I. The Room
On a Sunday morning in July 2025, a small room two blocks east of the U.S. Capitol filled up past its capacity. The room belonged to the Conservative Partnership Institute. The building was one of nine properties CPI affiliates had quietly bought up on a single Pennsylvania Avenue block for forty-one million dollars between 2022 and early 2023. The annual report called the campus “Patriot’s Row.” Russell Vought’s Center for Renewing America — the operation that wrote Chapter 2 of Mandate for Leadership — operated out of the same building as a CPI partner. Stephen Miller’s America First Legal operated out of the same building. The House Freedom Caucus held weekly meetings around the corner.
On that Sunday morning, the room had been rented out to a church.
The church was Christ Kirk DC. It was the first Washington congregation of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches — the denomination Doug Wilson had founded out of Moscow, Idaho. The room was small, not air-conditioned, lit by a skylight that let the July sun fall on a grey lectern. Above the lectern, an American flag the size of the wall it covered had been hung with its stars and stripes facing downward. The inverted flag is the standard military signal for dire distress. Christ Kirk DC was using it as denominational signage.
To one side of the flag, a yellow Gadsden flag: Don’t Tread on Me. To the other side, an Appeal to Heaven flag — the white-and-green pine-tree banner that flew at the January 6 attack on the Capitol, two blocks west of where the congregation was now sitting. Framed newspaper clippings praising Ronald Reagan hung on the walls beside a Republican National Convention plaque.
Roughly 120 people filled the room — Religion News Service counted 120, Christianity Today counted nearly 200. Standing room only. Men in suits. Almost all the women in dresses and stilettos. The body heat was rising in a space that had not been designed to hold a congregation.
A few minutes before the service began, the Secretary of Defense walked in. Pete Hegseth was in a suit. His wife Jennifer was with him. His children were with him. Secret Service agents flanked the pews. He took a seat a few rows back, in the middle. Children already seated whispered excitedly as he passed.
Nick Solheim was also in the room — the head of American Moment, the Vance-linked conservative-staffer pipeline that had hosted Wilson at the Dirksen Senate Office Building in September 2023, that had co-organized NatCon 4 in Washington a year before, that had been placing Wilson-network alumni into State Department political-appointee slots since the second Trump term began. Solheim was not advertised. He was simply present.
Outside on the sidewalk, two protesters. One held a sign that read Christ Church Is not Welcome.
The preaching pastor that morning was Jared Longshore, an associate pastor at Christ Kirk Moscow and pastor of Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowship in suburban Nashville — the same church the Defense Secretary attends in Tennessee. Longshore is auburn-bearded, bespectacled, professorial. He wore a blue suit and a striped tie. He leaned over the lectern. His delivery, Christianity Today would later call “subdued, heady” — the Reformed-Presbyterian tradition’s preference for argument over emotion.
“We understand that worship is warfare,” he said.
He paused.
“We mean that.”
A few minutes later he would say: “Politics is downstream from culture, and culture is downstream from worship.”
The room itself was upstream of the policy chapters being written down the hall. That is the load-bearing claim of the entire operation, and Longshore was making it from the lectern. The doctrine names what the room is for. The architecture confirms what the doctrine names.
The sermon ended with a binary. Christ or Chaos.
Two months earlier, on May 12, 2025, Doug Wilson had announced this church plant on his blog under the title “A Mission to Babylon.” The metaphor was deliberate. Babylon is the captive empire of Daniel and Nehemiah — the empire where the faithful are exiles called to reform civil institutions from within. Not the empire of Revelation. Not the empire to be fled or destroyed. The metaphor declared the project a re-occupation, not a withdrawal.
“With the change in administration,” Wilson wrote, “we believe that there will be many strategic opportunities with numerous evangelicals who will be present both in and around the Trump administration.”
Eight months later, in March 2026, Wilson would post a follow-up. Attendance was robust. The core group was strong. The congregation had begun raising money to buy a permanent building near Capitol Hill. “Nothing would say ‘permanent presence,’” Wilson wrote, “like such a purchase would.”
