A Trump-appointed Religious Liberty Commission was supposed to defend the First Amendment. Instead, it may have revealed how narrow that liberty has become. When Commissioner Carrie Prejean Boller asked a simple question - whether opposing Zionism or criticizing Israeli policy automatically qualifies as antisemitism - the reaction was swift, furious, and decisive. Within twenty-four hours, she was removed.
This isn’t really about pageant queens, pundits, or personalities. It’s about whether historic Christian theology is now out of bounds in American public life. For most of church history, from Rome to the Reformers to the American Founding, Christians did not treat support for a modern Jewish nation-state as an article of faith. Yet today, questioning that assumption can cost you a seat at the table.
If you don’t subscribe to NXR (New Christian Right), you’re missing out, because I’m heading up their Substack operations. The truth is, Insight to Incite just isn’t big enough to hold all of my thoughts (for now). In fact, I’ve got something in the works that’s really exciting, which I’ll send everyone an email about soon enough. Here’s a hint.
Meanwhile - back to NXR - yesterday I published a piece about Carrie Prejean Boller, who until this morning was a commissioner at the Religious Liberty Commission. And no, I don’t mean the Southern Baptist Convention’s Democrat PAC (basically), renamed that in 2019, from ERLC. I’m talking about the commission that was made in May of 2025 with an executive order signed on the National Day of Prayer, as part of the giant stack of red meat Trump has thrown to his evangelical supporters. The commission wouldn’t serve an actual government purpose, of course, but it would signal to the evangelicals who got Trump elected that he appreciated their support.
The commission is chaired by Texas Lt. Governor, Dan Patrick, and has Ben Carson as co-chair, Dr. Phil as something-or-other, and also Carrie Prejean Boller as a commissioner. Boller, if you don’t recall, was Miss California in 2009 and runner-up to that year’s Miss America. She made the news when she gave a fairly Christian answer to a question in the pageant’s final round about sodomy-based marriages, and blew up her chance to win Miss America with an integrity grenade. Since then, she’s been a darling on the conservative Christian circuit and has maintained support for POTUS over the years.
Boller is, among other things, a staunch Roman Catholic, and has been since converting to marry her NFL quarterback husband (I’d be more specific, but you don’t care, and I don’t know football). Unsurprisingly, she holds to Roman Catholic doctrine, and in case you weren’t aware, Roman Catholics are not Christian Zionists. This shouldn’t surprise you, because Roman Catholicism goes back to Constantine and Christian Zionism didn’t exist until Dispensationalism was thought up in Darby’s Irish basement in 1821. And the notion that Christians should support the existence of a Jewish ethnostate wasn’t widespread among Christians until Zionists at Oxford published a Bible to promote Darby’s theology in the marginal notes, and stuck Scofield’s name on it.
I recognize that this is shocking to a great many modern American Christians who have absolutely no grasp of church history, but had someone suggested it was a Christian obligation to bequeath modern Jews a land grant in Palestine or serve as their national protectorate to one of the Founding Fathers, Jonathan Edwards, or George Whitefield, they’d have summoned an exorcist. The Dispensational Zionism of modern mainstream American Evangelicalism is so absolutely foreign to historic Christianity that it would be unrecognizable to most of the Americans throughout our history.
John Winthrop, who preached the famous ‘Shining City on a Hill’ sermon that was once required reading for American public school children, would have found Christian Zionism to be a perverse and bizarre notion. And it’s for that reason that what Carrie Prejean Boller did recently at the fifth meeting of the Religious Liberty Commission was as brave as what she did at the 2009 Miss USA event. She said something true, she said something unpopular, and she said something necessary.
As I reported at NXR…
The illusion that the commission was seriously interested in tackling the issue of antisemitism cracked when Commissioner Carrie Prejean Boller did the unthinkable. Unconscionable. Unallowable. Downright antisemitic, actually. Unforgivable.
She asked a definitional question. Boller wanted to know whether opposing Zionism or criticizing Israeli policy in Gaza “automatically counts” as antisemitism. Boller said, plainly, that she is Catholic and “Catholics do not embrace Zionism.” Then she asked the obvious follow-up: “Does that make me an anti-semite?”Cue the record scratch. How dare she.
WAILING AND GNASHING OF TEETH
All of the usual Christian pundits who have made a career for themselves in the niche market of Christian conservatism acted as though she did the unforgivable. I thought that Todd Starnes (who got his start with Israel’s ambassador to American evangelicals, Mike Huckabee, way back in the day) was going to have an aneurysm. You could hear a thousand evangelical talking heads breaking wind in surprise that she would dare ask the question if Roman Catholics - who believe things Roman Catholics believe - can have religious liberty in the United States to oppose Zionism.
It was a darned fine question.
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Yes, Pope Francis went on record and publicly professed Israel’s “right to exist.” But what made that incredible, or that he underwent the goyim humiliation ritual at the Wailing Wall (a ruin of a retaining wall disattached from Herod’s Temple that Israelis pretend is sacred landscaping infrastructure), is that he was the first Pope to do so. The Catholic Church has never historically abdicated ownership of Jerusalem or greater Palestine to modern Jews. Would you expect the church that sent crusaders to take back the Promised Land by blood to cede it to the people whose ancestors crucified Christ, and still reject Him?
