On January 24, a US Border Patrol agent shot and killed 37-year-old ICU nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis after he was held down by multiple federal agents. The Trump administration alleged that Pretti threatened agents with a gun. But videos appear to show Pretti, who was carrying a licensed handgun, holding only his phone in his hand when he was tackled and agents disarming Pretti before he was shot and killed. Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. The Trump administration has since signaled that it’s scaling back the federal immigration operation in the city. Multiple news outlets are reporting that Gregory Bovino, the top US Border Patrol official, has been demoted and will leave. Tom Homan, the White House border czar, is now expected to manage immigration enforcement in Minneapolis, according to multiple reports. Following Pretti’s death, thousands of protesters once again flooded the streets of Minneapolis. One of them was Rob Schenck, an evangelical minister who once routinely lobbied legislators to adopt a Christian conservative agenda and worked to persuade Supreme Court justices to rule in favor of the religious right. But Schenck began doubting the movement and his own role in it—especially once President Donald Trump came to power. Since then, he’s made a moral and political 180 and is now working to undo his decades of activism that he believes helped lead to this moment.  On this week’s More To The Story, Schenck sits down with host Al Letson to talk about what led him to the streets of Minneapolis, his emotional visit to Renée Good’s memorial, and why he’s become “guardedly optimistic” about the ultimate direction of this current political moment in America. Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.

He helped build the religious right in the United States. Now he’s in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to join the clergy’s fight ICE’s siege of the city. “Being here, in solidarity, is part of the repair work in my own soul,” said Rev. Rob Schenck, an Evangelical minister who spent decades commingling church and state to advance conservative causes like the anti-abortion movement. One example: Schenck’s organization, Faith and Action in the Nation’s Capital, created “Operation Higher Court,” which trained wealthy couples as “stealth missionaries” to befriend Supreme Court justices to preserve, in his words, a Christian nation. Now, he says he must confront the damage he helped cause, including what he believes was his role in delivering “the entities that are now inflicting all of this suffering on so many people”—extending to the rise of President Donald Trump. “We made this terrible deal with Donald Trump because we were already demoralized,” he told Mother Jones in 2018. “He didn’t demoralize us—he is the evidence of our demoralization.” So, here, braving subzero temperatures, Schenck told me, “I have to do the work of repair.” The video above was taken on Friday, during the city’s “Day of Truth and Freedom”—a citywide strike and march in which clergy played a prominent role. “These folks are showing more grace in accepting me than I would have ever extended to them,” he said, flanked by organizers shouting, “Whose streets? Our streets!” The next day, after learning of federal agents shooting and killing Alex Pretti, Schenck extended his stay in the city. I’ve been following Rob on his journey over the last few days and the clergy’s fight against ICE, which we will feature more of in the coming days. “This is redemption,” he told me. “This is redemption.”

Once again, the response was quick, fuming, and filled with falsehoods. On January 7, about five hours after a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minneapolis fatally shot a woman in her SUV, President Donald Trump addressed the reckless killing in a social-media post: The victim, he said, “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense. Based on the attached clip, it is hard to believe he is alive.” Those were lies. Trump shared murky slow-motion footage from a distant door camera, but clearer videos from eyewitnesses had already gone viral and showed the reality. ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot Renee Good, an American citizen and 37-year-old mother of three, point-blank through the windshield and open driver’s-side window as Good tried to turn her slow-moving vehicle away from him. Ross then reholstered his gun and walked down the street toward where the SUV had crashed, eyewitness video showed. (Moments later in that same video, Ross can be seen even more clearly walking back up the street and showing no signs of serious injury. Trump officials have since claimed that Ross suffered from an unspecified degree of internal bleeding.) Trump’s post culminated with him blaming Good’s death on what he said was a sprawling conspiracy targeting ICE agents: “We need to stand by and protect our Law Enforcement Officers from this Radical Left Movement of Violence and Hate!” Just over a week later, amid tense protests and further violence by ICE in Minneapolis, he threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act. Trump’s vitriol, though often seen as “unhinged” by critics, is methodical and by design. He uses any violent national tragedy as political ammo. During his first year back in the White House, he has seized upon assassinations, mass shootings, and other deadly traumas to stoke partisan division and justify extreme policies and actions. Fact-finding in the aftermath of a tragedy does not matter to him—only setting the narrative does. > “He only speaks in one key, and that key is division.” His top officials back him in lockstep. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem declared shortly after Good’s killing—before any investigation—that Good had committed “an act of domestic terrorism.” Noem’s description of what happened with the ICE agents defied reality: “A woman attacked them, and those surrounding them, and attempted to run them over and ram them with her vehicle.” Vice President JD Vance blamed the deceased victim for “an attack on the American people,” declaring it “classic terrorism.” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt reiterated that Good’s death was “a result of a larger, sinister left-wing movement that has spread across our country.” The brazen lying and demonization were familiar, the latest in a pattern from Trump that has included his response to the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, a mass shooting at a Mormon church, a terrorist attack on National Guard soldiers, and even the shocking murders of Hollywood icon Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele. (Details on these and others below.) Most modern presidents have sought to console and reassure the country in the face of national tragedy, but Trump’s behavior stands alone, says Matt Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University. “He seems incapable of trying to unify people or issue words of healing,” Dallek says. “I can’t think of a single instance in which he tried to calm tempers. He only speaks in one key, and that key is division.” Shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, President George W. Bush stated that true Islam “is peace” and urged Americans not to vilify millions of Muslims who were making “an incredibly valuable contribution to our country.” After the devastating gun massacre at a historic Black church in South Carolina in 2015, President Barack Obama called for national soul-searching and emphasized the power of goodness and grace over racist hatred. You have to go back half a century, to “law and order” hardliner Richard Nixon, to find a more combative approach, Dallek notes. Yet even though Nixon was bilious and conspiratorial against the political left, he was more measured in his public reaction to national trauma and less willing than Trump to disregard reality. Nixon’s messaging included victim-blaming after four students were shot dead by national guard troops at Kent State University in May 1970—but he also acknowledged that most in the protest movement were “very peaceful” and said he would withhold judgement about the shooting until after a factual investigation. Trump’s tactics have been effective for helping him maintain a minority base of fervent supporters, says Dallek. “They can all get behind this idea that whatever is happening within MAGA is much less worse than the threat of ‘the radical left.’” He adds: “It justifies, after the fact, his very aggressive and even extremist policies, including the unleashing of ICE on blue cities and states. The narrative he creates says to all his supporters that what he’s doing is ‘destroying the enemy within,’ that he’s taking care of the scourge that he promised to address. I think it’s a mistake to discount just how powerful that can be.” Trump provokes so much news and controversy for the public to process that his exploitation of violent tragedies tends to fade quickly from consciousness. The rhetoric has an intended effect, then attention is gone. But scrutiny of recent disasters reveals the clear pattern by which Trump has built up a leftist bogeyman (including designating antifa a domestic terrorist group) and has further cultivated contempt for immigrants and political adversaries. “WITH GOD AS MY WITNESS” When Charlie Kirk was assassinated last September, the Trump White House emphasized blame, rapidly and without