II. The Old Question, Asked Differently
In Jesus Wept, I wrote about Howard Thurman’s grandmother. Nancy Ambrose, born into slavery, told her grandson about the two services she heard every Sunday on the plantation where she was held. In the morning, the master’s minister preached obedience from Paul’s epistles. In the afternoon, after the white preacher had gone, an enslaved preacher told her: You are not slaves. You are God’s children.
Frederick Douglass made the same distinction in 1845. He called it “the Christianity of this land” against “the Christianity of Christ.” Two Christianities, he said. Same Bible, opposite ethical implications.
That frame still works. It is the load-bearing frame for resistance to white Christian nationalism. The white preacher’s Christianity, and the resistance tradition that runs through Douglass and Thurman and Bonhoeffer and King and the Black churches where King composed his Birmingham letter.
But the moment we are in is not a simple repeat of two-Christianities. It is three masteries against one resistance. And the three masteries don’t agree with each other.
The Reformed wing — Wilson, Hegseth, Christ Kirk DC, Joe Rigney, American Reformer, the CREC — is postmillennial reconstructionist: Christ already reigns; history is the long subduing of his enemies; the United States is a fallen Christian nation in need of return rather than conversion. The Catholic-integralist wing — Sohrab Ahmari at Compact, Patrick Deneen, Adrian Vermeule, the Cluny Institute — holds that liberalism is itself a heresy and that the state’s proper role is to direct citizens to their last end, which is union with God. The Pentecostal-NAR wing — Lance Wallnau, Paula White, AFPI faith outreach, the Seven Mountains framework, the prophetic-apostolic networks — holds that Christians are called to take dominion over the seven spheres of cultural influence and that the present is a kairos moment of apostolic mandate.
These three wings have called each other heretics for five hundred years. Wilson, in a March 2026 podcast interview with John Papola and a follow-up video posted to his Blog & Mablog on March 16, 2026, said that in his ideal Christian nation, Catholic Marian processions would be banned as “public displays of idolatry” — “a parade in honour of the Virgin Mary, carrying an image of the Virgin Mary down main street, no.” He clarified that the ban would not arrive for centuries; the doctrinal commitment is intact regardless of the timeline. The integralists deny the validity of Pentecostal prophetic gifts. The Pentecostal charismatics deny Catholic sacramentalism. Reformed cessationists deny that the Spirit gives any new revelation after Scripture; continuationists deny that the canon has closed. These are not minor differences. They are the boundary disputes that define intra-Christian polemics.
And yet on that Sunday in July, the Reformed preacher was preaching the Reformed-postliberal sermon in the building rented from Vought’s Center for Renewing America operation, with Pete Hegseth in the pews, while the Catholic Vice President was the operator who had cast the tiebreaking vote on January 24, 2025 to put Hegseth at Defense.
When Jared Longshore said worship is warfare, he was not being metaphorical. The doctrine is specific. In the Reformed-reconstructionist line that runs from R. J. Rushdoony through Doug Wilson, worship is the active subjugation of God’s enemies through the proper ordering of the soul, the household, and the polity in obedience to biblical law.
Discipline, including the willingness to inflict pain on behalf of righteous authority, is not a regrettable necessity. It is an instrument of sanctification. Joe Rigney, who co-founded Christ Kirk DC and now sits as president of New Saint Andrews College in Moscow, has argued in print that empathy is itself a sin — that compassion for the wrong people corrupts moral judgment and must be governed by hierarchy. This is the theological substrate that made Pete Hegseth confirmable. The Defense Secretary’s published writings on warrior ethos, the Pentagon prayer service his pastor Brooks Potteiger led, the directives now flowing through the Department of War about masculinity standards and recruit treatment — these are not Hegseth’s personal idiosyncrasies. They are CREC doctrine, exported.
How does that sit in the same room with a Catholic Vice President?
That is the question.
