QAnon & The Spring of 2020

Go back to the spring of 2020 for a second, because you were there too.

Wherever you were in the world, you were in your house. All of us were, at the same time, for the first time in human history. The schools closed. The offices closed. The churches closed, which should have been the loudest alarm any of us ever heard and instead barely registered. We stood on tape marks on the floor of the grocery store. We watched the numbers climb every night on a screen. We could not touch our own parents. Underneath all of it, in every single house on every single street, the same low hum was running, a specific kind of dread that nobody could name out loud, because for the first time most of us could not answer a very simple question. Is the world ending.

I want you to understand what that was, spiritually, because it was not an accident of history and it was not bad luck. Eight billion people were sealed in their homes, cut off from every ordinary comfort, cut off from gathering, cut off from the ordinary rhythms that keep a person steady, frightened, isolated, and suddenly with unlimited hours and a device in their hand. If you wanted to build a laboratory for growing a deception, you could not build a better one than that. You would not even try. The soil was already turned over. Every one of us was starving for an answer, and something was about to walk through every door on earth at once and offer us one.

It got me. I want to tell you exactly how.

This is the chapter I write with the most personal weight, because it is the system I was most completely inside, and it did not happen to me once. It happened to me twice, wearing two different names, and I did not recognize until much later that both times were the same trap. By 2020 I was deep inside a movement that called itself an awakening. It had a name: QAnon. I did not see it as a conspiracy theory at the time. I saw it as finally waking up to what everyone else was too comfortable to look for. I waited for Q drops like a fiend. I refreshed boards constantly. I believed a specific political figure had been anointed by God to dismantle a global satanic system, that the drops were intelligence from a divine source, that resistance to him was demonic. I believed John F. Kennedy Jr. was alive and coming back to help him, a real-life Batman and Robin waiting in the wings to save the world. I was trapped in my home during COVID, afraid the world itself was ending, spiritually starving and pressing against that hunger with everything I had. It was a perfect environment for that fire, and if you have not figured it out by now, all of it was, is, and always will be entirely intentional. It works because we eat it up. Every new revelation about the darkness of the world became another brick in a wall of a worldview I was building instead of the Word of God. It felt like clarity. It felt like waking up. That is always how it feels from the inside, which is exactly why it works, and 2 Corinthians 11:14 tells us that Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. It does not say he arrives looking dangerous. It says he arrives looking bright.

I want to be plain about something before I go one sentence further, because it matters more than anything else in this chapter. QAnon and the political Christian revival that followed it were never two different seasons of my life. They were the same strategy wearing a second costume, and Satan used both of them, back to back, to trap me the same way he is using them right now to trap you. I lost family and friends walking that road both times, and I do not say that to earn your sympathy. I say it because the cost is real and I want you to know it before you pay it twice, the way I did.

Christian Nationalism is not a denomination or a centralized organization. It is the belief that America is or should be a Christian nation, that its founding was divinely ordained, and that defending America’s Christian identity is itself a spiritual calling. People will tell you America was founded as a Christian nation, and I believed it for years because it was repeated around me as settled fact.

The actual record says otherwise. The Constitution does not mention God or Jesus a single time. In 1797, under President John Adams, the Senate unanimously ratified the Treaty of Tripoli, whose eleventh article states plainly that the government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion. Thomas Jefferson, writing to the Danbury Baptist Association in 1802, described the First Amendment as building “a wall of separation between church and state,” a phrase he chose deliberately, not casually. These are not the words of modern skeptics rewriting history to suit an agenda. They are the words of the founding generation itself, in their own hand, about their own intentions. I am not telling you this to wound your love of country. I am telling you because the lie I fell for needed exactly this soil to grow in, and the most effective deception never comes dressed as something foreign. It comes wearing the flag you already salute and quoting the Bible you already believe.

The first move this strategy makes is to question the Word, not by denying it but by filtering it through a lens that decides in advance which parts of it are allowed to matter right now. Watch how it works on the Seven Mountain Mandate, the theological engine running under most of what calls itself Christian Nationalism today. It traces to 1975, when two respected evangelical leaders, Loren Cunningham and Bill Bright, said they had each received the same vision from God, that Christians should influence seven spheres of culture: family, religion, education, media, arts, business, and government. In its original form this was a vision of discipleship, of believers serving as salt and light within their own vocations. That is not what it became. Around the year 2000, Cunningham shared that vision with a business consultant and self-described prophet named Lance Wallnau, who reframed the seven spheres as seven mountains to be conquered from the top down rather than served from the ground up, and in 2013 Wallnau and Bill Johnson published Invading Babylon: The 7 Mountain Mandate, completing a shift from influence to invasion, from being salt to seizing territory. It was Wallnau who later popularized the specific claim that a modern American president carried the anointing of Cyrus, the pagan king God raised up in Isaiah 45 to release Israel from captivity. God does call Cyrus His anointed and His shepherd, and that argument is true as far as it goes. The problem is the application. The Israelites were never called to worship Cyrus. They were called to worship the God who sent him, and a theology that quietly reverses that distinction is not tracing Scripture, it is filtering it. This is also the logic that makes a leader’s personal failings stop functioning as a warning sign and start functioning as proof of the theology. Once a leader is declared specially anointed, his flaws are not a problem to be reckoned with. They become evidence that God simply uses unusual people, which means there is no longer any behavior that could ever disqualify him in his followers’ eyes, only facts that need to be reframed until they fit.

