As a result of this decision, Nevadans who have Medicaid as their health insurance will no longer need to fear that they will be forced to carry a pregnancy against their will.”

In November, voters in New York will decide whether to enshrine an ERA of their own—one of 10 states with abortion-related initiatives slated for the 2024 ballot. Yet initiatives in two of those states were in jeopardy until courts came to their rescue this week. On Tuesday, the Missouri Supreme Court threw out a last-minute claim arguing that the text of an abortion-rights initiative petition had omitted details required by state law; it ordered the anti-abortion secretary of state to certify the initiative for the ballot.

On Friday, the Nebraska Supreme Court ruled that dueling initiatives can appear on the ballot in that state, where current law bans abortion after 12 weeks. One of the initiatives, titled “Protect the Right to Abortion,” would create a state constitutional right for Nebraskans to get an abortion prior to “viability” (the hard-to-pinpoint moment in pregnancy when a fetus is able to survive outside the uterus). The other, titled “Protect Women and Children” would enshrine the current 12-week abortion ban in the state constitution.

If both pass, the one with the most votes prevails. But anti-abortion advocates had tried to kill the pro-abortion rights measure altogether by arguing that by regulating abortion before and after viability differently, it dealt with more than one subject, according to the Nebraska Examiner. Friday’s state Supreme Court ruling tossed that challenge, and ensures the vote on both questions will proceed.

Now, with 52 days left before voters will decide whether to add abortion protections to their state constitutions, the opinion from North Dakota’s Judge Rominick could offer some guidance.

“If we can learn anything from examining the history and prior traditions surrounding women’s rights, women’s health, and abortion in North Dakota, the Court hopes that we would learn this: that there was a time when we got it wrong and when women did not have a voice,” Rominick wrote. “This does not need to continue for all time, and the sentiments of the past, alone, need not rule the present for all time.”

When Project 2025 staffer and former Trump White House personnel chief John McEntee tried to score points on social media on Thursday by denying that women were “bleeding out” due to abortion bans, he probably didn’t expect them to reply to him directly.

“Can someone track down the women Kamala Harris said are bleeding out in parking lots because Roe v. Wade was overturned?” McEntee asked in a TikTok video filmed at a restaurant as he dipped fried food into sauce.

“Don’t hold your breath,” he added, smirking.

“I’m right here,” replied Carmen Broesder, a mother living in Idaho, which enacted a trigger law after the fall of Roe, a making it a felony for doctors to provide an abortion unless it was necessary “to prevent the death of the pregnant woman.”

In a TikTok video of her own, Broesder recalled how hospital staff turned her away from the ER three times during an excruciating 19-day miscarriage. She said she was repeatedly denied a procedure to remove tissue from the uterus—a procedure known as dilation and curettage (D&C) that is also used in abortions—and that they gave her just one dose of pain medication in 19 days. “I blacked out in my hallway due to blood loss,” she recounted.

@geekynerdbitchcarmen

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♬ original sound – Date Right Stuff

In June, the Supreme Court gave Idaho hospitals the green light to perform emergency abortions to protect pregnant people’s health, as well as their life—but the ruling is temporary while the lower courts reconsider the issue. But the problem isn’t confined to Idaho. In Oklahoma, Jaci Statton developed heavy bleeding, dizziness, and weakness from a molar pregnancy, a condition in which a fertilized egg does not develop into a fetus. For more than a week, she told NPR, doctors denied her treatment, and she was transferred to three different hospitals. Ultimately, she had to drive three hours to an abortion clinic in Kansas to get an D&C.

“The record shows that, as a matter of medical reality, such cases exist,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in a concurring opinion in the Idaho case. “Hospitals in Idaho have had to airlift medically fragile women to other States to receive abortions needed to prevent serious harms to their health. Those transfers measure the difference between the life-threatening conditions Idaho will allow hospitals to treat and the health-threatening conditions it will not.” 

“I was told when I had a possible ectopic pregnancy that I would have to ‘wait until it made me septic’ to get the surgery to save my life.”

According to Rolling Stone, Broesder’s severe blood loss during her miscarriage caused erratic blood pressure and a stress response that led her to be diagnosed with a heart condition she said could lead to a heart attack if she gets too excited or upset. “I have to deal with these side effects for the rest of my life because of abortion laws,” Broesder said in her video.

Broesder’s experience is a clear illustration of what Vice President Kamala Harris was talking about when she responded to former president Donald Trump’s bizarre claim during the debate that “every legal scholar” wanted Roe v. Wade overturned. “Pregnant women who want to carry a pregnancy to term, suffering from a miscarriage, being denied care in an emergency room because the health care providers are afraid they might go to jail, and she is bleeding out in a car in the parking lot—she didn’t want that,” Harris said. “Her husband didn’t want that.”

McEntee, the founder of a conservative-only dating app, has a large following on TikTok, where he posts snarky and often offensive quips about race and gender designed to tickle his MAGA audience. But his video garnered thousands of first-person responses, many telling stories about severe medical complications after pregnant people were denied care.

