Turning Point USA’s Erika Kirk has begun to command a large following after her husband, Charlie Kirk, was assassinated just over one year ago. Authors like Allie Beth Stuckey and Megan Basham have written best-selling books deploring the perceived excesses of the political left and promoting their view of traditional Christian gender roles.

There’s a clear need for scholars to explore how women like this have made space for themselves within a patriarchal landscape and how the concept of “traditional” White Christian womanhood developed in the first place.

In her book Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made, Calvin University historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez works to fill this gap in the scholarship. She traces the history of White Christian womanhood from the late 19th century to the modern day.

While being subservient to men, Du Mez shows how, through consumer culture and politics, White Christian women amassed power for themselves by upholding the power structure. However, these figures risk being stripped of this power when they step outside of subordinate roles in the patriarchy.

Contributing writer Kenneth Ethan Frantz recently spoke with Du Mez about her new book, the formation of White Christian womanhood, and how her work connects to the ongoing conversation about “Biblical womanhood.” The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Kenneth Ethan Frantz: It is a book about White Christian women, but it is also very much a book about capitalism and Christian consumer culture. Would you mind talking about how you see those things as intertwined?

Kristin Kobes Du Mez: One of my regrets in writing Jesus and John Wayne is that I did not adequately grapple with the economics of that story and situate that story within a broader economic history. And so I tried to make up for that in Live, Laugh, Love.

When you’re looking at cultural products, and in this case the Christian products industry, you have to think about money changing hands, but the story goes deeper than that. It also looks at how particular theologies and ideologies were useful to and amplified by corporate America.

So I look at in the 1930s and ‘40s, for example, how corporate interests united with certain religious leaders to promote an individualistic interpretation of Christianity and really push back against the social gospel tradition that had critiqued corporate power, inequality. And what happened was that an individualistic evangelicalism and philosophy of positive thinking were ideally suited to promote free market capitalism.

And you see this growing alignment in the ‘30s, ‘40s, ‘50s, up to the present. And I think that’s a really critical backstory so that you can understand how now generations of Americans, and particularly American Christians, have accepted essentially the gospel of free market capitalism.

KEF: I also saw throughout the book that there is an ecumenical, interfaith strand throughout the book, like Mormons, Catholics, mainliners, but also New Thought. How is the interfaith element important to the story?

KKDM: What I realized early on was that the neat and tidy categories that scholars of American religion like to work with simply didn’t apply to the story that I was trying to tell. Early on, so already in the late 19th century, you see both similarities and then influences going back and forth between New Thought, which evolves into the philosophy of positive thinking and Holiness evangelicalism. And you see an emphasis on health and faith healing that feeds the charismatic movement, but you see this parallel movement going on inside New Thought.

You see a shifting emphasis gradually in both traditions around not just health, but also wealth. And so really it’s a story of porous boundaries. That certainly is the case in the 20th century around ideals of femininity, where you can see the direct influence between ideals of femininity popular in New Thought spaces influence Mormonism and influence evangelicalism.

And so ultimately one of the threads of the book is showing how “biblical womanhood” and popular ideals of femininity in evangelical spaces have a much more complicated pedigree than evangelicals would have you believe. And there’s much more to these ideals than simply biblical influences. So yeah, I will also say that the closer I looked at figures like Billy Graham, Oral Roberts, Norman Vincent Peale, the more I saw similarities in their teachings rather than seeing them as participating in these very distinct traditions. And what I realized is that they saw it themselves.

So one of my chapters is called “Different Sides of the Same Street,” and that’s a quote from Norman Vincent Peale, recognizing that he and Graham are undertaking essentially the same project, but in different spaces. And I throw Oral Roberts into that mix as well. And so it’s really a reconceptualization of 20th century American religion and understanding how what we thought were largely distinct traditions are working towards the same end.

And in the mid-century, that was promoting free market capitalism, individualism, pushing back against New Deal liberalism, and against any real conception of structural inequalities that might need to be addressed socially, politically, or even theologically.

KEF: You’re a historian, so in the book it covers a wide range of time. You also just mentioned you cover a variety of different people. So would you mind going into the logic of the case studies you chose, what you excluded, what you included, and why?

KKDM: Yeah, it started off where I had a sense of some of the women who are going to be important in this story. So I started off with women like Catherine Marshall, the author of the book, Christie, and a number of other books. And she, by the way, is situated in the mainline. And then also Elisabeth Elliot, I knew was going to play a role. I did not know exactly the role that she was going to play when I started researching this project. She became just fascinating to me. And I knew women like Amy Grant, Sandi Patty, these sorts would have a place. And then I knew going up to more contemporary times, Beth Moore, Joyce Meyer.

So I started off with a number of women that I knew were part of this story because of their prominence. And then as I began to dig into their life stories, and first, just read their writings, I started adding more women to the list.

And one of the most important women that I added who wasn’t on my radar when I started this project was Hannah Whitall Smith. So going back to the 19th century. And what led me to her was the writings of Elisabeth Elliot, of Catherine Marshall, of these women that I knew were important in the ‘60s and ‘70s. And they kept citing her, they kept reissuing her book, writing adaptations of her work themselves. And so that really drew me back to the 19th century.

So it was just kind of standard research. But as I began to dig into these life stories, that’s where I started to see the connections. The connections between figures that I had never imagined were connected. And through these connections, I began to see the shape of the larger narrative. So I mean, it took me five and a half years, and it’s just a research project that began in one place asking some questions with some ideas, and it took me in all sorts of directions that I hadn’t anticipated.

But by the time I finished, I felt confident in the power of this narrative and the pieces that fit together. That said, there were so many figures who could have also been added to this. And some were painful to leave out. But already I know that I’m pushing the limits of what I’m asking readers to sit with. There are so many names in this book and many names that will be familiar to some, and then many that will be completely unfamiliar.

In some chapters, the women that I highlight really are representative and could be swapped out with others, many others. And then in some cases, they are really significant. So somebody like Elisabeth Elliot and Catherine Marshall, both of them really couldn’t be swapped out for somebody else. In part because they’re really creating the system. Whereas other women, particularly later on, are inhabiting the system that is already up and running.

KEF: You cover some people that some might consider quite fringe and outside of the realm of mainstream evangelicalism, like Doug Wilson, Bill Gothard, and R. J. Rushdoony. Would you mind talking about why you chose to include those people and how they connect to mainstream, I guess, White Christianity?

KKDM: I guess I hear fewer people these days claiming that these figures are fringe. I think that was more common to hear 10 or 15 years ago. They enter this narrative because one of the themes of the book is there’s always a tension between the power of the spirit, individualism, human agency, whether it’s in New Thought, positive thinking, mind controls reality, or Holiness evangelicalism where it’s each individual believer has within themselves the power to believe, trust and obey, and then you’ll be blessed with holiness and happiness, this kind of formula.

That can be really empowering and it can also be really disruptive. And you can see that in the early history of Pentecostalism, for example, where you have women and Black Christians, believers, and the poor, and those on the fringes of society claim the power of the Spirit. It can be very disruptive.

And I would add James Dobson into that mix who would not be considered fringe and Doug Wilson. And what you see then is their teachings of rigid hierarchy and control and of defining women’s faithfulness, not in terms primarily as submission to God as Hannah Whitall Smith did in the 19th century, but submission to the authorities God has placed over you, submission to man.

That is this critical move that ends up shaping the lives of millions of women so that they perceive faithfulness in terms of submitting to the “God ordained authorities” and all that entails in terms of their identity, in terms of vulnerability and so on. So those figures play a role in this story in reasserting control. And I think that it will become clearer and clearer how influential they were and how influential they have been up to the present day.

And particularly somebody like Rushdoony, that for a long time scholars have just, oh, he’s fringe. He’s the “crazy uncle” of evangelicalism. Well, look at his influence. Look at his influence through Howard Phillips and the Council for National Policy right there, defining the Christian right politically and this vision for what it means to take America back for God, if you will.

The influence we see today is somebody like Doug Wilson. But the reason he’s being elevated at this point is because of his subtle influence, or not even subtle, his profound influence beneath the surface, reaching into conservative denominations, conservative churches for decades now and through his networks.

So yeah, I would contest that these figures are fringe. They are not the whole story. And I think one thing that Live, Laugh, Love does is by providing such an expansive account, you can fit figures like this in and see their influence inside their spaces and then beyond.

One more thing I would say with Rushdoony is his influence is not just in traditionally reformed spaces where it started, but we can trace his influence through charismatic spaces as well. And the dominionism that we see promoted by New Apostolic Reformation prophets and apostles. So yeah, I find it hard to support the claim that somebody like Rushdoony is fringe at this point, unfortunately.

KEF: You did mention even though a lot of Christian leaders didn’t like the economic form of communism, they did kind of draw a lot of control techniques from the communist movement. So how did that come into your narrative of White Christian women?

KKDM: That was one of the unexpected twists and turns of this research. I mean, anybody who studies post-World War II evangelicalism knows that it’s all about anti-communism. You listen to a sermon, you’re going to hear about the threat of Soviet communism. And I knew that. I wrote about it in Jesus and John Wayne, Billy Graham and so forth.

This time around, I started paying a little bit more attention to what they meant by that, and particularly what they meant when they said that the only antidote to communist totalism is an evangelical totalism. That the allure of the communist worldview was so powerful that what was needed was a totalizing system that would draw people into what was good and true to Jesus, to Christianity, and away from that totalizing ideology of communism.

What did they mean by that? What did they then set out to build? Organizations like Campus Crusade, how was that structured around individual cells, small groups, recruitment tactics? When I would hear people who have been part of these organizations talk about both what the organizations provided them and what these networks and communities provided them in terms of sense of belonging and identity, and how difficult it was to leave those organizations and the mechanisms of power used to control behaviors.

That’s when I realized that we needed to take them at their word when they said they wanted to offer a totalism of their own to combat Soviet totalism. So there’s a lot of receipts in the book for what that looks like. And I think that that section will resonate with a lot of readers who have been in these spaces and experienced both the good and the bad of these spaces. A profound sense of belonging and meaning and purpose. When they cross a line that they maybe didn’t even know existed, how they feel the other side of the equation.

KEF: A lot of the products, consumer culture, a lot of the products White Christian women consumed from the late 19th century to today did tell them to be submissive, be gentle, almost act like children and be afraid of cows and pout when you don’t get your way. Would you mind talking about how that developed and how that might contribute to this notion of women being controlled?

KKDM: I think it’s easiest to control people when that control does not appear to be coercive, but rather when it promises rewards, when it promises happiness. That’s how you draw people into systems when you promise that it will be for their own good and that they will benefit, that they will be “empowered.” And I think that’s what this feminine ideal does for women.

It emerges in the early 20th century. I trace this particular ideal of fascinating womanhood to the early 1920s, a publication called Fascinating Womanhood that was published by a New Thought publisher, so not explicitly Christian. And it presented a view of femininity based on a law of attraction, this New Thought concept that if you are attractive, you will attract good things to yourself. This is a law of the universe. For women, that meant you need to be beautiful, and you need to be charming.

And to be beautiful and charming meant to adore men and to never challenge their ego and to turn yourself into a childlike woman, a woman child really, who is kind of half angel, half child. And when you were able to win a man’s affections, he would give you what you most wanted, which was a happy marriage and money and things and all the material blessings, if you will.

This was an entire handbook for how to behave. So yes, when you go on a date, first of all, absolutely pay attention to your appearance. Beauty is everything. And then when you attract a man enough to go on a date, try to get him to take you off the beaten path so that you can feign incompetence more easily and allow him to feel important and strong and brave. It’s a lot of performativity, not authenticity.

To be a successful woman requires appearing to be incompetent, silly, frilly, feminine, but that is your path to empowerment. So it’s a silly set of booklets. It doesn’t become a massive bestseller, but it travels through an almost underground network. Gets passed down usually from mothers to daughters who say, yes, this is the key to marital happiness. And then it reemerges in the 1960s in Helen Andelin’s book, Fascinating Womanhood, very closely based on the originals.

And then that book directly inspires Maribel Morgan’s Total Woman, which in turn really sets the template for decades of writings on Christian womanhood. So this is where it comes from. How does it control women? It promises women that if you follow these rules, you’re going to be happy and you’re going — this is the path to women’s power.

KEF: This book does kind of contribute to an ongoing conversation on biblical womanhood or White Christian womanhood. Other authors like Beth Allison Barr comes to mind. Do you see your work as connecting to the two books she’s written recently?

KKDM: I cite her. In some ways, we are coming at the same question from different disciplinary places, or not disciplinary, but from different subfields within the discipline of history. And that question is really questioning the purported timelessness of evangelical ideals of quote unquote “biblical womanhood.” That as historians, we know things have not always been the way they are now. And we know that Christians over the course of Christian history have come up with ideals of Christian womanhood and ideals of femininity that look very different from the current ideals that go under that brand of biblical womanhood today.

Beth knows that because she’s a medieval historian and she’s spent her life studying medieval women who have been throughout Christian history renowned for their faithfulness, whose lives look absolutely nothing like the ideal presented in modern evangelical books on womanhood. So that’s kind of her entry point.

Beth then brings it up to the present and does this as well. I don’t go as far back, but what I’m looking at is the title of her first book in this trilogy. She’s written other books, but The Making of Biblical Womanhood, that’s where I come in as a 20th century specialist to show how these pieces got put into place, where they came from.

What we do as historians, showing how things came to be, is extremely disruptive in spaces that presume to be working with God-ordained concepts handed down from God who tend to deny any kind of hermeneutic. All right, this is the plain reading of the scripture, and who have worked to develop a kind of closed system inside their spaces. There are approved readings and then anything on the outside should not be trusted. And what we are able to do is our work has broken into some of those spaces and demonstrated how these purportedly timeless “biblical constructs” have a human history.

End of the day, I would say that the historical work that I do, while disruptive, does not in fact answer the question of who is right here. Which one is the most biblical? Which one is the only right? I guess it would push back on anybody’s confidence that their particular view is the only right Christian view. And they can still hold that, but they just can’t hold that and say, “And it is timeless and eternal.”

So I think that’s the kind of work that we do. My book of both of my books are our books, mine and Beth’s, they’re very much in conversation with each other, but kind of approaching this from different angles.

KEF: And a theme that comes up in both Jesus and John Wayne and in Live, Laugh, Love is amassing power and abusing power. In the last chapter in Live, Laugh, Love, you do talk a bit about abuse in the Southern Baptist and the Assemblies of God. And so would you mind, how does this concept of biblical womanhood, as you see it, contribute to a lot of the abuse that’s being uncovered in these major Christian denominations?

