The Bird, Babylon, and the Christian Underground: Strategies for Establishing a Christian Presence in a Captured Order

Fellowship Discussion Essay | May 10, 2026

Occasion: Sunday’s gathering had last week’s fellowship summary as its formal seed text, which was downstream of three weeks of fellowship work — the eight-strongholds essay of late April, the May 3 discussion of evangelism’s real deliverable, and a sequence of fellowship essays I have produced this past week engaging external pieces (Stephen Grosz on psychoanalysis, Charles Whitaker on proselytism, Justin Brown on the loneliness of being liked but never known, John Ritenbaugh on the harmony of grace and law). The Sunday meeting was largely unscripted — Michael Sherman opened with a walkthrough of his lifelong classification mandala at NowAll.us, Isak Gutierrez asked the question that organized the first half of the conversation (where do Christians and non-believers find common ground), and the second half opened into a deeper question that the fellowship has been circling for some time: how does a faithful Christian community live, as a community, inside a political and ecclesial order that has been comprehensively captured by forces hostile to the gospel? Three different answers surfaced — Susan Gutierrez’s separationism rooted in Come out of Babylon, Charlie Gutierrez’s live-like-a-bird approach, and my own preference for a de facto colony — and the discussion converged on a single name for what we were reaching toward, supplied by Charlie at the end: the Christian Underground.

What follows is the synthesis of what we said. The hour was longer than the discussion will feel in this writeup, partly because some threads opened and did not close, and partly because the disagreements were sharper than they appeared in the moment. I have tried to render each participant’s position fairly, including my own, and to flag the threads that remain open.

I. The Mandala — Michael Sherman’s Classification System

Michael opened by walking me through the current state of his classification system at NowAll.us, which sits under the Contact Us tab on the site he has been building for the better part of three decades. The image is a modified yin-yang: at the top is You, at the bottom is All, and the right and left halves are not single fields but each divided into an inbound and outbound quarter, because Michael long ago concluded that the interaction zone between any two terms is structurally rich enough to deserve its own subdivisions.

The right half of the wheel runs from the personal at one extreme — psychology, the where are you coming from of the individual — out to the macroeconomic at the other — the conditions you mostly inherit from the desert or the Eskimo community or the century you happen to live in. In between sit sociology, anthropology, and the institutional middle layer. Civilization runs through the green cells. Cultures, governments, and economies are the three principal slices. Each is further divided into an inner (individual-facing) and outer (anthropological-facing) face, with a sociological convening zone in the middle. Politics, institutions, and history are arranged as future, present, and past — the Declaration of Independence, Michael noted, can be filed under politics if what you are studying is Jefferson’s thinking as he wrote it, or under history if what you are studying is the artifact after the fact. The micro/macro split applies to economics in the same way it applies to physics. The left half of the wheel runs from biology (the most personal of the sciences) out to mathematics and the abstract models that don’t even have to be instantiated. Where biology meets math, you get the world of matter and energy.

The numeric scheme makes the right and left halves indexable: the 100s are the arts, the 300s are the sciences, the 200s are everything that runs through the civilizational middle. Sub-decimals locate any individual concept inside the cell where its innermost nature lives. The classification rule, Michael said, came to him from Marcus Aurelius: Who is it? What is it in and of itself? What is its nature? Once you can answer the what is its nature question for a concept, you know where in the wheel it goes.

I asked Michael to send me a copy. I have my own indexing problem on the Renaissance Ministries side — the Christos AI corpus is growing faster than my ad hoc folder structure can absorb — and Michael’s wheel is the engineered version of what I have been making up as I go. I will return to it when the time comes to re-organize the website. The mandala is also, as it was on May 3, the engineering version of Michael’s evangelistic method: find the cell where you and your interlocutor already overlap, and start there. That method is going to do real work in the next several sections of this summary.

II. The Question — Where Christians and Non-Believers Overlap

After Michael’s walkthrough, I asked the group whether anyone had read last week’s fellowship essay. Isak said he had started it. Then he asked Michael the question that organized the rest of the morning:

What are the things, as an atheist or a non-believer, that overlap with Christianity and your beliefs? Where do you tend to agree, and where do you tend not to?

Isak’s framing was honest about his own history. He has, by his own account, lived his life as different versions of those positions — Christian, atheist, seeker — at different times. The question was not academic. He was asking for an inventory of shared ground from someone who has thought about it for as long as Michael has.

Michael’s first answer to the overlap question was the right one. He reached, with help from the group, for the verse Susan had once supplied: By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another (John 13:35). The overlap, at the foundation, is love for one another — and the practical instances of it across two millennia of Christian witness are not difficult to find. Michael named Mother Teresa, and the broader tradition of Christian charity that produced her. He named John Paul II, standing up to the Soviet bloc in Poland during the 1980s, not only the political capital to do it, but also the courage. He named the long list of Christian humanitarian work that, when Christianity is at its best, manifests precisely the kind of outgoing concern for others that is the substance of the gospel.

There is a great deal of overlap at this level, Michael said, and he was clear that the overlap is real, not a strategic concession. The agreements between his position and Christianity are substantial — forgiveness, the Decalogue at its core, the Sermon on the Mount, 1 Corinthians 13:11. When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. The overlap between stated convictions and lived ethical practice is broad enough to support substantial cooperation.