The second move is to deny the consequence, and this movement has run that experiment before, in public, with the whole world watching. In Germany in the 1930s, a popular movement called the German Christians, made up of tens of thousands of ordinary churchgoing believers, fused their faith with national identity and glorified Adolf Hitler as a prophet raised up by God. They rewrote the faith to match the politics of the moment, and they were certain the entire time that they were being faithful. They did not see the consequence coming because their theology had no room to look for it.

What should give every believer hope is that not everyone went along with it. In May of 1934, a group of pastors including Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer met in the German town of Barmen and issued a declaration that Jesus Christ alone is the Word the church must obey, and that the church cannot hand its allegiance to any nation or leader without betraying Him. Bonhoeffer was executed in a concentration camp in April of 1945, weeks before the war ended, having understood what most of the church around him refused to see until it was too late. I watched a smaller version of the same denial play out inside my own movement in real time. Deuteronomy 18:22 gives Scripture’s own test for a false prophet: when someone speaks in the Lord’s name and the thing does not come to pass, that is a word the Lord never spoke, and you need not fear it. QAnon’s central promise was an event called the Storm, a coming day when the hidden cabal would be exposed and the anointed leader vindicated, tied to specific dates. When the inauguration came on January 20, 2021, and the Storm did not, the date moved to March 4. When that passed, it moved again. Nothing ever happened, because nothing was ever going to happen, and the consequence of that failure, according to Scripture’s own test, should have been the end of the movement’s credibility.

This was never confined to anonymous message boards. The same test applies to prophets speaking with their own names attached, on camera, to millions of people. Kat Kerr is one of the most viral voices in that world, a self-described prophetess who claims to have visited heaven hundreds of times since 1996, describing it in detail on camera to millions of views: friendly dinosaurs children can ride and pet, unicorns she insists are real creatures rather than myth, and a place she calls Christmastown, where, in her words, Santa Claus himself lives and the snow is alive. I want to be clear about why that detail belongs in a book about deception and not just a book about strange television. A woman claiming that level of direct access to heaven is the same woman who, in 2018, told her audience that God had shown her Trump winning reelection in 2020, followed by Mike Pence serving two full terms after him, guaranteeing what she called twenty-four years of God in the White House. None of it happened. By December 2025, the same woman was telling the same audience she had spent an entire week in heaven with the recently assassinated Charlie Kirk, describing in detail what he was wearing and the private conversations he was having with God the Father. The Christmastown story and the election prophecy are not two separate categories, one silly and one serious. They come from the identical claim, that this specific person has reliable, literal access to the mind of God, and Deuteronomy 18:22 gives exactly one test for that claim: does what she says will happen actually happen. It did not, and a platform of millions of views has never once been the same thing as a word actually spoken by the Lord.

Cindy Jacobs, co-founder of a prayer network called Generals International and one of the most influential figures in the modern prophetic movement, stood on a stage outside the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, praying and prophesying to halt the certification of the presidential election while the building was being stormed a few hundred feet behind her. Deuteronomy 18:22 does not carve out an exception for a prophet with a large platform or powerful friends. A word that does not come to pass was never the Lord’s word, no matter how many people were watching when it was spoken, and no matter how sincerely the person speaking it believed every word.

Every single thing I just showed you is sitting in public right now, on YouTube, on TikTok, in searchable news archives, free for anyone to find in under five minutes. None of it is hidden. None of it required special access or inside information. I did not uncover a conspiracy. I watched the same videos you could watch tonight. That should unsettle you more than the content itself does. If this is genuinely this easy to find, the only thing standing between you and seeing it clearly was never a lack of information. It is cognitive dissonance, the very human refusal to let a fact land when landing costs you your community, your identity, or your certainty that you have been standing on solid ground the whole time. Here is the question underneath all of it that I need you to actually sit with, not skim past: what are you entering into a spiritual and eternal agreement with when you nod along to a woman who claims to have God’s itinerary memorized, or stand and pray beside people storming a building in Jesus’s name? An agreement is still an agreement even when nobody signs anything. You make it with your attention, your trust, and your amen.

I know exactly what it feels like to be the one standing outside screaming about this, because I am doing it right now, here, to you. It is a genuinely terrifying feeling, watching people I love sit inside a house that is on fire, watching smoke come out from under the door, and watching them turn the television up louder instead of getting out. I am not writing this chapter from a place of superiority looking down at you. I am writing it from the sidewalk outside your window, and I need you to hear me over whatever is playing inside.

