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If you haven't spent time inside Christian nationalist churches/communities, here's how these systems work and how to support survivors.

What you just watched on CNN was not a story about religion gone wrong. It was a story about a political movement – one of the most effective in modern American history – told through the people it chewed up and discarded on its way to power. The survivors in The Whole Story with Anderson Cooper: “The Rise of Christian Nationalism” described physical abuse, sexual abuse, financial control, psychological manipulation, and the systematic silencing of anyone who tried to speak up. All of it happened inside churches. All of it was justified with theology and doctrine. And all of it was protected by institutions that have now extended their reach well beyond church walls and into the halls of American government.

If you're not part of the evangelical world, your instinct might be to see this as an internal religious matter: tragic, but ultimately someone else's problem to solve. It isn't. And here's why.

Christian Nationalism is often discussed as an insular ideology: a set of beliefs about America's identity as a “Christian nation,” and the role of biblical law in government. That's part of the definition, but it misses what makes the movement so effective and so difficult to counter. Christian Nationalism doesn't function primarily as a set of ideas that circulate within the confines of certain houses of worship. It functions as a proliferating social ecosystem—a network of tightly controlled communities that produce, from childhood, the true believers, the obedient voters, the political operatives, and the cultural foot soldiers that the movement depends on.

Here’s what that ecosystem looks like from the inside

This is not a description of a fringe cult. This is the operating model of communities embedded in major evangelical denominations across the United States – communities whose leaders now occupy positions of significant political power.

Are you concerned about the rise of Christian Nationalism and Christian Nationalist leaders? Are you worried about the impact that he and so many others are having on our country and our communities? Do you have the means to support efforts to help survivors exit these high-control churches and build a new life for themselves, or to support the work to build community and pathways to organizing for millions of Exvangelicals? You can support Deconstruction Doulas with a monthly donation via Patreon or a one-time gift via GoFundMe, and/or you can support Project 21:12’s ongoing work via their donation page.

Doug Wilson, the CREC, and the broader network

The CNN documentary focuses significantly on Pastor Douglas Wilson of Moscow, Idaho, and the CREC denomination he leads. Wilson is a useful case study because the pipeline from church to political power is unusually visible in his network, but the pattern is not unique to him. Wilson's CREC denomination encompasses over 150 churches internationally. Public filings indicate that his publishing arm, Canon Press, generates somewhere around $5 million a year in revenue. His theological positions – the explicit defense of patriarchal authority, the rejection of women's equality as heresy, the advocacy for the fusion of church and state – are not fringe positions quarantined within his denomination. They are in all seven major Southern Baptist seminaries in one form or another. They are re-published by major evangelical presses. They are promoted on widely read and watched evangelical platforms. Major evangelical leaders continue to platform him and lend him their credibility. And members of his churches now hold positions of significant power in the federal government.

But Wilson is one node in a larger Christian Nationalist network. The New Apostolic Reformation – a fast-growing charismatic movement – explicitly affirms Christian Nationalist policy goals through its “Seven Mountains Mandate,” which teaches that Christians must achieve total dominance over seven spheres of cultural influence: government, education, media, arts and entertainment, business, family, and religion. This is not an inference drawn by outside critics. It is their stated strategy, published in their own materials and preached from their own pulpits.

The policy goals of the broader Christian Nationalist movement are equally explicit. Leaders within the movement have publicly advocated for enshrining “male headship” – by which they mean unconditional female submission, whatever else other Christians might mean by the phrase – into law. Other policy goals include:

These are not fringe statements. They are published in books, preached in sermons, outlined in policy white papers, and spoken aloud at public conferences. The infrastructure to pursue them is in place and growing.

Research by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) finds that approximately 30% of U.S. adults – roughly one in three – qualify as adherents of, or sympathizers with, Christian Nationalism. Among those who attend religious services weekly, the figure is 51%. Among white evangelicals specifically, 31% endorse political violence as a means of accomplishing their political goals.

This is the movement that produced what you just watched on CNN. The survivors who told their stories are the human evidence of what this system does to the people inside it. And the system is working very hard to make sure they are not believed.

Why people don’t leave – and quickly

Given all of this, you’re probably wondering why people don’t leave – and quickly. This is the question that most people outside these communities ask first. The answer is the key to understanding both why the movement is so powerful and why the work of helping people exit is so strategically important.

Leaving a Christian Nationalist community is not like leaving a church. It’s more like leaving a country – one where you hold no passport, and have no currency that's recognized outside its borders. Plus, you’ve been told since birth that the outside world is hostile and godless and will destroy you.

You lose every relationship at once. Your spouse, your parents, your siblings, your children's godparents, your best friend of twenty years – all of them are inside the community, and the community enforces its boundaries. Excommunication and shunning are standard practice, not rare punishments. When you leave, your entire social world disappears overnight.

You may have no way to support yourself. If you were raised in this system – particularly if you're a woman – you may have been homeschooled, or sent to a private school, with a curriculum designed to prepare you for domestic life, not employment. You may have no résumé, no professional network, no work history. If your family's income comes from a church-affiliated employer, dissent alone can cost you your job before you even leave.