KKDM: This idea of biblical womanhood, first and foremost, is about submission to male authority. And so it makes women susceptible to abuse in their own homes and churches. It also teaches women to accept their circumstances and that suffering leads to holiness, and it rewards loyalty to the brand and punishes those who challenge the authority of those at the top of the system, those pastors and leaders, or in a household, husbands. So it certainly sets up a framework that makes women vulnerable to abuse and makes it very difficult for women to report abuse.

And importantly, for communities of faith to then respond in appropriate ways once reports do surface. And this is something I address in Jesus and John Wayne, and again, in Live, Laugh, Love, that for a community that claims to value sexual morality so much and sexual purity, how can we explain the fact that the standard pattern to handle allegations of abuse inside these spaces is to minimize those allegations, to support the predator, to require quick forgiveness. And if the victims do not comply and keep speaking out, or if they want to see justice, then the result is ostracizing the victims.

If you are just looking at beliefs like sexual morality, you’re not going to have an answer to that question. You have to look at the power dynamics that were built into these systems and then taught as God’s will. And women themselves were taught if you disrupt these power dynamics, you are sinning against God. And these are faithful women who want to obey God, and that’s how these systems work. So that’s what I tried to bring to light, just reading the sources.

KEF: Some women have managed to amass power for themselves through these norms of White Christian womanhood, like Erika Kirk, Kristi Noem, and Allie Beth Stuckey come to mind. So would you mind talking about that and how they prop up the system?

KKDM: There’s always a place inside these systems for women themselves to support and defend the system. And then this is where the performativity is so crucial. You need to perform femininity; you need to perform submission.

I think of Phyllis Schlafly famously thanking her husband for giving her permission to speak whenever she would speak publicly, these sorts of things. That women who follow all the rules and play this crucial role of discipling or indoctrinating, choose your verb there, women into this system are rewarded with considerable power.

But as the case study of Anita Bryant makes clear, as soon as you step out of line, that power is taken from you. And it is always power within constraints. You are empowered to promote and defend the ideology, the system. And this only works with women on the front lines promoting and defending this ideal of femininity and submission.

Kenneth Ethan Frantz is a freelance writer and a doctoral student in sociology at the University of Oklahoma. You can follow him on Bluesky @kennethefrantz.bsky.social.

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A quarter century later, the head of the U.S. military —who has Crusader imagery tattooed on his body and the cover of his Bible — spent the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks quoting Scripture and promising divine violence against another predominantly Muslim nation. Pete Hegseth, who likes to call himself “secretary of war,” used the official observance ceremony at the Pentagon to justify the ongoing war against Iran. And he repeatedly used biblical passages — from Isaiah to Psalms to Matthew — out of context as he recast the United States as a divine force sending terrorists to hell.

“Over the past six months … our warriors have fought an Islamic theocracy that has wished us death for nearly half a century,” Hegseth said as he shifted the ceremony’s focus to the Iran war. “We’re still sending terrorists where they belong — to hell — and tankers to the bottom of the ocean where they belong.”

Two of the three scriptural references in Hegseth’s remarks on Friday are the two passages he most invoked — and most misused — this year. As he has done repeatedly since May, Hegseth quoted Isaiah 6:8. In the biblical text, that verse is part of the call of the prophet Isaiah. But Hegseth now turns the passage into a military recruitment moment, and the Pentagon has followed his lead by repeatedly posting the verse on social media with images of soldiers and the phrase “send me.”

“These dastardly and cowardly attacks changed America in ways that even the sound of those planes on this day stirs your soul. But it changed America not as the cowards had hoped,” Hegseth said on Sept. 11. “Their attacks inspired millions to step forward instead and say, ‘Send me.’ In the book of Isaiah, Isaiah said, ‘Here I am, Lord. Send me.’ And in the days that weeks that followed, millions of Americans said, ‘Here we are. Send us.’”

With military members replacing the prophet and the nation replacing God, Hegseth conscripts the verse to be about an imperial military calling people to fight. To put it simply, Isaiah 6 is not about joining the U.S. military. It’s not even about joining any military. But Christian Nationalism heretically turns the nation into an idol, making it so the call is ultimately not to serve God but to serve (and die) for the nation.

Hegseth sees those as the same thing, but they’re not. He argued during his remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast in February that a soldier who dies for the nation “finds eternal life.” With that Crusader theology, Hegseth conflates God and country, making salvation not about the work of Jesus but about a soldier dying for a nation. His co-option of Isaiah 6:8 makes the same fundamental mistake.

Another biblical passage Hegseth used in his speech Friday is Psalm 144:1-2. Like with the Isaiah verse, he has repeatedly used this verse this year. In the text, the psalmist praises God as the one “who trains my hands for war, my fingers for battle.” And the psalmist calls God “my fortress, my stronghold and my deliverer, my shield and he in whom I take refuge.” With its violent imagery, Psalm 144:1-2 makes an appearance in Saving Private Ryan (while Isaiah 6:8 shows up in another World War II film, Fury).

Hegseth read those two verses and several others from Psalm 144 during the January worship service at the Pentagon after explaining that he had prayed through that passage and shared it with others under his command as part of the planning for the military operation in Venezuela a couple of weeks earlier. In March, he read the first two verses during a press conference, that time employing it to support Operation Epic Fury in Iran. The first verse was also included in a violent prayer he read during the March worship service at the Pentagon that he offered in support of the war in Iran. On Friday, he returned to it as the close to his remarks.

“We have faith in our warriors. But we also have faith that there is one who keeps watch over us. And Scripture tells us that the Lord is our fortress and our shield. The Lord trains our arms for war and our hands for battle,” he said. “Strengthened by faith in Almighty God, we will continue to defeat our enemies and protect this republic just as the heroes and the warriors of 9/11 did. Because in this nation, in God we trust, in this land, in this place, on that day, and still today. And amen.”

While Psalm 144, like many of the poems in the Book of Psalms, contains violent language and metaphors, Hegseth tends to pull the militaristic verses out of context, read them as inherently literal, and apply them to the U.S. military. In reality, the language of the psalms is frequently metaphorical and often comes from someone who is being oppressed and crying out to God to save them from a powerful military. That is, they are not the head of the Pentagon praying for God to bless their military might as they kill less powerful people. Yet, people like Hegseth want to literally apply the poetic language of songs while treating Jesus’s clear teachings about loving our neighbors and our enemies as just poetic suggestions.

Hegseth drafted another verse during his remarks Friday, but this one was not one of his regulars. And he managed to once again change the meaning of the passage to make it somehow justify his military agenda.

Turning to Matthew 24:6, Hegseth referenced the warning of Jesus to his disciples that they would “hear of wars and rumors of wars.” In the Hegseth new revised version, this phrase means the U.S. military must keep fighting wars, like the one in Iran.

“We’re ensuring that Iran will never have a nuclear weapon. The economic pressure tightens every day. We control the Strait,” Hegseth said with apparently as little understanding of the condition of the Strait of Hormuz as with the meaning of Bible verses. “We will finish this fight. But we also know, as the Scripture says, the world will always have war and rumors of war. And so the fight goes on. And so we raise up a new generation of strong, brave warriors who will say, when it matters most, ‘Send me.’”

In Hegseth’s nihilistic interpretation, there will be “wars and rumors of war” so that means we have to fight in those wars (and maybe spread those rumors). But Jesus wasn’t rallying the troops before sending them into battle. He also says in the next verse that there would be “famines and earthquakes,” but I sure hope Hegseth doesn’t think that means were supposed to cause famines and earthquakes (although, maybe that’s what Elon Musk thinks given all cuts to lifesaving aid programs). Saying there will be wars is much different than saying we should fight in or even start wars.

Standing outside the Temple in Jerusalem, Jesus was warning his disciples that the Temple would be destroyed someday and also talked about “the end of the age.” Far from telling them to fight wars, he was instead letting them know what to expect. And right before his “wars and rumors of war” remark, he offered a stark warning: “Watch out that no one deceives you. For many will come in my name, claiming, ‘I am the Messiah,’ and will deceive many.’” Watch out for deceivers, for people coming in Jesus’s name with a false gospel. You might want to reread that passage, Pete.

Such misuses of the Bible might not be as funny as when Hegseth prayed the Pulp Fiction version of Ezekiel 25:17, but what he offered on Friday is even more heretical. And it’s even more dangerous when our crusading Secretary of (Holy) War is misusing verses and a national remembrance to justify new wars and rumors of war.

As a public witness,

Brian Kaylor

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by Brian Kaylor, Word&Way Editor-in-Chief

Twenty-five years. A generationally defining moment, 9/11 seems both so long ago and yet something we’re still living through.

We’re fighting another misguided and destabilizing war in the Middle East. The federal agency created in the aftermath to protect the nation — the Department of Homeland Security — is roaming our streets and spying in our churches. Politicians are still demonizing Muslims and seeking to create unconstitutional restrictions on religious liberty.

A quarter century. And yet, we seem to be stuck. I can still feel the horror and lament I felt watching the scenes that day from my college campus. And I feel the horror and lament for many of the things we as a nation did in response.

May God continue to comfort those in mourning. And may God help us to find a better way forward.

Other News of Note

• A Catholic theologian has joined the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s public affairs office to help promote the administration’s immigration policies.

• A federal judge is still considering whether to hold DHS in contempt for spying at a Baptist church covered by an junction. But the judge did order DHS to report if they have conducted actions at or near any other church covered by the injunction.

• Brian Kaylor appeared on the Faithful Politics podcast this week to talk about the incidents of DHS spying at churches:

• Tom Homan, the White House’s border czar, claimed this week that they have not arrested anyone at a church. But reporter Jack Jenkins noted that is false and even DHS has admitted to doing so.

• The Pentagon continues to conscript Isaiah 6:8 to make the verse about a military fighting for a nation instead of a prophet serving God. A Public Witness was the first to document this new PR effort.

• Kristen Thomason wrote for Baptist News Global about how the Trump administration has set back global vaccination efforts.

• Angelina Ispir wrote for Religion Unplugged about St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church, which was destroyed when the World Trade Center’s south tower collapsed on 9/11. Reopened in 2022, the church tries to minister to those coming to the area to remember 9/11.

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Although most famous for his “give me liberty or give me death” speech, Henry was a significant figure well beyond those seven words. The first post-colonial governor of Virginia, he was also an influential opponent of the U.S. Constitution. And he often found himself sparring with Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, including on church-state issues. That’s why I mention him.

Madison wrote his famous document “Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments” to push for religious freedom and against the establishment of religion as a direct response to Henry introducing a Virginia bill in 1784 to create a tax with the proceeds to be given to churches to support Christian ministers. Madison managed not only to defeat Henry’s proposal but also to instead get passed the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom that Jefferson had written several years earlier. That act officially disestablished the Church of England (or the Episcopal Church) in Virginia, served as a model for the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and was one of three accomplishments Jefferson put on his tombstone (along with the Declaration of Independence and the University of Virginia).

Henry is a key example that not all of the founders agreed with the idea of separating church and state, but Madison and Jefferson mostly won the debates as they created a new experiment in nonsectarian governance. So it was interesting to find myself on the program after Henry. But that’s the kind of thing that happens at Colonial Williamsburg, where the past and present meld together.

As a way of celebrating and thinking about the 250^th anniversary of the United States, the Southern Union Conference of Seventh-day Adventists held an event focused on celebrating religious liberty. In addition to experts on the historic advocacy by Adventists for religious liberty, the week included non-Adventists like Randall Balmer, Steve Green, and myself. And since we were gathered at a place where you can walk down the street and step back into 1776 while people demonstrate various trades, crafts, and other roles while in colonial garb and character, the conference also included remarks from longtime impersonators of Henry, Jefferson, and Rev. Gowan Pamphlet (an enslaved preacher who founded a Black Baptist church in Williamsburg in the 1770s and became the first ordained Black preacher in the colonies).

The impersonators, who have studied and played their roles for years, brought a unique tone to the conference. Pamphlet is portrayed by a real Baptist pastor. I even enjoyed Henry, though I still disagree with him on church-state issues. As Henry took funny potshots at Baptists (since they were outspoken advocates for church-state separation and therefore often sided with his political opponents, Madison and Jefferson), others in the room would smile and look at me as the only Baptist in the room. So I decided I was not throwing away my shot. During the Q&A time, I introduced myself as one of those Baptists who think Madison and Jefferson were right by opposing his church tax bill and I asked him to explain how his system would work for churches that refused out of principle to accept the tax revenue. Later, I gave my presentation and emphasized why Henry’s proposal was problematic. I don’t think I changed old Henry’s mind, but that’s okay because I know Madison and Jefferson won the debate anyway!

Beyond interacting with Henry and the others — and wandering around to visit the old print shop, watch the rifle demonstration, and take in the fifes and drums march — this issue of A Public Witness takes you inside the conference to celebrate America’s heritage of religious liberty, with a special Adventist flavor.

Our Best Idea and Greatest Gift

Randall Balmer, author of America’s Best Idea: The Separation of Church and State, warned about the dangers of Christian Nationalists who want to undo church-state separation. To refute the claims by Christian Nationalists, Balmer suggested three main areas: theological, historical, and practical. As an Episcopal priest, historian of American religion, and a professor at Dartmouth College, Balmer offered some examples for each of those three tracks.

“Let’s start with theological,” he said. “John 18:36 — Jesus said, ‘My kingdom is not of this world.’ Let’s go home! What more needs to be said? ‘My kingdom is not of this world.’ That’s pretty good.”

Rather than going home, Balmer offered a few more thoughts on the theological problems with Christian Nationalism. He also pointed to Mark 12:17 and John 6:15. The former features Jesus using a coin to contrast “the realm of Caesar and the realm of God.” The latter occurs between the stories of Jesus feeding the 5,000 and Jesus walking on water. Balmer argued this easily overlooked verse between two famous stories shows Jesus’s attitude to taking political power: “When Jesus therefore perceived that they [the crowd he had just fed] would come and take him by force to make him a king, he departed again into a mountain himself alone.”

“It doesn’t sound like somebody running for office,” Balmer remarked.

Dealing with historical arguments, Balmer pointed out some misrepresentations and false claims popularized by pseudo-historian David Barton. Like claiming nearly all of the founders were devout Christians. Balmer instead traced the growth of the idea of church-state separation from Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island and a cofounder of the first Baptist church in the Americas. The ideas of Williams created the foundation for the new nation, especially the First Amendment.

“The First Amendment, first part of it is 16 words: ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.’ And I contend that that is America’s best idea. Ken Burns says national parks are America’s best idea. I respectfully disagree, even though I like Ken Burns and I admire his work,” Balmer said.

