Theocracy in the Making
- Kal Inois
- May 13
- 11 min read
How Republicans Replaced Your Constitutional Rights With the Bible
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The United States Constitution is being dismantled. Not quietly, not gradually, and not by accident. It is being stripped to its bones by a political party and a regime that have decided the Bible outranks it, that God supersedes it, and that the American people have no right to question either. When the bones are bare, they intend to cremate them.
This is not hyperbole. This is not partisan fearmongering. Every claim in this article is documented, sourced, and spoken in the words of the people doing it. They have told you exactly what they are doing. They are counting on you not to believe them.
Believe them.
Republicans love the Constitution. They wave it at rallies. They stuff pocket editions into their suits. They invoke it in speeches, press releases, and fundraising emails. They swear an oath to it.
They just don't actually believe in governing by it.
For the past several years, and with unprecedented speed and brazenness since January 2025, the Republican Party has been systematically replacing the Constitution as the source of American rights and governance with a single alternative: the Christian Bible, interpreted by a narrow and extreme sect of evangelical Christianity, and enforced through the instruments of the federal government.
This is not just a minority opinion held by a few firebrands. It is now the official position of the White House, the Department of Defense, the blueprint of Prøject 2025, the institutional agenda of the Southern Baptist Convention, and the theological framework of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, the denomination that currently controls the Pentågon. It is documented in public speeches, official proclamations, congressional testimony, and a 900-page governing manifesto. And it is happening in broad daylight.
The Constitution's First Amendment opens with twelve words: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." The record speaks for itself; and it is damning. Here are the receipts.
The Language of Theocracy
The tell is always in the language – words matter. Pay attention to how Republicans talk about rights, specifically where they say rights come from.
The Constitution is clear: rights are secured by law, debated by Congress, interpreted by courts, and amended by the people. The Declaration of Independence, a pre-constitutional document with no legal force, speaks of rights "endowed by their Creator," a phrase that historians note was added by Benjamin Franklin and John Adams to Thomas Jefferson's original draft, and which Jefferson himself, a deist who rejected organized religion, did not intend as a reference to the Christian God.
None of that matters to today's Republican Party. They have collapsed the distinction between the Declaration and the Constitution, between religious sentiment and legal authority, and between "God" and their specific version of evangelical Christianity. And they say so out loud.
Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense, in a message to NRA members:
"Never surrender your God-given rights, the right to bear arms, endowed by Almighty God."
The Second Amendment is a constitutional right. Hegseth reframes it as a gift from God, which means it cannot be regulated, amended, or limited by any human institution. Not Congress. Not the courts. Not the people. God gave it, so only God can take it away.
†rump, in his official Bill of Rights Day 2025 proclamation from the White House:
"We vow to always preserve, protect, and defend our God-given rights, our glorious American heritage, and our constitutional way of life."
Note the framing: "God-given rights" comes first. "Constitutional" is an afterthought, a description of lifestyle, not a source of authority.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, chairing a congressional hearing:
"The left wants to take away Americans' God-given rights over the Earth in order to satisfy their godless climate cult beliefs."
Rights over the Earth. From God. The Constitution, which says nothing of the sort, is irrelevant to this framework.
Prøject 2025, the 900-page governing blueprint written by the Heritåge Føundatiøn and implemented without question by the †rump regime, in its opening promises:
"Secure our God-given individual rights to live freely, what our Constitution calls 'the Blessings of Liberty.'"
This sentence is the blueprint's entire argument in miniature: rights come from God first. The Constitution merely names what God already gave. That framing has enormous consequences, because if rights come from God, then interpreting those rights belongs not to judges or legislators, but to those who claim to speak for God.
Clarence Thomas, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, in a 2026 speech at the University of Texas:
"Progressivism seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration of Independence... it holds that our rights and our dignities come not from God but from government."
A sitting Supreme Court justice, one of nine people with lifetime appointments to interpret the Constitution, is arguing that the Constitution is not the source of American rights, and that God is.
The Institutional Infrastructure
These are not random statements. They are the public expression of a coordinated institutional project with deep roots, significant funding, and a clear end goal: the replacement of constitutional democracy with Christian governance.
