Editor’s note: This profile is part of a GPAHE series examining the people shaping American Christian nationalism in post–Project 2025 America. Christian nationalism is distinct from Christianity itself; mainstream churches have publicly rejected the movement as a distortion of the Christian faith. The figures profiled here are the architects of a theocratic, political project working to fuse American national identity with conservative Christian supremacist rule and dismantle democratic institutions.
He co-wrote a Christian nationalist manifesto, then won a state Senate seat and set about writing it into Oklahoma law — down to murder charges for women who end pregnancies and prison for anyone caught watching porn. In June, the Republican voters of southwest Oklahoma took the seat back.
Key Takeaways
- Deevers co-authored a 2023 manifesto calling for explicitly Christian law. Two years of his legislative efforts came out of it.
- He won a December 2023 special election and filed his first bills within weeks: abortion prosecuted as murder, mothers included; 20 years in prison for watching porn; sexting banned for everyone but married couples; no-fault divorce gone. None became law.
- He preached at Doug Wilson‘s church in Moscow, Idaho, and calls church-state separation an insult to Christ.
- Republican primary voters retired him on June 16, 2026 — four months after Pete Hegseth put Wilson behind a Pentagon pulpit.
“There are a few essential truths that we Americans need to understand about what made America great and will make America great again,” Dusty Deevers preached in January 2026. “And dare I say, to rebuild and make America Christian again.” The Oklahoma state senator had the room stand for a reading from Acts, then built his case from the founders — John Adams, Noah Webster, Benjamin Rush, the Declaration signer who called himself “a Christocrat.” His hosts, Founders Ministries, had spent four decades pulling the Southern Baptist Convention back toward its Calvinist roots. Deevers’ sermon was “God’s Mandate to Government Leaders,” and no law, he told the room, is neutral — “every statute catechizes.” “Legislators, hear this warning,” he said. “God will not be mocked. You are not sovereign. You will give an account before King Jesus. … Kiss the Son or face the beating. You must choose your allegiance.”
Five months later, Republican primary voters in his own district voted him out of office.
Deevers, 48, pastors a Baptist church in Elgin, Oklahoma. In 2023 he put his name on a Christian nationalist manifesto. That December he won a seat in the state Senate and began turning the manifesto into bills. The bills died in committee, one vote at a time, and on June 16 his own party’s voters in Senate District 32 finished him last in a three-man primary. Right Wing Watch, which tracked him from his first campaign, called his two and a half years in office “a case study in what happens when Christian nationalists get in power.” The movement’s leading men mostly work from pulpits and podcasts, where the program stays hypothetical. Deevers put it into bill form, in one of the reddest states in the country, and what happened next — in committee and then at the polls — is the closest thing on record to an answer.
Oklahoma made room for a politician like him. State Superintendent Ryan Walters ordered a Bible into every public classroom. The state put PragerU’s videos in front of students and approved the nation’s first religious public charter school, St. Isidore of Seville, which died on a 4-4 Supreme Court deadlock.
Knock on the Window
Deevers grew up in Elgin, a town of about 3,700 in the southwest corner of the state, and was born again at 10 in the same church building where he now preaches. He sold cars for three months out of college, and on his honeymoon he told his wife he believed God was calling him to seminary — “we went from we were going to be rich to we are going to be poor and we’re going to have people hating us,” he said. He moved home in 2013, led the fight that kept his childhood church open, and since 2016 has pastored Grace Reformed Baptist Church of Elgin. He has been married 21 years, and he and his wife homeschool their six children through Classical Conversations, a Christian classical curriculum.
Deevers dates his politics to the pandemic. His father spent a year and a half locked down in a memory care facility — “we could only knock on the window and wave at him,” Deevers said later. He began showing up at town council meetings to argue that local officials held no jurisdiction over healthy people’s bodies. From the pulpit, he preached against the COVID-19 vaccine. Oklahoma Watch recorded what that sounded like in 2021: the vaccine was a “mathematical equation” pushed on utilitarian logic, he told his congregation — “the same moral principles that were used in the 19th and 20th centuries to immunize the society against becoming infected with bad genes, Jewish genes, low IQ genes.”
The Manifesto
Deevers made his name in the abolition wing of the anti-abortion movement, the faction that wants women who end pregnancies charged with homicide. On May 12, 2022, he stood before a crowd of more than a hundred inside the Louisiana Capitol, leading prayer and song for a bill to do exactly that. Legislators in at least nine states introduced abolition bills in 2023. Deevers holds that personhood begins at fertilization and every abortion is homicide. “I will not vote for a law that says there may be a protected class of murderer to kill their own child,” he said in the January sermon.
In May 2023, Deevers and a fellow abolitionist, James Silberman, posted the “Statement on Christian Nationalism and the Gospel” online. The country it describes would “formally acknowledge the Lordship of Christ” and give “essential Christian Orthodoxy” national recognition. Abortion would be gone, and so would legal same-sex marriage. The signers pledged to “recapture our national sovereignty from godless, global entities.” Christian nationalism predates the statement by generations; the document’s ambition was to turn the label from an accusation into a confession that believers could sign. William Wolfe and Joel Webbon edited it. Wolfe served in the first Trump administration and now works to push the Southern Baptist Convention toward Christian nationalism. Webbon wants women’s suffrage repealed. Deevers serves on the advisory board of Wolfe’s Center for Baptist Leadership.
