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 helped Project 2025 architect Russ Vought scope out “a sound Christian Nationalism,” and has pushed the 12.3 million members of the Southern Baptist Convention toward Christian nationalist policies. In June, the denomination elected the president he campaigned for.
Key Takeaways
- Wolfe served in Trump’s Pentagon and State Department and calls himself a Christian nationalist. He helped draft the 2023 manifesto demanding that American law acknowledge “the Lordship of Christ.” That October, he made his case to the audience of white supremacist Stew Peters, who calls for executing Democratic officials.
- His Center for Baptist Leadership launched in March 2024, telling the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), the largest US Protestant denomination, to elect leaders willing to call its documented sexual abuse crisis a lie.
- Wolfe endorsed Willy Rice and spent two years campaigning for him. Rice won the SBC presidency on June 9, 2026. A constitutional ban on women pastors cleared its first vote the next morning.
- In April 2026, Wolfe campaigned for Rice on an all-male far-right club’s podcast, days after one of its hosts answered a comparison between the movement’s deportation politics and the Ku Klux Klan with a video celebrating the Klan: “Yes, and I’m tired of pretending it’s not.”
A few hours before the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) handed out presidential ballots in Orlando on June 9, 2026, Willy Rice stood at a lunchtime forum and told a room of young SBC pastors what he thought of their denomination’s decade. “I’m afraid … we’re going to hug ourselves to death,” he said. “We are going to wake up one day and be Kodak or Blockbuster.” That afternoon, the Clearwater, Fla. pastor, who had waved off the SBC’s sexual abuse crisis as closer to hoax than fact, took 5,217 votes — 57 percent — and the presidency of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.
The man behind Rice’s talking points holds no office in the SBC. He has never pastored a church. Christian nationalist William Wolfe spent seven months as a deputy assistant secretary of defense in the first Trump administration, and the day Rice won, he told Religion News Service the election was “a major vindication of the issues we have addressed and fought for.” Three months earlier, on March 14, 2026, from the pulpit of Bethel Church in Petersburg, West Virginia, Wolfe had explained what those issues add up to: “Frankly, yes, we are going to impose it upon you.”
Wolfe is the Christian nationalist movement’s inside man. Others preach for converts or run for office. Wolfe captures institutions that already exist. When the first Trump administration ended, he took a fellowship at Russ Vought’s think tank, the Center for Renewing America, where the work was planning the next Trump term. In March 2024, he turned the same method on his own denomination, which keeps a pulpit in nearly every county in the South.
The Orlando convention gave Wolfe more than a president. Southern Baptist churches govern themselves; what binds them is the annual meeting, where congregations send voting delegates, the denomination calls them messengers, and where amending the SBC constitution requires a two-thirds vote in two consecutive years. Proposed amendments are also supposed to spend a year under executive committee review before messengers ever see them. On the meeting’s first day, messengers voted to skip that waiting period for a proposal from Al Mohler, president of the denomination’s flagship seminary. His “Truth and Unity” amendment proposes to expel churches that let a woman preach to the assembled congregation, and the next morning, it cleared the first of its two required votes with nearly 75 percent in favor.
In February 2019, the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News counted more than 700 people abused in SBC churches since 1998 and roughly 380 church leaders and volunteers accused of sexual misconduct. At his June 10, 2026, press conference, Rice signaled where the denomination’s abuse reforms are headed. The movement to address abuse, he said, “absolutely was weaponized, just like the Me Too movement in the secular culture.” Christa Brown, a survivor of abuse by an SBC pastor and a longtime advocate for reform, told the AP that if anyone politicized the issue, it was the people fighting over SBC power.
The Center for Baptist Leadership titled its post-convention podcast recap “SBC Reformers Just Scored Their Biggest Win in Decades” and walked listeners through how the show had mobilized messengers to Orlando. Baptist News Global counted Rice as the first reform candidate to defeat an institutional candidate for the presidency in 35 years.