III. The Indictment — Michael on Christianity in History

The disagreements, however, were many. Michael offered them not as a sneer but as someone who has spent decades trying to make sense of what the historical record actually shows, and the catalog he produced is the catalog every honest Christian apologist will eventually have to face.

He began with the Spanish Inquisition — not just the killings, but the deliberate elaboration of pain over time. The Iron Maiden, with its spikes arranged to crush the body slowly. The breaking wheel, on which a person’s limbs were shattered, and the body was then elevated so birds and ants could complete what the wheel had begun. Honey was applied to draw the insects. The point of the technologies, Michael emphasized, was not death but the extension of dying. These things were not improvised in some basement; rather, they were specified, engineered, manufactured, installed in cathedrals, and used by inquisitorial courts.

Michael’s assessment was, “It’s as if they looked at the cross and the crucifixion and carried on. And said, “You know what, this is the good stuff. Let’s all wear this around our neck, and let’s all torture people just like this.” He did not say it as polemic. He said it as the honest perception of someone watching the historical record and noting that the practitioners of the inquisitorial torture seem not to have noticed what their central symbol depicted. The cross, in its biblical meaning, is the place where the innocent absorbs the violence of the guilty. The inquisitorial cross is the same instrument used to prolong the accused’s suffering. Something has gone radically wrong when those two are confused.

Michael’s catalog continued past the Inquisition. The Crusades. The Bosnian War of the 1990s, in which Eastern Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant Christians arranged themselves into three armies and killed each other for territory in a region every faction claimed for God. The Spanish Conquest of the Americas, in which the genocide of indigenous peoples was conducted explicitly as a Christianization mission. The pattern Michael named was that the banner of God has been carried, again and again, by armies committed to ends the gospel never authorized.

He turned to a contemporary remedy he finds promising. A student of his, now a professor at New York University, has built a career convening religious leaders on all sides of an active conflict and brokering conversations among them. During his college years, the student traveled to Sri Lanka and gathered peace stories from each of the four major religions then warring on the island, and then published the collection in all four languages. The project assumes that one cannot expect the warring generations to make peace with each other, but one can sometimes raise the next generation to recognize that each tradition, somewhere in its archive, contains stories of the peace it has lost. Michael named the existence of formal Interfaith Council bodies that operate on the same premise. On Michael’s account, the Interfaith Council is a real and useful institution.

IV. Isak’s Diagnosis — Religion as Cover for Other Motives

Isak, after listening to Michael’s catalog, offered a diagnosis. He suggested that the wars Michael describes are, on close inspection, not really about religion. They are about land, resources, captured populations, dynastic ambition, and the desire of small groups of decision-makers to manufacture consent for war from larger populations that would otherwise not have agreed. It’s not a war by the people, Isak said. It’s a war by some people who decided that’s the route we have to go to create propaganda or a narrative. The religion functions as the propaganda layer — the cover that makes the actual war seem to the foot soldier like a war he can join with a clear conscience.

If wars were really about religion, Isak observed, they would have ended whenever the religious leaders sat down together and identified their shared commitments. But they do not end at that table, because that is not actually what the wars are about. Michael agreed in full: Oh, I agree 100%. Excellent. Well put.

This was a moment of substantive convergence between Isak’s diagnostic instinct and Michael’s historical analysis, and the conversation could have closed at this point with everyone in agreement that the indictment Michael had raised is real and that its proximate cause is the human use of religion as cover for non-religious ambitions. The complication, which I raised next, was whether that observation — that religion is being misused — is itself a sufficient diagnosis, or whether the religion is also doing something that makes the misuse easier.

V. The Distinction Defense — Christianity Versus Its Distortions

I made the distinction-defense at this point. The actions Michael had cataloged — Inquisition, Crusades, conquistador genocide, Bosnia — are not what Christianity teaches. They are what people who claim Christianity have done. The doctrine and the doings are not the same thing, and conflating them is the same kind of error as conflating chemistry with the chemists who built the gas chambers. It is poorly executed Christianity that is being indicted, not Christianity. It says what those particular Christians did. It does not say what Christianity does. It says what poorly executed Christianity does.

Michael’s pushback was that Christianity inspires Christians to join the cause. The Spanish Conquest was sold to its soldiers as, “We are going to Christianize the natives.” The translation of that recruiting pitch in the field was the wiping out of whole tribes and the enslavement of those who were not killed. The point, Michael said, is that the religion does the recruiting work. The leaders cite it; the foot soldiers join because they are told the cause is righteous; the misuse is enabled by the texture of religion itself. It is the nature of religion to bind salvation to membership, its history of crusading rhetoric, its production of priests and popes who can authorize the war and absolve its consequences.

Note: The use of the texture of religion by the priesthood or government to motivate action in the name of a group is not an indictment of the truth of that religion. In particular, the truth of Christianity is not determined by the pretexts used by governments, missionaries, popes, expeditionary forces, or crusaders. Rather, this widely referenced and exemplified history of the misuse and misdirection of action and zeal in the name/aegis of religion is a testament to religion’s power to enlist human thought, emotions, and action. The fact of such power is a cautionary note for those who hear the appeals of religion. It is likewise a warning to those tempted to use that power to as the motivator for their program (whether commercial (consumption/profit-driven), governmental (state compliance), personal (cult-like obedience), inspire of the great responsibility***  of the be used correctly/rightly, lest the naive, the immature, the unsophisticated be enrolled in unrighteous action in their misguided attempt to execute righteousness. The true indictment is of the practitioners, populations, and leaders who follow blindly or cynically/maliciously misuse the inherent power of religion to motivate man toward God’s manifestation of His Kingdom.