III. The Three Operators
The answer the documentary record forces is that the coalition is held together not by theological agreement but by operators — specific people whose job is to make the lanes work together without making them reconcile.
There are three operators.
Charlie Kirk, who would be assassinated at Utah Valley University on September 10, 2025, built the cross-track recruitment vehicle.
Kirk’s Turning Point USA (TPUSA) Faith division did not pick a theological lane. It picked all of them. In September 2023, Kirk featured Lance Wallnau at the TPUSA Faith Pastors Summit in San Diego — locking in the Pentecostal-NAR connection a year before the formal Courage Tour partnership. In January 2024, Kirk announced the Courage Tour merger with Wallnau, AFPI co-sponsored with seven swing states, 2,500 churches. In July 2024 he hosted Doug Wilson at the Believers Summit in West Palm Beach with 3,300 attendees. RNS quoted Kirk calling Wilson a “thoughtful, brilliant thinker,” urging pastors to share the podcast interview. Reformed and NAR figures on the same stage; the same operator booking both.
The Catholic-adjacent track was the one Kirk did not finally close before he was killed. A little more than a week before the Utah Valley shooting, at a pro-life prayer breakfast in Visalia, California, Kirk spoke privately with Bishop Joseph Brennan of Fresno. As the two were parting, Kirk — acknowledging the public speculation about his possible conversion — said simply, “I’m this close.” Bishop Brennan’s brother, Robert Brennan, recounted the exchange in Angelus News on September 18, 2025; the account was picked up across the Catholic press.
The claim is second-hand by definition: Kirk is dead; the bishop is the witness, his brother the publisher. But the Catholic move was always going to be personal and devotional rather than institutional, regardless of where exactly Kirk landed in that final week. It was running through his marriage to a devout Catholic woman (Notre Dame Prep, ASU, currently pursuing a doctorate in Biblical Studies at Liberty University) and through his friendship with the Catholic Vice President of the United States, a friendship that had begun in 2017 after a Tucker Carlson appearance and a follow-up Twitter DM.
Kirk did not need to agree with all three traditions. He needed all three traditions to want to be on his stage.
He was thirty-one.
His wife Erika Kirk is the operator who inherited the recruitment vehicle.
She took the CEO/Chair role at Turning Point USA on September 18, 2025. She is now running the NAR-coded TPUSA Faith infrastructure her husband built. The August 2025 Faith Forward Pastors Summit speaker list — Wallnau, Samuel Rodriguez, Jentezen Franklin, John Bevere — locked the TPUSA Faith infrastructure as authentically NAR-adjacent. Erika is administering that infrastructure. She is a Catholic operating a Pentecostal-charismatic platform whose primary political ally is her late husband’s Catholic friend.
That is the substrate-deniability pattern at the personal-relationship register. The personal is not the institutional. A Catholic woman can administer a Pentecostal-charismatic infrastructure without changing its character — and that is precisely the point. The fact that Erika is Catholic does not change the NAR character of TPUSA Faith. The fact that TPUSA Faith is NAR-coded does not change that Erika is the woman running it. The fact that the Vice President is Catholic does not change that he just publicly described the post-assassination TPUSA succession moment as a “revival” — Pentecostal-charismatic native vocabulary that does not translate into Catholic or Reformed idiom.
The substrate-deniability is the architecture. Each register can deny that the coalition is principally any other register, while every register’s institutional infrastructure remains intact under the management of someone confessionally adjacent to it.
JD Vance is the doctrinal-articulation operator.
Before he was Vice President, Vance courted each of the three lanes in their own venues, in their own languages, with their own theological vocabularies.
In November 2021, at NatCon 2 in Orlando, Vance gave the keynote — “The Universities Are the Enemy” — and, attacking critical race theory in schools, said: “Telling a little girl that she’s evil because of her skin color is disgusting and vile, and as a Christian I’d say Satanic.” That word — Satanic — is Reformed-evangelical vocabulary deployed on a NatCon platform Wilson also used. Three years before the VP nomination. It was the earliest documented theological-vocabulary deployment on that platform.