Prøject 2025: The Governing Bible
Prøject 2025 is the most explicit statement of this agenda ever produced by a mainstream American political organization. Written by the Heritåge Føundatiøn and more than 100 allied conservative groups, it was implemented by the †rump regime beginning on Inauguration Day 2025 through dozens of executive orders, even as †rump publicly claimed he had "never heard of it."
The document's opening framework states that the Constitution "grants each of us the liberty to do not what we want, but what we ought", explicitly replacing individual liberty with theologically defined obligation. It calls for the government to "maintain a biblically based definition of marriage and family." It proposes renaming the Department of Health and Human Services the "Department of Life." It requires government workers to be paid time and a half for hours worked on the Sabbath, specifically Sunday, not the Sabbath observed by Jewish or Muslim Americans.
Heritåge Føundatiøn President Kevin Roberts opened the Mandate for Leadership by prioritizing the securing of "our God-given individual rights to live freely" against a "woke" threat, and declared that "we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be."
As BJC Executive Director Amanda Tyler told the Guardian: "It would really rewrite the federal government and change policies in so many different areas at once in a way that would hasten our journey down that road to authoritarian theocracy."
The Church That Runs the Pentågon
Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense, is not merely a religious man who happens to run the Pentågon. He is an active, committed member of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, an extreme Calvinist denomination led by Pastor Douglas Wilson of Moscow, Idaho, a self-described Christian nationalist who advocates for "theonomy": the governance of society by biblical law.
Wilson has praised the Christian governance of the Confederate States of America. He has argued that southern slavery was "far more humane than that of ancient Rome." He opposes women's right to vote. He does not oppose the death penalty for homosexuality. He wants, in his own words, "to take over the world for Christ."
Since Hegseth became Secretary of Defense, Wilson has moved his personal pastor, Brooks Potteiger, to Washington D.C. to establish a new Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC) church for Hegseth to attend. Potteiger now leads monthly Christian worship services inside the Pentågon, broadcast on the Pentågon's internal television network, where he has preached that Jesus has "the final say" over Tomahawk and Minuteman missiles.
At the March 25, 2026 Pentågon worship service, Hegseth himself prayed for "overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy," and asked that "wicked souls be delivered to the eternal damnation prepared for them," explicitly framing the war in Iran as a holy war fought in "the mighty and powerful name of Jesus Christ."
Senator Raphael Warnock, who is also pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, condemned Hegseth for inviting a preacher "who does not believe that women ought to be able to vote, who says that slavery was not so bad, and who believes that America ought to be a Christian theocracy," adding: "I don't want to live in anybody's theocracy, Christian, Jewish, Islamic. We live in a multifaceted democracy."
Professor Julie Ingersoll, who studies Reformed Christianity at the University of North Florida, describes CREC's foundational political belief: "When we talk about legitimate government having its authority coming from the consent of the governed, they don't believe that at all. Legitimate authority comes directly from God."
The man running the United States military belongs to a church that does not believe in the democratic foundations of the government he serves.
The Political Army
The Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the United States with nearly 13 million members, is the political and cultural engine driving this agenda into Republican electoral politics.
The SBC was founded in 1845 by Southern Baptists who split from northern Baptists specifically to defend slavery. For most of its history it opposed the Civil Rights movement. Today it is the primary institutional home of the Christian nationalist movement within mainstream American life.
In June 2025, the SBC voted at its annual convention in Dallas to formally pursue the overturning of Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court ruling establishing marriage equality. The resolution declared that laws recognizing same-sex marriage "defy God's design for marriage and family." It was the first time in the SBC's history that it had voted to actively campaign against an established constitutional right, not on constitutional grounds, but on the grounds that the law defies God.
Two SBC pastors joined fellow conservative clergy to pray over †rump at the White House. Historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez told the BBC that the SBC can "sense that there's been this shift, that there may be a window opening and that they think this is the right time to press this issue," that issue being the replacement of secular constitutional law with biblical law.