A month after the statement went up, messengers at the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting considered Deevers for vice president of the denomination. He drew 784 votes and lost to a Louisiana pastor.
The denomination’s leadership wanted no part of it. SBC President Bart Barber went after him on social media, Deevers recalled later, accusing him of being “obsessed with throwing 14- or 16-year-old girls in prison.” Deevers’s answer was that Barber “didn’t have the stomach to do what God’s word said.”
Obey God: Defy Tyrants
In 2023, the district’s state senator resigned his Lawton-area seat to run the local chamber of commerce. Deevers’s congregation prayed over the vacancy for three weeks. At the last meeting, Deevers and a fellow pastor put themselves forward. The church prayed another hour, then laid hands on Deevers and, as he described it, commissioned him — “extending the ministry of this church to the citizens of Oklahoma.” His campaign ad showed him with a rifle, in a black t-shirt: “Obey God: Defy Tyrants.” Baptist News Global profiled him in October 2023 as an ultra-conservative pastor running to abolish abortion, pornography, and no-fault divorce.
He won the four-way Republican primary on October 10 with 37 percent. State law at the time set no runoff for special elections, a rule the Legislature has since changed. Second place went to Jean Hausheer, a retired eye surgeon from Lawton. The progressive Oklahoma Observer warned that the seat was about to go “to a far-right extremist.” In the December 12 general election, Deevers beat Democrat Larry Bush, a former University of Oklahoma football player, 55 to 45 percent, and was sworn in eight days later. At the Founders conference in January, he put his own numbers on the race: opponents spent more than $1.5 million against his $23,000.
The Docket
Government exists, Deevers says, to “terrorize evildoers,” and he wants American law carried back to the codes of the 1600s. The lineage is Reformed Baptist: in the pulpit he cites the 1689 Second London Baptist Confession, which says God “armed them with the power of the sword” — them being civil magistrates — and he names his teachers: John Calvin, the 16th-century reformer who ran Geneva as a church-state, and Charles Spurgeon, Victorian London’s most famous Baptist preacher. Asked whether anything separates his two offices, he answered: “I don’t see any firewalls that are provided to me by the scriptures.”
His mildest bill abolished the state income tax as a levy on “a man’s first fruits” that violated, by his tally, at least three Commandments. Deevers grounded Senate Bill 1825 in Proverbs — “A false witness will not go unpunished” — so anyone convicted of filing a false criminal report would face the penalty of the crime they alleged. He filed to end no-fault divorce. During his campaign, he declared that he favors “public shaming for those who are at fault in divorce.” Anyone caught watching porn faced up to 20 years in prison, anyone sexting someone they weren’t married to committed a crime, and an informant could collect $10,000 for turning in a neighbor — a bounty copied from Texas’s abortion law. Project 2025 calls for pornography to be outlawed and its purveyors imprisoned. Deevers’s bill reached the viewer. The most extreme bill classified any abortion as homicide and let prosecutors charge the mother — with first-degree murder, which in Oklahoma can carry death.
Jimmy Fallon worked the porn bill into a Tonight Show monologue; Deevers answered on X, “Sorry, @jimmyfallon, but pornography must and shall be abolished.” Rolling Stone profiled him in February 2024 under the headline “This Lawmaker Wants to Jail People for Watching Porn” and judged his views “extreme — even for a Christian nationalist.” Right Wing Watch clipped his podcast appearances week after week, and Deevers thanked the group each time: “Thank you for sharing the truth, @RightWingWatch! Right Wing Boost.”
On March 13, 2024, Deevers stood on the Oklahoma Senate floor and applied the doctrine to the federal government: when it “commands what God forbids… we are not to obey them.” The Freedom From Religion Foundation demanded his resignation. He kept his seat. He later spoke at a Capitol rally against a conspiracy theory that the World Health Organization was about to seize American sovereignty. “If we do not stand up to these global bodies, who are usurpers, then it will be to our own demise and our own judgment,” he said.
None of Deevers’s agenda passed. In February 2025, three of his bills — a covenant marriage act with a $2,500 tax credit, the no-fault divorce repeal, and a refiled pornography ban — failed in committee with Republicans joining the votes against them.
Offensive War
He had been in office only weeks when he told a podcast: “Whenever Christians are voted into office, it’s not just good for Christians, it’s good for the wicked as well.” By September 25, 2024, on Wolfe’s podcast, he was calling Kamala Harris voters “wicked, murderous people,” many of them “demon possessed.” He preached at Grace Agenda, the conference Doug Wilson‘s Christ Church holds in Moscow, Idaho, telling civil leaders it is their duty to “submit” to Christ’s authority. Wilson has since led worship inside the Pentagon at Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth‘s invitation.