evidence, on a broad conspiracy. Law enforcement authorities announced in the initial aftermath that the suspect charged in the killing, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, likely acted alone—and no evidence to the contrary has emerged in the more than four months since. Nevertheless, top Trump aide Stephen Miller hammered home the preferred narrative on Kirk’s former podcast, in a conversation with Vance that was live-streamed from the White House five days after the killing. “It is a vast domestic terror movement,” Miller said. “And with God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security, and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle, and destroy these networks…and we will do it in Charlie’s name.” Attorney General Pam Bondi pushed broader blame in an interview with ABC News: “Who killed Charlie?” she asked. “Left-wing radicals, and they will be held accountable.” On Newsmax, Dan Bongino, then the FBI deputy director, leaned into talk of investigating a possible conspiracy. > “That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent.” Inside a Phoenix stadium 11 days after the killing, Trump led the memorializing of Kirk as a persecuted martyr. He said that Kirk had faced “menacing hate” everywhere on his campus tours from “rage-filled radicals.” He denounced “antifa terrorists” and claimed that “many of these people” allegedly targeting Kirk were highly paid “agitators.” In an especially dark turn, Trump went off script after saying that Kirk was a “noble spirit” with a forgiving view of the political opposition. “That’s where I disagreed with Charlie,” Trump added, waxing sardonic. “I hate my opponent. And I don’t want the best for them.” “ANOTHER TARGETED ATTACK ON CHRISTIANS” Later in September, a man committed a mass shooting and arson at a Mormon church in Michigan and was quickly killed by police. Less than three hours afterward, Trump commented on social media: “The suspect is dead, but there is still a lot to learn.” In that same post, however, he declared a motive: “This appears to be yet another targeted attack on Christians in the United States of America.” Asked the next morning about motive on Fox & Friends, Leavitt said she’d learned from FBI director Kash Patel that all they knew so far was that the killer “hated people of the Mormon faith.” Further media reporting on the perpetrator, who killed four victims and injured eight others, soon complicated the Trump narrative of a war on Christianity. Friends said that 40-year-old Thomas Sanford was a right-wing Republican. Social media posts showed he’d backed Trump for president, and recently a Trump sign had been displayed on his home. His grievance with the Mormon church appeared to hinge specifically on a rough breakup he’d gone through years prior with a Mormon girlfriend. He was an ex-Marine who’d served in Iraq and had a history of substance abuse. He had a young son with a rare genetic disorder, a source of emotional and financial strain. Sanford, in other words, was like many other suicidal mass killers: his pathway to violence was complex, with no clear ideological explanation. The Trump White House said nothing further. Media coverage dwindled. But there was evidence from the start that some people had perceived the source of the massacre the way Trump wanted: As a Wall Street Journal reporter described from near the scene that day, “I’ve heard people yelling out car windows about radical leftists.” “SO WHACKED OUT” Depending on who the victims are, Trump’s divisiveness has taken other forms—including what he doesn’t say or do in the aftermath. Back in June of last year, when a man in Minnesota hunted two Democratic state lawmakers at their homes, fatally shooting former House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband and wounding Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, Trump was notably muted as a search was underway for the suspect. Trump offered only a brief, uncharacteristic written statement, posted by Leavitt on his behalf, in which he denounced the violence generally and said that the DOJ and FBI were fully on the case. After the suspect was captured and evidence emerged that he was a Trump supporter who held extreme far-right views, Trump began using media interviews to trash Gov. Tim Walz as “grossly incompetent” and “a terrible governor.” Normally after such a rare, high-stakes catastrophe, a president would offer support to regional leaders directly impacted, but not in this case. Trump sowed uncertainty in the media about whether he would reach out to Walz, and when asked again three days after the assassinations, he scoffed. “I think the governor of Minnesota is so whacked out. I’m not calling him,” he said. “The guy doesn’t have a clue. He’s a mess.” Three months later, when asked by a reporter why he hadn’t ordered US flags lowered in honor of Hortman—as he had just done for Kirk—Trump said he was “not familiar” with who Hortman was. He added that he “wouldn’t have thought of” lowering flags for her and blamed Walz for not making the request. Earlier this January, Trump promoted a delusional conspiracy theory on social media suggesting that Walz himself was behind Hortman’s killing. “WE DON’T WANT THEM IN OUR COUNTRY” After an Afghan national gunned down two National Guard members in a terrorist attack just before Thanksgiving in Washington, DC, Trump unleashed a broad tirade against immigrants. The shooter had first been resettled in the US in 2021 under Operation Allies Welcome, a program for some who’d fought alongside the US military in Afghanistan. But although the shooter had later been approved for asylum under the Trump administration in 2025, Trump railed against his predecessor, vowing to “re-examine every single alien who has entered our country from Afghanistan under Biden.” In those same remarks from Mar-a-Lago the day of the attack, Trump went on to demonize “hundreds of thousands of Somalians” in Minnesota (overstating and misnaming that population). He blamed them for “ripping off billions of dollars” and alleged they hate America. Trump soon amped up his dehumanizing rhetoric as ICE began aggressive operations targeting Somalis and others in the Minneapolis region. During a Dec. 2 cabinet meeting broadcast live, the president laced into Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, whom he has vilified for years: “She’s garbage. Her friends are garbage. These aren’t people who work.” He said further of the Somali community, “When they come from hell and they complain and do nothing but bitch, we don’t want them in our country. Let them go back to where they came from and fix it.” Trump’s team applauded as Vance pounded the table enthusiastically. “A VERY SAD THING HAPPENED LAST NIGHT” Trump’s reaction to another high-profile tragedy late last year seemed especially revealing. It is difficult to conceive of any purpose—other than to express vengeful satisfaction and provoke outrage—for his response to the news that Rob and Michele Reiner had been stabbed to death in their home, and that their long-troubled son Nick was the suspected killer. Trump’s victim-blaming post on social media was bizarre, degrading, and grim: “A very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood. Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michele, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME… He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness.” The outrage came indeed. (“We are led by the most loathsome human being ever to occupy the White House,” wrote conservative columnist Bret Stephens.) This pattern of conduct from Trump may be pushing the nation farther down a dark path, says Dallek, the historian. One concern is that the more violent events we have, the more divided the country could become. “Because the interpretation of those events by different factions is so in conflict, each violent episode worsens the atmosphere. It inflames people on all sides, and it’s impossible at that point for reason to triumph over the fury that people feel, in some cases justifiably.” > Trump has made clear repeatedly that he may further attempt to use the > American military against Americans. The risk has heightened around the killing of Renee Good and as ICE and Border Patrol operations have grown more lawless and violent. In Dallek’s view, Trump’s signals have been disturbingly clear: disinterest in the real facts of what’s happening on the ground, a total absence of accountability, and the White House doubling down on claims that it is their militarized deportation forces, not communities, that are under siege. “To all ICE officers,” Miller declared on Fox News this week, “you have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties.” “It creates a kind of permission structure,” Dallek says. “I think the leaders of the Trump administration have told ICE and Border Patrol to take off the gloves, to be very aggressive. Now we are seeing the results of that message on the streets of American cities.” Trump’s latest threat has long been building. Though the federal courts recently thwarted some of his extended deployments of National Guard troops, he has made clear repeatedly that he may further attempt to use the American military against Americans. “We have an Insurrection Act for a reason,” he told reporters in the Oval Office last fall. “If people were being killed and courts were holding us up, or governors or mayors were holding us up, sure, I’d do that.”