I consider Michael’s argument against Christianity based upon this historical precedent of misuse and misapplication of the core principles/philosophy/theology/teaching of religion to be in the same class of misunderstanding of religion as those who have misapplied it in the application of the horrors of the iron maiden and the wheel. I believe it is this error, and errors in its orbit, to be one of the strongest (albeit weak) and most commonly used (indicating the lack of sophistication and discrimination of the intelligentsia/leader/power-class). This error is   The error is in the But He is not naively confusing the religion with its misuse. He is saying that any religion that can be so reliably weaponized must, in some sense, be vulnerable to weaponization at its structural level — and that the proper Christian response to the historical record is not the distinction-defense alone, but the harder question of why the distinction has historically failed to hold, and what would need to change for the distinction to do real work.

I did not concede the full structural form of his argument, because I do not think the religion’s vulnerability to weaponization is the same as a defect in the religion itself. But I want to record the argument’s strength here, because the fellowship’s project — building the Kingdom Culture, the Christos Civitas, what Charlie at the end of the morning would name the Christian Underground — has to be a Christianity that is not vulnerable to that weaponization. The distinction-defense alone is not enough. The lived community has to make the distinction true.

VI. The Islam Exchange

The conversation then took a sharper turn — sharper than it perhaps needed to — into Islam. I said something I will repeat here for the record, and I will also note that Michael’s challenge to it was substantive enough that I cannot resolve the exchange in the writeup. I said that the comparison between Christianity and Islam, on the question of whether either is a religion of peace, is not symmetric. Islam was founded in war, expanded by conquest, and continues — in the sense that its core scriptures and its dominant historical practice both authorize it — to be a religion that converts at the point of the sword. The George W. Bush–era assurance to the American public that Islam is fundamentally a religion of peace is, I argued, not historically accurate. The Crusades were a defensive response to seven centuries of Islamic conquest that had taken Iberia, the Levant, North Africa, and much of southeastern Europe. Without the Crusades the conquest would have continued into the rest of Europe.

Michael’s response was the right response: a Muslim would say exactly what I had just said, only with the words Christianity and Islam exchanged. He asked me to produce the scriptural citations that demonstrate Islam’s authorization of forcible conversion. I told him I could not produce them from memory, because I am not a Qur’anic scholar, but that I had read the citations many times and would be willing to gather them. (That offer stands, and I will gather them this week. To be filed as an open thread.)

I distinguished, in the meantime, the Meccan and Medinan periods of Muhammad’s career — the earlier Meccan period being the one from which Western apologists most often draw their religion of peace characterizations, and the later Medinan period being the one in which the political-military character of the movement was established. The dominant Islamic legal tradition, I said, treats the Medinan revelations as superseding where they conflict with the Meccan. This is doctrine I have read but not studied to the level Michael was asking for.

Michael’s counter was to introduce the Jewish historical experience as a comparative datum, since the Jewish people have lived under both Christian and Islamic rule at various points and have, in some places, kept records of how each regime treated them. He cited the period of Islamic rule over portions of Iberia as a time when Jews were taxed but not persecuted, and the period of the Spanish Inquisition that followed the Christian Reconquista as the time when Jews were tortured and expelled. The example by itself is real. The generalization Michael drew from it — that Christians have historically killed Jews while Muslims have historically tolerated them — is, I argued, too quick. A single example is not a generalization. There are other examples that run the other way. The Holocaust is one. The expulsion of Jews from Arab lands in 1948 and after is another. The history of the dhimmi status, which subordinated Jewish communities to Muslim rule under conditions that were tolerable when the rulers were generous and severe when they were not, is a third. The honest comparative-history answer is that Jews have fared variably under both regimes, and that the variability tracks the disposition of the local rulers more than the underlying religion.

We did not resolve the exchange. I am willing to say that the comparative-history question is more contested than I initially framed it. I am not willing to concede the larger claim that Islam and Christianity are equivalently disposed toward forcible conversion, because I do not think the textual and historical records support that equivalence. But the matter is open, and I owe the fellowship the citations I was unable to produce on the spot.

VII. Hitler, the Pope, and the Failure of Christians to Stand Up

Michael then pressed the question further by introducing the Holocaust. Hitler’s Germany, he noted, was a Christian nation by any external measure — culturally, demographically, even formally in many of its church-state arrangements — and the response of the Christian church to the gas chambers was not to stand against them. Some clergy did stand. Most did not. The Pope did not, in any way commensurate with what was happening. The German Protestant church, with the Barmen Declaration exception, did not. The wider European Christian populations, in occupied France and Belgium and Poland, did not, with the exception of pockets of resistance and the moral exceptions like Bonhoeffer who paid for their resistance with their lives.