In March 2022, Vance went on the Eric Metaxas Show — Trinity Broadcast Network (TBN) distributed, the flagship Pentecostal-charismatic broadcast network — and engaged without distancing Metaxas’s framing of the political contest as a fight against attempts to ban God from the public square.
In October 2022, Vance was the closing keynote at Sohrab Ahmari’s “Restoring a Nation” conference at Franciscan University of Steubenville. He told the assembled postliberal Catholic intellectual leadership: “I’ve admired a lot of you from afar.” Ahmari, Patrick Deneen, Adrian Vermeule, R.R. Reno, Scott Hahn — every one of them in the room.
In May 2023, Vance sat on the “Regime Change” panel at the Catholic University of America with Deneen and Heritage’s Kevin Roberts. He described his political goals as “explicitly anti-elitist, explicitly anti-regime,” adopting Deneen’s vocabulary verbatim, with Deneen and Roberts on the panel beside him.
This is the documented pre-VP record: Reformed-evangelical vocabulary in November 2021. Pentecostal-adjacent venue in March 2022. Catholic-integralist conference in October 2022. Catholic-integralist intellectual seminar in May 2023. He courted each track in its own venue with its own language three years before the nomination.
The synthesis came after.
On September 21, 2025, at the memorial service for Charlie Kirk in State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, Vance — the Catholic Vice President — publicly named the post-assassination TPUSA succession a revival. That word is not Catholic. It is not Reformed. It is Pentecostal-charismatic native vocabulary. Vance said it from the stage, in front of a stadium audience and a national television feed, in the same eulogy where he recited the Nicene Creed (Catholic liturgical text) and admitted he had “talked more about Jesus Christ in the past two weeks than in my entire time in public life.” Three theological registers in one eulogy. The friendship-tied Catholic Vice President naming the platform’s Pentecostal-charismatic genre while reciting Catholic liturgy.
On December 21, 2025, at AmericaFest in Phoenix — TPUSA’s annual gathering, the largest of its kind — Vance gave what Religion News Service described as the most explicit VP-era “Christian nation” declaration. In my reading, the speech layered three theological registers simultaneously. Catholic natural-law framing. Reformed persecution-narrative framing. Pentecostal-NAR revival-after-darkness framing — “a story of very dark nights followed by very bright dawns,” and the call for “slayers of dragons” and “men who are willing to die for a principle if that’s what God asks them to do.” Vance code-switched across all three vocabularies inside a single speech, on a single platform, to a single audience that contained members of all three traditions.
This is the operator-level function the coalition needs. Kirk built the venue. Erika administers the venue. Vance speaks in all three of the venue’s languages without requiring any of them to translate.
IV. The Architecture
If the three operators were the whole story, the coalition would be a personnel arrangement rather than an architecture. But the operators are themselves only one scale of the pattern.
The pattern recurs at the funding scale.
The conventional assumption about MAGA Christian nationalism — the assumption I had until the documentary work forced it open — is that some single funder or funder-network is the principal of the operation. The most common candidate-name is Peter Thiel, given his $15 million underwrite of Vance’s 2022 Senate race, his role as the principal of Vance’s professional career, his decades of investment in surveillance and intelligence infrastructure adjacent to the operation. The narrative wants a principal.