After walking through various statements by founders about church-state separation, Balmer lamented that Christian Nationalists today are “working through legislation and judicial rulings, trying to undermine the separation of church and state, particularly at the state level.” And this concerns him because, turning to the practical refutation of Christian Nationalism, Balmer argued the separation of church and state has been good for both.

“It works. It has worked remarkably well for over 200 years,” he said. “It has shielded the government from religious factionalism. It is also protected the integrity of religion. … Ridding the nation of separation of church and state is the worst thing that could happen to faith.”

Steven K. Green, a law professor and director of the Center for Religion, Law, and Democracy at Willamette University, similarly warned about efforts to undermine church-state separation. He noted that the U.S. Supreme Court in recent years has created a “judicial imbalance” when interpreting the religion clauses of the First Amendment.

“We’re going in a direction where the two religious clauses are kind of out of whack with each other, out of sync with each other,” he added.

With the court’s focus on the Free Exercise Clause over and against the No Establishment Clause, this concerns Green since he sees religious freedom as “one of the greatest gifts that the United States has given to the world.”

“We may take it for granted, but religious freedom is the exception worldwide rather than the norm,” he added before noting that two-thirds of the world’s population live in countries “where there is either active religious persecution or religious discrimination.”

Green, author of Separating Church and State: A History, offered a historical walk through how the idea of church-state separation developed among preachers, politicians, and judges. And he noted the growing attacks on the idea in recent years, especially in the realm of public education.

After picking apart some recent court decisions where the high court has been allowing more sectarian content and expression into public schools and some potential problems that could emerge from those rulings, Green previewed some likely big Supreme Court cases coming soon that could further chip away at church-state separation. One is St. Mary Catholic Parish v. Roy, where Catholic preschools in Colorado are demanding to receive state funding even if they do not follow the state’s nondiscrimination rules required to receive such funding. Another potential case could come from Virginia as a Liberty University student requested the high court reconsider whether states should be forced to fund ministerial studies. Another potential case he pointed to is whether the Supreme Court decides to rule on states forcing public schools to post a highly edited version of the Ten Commandments in classrooms.

‘A Heritage of Advocacy’

In addition to considering religious liberty and American history more broadly, the conference at Colonial Williamsburg also highlighted the historic witness of Seventh-day Adventists on the issue.

“We have a heritage of advocacy in this area,” explained Bettina Krause, editor of Liberty magazine and associate director of public affairs and religious liberty for the North American Division of Seventh-day Adventists.

Krause highlighted the history of persecution of Seventh-day Adventists to explain why they have long advocated for religious liberty and church-state separation. This especially occurred because of “state-level Sunday rest laws.” Looking through the archives of the Adventist magazine she edits, which go back to 1906, she told a couple of stories of Adventists who were persecuted because of their Sabbath beliefs.

Like a man who was doing work around his own house in 1931 and was then arrested by police after a neighbor called to report he was violating the law against working on Sunday. The Adventist man argued he was being targeted for his beliefs since on the way to jail they passed men clearing brush on the side of a highway and an amusement park that was open. The judge ordered the man to appear in court on his own Sabbath — Saturday — which he protested to no avail. Eventually, he paid a fine for violating the law. Krause told other stories of Adventist pastors being arrested, jailed, and even forced to work on a chain gang for violating Sunday rest laws.

As a result of such experiences, Krause said, Adventists have been a small group but have a history of “punching above our weight on issues of religious liberty.” And their historical experience, she added, demonstrates a truth from James Madison’s document on religious liberty that he wrote in response to Henry’s church tax proposal.

“One of my favorite quotes: ‘Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians in exclusion of all other sects?’ Here’s the thing: We, as Adventists, we do not need law degrees, we do not need to understand constitutional law to understand this principle. Because we have lived it. We have lived it through the many, many decades when there were state-level Sunday rest laws,” she said.

Krause emphasized it was important to recall these stories since some no longer appreciate why they should support church-state separation. She lamented that “our church is suffering a crisis of memory” by forgetting what can happen to religious minorities like themselves when the government starts enforcing sectarian beliefs like Sunday rest laws. As a result, she fears some Adventists are open to Christian Nationalism since they don’t realize they could once again be targeted. She noted, however, that Adventists in many other countries are still “suffering the consequences of being religious dissenters” and so haven’t forgotten why religious liberty for all matters.

Joe Reeves, editor of the Adventist publication InVerse and assistant director of the Sabbath School and Personal Ministries of the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, similarly highlighted their long tradition of advocating for church-state separation going back to the 19^th century. He quoted from Ellen G. White, a co-founder of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, and other early Adventist leaders.

Like the other speakers, Reeves warned about Christian Nationalists today who are seeking to change the balance between church and state, and he lamented that many Christians are getting caught up in the theology of seeking a earthly king to establish Christianity by force of law. In contrast, he urged Adventists to support the religious liberty rights of everyone, including Muslims and others they may disagree with.

“If we only believe in religious liberty for ourselves and nobody else, what kind of religious liberty is that?” he added. “So that’s why we believe in religious liberty for everybody. Otherwise, it’s not religious liberty at all.”

And Reeves warned about Christian Nationalists promising to bring about the kingdom of God. As a rebuttal to that mentality, he recalled a warning from White, the early Adventist prophet, in 1898 about how what that brings is not the rule of Christ but the authoritarian rule of one sect.

“Today in the religious world there are multitudes who, as they believe, are working for the establishment of the kingdom of Christ as an earthly and temporal dominion. They desire to make our Lord the ruler of the kingdoms of this world, the ruler in its courts and camps, its legislative halls, its palaces, and market places,” she wrote. “They expect him to rule through legal enactments, enforced by human authority. Since Christ is not now here in person, they themselves will undertake to act in his stead, to execute the laws of his kingdom.”

As a public witness,

Brian Kaylor

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Top 5 at wordandway.org

1. Review: How Western Christianity Got It Wrong. Robert D. Cornwall reviewed How Western Christianity Got It Wrong: Replacing the God of Fear with a Spirituality of Healing by Randy Woodley.

2. Raphael Warnock Has Done It. Adam Hamilton Wants to Follow as a Pastor-US Senator. David Crary looked at how someone can simultaneously serve as a local pastor and in Congress.

3. Two Pastors Detained, a Student Dead: Haitians in Ohio Turn to Faith Amid Fear of ICE. Kathryn Post reported from Springfield, Ohio, as the Trump administration targets the Haitian community there.

4. As the Far-Right in Germany Aims to Take Power, Churches Are Fighting Back. Liam Adams reported from Germany about how some clergy are resisting the rise of anti-immigrant politicians.

5. Wendell Berry, Writer and Farmer, Was Extolled by Many as a Modern-Day Prophet. The Kentuckian died this week at age 92.

Dangerous Dogma

This week’s episode features a conversation between Word&Way Editor Brian Kaylor and Robert P. Jones, author of the forthcoming book Backslide: Reclaiming a Faith and a Nation After the Christian Turn Against Democracy. Listen to the audio version here (or wherever you listen to podcasts) or watch the video version here.

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by Brian Kaylor, Word&Way Editor-in-Chief

When President Donald Trump sparked a gerrymandering battle in multiple states last year, one of the first states where lawmakers started drawing new maps was Missouri. Republicans in the Show-Me State invoked Christian values to justify the need to shift one U.S. House seat from Democrats to the GOP. I showed up to testify against the gerrymandering to specifically criticize such rhetoric. After all, the goal of this gerrymandering was literally to force out of office a United Methodist minister!

Missourians responded to the move by invoking a state constitutional right to block legislative measures via a statewide ballot referendum. After months of delay tactics by the Republican secretary of state, the Missouri Supreme Court yesterday (Sept. 3) unanimously ruled that the gerrymandered map cannot go into effect for the midterms, with the referendum instead going on the ballot. The justices noted that the constitutional standard was clear and any “confusion, expense, and practical difficulties” occurring as a result of the ruling are wholly the fault of the secretary of state for misreading the Constitution and delaying the issue.

Republicans are upset, making lots of absurd claims like calling the justices “liberal” (which is absurdly false). But let’s not miss the significance of the unanimous ruling. The effort to rig the district lines to drive out a Black pastor failed. And that means the Republican state senator nominated for the seat, who is one of the biggest proponents of White Christian Nationalism in the state legislature (see my earlier quick take on him), is now on a path for a big defeat in November. It’s good when democracy and constitutional order win. But it’s still frustrating to see so many Christian leaders supporting the anti-democratic and often racist measures like the blocked gerrymandering plan in Missouri.

Other News of Note

• Kristin Kobes Du Mez wrote for The New York Times about the politics of Christian kitsch geared for women.

• Jason DeRose of NPR reported on two Democratic candidates for the U.S. House in Iowa who are both mainline Protestant ministers.

• President Donald Trump appointed a pastor and longtime supporter to serve as an adviser on tobacco-related health issues with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

• Mehdi Hasan wrote for The Guardian to criticize the U.S. Senate campaign of Mike Rogers in Michigan for choosing controversial MAGA pastor Lorenzo Sewell to lead the campaign’s faith outreach. (Sewell has also been invited to lead worship events at the U.S. Department of Agriculture.)

• A Unitarian Universalist minister in Idaho was convicted for protesting anti-transgender bills in the lobby of the governor’s office.

• Former Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin, a Republican, was arrested for contempt of court after not turning over financial documents in a case involving his divorce and child support. He was arrested “on the set of a Christmas movie” while playing the role of a “featured extra.”

• Rev. Travis Norvell, a Baptist pastor in Minneapolis, wrote for MS NOW about how some mainline Protestants in the Twin Cities have experienced a revival after standing up to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

• Mary Sanchez of The Beacon reported on deportation concerns amid the Haitian community in Kansas City, Missouri, which includes at least four Haitian churches.

• Rev. Robert Perry, a retired Baptist pastor in Springfield, Missouri, who has for months been visiting individuals detained by ICE, was arrested for protesting the detention of individuals without charges. As a result, a local interim sheriff is barring Perry from visiting and ministering to people being detained.

• Andy Olsen of Christianity Today profiled a Honduran father who became the unofficial “pastor of Plymouth jail” after being detained by ICE.

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That’s what U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche declared on Aug. 27. The next day, his department defended the bureaucracy of the Department of Homeland Security for spying on churches, insisting there were no First Amendment protections in the case for the congregations (including a Baptist church covered by a federal injunction).

Why a disconnect exists between his claim about stopping “a weaponized bureaucracy that chills First Amendment activity” and defending spying on churches was answered in the next sentence of his statement: “Our working group’s efforts to investigate weaponization under the previous administration will continue.”

While the DOJ attempts to accuse the Biden administration of an anti-Catholic bias for monitoring two rightwing priests, the DOJ is defending secretly spying on Lutheran, Baptist, Episcopal, and Unitarian Universalist churches — including recording in a church sanctuary and staking out a church’s building on Sundays.

The DOJ’s inconsistent attitude about the sanctity of church buildings showed up in court filings this week in the case of 38 individuals charged after a protest at a Southern Baptist church in St. Paul, Minnesota, where one of the pastors is also a local ICE leader. Meanwhile, denominational groups — that in February won an injunction protecting their congregations from warrantless DHS enforcement actions — filed a response on Sept. 1 to DHS’s arguments over whether DHS should be held in contempt for repeatedly surveilling a church covered by the injunction. The religious groups (which include American Baptist Churches USA, Alliance of Baptists, Metropolitan Community Churches, and several regional synods of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America) are requesting a judge to force DHS to turn over documents about any surveillance at other protected churches and create new procedures to prevent additional incidents.

As debates swirl about DHS and DOJ actions in federal courtrooms in Minnesota and Massachusetts, this issue of A Public Witness unpacks the newest developments from the DOJ’s new “weaponization” report, the church protest case in Minnesota, and this week’s filing from denominational groups in the injunction case in Massachusetts.

‘Zero Tolerance’

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Earlier this month, filings in a criminal case in Minnesota revealed that DHS had spied on Lutheran, Episcopal, Unitarian Universalist, and Baptist churches in the Twin Cities and at a Lutheran church in Michigan. As first reported by A Public Witness, one of those churches was covered by a federal injunction. Court filings show that DHS agents on at least four occasions — including on two Sundays — surveilled people entering or leaving University Baptist Church. And on at least one occasion, it sent an undercover agent inside to secretly record people attending a Mixed Martial Arts class led by a progressive group in UBC’s building (and then the agent had to go back into the building to recover the recording device after realizing she had dropped it). These actions occurred despite prominent signs at the church notifying DHS agents that they are barred from entering.

While DHS admits that agents in its Homeland Security Investigations agency went to the church as part of its “Project Whipple Shield” effort, it refused to say if other protected houses of worship have been targeted in DHS investigations.

“HSI surveilled criminal suspects at or near the Church only during the four investigatory actions referenced above,” an HSI agent claimed in an Aug. 28 filing to a federal court in Massachusetts (where the injunction covering UBC was granted). “To my knowledge, HSI has not investigated any other location on the current protected areas list as part of Project Whipple Shield. I cannot confirm or deny that there are additional investigations at other locations on the protected locations list.”

The HSI agent also claimed in his statement that he knew about the injunction before the surveillance and authorized the actions at UBC after determining the injunction did not apply to his investigation. But beyond Zappone’s after-the-fact statement, DHS argued in its Aug. 28 filing in Massachusetts that it should not be required to turn over any documents from prior to the surveillance showing that it did actually discuss the injunction and whether it applied to the investigation.

The argument by DHS that the judge should trust the agency comes amid a series of allegations in other ICE-related cases that DHS and the Department of Justice have acted improperly. Earlier this year, federal prosecutors dropped criminal charges against people arrested for protesting outside an ICE detention center in Broadview, Illinois, after revelations of grand jury misconduct by DOJ prosecutors. U.S. Judge April Perry said she was “incredibly shocked” by the “prosecutorial behavior before a grand jury,” adding that “trust has been broken.” Perry is now considering whether to sanction the prosecutors. Because of the “Broadview 6” case, another federal judge ordered the government to turn over all grand jury materials in the cases of the 38 people arrested after a protest at a Southern Baptist church in St. Paul, Minnesota, where one of the pastors is also a local ICE leader. The ICE pastor and other ICE officials have since been criticized by a federal judge for violating dozens of court orders.

Because of these and other recent cases, the defense attorney for one of the “Minnesota 15” defendants told a federal judge in Minnesota last week that DHS should be required to turn over more documents from its investigation.

“We’ve got to the point that federal judges are telling the government, ‘We can’t rely on you anymore,’” defense attorney Kevin Riach said in court on Aug. 27, adding that the presumption that federal agents act in good faith has “evaporated.”

