Ross Douthat’s recent article on evangelicalism reminded me of the new evangelical populism on display at Rededicate 250. I have described this loose coalition in relation to Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA and the independent Charismatic networks from which the New Apostolic Reformation sprang. While this new form of evangelicalism is a coalition of co-belligerency, it also holds a shared outlook that needs to be described more fully. It centers on the nondenominational networks and megachurches that have emerged since 1965, but crosses over with the Southern Baptist Convention and the Assemblies of God.
This evangelical populism does not equate to what I’ll call the “New Protestant Right.” By New Protestant Right I mean a small, aggressive group of centers and institutes with high visibility online that constitute a hard-right reaction to current politics. William Wolfe’s speech at the National Conservatism Conference in Jerusalem earlier this month is an example. Wolfe, a Southern Baptist, was invited to describe the ideas that animate the New Right in American politics. Wolfe’s Center for Baptist Leadership has been advancing a strong Christian nationalist agenda.
Since Christian nationalism rests on the claim that America is a Christian nation in some sense, it can be confusing when the New Protestant Right and the new evangelical populism approach the same thesis from different angles, especially for outsiders unfamiliar with non-denominationalism.
This leads to the first clear demarcation between the two groups: The New Protestant Right is almost exclusively a Reformed phenomenon. It’s made up of Calvinist Baptists and Presbyterians advocating a Reformation view of the relationship between Christianity and government. Within evangelical populism, most people have moved beyond denominational structures, choosing instead to operate through networks that secure congregational autonomy.
The New Protestant Right
The New Protestant Right is an offshoot of the broader New Right forged in the long year of 2020, from the first Trump impeachment in December 2019 to the passage of Biden’s American Rescue Plan in March 2021. Those months covered five crises: the COVID-19 pandemic, the ensuing economic downturn and rise in inflation, the racial reckoning and riots, a worsening border situation, and plummeting trust in democratic institutions. The polarized electorate became even more suspicious of the media, education, and government—institutions that maintain the shared American way of life. From this context, the New Protestant Right emerged.
The cold war in Presbyterian and Baptist circles over the cultural moment turned into a hot conflict in 2020. In his book Fault Lines (2021), Voddie Baucham blasted evangelical leaders, organizations, and denominations for compromising on the question of justice. It wasn’t just Russell Moore or Tim Keller; Baucham saw the Southern Baptist Convention and the Gospel Coalition as cozying up to “critical social justice” ideas centered on a narrative of oppressor and oppressed. He likened the current moment to the opening of fundamentalist-modernist controversy in the early 1920s, and called for anti-modernist crusaders in the mold of J. Gresham Machen.
Writer Aaron Renn offered an analysis centered on what he saw as the new cultural terrain of the “Negative World.” Beginning with the Obergefell decision (2014), Renn argued in his seminal First Things essay “The Three Worlds of Evangelicalism” (2022) that being a Christian had become a social negative. In the face of the negative world, Renn suggested that previous evangelical strategies were no longer relevant.
These critiques fueled the New Protestant Right. Older evangelical approaches like the principled pluralism of Chuck Colson and Rich Mouw or the two-kingdom approach popularized by Michael Horton had to be rejected in favor of more aggressive cultural engagement.
Three online coalitions became hubs for the New Protestant Right. The first hub was the “new founders” associated with the venture capital firm New Founding, the online journal American Reformer, and the Center for Baptist Leadership (CBL). Their goal is to reform Christian institutions, taking an aggressive posture toward secular culture grounded in a philosophy of Christian nationalism. The major players are Nate Fischer, Josh Abbotoy, Daniel Strand, and William Wolfe, who all help lead one or more of these organizations.
The second camp includes the outlet New Christian Right and figures like Joel Webbon, Dale Partridge, and Michael Spangler. They share a Christian nationalist agenda with the new founders, and offer an even more radical vision. With the goal of restoring the Western heritage, their view of a Christian nation includes repealing women’s suffrage in favor of one vote per family, and they see the Judeo-Christian hyphenate as heretical.