Michael invoked a line from John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman on this point — the line is roughly that the issue was not that Hitler had the power to be so evil, but that millions had not the strength to stand against him. The Christian failure of the 1930s and 1940s, on Michael’s reading, was not that Christianity caused the gas chambers, but that Christianity did not produce the resistance that the moment required. The pope who could have said no — and said it with the moral authority of the Catholic Church behind him — did not say no. He acquiesced. And the consequence of the acquiescence, in Michael’s framing, was that the Church watched the genocide happen.

I made the distinction-defense again, more carefully this time. It does not say what Christianity does. It says what those particular Christians did. It says what poorly executed Christianity does. Michael’s response was the response that has stayed with me most from the whole morning. He said: that is exactly the project you are trying to undertake — the project of producing a Christianity that does not boot-lick whoever claims to be Christian and is in power, but actually stands. The task is large. It has historical precedent against it. But it is precisely the right task, and if you can pull it off, you will have added a chapter to the Christian story that the previous chapters needed.

That was a moment of substantive endorsement from Michael that I want to record. He does not believe Christianity has, as historically practiced, been what it claims to be. He does believe the version of Christianity I am trying to build with this fellowship could be — and he is, on the evidence of the morning, willing to support the attempt. Why I say go for it, he said. Which is why I’m kind of hoping you can pull this off, because what you just said needs to happen if Christianity is going to have the soul of its essence become what it stands for, instead of, you know, boot-licking whoever says he’s Christian.

VIII. Institutions, Hierarchy, and the Uninformed Middle

The conversation transitioned, through my own use of the word institutions, into the question of how religious and political institutions actually function and whether their failures convict the underlying systems or only the particular institutional inhabitants. I had used institution to mean the perversion of an ideal that has become the public voice of the ideal — the bishop conference that has become what Catholicism says, the news anchor who has become what journalism is, the academic department that has become what the discipline thinks. Michael clarified that he had been using institution differently in the mandala: not as a perversion of an ideal but as the present-tense layer of social reality, between the future-oriented activity of politics and the past-oriented recording of history. The institution, on Michael’s framing, is the way things presently are; it is changeable, and the change is what politics and history both register.

We disagreed about hierarchy. I made the claim that every organization with a leadership structure is, in its operational moment, a top-down system — that even when there is a populist vote at the front end, what follows is a bureaucratic machinery that executes the will of the leadership. Michael pushed back hard. Western constitutional democracy, he said, is not top-down in any straightforward sense. The president faces a Congress made of a Senate and a House, both of which can refuse him. The British Prime Minister faces the Commons and Lords. The German Chancellor faces the parliament. The separation of powers is the principal mechanism by which the one big leader runs everything model is checked. He used the image of superheroes with different powers — the President fast, the Senate strong, the House numerous, the judiciary precise — fighting on different fields rather than head-to-head for a single prize.

I came around partway. The separation-of-powers structure is real, and it does produce something more complex than a single Goliath. But I am not persuaded that the complexity rescues the model from the deeper problem, which is that the population doing the voting is, in significant part, uninformed and is voting on grounds that are not adequate to the seriousness of the decisions being made. Michael did not deny the uninformedness. He invoked Mark Twain — the Lord must have liked the common folk, because he made so many of us — and offered as illustration the 1988 Democratic primary turning on the phrase where’s the beef?, and the 1952 Eisenhower campaign cartoons, with their elephants and balloons, that helped carry the general election. The uninformed middle decides elections by responding to memes and slogans rather than by deliberation on substance.

That is the dynamic. Michael did not defend it; he described it. And the description, taken seriously, is corrosive of any easy democratic faith. If the institution-electing population is choosing on this basis, then the institutions it produces are likely to be of the same kind. The Pope, Michael conceded, has been on both sides of the moral ledger across the centuries — the John XXIII / John Paul II / Francis side, and the Galileo / Hitler-acquiescent side. We did not settle whether the variability of the institutional output convicts the underlying institution. I do not think we will settle that question soon. It is the same question, in another form, that we are asking about Christianity itself.

Michael left the meeting at this point, with the standing observation that the issues we had covered were the issues he thinks about all the time and that the conversation had been generative for him. The fellowship continued without him.

IX. After Michael’s Departure — Isak on Not Being Tricked

Isak offered the first reflection after Michael left. The thing he heard in Michael’s whole presentation, he said, was the desire not to be tricked — and that desire is the same desire that drives a lot of serious Christians, and a lot of serious seekers, in any tradition. People who think for themselves do not want to find out, ten years in, that they have been moved by sleight of hand. The fear that the religion is doing that to them is the fear that produces the rogue Christian posture Isak has had to come to terms with in himself. He does not, by his own account, want a Pope above him, or a denominational leader who can speak for his conscience, or a creedal authority that can pre-empt his own discernment. He wants to know God for himself, and he wants what he calls the actual relationship, not the relationship the religion has packaged for him to consume.

This concern was, I think, the most personally serious thing said during the morning. It is also a concern the fellowship has to take seriously as we try to build something. Whatever the Christian Underground turns out to be, it cannot be a trick. The people who join it have to do so with their eyes open, and the structure has to be the kind of structure that does not require its members to suspend their discernment in order to belong. The historical Christianity Michael indicted has, very often, required exactly that suspension. The Christianity we are trying to build has to be one that produces deepened discernment, not surrender of it.