Instead came the third move, impugning God’s motive rather than accepting the test He had already given. Faced with predictions that had plainly failed, followers did not conclude they had been misled. They moved the goalposts, insisted the real victory was how many people had been awakened, and layered Scripture and worship songs over the wreckage to spiritualize it, telling each other God woke you up for a reason and you cannot go back to sleep now. That is not the fruit of the Spirit of truth. That is the reflex of a lie protecting itself, and for a while it was protecting itself inside of me. The same reflex runs underneath the political side of this system whenever God’s apparent inaction or a lost election needs explaining. It is never the theology that gets questioned. It is always your prayer that was not enough, your faith that was not strong enough, never the possibility that God’s kingdom was never designed to travel by ballot in the first place.

The fourth move is to offer a counterfeit, and Jesus already showed us exactly what the real thing looks like by refusing this one every time it was handed to Him. In the wilderness, Satan offered Him every kingdom of the world and its splendor, and He declined. After He fed five thousand people, the crowd tried to force a crown onto Him, and He withdrew. He told Pilate plainly that His kingdom was not of this world, or His servants would be fighting. He held all the power required to build any kingdom He wanted at any moment, and He chose a cross instead. This movement offers the opposite kingdom, and it does not ask whether a leader is holy. It asks only whether he promises order and restoration, so that political victory becomes the kingdom of God, national identity becomes Christian identity, and the flag gets offered as a companion to the cross until, over time, it quietly becomes a replacement for it. A savior who can be voted out of office, assassinated, or indicted is not a savior. He is a distraction wearing a crown, and I gave my whole heart to one anyway.

So that is the machine. That is what it is, where it came from, how it moves, and what it does to the people it gets. Now I have to tell you what it looked like when it came for me the second time, and where it ended up, because this particular deception does not stop at your kitchen table. It ends in the Oval Office.

In the fall of 2025 everything cracked open. On September 10th, Charlie Kirk was assassinated. He loved Jesus and never missed an opportunity to declare his faith publicly, and I loved him for that, which is part of what made his death land in me the way it did. That moment changed the trajectory of my life, and I believe it was meant to. I knew in my spirit that I had just watched a literal turning point, not only for me, but for all of us.

I need to tell you what those days actually felt like, and I am aware of how it is going to sound. I am telling you anyway. Hear me over whatever news channel you are listening to inside, because there are millions of people who felt the exact same thing at the exact same time, and they have been coming forward ever since, one after another, with the very same testimony, almost word for word.

The air went dead. That is the only way I know how to describe it. Something pulled in close and sat down on top of everything, and it did not lift for weeks. I could not scroll a single platform without seeing his death or the world’s reaction to it, and when I looked at the faces, at the celebrating and the mockery and the jokes, the scales came off my eyes and what I was seeing was not political passion and it was not cultural anger. It was something ancient and specific, wearing a human expression. I watched demons manifest themselves in people, not metaphorically. I saw black clouds rolling in over all of it, closer and darker as the days went on. The rest of the world either threw a party or went to work like it was an ordinary Wednesday.

I am not asking you to take my word for any of that. I am only telling you what I saw, and that it never left me. Whatever came off my eyes in those weeks never went back on.

There were moments I still cannot shake. I sat glued to the television and watched a grieving widow stand before the nation and deliver what she described as a battle cry, and I bawled my eyes out, swept up in the emotion of it the way the whole country was.

Then I watched the memorial, and I want to describe it to you the way I actually saw it, as an observer, through the lens I am now convinced Jesus Himself was holding up to my face in those weeks. A man was murdered, and eleven days later, eleven, there was a full memorial ready in a stadium. Lighting, staging, speakers, production, a stadium filled to capacity with a crowd estimated between ninety and a hundred thousand people and overflow arenas opened to catch the rest, cameras positioned, a program running on schedule. Grief that moves at that speed is grief that has been produced, and I do not say that to diminish a single tear in that building, because I believe most of them were real. I say it because I was watching with different eyes by then, and what I saw was a machine that already knew how to turn even this, even a murder, even a widow, into an event with a run of show. The scales were off, and once they are off you cannot unsee it anywhere.

Brandon Lake stood on that stage and led worship over a stadium full of people mourning a well-loved Christian political figure. I want to be careful and honest about what I believe was actually happening in that room, because I say this with love for every single person in it, and with love for Charlie himself. Charlie was an amazing human being. I will never change my mind about that, and I will never change my mind about this either: he was used precisely because of it. He was lured out to the very edge of the political battlefield, and his relentless love for Jesus and his relentless love for his country were fused together out there until the lines between them blurred. That fusion did not die with him. It filled a stadium. Those tens of thousands of people believed they were lifting their hands to heaven, and what they were actually bringing into that room, into those same raised hands, was their love of country, their love of Charlie, and their love of their Jesus, all braided into one thing. They were not raising their hands for just Jesus. They were not buying all those Bibles for just Jesus. It got blurred, and it got blurred without them ever noticing it happen, which is exactly how this deception has always worked, on every one of us, in every chapter here. The Holy Spirit made sure I noticed. Not because I am sharper than anyone in those seats, because I am not. He made me notice for one reason only: to save me from it.