The third is the Reformed Christian Politics coalition. Led by Stephen Wolfe (no relation to William Wolfe), this group of Presbyterians seeks to influence the Reformed denominations associated with the North American Presbyterian and Reformed Council (NAPARC). They seek a Christian nationalism in which the U.S. government promotes true religion. Toward this end, Stephen Wolfe founded the Institute of Christian Politics to promote the vision he set forth in his book The Case for Christian Nationalism (2022).
These three camps have ties to Christian reconstructionism exemplified by pastor and theologian Doug Wilson, who is based in Moscow, Idaho. Together they form the New Protestant Right. Although they do not agree on the particulars, they all reject the old evangelical approach to politics and evangelization. They believe they are recovering Christendom for the American experiment. Colson argued that Christians could bring their beliefs with them when they entered civil office, but they should not seek government sanction of those beliefs. The New Protestant Right wants governmental structures and laws to enforce Protestant belief and practice.
Overall, the New Protestant Right has online salience but a small ecclesial body, and its influence extends mostly to the tiny Reformed Baptist and Presbyterian worlds through their various online platforms and conferences. The Presbyterian Church in America, by far the largest denomination in the NAPARC, rejects the Christian nationalism Stephen Wolfe represents. William Wolfe has been trying to influence the future shape of the Southern Baptist Convention through the CBL, but it remains to be seen whether he will succeed.
William Wolfe’s NatCon address only gave a snapshot of the Reformed Protestant corner of the New Right, and did not convey the positions of the new evangelical populism.
The Networks of the New Evangelical Populism
As I noted in the previous newsletter, non-denominational networks are the center of the new evangelical populism. They emphasize church autonomy and are suspicious of strong organizational structures. In these networks, local congregations participate in broader networks on an at-will basis and can determine their own pastoral staff.
These networks come in evangelical and Pentecostal-Charismatic (P-C) flavors. The emphasis on congregational polity, coupled with the two broad types, suggests a continuum with the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) on the evangelical end and the Assemblies of God (AG) on the P-C end. In both denominations, the local church has complete autonomy to leave at any time. To give three examples, Elevation Church in Charlotte, North Carolina and Saddleback Church in Southern California both recently left the SBC, while Bethel Church in Redding, California left the AG in 2006.
While some older denominations like the AG are seeing limited growth, most of the dynamism in American Protestantism is happening below the radar within non-denominational networks. Scholars have long noted the decline in the SBC and mainline Protestantism, but often without examining the realignment of existing congregations into a new network or a new denomination. For example, not all congregations that left the United Methodist Church became part of the more conservative Global Methodist Church in 2022. Some simply went independent.
Independent Charismatic networks have been on the rise since the 1980s. One of the key claims in Byron Johnson and Thomas Kidd’s The Death of Religion? (2026) is that the religious census conducted every ten years is undercounting the number of congregations. Using the data J. Gordon Melton’s team at Baylor’s Institute for Studies of Religion collected of three counties in different states, Johnson and Kidd determined that this undercount was mostly among non-denominational congregations, most of which were part of some network.
The Antioch Movement is one example. The Antioch Movement is a network of over 125 congregations, forty-five of which are in the U.S. This network emerged from a Baptist discipleship school in Waco in the late 1980s, which produced Antioch Community Church (ACC), a Charismatic megachurch, in 1999. The movement it started is part of the new independent Charismatic networks that dominate the American landscape.
When J. Gordon Melton published his master list of P-C denominations in the U.S., he had identified over four hundred Pentecostal or Charismatic denominations and over two hundred apostolic networks. Most of the denominations consisted of small, new groups of congregations.
In examining some of these smaller denominations, it’s clear that there is little functional difference between them and a network. The structural differences between Calvary Chapel Association (CCA), Vineyard U.S.A., and Sovereign Grace Churches (SGC) are minor, even though CCA calls itself an associational network, SGC refers to itself as a fellowship, and the Vineyard defines itself as a movement of churches.