While DHS claims it considered the injunction before the four surveillance incidents, it also oddly argued it could not determine if the injunction actually applied to the three times when DHS surveilled UBC’s building without entering it. The federal injunction not only prohibits agents from going on the property of protected houses of worship but also from conducting enforcement operations within 100 feet of an entrance to the church. While the denominational groups who won the injunction noted in a court filing that the library parking lot surveilled by DHS agents is within 100 feet, DHS insisted in their response that “agents could not confirm” if that was true. Absent going to Menards for a tape measure, agents could’ve checked Google Maps to see that the lot is, in fact, within 100 feet of the door they recorded people entering and exiting.

Definitional Debates

The key argument by DHS that it did not violate the federal injunction comes down to a definitional dispute. Instead of arguing over what the definition of “is” is, DHS is claiming its investigation had nothing to do with immigration enforcement and didn’t occur at religious events. DHS insists its surveillance at UBC and the other churches was only about alleged criminal violations unrelated to immigration.

In February, before the DHS surveillance incidents, a federal judge granted an injunction protecting congregations in the American Baptist Churches USA, Alliance of Baptists, Metropolitan Community Churches, and several regional synods of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. (A similar injunction that protects churches in the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and several regional Quaker groups in addition to a Sikh Temple in California was upheld this month by a federal appeals court.) UBC is affiliated with both ABCUSA and the Alliance, which are both covered by an injunction, and the church was even specifically cited in the judge’s ruling as an example of why the injunction was granted as a result of an incident near the church during worship in January (and that incident was not even as close as the library parking lot).

The denominational groups in the case alerted the federal judge in Massachusetts of the surveillance and asked him to consider holding DHS in contempt of court. Noting that the injunction was not limited to just enforcing immigration laws, the groups said the incidents at UBC were violations since the judge had barred warrantless DHS actions conducted “in whole or in part, to enforce the immigration laws” (italics added in the faith groups’ filing). Since the investigation was done to stop individuals from allegedly trying to disrupt immigration enforcement actions during “Operation Metro Surge,” the plaintiffs insist DHS’s investigation was “in part” to enforce such laws.

DHS responded by arguing their investigation had nothing to do with immigration enforcement. However, it is also fighting motions that it turn over more documents detailing the extent of “Project Whipple Shield” and related investigations that led to the charges. The reference to “Whipple” in the investigation’s name refers to the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building, a facility named for an Episcopal bishop that served as the base of operations for the surge of ICE agents into the Twin Cities (which sparked the protest efforts then investigated by DHS).

DHS insisted in its filing on Aug. 28 that its investigations at the churches “were conducted in good faith” and did not violate the congregations’ First Amendment rights. But DHS also made that claim by suggesting it get to define what is a religious exercise or not. DHS argued, without any apparent sense of irony, that allowing any event at a protected church’s building to be covered by the injunction would “broaden the scope of the injunction so that their places of worship are effectively turned into sanctuaries.”

The religious groups disagreed in their own filing with DHS’s claims that the surveillance was not a violation of the congregation’s religious rights.

“Members of the church learned of the violations last week and have been shocked and upset that ICE not only was monitoring the church, and doing so on Sundays, a holy day of worship, but even entered the church itself,” a filing by the denominational groups noted. “As stated by a current member and recent president of the church: ‘This is a complete violation of our sacred space. The church is meant to be a place of sanctuary and safety — not infiltration by government agents.’”

Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward (which represents plaintiffs in the injunction case), also pushed back against DHS’s claims that their spying on churches was not problematic.

“Alarming evidence has shown that despite a court ordering them not to do so, ICE agents continue to invade churches and other places of sanctuary, terrorizing the people who seek refuge and respite within them,” Perryman said. “It is clear that the government will stop at nothing — including at church doors — in its campaign to stoke fear in communities across the country, so we are asking the court to hold them accountable for this intrusion. Democracy Forward is proud to represent our courageous clients, who are demanding accountability from a government that, instead of respecting their religious freedoms, is trying to actively abuse them.”

U.S. District Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV, who issued the injunction in February, set a video hearing for Sept. 4 to consider DHS’s actions and whether it should be held in contempt. Meanwhile, Judge David Schultz, who is overseeing the criminal case in Minnesota, said he would rule soon on whether or not to force DHS to turn over more documents to the defendants.

As a public witness,

Brian Kaylor

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Top 5 at wordandway.org

1. Eulogies Do Not Save the Living. Jack Nassar wrote about how Christian denominations can practice real solidarity with Palestinian Christians.

2. Clergy Rally for Haitians in Maryland County Amid Fears of ICE Surge. Jack Jenkins reported from a rally with Rev. William Barber II and other clergy.

3. ‘Our Immigrants Are Invisible’: A Pastor Ministers to the Frightened at Immigration Court. Fiona Murphy reported on an ELCA Lutheran minister showing up at immigration hearings in New York City.

4. An AP Reporter Spends the Night Locked Inside Jerusalem’s Holiest Church With Clergy and Pilgrims. Giovanna Dell’Orto reflected on spending a night locked in a Jerusalem church with clergy and pilgrims.

5. ‘I Am a Person of Faith’: How Christianity Shaped Dolly Parton’s Music and Spirit. Adelle M. Banks wrote about the faith of the country music icon who died this week.

Dangerous Dogma

This week’s episode features a conversation between Word&Way Editor Brian Kaylor, Lutheran minister and journalist Angela Denker, and Disciples pastor and author Beau Underwood. The conversation includes discussion about revelations that the Department of Homeland Security has been spying in churches, a controversial golf ad, and a White Sox night celebrating Pope Leo. Listen to the audio version here (or wherever you listen to podcasts) or watch the video version here.

Follow Us on Bluesky

by Brian Kaylor, Word&Way Editor-in-Chief

Russia’s authoritarian leader Vladimir Putin has a new strategy for turning the tide in his ongoing failure to defeat Ukraine. He’s sending a few body parts of an old saint to the front lines.

The remains of Dmitry Donskoy, a 14th-century Moscow prince, were recently discovered. A national hero today, he started construction on the Kremlin and fought against the Mongols. In 1988, the Russian Orthodox Church canonized him as a saint as part of the celebrations of the 1,000th anniversary of Christianity gaining official recognition by a Kievan Rus’ leader.

When Donskoy’s remains were discovered, Putin heralded the “glorious acquisition.” A Russian Orthodox spokesperson praised the “sensible decision” to send some of the remains off to war. But Ukraine’s foreign minister was unimpressed, declaring about the plan, “Unlikely to help end the war. But if Putin took his place, that just might.”

I think the Ukrainian leader is right. After all, the previous attempts by Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church to forcibly conscript God to help them win the war have all failed. Patriarch Kirill has blessed the war, claimed that soldiers dying in it would be forgiven of their sins, and praised the creation of nuclear weapons as proof of “God’s grace and mercy” for Russia. Make no bones about it, none of this has brought divine assistance for Russian imperial war against its neighbor.

Christian Nationalists ultimately always end up with a small view of God. They want a deity they can control like a magical genie who they bring out of a bottle when they need a miracle. And no matter how many remains of saints they desecrate, they cannot bless an evil war.

Other News of Note

• Audrey Dutton of ProPublica reported on preventable deaths of children among a faith-healing sect in Idaho, where parents are granted religious exemptions from laws requiring they provide medical care for their children.

• A second Catholic priest in Iowa is suing the U.S. Department of Homeland Security for delaying his work authorization permit.

• Farnaz Fassihi of The New York Times profiled Artemis Ghasemzadeh, a Christian convert from Iran who was deported by the Trump administration to Panama but now has been given asylum in Canada.

• After being sued by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for refusing to grant a Jewish employee time off for Sabbath observances, Apple Inc. will pay $150,000 to the former employee and update its religious observance policy.

• Quaker and other U.S. groups that help individuals obtain conscientious objector status are seeing a spike in inquiries — including from current military members who believe they’re being asked to violate international law.

• Abingdon Press, the book publishing arm of the United Methodist Publishing House, issued a statement condemning the antisemitic attacks on Dr. Amy-Jill Levine after her election as the first Jewish president of the Catholic Bible Association. Abingdon has published numerous books by Levine, who is a New Testament scholar.

• Marissa Nichols wrote for the National Catholic Reporter about pop-up Masses.

• An Episcopal church that sits just a couple of blocks from NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, unveiled a sculpture to honor Black Americans and women who played a role in the U.S. space exploration program.

Photo of the Week

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In the forthcoming Damned If She Does: Why Women Quit Church and What It Means for the Future of Religion, journalist and author Sarah Stankorb puts women’s voices and experiences of American Christianity front and center. Exploring a broader range of transgressions within Christian communities, the chorus of repressive tales and moral abuses ends on a common note: for many women in recent decades, the healthiest and most liberating decision they could make was to walk out of the church.

“This story of women leaving the church is revealed in statistics but better understood in the intimate accounting of heartbreak: churches that tried to suppress them or were silent on racism or sexual abuse but loud on abortion or gay marriage or how to vote,” Stankorb writes. “Their collective experiences indicate a recalibration of American values, a spiritual and ideological reorganization. Whatever Christian faith’s underlying influence in our civil sphere, this fresh vacancy leaves space to redefine or, perhaps, rediscover what ties have bound us as Americans all along.”

Those dynamics were certainly clear in the vocational arc of Georgette Gaston. A United Methodist pastor who shepherded a congregation through pandemic upheaval and denominational divisions over the inclusion of LGBTQ members, she managed to overcome a plethora of headwinds to grow her congregation both numerically and in terms of willingness to extend love to neighbors. By the conventional standards of ministry, she was doing everything right.

Yet, her “reward” was to be handed more responsibility with little additional remuneration and lots of extra headaches. She was asked to tolerate toxic leadership and defer to those who held power because of the financial resources they controlled. She watched as Christian Nationalism grew in strength within the pews. It was the stained-glass cliff in action, with successful women being invited into higher but more difficult leadership roles. They are left with either working to the point of exhaustion or shouldering the blame when a fragile institution collapses despite their best efforts.

“I never lost my faith in God,” Gaston says in Stankorb’s book. “I lost my faith in the church. I often felt used by the system that they were trying to prop up.”

The circumstances of the different characters are quite different, but the conclusions they arrive at are eerily similar. The women whose perspectives we have the privilege of learning from reach a point where the church took more life than it gave to them.

“When many American churches traded Christian virtue for Christian power, they left the virtuous or bored or disgusted or disbelieving with only two real options: practice faith outside the institution or abandon faith altogether. People’s lived experience, including their own Christian values, pulled and tugged. For longer than many men, women hung on,” Stankorb writes.

Without detracting from the power of the book’s narrative or the authenticity of the voices within it, I did wonder how much one can extrapolate from the stories it tells to the broader trend it seeks to explain. There is no doubt that many women have left the church because of the outdated views and terrible abuses the book describes. At the same time, there are also women who embrace the theological views that have alienated so many others. It is always hard to make the jump from illuminating examples to confident explanations. Is what we read here just some of the story or most of the story?

Still, what Stankorb accomplishes in Damned If She Does is quite impressive. She makes clear the frustrating and harmful predicaments so many women have faced trying to live up to standards imposed on them by American Christianity, while documenting the many hypocrisies the church tolerates or pretends to ignore out of delusion or self-interest.

Near the end of the book she states, “[Disaffiliating women] have felt the pain of disillusionment, which can be psychic and spiritual; but in America, it currently comes with the threat of corrupt powers overtaking our most fundamental truths. That version of the church asks us to worship a lie. And here, women, who are the last to go, are the canary we ought to watch as she takes wing.”

For pastors and leaders valuing the leadership and presence of women in Christian communities, this book is an alarming reminder that the sins of patriarchy and other social ills are alive and well in those places. It’s a shame how those who claim to care so much about drawing people closer to God have instead driven so many women out of the church.

As a public witness,

Beau Underwood

By the way, Damned If She Does: Why Women Quit Church and What It Means for the Future of Religion will be released by Broadleaf Books on Sept. 15, but it is already available for preorder.

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“Citizenship is more of a privilege, dependent upon ancestry, background, how long you’ve been here, whether you meet the qualifications or not,” Wilson said as he insisted citizenship was not a right. “And if America is a creedal nation, then you have to have creedal standards. So anybody who voted for Mamdani should lose their citizenship.”

Wilson’s comment during an event in Moscow, Idaho, sparked applause from the audience that had gathered for a conference hosted by his church. The session on Christian Nationalism featured comments and dialogue by Wilson, Joe Rigney (an associate pastor with Wilson), Albert Mohler (president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary), Paul Miller (a professor at Georgetown University who was mostly offering a counter voice opposing Christian Nationalism), and moderator Jared Longshore (an associate pastor with Wilson). The “Which Way, America?” session was sponsored by Canon Press, a publishing house Wilson founded and that has published many of his works. Canon just published a book, Five Views on Christian Nationalism, featuring Wilson, Rigney, Mohler, Miller, and R.R. Reno — and the session promoted the book by having four of the authors offer remarks and then engage in discussion and debate over various church-state issues.

Before making his remark about Mamdani voters, Wilson argued in the session that he thinks the United States could be considered a creedal nation, calling it “a Christian nation with a Christian consensus, Christian history.” As a result, he insisted that to participate in decision-making, people must acknowledge “the historical reality of our Christian history — which I think is undeniable” and must want to “preserve” the “overwhelmingly Christian ethos” of the United States. He therefore condemned the Biden administration for allowing immigrants to come into the country with a different history and worldview. Wilson insisted that because of immigration, “we’ve lost our bearings.”

In addition to Mamdani voters, Wilson argued that someone who is a “nihilist” shouldn’t be “allowed to be a citizen” since “he denied the whole foundation of the state” and therefore “rejected his own citizenship.” He also referred to the ideology he wanted to strip of citizenship as “atheistic nihilism.”

Although Wilson did not explicitly explain why he felt Mamdani voters deserved to be stripped of their citizenship, his remarks came after comments by Rigney and Mohler that the immigration of Muslims threatened the United States. Mohler argued that since he believes the U.S. Constitution and polity “is based upon Christianity,” then “one of the biggest problems we face right now” is immigrants who practice Islam. Rigney made the point even more directly, insisting that “religious diversity is destructive. It’s not our strength. Islamic and Hindu immigration erodes America’s Christian core.”

“Hindu and Islamic immigration in particular are harmful because, quite frankly, statues to monkey gods anger the living God,” Rigney added. “He doesn’t like it. Idolatry is offensive to him and we can’t expect his blessing while engaging in that kind of idolatry. Moreover, Islam in particular is adept at manipulating Western Christian and post-Christian structures and policies in order to establish beachheads.”

Wilson previously argued that Muslims and Hindus should not be allowed to hold political office in a “Christian” nation. And he insisted that Muslims, Hindus, Catholics, and other non-Protestants should not be able to worship in public spaces in a “Christian” nation.