The Title He Sells
Wolfe grew up lower-middle-class outside Charlotte, North Carolina, shopping at Goodwill. By his own account, politics came before faith. He traces his politics to watching his friends’ fathers lose construction work to trade deals and to contractors paying undocumented workers cash under the table — an experience he says “put a fire in my bones.” His 15-year-old brother died in June 2011, and his life collapsed. He was 22 when the pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, D.C., shared the gospel with him, Wolfe recounted in a 2024 interview. He was baptized into a congregation at the center of the SBC’s establishment wing. He earned a degree in history from Covenant College and stayed in the capital for a decade, working in three congressional offices. From the Hill, he moved to Heritage Action for America, then to the State Department as a director of legislative affairs, and finally to the Pentagon.
That last title is the one he sells. Conference bios introduce him as “a Senior Official in the Trump Administration.” The job lasted from June 2020 to January 2021, through the election and through January 6.
Instead of cashing in as a lobbyist, Wolfe went to Louisville to finish a master of Divinity at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He already knew the school. Baptist News Global identified him as a former intern to its president, Al Mohler, whose amendment his group would one day whip votes for.
American Reformer takes its theology from the 16th-century Protestant reformer John Calvin and its politics from the hard right. The men behind the venture firm New Founding, a Project 2025 advisory board member, co-founded it. The magazine made Wolfe a fellow, and by September 2022, he was speaking at the National Conservatism Conference (NatCon) in Miami, where the transnational far right gathers. Three years later, he was back on the NatCon stage, in Washington this time, to lecture on “Recovering the Evangelical Political Voice.” To make America great again, he told the room, “We’re going to have to make it Christian again.” The talk was a call for “a Protestant Christian political Manhattan Project,” complete with a joke about rounding up Protestant pastors, putting them “in camps” for reeducation.
“A Sound Christian Nationalism”
Russell Vought was running the Center for Renewing America on January 25, 2023, when he tweeted that he was “proud to work with @William_E_Wolfe on scoping out a sound Christian Nationalism.” Vought now directs the federal budget.
Three months after Vought’s tweet, Wolfe made an appearance on Christian nationalist Joel Webbon’s podcast for an episode recorded April 19, 2023. He had traded complementarianism, the mainstream evangelical teaching that assigns men and women distinct roles, for “biblical patriarchy,” he said. White guilt, he argued, drove the failures of evangelical leaders. His sign-off urged Baptists to “beat your plowshare into a sword” and join him on the front lines.
The 2023 Statement on Christian Nationalism and the Gospel, which Wolfe drafted with Webbon and a third author, binds every nation, in every age, to the moral principle of each of the Ten Commandments. In October 2023, he went on the show of Stew Peters, a white supremacist who has urged the execution of Democratic officials, and told the audience that Christian nationalists in office must save America from “globo-homo nationalism.” That December, Wolfe posted part of the agenda and thought better of it; The New Republic preserved the deleted thread: end no-fault divorce, gestational surrogacy, and sex education in schools. Christian nationalism is “inevitable,” he argued, and young men disaffected by the secular order find the label appealing: “I want to work with those young men.”
Pulpits Money Can’t Rent
The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) holds roughly 47,000 congregations by veteran Nashville investigative reporter Phil Williams’s count, plus six seminaries, two mission boards, the Lifeway publishing house, and a policy office in Washington. In Orlando, messengers approved a $186 million budget to run it all, even as the denomination has shed 3.6 million members over two decades, down to 12.3 million.
The SBC’s right turn did not start with Wolfe. Dallas hosted the 1985 showdown that sealed the conservative takeover of the convention and drove out its moderates. Decades later, Russell Moore ran the denomination’s policy office in Washington, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC), where he refused to endorse Trump and pressed the denomination to face its sexual abuse crisis. After years of fighting SBC leaders over Trump and over immigration, Moore quit on May 18, 2021.
Twenty-one months after he left, on February 21, 2023, the Executive Committee expelled Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California, the SBC’s second-largest congregation, for naming women pastors. Rick Warren, who founded Saddleback and wrote The Purpose Driven Life, flew to New Orleans that June and asked the messengers to let his church back in. They voted 88 percent to keep it out. Hours later, the same messengers gave first-round approval to a constitutional amendment barring women from any pastoral title. The votes were not there in Indianapolis in 2024 or in Dallas in 2025. Al Mohler, the seminary president Wolfe once interned for, rewrote the ban for Orlando. His version reaches past the title to the act: a woman preaching.