Watch how high the fusion was honored, because this was not a fringe thing happening at the edges. His body was flown home to Arizona in a beautiful wooden casket aboard Air Force Two, and the Vice President of the United States himself helped carry it, a grieving pallbearer in a dark suit on the tarmac. I am not telling you that to diminish the honor. I am telling you because I want you to see, clearly, how completely the line between the sanctuary and the state had already dissolved before the first worship song was ever sung over him. A man who loved Jesus was given a head of state’s farewell, and almost no one paused to notice that those are two entirely different kingdoms.

Here is the part that confirmed everything the Holy Spirit had shown me, because I did not have to wait long to watch where the fire actually led. Just over three months after the memorial, I could not scroll a feed or turn on a television without catching clip after clip of the same thing. Erika Kirk, now leading his organization, stood up to open AmericaFest in Phoenix that December and said it plainly. We are going to get my husband’s friend, JD Vance, elected 48 in the most resounding way possible. She had already told Megyn Kelly a month earlier that the support was in the works, and that one of the last conversations she and Charlie ever had was about how intentional he was about backing Vance for the next election. Sit with that. The revival that so many sincere believers latched onto, the one that filled stadiums and sold Bibles and lifted a nation’s hands, resolved in front of the whole country into a presidential endorsement. The worship and the campaign were never actually two separate things. They were the same fused thing the entire time, and I had watched it get lit.

Let me say it plainly. They are comfortable. They have no reason to question the motive, or who is really behind it, or why, because all of it feels like home. It is the same cognitive dissonance I lived inside for years. I was them. I was firm in my convictions and would have argued you down over them, and never once suspected that what I was defending was not actually Him. That is how these systems work. They do not knock. They swallow people whole, comfortably, and the person inside feels only peace the whole way down. I cannot soften this part: millions will spend eternity on the far side of that comfortable decision, separated from the very One they say they worship, still certain they were right. There is no hell that comes wrapped in a flag. No cross-and-country hell with worship music playing. Just separation from Jesus, and the one who engineered it. Just Satan. Nothing else was ever down there waiting.

I have to tell you where I was standing while I watched all of it, because this is the part of my testimony I can only say once. Those weeks did not just grieve me. They took me to an edge I had been walking toward for a long time, and I got close. I promise you, I was close. The darkness over everything felt total, and the enemy, who you now know does not care about me personally but knows exactly what I am to God, would have been perfectly happy to finish me off in it. He did not get to. Jesus held that lens up to my face with one hand and held me back from the edge with the other, and His timing, down to the day, is the only reason there is a book in your hands at all. I did not survive that season and then decide to write. I survived that season because there was a book He wanted written, and you are the person He wanted it written for. So when I spend these chapters begging you to turn around, understand that I am not preaching from a pulpit. I am calling back over my shoulder from the ground I was nearly lost on.

In the days that followed, I watched the Turning Point organization move quickly to channel the grief and shock of that moment into what was framed as a Christian revival. Bible sales soared. In September 2025, the month Charlie was killed, about 2.4 million Bibles were sold in the United States, a 36% jump over the year before and the single highest month of the entire year, according to Circana BookScan, the firm that tracks book sales nationwide. He was given a special national honor, a presidential medal, a national day of remembrance set on his birthday, and had roads renamed after him. On the surface, more people reading Scripture sounds like an unambiguous good. I watched something else happen alongside it, something that did not sit right with my spirit, and I believe God was holding me back from falling into the same trap I had fallen into before, because I would have.

There is more from inside that stadium I need you to see, plainly, so you can decide for yourself, because these are things that happened and you can go watch them.

His microphone sat encased in a lighted box, the way a crown sits under glass. His shirts sold out nearly as fast as they could be printed, the Freedom shirt most of all, the same one he was wearing the day he was killed. You blinked and it became the new uniform of the American Evangelical Christian patriot, worn like a testimony, the exact same way I once wore that QAnon mask during Covid, proudly, certain it meant I belonged to something true. Nearby stood a tent, said to be the same tent he had been sitting under when the shot that took him out of this world rang out, and I watched people take selfies under it. I want you to sit with that image for one second longer than is comfortable. The event itself opened like a WWE entrance, pyrotechnics and fire and spectacle staged around the things of God. There were hands raised in worship everywhere the cameras turned. Political commentators I never in my life expected to hear say the name of Jesus said it, from a stage, to millions.

Then the service closed with an image I will carry for the rest of my life. The President of the United States stood on that stage at the end, holding up the grieving widow. The most powerful man on earth and a brand-new widow, side by side under the lights, grief and government in a single embrace, in front of a stadium with its hands in the air. Whatever you believe about any of the people in that frame, I need you to see the frame itself, because the frame is the sermon. That picture taught millions of mourning believers, in one image, that their comfort and their country and their Christ all stand together on the same stage.