Pope Pius X rejected Theodore Herzl’s Zionist schemes when they were personally presented in 1904, despite Herzl's deceitful profession of Christ to secure the pontiff's signature. Pious saw through Herzl’s false confession and rejected the notion that modern Jews are entitled to Palestine. And every Pope until Francis agreed. In fact, technically, Francis only confirmed their right to exist, not their right to the land itself.
MANY AMERICAN CHRISTIANS REJECT ZIONISM
But far be it from me - a Protestant who still Protests - to defend Roman Catholic doctrine. It’s enough for me to affirm Reformed Protestant doctrine, which also rejects Zionism out of hand. Despite being written before Christian Zionism was ever a twinkle in Darby’s eye, every single Reformed Confession of Faith flatly rejects the theological underpinnings of that novel, perverse doctrine. They hold to what our critics call “Replacement Theology.” That would include the Belgic Confession, Heidelberg Catechism, Canons of Dort, Westminster Confession of Faith, Westminster Larger Catechism, Westminster Shorter Catechism, the Second Helvetic Confession, the Scots Confession, the French Confession of Faith, and the Thirty-Nine Articles.
In other words, Americans who hold to any of those Confessions of Faith would agree with Carrie Prejean Boller: it is against our faith to support Zionism.
Americans who hold to these Confessions include the Presbyterian Church in America, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church, the Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America, the Christian Reformed Church in North America, the United Reformed Churches in North America, the Protestant Reformed Churches in America, the Reformed Baptist Churches, the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, and the Anglican Church in North America. And not to mention, countless unaffiliated churches in the United States who still hold to these anti-Zionist Confessions of Faith. In fact, a great many Southern Baptists - the largest Protestant denomination in the United States - still hold to the older, more Calvinist beliefs of their founders who held to Covenant Theology.
I did the math. The above churches represent at least 16 million Americans whose Confessions of Faith reject the doctrinal underpinnings of Christian Zionism. When you add Papists like Carrie Prejean Boller (Roman Catholics consist of about 70 million, nationwide), that’s a total of 85 million Americans who reject Christian Zionism confessionally.
I’m sure these churches have members who don't know what their confessions teach, and some who don’t agree with them. But I’m also positive there are Christian believers among churches who do confessionally support Christian Zionism (faiths that developed after 1821) who personally refrain from holding that unbiblical doctrine themselves.
The fact is, Christian Zionism may very well control major evangelical institutions that are highly visible im American media. But do not be mistaken in believing that Christians in the United States unilaterally support the establishment of Jewish ethnostate in Palestine.
QUESTIONS FOR THE RELIGIOUS LIBERTY COMMISSION
I’d like to ask Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick whether he knows who founded his church. Patrick is a member of the Second Baptist Church of Houston, Texas (your typical SBC megachurch). That denomination was founded in 1844, long before Oxford Zionists circulated the doctrines of Christian Zionism in the “Scofield” Bible. His denomination was founded by those who held to the Abstract of Principles, a strong affirmation of so-called “Replacement Theology.” Is his own denomination founded by “antisemites”? Would they have religious liberty in Patrick’s America? In fact, I did ask Dan Patrick those questions here.
Heck, Dr. Phil is on the Commission, and he’s a Campbellite. The last I checked, they’re werent’ huge Scofield fans. For that matter, so is Ben Carson. And he’s a cultist, belonging to the Seventh Day Adventists, which rejects Christian Zionism wholesale in favor of the doctrines of prophetess, E.G. White. Why are we acting like every professing believer in the United States is a Zionist?
What makes this episode scandalous is not that a commissioner asked how antisemitism is defined (a necessary question you refused to answer). It is the reaction that exposed how deeply a particular foreign policy posture has been absorbed into segments of American religious life. Over time, support for the modern State of Israel has moved in evangelical circles from a prudential political judgment to something approaching a doctrinal reflex. That shift did not descend from the Reformers, from the Puritans, or from the historic confessions already mentioned. It emerged through 20th-century prophecy culture, conference circuits, study Bibles, televangelism, donor networks, and political coalitions that fused eschatology with geopolitics.
Once embedded in institutions, ideas develop gravity. Media platforms reward certain talking points. Advocacy organizations build influence around specific policy commitments. Politicians learn which signals reassure key constituencies. Over decades, what began as one interpretive framework among many has become treated as the default Christian position. When that happens, dissent is pathologized.
The Religious Liberty Commission illustrates this dynamic. A Catholic commissioner simply asked whether opposition to Zionism or criticism of Israeli policy automatically qualifies as antisemitism. The response was claims that she crossed a moral boundary. That reaction says less about the content of her question and more about how certain political alignments have become sacralized.
PATRICK’S REMARKS
In the NXR article yesterday, I predicted that Boller would be removed from the Commission today. Sure enough, Patrick made that announcement this morning. He said:
Carrie Prejean Boller has been removed from President Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission. No member of the Commission has the right to hijack a hearing for their own personal and political agenda on any issue. This is clearly, without question, what happened Monday in our hearing on antisemitism in America. This was my decision.
What Boller did was ask how antisemitism is defined. And as I explained at NXR, “If even asking questions gets you booed in a Bible museum, maybe the commission isn’t about liberty at all. It’s about control. They weren’t trying to solve any issues, get to the bottom of disagreements, or protect the religious liberty of Americans. They were coalescing to determine the best ways to protect the Nation of Israel from the free speech rights of Americans.”
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