In Iran, millions of protesters have taken to the streets to protest the repressive religious regime that has ruled the country for more than four decades. The response of the government, led by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has been swift and brutal, with thousands of protesters reportedly killed. All over the world, onlookers are cheering the courage of the Iranian people who are risking their lives to fight for their freedom. In a video posted on X, Reza Pahlavi, the son of the shah who led the country for 38 years until he was ousted by the current regime in 1979, vowed, “We will completely bring the Islamic Republic and its worn-out, fragile apparatus of repression to its knees.” In a Tuesday post on Truth Social, President Donald Trump encouraged the Iranian people to “KEEP PROTESTING—TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!!” But for some Christians, the Iranian protests are more than just a popular uprising; they are the fulfillment of ancient Biblical prophecies that foretell the second coming of the Messiah. Last June, shortly after the United States bombed Iran, I wrote about the US evangelicals who were cheering that move: > Broadly speaking—though there are certainly exceptions—many of the most ardent > supporters of Trump’s decision to bomb Iran identify as Christian Zionists, a > group that believes that Israel and the Jewish people will play a key role in > bringing about the second coming of the Messiah. As Christians, they are > called to hasten this scenario, says Matthew Taylor, a senior scholar at the > Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies in Baltimore and author > of The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening > Our Democracy. “The mission, so to speak, is to get the Jews back to Israel > and to establish themselves within Israel,” he says. “Then you fulfill the > preconditions, or one of the preconditions, for the second coming.” The dark side of this theology, Taylor added, is that in this version of the end times, once the Messiah comes, the Jews will either convert to Christianity or perish. Ben Lorber, a senior research associate with the far-right monitoring group Political Research Associates, explained via email this week that for Christian Zionists, Iran is “an embodiment of the satanic force of fundamentalist Islam, arrayed in a ‘clash of civilizations’ against the Judeo-Christian West, represented by America and Israel.” The uprising, therefore, is a good thing—but not only because of liberation from an oppressive regime. “An apocalyptic war between these players is often seen as a precondition and sure sign of the End Times,” and by extension, the second coming. Christian Zionists agree on those broad strokes, but they’re a little fuzzier on the details—there is some disagreement as to exactly what part of the Bible predicts the current geopolitical situation. Some believe that God is using President Trump to protect Israel from Iran. As I wrote in June:   > Hours before news of the bombing broke, Lance Wallnau, an influential > [charismatic Christian] leader with robust ties to the Trump > administration—last year, he hosted a Pennsylvania campaign event for JD > Vance—warned his 129,000 followers on X, “Satan would love to crush Israel, > humiliate the United States, destroy President Trump’s hope of recovery for > America, and plunge the world into war.” But then he reassured them: “That’s > not going to happen. Why? I was reminded again just a few moments ago what the > Lord told me about Donald Trump in 2015.” He explained that he had received a > message from God that Trump was a “modern-day Cyrus,” an Old Testament Persian > king whom God used to free the Jews, his chosen people. In a video posted two > days after the bombing, Wallnau concluded that the prophecy was coming true. > “Jesus is coming back, and I believe this is all part of him setting the stage > for his return,” he said. For other evangelicals, current events echo the Old Testament book of Daniel, in which Michael, Israel’s guardian angel, battles a demon named the Prince of Persia. After a long period of suffering and much turmoil, God ultimately wins. Others see yet another Bible story playing out—but with the same outcome. Last week, the Christian Zionist news site Israel365 News ran a story laying out the details of the prophecy. This particular prophecy can be found in the book of Jeremiah, in which God promises to wipe out the brutal military forces in the Iranian city of Elam before restoring order there. Israel365’s article focuses on Marziyeh Amirizadeh, an Iranian Christian who fled to the United States when she was imprisoned and sentenced to death for her conversion. In it, she describes a 2009 dream she had when she was in prison. “God said that He is giving a chance to these people to repent, and if they do not, He will destroy them all,” she explains. And now, with the protests, “God’s justice against the evil rulers of Iran has already started, and he will destroy them all to restore his kingdom through Jesus.” “The Bible can open the eyes of Iranians to the truth,” she adds. “Therefore, inviting Iranians to Christianity is very important because the majority of Iranians have turned their back on Islam and do not want to be Muslims anymore.” > “Inviting Iranians to Christianity is very important because the majority of > Iranians have turned their back on Islam and do not want to be Muslims > anymore.” Her remarks refer to widespread claims that Muslims in Iran are converting to Islam in droves. In an article last year, for example, the Christian Broadcasting Network reported that “millions” of Iranian Muslims had recently converted to Christianity and that most of the country’s mosques had closed as a result. The claims of the extent of the conversions are impossible to verify—there is scant hard evidence of a dramatic uptick in them. Practicing Christianity is illegal in Iran, and converts can face the death penalty. But believers remain convinced that the uprising is part of a cosmic plan. Sean Feucht, a Christian nationalist musician who organizes prayer rallies at state capital buildings, told his 205,000 followers on X last week, “While they build mosques across Texas, they are burning them down in Iran!” He added a lion emoji, which some evangelical Christians use to symbolize Jesus. In a blog post on Tuesday, Colorado evangelist Dutch Sheets, a key figure in the campaign to overturn the 2020 election and the lead-up to January 6, offered a prayer asking God to free the Iranian people “from Iran’s tyrannical government and the evil principality that controls it,” adding a plea for “an earth-shaking revival.”  Tim Ballard, who has been accused of sexual misconduct and is the leader of an anti-trafficking group, posted to his 166,000 followers earlier this month, “Jesus is also making a move in Iran.” Over the last few days, Trad West, an anonymous account on X with 430,000 followers, has repeatedly posted “Iran will be Christian.” As the protests wear on, the government’s retaliation is intensifying. With information on the crackdown tightly controlled by the regime, and strictly curtailed citizen access to the internet, the precise death toll so far is unclear. According to reporting from CBS, the UK government estimates that 2,000 protesters have been killed, while some activists believe the total could be as much as 10 times that figure.      “Revolution is inevitable in Iran,” Feucht, the Christian musician, said in another tweet. “It’s prophecy, and it is going to happen.”

Dan McClellan has spent much of his life learning—and relearning—what the Bible and its authors were trying to tell us. But the years he spent in graduate school studying Hebrew texts, Near Eastern cultures, and the concept of deity taught him something else: The way scholars talk about the Bible is much different from how churchgoers—or most people on social media—talk about it. So several years ago, McClellan began pushing back against what he saw as misguided biblical interpretations online and found an audience. Today, he has almost 1 million followers on TikTok who look for his thoughts on topics like the “sin of empathy,” what the Bible says about slavery, or maybe just to see what graphic T-shirt he has decided to wear that day. (He confesses to also being a comic book nerd.) But one strand of thought that weaves through many of his videos is how Christian nationalists have recently used the Bible to gain political power. Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. “The hot new thing right now is to be a Christian nationalist,” says McClellan, who also wrote The Bible Says So: What We Get Right (and Wrong) About Scripture’s Most Controversial Issues. “And I think a lot of people are jumping at the opportunity to get on board this attempt to take over the government on the part of Christians. And unfortunately, it means hurting an awful lot of people along the way.” On this week’s More To The Story, McClellan sits down with host Al Letson to talk about the ways people throughout history have used the Bible to serve their own interests and describes a time when his own perspective of the Bible was challenged. This is an update of an episode that originally aired in July 2025. This following interview was edited for length and clarity. More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Al Letson: So you got a new book out, but wait, before we get to that, before we get to that, I should tell my listeners that I am such a huge fan of your work. I’ve been following you for a while and I think I came across your work because I’m the son of a preacher man, grew up in the church and definitely have my own religious beliefs. But what I love about the work that you do is you are just kind of demystifying the Bible and putting it in context. How did you end up doing this type of work, for lack of better term, fact-checking people’s conception of the Bible on TikTok and Instagram? Dan McClellan: Yeah, that was definitely not what I was aimed at when I started graduate school. In fact, I think from an academic point of view, my career looks more like a failure than anything else. Because I have taught at some universities, but never on a full-time basis. I don’t have a tenure-track position or anything like that. But something that has always been a concern of mine, even when I was an undergraduate and then moving into graduate school was the fact that the way scholars and experts talk about the Bible and think about the Bible is very, very different from the way the folks on the street or in the pews think and talk about the Bible. There’s a very big gap between those two. And the more I learned about the Bible and an academic approach to the Bible, the more that gap bothered me and the more I wanted to be able to share the insights that come from that expertise with the folks on the street and in the pews, which is not an easy thing to do, not only because it requires packaging frequently very complex concepts into things that are more easily digestible, but also