The documentary record does not support that narrative. The Thiel-network connection runs to Vance personally and to the Catholic-integralist intellectual infrastructure (Imitatio funding for Girardian scholarship; Narya Capital’s Series B participation in the Hallow Catholic prayer app; speakers at the ACTS 17 Collective). It does not run to Charlie Kirk’s TPUSA. It does not run to the American Reformer publication that is the flagship of the Reformed-postliberal lane. No published reporting documents Thiel-network capital flow into Kirk’s TPUSA, the CREC publishing infrastructure, or the Pentecostal-NAR institutional substrate — not through Thiel Foundation 990-PF filings, not through Rockbridge Network 501(c)(4) distributions, not through Founders Fund’s documented giving. The flagship Reformed publication, American Reformer, is funded by the Bradley Impact Fund — publicly disclosed in an October 2024 Grant Recipient Spotlight on the fund’s own site. Bradley network, not Thiel network. TPUSA’s publicly reported revenue base — approaching nine figures — runs through Uihlein, Marcus, Bradley Impact Fund, Donors Trust, the late Foster Friess’s family, and Robert Shillman before he canceled. No Thiel-network donor has surfaced among them in public reporting. AFPI’s anonymous-donor stack has no leak naming Thiel.
The coalition runs on at least two, probably three, structurally distinct donor stacks operating in parallel. Thiel-network underwrites the Catholic-integralist lane and the Vance operator personally. Bradley/Scaife/Olin/Federalist Society money underwrites the Reformed-postliberal publishing and judicial infrastructure. Green/Uihlein/Marcus/Friess-family money underwrites TPUSA and the Pentecostal-NAR mobilization layer. The lanes coordinate at the operator level, not at the funder level.
The architecture is fractal. The substrate-deniability pattern Doug Wilson set up at the lecture-hosting scale (Cluny Institute / Vincenzo Gioberti Cultural Association / ACTS 17 Collective — three substrate-specific 501(c)(3) vehicles each preserving deniability for the others) is the same architecture Vance operates at the denominational scale (Catholic-integralist personally / Reformed-postliberal adjacent / Pentecostal-NAR ratifying) and the same architecture the funder network operates at the capital scale (Thiel / Bradley / Green-Uihlein-Marcus — three substrate-specific donor stacks each preserving deniability for the others). Three scales. Same pattern.
This is the structural answer to the question of how a coalition whose constituent theologies have anathematized each other for five centuries holds together politically. The coalition does not require theological reconciliation. It requires multi-stack deniability. Each lane can sincerely deny that the coalition is principally about any other lane’s theology. Each funder can sincerely deny that they are underwriting any other lane’s project. Each operator can sincerely deny that they personally subscribe to any other operator’s confessional position.
The multi-everything structure is the deniability mechanism. If a single funder underwrote the whole thing, the structure would collapse to single-funder dependence. If a single operator articulated the whole thing, the structure would collapse to single-operator vulnerability. If a single theology defined the whole thing, the structure would collapse to single-tradition exposure. The coalition is durable in direct proportion to its non-coordination.
V. Operations Made Visible
The funding architecture is how the coalition is built. The cover-up architecture is how it operates. Same pattern, different scale.
I have written elsewhere about the killings of Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis in January 2026. Renée Good, thirty-seven, a poet and mother of three, whose last words on the agent’s personal cellphone video — That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you — were captured by accident and released by Alpha News on January 9–10. Alex Pretti, thirty-seven, a VA ICU nurse who stepped between an agent and a woman who’d been pushed to the ground, then was tackled, pepper-sprayed, and shot ten times in five seconds.
What I have not written — what the published archive has not yet named as architecture — is the cover-up structure that operated around those killings.
The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) agreed to a joint investigation of the Renée Good shooting on the morning of January 8. By that afternoon, the U.S. Attorney’s Office had reversed the agreement. BCA Superintendent Drew Evans went on record: “The BCA has reluctantly withdrawn from the investigation.” When Alex Pretti was killed on January 24, the BCA was blocked from the scene the same day — with a judge-signed warrant. The FBI formally denied the BCA all evidence in the Pretti case approximately February 16.
The Justice Department announced a civil-rights investigation into the Pretti killing on January 30. CBS News reported a few days later that the DOJ had assigned Brandon Wrobleski — an employment litigation attorney with no federal criminal case experience — to lead the probe. Career civil-rights prosecutors who specialize in excessive-force cases were excluded.