In the forum on Christian Nationalism, he did not explain any details for how he would strip citizenship from someone because of the faith of those they vote for. Such a proposal would apparently mean that voting could no longer be done by secret ballot.

As Miller, the author of The Religion of American Greatness: What’s Wrong with Christian Nationalism, pushed back on some of Wilson’s rhetoric, Wilson said he rejects the idea of government neutrality when it comes to religion. He said that while he wanted “denominational neutrality” since “the state should stay out of Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist” disagreements, he wants the Protestant Bible to serve as a governing guide. As an example, Wilson argued that the tax rate should not be more than 10%, which he claimed was based on his reading of the Bible. Wilson later added he wants to repeal the 17th Amendment, which switched the election of U.S. senators from state legislators to a vote of the people in each state, because the new system is too democratic.

Once considered a fringe far-right Christian figure, Wilson in recent years has found himself increasingly embraced by the broader evangelical world and the conservative political movement in the age of Donald Trump. The biggest evidence of his rise is that Hegseth, who likes to call himself the “secretary of war,” is part of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches and invited Wilson to preach at the Pentagon in February. Wilson’s CREC launched a church in Washington, D.C., last year that Hegseth often attends. Rigney recently preached the installation service for its pastor, Brooks Potteiger, who has preached at the Pentagon three times.

Mamdani won the election as mayor of New York City on Nov 4, 2025, with more than 1.1 million votes. Since then, he has been a key target of a surge in Islamophobic rhetoric by Republican politicians and rightwing preachers — including those preaching inside the Pentagon during a war against an Islamic nation.

As a public witness,

Brian Kaylor

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Top 5 at wordandway.org

1. A Guide to Understanding the Biblical Showdown in Texas. Rodney Kennedy wrote about religious issues and character matters in the U.S. Senate race in Texas between Democrat James Talarico and Republican Ken Paxton.

2. Supreme Court Asked to Review Texas Law Requiring the ‘Ten Commandments’ in Public Schools. The nation’s highest court may decide to hear what could be a significant church-state case.

3. US Military Base Schools Put New Emphasis on Western Civilization and Christianity. Yet another way Pete Hegseth is pushing Christianity is in curriculum for schools on military bases.

4. Review: The Strain of Other Blood. Robert D. Cornwall reviewed The Strain of Other Blood: The Life of the Reverend Mother Ruth from Harlem by Patricia Allen.

5. If Jesus Showed Up Today, Would he Play Guitar? Bob Smietana wrote about how worship has evolved to prioritize music.

Follow Us on Bluesky

by Brian Kaylor, Word&Way Editor-in-Chief

On Thursday (Aug. 20), multiple denominational groups officially alerted a federal judge that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security had spied on a church in Minneapolis, Minnesota, despite that judge issuing a federal injunction blocking warrantless DHS enforcement actions on that church’s property. The faith groups also asked the judge to consider holding DHS in contempt of court.

The filing was sparked by the news last week that DHS had spied on multiple churches in the Twin Cities and one in Michigan. As first reported by A Public Witness, one of those churches was covered by a federal injunction. That revelation quickly showed up in filings in the Minnesota case where several liberal activists face charges for anti-ICE efforts.

Now, the news of DHS’s actions in Minnesota has also sparked a legal filing in the original case where the judge granted an injunction protecting congregations in the American Baptist Churches USA, Alliance of Baptists, Metropolitan Community Churches and several regional synods of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. (A similar injunction that protects churches in the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and several regional Quaker groups in addition to a Sikh Temple in California was upheld this week by a federal appeals court.)

“Given the blatant and repeated nature of Defendants’ violations, the harm to fundamental rights of religion and expressive association, and the threat of future similar violations, Plaintiffs also respectfully request the Court’s expedited consideration of this motion,” Thursday’s filing by the denominational groups reads.

Sadly, it’s not a surprise that DHS would violate the injunction. They’ve ignored dozens of court orders and rulings. But we shouldn’t turn a blind eye to it. Faith groups should continue to work to hold DHS accountable and to protect the sanctity of houses of worship.

Other News of Note

• Matthew Kelly of The Kansas City Star reported on a Republican super PAC attack ad that deceptively edited clips from sermons by Rev. Adam Hamilton, a United Methodist minister who is now the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Kansas.

• The New York Times explored the rise of Islamophobia in Texas.

• The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court unanimously upheld a ruling blocking the installation of two large statues of Catholic saints at the entrance of a public building in Quincy.

• The Satanic Temple and the ACLU of Iowa are suing the Hawkeye State for repeatedly refusing to allow The Satanic Temple to hold events or put up displays inside the state Capitol building even though other religious groups are allowed to.

• After a public library in St. Charles, Missouri, banned LGBTQ items, a local resident protested by requesting they ban the King James Version of the Bible because of its violent content. The library trustees rejected the challenge.

• An employee of a biotech firm is suing his company because they denied his request for a retirement investment plan that did not include fossil fuels. He’s claiming that as a United Methodist they are not sufficiently accommodating his religious beliefs, which includes caring for creation.

• As ICE ramps up its efforts to deport Haitians living in the United States after the Trump administration removed legal protections, a pastor in Springfield, Ohio, has been detained for possible deportation. Several other pastors and church leaders have been deported by the Trump administration.

• The Chronicle of Higher Education reported on how William Jewell College, a Baptist school in Missouri, turned around its financial and enrollment decline even while many small liberal arts colleges have closed.

• Hannah Herrera wrote for Christianity Today about how churches in Colombia responded to the recent earthquake.

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Mark Dever, the senior pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, D.C., and a spiritual advisor to Pete Hegseth, became only the second preacher to return to the Pentagon to offer another sermon as part of Hegseth’s monthly Christian worship services. Hegseth’s pastor, Brooks Potteiger has preached three times. Dever previously preached during the August 2025 service. Hegseth noted in his introduction that he had attended Dever’s church several times last year (but then switched to a new church launched by Doug Wilson’s Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches). Eight of the 16 Pentagon services have featured a Southern Baptist preacher.

Dever, who also leads a ministry he cofounded (9Marks) to promote what he believes are the biblical marks of a church, spoke during Wednesday’s service as if the U.S. military members are all Christians and can be compared to the Hebrew people in the Old Testament. He started by saying he wanted to help explain “why on earth God lets things get so bad.” To do so, he pointed to two biblical stories where God’s people found themselves on the verge of being destroyed by a large imperial army.

Dever first turned to Exodus 14, where Moses led the Hebrew people out of bondage in Egypt. Pharaoh changed his mind about letting them go and therefore sent his army of more than 600 chariots to kill them. Finding themselves stuck between the army and the Red Sea, Dever explained, the situation seemed hopeless. But he quickly added that God led them to that point on purpose before parting the Red Sea for the Hebrew people and then killing everyone in Pharoah’s military.

For his second story, Dever turned to Isaiah 37 where “a huge Assyrian army” had surrounded an “absolutely hopeless” Jerusalem. He then noted how King Hezekiah responded by praying to God for deliverance since his own military could not defeat the “gigantic army.”

“Exactly like the Israelites at the shore of the Red Sea, here you have the Israelites in Jerusalem surrounded and without any earthly hope,” Dever said. “Why would a sovereign and good God let that happen? To show them once again that he alone was a sufficient hope for them, that he would fight their battles.”

“As Christians, we may not be in as dramatic a situation as the people in Jerusalem or the people with the Egyptian army behind them — although sometimes you may be in situations like that,” Dever added. “Why does God, if he’s a good God, let his children get in situations like that? Oh, he has a very specific reason. It’s to show you how much he does love you and exactly what he is able to do as he takes care of all the apparently irrefutable problems. The things that could never be solved, he solves them and he delivers you in a way you wouldn’t have expected.”

As Dever spiritualized and personalized the message to those sitting in the Pentagon, he did so at a time when Hegseth is seeking an unprecedented military budget of $1.5 trillion that surpasses even what the U.S. spent, adjusted for inflation, during World War II. Even if that 44% increase is not approved by Congress, the United States already spends more annually on its military than the next six nations combined. Meanwhile, Hegseth’s Pentagon has killed more than 200 people — including fishermen and perhaps human trafficking victims — in boats off the coasts of South America. And the United States is nearing the six-month mark in its war against Iran, with violence even occurring in the famed Red Sea. Yet, Dever stood in the Pentagon to bless all of that while reading stories of large imperial armies being destroyed by God.

‘God of Angel Armies’

Before Dever preached, a uniformed military member opened the worship service with a prayer full of biblical war imagery. Praising “the God of angel armies, strong and mighty in battle,” the prayer borrowed from multiple psalms. Later, the prayer drew from Ephesians 6: “Make us spiritual warriors who take up the armor that you have provided and stand firm in truth, righteousness, salvation, and faith, with the sword of your spirit always at the ready. Make us strong and courageous, for we stand not in our own strength, but in the strength of your might.”

Hegseth, who likes to call himself “secretary of war,” also spoke and prayed before introducing Dever. He said that they were gathered at the service to not just “pray for our nation” but also to “ask God’s blessing on the endeavors that we undertake” in the Pentagon.

Hegseth read from James 4:4-8 — in his English Standard Version Bible that is stamped on its cover with Crusader symbols that match his controversial tattoos. The passage urges Jesus’s followers to follow God and therefore be enemies of the world. Hegseth tried to apply the passage by urging those in the Pentagon who are “involved in the day-to-day grind of fighting the world’s battles” to also follow God as they do it.

“We ultimately need to remember that there’s a spiritual battle deeper than all of it that we need to be prepared to be engaged in and fortified for. And drawing near to God means he in that process will draw near to you as well,” he added. “I urge and challenge you, just like I challenge myself each day, to dive into the word and seek his wisdom, the truth that comes page after page.”

“Lord God, give us the wisdom to see what is right through your word and through the truth, and the courage to see it through, no matter what. That it is not the appeal of the world, it’s not the affirmation of the world that matters, but instead that we seek your truth and serve you, understanding that it is the blood of Christ that redeems all of us equally at the foot of the cross,” Hegseth prayed. “We thank you to live in such a country where we can gather once a month and praise your holy name, worship you, and once again recommit our jobs and our responsibility to your purpose.”

After the sermon, Dever led those gathered in saying the Lord’s Prayer and then in singing “My Hope Is Built on Nothing Less” and the “Doxology.”

Ongoing Litigation

While Hegseth holds monthly worship services in the Pentagon, litigation over the events continues in federal court. But in court filings so far, the Department of Defense has been evasive and insisting they do not know things that they clearly do — including facts reported by A Public Witness.

In March, Americans United for Separation of Church and State (where I serve as vice chair of the national board of trustees) filed Freedom of Information Act suits against the Department of Defense and Department of Labor after the agencies have failed to turn over records sought by AU about the services, including the planning and costs of the services, communications to employees and contractors about the services, transcripts or recordings of services, and any complaints from employees in response to the services. Although the monthly services at Labor stopped after the ouster of Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer in May, the litigation continues over the organizing and hosting of the five services before then.

The two lawsuits note that AU filed its FOIA request with both agencies on Dec. 19 in order to learn more about the services. As AU explains in its Defense Department suit, “The requested records will improve public understanding of the Secretary’s Christian Prayer & Worship Services and whether the government is upholding its obligations to remain neutral about religious matters and to respect the religious freedom of its employees, the members of the U.S. military, and its contractors.”

In a response filed in May, the DoD acknowledged a few things from AU’s lawsuit but mostly claimed to not know whether the assertions in the suit were true or not. The standard line used by the attorneys was that “defendant lacks knowledge or information sufficient to form a belief as to the truth of the allegations.” In fact, they insisted 17 times that they “lack knowledge or information.” But in several cases, that’s simply not true.

For instance, AU correctly mentioned in its suit that “on May 21, 2025, DoD began hosting ‘the Secretary of Defense Christian Prayer & Worship Service’ (hereafter, the ‘Secretary’s Christian Prayer & Worship Service’), which is an event that has since occurred on a monthly basis.” The DoD responded, “Defendant admits that the Department of Defense began hosting the prayer and worship services on or about May 21, 2025. Defendant lacks knowledge or information sufficient to form a belief as to the truth of the remaining allegations in paragraph 3 regarding the subsequent frequency of such events.” The DoD is claiming they do not know if Hegseth’s services have been held monthly, even though they themselves held those services monthly. If they have somehow lost the records, they could find out that the services have been held monthly simply by visiting our “Government Worship Watch” page!

Other points in the lawsuit the DoD claimed to lack knowledge or information about included that “DoD has possession, custody, or control of the records requested by Americans United.” This is, of course, the whole point of the lawsuit, so they apparently don’t want to admit they’re hiding things. DoD also claimed they had no idea if people received an email invite to the first service, even though a copy of the invite has already been made public. Additionally, they claimed to not know if Brooks Potteiger preached at the first service or that Hegseth prayed during it, even though those are simple statements of fact that one can literally watch on an online recording of the service. And there are several other basic facts that can be proven publicly that DoD claims to not have knowledge or information about.

While DoD attorneys remain unaware (or dishonest), you can learn more about the official services at the Pentagon and other federal agencies on our “Government Worship Watch” page.

As a public witness,

Brian Kaylor

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“We should not become accustomed to this. We should not let this become sort of the taken-for-granted, status-quo norm that we just expect, because this is wrong,” added Sanders, who is also a professor of congregational & community care leadership at Luther Seminary. “It’s something that many of our sibling congregations and denominations have been fighting in court for some time. So we name this as the reality that we are facing in the world right now, and a reality that we should continue to resist.”

As reported by A Public Witness on Friday, DHS sent undercover agents into at least five church buildings to track activists attending events at Baptist, Lutheran, Episcopal, and Unitarian Universalist churches in Minnesota’s Twin Cities (and an event featuring Minnesota activists at a Lutheran church in Michigan). Multiple pastors have said they were unaware of the DHS actions inside their buildings until news broke last week.

“It’s a strange time,” Rev. Steve Sylvester, intentional interim lead pastor at Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in the Twin Cities suburb of Roseville, told me. “Even with the kind of aberrations that we’ve been dealing with, typically people don’t sit down and think, ‘Well, the Stasi might know what I’m doing.’”

He added that while he “knew that people who should not have been looked into were looked into,” it still came as a surprise that people coming to his church building were surveilled. He also questioned the accuracy of the agent’s report about the discussion and reactions of people at the meeting. But he’s mostly alarmed that DHS would target churches and people coming to events at churches.