because there tends to be a lot of pushback from the streets and the pews when you say, “Actually, that’s not what the Bible is like, it’s more like this.” Because of how deeply embedded in their worldviews their own understandings of the Bible are. And so I’ve always tried to engage on social media with the discourse about the Bible and religion. And I’ve always tried to combat the spread of misinformation and speak out against hoaxes and fake artifacts that people try to pawn off as real, have been doing this for a long time on blogs and on message boards and on Facebook and things like that. And the reach is just not that great on those channels. And then for whatever reason, I stumble across TikTok and suddenly I’m able to find an audience that is interested in someone who is there to call balls and strikes rather than to try to defend one dogma or one identity over and against the other. And I’m very happy to be in a position where I say that I combat the spread of misinformation about the Bible and religion for a living. And I wouldn’t take a university position right now if somebody offered me one. So very happy to be in the position I am right now. If any of our listeners have not seen you on TikTok or Instagram and they’re just listening to this conversation and they’re being introduced to you for the first time, I think they would be surprised to know that you’re also a huge pop culture nerd, like myself, a specific type of nerd though. You’re a comic book nerd. I mean, I’m sure you cover many nerddoms, but the one we definitely have in common is comic book and so which makes your videos fun. I think, from what I gather, there are an awful lot of folks out there who find my work relatable precisely because I do not come across as some stuffed shirt, Ivory tower academic. I’m just another dude who likes to wear graphic tees and likes to read comic books and stuff like that. And so I mean, how much better off could things be for me that the things that I enjoy are things that my audience enjoys and that I get to just riff about? So when I think about you on TikTok, I mean, basically you’re fact-checking people who are bending the message of the Bible for their own purposes. I mean, people have been doing this since the Bible was written. But today with social media, those interpretations are now being delivered in a new and really effective way. Yeah. I think the Bible for a long time has been viewed as the highest authority, and particularly after the Reformation when a lot of Christians got rid of everything else and now all we have is the Bible. But if you have something, a text that is supposed to be God’s very word and inspired and inerrant and that is the ultimate authority, if you can leverage that in support of your identity markers, in support of your rhetorical goals and everything like that, that’s a powerful tool in structuring power and values and boundaries. And so it becomes the… That’s the holy grail. That’s what you need to have on your side. But because it’s a text, it has no inherent meaning. It has to be interpreted, which then means whoever best interprets the text in support of their ideologies is going to be able to leverage that ultimate authority. And so I think an awful lot of people spend an awful lot of time trying to read their own ideologies and their own identity politics into the text because that is a very attractive instrument that they can then leverage to serve their own ends. And unfortunately, far too often that means powerful people using that as a tool against less powerful people and groups. And I think that’s particularly true today. I would say that when we look at the way religion is being used to fight against things like homosexuality, the way the Bible is being used to reframe slavery. There was one clip where Charlie Kirk was a person that you were taking his, I wouldn’t say misinformation, I would say disinformation because I think that he actually knows the truth of what he’s saying, as someone that knows the Bible a little bit, even I can look at the things he’s saying and be like, “What are you talking about?” Yeah, he’s an example of somebody I get tagged in his videos a lot and I try not to engage unless there’s a plausible case to be made that what he’s talking about overlaps with the Bible. That’s an example of somebody who right now is trying to leverage the Bible in defense of Christian nationalism because that’s the hot new thing right now is to be a Christian nationalist. And I think a lot of people are jumping at the opportunity to get on board this attempt to take over the government on the part of Christians. And unfortunately, it means hurting an awful lot of people along the way and structuring everything to serve the interests of already privileged and powerful groups over and against the interests of already vulnerable groups. I think folks who love power more than they love people are the actual problem that is causing a lot of the social ills that we have today. And unfortunately, the Bible is very frequently one of the main instruments that we find in the hands of those people. A couple months ago, the thing that I was hearing a lot on social media specifically from right wing religious folks is the idea that there’s the sin of empathy. And on its surface I thought it was laughable, but I have you here now. So my question is is there anywhere in the Bible that talks about the sin of empathy? Certainly not. There are certainly times when in narratives God will say, “Show no mercy,” or something like that. And these are particularly problematic passages where God says, “You will go through the town and you will kill everything that breathes, men, women, children, the suckling baby. Show no mercy.” And so I think you could interpret that to mean there are times when God does not want you to be empathetic, at least there are times when the narrative calls for that. But I think we can point out that’s a bad narrative and that’s a bad message. There’s certainly no point where anyone says empathy is a sin just in general. And the notion of the sin of empathy is just an attempt to try to overturn the fact that we’re social creatures and we are evolutionarily and experientially predisposed to feel what other people are feeling. That is what allows us to cooperate. That’s what allows us to build larger and more complex social groups without things breaking down. Empathy is important to the survival of humanity, but it has a negative byproduct because we all understand ourselves according to specific sets of social identities. And if you have a social identity, you have an in-group and then you have an out-group. And so empathy can be problematic when we empathize with the in-group to the degree that we then become antagonistic toward the out-group. We call that parochial empathy. If you are empathetic toward the people you identify with to the degree that you then antagonize and harm the out-group, that can be harmful. But I don’t think that’s what people are talking about when they are talking about the sin of empathy because those are the people who are overwhelmingly trying to defend precisely parochial empathy because they’re trying to convince others it’s bad for us to empathize with undocumented immigrants. It’s bad for us to empathize with people from other nations. It’s bad for us to empathize with either conservatives or liberals. I think empathy that is outward looking is good. Empathy that is parochial, I mean, it serves a purpose. Smaller groups that are threatened, that are vulnerable, in order for those identities to survive, they have to kind of circle the wagons and you have to kind of be a little protective of your identity. This is what the Judeans and the Jewish folks throughout history have had to do. And that’s necessary, I think, in certain contexts for the survival and the protection of vulnerable identities. But once you become the oppressor, once you become the empire, once you become the dominant group to then say the out-group is bad and to exercise that parochial empathy, I think that becomes phenomenally harmful. And so ironically, there can be a way that empathy is bad and the folks who talk about the sin of empathy are primarily defending the bad kind of empathy and criticizing the good kind of empathy. So I think they have it precisely backwards. And I think all they’re trying to do is protect their own privilege and power. Yeah. I mean, I think they have it backwards, but I think they have it backwards purposefully so. I think that there are a lot of people who don’t know any better and they say things based in their ignorance, but I also think there are a lot of people who interpret the text in a way that justifies the things that they already believe to be right. It’s good for them to… I mean, sometimes when I’m listening to some folks talk about the Bible and Jesus, the image of Jesus that comes in my mind is Jesus riding horseback on a Tyrannosaurus Rex with two sub-machine guns in his hand. With an AK, yeah. Yeah, exactly. It’s like that’s not the Jesus that I see, but I understand how some people can twist their beliefs to fit that image. Yeah. And you do, anytime you have these movements, you’ve got a lot of people who are there along for the ride. They’re convinced of things, but a lot of the thought leaders and a lot of the people who are driving the car are conscious of what they’re doing, are very intentionally doing it. So tell me about your book. why’d you write it? All the things. All the things. It’s called The Bible Says So: What We Get Right and Wrong About Scripture’s Most Controversial Issues. The framing that I came up with is the Bible says so because one of the most common things that I’m confronting in social media is the notion that the Bible says X, Y, and Z. And so that was the genesis of this manuscript that turned into this book, which has 18 different chapters, an intro, and then I give a little broad-level view of how we got the Bible. But then 18 different chapters, each one addresses a different claim about what the Bible says. So the Bible says homosexuality is an abomination. The Bible says God created the universe out of nothing. The Bible says you should beat your kids. A lot of different claims about what the Bible says. And in each chapter I try to go through and share what the data actually indicate about what the authors and earliest audiences of these biblical texts understood the text to be doing and to be saying, where normally when people say the Bible says X, Y or Z, they’re sharing what makes the Bible meaningful and useful to them in their specific circumstances. And what I do is try to say, “I’m going to set that aside and I’m going to try to understand what would’ve made this text meaningful and useful to its authors and earliest audiences irrespective of how meaningful and useful that may make it to us.” And so I try to share what we think the authors were trying to say when they wrote whatever they did right in the Bible. All of your studies that you’ve… And you’ve gone deep into all of this, is it fair