At that same 2025 Dallas meeting, a resolution went to the floor demanding the Supreme Court overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, the ruling that legalized same-sex marriage, and calling for civil laws that “reflect the moral order revealed in Scripture and nature.” Nobody rose to argue. The SBC had condemned the ruling since it was issued in 2015, without ever asking the court to reverse it. The Southern Seminary professor who chaired the resolutions committee told reporters he was “clear-eyed about the difficulties” and has argued elsewhere that Christians are “called to play the long game.” Wolfe wasn’t playing anything that patient. Same-sex marriage, he said on a Liberty podcast that same month, “is fundamentally an impossibility. It doesn’t exist.” When SBC leaders drafted resolutions for Orlando warning against ethnonationalism and antisemitism on the dissident right, Wolfe grumbled that “The Ghost of Russell Moore stalks many of the SBC resolutions this year.”
A Clock, Not a Cudgel
Wolfe spent December 2023 calling the denomination’s most famous woman Bible teacher “an ungodly, even demonic, influence on the SBC.” He opened the Center for Baptist Leadership (CBL) — a pressure group with no official role in the SBC — three months later, on March 8, 2024, and the group announced its diagnosis on social media: “leaders in the SBC allowed CRT [Critical race theory], DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion], and feminism to infiltrate our seminaries, our entities, and our churches.” The CBL’s first published piece urged Southern Baptists to elect leaders who would say that the claim of systemic abuse in the SBC “is a lie.” The “lie” was that February 2019 investigation. Wolfe describes the CBL as a subset of American Reformer’s larger project of Protestant renewal — “kind of like a House Freedom Caucus for the Southern Baptist Convention” — and his stump line is that the SBC has “less financial transparency than Planned Parenthood.”
The CBL’s main target was the ERLC. The commission had angered the hard right by opposing criminal penalties for women who seek abortions and by defending immigrants. Four months after the CBL launched, the chair of the ERLC’s board announced that the commission’s president, Brent Leatherwood, had been fired. The rest of the board overruled him, and the chair resigned instead. Leatherwood kept the job for another year. Willy Rice stood up at the Dallas meeting on June 10, 2025 — 40 years after the takeover fight in the same city — and moved to abolish the agency. Wolfe posted the talking point within hours: the vote “is not a cudgel, it’s a clock.”
On June 11, nearly 43 percent of messengers voted to abolish the commission. Any pastor who lost the confidence of 40 percent of his congregation “would resign the next day,” Wolfe said afterward. Leatherwood resigned on July 31, 2025, seven weeks later, the third ERLC president in a row to leave under fire. Wolfe’s CBL issued a statement the same day: Leatherwood “was not the right Baptist for this job.” On April 13, 2026, the trustees installed a new president, the change of leadership that the CBL had demanded in writing. The clock Wolfe set ran out on schedule.
The Iron Fist
Wolfe’s co-authors on the Statement on Christian Nationalism have records of their own. Joel Webbon wants a “Christian Nationalist Caesar” to rule the United States with an iron fist, Constitution be damned. The third author, Oklahoma state Sen. Dusty Deevers, sits on the CBL’s advisory board and files bills to criminalize abortion as homicide. CBL’s roster includes a sitting ERLC trustee who was also strategizing for the group trying to kill it.
In June 2025, on a Liberty podcast episode billed as “America Was Made BY Christians FOR Christians,” Wolfe read the founders’ promise to “our posterity” as a bloodline. “When the founders of America wrote for our posterity, they did not mean millions of Indian immigrants. They did not mean millions of Muslim immigrants to America or millions of South American immigrants. Again, no offense, they have their own countries.”
At a Valentine’s Day gathering in 2026, Wolfe told a story about being “the only person in line speaking English” at a North Carolina DMV, and drew the conclusion himself: millions must be deported so his sons will not grow up as minorities. Right Wing Watch circulated the clip in March. Wolfe stood by the remarks (“I am actually not sorry”), called the group demons, then denied saying what the video showed him saying.