“It’s a big deal because it’s an infringement on our rights as citizens,” he said. “It’s frightening that, apart from any conceivable suspicion of wrongdoing, the federal government is able to invade privacy of individuals involved at a house of worship. … The reality that our government is surreptitiously spying on our houses of worship, I hope is something that breaks through whatever it needs to break through so that people can understand what’s going on.”

During worship on Sunday, Sylvester also informed the congregation about the news, calling it a “weird thing” he didn’t expect to deal with during his time as interim. He noted they don’t yet know all that happened or what it means, but he promised that church leaders would continue to update members. He then demonstrated the church remains undaunted in its public witness since his very next announcement was about a group “that did the trainings for the legal observers back during the occupation in the winter” and is now helping train congregations and others in “defense of democracy” to “ensure that elections are safe for all.” He added that some members from the congregation had been part of the election training and would share more in a meeting after the service. It is not yet known if anyone from DHS also attended that meeting Sunday.

Another church that was spied on, St. John the Evangelist Episcopal Church in St. Paul, issued a public statement to members on Friday after the news broke. Rev. Craig Lemming, the church’s associate rector, mentioned the surveillance incident and insisted the church “acts within the law, supports our community, loves our neighbors as Christ commanded, and we continue to seek out ways to improve the safety and security of our building.”

“During Operation Metro Surge, our neighbors asked St. John’s if they could gather in our facility so that they could provide mutual aid to support people who were suffering through that horrific season. We supported these efforts by providing our neighbors space to gather to coordinate mutual aid for those in need. Some of our parishioners joined those meetings,” he wrote. “We proclaim Christ’s love of all people joyfully; we remain devoted to growing in the knowledge and love of Christ; and we welcome, love, and serve all of our neighbors. As these court proceedings unfold, we pray that God’s truth, justice, and peace shall prevail.”

Meanwhile, the understanding of the level of DHS’s spying on churches continues to grow as more incidents are revealed in court records.

New Court Filings on University Baptist Church

The news that undercover DHS agents had secretly entered churches came in court filings on Aug. 13 in the case of one member of the “Minnesota 15,” individuals arrested in June and accused of “conspiracy to impede or injure federal officers” and efforts to allegedly “violently oppose immigration law enforcement” earlier this year during DHS’s “Operation Metro Surge,” which saw federal agents kill Renée Good and Alex Pretti. The individuals pleaded not guilty and insist they are being prosecuted for speech and not any actual acts of violence.

Kevin Riach, a defense attorney for one of the individuals, filed numerous documents as he accused DHS of “abuses” that demonstrated “the political animus driving the case.” In addition to filing DHS documents and reports that show agents had spied at libraries, schools, labor union buildings, and elsewhere, the documents he included also detailed five times DHS agents entered a church building: at First Universalist Church in Minneapolis on Dec. 13, at Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in Roseville on Feb. 1, at Zion Lutheran Church in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on April 8, at St. John the Evangelist Episocpal Church on April 14, and at University Baptist Church on May 28.

After the revelation of the church surveillance garnered news attention, UBC leaders filed a statement with the court noting the federal injunction that is supposed to block such activity by DHS. UBC is part of the American Baptist Churches USA and the Alliance of Baptists. A federal judge on Feb. 13 granted an injunction for both denominations to block DHS from conducting warrantless actions on the property of affiliated congregations. And the judge specifically mentioned UBC in his ruling. That injunction also protected congregations in the Metropolitan Community Churches and several ELCA regional synods, and an earlier injunction covered churches in the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and several regional Quaker groups in addition to a Sikh Temple in California. Despite the injunction, an undercover DHS agent entered UBC’s building to record people inside.

Jean Lubke, who served as president of UBC’s church council at the time of the DHS action on May 28, filed a statement in the court case on Aug. 14 after church leaders learned of the incident earlier that day. Her document informed the court of the federal injunction and that UBC’s address had been provided to DHS by denominational leaders so DHS would know it was a protected location. She also noted that the church “prominently posted signs at all main exterior entrances to the church stating: ‘These Premises are a Protected Area Pursuant to Federal Court Order in New England Synod v. Department of Homeland Security, Case No. 4:25-cv-40102-FDS.’” Additionally, she mentioned the church has a larger yard sign in front of the building declaring, “Federal Agents Not Permitted on Premises. Federal Agents (ICE, DEA, ATF, CBP, or any other agent or agency) may not enter, park, or stage on this property. No Trespassing. Violators will be towed.” The signs were up at the time the DHS agent entered the building. The presence of the signs was not mentioned by the agent in her report, but UBC included photos of them in their court filing.

DHS did not respond to my request for comment about the surveillance of churches in general or the issue of the federal injunction covering UBC. Additionally, my requests for comment were ignored by the Department of Justice, the White House’s “Religious Liberty Commission,” and the White House’s “Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias.”

In addition to the statement by Lubke and UBC, defense attorney Riach also filed more official reports from DHS documenting at least three other times federal agents went to UBC’s property during its surveillance of targeted activists beyond the previously noted incident on May 28:

• On the afternoon of April 12 (a Sunday), agents went to UBC to observe people arriving for a meeting. They ran registration checks on vehicles parked nearby and waited to monitor who left the meeting nearly two hours later. The report adds that the person they were trying to track was not even seen by agents at the church that day.

• The next Sunday brought a similar scene, with agents arriving at UBC late on the morning of April 19 — perhaps while some people were still there for the church’s Sunday morning activities. Agents once again tracked who entered the church for a meeting, checked the plates of nearby cars, and recorded video of people exiting the building after the meeting. But once again, the targeted individual was not among those agents saw or recorded at UBC.

• On June 11, agents again waited at UBC and this time saw the person they were trying to track enter to help teach a Mixed Martial Arts class led by a progressive group in UBC’s building. The class, called “Left Jab,” is the same one that an undercover agent secretly attended and recorded after entering UBC’s building on May 28. On June 11, agents did not mention entering the building but did record video of people going inside the church.

The four incidents at UBC’s building occurred despite a federal judge’s injunction to specifically “prohibit warrantless enforcement actions — absent exigent circumstances — inside a church, at the entrance to a church, at a religious education facility (such as a Sunday school), at a religious social-service facility (such as a day-care center), or on adjacent church property (such as a parking lot).” Judge Dennis Saylor IV added in his Feb. 13 ruling that “violations of this preliminary injunction may subject [DHS] and all other persons bound by this order to sanctions and penalties, including contempt of court.”

‘Government-Sanctioned Desecration of Churches’

In addition to the pastors of the targeted churches, others are also speaking out against DHS’s actions. Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons, vice president of programs & strategy for Interfaith Alliance, denounced the spying as “shameful.”

“One of Donald Trump’s first actions as president in 2025 was removing protections from houses of worship that restricted ICE activity in sacred spaces. Now, we’ve learned that ICE sent undercover agents into churches to spy on constitutionally-protected activity,” Graves-Fitzsimmons told me. “Trump’s surveillance of sacred sites is shameful. We can now see a pattern of government-sanctioned desecration of churches.”

“If the Biden or Obama administrations had sent government agents to spy on churches, conservative media would have had a meltdown. It’s time for our leaders — especially those who regularly talk about protecting religious liberty — to come together across our religious and political divides to stop this abhorrent ICE cruelty and protect sensitive locations,” he added.

Interfaith Alliance has also put together a petition calling on DHS to “stop spying on churches.” It declares, “Houses of worship are sacred sites. Government agents conducting undercover investigations risk desecrating our houses of worship. Americans of all beliefs across the political spectrum can unite in respecting the religious freedom rights of houses of worship. As Americans of diverse faiths, we call on DHS to stop its undercover spying on houses of worship. The Trump administration must hold anyone who infringes on Americans’ religious freedom rights accountable.”

‘Bestow a Special Blessing on Our Informer’

Sanders, the interim pastor at UBC since the start of June, told me in a statement over the weekend that the church denounces the surveillance by DHS and also stands in solidarity with other houses of worship targeted by this and previous administrations.

“Government surveillance of activity inside houses of worship and prayer is, unfortunately, not new. Many of our Muslim friends and neighbors have known this reality in a much more pervasive and pressing way than Christian communities like University Baptist Church have ever experienced,” he explained. “We should, as a society, agree that sacred places and the many and varied community activities taking place within them should not become targets of government infiltration.”

“Yet we know that many churches like University Baptist Church and our sibling congregations around the country have become a threat to those in power when we care for our neighbors, provide safe spaces for our community members to gather in peace, and strive together toward justice,” he added. “In these ways, we resist the lure of xenophobia, organized abandonment, and the disposability of lives on the margins of society that have become such forceful influences in our contemporary political lives. We will continue to insist that solidarity with our most vulnerable neighbors is the way that we best follow the ways of Jesus in the world.”

As Sanders noted, government surveillance of houses of worship is unusual but not unprecedented. During the George W. Bush administration, federal agents infiltrated and even bugged mosques. And Donald Trump has said the government should do that to mosques again.

But for Sanders, past examples of the government spying on houses of worship isn’t just something that he learned happened to other churches or sacred sites. He also knows it from another church where he has served. Decades before he served as pastor of Old Cambridge Baptist Church in Massachusetts, the church found itself being spied on by the FBI for its work in the sanctuary movement of the 1980s, an effort by some churches to challenge federal immigration measures by giving sanctuary to individuals at risk of deportation.

Famed Harvard theologian Harvey Cox, a member of the church, wrote a humorous New York Times piece in 1986 describing the church’s response to learning a government informer had been attending the church. While he criticized the government for spying on churches, he also joked that the government didn’t need to work that hard since “the newsletter carries more information than most of our members want to know.”

“What surprised us most was that the FBI thought it would be hard to worm information out of us. Many people think our church’s problem is just the opposite. Since we are Baptists and therefore maybe a little on the zealous side, we are more often accused of telling people too much,” Cox added.

So he wrote about how nice it was that the pastor of the church made a point during a time of prayer to, in addition to “remembering the sick and the shut-ins,” also ask “the Lord to bestow a special blessing on our informer.” He added that the informer needs the prayer since “we are an active congregation” and therefore the informer will have to “keep hopping” to record everything.

“We all secretly hope our infiltrator does not get tired and quit,” Cox added. “If he stays around long enough, he’ll learn that when we say our church is a ‘sanctuary,’ we don’t mean just for Salvadoran refugees. Churches are sanctuaries for homeless, lost, and confused people of all kinds, including secret agents. They, too, are welcome to come and pray, listen to the Gospel reading, and belt out ‘Beulah Land’ with us. Who knows, they might even end up getting saved. It wouldn’t be the first time.”

As a public witness,

Brian Kaylor

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Top 5 at wordandway.org

1. Review: Apocalypticism as a Worldview in Ancient Judaism. Robert D. Cornwall reviewed Apocalypticism as a Worldview in Ancient Judaism by John J. Collins.

2. With Three Prisoners Scheduled for Execution, Southern Churches Toll Their Bells. Aleja Hertzler-McCain reported on faith groups leading vigils this week as Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Alabama all executed someone on Thursday.

3. After Cuts, Trump Administration Gives $2B to Christian Groups for Global Aid. While some praised the administration for increasing global aid after significant cuts, others criticized the sectarian bias in who will get the money.

4. Johnny Hunt’s Last Defamation Claims Rejected by Federal Judge. A former president of the Southern Baptist Convention lost his lawsuit against the SBC, which had reported an allegation that he committed sexual assault against a pastor’s wife.

5. Pope Leo Hat Giveaway Turns White Sox Game Into the Church of Baseball. Bob Smietana reported from Rate Field about a celebration of a baseball team’s famous fan.

Follow Us on Bluesky

by Brian Kaylor, Word&Way Editor-in-Chief

This morning, I published a report about court documents that detail how the U.S. Department of Homeland Security sent undercover agents into Lutheran, Baptist, Episcopal, and Unitarian Universalist churches in Minnesota and Michigan. Church members who were not targets of an investigation and who did nothing wrong were spied on. And DHS entered one church despite a federal judge’s injunction protecting it from warrantless DHS actions.

Interfaith Alliance this morning quickly mobilized in response. Citing A Public Witness, they put together a petition calling on DHS to “stop spying on churches.” It declares, “Houses of worship are sacred sites. Government agents conducting undercover investigations risk desecrating our houses of worship. Americans of all beliefs across the political spectrum can unite in respecting the religious freedom rights of houses of worship. As Americans of diverse faiths, we call on DHS to stop its undercover spying on houses of worship. The Trump administration must hold anyone who infringes on Americans’ religious freedom rights accountable.” Amen!

You can add your name to Interfaith Alliance’s petition here.

Other News of Note

• Allegra Hobbs of Texas Monthly reported on how James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Texas, said last year he would not accept endorsements during a church service — and then did exactly that on Sunday in a move that helped the church violate IRS rules governing tax-exempt nonprofits.

• Pillow-hugger Mike Lindell, who spent years speaking at rightwing Christian events to claim the 2020 presidential election was stolen (even though it was not), is claiming he lost the Republican primary for Minnesota governor because of voting irregularities.

• Jonathan D. Cohen wrote for ARC about how the leading moralizing against gambling today is no longer coming from rightwing evangelicals like Jerry Falwell but liberal politicians like Sen. Chris Murphy.

• Former U.S. Vice President Mike Pence is now a visiting professor at Colorado Christian University.

• After pushback, a public school district in Colorado will remove the Bible-based content from controversial curriculum they had just adopted.

• John Fritze of CNN wrote about an upcoming U.S. Supreme Court case that could impact where people are allowed to hold prayer gatherings.

• Eve Sampson of Military Times reported that U.S. Marines have been given less than two months to update their religious affiliation after the Pentagon slashed nearly 200 options.

• Rev. Stephanie Vader, a United Methodist pastor in Washington, D.C., is urging Christians to speak out against the growing National Guard presence in the nation’s capital.

• Alex Hannaford of The Independent wrote about the “manosphere” trying to depict Jesus as a masculine “MAGA poster boy.”

• Hernán Restrepo of Christianity Today reported on how pastors in the Spanish enclave of Ceuta ministered amid a recent swell of migrants.

Photo of the Week

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The case in Minnesota involves 15 individuals accused of “conspiracy to impede or injure federal officers” and efforts to allegedly “violently oppose immigration law enforcement” earlier this year during DHS’s “Operation Metro Surge,” which saw federal agents kill Renée Good and Alex Pretti. Days after the killing of Pretti, federal officials opened an investigation not into his death but into liberal activists protesting Immigration and Customs Enforcement actions. That investigation led to the charges against the defendants, known as the “Minnesota 15.” The individuals pleaded not guilty after being arrested in June and insist they are being prosecuted for speech and not any actual acts of violence.