to look at the Bible as a historical document or do you see the Bible more as a collection of stories that try to teach people, specifically people of that time how to live their lives, like how to be safe, how to create community, all of those things? I think there’s a degree to which many parts of the Bible are historical, but I think that’s incidental. The Bible was certainly not written as a history book. And I think overwhelmingly, the Bible is a collection of texts from that time period that were intended to try to do certain things with the audiences. It wasn’t also always necessarily about how to live right. I think a lot of the times it’s about trying to establish who’s in control and what kind of understanding of our identity we should have and things like that. So there are a lot of different rhetorical goals going on, and sometimes one set of authors might be arguing against another set of authors. You see that particularly between Samuel and Kings and Chronicles. You have a lot of things being changed because the editors of Chronicles were like, “I don’t like the way you do it. I’m going to do it this other way.” And they’re trying to make different points. But yeah, they’re definitely rhetorical texts. They’re definitely to some degree propagandistic texts, and particularly a lot of the historical texts having to do with the Kings and things like that in the Hebrew Bible. Once we get into the New Testament, I think it’s probably a little more in line with texts intended to help people understand how to live according to the opinion of the authors. Tell me if this categorization is fair. The God of the Old Testament is, my dad would kill me if he heard me say this, but the God of the Old Testament feels very much a God of get off my lawn, kids and very much like an angry wrathful God, like, “You step in line with me or I will smite you. I will burn whole cities down. And if you turn around and look at those cities, I will turn you into pillars of salt. I don’t mess around. There’s no mercy.” Then after Jesus is born and Jesus lives his life, the God we meet there is a much more generous and loving God, the God who hung out with tax collectors, who hung out with prostitutes, who told you to love your neighbor as you would love yourself, all of these things that are a much more softer and loving deity than what we see in the Old Testament. Would you agree that that’s true? I would agree that that’s a very common interpretation. And I would agree that on the surface, if we’re not looking incredibly closely, it can seem like that. But I think there’s a problem with that perspective, and there are a few things going on here. Because you have an angry vindictive God in the New Testament as well, but it’s isolated to only a couple places and primarily like the Book of Revelation represents a deity that will bathe its sword in the blood of victims, and you also find a phenomenally merciful and long-suffering God in different parts of the Hebrew Bible. And this is one of the reasons that I’ve tried to point out there’s no one God of the Bible. You have numerous different divine profiles being represented throughout both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. Different authors are going to represent God in whatever ways serve their own rhetorical interests and goals, but there is a chronological trajectory as well. As things are changing in the world in societies, you go from far more warfare, far more conflict between societies to a time period when there’s still war and conflict, but there’s a lot more advocacy for peace. And it’s not the division between the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament where that pivots, it’s actually before the end of the Hebrew Bible. I think that that dichotomy of the vindictive and violent God of the Hebrew Bible and the loving merciful God of the New Testament also is problematic from an antisemitism point of view because that has taken up frequently to frame the God of the Jewish people as evil and the God of Christianity as good. And that facilitates, or it historically has facilitated a lot of problems. So I try to help people understand that you’ve got a mix of both in both sets of texts, and it’s really your choice what you choose to emphasize, give priority to and center. This is exactly why I love your videos because I have a long-held belief that I’ve thought about over years. And then you come along and you blow it all up. You blow it all. Not only do you blow it up, you point out the places where that belief is problematic because until you said it, I never would’ve thought of it in the frame of like antisemitic. It’s the blind spot, I don’t see it like that, but when you frame it in that way, I get it. I get why that thinking is totally problematic, and I think that’s the power of what you do on social media. And that’s something that it’s a lesson I had to learn myself as well. Because I saw somebody posted on Twitter many years ago a picture of Santa Claus in somebody’s living room, but he was angry and had an ax or something, and there’s a little kid on the stairs looking around the corner and says, “Oh, no, it’s Old Testament Santa.” And I was like, “Aha.” And I shared this and some of my Jewish scholar friends immediately were like, “Bad form. Here’s why this is bad.” And it had never occurred to me either, and then I couldn’t unsee it. Once I accepted that people with very different experiences are going to feel very differently about the joke and what’s being expressed there, I couldn’t unsee that. It’s interesting to me growing up in the Baptist church that when I was in church and in the church that I went to, the Bible verse that I heard more than anything was that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of the needle than a rich man to enter the gates of heaven. And that was kind of a thing in the church that I was in, and most of the churches that I went to, that wealth did not equate that you were a pious and good person. It was more the opposite, that wealth meant that your actions had to be more because it was going to be hard for you to get through the gates of heaven. And it seems that that Bible verse is completely forgotten by, well, A, like a lot of these Christian nationalists or preachers who engage in the prosperity gospel. Yeah, it’s a big issue. And I mean, there are ways that people try to get around that verse. They say that, “Oh, eye have the needle doesn’t mean an actual sewing needle. It refers to what’s called a wicked gate, a little door that is inside of the main door of the city gate.” And so it just means that you have to open the little door and the pack has to be taken off the camel and they have to shimmy through on their knees. And I don’t think these people have ever seen a camel in real life who are saying this because camels are not going to do that. But there were no such gates anywhere in, around or near Jerusalem, anywhere near the time of the composition of the New Testament. And this is very clearly hyperbole that is coming at the end of a story about a rich young ruler comes to Jesus and says, “I’ve kept all the commandments since my youth. What do I have to do to inherit the kingdom of God?” And Jesus says, “Sell everything you own and give it to the poor.” And then it says the man went away sad because he had a lot of possessions. And that’s where Jesus goes, “Tsk, tsk. It’s going to be hard for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven,” and then gives this hyperbolic notion of a camel passing through the eye of a needle. And for people who try to endorse a prosperity gospel interpretation of this, not only is it incredibly hard to do and it’s never really convincing unless you are already there and just need to be made to feel like it’s not impossible. But like everywhere else in the gospels, Jesus says, “You cannot serve God and mammon.” And Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor.” And you can look in the sermon on the Mount and in Matthew 5, and it says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” And so people say, “Aha. It doesn’t say… That’s not about economic poverty, that’s about humility.” But you can then go to the sermon on the plain in the Gospel of Luke and it just says, “Blessed are the poor.” Which very clearly is referring to economic poverty. As I said before, the Bible is a text. It has no inherent meaning. We create meaning in negotiation with the text, which means we’re bringing our experiences and our understanding to the text, and that’s generating the meaning. And if you have experienced privilege and wealth your whole life, you’re going to interpret the Bible in a way that makes that okay. It’s very rare that we have someone in a position like that who comes to the text and can think critically enough to realize, “This is about me. This is saying that I am the problem. I better fix myself.” That’s phenomenally rare. What is far more common is for someone to bring their own experiences to the text and say, “I was right all along. The problem is everybody else. The problem is not me. I can find endorsement or validation of my own worldviews and my own perspectives and my own hatred and my own bigotry in the text and that authorizes and validates it.” And that’s what we see going on overwhelmingly in public discourse about the Bible. Tough question that you’ve probably been asked a million times before, but the fact that you are doing such deep research on the Bible, how does that affect your religious belief? And I think for a long time I assumed that you are an atheist, that you didn’t believe in God, but then you did a video and you talked about being a Mormon, and I was like, “Wow, okay. That’s a wrinkle. That’s something there.” So yeah, talk to me about that. How do you balance the two things? Well, and this is something I’ve for a long time said, I don’t talk about my personal beliefs on social media, so that’s a boundary that I try to maintain. But what I will say is that I have always tried very, very hard ever since I started formally studying the Bible to ensure that I was compartmentalizing my academic approach to the Bible from my devotional approach to the Bible, keeping them firmly separate, which is not an easy thing to do because I was raised more or less without religion. And like I mentioned earlier, I joined the LDS church as an adult. I was 20 years old. I didn’t really have much that I had to deconstruct when I started studying the Bible academically. So I would say that a lot of people reach out to me for help with deconstruction, for help with trying to understand these things through a prism of faith. And that’s where I say, “That’s above my pay grade.” I don’t take a pastoral approach to this. I’m not here to hold anybody’s hand through faith crises and things like that. There are content creators out there who do that kind of thing. I’m just here to try to present the data and my own personal grappling with that is something that is private. So I do keep that separate. Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.