A year earlier, every bit of that would have set my heart on fire in exactly the wrong direction. This time something in me went quiet instead of stirred, and I could not make it stir no matter how hard I tried.

Because here is what I was actually watching. A Christian man was murdered, and his murder was picked up by the most powerful office on earth and built into a stage. That is the part that should concern every single person reading this, and it has nothing to do with politics and nothing to do with the organization that put on the event. I am not asking you to look at them. I am asking you to look at what got built on top of the grief, and who it was built for, and what it was quietly teaching the millions of people watching it to feel about a flag and a cross at the same time.

I am not forming an opinion about who did this or why, and neither should you. That is not the part of this story I am asking you to look at.

Here is the part I am asking you to look at. Just a few weeks later, Turning Point was everywhere. Unavoidable. On every feed, in every church conversation, on campuses and screens and stages, and not in the same capacity Charlie had been involved. The shift happened fast, and I want to be honest with you: had I not been paying attention, had the Holy Spirit not already pulled the scales off my eyes, I would have fallen for it the very same way the world was falling for it, with my whole sincere heart. Watch the sequence. In a matter of weeks, we went from mourning Charlie to being rallied around carrying his close friend, the sitting Vice President of the United States, toward becoming the forty-eighth president. Mourning became momentum. A funeral became a launchpad. The timing of the entire thing, from the stadium to the merchandise to the movement to Scripture being read aloud from the White House itself, is the part almost nobody stopped to look at, because grief does not stop to look. I believe it may be one of the most spiritually dangerous things that has ever happened to this nation, precisely because it was wrapped in the name of Jesus and watered with real tears. You need to hear the last part of this clearly. None of it is happening by chance. Not the timing, not the fusion, not the speed. That alone should sober up every human being alive on this earth today with a set of eyes and a newsfeed.

If you think I am reading too much into a staged event and a feeling, listen to how plainly it is now being said out loud, by the most powerful family in the country. In October 2025, on a podcast, the President’s son Eric Trump said, and I am quoting him directly, we’re saving Christianity, we’re saving God, we’re saving the family unit. Saving God. Sit with the size of that sentence. The God who spoke galaxies into existence, who was before the foundation of the world, who holds every atom together by the word of His power, described as something a political family is rescuing. Five years earlier the same man had already said his father literally saved Christianity. In between those two statements, after the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania in the summer of 2024, he spoke at faith events and on podcast after podcast declaring that there is a hand of God on my father’s shoulder, framing his father’s survival as divine intervention aimed at a higher political and cultural purpose. This is not a slip of the tongue. It is a worldview, stated proudly, on the record, and applauded.

The woman the President appointed to lead the White House Faith Office said the quiet part with no hedging at all. Explaining, at a book signing in late 2019, why she had joined the administration after a lifetime of insisting she would never touch politics, Paula White said this: it wasn't about doing politics, it was about an assignment, and to say no to President Trump would be saying no to God, and I won't do that. Read that again slowly. Declining to serve a particular politician is placed on the same level as refusing God Himself. That is not an endorsement. It is a category error with eternal stakes, the exact move the serpent has always made, taking something that belongs to God alone, in this case the authority to bind your conscience, and quietly reassigning it to a man. When obedience to God and loyalty to a president are treated as the same sentence, one of them is about to swallow the other, and it is never the president who gets swallowed.

But I need to land the full weight of what she actually did there, because at this hour in the timeline, with it this out in the open, I am still amazed that almost no one has caught it. There is exactly one Person in all of history about whom her sentence is true. Jesus said it of Himself: whoever rejects Me rejects the One who sent Me. That is Luke 10:16, and it is a claim that belongs to the Son of God alone. So listen to what was really said at that book signing. A property that belongs exclusively to Jesus Christ was lifted off of Him and set onto an American president, by the woman who now leads the White House Faith Office. Saying no to this man is saying no to God is a sentence with only one rightful owner, and He was crucified for being the One it is true of. She has not only said it. The world has the photographs of her hands laid on the President in the Oval Office, and the broadcasts declaring God's anointing over him, the big deal of God's own anointing, publicly pronounced onto a politician's head from the most powerful office on earth, in front of the watching world. Hold on to the image of those hands, because you are going to meet them again before this site is over, and when you do, I want you to remember exactly where you saw them first. At this hour, with the signs this obvious and the words this plain, the silence of the watching church is the loudest sound in the room.

Even the last legal guardrail is being tested. In July 2025 the IRS filed to settle a lawsuit by agreeing it would not enforce the rule that has long kept pulpits from endorsing candidates, at least when a pastor speaks to his own congregation through the church's normal channels. A federal court declined to finalize that agreement, and the fight is still moving through appeals, so as of this writing the rule technically stands. But watch the direction of the pressure, not the paperwork. Set aside whether the policy itself is good or bad, and ask the spiritual question instead: what happens to a church the moment its pastor can stand on the stage and tell you, on God's authority, who to vote for? The pressure that used to stop at the sanctuary door is now looking for a key to it, and a flock that has already been taught to hear a man's political preference as the voice of God will not know the difference when it walks in.