Deevers escalated. “The rogue court will stand before God for their decision,” he said of the justices who legalized same-sex marriage, in a clip posted April 24, 2025. By September 2025, he was calling the separation of church and state itself “blasphemous.” In October 2025, he promoted an appearance alongside Wolfe, posting the event flyer to his X account, and called on Christian men to “make offensive war on the gates of hell” and to “dominionize” the world.
On Steve Deace’s show that April, he described the job: 50 issues a day cross a senator’s desk, by his count, and he runs every one of them through scripture. He estimates he shares the gospel 10 times a day at the Capitol. Abortion stayed the center. Oklahoma already bans nearly all abortions, so Deevers built his case on the pills: more than 3,200 chemical abortions a year inside the state and over 4,000 women leaving it to end pregnancies, by figures he cites from tracking studies. His answer, session after session, was an abolition act erasing what he calls the homicide code’s maternal “exceptions.” From the Founders pulpit in January 2026, he added a second argument: “Without abortion, hookup culture dies overnight.”
Even the anti-abortion movement fought him. The abortion-as-homicide bill died after anti-abortion organizations in the state spoke out against it; the mainstream rejects charging women, and Students for Life president Kristan Hawkins says abolitionists “protest me more than they protest Planned Parenthood.” “Politics and compromise have corrupted their mission,” Deevers said of the mainstream groups. In November 2025, he posted: “I am the most anti-abortion legislator in Oklahoma. Why are @StudentsforLife and @KristanHawkins trying to take me down?”
Inside the Capitol, he helped found the legislature’s insurgent Freedom Caucus and became its vice chairman. President Pro Tempore Lonnie Paxton stripped the caucus chairman of a leadership post and accused the group of self-promotion. Caucus members blamed him for burying their bills. Deevers kept filing. He answered the pandemic with six bills he called “Make Oklahoma Healthy Again” — “the government may never again do what they did,” he said. On January 16, 2026, he announced five “America First” immigration bills — state-level pieces of Project 2025‘s mass-deportation program. The feud with leadership carried into the June primaries.
The Rematch
On March 5, 2026, with Senator Markwayne Mullin headed to Trump’s Cabinet, Deevers floated a bid for the open seat. He filed for reelection to his state Senate seat instead, and in April 2026 he brought Kyle Rittenhouse — who killed two men at a 2020 protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and was acquitted of all charges — to the district for a meet-and-greet at the Medicine Park aquarium. After local backlash, the aquarium sent the event elsewhere; Deevers wrote that Rittenhouse is a patriot and “we will never bow to the violent leftist mob.”
Hausheer filed again, and a second Baptist pastor from Elgin ran at Deevers from the right. On June 9, the Southern Baptist Convention elected the president Wolfe had campaigned for. A week later, on June 16, Deevers finished last of the three with 29.9 percent and missed the August 25 runoff. The Freedom Caucus had challenged seven incumbent Republican senators statewide; every challenge failed. President Pro Tempore Lonnie Paxton told The Frontier the voters “absolutely sent a message.”
Deevers posted a video blaming “wealthy outside groups” for the money spent against him. The money was real. Oklahoma Watch counted more than $200,000 in negative ads against Deevers from a single group, Stand With Oklahoma PAC — about $11 for every registered Republican in the district, and part of nearly $3 million that outside groups poured into legislative primaries this past spring.
His term ends on November 18, 2026. He still has the pulpit in Elgin — the church he was saved in at 10 and later helped restart. Near the end of the January sermon, he told the room: “If we want to make America great again, kiss the Son,” he reiterated. “Submit every home, church and magistrate to Christ’s word so his rule restores our joy before his rod restores our sanity.
In His Own Words
“It’s a serpentine theocracy or a rule of God, and there’s not a space in the middle.”
— January 29, 2024: speaking on a podcast clipped that day, weeks after he took office.
“Nations will rise and fall on the basis of their submission to Christ!”
— May 15, 2024: in a speech clipped and posted that day.
“The demons who want their child sacrifice, who want this land being covered in blood … that’s what the demons want.”
— September 25, 2024: talking about abortion supporters on William Wolfe’s podcast.
“No ruling that redefines a God-ordained institution is ever truly settled.”
— April 24, 2025: arguing the Supreme Court should reverse its same-sex marriage ruling.
“I am merely taking the word of God and applying it to 50 issues a day.”
— April 2025: describing his legislative job in an interview.
“We do not ask for a seat at the table. We proclaim the terms of the king to those who he has placed in office.”
— January 2026: preaching to the national Founders conference, held January 22–24, on how churches should address legislators.
“I trust the Lord of glory and remain committed to truth and righteousness, liberty, and the good of the people, wherever God places me next.”
— June 17, 2026: conceding the primary, the day after the vote.
“By God’s grace, providence, and unfailing promise, every state in America and every nation on earth will bow before their rightful, risen, and anointed King, Jesus Christ, the King of kings and Lord of lords.”
— June 26, 2026: posting on social media, 10 days after the primary.