Southern Baptist messengers have gone the other way. In New Orleans in 2023, they affirmed the “inherent dignity and value” of immigrants regardless of legal status and asked the government to open legal pathways to permanent status. In 2011 and in 2018, they had called nativism inconsistent with the Gospel.
The Greene Tavern, an online talk show, comes out of the Nathanael Greene Society, the North Carolina chapter of the Old Glory Club, a nationwide network of men-only far-right clubs whose members, a 2025 Guardian investigation found, include “prominent antisemitic influencers.” One of its hosts posts under the name Kaiser von Lohengramm. On April 6, 2026, he answered a Phil Williams article titled “In Far Right’s Growing Remigration Talk, Echoes of KKK America.” “Yes, and I’m tired of pretending it’s not,” he posted over a video of an anime figure in the white robe and hood of the Klan, set to an anthem urging men to “go with the Ku Klux Klan.”
Days later, Wolfe joined the show. Rice “would very much be our guy,” he told the panel, and electing him was “really my main focus” in the run-up to Orlando. The campaign, he said, was transferable: for anyone “in another denomination that’s fighting with a leftist … what we’re doing is showing that you can win. You bring political grassroots organizing and activism and apply it to these denominational fights.” He gave the same advice about the Republican Party: show up at your local county GOP meetings with three or four friends, and “try to take these things over. I don’t mean it in a hostile sense.”
On air, Wolfe dismissed the Klan comparison as “completely laughable” and described the people who make such charges as “morally reprehensible troglodytes.” He called for “mass deportations, denaturalizations, and remigration” — “not out of hate for anybody,” he said, but “out of love for the American people.”
Messengers at the SBC’s 150th-anniversary meeting in Atlanta in 1995 repudiated “historic acts of evil such as slavery,” which the resolution tied to the convention’s 1845 founding, and resolved to “genuinely repent of racism of which we have been guilty.”
Laying Hands
In February 2025, Wolfe told a podcast that Trump was filling the government “with people who are our guys” and that the second term was “shock and awe.” Paula White-Cain runs Trump’s Faith Office, and on March 19, 2025, she gathered a group of religious-right leaders in the White House to pray over the president. Wolfe stood in the room with David Barton and laid hands on Trump. Barton’s WallBuilders operation supplies the movement’s version of American history. After the meeting, Wolfe posted a video in which he marveled at his access and explained that under a Harris administration, Christians like himself would have been shipped “to the gulags.” Three weeks later, on April 7, he described on a podcast what he had actually done with that access: urged the administration to accelerate deportations, because Southern Baptists and Christians “want to see mass deportations,” and the evangelical organizations objecting to Trump’s immigration crackdown were “astroturf.”
Per procedure, in June 2027, the convention meets again in Indianapolis. Mohler’s amendment comes back with it for its second and final vote, and the abuse reforms fall under Rice’s gavel. Wolfe will be there the way he was in Orlando: off the ballot, working the floor. At NatCon in Washington last September, he reminded the room that America “was essentially 98 percent Protestant at its founding.” “You’re very welcome here,” he said. “We’re glad to have you, but it is ours, and we would like at least some of it back.”
In His Own Words
“I want a Christian nation if only 5% of our population is Christians and somehow we’re the ones who control the reins of power and we pass good and just laws that will benefit the 95% of the population who aren’t converted. I still want that. That’s what I want.”
— April 19, 2023: his terms, offered on Joel Webbon’s podcast between calls to purge “loser theology.”
“If we have ever lived in a point in time in American history since then that we could argue that now is the time to arms again, I think we are getting close.”
— October 21, 2023: his warning at a “Jesus and Politics” conference, delivered while quoting a 1758 militia sermon.
“I don’t care how much they scream. I don’t care how much they cry.”
— January 2026: his defense of ICE deportation raids, given on a Liberty University show.
“I want my children to grow up in a country where they’re not minorities.”
— February 14, 2026: his case for mass deportations, made to a room of allies.
“I am going to enforce my morality on you, inasmuch as our morality is God’s morality.”
— March 14, 2026: his sermon at a West Virginia church, preached three months before his candidate won the SBC presidency.