Leonard interjected at this point with a recommendation of the film Idiocracy — the satirical Mike Judge picture from 2006 about a society that, over five centuries, becomes catastrophically less intelligent because the educated have stopped reproducing while the uneducated have not. Isak elaborated the premise. The film’s opening contrast — the educated couple who will have children when the time is right, juxtaposed against the unprovident pair whose descendants multiply uncontrollably — is, Leonard said, a parable for the demographic gradient our actual civilization is now riding. It is funny, and it is unfunny.

X. Leonard’s Bird and the Two Strategies

The film cue led Leonard into the metaphor that organized the rest of the morning. He said: Michael is an observer of the game, not a player. The game itself, Leonard said, is being played by what the gaming world calls NPCs — non-player characters, controlled by the game rather than playing it. The game is a single bird with two wings: one left, one right, both attached to the same body, both flapping in the same direction. The wings appear to disagree; the bird does not. The bird is going wherever the bird is going, and the NPC voters who choose between the wings each cycle are, in effect, choosing nothing about the destination.

I named what Leonard was describing as the uniparty critique — the analysis, common on the dissident right and on parts of the dissident left, that the apparent contest between Republicans and Democrats is a contest within a single political class with substantially convergent commitments on the matters that most affect the population. Leonard agreed. The bird is, on his picture, headed toward the precipice that 250-year-old empires conventionally reach. The American Republic is at or past that mark. The end is either external conquest or internal disintegration. Leonard quoted the enemies foreign and domestic phrase from the constitutional oath, and observed — pointedly — that the domestic enemies are the more proximate threat.

I said something that should not have been compressed into a single line, but it was: in the language of the bird metaphor, the domestic enemies are the Democrats — and I meant by this not the millions of ordinary Democratic voters, who are largely the uninformed middle Michael had described, but the leadership and machinery of the Democratic Party, which has, over the past three decades, allied itself with the cultural and institutional forces I take to be most directly hostile to the gospel. Leonard agreed and added the necessary correction: there are a lot of Republicans that are Democrats too. The party label is not the operative variable; the underlying alignment is. The Republicans In Name Only — the RINOs — count, on this analysis, as part of the same wing of the same bird.

Two strategies for the right-wing problem then surfaced. Leonard’s strategy was to pull the right wing off the bird entirely and attach it instead to the cross of Christ — a posture of separation from the political process altogether, on the conviction that the bird cannot be salvaged and that what the gospel asks is a different mode of existence. If you pull the wing off, Leonard noted, the bird crashes. The bird crashing is, on his picture, not the problem; it is the relief.

My strategy was different. I do not want to disengage. I want to dominate. The right wing — by which I mean the believing, traditional, scripturally-grounded portion of the population, the Moral Majority in Reagan-era language and the Kingdom Culture in our own — should not abandon the bird; it should beat its wing harder and faster than the left wing, and steer the bird’s flight toward an actual Christian civilization. The Christos Civitas project, as I have articulated it across the previous fellowship essays, is the affirmative version of this strategy: a Christian people building the political, ecclesial, and cultural institutions that will carry the next generation, won one soul at a time.

These two strategies — Leonard’s separation and mine of cultural dominance — are not, I now think, opposed in the way they first appeared. They are answers to the same question at different stages of the same project, and the synthesis that surfaced later in the morning (the Christian Underground) is the right name for what we are actually doing.

XI. Susan’s Counter-Direction — Come Out of Babylon

Susan, who had been listening through the bird-and-cross exchange, offered the deepest counter-direction of the morning. The Bible, she said, presses us toward something different than fixing the existing government from within. She had been reading widely in the come out from among them passages — Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing; and I will receive you (2 Corinthians 6:17), and the parallel come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins (Revelation 18:4) — and she had concluded that the biblical prescription is more radical than either Leonard’s wing-amputation or my cultural-dominance strategy.

What Susan saw is that the corruption is not concentrated in one wing or one party. It is structural to the man-made governmental order itself, in such a way that even a corrected version of that order would be subject to the same gravitational drag. The man-made laws, even the good ones, are bound up with bad ones in package deals — the legislative process cannot deliver pure goods because the institution itself is impure. The way the Bible proposes, Susan said, is not to refine the bird but to step off it onto a different platform entirely, and to let the alternative platform become visible to the rest of the population as a competing option. Once a real alternative is visible, the monopoly the man-made government has on the spiritual imagination of its citizens is broken. Some people will, then, choose the alternative. The fruits of the Spirit, which are presently muted in the Christian community by the entanglement with the unbelieving order, will become visible — and the visibility itself will draw the remainder of the population that is still drawable.

Susan’s framing is biblically rooted in a way that I have to respect, even where I am not yet sure I agree with the strategic conclusion. The texts she invoked do say come out. They do say be separate. They do contemplate a faithful remnant inside but not of the order it lives in. The question is what coming out operationally looks like in 2026 America, and whether the coming out is a present-tense action or an eschatological hope that will be realized when the Beast system makes neutrality impossible. Susan, I think, was holding both. The action has to begin now while the cost is still bearable; the full separation will not be required until later, but by then the people who have not begun the work will not be ready for it.