In a development first reported by Talking Points Memo, a defense attorney for one of the defendants on Thursday (Aug. 13) alleged “abuses” by ICE and other DHS agents that showed “the political animus driving this case.” The filing notes that “undercover agents posing as protesters surveilled community meetings at churches, parks, libraries, schools and union halls.”

“These agents surreptitiously recorded dozens of conversations with ordinary people who were simply exercising their First Amendment right to protest ICE’s lawless rampage in our state,” defense attorney Kevin Riach argued in the filing. “None of these individuals did anything other than engage in protected First Amendment speech in a church meeting room. Yet now their personal information is memorialized in a DHS dossier.”

Official DHS documents detailing various surveillance incidents were included in the court filing as evidence to support the claim. The DHS reports show that undercover agents entered at least four churches in the Twin Cities and another in Michigan:

• On Dec. 13, an undercover agent attended a “how to stop ICE” meeting that was hosted by Sunrise Movement – Twin Cities at First Universalist Church in Minneapolis. The agent’s report notes the meeting highlighted that the group is “a nonviolent, direct action group” and discussed ways to publicly challenge ICE’s presence in the Twin Cities.

• On Feb. 1, an undercover agent attended a meeting sponsored by the Twin Cities Direct Action that was held at Prince of Peace Lutheran Church, an Evangelical Lutheran Church in America congregation in the suburb of Roseville. Beyond detailing who attended the meeting of “approximately 10 people,” the agent described the meeting as “democratic in nature,” unorganized, and focused on social media strategies and fundraising since the group only had about $5,000. The agent emphasized that the group talked about trying to “stop and abolish ICE” and how there was “a civil war” going on as ICE agents were in the community.

• On April 8, an undercover agent attended an event in the sanctuary of Zion Lutheran Church, an ELCA church in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Part of the national speaking tour, the “Breaking the ICE: Lessons from the Resistance in Minnesota” event featured stories about how people had responded to Operation Metro Surge. The agent’s report includes information on Michigan church members who were not part of the targeted Minnesota activist group but who attended the event because they opposed ICE.

• On April 14, an undercover agent attended a Direct Action Minnesota meeting at St. John the Evangelist Episcopal Church in St. Paul. Other federal agents collected the license plate information of vehicles parked in a nearby lot — even though they may not have all belonged to people attending the targeted meeting.

• On May 28, an undercover agent attended a Mixed Martial Arts class led by a progressive group and held at University Baptist Church in Minneapolis. The agent spoke with people and participated in the training, which led to a moment described in the report: “Due to the physicality of the event, [the agent’s] concealed body-worn audio recorder erroneously fell to the floor of the gymnasium near the end of the training. [The agent] briefly left the gymnasium, realized she no longer had the device, and returned to the gymnasium to retrieve the device” three minutes later.

The incident at University Baptist Church could raise additional legal issues beyond those mentioned in the court filings or sparked by the other church surveillance incidents. The church has been covered since Feb. 13 by a federal injunction blocking DHS from conducting warrantless actions on its property.

UBC is part of the American Baptist Churches USA and the Alliance of Baptists. Both denominations are among the dozens that sued last year to challenge the Trump administration for removing the rule that barred DHS immigration enforcement actions at sensitive locations like houses of worship. So far, only a few groups have won a federal injunction to protect their congregations. In the first case, a judge barred such DHS actions at churches in the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and several regional Quaker groups in addition to at a Sikh Temple in California. In another case, a different judge granted an injunction to protect churches in the ABCUSA, Alliance, Metropolitan Community Churches, and several ELCA regional synods.

“In substance, the preliminary injunction will prohibit warrantless enforcement actions — absent exigent circumstances — inside a church, at the entrance to a church, at a religious education facility (such as a Sunday school), at a religious social-service facility (such as a day-care center), or on adjacent church property (such as a parking lot),” Judge Dennis Saylor IV wrote in his ruling granting the injunction. “It will also prohibit such enforcement within 100 feet of the entrance to a church, absent exigent circumstances or supervisory approval. And it will prohibit law enforcement from knowingly setting up checkpoints to interrogate persons on their way to or from a church.”

While the case involved the issue of immigration enforcement actions, Saylor made it clear that his ruling was not merely reinstating the old rule but instead “imposes a new set of restrictions” that “is broader than” the previous policy. Additionally, the purpose of DHS’s surveillance at UBC was to support DHS’s immigration enforcement efforts in the Twin Cities. The action at UBC targeted a liberal activist instead of someone from another country, but it was ultimately part of the administration’s ICE agenda.

The DHS documents do not indicate whether they considered if the injunction applied to this surveillance action. But in addition to UBC being doubly covered by both its denominational affiliation, the church is also specifically cited in the judge’s ruling as an example of why the injunction was granted. The judge noted that on Jan. 11, the church’s pastor learned just before the Sunday worship service that ICE was parked less than a half mile away so he warned people from the pulpit. As a result, a month later the judge granted the injunction to protect UBC and other churches. Yet, three-and-a-half months after that ruling, an undercover DHS agent entered the church and recorded people engaged in lawful activity.

The Department of Justice’s Joint Task Force Vanguard that brought charges against the “Minnesota 15” is co-directed by a man who marched in the pro-Trump crowd outside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Meanwhile, mainline Protestant clergy have been among those leading anti-ICE protests in the Twin Cities — even before learning ICE and other agents secretly spied on events inside mainline churches.

As a public witness,

Brian Kaylor

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These accounts highlighted Hegseth reading a psalm, apparently since they believed it fit the narratives of the United States as a “Christian” nation and the Trump administration as “godly.” The first couple of accounts actually linked to my report since I was the only one who had documented this. But as it spread to other accounts, the sourcing got dropped. Instead, we were just left with what was supposed to be an uplifting social media graphic. But there was something else unexpected about many of these posts. With a few exceptions, they did not feature an image from the actual service (like the screenshots and video in my report) but an AI-generated image.

While the image on the left is actually from the January 2026 service, the other two are clearly conjured up by AI. The middle one is a passable recreation of Hegseth, though it’s not in the correct room. The image on the right is not only the wrong room with the wrong people but it’s also a horrible attempt at Hegseth and his wife Jennifer. Ironically, that version is from the same content “creator” as the middle one, showing he’s not even consistent with his depictions of the same service.

This type of content has continued as I’ve reported each month on the Pentagon services. Not only do these images have that usual look of AI slop, but they also continue to get things wrong. The room for the services changes and is clearly not the auditorium where the services (other than the Christmas one) have been held. Hegseth changes a bit in the images, though he’s one of the few people the AI models usually get fairly close. Beyond him, we’re given fake pastors and various inaccurate depictions of Hegseth’s wife (unless the AI models are suggesting Hegseth is bringing other women to the services).

These supposedly “inspirational” Christian messages glorifying the Pentagon services with AI images are not just weird (though they very much are that). They also provide a window into a disturbing social media trend that is impacting how many people view faith and public life as the algorithms of Facebook and other platforms serve up these fake images that lift up a distorted view of Christianity. So this issue of A Public Witness dives into the weird world of AI-generated social media content that seeks to disciple people in the way of Pentagon worship services.

AI Love To Tell The Story

The AI slop posts about the Pentagon services aren’t just fringe accounts. These are coming from content “creators” who have large followings and get lots of interactions on their posts. As I’ve paid attention to the posts, I’ve noticed a few trends.

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“I want to go back to the way it was in the first 13 state constitutions, because there was a public declaration required in Judeo-Christian orthodoxy in order to hold office, because we are a Christian nation,” he argued during a recent town hall in a church. “That doesn’t mean you have to be a Christian, doesn’t mean you have to swear allegiance to Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior. It means you recognize what the foundations of this nation are. I would love to see that.”

I’m honestly not sure what his test would look like. While he tried to say they wouldn’t have to be Christians, only Christians could actually affirm “Judeo-Christian orthodoxy.” Additionally, his historical examples were often clear about requiring a Christian affirmation.

As usual, Beckwith gets a few of the details wrong. There wasn’t a religious test in all of the constitutions for the first states, though there was one in most of them. None of them talked about a “Judeo-Christian” faith system as they were instead requiring someone to be Christian or even part of a denomination in order to serve in office. In Maryland and Massachusetts, one had to declare they were a Christian. In Georgia, New Hampshire, New Jersey, and North Carolina, one had to be a Protestant. In Pennsylvania, one had to say they believed in God and affirmed the “divine inspiration” of “the Old and New Testament.” In Delaware — which took the whole religious test thing to another level — one had to “profess faith in God the Father and in Jesus Christ his only Son and in the Holy Ghost, one God blessed for evermore” and “acknowledge the holy scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be given by divine inspiration.”

That’s the history Beckwith said he wants. However, after being reminded that the Hoosier State had never had such a test and explicitly bans them in its Constitution, he quickly clarified he wants a constitutional amendment instead of just a legislative measure.

Beckwith also leaves out the part of the story where we got rid of those bigoted tests for office. While such tests were a regular practice in the British government and its colonies, the only religious reference in the original U.S. Constitution before the amendments was an explicit prohibition against such tests. Even before the First Amendment, our founders were separating church and state in this key way. Rejecting religious tests for office is foundational to who the United States is!

Unfortunately, Beckwith isn’t alone. Other politicians and preachers pushing Christian Nationalism have also floated the idea of undoing the American experiment that banned religious tests for office. Like Doug Wilson, the self-described “paleo-Confederate” Idaho pastor who started the denomination that Pete Hegseth is part of (and who Hegseth had preach during the February 2026 Pentagon worship service).

As a result of the advocacy of figures like Wilson and Beckwith, it’s worth remembering why the American experiment includes a ban on religious tests for office. So this issue of A Public Witness swears to tell the truth about how the Christian Nationalist vision flunks an important democratic test.

‘Greatest Engine of Tyranny’

After Roger Williams and John Leland, Isaac Backus was probably the third-most important Baptist voice for religious liberty during the colonial and founding era of the United States. A Baptist pastor in Massachusetts from 1751 until his death in 1806, he was among those who started the school that eventually became Brown University. An outspoken advocate for religious liberty, he published various tracts on the subject and spoke before colonial and national groups as he sought an end to religious taxation that supported official colonial churches and an end to religious persecution by civil authorities. He served as delegate to the Massachusetts convention that ratified the U.S. Constitution in 1788. He voted for the new Constitution after specifically praising Article VI for barring religious tests for office.

“Nothing is more evident, both in reason and in the holy Scriptures, than that religion is ever a matter between God and individuals, and therefore no man or men can impose any religious test without invading the essential prerogatives of our Lord Jesus Christ,” Backus told his fellow delegates. “Constantine approved of the practice when he adopted the profession of Christianity as an engine of state-policy. And let the history of all nations be searched, from that day to this, and it will appear that the imposing of religious tests hath been the greatest engine of tyranny in the world.”

Backus also praised the new Constitution for “excluding all titles of nobility or hereditary succession of power” since “all men are born with an equal right to liberty and property, and that officers have no right to any power but what is fairly given them by the consent of the people.” For him, the religious freedom enshrined in Article VI’s ban of religious tests was an essential part of the new American experiment.

It’s significant that Backus made this argument in Massachusetts. The colony-turned-state had a long history as a Christian Nationalist place where church and state were joined together. It would be the last state in the new nation to disestablish its official state church. And it had long been a place of religious discrimination against Christians who didn’t belong to the powerful Congregational Church. Massachusetts Bay Colony banished religious dissenters like Puritan minister John Wheelwright, Anne Hutchinson, and Roger Williams. The latter, forced into exile, founded the first colony with religious liberty for everyone (Rhode Island), cofounded the first Baptist church in the Americas, and pushed for church-state separation. Colonial leaders in Massachusetts even executed Mary Dyer, William Robinson, and Marmaduke Stephenson for being Quakers. If you can’t get along with the Quakers, that really says more about you than them!

Given that history, it’s not surprising that the issue of religious tests for office was one that multiple delegates addressed during the Massachusetts convention that voted for ratification. But Backus was not the only voice to praise Article VI. And some of the arguments for the prohibition are particularly prescient.

Theophilus Parsons, a lawyer and son of a minister, emphasized two important points: the religious tests would not prevent a dishonest person from saying what they needed to in order to obtain an office, and this would place the new government in the position of deciding what it means to be a Christian. Instead of a religious test, he urged people to pick leaders based on the moral character of their lives.

“It has been objected that the Constitution provides no religious test by oath, and we may have in power unprincipled men, atheists, and pagans,” he told his fellow delegates. “No man can wish more ardently than I do that all our public offices may be filled by men who fear God and hate wickedness, but it must remain with the electors to give the government this security. An oath will not do it. Will an unprincipled man be entangled by an oath? Will an atheist or a pagan dread the vengeance of the Christian’s God, a being in his opinion the creature of fancy and credulity?”

“What security is it to government that every public officer shall swear that he is a Christian? For what will then be called Christianity?” Parsons added. “One man will declare that the Christian religion is only an illumination of natural religion and that he is a Christian; another Christian will assert that all men must be happy hereafter in spite of themselves; a third Christian reverses the image and declares that let a man do all he can, he will certainly be punished in another world; and a fourth will tell us that if a man use any force for the common defense, he violates every principle of Christianity. Sir, the only evidence we can have of the sincerity and excellency of a man’s religion is a good life. And I trust that such evidence will be required of every candidate by every elector. That man who acts an honest part to his neighbor will most probably conduct honorably towards the public.”

Daniel Shute, a Unitarian pastor who had served as a military chaplain, also emphasized that while a religious test would exclude “honest men” who didn’t meet the qualifications, “unprincipled and dishonest men will not hesitate to subscribe to any thing that may open the way for their advancement and put them into a situation the better to execute their base and iniquitous designs.” He therefore praised the Constitution for rejecting “bigotry,” adding that he recognized that “there are worthy characters” in denominations beyond his own — and he specifically mentioned Quakers, Baptists, Anglicans, Catholics, and “even among those who have no other guide in the way to virtue and heaven than the dictates of natural religion.”

Massachusetts, which had the largest ratifying convention among the states, became the sixth state to ratify the Constitution in a vote of 187 to 168. It wasn’t the only place where debates emerged over Article VI. And voices in other states similarly praised the prohibition on religious tests and got the Constitution across the finish line. Like in North Carolina where James Iredell, who would soon become one of the first members of the new U.S. Supreme Court established by the Constitution, argued that Article VI “is calculated to prevent evils of the most pernicious consequences to society.”

“Every person in the least conversant in the history of mankind knows what dreadful mischiefs have been committed by religious persecutions,” he said. “Under the color of religious tests the utmost cruelties have been exercised. Those in power have generally considered all wisdom centered in themselves, that they alone had a right to dictate to the rest of mankind, and that all opposition to their tenets was profane and impious. The consequence of this intolerant spirit has been that each church has in turn set itself up against every other and persecutions and wars of the most implacable and bloody nature have taken place in every part of the world. America has set an example to mankind to think more modestly and reasonably; that a man may be of different religious sentiments from our own, without being a bad member of society.”