It comes from the top too. In the spring of 2024, ahead of Easter, Donald Trump posted a video urging Americans to buy a sixty-dollar Bible he had partnered to sell, the God Bless the USA Bible, which binds the actual text of Scripture together with the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the lyrics to a country song, with both him and the singer taking a royalty on every copy. The caption on that post is the whole chapter in four words. Let's Make America Pray Again. Not repent. Not believe. Pray again, as a national campaign, with the founding documents stitched into the back of the holy Scriptures as though they belong in the same book, and the name of God turned into a product with a price tag, a profit margin, and a presidential signature on the cover. I need to say that last part plainly, because it actually happened and it should not be allowed to slide past anyone. Special editions were sold, for around a thousand dollars apiece, with his name signed across the cover of the Holy Bible. Sit with that. There is exactly one Author of that Book, and He did not need a co-signer.

Then it went somewhere I would not have believed if I had not watched the footage myself. On May 6, 2026, at Trump National Doral in Miami, a twenty-two-foot statue of the President, covered in gold leaf, was unveiled with his fist raised in the air. It had been commissioned by a group of crypto investors, it reportedly cost around four hundred fifty thousand dollars, and when the covering came off, an evangelical pastor named Mark Burns, a member of Pastors for Trump, stood at a podium in front of it and led a dedication ceremony. The President called in by phone while it was happening, and the pastor held the receiver up to the microphone so the crowd could hear him.

I want you to notice what the pastor said, because he said it before anyone else could. Let me be clear, he told them. This is not a golden calf. He named it himself. He stood in front of a gilded twenty-two-foot image of a living man, at a ceremony held to dedicate it, and the very first thing he had to do was assure everyone watching that this was not the thing it obviously resembled. Nobody has to clarify that about a war memorial. Nobody stands in front of a statue of Lincoln and explains that it is not an idol. You only have to say that when the resemblance is close enough that the room is already thinking it.

Read Exodus 32 again sometime. The people were not trying to abandon God when they built that calf. That is the part everyone misses. Aaron announced a feast to the Lord and built an altar in front of it. They believed they were worshiping the God who brought them out of Egypt. They just needed something they could see, something gold, something present, while Moses was up on the mountain taking too long. That is not a story about people who quit believing. It is a story about people who got tired of waiting on an invisible God and made themselves a visible one, and then attached His name to it.

I am not going to tell you what to conclude about a statue. I am asking you to notice how far the road went, and how few people driving it ever felt the turn. It started with a flag next to a pulpit. It ended with a gold-leafed man on a pedestal and a pastor dedicating it while insisting, out loud, that it was not what it looked like.

I have to tell you where I was standing while I watched all of it, because this is the part of my testimony I can only say once. Those weeks did not just grieve me. They took me to an edge I had been walking toward for a long time, and I got close. I promise you, I was close. The darkness over everything felt total, and the enemy, who you now know does not care about me personally but knows exactly what I am to God, would have been perfectly happy to finish me off in it. He did not get to. Jesus held that lens up to my face with one hand and held me back from the edge with the other, and His timing, down to the day, is the only reason there is a book in your hands at all. I did not survive that season and then decide to write. I survived that season because there was a book He wanted written, and you are the person He wanted it written for. So when I spend these chapters begging you to turn around, understand that I am not preaching from a pulpit. I am calling back over my shoulder from the ground I was nearly lost on.

In the days that followed, I watched the Turning Point organization move quickly to channel the grief and shock of that moment into what was framed as a Christian revival. Bible sales soared. In September 2025, the month Charlie was killed, about 2.4 million Bibles were sold in the United States, a 36% jump over the year before and the single highest month of the entire year, according to Circana BookScan, the firm that tracks book sales nationwide. He was given a special national honor, a presidential medal, a national day of remembrance set on his birthday, and had roads renamed after him. On the surface, more people reading Scripture sounds like an unambiguous good. I watched something else happen alongside it, something that did not sit right with my spirit, and I believe God was holding me back from falling into the same trap I had fallen into before, because I would have.

There is more from inside that stadium I need you to see, plainly, so you can decide for yourself, because these are things that happened and you can go watch them.

His microphone sat encased in a lighted box, the way a crown sits under glass. His shirts sold out nearly as fast as they could be printed, the Freedom shirt most of all, the same one he was wearing the day he was killed. You blinked and it became the new uniform of the American Evangelical Christian patriot, worn like a testimony, the exact same way I once wore that QAnon mask during Covid, proudly, certain it meant I belonged to something true. Nearby stood a tent, said to be the same tent he had been sitting under when the shot that took him out of this world rang out, and I watched people take selfies under it. I want you to sit with that image for one second longer than is comfortable. The event itself opened like a WWE entrance, pyrotechnics and fire and spectacle staged around the things of God. There were hands raised in worship everywhere the cameras turned. Political commentators I never in my life expected to hear say the name of Jesus said it, from a stage, to millions.