XII. The Ambassador and the Testamentary Trust

Susan offered two specific mechanisms by which the coming out might be operationalized in current American legal structure. The first is the ambassador model. An ambassador to a foreign country is, by long-established diplomatic convention, not under the legal jurisdiction of the country in which she serves. She represents her sending country; she is taxed and disciplined and adjudicated by it; she is, in the receiving country, subject only to the limited protocols that apply to her diplomatic status. Susan’s proposal is that Christians can — and the New Testament directly authorizes the language for it — claim the status of ambassadors for Christ (2 Corinthians 5:20), and that the ambassadorial status, properly understood, places them under the jurisdiction of Christ’s kingdom rather than under the jurisdiction of the American legal order in which they currently live.

The mechanism is real, in the sense that the United States does recognize foreign ambassadors and accord them diplomatic immunity. The mechanism is also constrained, in the sense that the recognition has to come from the State Department and the President, and is generally not granted to citizens of the receiving country itself claiming foreign-sovereign status under a religious framework. Susan is, I think, hopeful that the current administration — given its religious orientation and its skepticism of the institutional consensus on church-state matters — might be open to recognizing a Christian-citizenship status that operates analogously to ambassadorial status. I cannot evaluate the legal feasibility of this. I do think the ambassador for Christ language in 2 Corinthians 5:20 is doing real theological work that the Christian community has not fully drawn out, and I want to take Susan’s proposal seriously enough to study it.

The second mechanism Susan offered is the testamentary-trust model. Within the New Testament, she has identified what she reads as a last will and testament of Jesus Christ — and within that testament, a testamentary trust into which the Father has transferred a class of persons (the given of John 17, thine they were, and thou gavest them me). The legal analogy Susan is reaching for is the modern testamentary trust, in which assets are protected by being held inside the trust rather than by the individual beneficiary, and which can — in some jurisdictions — extend its protection to the persons whose support is the trust’s purpose. The proposal is that Christians, by virtue of having been given to Christ by the Father, are inside a legal-spiritual structure that the man-made courts are theoretically obligated to recognize when correctly invoked. Susan acknowledges that the testamentary-trust mechanism has not been tested in court in this form; she also reads it as having real future potential, particularly if the current legal environment continues to be open to religiously-grounded jurisdictional claims.

Charlie’s response to Susan’s framing, partway through, was characteristic and warm: This is Dr. T telling you, in a very nice way, you’re completely delusional. I want to record that exchange because it captures the dynamic that produced the rest of the conversation. I am skeptical of Susan’s specific legal mechanisms. I do not think the ambassadorial framework or the testamentary-trust framework will be received by the American courts in the way Susan’s argument requires. But the substantive theological insight — that Christians belong, juridically, to a different sovereign than the one stamped on the currency — is biblically defensible, and the question of how that different sovereignty becomes practically visible is the right question. The answer may not be the specific legal mechanism Susan named, but it is in the neighborhood of what she was reaching for.

Susan’s response to my skepticism was, again, biblically grounded: when the way forward is not visible, the biblical pattern is to call a fast. Ezra called a fast in chapter 8. Nineveh called a fast in Jonah 3. The fellowship, she said, would do well to do the same. The way we cannot see may become visible when the fast is kept.

XIII. Charlie’s Third Way — Live Like a Bird

Charlie, who had been quiet through most of the morning, offered a third strategy that drew on a long personal history. The strategy is what I will call the live like a bird approach.

When he is at the ocean — Fort Funston, where he sometimes sits in the late afternoon after the crows and ravens are done with the day’s work and have come over to play in the updraft along the cliff — Charlie watches the seagulls and pelicans pass overhead in their irregular parade. They appear to him to live in a kind of freedom that he does not. The birds do not have to pay rent, hold a driver’s license, file taxes, or comply with the Lilliputian regulatory net that has been laid across the daily life of an American citizen. Their constraints are different — they have to avoid predators and find food — but those constraints are relatively simple and ancient, not the elaborate web of human-invented agreements that has been laid across Charlie’s path. I’m at least as smart as that Pelican, he said. The question he has been asking himself is what the Pelican is doing, or not doing, that keeps it free, and what Charlie himself has been doing that has tied him to the ground.

The answer he has settled on, partially, is this: refuse to enter into agreements with crazy people. Have as little contact with formal authority as can be managed. Stay out of the line of sight of the bureaucratic and ecclesial regimes that want to register, license, regulate, tax, and otherwise capture the citizen-believer. Live, deliberately, under the radar — what Paul Fussell, in his book Class, called the bottom out of sight, the social position in which one is invisible to the controllers because one has nothing they want to take and offers nothing they want to grant. Charlie has done this in measurable ways across his life. He did not register his children with the state when they were born. He homeschooled them outside the public school system. He has chosen freelance and low-overhead work over formal employment that would require him to be visible to the various intake systems. He has spent, by his own account, nine and a half months of his life across some eight to twelve different jails, having chosen to refuse cooperation with various manifestations of state authority that he judged to be illegitimate. He has, in the language of his metaphor, been trying to fly.