The Department of Veterans Affairs — Pretti’s actual employer — conducted internal investigations of its own employees who attended vigils honoring Pretti after his death. CNN reported the agency showed at least one VA employee, a recreational therapist in Augusta, Georgia, circled photographs of herself at a vigil.
These are not separate phenomena. They are layers of one architecture.
The visible layer is rhetorical: Kristi Noem at the podium calling Good a “domestic terrorist” who had “weaponized her vehicle”; Stephen Miller calling Pretti a “domestic terrorist”; Gregory Bovino claiming Pretti came to “massacre law enforcement.” The rhetorical layer creates political permission. It pre-frames the victims as aggressors. It makes federal investigative monopoly look defensible to anyone who has accepted the framing.
The invisible layer is procedural: FBI exclusive-jurisdiction assertion. State-lockout. DOJ civil-rights investigation staffed to fail. VA employees investigated for attending vigils. The procedural layer prevents the factual record that would contradict the rhetorical layer. Layer 1 makes Layer 2 defensible. Layer 2 prevents the evidence that would undermine Layer 1. They are interdependent.
But the second layer is what we are usually not seeing.
The architecture is not new. The Critical Incident Teams operated as a southwest-border cover-up apparatus from 1987 to 2022 — thirty-five years with no statutory authority, citing only the housekeeping statute. Documents released by the Southern Border Communities Coalition in October 2021 showed that the CITs’ stated mission was the “mitigation of civil liability” for Border Patrol agents facing lawsuits. The teams investigated agent killings and high-liability incidents for thirty-five years without statutory authority — controlling scenes ahead of local law enforcement, managing evidence chains of custody, dispersing witnesses, intruding on autopsies, subpoenaing medical records.
The canonical case is Anastasio Hernández Rojas — beaten and tasered to death at the San Ysidro Port of Entry on May 28, 2010. CIT was on scene 15 hours before the San Diego Police Department was notified. Bystander cell-phone videos were deleted on scene. Government surveillance footage disappeared. The arrest report existed in two contradictory versions. The administrative subpoena for Hernández Rojas’s medical records was signed by an officer named Rodney Scott — then the Acting Deputy Chief Patrol Agent of the San Diego sector.
On April 28, 2025, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights issued its merits decision in Family Members of Anastasio Hernández Rojas v. United States. It was the first extrajudicial killing case the IACHR had ever decided against the United States. The Commission found torture, excessive force, evidence destruction, biased and incomplete investigation, and denial of justice. The CBP investigation that the IACHR found “biased and incomplete” was the investigation Scott supervised.
On June 18, 2025 — seven weeks after the IACHR ruling — the United States Senate confirmed Rodney Scott as CBP Commissioner. The vote was 51 to 46. The senators voting yes had access to the IACHR ruling. They voted to confirm him anyway.
On February 12, 2026, Scott — now CBP Commissioner — testified at a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing and confirmed that the Office of Professional Responsibility was conducting “collection and preservation of evidence” in the Alex Pretti investigation.
The man who supervised the canonical CIT cover-up of an extrajudicial killing in 2010 — the cover-up an international human rights tribunal officially condemned in April 2025 — was confirmed seven weeks after that condemnation to run the federal agency conducting use-of-force accountability. He is now confirmed on the record to be conducting evidence collection in the Pretti case. The loop is closed at primary-source level.
The 2026 Minneapolis cases are not aberrations from the federal-officer accountability system. They are the system continuing in a new theater. What changed in 2026 is not the architecture but the conditions: urban media density, locally-elected prosecutors, a state-court officer-involved-shooting infrastructure that the southwest border did not have. The architecture has been retooled — FBI-jurisdiction monopoly instead of CIT scene-arrival — but its function is identical. Prevent the independent investigation. Block the factual record. Protect the agents.
And here is what makes the architecture’s existence the falsification of the framing:
If the federal authorities believed their own characterization of Renée Good and Alex Pretti as domestic terrorists, they would want independent investigation. Every additional investigative body that examined the evidence and reached the same conclusion would strengthen the framing. The IACHR for the border-killings, the BCA for the Minneapolis killings, the career civil-rights prosecutors at DOJ — independent confirmation would only help the official narrative. There would be no reason to lock them out.