Then the service closed with an image I will carry for the rest of my life. The President of the United States stood on that stage at the end, holding up the grieving widow. The most powerful man on earth and a brand-new widow, side by side under the lights, grief and government in a single embrace, in front of a stadium with its hands in the air. Whatever you believe about any of the people in that frame, I need you to see the frame itself, because the frame is the sermon. That picture taught millions of mourning believers, in one image, that their comfort and their country and their Christ all stand together on the same stage.

A year earlier, every bit of that would have set my heart on fire in exactly the wrong direction. This time something in me went quiet instead of stirred, and I could not make it stir no matter how hard I tried.

Because here is what I was actually watching. A Christian man was murdered, and his murder was picked up by the most powerful office on earth and built into a stage. That is the part that should concern every single person reading this, and it has nothing to do with politics and nothing to do with the organization that put on the event. I am not asking you to look at them. I am asking you to look at what got built on top of the grief, and who it was built for, and what it was quietly teaching the millions of people watching it to feel about a flag and a cross at the same time.

I am not forming an opinion about who did this or why, and neither should you. That is not the part of this story I am asking you to look at.

Here is the part I am asking you to look at. Just a few weeks later, Turning Point was everywhere. Unavoidable. On every feed, in every church conversation, on campuses and screens and stages, and not in the same capacity Charlie had been involved. The shift happened fast, and I want to be honest with you: had I not been paying attention, had the Holy Spirit not already pulled the scales off my eyes, I would have fallen for it the very same way the world was falling for it, with my whole sincere heart. Watch the sequence. In a matter of weeks, we went from mourning Charlie to being rallied around carrying his close friend, the sitting Vice President of the United States, toward becoming the forty-eighth president. Mourning became momentum. A funeral became a launchpad. The timing of the entire thing, from the stadium to the merchandise to the movement to Scripture being read aloud from the White House itself, is the part almost nobody stopped to look at, because grief does not stop to look. I believe it may be one of the most spiritually dangerous things that has ever happened to this nation, precisely because it was wrapped in the name of Jesus and watered with real tears. You need to hear the last part of this clearly. None of it is happening by chance. Not the timing, not the fusion, not the speed. That alone should sober up every human being alive on this earth today with a set of eyes and a newsfeed.

If you think I am reading too much into a staged event and a feeling, listen to how plainly it is now being said out loud, by the most powerful family in the country. In October 2025, on a podcast, the President’s son Eric Trump said, and I am quoting him directly, we’re saving Christianity, we’re saving God, we’re saving the family unit. Saving God. Sit with the size of that sentence. The God who spoke galaxies into existence, who was before the foundation of the world, who holds every atom together by the word of His power, described as something a political family is rescuing. Five years earlier the same man had already said his father literally saved Christianity. In between those two statements, after the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania in the summer of 2024, he spoke at faith events and on podcast after podcast declaring that there is a hand of God on my father’s shoulder, framing his father’s survival as divine intervention aimed at a higher political and cultural purpose. This is not a slip of the tongue. It is a worldview, stated proudly, on the record, and applauded.

My mother belongs in this chapter too, and I have been putting off writing this part. You have already met her twice. She is the one with the Bible she never opened. She is the one who told me she did not believe the words of Jesus when I read them to her out loud in her own living room. She is also, and I want to say this with real affection because it is real, a genuine red, white, and blue patriot. She loves this country the honest way. That love is not the problem and never was.

The problem is that the lines got erased, and I do not think she could tell you when it happened. Every screen in her house runs the same channel all day long. The television in the living room, the tablet in her lap, the radio in her car. It is on when I arrive and it is on when I leave. Every story is the same story, and every story is about one man. That is the water she swims in, all day, every day, and nobody swimming in something all day notices it is wet.

On the exact day I sat in her living room and read her John 6:44, hoping the words of Jesus in His own voice might plant something, I got up afterward and walked toward her kitchen, and I saw it. There is a tin sign hanging above her kitchen doorway. It says something patriotic and something about loving Jesus, in the same breath, in the same sentence, in matching letters.

I cannot remember what it said. I have tried. I want to be honest about that, because at first it embarrassed me that I could not recall the words. Then I understood that my not remembering is the entire point. The specific wording did not matter. It was never meant to be read closely. It was meant to be felt, and what it made you feel was that the two things on it were one thing.

Stand in that doorway with me for a second and take inventory of that house. On the wall, Jesus and the nation, fused into a single decoration. On the shelf, a book about the battlefield of the mind, holding the place where a Bible should be, gathering the attention that Bible never got. In her theology, purgatory, a doctrine she cannot show me anywhere in Scripture but will defend without hesitation. Three different systems, from three different chapters of this site, all of them living in one woman at the same time, and not one of them announcing itself as the thing it is.

She is not a case study to me. She is my mom. She loves God, and I believe that completely. That is what makes this so heavy to write, because everything I have spent this site documenting did not come for her all at once and it did not come wearing a costume. It came one comforting thing at a time, over years, until there was a sign over her doorway with two loves printed on it and no seam left between them.