His method is also Christological, on his reading. I think what I’m describing is actually what Christ did, he said. Until the end of his ministry, when he chose to be entangled, Christ was, in fact, hard to catch — slipping away from crowds that wanted to take him, walking through synagogue mobs that meant to throw him off cliffs, answering questions in ways that left the questioners without traction. The freedom of the Son of Man on earth, in Charlie’s reading, was the freedom of someone who declined to grant authorities the power to determine his agenda. The crucifixion happened when Christ chose to allow it. Until that hour, the form of his life was the form of someone who lived around, not under, the regimes that wanted to control him.

XIV. The Critique and the Defense of Charlie’s Way

My critique of Charlie’s method, which I will rephrase here in the form it had after the morning’s debate, is that the method is workable for the individual but does not scale to the Bride. The two pure forms of the bottom out of sight and top out of sight positions Charlie referenced — the homeless and the Rothschilds — are not available to most of us. The middle position Charlie has constructed for himself, which is the under-the-radar life of someone who has chosen to be uninteresting to the controllers, is real and admirable, but it is not the form of a public Christian witness that will draw the next generation. The Church the Lord is preparing for his return is, by his own description, without spot or wrinkle — and the body of Christ does not become spotless by mass relocation to bottom-out-of-sight obscurity. It becomes spotless by a kind of present, visible, costly faithfulness that produces, over time, a public alternative to the controlling order. We cannot, as a Bride, be lukewarm and irrelevant. The lukewarm are spit out (Revelation 3:16). The light that is hidden under the bushel is wasted (Matthew 5:15).

Charlie’s defense, when I pressed him on this, was the most poignant moment of the morning. I want the freedom of the angel Gabriel, he said. It’s not really realistic right now. I’m bound by gravity and proximity to endless Karens, but I’m doing my best. The gap between the freedom he is reaching for and the freedom he is presently allowed is, he acknowledges, real. He is not claiming to have arrived at the bird’s life. He is claiming to be trying, and to be doing it better than he would be doing if he had instead chosen the head-to-head confrontation with state authority that has, in his earlier life, produced nine and a half months in jails without producing any visible change in the regimes he confronted.

I want to record that I take Charlie’s critique of the head-to-head approach seriously. He has the lived experience of having tried it. I have not been to jail for my convictions. The cost-benefit analysis he has performed across his lifetime has produced his current position, and the position is not pure dropping-out — he is, by being on the call this morning, by raising his children in the faith, by sustaining his marriage with Susan, by partnering with me on Ideomotion, doing public work that is visible and costly. The freedom-of-the-bird metaphor is what he is aiming at, not what he is claiming. The actual life he is leading is a middle path between full engagement and full retreat, and the middle path has real virtues that the two pure positions lack.

XV. Susan’s Eschatological Urgency

Susan, returning to the strategic question, raised the temporal dimension that I think the entire fellowship has to attend to. The American present, she said, is the period of relative ease. Charlie’s under-the-radar strategy works now because the controllers have not yet built the infrastructure of universal compliance that the book of Revelation describes them building. The mark of the Beast — whatever its specific operational form turns out to be — is the moment when the controllers’ grid becomes universal, mandatory, and unrefusable, and when the choice between the Beast and the Lamb becomes a public stand that cannot be evaded by being uninteresting. Right now is the time to stand up and say, okay, the we are for Christ, and Christ stands for this, this, this, this, and we are to really now, while things aren’t too hard, at least in this country, they aren’t too hard, we really would do best, and what Christ is asking us to do is stand up for and make him our only master, make him our only king. And I see in the Bible ways to do that.

The argument is that the under-the-radar strategy is non-renewable. It works in a regime that has not yet completed its surveillance, and it will not work in the regime the Beast system is in the process of building. The fellowship has, on Susan’s reading, a window. The work of organizing now — naming what we believe, identifying the people who are with us, building the alternative — is work that is much easier in the present window than it will be after the window closes. If we don’t do that right now, then we’re going to be in a position that’s a much weaker position when we actually have to do that.

I think Susan is right about this. The eschatological urgency she is raising is the variable that resolves the disagreement between Charlie’s method and mine. Charlie’s method works in the present. My method (cultural dominance via the Christos Civitas) is the work that has to be done before the present window closes. Both are operative; neither is the whole story; both have to be subordinated to the question of when the moment of public stand will come, and how to be ready for it.

XVI. The Synthesis — The Christian Underground

What surfaced, in the closing minutes of the meeting, was the synthesis. I think we found the right name for what we are trying to build.

The synthesis is this: Charlie’s under-the-radar method is the right tactical posture in the present window, and Susan’s come out of Babylon directive is the right structural posture for the long term, and my cultural dominance via the Christos Civitas is the right strategic posture for what we are building toward — but all three of them belong inside a single name, and the name is the Christian Underground. Charlie supplied the phrase. Leonard, in his characteristic register, offered the inverted form: the Christian overground. Both are correct. The Christian Underground is what the fellowship is building in the present, while the present window is open. The Christian Overground is what the Underground becomes when the time of public stand arrives and the Underground steps forward into visibility.

The Christian Underground is not a formal legal entity. It is not a new denomination. It is not a separatist commune. It is a network of believers who have made the same set of commitments — to obey God before man where the two conflict; to take their primary jurisdiction from Christ and not from the state; to build the alternative culture that will be ready to become visible when the moment of stand arrives; to bear witness in the present in the ways that are practicable in the present; and to support each other across the relational, economic, ecclesial, and political dimensions of life. The Christian Underground is what the early Church was before it had buildings. It is what the persecuted church has always been when the regime is hostile and the gathering is illegal. It is what we may yet become, in this country, when the present window closes.