Your own mind works against you. Decades of theological conditioning have taught you that questioning authority is sin, that doubt is spiritual failure, and that leaving will damn you, and maybe your children’s, souls. Even when you intellectually recognize the abuse, the emotional and psychological programming runs deep. Survivors describe years of internal struggle before they can act on what they already know to be true.

Your physical safety may be at risk. Some members live under spouses who take “male headship” – the doctrine that men have God-given authority over their wives – literally and violently. When these survivors seek help from their churches, church leaders frequently side with the abuser. Some churches actively prevent survivors from contacting the police. Leaving without a safety plan can be genuinely dangerous.

The system is designed this way on purpose. The barriers to exit are not accidental byproducts of a tight-knit community. They are structural features of a system that depends on retaining its members to maintain its power. Large families, ideological homeschooling, economic dependency, social isolation from the outside world, and theological enforcement of obedience all serve the same function: they make leaving so costly that most people don't.

This is why the movement is so durable. It doesn't need to win every argument or every election. It just needs to keep its people inside.

This is why it is so critical to help people leave, support them as and after they leave, and offer a compelling alternative for those who have grown up inside evangelical communities of all stripes so that more people see what’s possible on the other side. Most efforts to counter Christian Nationalism focus on the policy end: opposing specific legislation, winning elections, challenging court appointments. That work is important. But it treats the symptoms while leaving the underlying machinery intact.

Christian Nationalism sustains itself through a closed loop. Controlled communities produce obedient members. Those members raise large families within the system. Those families produce the next generation of members, voters, activists, and leaders. Dissent is punished. Exit is made nearly impossible. The loop reinforces itself with every generation. This is their pipeline.

The only way to deal with it is to remove its source of power: fear. And the only way we do that is by making a big, safe, well-paved path out. Every person who leaves a Christian Nationalist community takes something with them that the movement cannot easily replace. They take their children – children who will now grow up with access to the outside world, to an education that isn't ideologically controlled, with the ability to think for themselves. They take their compliance – one fewer voice affirming the authority of leaders who demand unquestioning obedience. They take their silence – because a survivor who speaks publicly, as the eight people in this documentary have done, makes the cost of abuse visible in a way the movement can never fully suppress anymore than they could keep the sun from rising.

And critically, every successful exit weakens the power of the movement. Christian Nationalist control depends on the credible promise that leaving will destroy you. Every person who leaves and rebuilds – who finds community, stability, and a life on the other side – is living proof that the threat is a lie. That proof reaches back into the communities they left. It reaches the people who are watching and wondering whether escape is possible.

Helping people exit high-control religious communities is one of the most direct, effective interventions available against the infrastructure of Christian Nationalism. It is upstream of politics. It addresses the root system, not just what's visible above ground. And helping folks find community and a way to use their experiences on behalf of others – to intervene in the very harm they have witnessed or experienced – is a powerful tool in our toolbox…one that has not been deployed at scale until now.

What you can do

There are two efforts – Deconstruction Doulas and Project 21:12 – that are making interventions on this power-building effort among Christian Nationalist evangelical leaders and congregations.

Are you concerned about the rise of Christian Nationalist leaders like Doug Wilson? Are you worried about the impact that he and so many others are having on our country and our communities? Do you have the means to support efforts to help survivors exit these high-control churches and build a new life for themselves, or to support the work to build community and pathways to organizing for millions of Exvangelicals? You can support Deconstruction Doulas with a monthly donation via Patreon or a one-time gift via GoFundMe, and/or you can support Project 21:12’s ongoing work via their donation page.

Deconstruction Doulas (DD) is a peer-support organization for survivors of spiritual abuse in high-control religious environments. It was founded by Margaret Bronson – a survivor of religious trauma herself and one of the eight survivors featured in the CNN documentary – alongside her co-founder Erin Kelly (also a survivor) and her husband, David (a former Southern Baptist pastor). DD is almost entirely volunteer-driven, funded by small individual donations from the survivor community itself. We have no institutional backers, no political sponsors, and no wealthy donors. Despite that, we have helped over 200 families get out of harmful religious environments themselves, or begin rebuilding their lives post-escape. What we do is concrete and immediate: safety plans and physical exit, court support, trauma-informed therapists, vital documents, employment, peer-support cohorts, and educational resources. DD operates on a shoestring. We need your help.

Project 21:12 aims to provide clear on-ramps for community-building and solidarity organizing to former evangelicals (“Exvangelicals” or “post-evangelicals”) in order to help folks make meaning of their experiences, be emboldened in community with others, and take action to diminish the power of rising Christian Nationalism fueled in part by evangelical leaders, while building the power of a social justice solidarity movement. There are 15 million Exvangelicals in the U.S., according to PRRI, and many more folks on the fence. Project 21:12 addresses this gap by developing a trustworthy organizing structure that can help Exvangelicals connect with a values-aligned community and translate that connection into action.

You can support Deconstruction Doulas with a monthly donation via Patreon or a one-time gift via GoFundMe, and/or you can support Project 21:12’s ongoing work via their donation page.

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