“I was told when I had a possible ectopic pregnancy that I would have to ‘wait until it made me septic’ to get the surgery to save my life,” one commenter said.

“My daughter. Nearly lost her life after she miscarried triplets that didn’t expel her body & 3 hospitals wouldn’t remove them,” another replied.

“I’ve been anemic on and off since my weeks-long miscarriage,” wrote yet another commenter. “Three hospitals refused to give me a DNC or pill protocol. Unimaginable pain and distress.”

And so it goes, on and on, for more than 19,000 comments as of Saturday.

More than two years since the overturn of Roe v Wade, legal battles over abortion laws are as chaotic as ever. But occasionally, the challenges playing out state by state result in a string of good news for abortion rights. That was the case this week, with a cluster of court decisions that will expand abortion access in Nevada and North Dakota, and allow Missouri and Nebraska voters to weigh in on the issue in November.

On Thursday, District Court Judge Bruce Romanick in Bismarck, North Dakota, issued a powerful opinion siding with abortion providers who challenged a state law that had deemed their practice a felony.

In his order, which takes effect in two weeks, Rominick ruled that the North Dakota constitution’s protections for life, liberty, and the right to pursue happiness include the right to choose abortion. “A woman’s choice of whether or not to carry a pregnancy to term shapes the very nature and future course of her life, on nearly every possible level,” he wrote. “The Court finds that such a choice, at least pre-viability, must belong to the individual woman and not to the government.” He also struck down the ban for its vagueness, concluding that, at present, North Dakota doctors could be prosecuted if other physicians second-guessed their decision to provide an emergency abortion.

Virtually all abortions have been illegal in North Dakota since April 2023, when Republican Gov. Doug Burgum signed a ban with exceptions only to save the life of the pregnant person, or for rape and incest survivors within the first six weeks of pregnancy. North Dakota’s only abortion clinic moved across the state line to Minnesota in 2022, soon after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, meaning most people seeking to end a pregnancy will have to leave the state.

But Romnick’s decision should make it easier for doctors to provide emergency abortions to patients with severe pregnancy complications—care that that is often withheld in abortion-ban states, with dire consequences. “It is now much safer to be pregnant in North Dakota,” Center for Reproductive Rights lawyer Meetra Mehdizadeh said in a statement on Friday.

Also on Thursday, a Nevada court order requiring the state Medicaid program to cover abortion became final after the state government declined to appeal an earlier ruling. Nevada will become the 18th state to allow Medicaid funds to cover abortion, the Associated Press reported.

That ruling is the result of a challenge brought under Nevada’s Equal Rights Amendment, which added language banning sex discrimination, along with many other types of discrimination, to the state constitution. Voters there supported the ERA by a nearly 18-point margin in 2022.

In their lawsuit, a Nevada abortion fund and the ACLU argued that the ban on Medicaid coverage amounted to sex discrimination because it denied low-income Nevadans who can become pregnant the ability to make decisions about their future. Back in March, a Clark County District Judge Erika Ballou had agreed—though her decision didn’t become final until this week.

”There was a time when we got it wrong and when women did not have a voice,” one judge wrote. “This does not need to continue for all time.”

“The court made clear that the state cannot withhold coverage for essential, sex-linked health care from low-income Nevadans,” ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project staff attorney Rebecca Chan explained in a statement. “As a result of this decision, Nevadans who have Medicaid as their health insurance will no longer need to fear that they will be forced to carry a pregnancy against their will.”

In November, voters in New York will decide whether to enshrine an ERA of their own—one of 10 states with abortion-related initiatives slated for the 2024 ballot. Yet initiatives in two of those states were in jeopardy until courts came to their rescue this week. On Tuesday, the Missouri Supreme Court threw out a last-minute claim arguing that the text of an abortion-rights initiative petition had omitted details required by state law; it ordered the anti-abortion secretary of state to certify the initiative for the ballot.

On Friday, the Nebraska Supreme Court ruled that dueling initiatives can appear on the ballot in that state, where current law bans abortion after 12 weeks. One of the initiatives, titled “Protect the Right to Abortion,” would create a state constitutional right for Nebraskans to get an abortion prior to “viability” (the hard-to-pinpoint moment in pregnancy when a fetus is able to survive outside the uterus). The other, titled “Protect Women and Children” would enshrine the current 12-week abortion ban in the state constitution.

If both pass, the one with the most votes prevails. But anti-abortion advocates had tried to kill the pro-abortion rights measure altogether by arguing that by regulating abortion before and after viability differently, it dealt with more than one subject, according to the Nebraska Examiner. Friday’s state Supreme Court ruling tossed that challenge, and ensures the vote on both questions will proceed.

Now, with 52 days left before voters will decide whether to add abortion protections to their state constitutions, the opinion from North Dakota’s Judge Rominick could offer some guidance.

“If we can learn anything from examining the history and prior traditions surrounding women’s rights, women’s health, and abortion in North Dakota, the Court hopes that we would learn this: that there was a time when we got it wrong and when women did not have a voice,” Rominick wrote. “This does not need to continue for all time, and the sentiments of the past, alone, need not rule the present for all time.”