Noting that such religious tests in England required members in the House of Commons to partake in “the sacrament according to the rites of the church,” Iredell argued this resulted in some who “degrade and profane a rite, which never ought to be taken but from a sincere principle of devotion.” He praised the Constitution for not giving Congress “any power” when it comes to “matters of religion.”

“I consider the clause under consideration as one of the strongest proofs that could be adduced that it was the intention of those who formed this system to establish a general religious liberty in America,” he added.

The Trump Test

Christian Nationalists today who, like the lieutenant governor of Indiana, want to return to the old model of religious tests for office have also been staunch supporters of President Donald Trump. Yet, Trump ironically helps illustrate some of the messes such tests would create.

Let’s go with the most common religious test in the colonies/states that required officeholders to be Protestant Christians. Does Trump actually meet that standard? He says he’s a Christian and has claimed since 2020 that he’s a nondenominational Protestant. But is him just saying that really enough to pass the test?

Trump is not a member of any church. He hasn’t even attended a Sunday worship service since December 2021. Other than funerals or special inauguration events, he’s not attended a church in more than 5.5 years as he instead golfs and posts social media insults nearly every Sabbath Day. He’s also famously biblically illiterate and profane.

If Trump is deemed sufficiently Christian for a religious test for office, it would be just because he says he is. In that case, the concerns of many of those who pushed for ratification of the Constitution are proved correct. If someone can just say they’re a Protestant without ever actually practicing the faith, then dishonest people who are willing to say whatever just to get elected will always be able to pass the test. Honorable Catholics, Jews, Muslims, nonbelievers, and others would be ruled ineligible while godless liars would be approved for the ballot.

Additionally, if there were such a test, someone would have to adjudicate it. Secretaries of state would be asked to render judgment on the faith of would-be candidates, with judges also likely asked to weigh in when politicians disagree with the decision. This would create opportunities for partisan antics and would give government officials and the courts the supposed authority to define who is a Christian or not.

Given the rhetoric we heard from many Republican politicians falsely claiming politicians like Barack Obama or Kamala Harris weren’t Christians — even though both were actually more faithfully participating in church life than Trump — it’s not hard to imagine a secretary of state claiming a Democratic politician isn’t qualified because they’re not a real Christian. We’re even hearing that rhetoric this year in attacks on Democratic candidates who are actual Christian pastors or seminarians!

Or imagine if a Democratic secretary of state claimed Trump didn’t pass the test and so wanted to keep him off the state ballot, like we saw with a couple of efforts in 2024 over the Constitution’s insurrection clause. In the standard the rightwing majority of the Supreme Court created in that case, we would have to wait and see if Trump won and then Congress would decide if he passed the test or not before certifying the election. But it would be a real loss to the Christian witness (and the nation) to have a partisan debate in Congress as lawmakers voted to officially rule if Trump is a Christian or not.

Fortunately, the framers of the Constitution tried something different, creating a separation of church and state that is good for both. So we should give a failing grade to anyone who wants to undo this system and recreate what Isaac Backus called “the greatest engine of tyranny in the world.”

As a public witness,

Brian Kaylor

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by Brian Kaylor, Word&Way Editor-in-Chief

Some political races offer quite the contrast. Like the James Talarico-Ken Paxton showdown for the U.S. Senate seat in Texas. A seminarian against a man caught in various financial and sexual scandals.

Another race that will offer a big contrast was set this week. Missouri state Sen. Rick Brattin won the Republican nomination to challenge Democratic U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver. This race probably won’t be as close as the Texas one, though we don’t yet know which way it will go. Missouri Republicans targeted Cleaver in a redistricting move that’s still before the courts. If the gerrymander is thrown out, Cleaver will easily win the urban Kansas City district. If the gerrymander is allowed, Brattin will likely win the sprawling district that only includes a third of Kansas City and then juts halfway across the state (to include my house in Jefferson City).

Either way, the race offers two visions of Christians in politics. Cleaver, who I interviewed on Dangerous Dogma a few years ago, is a United Methodist minister and former chair of the Congressional Black Caucus. He also has long had a reputation as a calming voice. And then there’s Rick Brattin, a brash proponent of White Christian Nationalism.

I’ve gotten to know Brattin as I’ve testified against Christian Nationalist bills in the Missouri legislature. He’s the current chair of the Senate Education Committee, and since pushing rightwing Christianity in public schools is a key goal of Christian Nationalists, I’ve tangled with him during several hearings. During a hearing last year about a bill on “chaplains” in public schools, we debated that idea and church-state separation. There was also the hearing last year over a bill to force a highly edited version of the Ten Commandments in schools. I’ve testified nearly 50 times over the past several years and Brattin’s treatment of clergy during that hearing was the most inappropriate behavior I’ve personally seen from a committee chair. And then there was the hearing this year where he and I debated whether or not the Constitutional Convention stopped to pray after Benjamin Franklin requested it (and to be clear, they did not pray even though Brattin wants to require schools to teach that they did).

A Black mainline Protestant pastor versus a White evangelical Christian Nationalist. The race for Missouri’s fifth congressional district offers two radically different visions of America and Christianity.

Other News of Note

• Brian Kaylor appeared on the Faithful Politics podcast with hosts Josh Burtram and Will Wright as part of their “Church & State 250” series.

• Kiera Butler of Mother Jones profiled the Christian Nationalist rhetoric of Pete Hegseth’s “Deputy Under Secretary of War for Intelligence and Security.”

• U.S. Rep. Andy Ogles of Tennessee, who has posted AI slop videos of himself (and others like Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio) dressed as medieval Crusaders, took his Crusader cosplay to a new level of historical accuracy by losing his reelection bid this week. The Islamophobic congressman was largely ousted in the Republican primary after being targeted by a pro-renewable energy PAC.

• Robert Downen of Texas Monthly wrote about the Christian Nationalist former state representative now advising Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on “election integrity.”

• Hunter Walker of Talking Points Memo reported on an ad from Colorado Republicans that depicted a Jewish gubernatorial candidate with devil horns.

• Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche sparked controversy with comments on restricting abortion that he made during a call hosted by the White House Faith Office and a rightwing Christian organization.

• A federal court heard arguments this week on behalf of Oklahoma citizens trying to block a proposed Jewish public charter school, which follows the previous rejection of a Catholic public charter school.

• A new Canadian Armed Forces policy bars military chaplains from offering sectarian prayer at official events that military personnel are required to attend.

• Russell Conreras of Axios reported on new data showing young Latinos are leaving organized religion at a higher rate than other demographics.

• Cody Benjamin of Christianity Today profiled a former modeling scout who’s now trying to create a Christian mobile network.

Photo of the Week

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Patriarch Kirill, who has sanctified Russia’s imperial war against Ukraine, claims the prayers of a 19th-century Russian Orthodox hermit led to God helping the Soviet Union create nuclear weapons more than a century later. He made the remarks while at an old monastery that’s a few miles (or a few more kilometers) from where Russia’s nuclear research program is still run.

“Scientists working here in Sarov created our Russian atomic bomb, which thwarted the enemy’s plans to destroy and enslave our Fatherland,” Kirill declared during a service at the Holy Trinity Saint Seraphim-Diveyevo Monastery about 15 kilometers (or 9.3 miles) from the nuclear facility in the neighboring city of Sarov. “Thus, through the labors of the scientists, engineers, and workers who toiled here, God’s grace and mercy were bestowed upon our country. It is clearly no coincidence that scientific research and engineering work were conducted in this very place, preserving our people and country from the terrible destruction that might have left neither our country nor our people.”

Or, maybe it really is a coincidence. After all, there are some pretty big theological holes in this account. A monk whose most famous quote is “acquire a peaceful spirit and then thousands of souls will be saved around you” has now been conscripted to justify nuclear weapons. So this issue of A Public Witness looks at how Kirill nukes God’s grace and mercy before considering how it serves as a warning about militaristic Christian Nationalism more broadly.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

Patriarch Kirill, head of the Russian Orthodox Church since 2009, is a longtime ally and defender of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. Kirill’s called Putin’s reign a “miracle of God” and has used his close ties to put the word “God” in the Russian Constitution and gain special privileges for the Russian Orthodox Church.

Kirill has, in Christian Nationalistic terms, wholeheartedly supported the Russian invasion of Ukraine — even heretically telling Russian soldiers that to die fighting for Russia is a salvific act. His use of the phrase “Holy Rus’” is imperial language dressed in religious garb as he includes the land of Ukraine (and others) in that territory he believes the Russian state and Russian Orthodox Church should rule over. And he has weaponized saints as part of the propaganda battle against Ukraine.

So it’s not really surprising to hear him bless the Russian state’s weapons of mass destruction. But his argument still seems to miss the mark.

If the nuclear weapons were a sign of “God’s grace and mercy” on the Soviet Union, then why did the United States get them first? Did God want to bless the United States more? But that doesn’t make sense since the United States is clearly the “enemy” in the story that God was allegedly saving the Soviet Union from. Wouldn’t real “grace and mercy” by God have been to block anyone from developing these weapons?

Also, this development came not in a godly nation but during the time when the Soviet officials were suppressing Christianity. Kirill even mentioned that in his homily on Saturday, as he often does. He referred to the “storm” of the “terrible revolutionary events” and “the terrible turning point in the life of our people and country.”

The monastery at which he spoke was actually shut down in 1927, a fate that the communist officials brought to many Orthodox and other Christian sites. Here’s how the monastery’s website describes that moment: “It rained heavily during the days the monastery was closing, as if the nature wept.” The site adds, “The cathedral was desecrated and its crosses were taken down. When the crosses were ripped down, the domes and the roof were damaged, so water leaked inside the cathedral.” The building was used as a granary and then a construction warehouse. It was returned to the local parish late in 1989 as the Soviet Union was crumbling, with services resuming the next spring. The site records that “in the spring of 1990, a shining rainbow marked the day its cross was raised.”

The monastery in nearby Sarov, one of the cities used for the Soviet nuclear program, suffered even more. It too was forced to close and became a place for building rocket launchers until Soviets blew it up in 1951 because they claimed it was at risk of collapsing. In 2016, the work of rebuilding the monastery started.

Kirill referred to this history on Saturday as he mentioned the nuclear gift from God, but he didn’t explain why God blessed the Soviet Union as it was persecuting the church. After all, he frequently insists today that the nation must follow God in order to be blessed, which is why he argued they needed to put the word “God” in the Constitution.

“For many years, this holy monastery lacked a place to pray,” he said on Saturday. “Secular institutions existed here, seemingly contradicting everything good, kind, and right, including the Christian Orthodox faith. But history has shown that it was in this very place that the shield of our Motherland began to be forged.”

And then there’s the matter of the saint Kirill credited with bringing the nuclear program: Seraphim of Sarov. He’s a big deal in the Russian Orthodox Church even if he’s little known beyond that — although he is remembered in the Anglican Communion on Jan. 2 and was referred to as a saint by Pope John Paul II. But for Russian Orthodox believers, he’s one of the most revered saints. So Kirill drafting him to bless the nation’s nuclear program is a big deal.

Seraphim was a mystical hermit who actually only went once to the monastery where Kirill spoke. He instead lived in a monastery in Sarov (thus his moniker, Seraphim of Sarov). Born in the 1750s, he died in Sarov in 1833 and was glorified as an Orthodox saint in 1903. As one who practiced strict asceticism and proclaimed the values of contemplation and self-denial, he hardly seems like a good candidate for patron saint of nukes. He’s known for extreme practices like praying on a rock for 1,000 straight days and his unusual eating habits like only eating grass for three years. On another occasion, he refused to fight back when attacked by a gang of thieves. Although he survived when they left him for dead, he suffered a hunched back after that and publicly forgave his attackers as he urged the judge to show them mercy.

That’s the guy Kirill credited with helping the Soviet Union create weapons that could ultimately destroy the whole world and all human life.

“Venerable Seraphim, who revealed his power to the Russian people during the most difficult period of their history, is undoubtedly a special saint of God, a special miracle worker, for all of us,” Kirill said in his sermon before talking about the nuclear program. “That this happened precisely in the place where Saint Seraphim prayed was no coincidence. I’ve spoken with our physicists, scientists who work in this field of scientific knowledge and ensure our country’s security — many of them are Orthodox Christians. In my conversations with them, I realized that they fully understand that the creation of a formidable weapon in our country in this particular place was no accident; all of this occurred, in part, through the prayers of our venerable and God-bearing father, Seraphim of Sarov. Thus, the humble elder, through his holiness and through his prayer, contributed to the continued existence of our people and our country.”

“I would like to reiterate that the Lord truly works miracles; he is the Lord of history, and the life of all mankind depends on him. That by his grace, through Elder Seraphim, the miracle of his presence was revealed here, and that in this very place the shield that protected our homeland was created — all of this is not a coincidence, but part of a single whole,” Kirill added. “Through his prayers, may the Lord protect the Russian land, our country, our Orthodox president, the authorities, and the military, defending our homeland from every enemy and adversary.”

And that’s how a revered, peaceful saint was weaponized to bless nuclear weapons.

Mirror Image

The rhetoric by Kirill on nuclear weapons and the war against Ukraine represents an extreme version of militaristic Christian Nationalism. But it’s also not that different from what we’re hearing today from the U.S. Department of Holy War.

Just three days before Kirill said nuclear weapons were a sign of “God grace and mercy,” the preacher at the Pentagon’s monthly worship service called the U.S. military a “means of God’s grace.” On the same day as Kirill’s remarks, the Pentagon again misused Isaiah 6:8 to make the prophetic call about joining the U.S. military (and this has been the verse they have most co-opted to justify imperial violence). Hegseth himself has conscripted numerous Bible verses — and a Pulp Fiction monologue — to argue that the U.S. military is acting as God’s instrument for divine justice (and “furious anger”). And like Kirill, Hegseth has argued that a soldier dying for the nation “finds eternal life,” thus following the theology of Crusader popes that makes salvation something one earns by sacrificing one’s self for the nation.

Bad theology can kill. Kirill’s theology helped lead the Russian military into Ukraine and Hegseth has distorted Christianity to justify launching a war against Iran and killing more than 200 people — including fishermen and perhaps human trafficking victims — in boats off the coasts of South America. The most dangerous form of Christian Nationalism is that deployed to justify using military force to kill people.

That’s why we must call out the heresies of Kirill, Hegseth, and others. We must not stand by quietly as they nuke the Christian witness.

As a public witness,

Brian Kaylor

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