God's timing is never unintentional, and I want to show you a moment from that same season that most people watched without really hearing. In the spring of 2026, as part of a nationwide event marking America's two hundred and fiftieth anniversary, the President read Scripture live from the Oval Office, a passage chosen for him specifically by the event's organizers because of its long history as a call to national prayer: 2 Chronicles 7:14, if my people who are called by my name will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and forgive their sin and heal their land. That verse is real, and it is powerful, and I believe every word of it. But read what surrounds it. The very same chapter that promises healing also warns, only two verses later, that if the nation turns aside and serves other gods, God will pluck it up from the land He gave it, and everyone passing by will ask why the Lord did this to them. We heard the most sobering scripture a nation could be handed, read aloud on live television from the most powerful office in the world, and the overwhelming response was to celebrate the vessel that read it rather than tremble at the warning inside it. Go back and open your own Bible and read the whole chapter yourself, slowly, not just the verse they chose for the cameras. That is the apple in the garden for this entire system, offered to a starving nation, and we took a very big bite.

None of this is an argument for sitting out of public life. William Wilberforce spent decades in the British Parliament fighting to end the slave trade because of his faith, not despite it, and Martin Luther King Jr. built the civil rights movement on Scripture. The difference is not whether a Christian engages the world. It is who gets served by that engagement. Wilberforce and King served their neighbor. This movement serves the nation and calls it God, and I could not tell the two apart for years.

Leaving was not instant and it was not painless. The Holy Spirit convicted me plainly, and the first things He had me get rid of were the physical reminders, and I want to be specific about what was in that pile, because it was both of them. The MAGA merchandise and the QAnon merchandise, the shirts, the sweatshirts, even a Covid mask I had worn like a badge. I name that mask on purpose, because it is a timestamp. It tells you exactly what season this was, and exactly what kind of soil this seed grew out of: the lockdowns, the fear, the isolation, the endless scrolling, a whole nation shut indoors and starving for something to belong to. Both went, together, because by then I understood they were never two different things. They are the very same monster wearing the same mask. I got rid of every piece of it, not because someone told me to, but because I could not hold onto the movement and hold onto Jesus at the same time, and that is exactly the choice this system is quietly asking you to make right now, whether you have noticed the question yet or not. What it will not tell you, because its whole structure depends on your certainty, is that its own founders admitted the framework was never meant to be a conquest, that the prophecy it built your hope on already failed a biblical test it cannot survive, and that the last time a generation of sincere believers fused this tightly with a national identity, it took a small remnant of pastors willing to be called traitors to their own country to say the word no. What is being taken from you is not your love of country. It is your discernment about where your citizenship actually lies, and it is being traded so slowly that you will never feel the exchange happening. You are being taught to read prophecy through the lens of an election, until a political victory starts to feel like the arrival of God's kingdom and a political loss starts to feel like spiritual defeat, and a fear that specific is never going to leave room for the peace Philippians 3:20 promises the people whose citizenship is actually in heaven. Ask yourself honestly whether your hope would survive an election going the other way. If the answer troubles you, that is the Holy Spirit, not condemnation, and it means grieving the leaders and movements you trusted the way you would grieve any other loss, because that grief is real. Jesus never asked Rome for a throne, and He is not asking Washington for one now. His kingdom was never going to be won at a ballot box, and it was never going to be lost at one either.

Here is the same exchange again, the one running through every chapter here. The movement wraps you in belonging: the rallies, the flags, the shared enemies, the feeling of standing shoulder to shoulder in a righteous army with God as your general. One hand offers you that identity, stitched in His name. The other hand is holding your collapse, because when the prophecy fails, when the election is lost, when the leader falls, the faith you welded to the movement cracks with it. I have watched people walk away from Jesus because a man lost, as if the Kingdom had been on the ballot. Anyone who steps back gets branded a traitor to God and country in a single breath, as if those were one allegiance. That is not God turning from you when the movement fails you. That is what happens when a nation is standing where only He should.

Watch what this soil does to the seed. Jesus said thorns would grow up and choke the Word, the cares of this world crowding it out, and there is no thornier ground than a heart where the news cycle gets watered every day and the Word gets watered on Sundays. My seed spent seasons in ground exactly like that. Nothing grew but the thorns.

If you have been carrying this one, and I believe some of you have been carrying it a long time, here is the thing I most want you to hear. He told Pilate plainly that His kingdom was not of this world, and He meant it then and He means it now. He is not running for anything. He does not need a nation to enforce His name, and He never once asked one to. You can love your country. I love mine. But He is not asking you to stand under your kingdom with Him. He is asking you to come stand under His, the only one that was never going to be voted in and can never be voted out. He does not want your loyalty split in two. He just wants you.

None of this was accidental either. God let me walk two seasons of this same deception, years apart, and pulled me out of the second one at the exact moment a watching world needed someone who had lived both to say so, clearly, before more sincere believers walked the same road.