The systematic prevention of independent investigation reveals what federal authorities actually know. They know that Renée Good was turning away from the agent when she was shot. They know that Alex Pretti’s handgun had already been removed from his holster before the agents fired ten rounds in five seconds. They know that Anastasio Hernández Rojas was handcuffed and face-down. They know that the framing does not hold against the evidence.
The cover-up architecture is the operational proof.
VI. The Resistance Tradition Is Still Unitary
When I wrote Jesus Wept, I named two Christianities. That was the right frame for that moment. It was Douglass’s frame, Thurman’s frame, the frame Martin Luther King carried into the Birmingham city jail.
It is also incomplete for the moment we are in now.
The masteries are plural. The captured theologies are plural. The donors are plural. The operators are plural. The coalition’s durability comes from its plurality. The lanes do not need to agree because they are organized around not-agreeing-while-coordinating.
The resistance tradition has always been unitary.
Not because there is only one resistance theology. There are many: Howard Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited, Bonhoeffer’s Discipleship, James Cone’s God of the Oppressed, Dorothee Sölle’s Suffering, Gustavo Gutiérrez’s A Theology of Liberation, the Black Catholic Sisters’ witness, the Doctrine of Discovery repudiations, the Episcopal House of Bishops’ January 31, 2026 letter naming Renée Good and Alex Pretti as victims of “state-sanctioned violence.” Many traditions. Many languages. Many denominational homes.
But all of them name the same Jesus. The Jesus who wept at Lazarus’s tomb. The Jesus who touched the leper. The Jesus who said what you do to the least, you do to me. The Jesus the Roman state crucified for sedition because his teaching about the Kingdom was a direct threat to imperial legitimation. That Jesus does not need cross-denominational reconciliation to be recognizable. He shows up the same way in every tradition that names him without first making him useful.
The lanes of the coalition cannot share that Jesus. They can share Wilson’s Jesus, who licenses worship-as-warfare and inverted flags. They can share Wallnau’s Jesus, who licenses Seven Mountains dominion. They can share Deneen’s Jesus, who licenses the common-good state. But they cannot share the Jesus who weeps with Renée Good. That Jesus is the falsification of all three of them, because that Jesus is the Jesus who refused to bless the architecture his rich young rulers came asking him to bless.
The resistance tradition’s witness is not primarily to the masters. The masters know what they are doing. They have known it for forty years on the southwest border. They knew it when they confirmed Rodney Scott seven weeks after the IACHR ruling. They know it when they exclude the career civil rights prosecutors. They know it when they investigate VA employees for attending vigils.
The witness is to the people inside the captured theologies who have not yet recognized that the theology is a justification of the capture rather than its source. The Reformed parishioner who has never heard her tradition described as the architecture of dominion. The Pentecostal who has been taught that the Seven Mountains framework is the gospel rather than a 21st-century novelty. The Catholic who has been taught that integralism is the historic tradition rather than a contested 20th-century revival. The evangelical who has been told that Christian nationalism is just love of country, that worship-as-warfare is just zeal.
That is who the witness is for. Not the operators. The people in the pews.
This is the a piece in The Second Sermon series. The first was Jesus Wept: Two Visions of Jesus Went to War in Minneapolis (February 13, 2026). The series follows the question Howard Thurman posed in 1949: what does the Jesus teach those with their backs against the wall?
The RAMM documents the connections that beat reporting can’t see:
4,776+ sourced events at capturecascade.org.
1,988 Counties with signals of potential detention center expansion (Federal contracts, 287(g), real estate traces, etc) at detention-pipeline.transparencycascade.org my site that tracks signals of potential cooperation with ICE and Border Patrol.
129 Community fights over detention capacity built out tracked.
All of this is self-funded, and paid subscriptions are the only way I can continue to do this long term.
