These People are Not Conservatives
On January 2, the Center for Baptist Leadership, William Wolfe’s political lobbying organization targeting the Southern Baptist Convention1, announced that it, along with its financial backer, American Reformer, will be sponsoring this month’s True Texas Project conference, where Daily Wire reporter Megan Basham will be speaking. The True Texas Project is a genuine far-right organization, whose leadership traffics in antisemitic conspiracy theories and great (white) replacement theory, as journalists Janet Mefferd and Robert Downen have shown.
It’s unsurprising that the CBL and its financial backer would sponsor this conference. American Reformer, an online journal that is the foremost repository of authoritarian political theory posing as Christian thought, is headed by Josh Abbotoy of “Protestant Franco” fame. Abbotoy is currently spearheading an effort to build an “aligned community” in Jackson County, Tennessee. The first two announced transplants to that community were Andrew Isker and CJay Engel, who both spoke at a previous TTP conference. Among other beliefs, Isker has promoted great replacement theory and Engel markets audiobooks from white-nationalist publisher Antelope Hill. Basham, who shares the distinction with Abbotoy of being a Claremont Lincoln Fellow, and who was the CBL’s featured speaker at their 2024 Southern Baptist Convention event, in defense of Abbotoy has publicly and dishonestly attacked journalist Phil Williams, who has been reporting on the real-estate and political project.
Despite what some would believe, these people are not conservatives, they are authoritarian reactionaries trying to market their politics to conservative Christians. The figure below illustrates this point.
Here are the general differences between these camps:
The average secular conservative is a social and economic libertarian. They’re not interested in Christian social mores, and, even though some may describe themselves as “evangelical,” they likely couldn’t accurately describe the gospel.
The average conservative Christian is synonymous with “Reagan Republican.” Though they may be friendly with much of MAGA politics and Culture War talking points, few are willing to publicly fight those battles. They’re more likely to be friendly to Turning Point USA’s talking points than American Reformer’s, though there’s some notable overlap, with figures like Jack Posobiec2.
The average Reformed media junkie, like the pop-Reformed media personalities they follow, is fully bought in to the Culture War. They consider “wokeness” to be the primary threat to the church and will defend writers like Basham, proactively ignoring her more than troublesome actions and alliances with Reformed Christian Nationalists, because they see her as integral to fighting Leftism.
Reformed Christian Nationalists are genuine authoritarian rightists (and often explicit ethno-nationalists), going as far as to promote murderous dictators, such as Francisco Franco and Augusto Pinochet. As I’ve previously detailed, their belief set is not the radicalization of a Christian worldview, but the Christianization of a radical worldview. Their vanguards are targeting the Reformed media junkie demographic, and, to a limited degree, have been successful.
That being said, as their foremost personalities become progressively known for their extremist behavior and alliances, Reformed Christian Nationalists will increasingly face difficulty convincing anyone to the lower-left of them on the political compass to openly sign on.
A since deleted tweet from Wolfe (he regularly expunges his X timeline):
Jack Posobiec and TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk were also Claremont Lincoln Fellows.