Democrats won big on Tuesday night, with victories in high-profile races across the country, including that of 34-year-old Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani in New York City’s mayoral race, centrists Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill in, respectively, Virginia’s and New Jersey’s gubernatorial races. On Wednesday, Dems celebrated their victories on social media, while Republicans grappled with their losses. Some chalked up their defeat to strategic errors, blaming their party for overemphasizing culture war issues and failing to address voters’ affordability concerns. President Donald Trump insisted on Truth Social that the government shutdown was to blame, as well as the fact that he was not on the ballot. But the far-right had some different takes. First up, the TheoBros, a network of mostly millennial self-proclaimed Christian nationalist pastors and influencers who have fashioned themselves as the shock jocks of X. One of the most outspoken, Texas pastor Joel Webbon, had this to say: > The reason we lose elections is simple: > > 1) We imported millions of foreigners, replacing the native population from > 90% White to 59% White. > > 2) We let women vote. https://t.co/eGNkpqIDw2 > > — Joel Webbon (@rightresponsem) November 5, 2025 In recent weeks, Webbon, who whines regularly about the 19th Amendment, has been responding to women who challenge his views with the kind of pie he thinks they should be baking—instead of speaking. Webbon isn’t the only TheoBro perturbed about the enfranchisement of those pesky women. In response to a post about how women’s votes contributed to Democrats’ wins, Brian Sauvé, a podcaster and pastor in Ogden, Utah, tweeted to his 74,000 followers: > Repealing the 19th is the moderate position at this point. > https://t.co/OEHrsnqNBS > > — Brian Sauvé (@Brian_Sauve) November 5, 2025 But women were not the only GOP headache for Christian Nationalists and the far right. Others waxed melancholic about the Great Replacement, the conspiracy theory that blames the US government for deliberately allowing white Americans to be replaced by immigrants. Stephen Miller, White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Advisor, tweeted to his 1.6 million followers, “Understand what our immigration system has done to us.” Arizona pastor Dale Partridge, author of a book titled The Manliness of Christ, offered: > This is worse than NYC electing a tranny. > > This is the initiation of an Islamic colony in America’s largest city that > will take generations to undo. > > This is how Europe fell. It’s happening here. https://t.co/aIwdvvfsjT > > — Dale Partridge (@dalepartridge) November 5, 2025 Auron McIntyre, who hosts a show on the rightwing network The Blaze, told his 236,000 followers on X, “Really need the GOP to understand that Mamdani did not win because he won the argument, because he convinced people that communism works,” he continued. “He won because NYC is flooded with immigrants who don’t care about fleecing the country they came to.” > “Really need the GOP to understand that Mamdani did not win because he won the > argument, because he convinced people that communism works. He won because NYC > is flooded with immigrants who don’t care about fleecing the country they came > to.” William Wolfe, a Christian Nationalist who served in the first Trump administration as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense at the Pentagon and Director of Legislative Affairs at the State Department, blamed immigrants for Mamdani’s win. “Due to intentional mass replacement immigration, New York City is now a third-world metropolis wearing the Big Apple as a skin suit,” he posted to his 82,000 followers. “Americans didn’t elect Mamdani, foreigners did.” Kevin Dolan, convener of the pronatalist conference NatalCon, posited that the remarkable upset victory in New York could portend the same for Texas, where he lives: > Republican politicians want to frame the problem as sectional ("those damn > Californians") because they don't want to talk about replacement migration > > Texas is on the same trajectory as NY, with Greg Abbott's enthusiastic consent > https://t.co/Ek6PulSMSK > > — Bennett's Phylactery (@extradeadjcb) November 5, 2025 Could American foreign policy be the reason for the dismal election outcomes? Calvin Robinson, an Anglican pastor in Michigan with 445,000 followers on X who was defrocked after he gave an apparent Nazi salute last year, certainly thinks so. “Republicans should study this before the next election,” he tweeted. “If you cannot put America first, you may well lose to a commie Mohammedan implementing Taqqiyah,” the Muslim principle of concealing one’s faith in times of danger. Clint Russell, host of the far-right podcast Liberty Lockdown, posted a clip of “groyper” extremist Nick Fuentes talking about the importance of “America First” foreign policy. “My message to every MAGA Inc talking head who ignored what the America First people have been saying,” he posted to his 268,000 followers. “Oh, you got swept tonight? Good. Keep ignoring us at your peril.” For Fuentes, on the other hand, the Democrats’ victories were not a cause for reflection or casting blame. Riding the high from his wildly antisemitic discussion with rightwing broadcaster Tucker Carlson, Fuentes took to the far-right platform Rumble, where he has 477,000 followers, to portray Republicans’ loss as an opportunity for groypers to win over MAGA loyalists. “Approval ratings in the toilet, Epstein files covered up, blue Wave just happened,” he said. “But the groypers are jubilant.” “Don’t say the word ‘Jewry,’” he said. Instead, he advised, “Put on your mask and conceal yourself.” He instructed groypers to use the growing divisions within the MAGA movement as wedges to further infiltrate the Republican party and American institutions. “Charm them, kill them with kindness, endear yourself to them, make yourself indispensable and always, always conceal what you’re really about,” he said. “And then get into the damn Capitol.”

Sean Duffy has spent most of his adult life as a professional attention-seeker. He is a former reality TV star, for one, and also a former Fox News host. Tough luck, then, that in the second Trump administration, Duffy got stuck as secretary of the most dreary of federal agencies—transportation. When was the last time that the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration went viral? But Duffy has found a way to turn even the most mundane highway procurement matters into an opportunity for pandering to the MAGA base—and getting back on Fox News. His secret sauce? He has been enthusiastically using the agency to spread the Gospel and advance his mission to make America fecund again. “In Trump 2.0,” laments Peter Montgomery, the research director at the nonprofit civil liberties group, People for the American Way, “every place is a place to wage holy war.” Duffy was once the “resident playboy” on MTV’s “Real World,” where he danced naked, called a roommate a “bitch,” and talked about getting laid. Now, he’s a devout Catholic with nine children who never misses an opportunity to urge young men to get married and have big families. Legal experts say Duffy’s activities are a stark violation of the Constitution’s prohibition on mixing church and state, but his fervor seems to override his obligation to uphold the law. Shortly after Duffy joined a Trump cabinet full of MAGA influencers, he made his first attempt to grab headlines and advance his religious mission by promising to prioritize transportation funding for areas with high birth and marriage rates. The policy was roundly panned as unworkable and failed to generate the sort of media coverage a camera-hungry secretary would like to see. Duffy was learning the hard way that, unlike other federal agencies—Health and Human Services, for instance, or Education—the Transportation Department is a tough spot from which to launch a culture war. After toiling away for a few months to excise Biden-era “woke” procurement requirements and “Green New Scam” projects, Duffy finally landed on a more promising vehicle for his Christian worldview: The US Merchant Marine Academy in Kings Point, New York. Something of an anachronism, USMMA is the only service academy that falls under the purview of the US Department of Transportation rather than the Defense Department. It trains midshipmen in marine engineering and other skills needed to run large commercial ships. Graduates serve as officers in various military branches and in the private maritime industry. But as the US merchant marine industry has dwindled to 188 ships, down from 282 in 2000, it has endured repeated calls to shut it down. “It’s an educational institution for an age that the US doesn’t participate in anymore,” Capt. John Konrad, the editor of the maritime industry blog, gCaptain, told the New York Times in 2012. A string of sexual assault scandals threatened the academy’s accreditation in 2016. A survey highlighted in a 2017 congressional oversight hearing found that USMMA had the highest rate of sexual assaults but the lowest rate of formal reports of any of the nation’s five military service academies. For all its shortcomings, the Merchant Marine academy’s backwater status has made it the perfect venue for Duffy’s one-man religious crusade. In early April, the secretary visited the academy and made an official DOT video for Good Friday in which he spoke “with an amazing group of young midshipmen about Jesus’ sacrifice for our sins.” The midshipmen—indeed, all men, even though the student body is more than 20 percent female—are shown talking to Duffy in the chapel, where they take turns quoting Bible passages to him. > On