Among networks in the evangelical mold, some are newer, seeker-sensitive congregations and others come out of the older fundamentalist landscape of Bible and independent Baptist congregations. Phoenix Seminary originated in a group of Baptist and Bible churches in greater Phoenix in the 1990s, one of which is the large Scottsdale Bible Church.
A final feature of the new evangelical populism is church-planting and leadership networks like Global Leadership Network (formerly Willow Creek Association) or the Acts 29 network. Formed out of the church-growth movement of the 1980s and 1990s, these networks cross denominational lines, willing to work with existing denominations as well as non-denominational fellowships.
One of the largest church-planting networks is the Charismatic Association of Related Churches (ARC). ARC refers to itself as a cooperative because it has local congregations from different networks and denominations among its members. It was started by a group of megachurch pastors to help existing congregations grow and plant new churches.
The Beliefs of the New Evangelical Populism
William Wolfe’s speech at NatCon did not represent these vast non-denominational networks. The loose connection between the small group Wolfe represents and the new evangelical populism resides in Turning Point USA’s partnerships among non-denominational networks and the SBC. Wolfe’s claims in his speech reveal ignorance about the theological and political impulses animating these networks.
Wolfe’s claim that Israel is no longer important does not reflect these networks. Most people in these networks are either Christian Zionists or adjacent to Christian Zionism. Many of these networks support Christian Zionism because they retain enough dispensational beliefs to see Israel and Jews as part of God’s plan. Even among those who reject dispensationalism, like Wayne Grudem, the networks retain support for Israel and vote accordingly.
This leads to a second characteristic of the new evangelical populism: They want to recover a Judeo-Christian vision of America, not Christian nationalism. Admittedly, some in NeoCharismatic networks espouse a soft form of Christian nationalism, but this looks more like acknowledging the historic role of Christianity in American history (regardless of the debate about the founding) and allowing public displays of Jewish and Christian symbols by state and local governments. It is not an effort to recover Protestant Christendom that one sees in the New Protestant Right.
These new networks are populist insofar as they resent the removal of public displays of nativity scenes, the Ten Commandments, and crosses from federal, state, or local properties. They disapprove of the strict separationist interpretation of the U.S. Constitution that defined the second half of the twentieth century. In this sense, they are fundamentally aligned with the older evangelical vision of a Christian America. This view includes positions such as that America was founded as a Christian nation, Americans are primarily Christian as a percentage of the population, or American culture has been largely defined by a shared set of moral commitments that stem from a Judeo-Christian heritage.
A third characteristic is that these new networks are much more politically active in terms of campaigning, running for political positions, and getting involved in government at the local and state levels. While one can still find the older evangelical position that politics should stay out of the pulpit, many in these new networks are increasingly crossing that boundary. Evangelicals became politically active through parachurch organizations in the 1970s, but that activism started to enter the churches in the 1990s when organizations like Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition started handing out voter guides. The events of the last two decades, including 9/11, Obergefell, COVID-19, transgender rights, and anti-racism, have intensified this activism.
Finally, many of these networks are Charismatic. Their praise and worship stem from the new music of the Charismatic movement of the 1970s and 80s. They also have a much more experiential view of Christianity predicated on the Charismatic. They have absorbed the older emphasis on revival into a Charismatic framework. This is primarily the result of Charismatic theologians like Wayne Grudem, who has been able to bridge the evangelical networks and the independent Charismatic networks.
These independent Charismatic networks have internal difference, including that they are egalitarian and multiethnic. But they have a shared outlook. Their theological profile amounts to being congregational in polity, Charismatic in practice, and premillennial in outlook. This profile translates into a strong suspicion of institutions, support for Israel, and a political activism that seeks to advance traditional Jewish and Christian moral and social commitments.
If the NatCon crowd wants to understand the political moves of the past two decades, they need to invite representatives of the new evangelical populism, not the New Protestant Right. The latter is trying to influence the former, but its hard-core Christian nationalism, rejection of Israel in favor of a replacement view of the church, and espousal of a more exclusively Reformed Protestant vision will never have a large impact.