Sources
Primary scene reporting (Christ Kirk DC inaugural, July 13, 2025):
Aleja Hertzler-McCain, “With Pete Hegseth in the pews, a Christian nationalist church plant launches in DC,” Religion News Service, July 14, 2025.
“At Doug Wilson’s DC Church Plant, ‘Worship Is Warfare,’” Christianity Today, July 15, 2025.
“With Pete Hegseth in the Pews, a Christian Nationalist Church Plant Launches in DC,” Word & Way, July 15, 2025.
“‘Christ or Chaos’: A Conservative Church With Political Ties Comes to Washington,” Washingtonian, July 16, 2025.
Doug Wilson, primary documents:
“A Mission to Babylon,” Blog & Mablog, May 12, 2025.
“Strategic Next Steps in DC,” Blog & Mablog, March 4, 2026.
CPI “Patriot’s Row” campus:
“Steps from Capitol, Trump allies buy up properties to build MAGA campus,” Washington Post, March 15, 2023.
“Top Trump-aligned conservative group buys up prime D.C. office space,” Axios, January 18, 2023.
Vance pre-VP per-track receipts:
“JD Vance: Universities Are the Enemy,” NatCon 2 Orlando keynote, National Conservatism Conference, November 1, 2021.
Vance on the Eric Metaxas Show (TBN-distributed), March 30, 2022.
“Restoring a Nation” closing keynote, Franciscan University of Steubenville (Sohrab Ahmari, organizer), October 7, 2022.
“Regime Change” panel with Patrick Deneen and Kevin Roberts, Catholic University of America, May 17, 2023.
Vance VP-era three-register speeches:
Charlie Kirk Memorial, State Farm Stadium, September 21, 2025.
AmericaFest “Christian nation” declaration, Phoenix, December 21, 2025 (covered by Religion News Service, NPR, ABC News).
Charlie Kirk cross-track receipts (pre-assassination):
TPUSA Faith Pastors Summit San Diego with Lance Wallnau, September 13–15, 2023.
Kirk-Wallnau Courage Tour partnership announcement, January 17, 2024.
TPUSA Faith Believers Summit West Palm Beach with Doug Wilson, July 26–28, 2024.
Renee Good / Alex Pretti / cover-up architecture:
“Renee Good’s Last Words: ‘I’m Not Mad at You‘,” The RAMM, January 16, 2026.
“Jesus Wept: Two Visions of Jesus Went to War in Minneapolis,” The RAMM, February 13, 2026.
“Border Patrol: A Criminal Organization Disguised as a Federal Agency,” The RAMM, February 17, 2026.
Drew Evans (BCA Superintendent) on-the-record statement re: Renée Good investigation reversal, January 8, 2026.
Hernández Rojas / IACHR / Rodney Scott:
Family Members of Anastasio Hernández Rojas v. United States, Case No. 14.042, Inter-American Commission on Human Rights merits decision, April 28, 2025.
Senate confirmation of Rodney Scott as CBP Commissioner, June 18, 2025 (vote 51–46).
GAO-24-106148, “CBP Successor Teams to the Critical Incident Teams Continue to Operate in the Same Manner,” May 13, 2024.
Scott testimony, Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, February 12, 2026.
I am a black Christian who has been in Pentecostal, charismatic, reformed and main line Protestant churches. I now identify as a Christ follower. Your article discloses what seems to me to be an unholy mess…all about rule and power - the essence of anti Christ. It is scary.
I just listened to the audio version of this article and it's so good I'm sitting down to actually read it. For months I have been diving down an alarming rabbit hole, actively trying to understand how the various brands of Christian Nationalists are working together. I am an author, trying to conceive of a true dystopian Christian plot that could be plausible and the cast of real life characters is dizzying! I myself am a survivor of a cult that currently advertises itself to be an ecumenical double monastary in the Benedictine tradition but it's flying the Appeal to Heaven flag and its members are actively arming themselves. I would give anything to better understand how this is happening.