Good Friday, we commemorate the crucifixion of Jesus. During my visit to > the US Merchant Marine Academy, I spoke with an amazing group of young > midshipmen about Jesus’ sacrifice for our sins. > > A complaint from ONE “concerned citizen” got the Academy’s beautiful & > historic… pic.twitter.com/n66pgSLKOM > > — Secretary Sean Duffy (@SecDuffy) April 18, 2025 During his visit, Duffy discovered the perfect controversy on which to focus his righteous outrage. In his video, Duffy highlighted “Christ on the Water,” a 1944 10-by-19-foot painting near the academy chapel by Hunter Alexander Wood, a lieutenant in the US Maritime Service. In it, a giant glowing Jesus stands on a vast body of water, presiding over an open lifeboat of the survivors of a sunken merchant ship. The painting originally resided at the academy’s San Mateo, California, campus, but when it closed in 1947, “Christ on the Water” was moved to Kings Point and placed in Wiley Hall, a space that then served as a chapel. But in 1961, Wiley Hall became an administrative office, where for decades, midshipmen facing “honor boards” for misconduct were forced to sit in front of Jesus while they awaited disciplinary action. In early 2023, a group of more than a dozen fed-up alumni, staff, faculty, and midshipmen reached out to Mikey Weinstein, the founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, to complain about the overtly religious painting in the public space. Weinstein is a Jewish civil liberties lawyer and third-generation graduate of the US Air Force Academy, who spent 10 years working as a lawyer in the Judge Advocate General Corps and served as a legal counsel in the Reagan White House. The pugnacious advocate has been a thorn in the side of religious fundamentalists in the military for more than two decades. “Jerry Falwell used to refer to me as ‘the field general of the godless armies of Satan,’” he told me in a call from his hospital bed, where he was recovering from surgery. > “Its location in the administration building implies that the Academy > officially endorses Christianity over other faiths.” Immediately recognizing the constitutional issues with the Jesus painting, Weinstein fired off a complaint to Vice Admiral Joanna M. Nunan, whom President Joe Biden had appointed as the first woman to serve as superintendent of the USMMA. The painting, he wrote, has denigrated non-Christians. “Its location in the administration building implies that the Academy officially endorses Christianity over other faiths,” he continued, noting that his clients were Jewish, Muslim, Protestant, Roman Catholic, Atheist, Agnostic, Buddhist, and one Native American Spiritualist. Nunan quickly responded and hung drapes over the painting while plans were made to move it. The MAGA faithful in Congress were outraged. In February 2023, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) wrote to Nunan, suggesting that she was “overtly hostile to religion” and called Weinstein’s complaints an “objective absurdity.” (Nunan left her post a few months later.) Ohio Republican Rep. Mike Turner even got the House Armed Services Committee to insert language in a Defense authorization bill that would have made it illegal for servicemembers and Defense officials to communicate with Weinstein and MRFF. (The language failed to make it into the final bill.) In September 2023, after a significant restoration, “Christ in the Water” was rehung in the academy’s chapel. But anger over the painting apparently festered, leaving Duffy an opportunity. During his April visit to the academy, he gave a speech in which he promised to get funding to improve the campus, and then closed by saying, “Could we bring Jesus up from the basement?” The room erupted into cheers, which Duffy encouraged while he assured the crowd he would restore the painting to its previous glory in Wiley Hall. A few weeks later, the Newark airport had a massive meltdown, as air traffic controllers walked off the job and hundreds of flights were canceled for two straight weeks through the first part of May. Nonetheless, Duffy found time to keep the Jesus painting saga alive. He announced on his official government accounts that he had commissioned a replica of the painting to hang in his DOT office. Moving the painting was “a personal affront to the midshipman at the academy,” he said in a DOT video. “This was such a touching story for me, I thought, ‘let’s get a replica of the painting and hang it in a place of prominence here at DOT.’ It looks beautiful.” > The @USMMAO Christ on the Water painting is a beautiful reminder of the power > of faith when we need it most. > > While we work on getting the piece out of the academy’s basement and back in a > place of prominence, I figured there was no better place to hang a copy than > right here at… pic.twitter.com/zrhtS6JRmw > > — Secretary Sean Duffy (@SecDuffy) May 7, 2025 Coming to the rescue of “Jesus in the Water” allowed Duffy “to trash the Biden administration as woke (and by implication anti-Christian), something sure to win him points in the White House,” says Montgomery. “And it generated a whole lot of fawning coverage of Duffy in religious-right and right-wing media.” Among those who weighed in was Ted Cruz. “Your statement—’Can we bring Jesus up from the basement?’—was more than rhetorical. I trust it will be seen as an imperative,” Cruz wrote in a letter covered in the conservative Daily Wire. “Thank you for your principled leadership, for defending our nation’s religious heritage, and for working to ensure that this government-commissioned memorial is returned to its rightful place.” Duffy continued to use the academy for proselytizing. During his commencement speech in June, he offered graduates dating advice and urged them to “always work out,” get married, and have lots of kids. And then he declared, “There are two kinds of people in life: those who believe in God and those who think they’re God. There’s something beautiful, humbling, and properly ordered about a man and woman who understand that there is a power greater than themselves…A good sailor knows that in the end, only God can calm the seas and bring them to safety. So stay faithful and never underestimate the power of prayer.” > “There are two kinds of people in life: those who believe in God and those who > think they’re God. There’s something beautiful, humbling, and properly ordered > about a man and woman who understand that there is a power greater than > themselves.” His speech constituted “an astonishing violation of the Establishment Clause,” says Caroline Mala Corbin, a professor at the University of Miami law school. She says the First Amendment wasn’t just designed to separate church and state, but also to protect religious minorities, who may be coerced by a state-sanctioned religion to violate their own religious beliefs. “I’m willing to bet there are people in the Department of Transportation who have gone along with some religious activities that they felt really uncomfortable participating in,” she says. “And that’s why we have an Establishment Clause: So the government can’t force you to choose between your job and honoring your beliefs.” Duffy, a lawyer and former Wisconsin congressman, doesn’t seem familiar with that particular part of the Constitution. During a July hearing, Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) grilled him about his pledge to return the Jesus painting to the hall. “You don’t think the Establishment Clause prohibits favoring a single religion over all others?” he asked. Duffy responded, “I would just note that we have freedom of religion, not freedom from religion.” Huffman attempted to probe further, asking, “What’s the message to Jews and Muslims and Hindus and non-religious folks in their disciplinary proceedings?” As the two talked over each other in a contentious exchange, Huffman concluded, grumbling, “We have a First Amendment for a reason.” Duffy’s brazen use of government resources to promote his vision of Christianity doesn’t surprise some observers who’ve been warning of the creep of Christian nationalism in the US government for years. “It’s a pretty standard playbook among MAGA influencers to throw a little God into the mix if you want to make the base happy,” says Matthew Taylor, a senior Christian scholar at the nonprofit Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies. “It’s a great path to career advancement because it builds out their constituencies. [Duffy] just has a much more limited set of options than, say, Pete Hegseth.” As Duffy has been hard at work imposing English-only requirements on truckers, banning rainbow crosswalks, and making official DOT videos blaming Democrats for shutting down the government, he has continued to visit the Merchant Marine academy to spread the Word. In early September, he showed up for a football game and made an official video of himself praying with the “Christian” players in the locker room before it started. > I was moved by this moment of prayer with the incredible young men of > @USMMAFootball before their game on Friday. Thank you! God is good > pic.twitter.com/VoG6mzzpAa > > — Secretary Sean Duffy (@SecDuffy) September 9, 2025 Then, he walked along the sidelines offering pregame analysis as if he worked for ESPN. “The excitement on this field for this Academy is remarkable,” he said in a video, as players jogged by. “They have the most amazing prayer. You have Christian men dedicated to country, ready for a great game. This is America at its finest.” The video so enraged Weinstein that he dashed off an op-ed for the Daily Kos calling Duffy a “piece of shit” and noting that he’d “heard from Academy faculty, staff, midshipmen, and graduates who are neither