The name is, I now think, the right name for what the Renaissance Ministries fellowship has been building all along. The CFE essays are the discourse of the Underground. The Christos Voting Network is the political layer of the Underground. The Ideomotion project is one operational outpost of the Underground. The Christos Home School is the formative layer. The fellowship gathering itself is the cell-meeting at the foundation. We have been building the Underground without having had a single word for it. Charlie gave us the word.

I take this as a real gift from the morning’s conversation. I will think on it, and I will bring it back to the next fellowship for the further work of articulating what the Underground is in more operational detail.

XVII. Susan’s Closing Call — Bible, Prayer, Fasting

Susan closed the substantive discussion with a call for direction-finding. Let us read the Bible with that in mind. What is the what is God telling us to do? Let’s examine with that question of, how do we go about, you know, organizing? How do we go about living according to what God is saying? And consult the Bible and see what we’re being told here. And instead of just going on our what we think is best, you know, what we — completely agree we absolutely want divine guidance, rather than human guidance and our own ideas. She suggested a fast. The biblical pattern is consistent — when the way forward is unclear, the people who are seeking the way fast and pray and search the scriptures for the indication of where to step next. I want to take this seriously. I propose that we agree, in the next fellowship gathering, on a coordinated fast of one or three days, during which we read the come out passages of both testaments together and bring to the next meeting what each of us has heard.

Susan closed the meeting in prayer.

XVIII. What Remains Open

A number of threads opened during the meeting and did not close. I want to record them so the fellowship can return to them.

First, the comparative-religion question — specifically the Christianity-Islam comparison — remains substantively open, and I owe Michael the citations I was unable to produce on the spot. I will gather them and circulate before the next fellowship.

Second, the Pope question — whether the historical failures of the papacy convict the office, the Church, or only the particular incumbents — was not resolved. The deeper version of the question is whether any institution that mediates between God and the believer is corrigible, and if not, what the alternative is. This connects to Isak’s I am one of those rogue Christians position, and to Susan’s come out framework, and to the whole question of whether the Underground we are building should have any clerical structure at all or whether it should be fully congregational. We will need to return to this.

Third, the practical question of how the Christian Underground operationalizes — what specifically a member of it does, day to day, that is different from what an ordinary believer in a typical evangelical congregation does — was named but not answered. The §6.2 question from the Ideomotion charter (what does the customer-to-fellowship pathway look like, operationally) is the same question in another register. We need an operational document for the Underground itself.

Fourth, Susan’s specific legal mechanisms — the ambassador framework and the testamentary-trust framework — need legal review before we adopt them as anything more than theological-imagery. Charlie was right that the as-stated mechanisms are not, in their current articulation, ready to be relied on in court. But the underlying theological commitments — that Christians belong juridically to a different sovereign, and that the present sovereignty of the state over the believer is contingent rather than absolute — are sound, and the operational form of those commitments needs work.

Fifth, the eschatological-timing question. Susan’s argument that the present window is closing has a certain urgency to it, but it is also the kind of argument that has been made by Christians for two thousand years without the predicted closure arriving. We need to think carefully about what specifically would constitute the closure of the window — what observable event would tell us the moment of public stand has arrived — so that we are not perpetually deferring the work on the grounds that the window has not yet closed, but also not prematurely declaring it closed and forcing a public stand for which we are not ready.

Sixth, the practical-organizational question of what the next steps for the Underground look like. We have a name. We do not yet have a charter, a covenant of membership, an admissions process, a discipline structure, or a relationship to the existing module structure of Renaissance Ministries. These will need to be drafted, deliberated, and adopted. The Christos Rigorous Framework (CRF), which Isak and I have been building separately, may be the right home for the formal articulation of what the Underground commits its members to.

Closing Reflection

I came into the Sunday meeting expecting to discuss the recent Forerunner essays I have been engaging — Whitaker on proselytism, Ritenbaugh on Amos 5:25, Brown on the loneliness of being liked — and we did not get to any of them. The meeting went in a different direction. I am glad it did. The deeper question that the recent essays have been circling — what kind of Christian community is faithful, in this moment, in this culture — surfaced more directly than I could have engineered, and the synthesis that emerged is more substantive than I expected.

The Christian Underground is the name we have been working toward. I will spend the week thinking about what it commits us to. I will return to the fellowship next Sunday with a preliminary articulation. Susan will return, I trust, with the fast and the further readings of the come out passages. Charlie will return with whatever the next week of bird-watching teaches him. Isak will return with whatever the rogue-Christian discernment process surfaces. Leonard will return with the next layer of metaphor — perhaps the Christian Overground in some new form, perhaps the bird metaphor pressed further, perhaps the Idiocracy reference unpacked into a serious cultural diagnosis. Michael, if he is willing, will return with the citations I owe him and the next iteration of his interfaith framework.

This is what the fellowship is for. We do not have the answer. We are, together, the people who are willing to keep asking the question. The Lord is sufficient to the answer, in his time.

Thank you, Susan, for the closing prayer. Thank you, fellowship, for the morning.

— Thomas