Christians nor male and as you might imagine they are furious.” Duffy seems impervious to such complaints. On September 29, he put out an official DOT press release celebrating the “restoration” of “Christ on the Water” at the USMMA. The agency also produced an official YouTube video entitled, “Jesus Has Risen at the Merchant Marine Academy!” One of the midshipmen in the video thanks Duffy “for allowing us the opportunity to glorify God on campus.” Civil liberties groups find Duffy’s shameless use of federal resources to promote Christianity shocking. “The Department of Transportation’s duty is to serve the public—not to proselytize,” says Rachel Laser, President and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Weinstein was a little blunter. In a press release, he compared Duffy’s restoring the Jesus painting to “its original unconstitutional place” as “akin to a stray dog urinating on a neighborhood tree to mark its territory.” The Transportation secretary, he fumed, “is making sure to brand the Academy as conquered Christian nationalist territory. All others are not wanted and need not apply.” Of all the madness coming out of the Trump administration this year— the ICE violence, the destruction of the East Wing, the extrajudicial killings of people on boats in the Caribbean—Duffy using his official perch to promote Christianity may seem mild by comparison. But legal experts say his targeting of the USMMA, and the spread of Christian nationalism in the military more broadly, is potentially very dangerous. “Military officers are trained to resist unconstitutional orders,” explains Robert Tuttle, a professor of law and religion at George Washington University law school. “If you can have the troops believing they are fighting the cause of God and Christianity, you can get them to do things they might not do otherwise.” And in the current administration, where Trump has claimed the Lord saved him from an assassin’s bullet, he says, “You can very easily see how folks could get into a mindset that serving Trump is God’s will.” As with so many of the norms smashed by the Trump regime, there is no easy remedy for Duffy’s religious crusade. The Supreme Court has made it much more difficult to bring lawsuits over Establishment Clause violations. Weinstein says he’s considering legal action over the Jesus painting, but he needs a midshipman at the academy willing to head up the litigation—an extremely difficult challenge for a young person, he says. “If you become a plaintiff in a military system like this,” Weinstein says, “you are putting yourself in a position where you are like a tarantula on a wedding cake.” In the meantime, Weinstein has issued an alert urging parents to keep their kids away from the “unconstitutional, fundamentalist Christian nationalist filth-saturated institution that the US Merchant Marine Academy has tragically devolved into.” The Transportation Department, possibly too busy figuring out how to keep unpaid air traffic controllers on the job, did not respond to a request for comment.

Earlier this week, conservative commentator Tucker Carlson hosted far-right influencer Nick Fuentes on his livestream show. Carlson had undoubtedly anticipated a blockbuster interview, and Fuentes, the leader of the extremist “groyper” movement, delivered handsomely, offering a buffet of provocative sound bites designed to spread far and wide on social media. He made the case for the importance of Americans “to be pro-white,” sang the praises of brutal Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, and bemoaned the problem of “organized Jewry in America.” But perhaps the most widely shared moments of the discussion had to do with Carlson and Fuentes’ shared distaste for Christian Zionism, the popular evangelical movement that calls Christians to support Israel. The conversation began with Carlson and Fuentes musing about the origins of the neoconservative movement—populated by such notables as William Kristol and Irving Podhoretz—that they blame for interventionist US foreign policy. “It arises from Jewish leftists who were mugged by reality when they saw the surprise attack in the [1973] Yom Kippur war,” suggested Fuentes. This explanation didn’t satsify Carlson who countered, “But then how do you explain [US Israel ambassador] Mike Huckabee, [Texas senator] Ted Cruz, and [former national security adviser] John Bolton?” Carlson then went on to include, “George W. Bush, Karl Rove— all people I know personally who I’ve seen be seized by this brain virus. And they’re not Jewish. Most of them are self-described Christians.” He continued, “And then the Christian Zionists who are, well, Christian Zionists. What is that? I can just say for myself, I dislike them more than anybody, because it’s Christian heresy. And I’m offended by that as a Christian.” The backlash by the right wing on X was swift. In a tweet to his 411,000 followers, Will Chamberlain, an organizer of the influential National Conservatism conference, accused Carlson of betraying the memory of avid Israel supporter the late Charlie Kirk. An anonymous account with the name Insurrection Barbie tweeted to a million followers. “Christian Zionist here and I’ll gamble my eternal salvation on my theology over that of Tucker Carlson all day.” US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee told his two million followers, “Wasn’t aware that Tucker despises me. I do get that a lot from people not familiar with the Bible or history. Somehow, I will survive the animosity.” Jumping to Huckabee’s defense, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), who has 7.1 million followers on X, tweeted, “Mike Huckabee is a pastor and a patriot who loves America, loves Israel, and loves Jesus. I’m proud to be in his company!” There are, in fact, a lot of people in his company. In a recent piece, I wrote about the astounding size of this movement. > A 2013 poll by the Pew Research Center found that 82 percent of white American > evangelicals believe that Israel was given to the Jewish people by God, > compared with 81 percent of ultra-­Orthodox Jews and 44 percent of respondents > overall. A 2024 survey by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs found that 64 > percent of white evangelicals believed Israel’s actions in Gaza were > justified, compared with 32 percent of the American public overall. Christians > United for Israel, the evangelical Zionist group founded in 2006 by Texas > pastor John Hagee, claims 10 million members, more than the entire population > of 7.5 million Jews in the United States. The movement has enormous financial > heft: A 2018 investigation by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz found that > Christian groups had invested an estimated $50 to $65 million in Israeli > settlements in the West Bank over the previous decade. The online skirmish over Carlson’s remarks about Christian Zionists is only the latest evidence to emerge of a growing fissure on the right over the extent to which the United States should be involved in foreign conflicts, especially those in the Middle East. As I wrote in a piece around the time that the United States bombed Iran, Christian Zionism has everything to do with this schism: > Broadly speaking—though there are certainly exceptions—many of the most ardent > supporters of Trump’s decision to bomb Iran identify as Christian Zionists, a > group that believes that Israel and the Jewish people will play a key role in > bringing about the second coming of the Messiah. As Christians, they are > called to hasten this scenario, says Matthew Taylor, a senior scholar at the > Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies in Baltimore and author > of The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening > Our Democracy. “The mission, so to speak, is to get the Jews back to Israel > and to establish themselves within Israel,” he says. “Then you fulfill the > preconditions, or one of the preconditions, for the second coming.” Christian Zionists often profess to love both Israel and the Jewish people, but for many of them, this devotion is intrinsically tied to their beliefs about the fate of the Jews in the end times—and it’s not pretty: > During his first term, Taylor noted, Trump made strong connections with > influential figures in the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR, a charismatic > Christian movement that teaches followers to take “dominion” over all aspects > of society, including government. Over the last decade or so, Christian > Zionism has become an important part of NAR theology—so much so that during > worship, some adherents now wear Jewish prayer shawls and blow shofars, the > ram’s horn instruments that ancient Israelites used to call troops to battle > and still features in some Jewish holidays. This is an example of what Taylor > refers to as philosemitism—the idea of loving Jewish customs and cultures. But > within end-times theology lurks a dark side to Christian Zionists’ fixation on > Judaism. Once the Messiah arrives, many Christian Zionists are convinced that > Jews will convert en masse to Christianity; in many versions, those who don’t > convert will perish. It can be tricky to disentangle anti-interventionism from straight-up antisemitism—especially after the October 7 Hamas attacks that kicked off the catastrophic war in Gaza. But it’s worth noting that the Christian Zionist faction of the pro-interventionist side isn’t necessarily in it for the love of the Jewish people, either. “If you actually read up on antisemitism and philosemitism,” Taylor told me, “they really are two sides of the same coin.” Image credit: Jason Koerner/Getty; Al Drago/CNP/Zuma, Bob Daemmrich/Zuma (2), Mattie Neretin/CNP/Zuma