The SBC's policy priorities – opposition to abortion, elimination of LGBTQ rights, and the promotion of Christian prayer in public institutions, are not merely reflected in the †rump regime's agenda. They are the agenda. As one longtime Baptist observer wrote in Christian Ethics Today: the SBC's "greater goal was to take over America, to make it a 'Christian nation,' to champion their misunderstanding of the Bible to promote 'biblical law,' a white, male-dominated authoritarian theocracy."
Biblical Law, Federal Policy
This is not merely theological. It is being operationalized in federal policy right now.
The war in Iran was launched without congressional authorization, a clear constitutional violation of Article I, Section 8, which grants Congress alone the power to declare war. Hegseth responded not with a legal argument but a theological one, framing the conflict as divinely sanctioned and praying publicly for "overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy." When a Tomahawk missile struck an Iranian elementary school and killed more than 165 people, mostly children, Hegseth had already cut the civilian casualty mitigation teams by 90%, leaving only one staffer assigned to civilian casualty prevention across the entire Middle East theater. Neither †rump nor Hegseth expressed remorse. Hegseth's pastor had already preached that Jesus is "sovereign over everything else that falls in this world, including Tomahawk and Minuteman missiles."
Reproductive rights have been dismantled not through constitutional argument but through the explicit imposition of one religious tradition's definition of life onto all Americans. Prøject 2025 calls for the FDA to revoke approval of mifepristone and for the prosecution of anyone who sends abortion medication through the mail, not because the Constitution requires it, but because "God ordained" that life begins at conception.
LGBTQ rights are being stripped not through legislative debate but through executive orders invoking "God's design" for gender and family. The H.R. 2616 PROTECT Kids Act and H.R. 2617 Say No to Indoctrination Act, the national "Don't Say Gay" legislation currently moving through Congress, are explicitly premised on the idea that acknowledging LGBTQ existence in public schools violates God's order.
The Department of Defense now holds mandatory Christian prayer services on its internal television network, led by the personal pastor of a secretary who has tattooed "Deus Vult," Latin for "God wills it," the battle cry of the Crusades, on his body, and who recited passages from Pulp Fiction at a Pentågon prayer service while presenting them as scripture.
The courts are being stacked with justices and judges whose judicial philosophy holds, as Clarence Thomas argued explicitly in 2026, that rights originate with God and the Constitution merely reflects what God has ordained, which means that when God's law as interpreted by conservative Christians conflicts with the Constitution, God's law wins.
The Deliberate Betrayal
Republicans will tell you, when pressed, that they support the Constitution. They will invoke the Founders. They will quote Madison and Jefferson. They will hold up their pocket editions and dare you to call them un-American.
But Madison explicitly warned against exactly what they are doing. Writing in Federalist No. 10, he argued that the greatest threat to republican government was the domination of one faction, one group with a shared passion or interest, over all others. He and Jefferson fought to keep the new government free of religious establishment precisely because they had seen what theocracies did to human freedom in Europe.
Jefferson's 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association, the document that gave us the phrase "wall of separation between church and state," was written in response to a Baptist congregation's concern that the government might one day impose religious conformity. Jefferson reassured them it never would. The irony is exquisite: the Southern Baptist Convention, the institutional descendants of those very Baptists, is now the primary force demanding that the government do exactly what Jefferson promised it wouldn't.
The Constitution they claim to venerate contains precisely three references to religion, all of them exclusionary. Article VI bans religious tests for public office. The First Amendment bars the establishment of a state religion. The First Amendment also protects the individual right to worship freely. In other words: the only thing the Constitution says about religion is that the government must stay out of it, and that no American can be required to practice or believe anything.
As scholar Brian Kaylor put it: "It's the exact opposite of creating a Christian nation."
The Republican Party, their legal scholars, and their judges know it. The hypocrisy is not an oversight. It is a strategy. By claiming that rights come from God rather than the Constitution, they accomplish something the Constitution would never permit: they place the interpretation of rights outside the reach of democratic process entirely. You cannot vote on what God said. You cannot amend what God ordained. You cannot sue God in federal court.
If rights come from God, and Republicans alone speak for God, then Republicans alone determine your rights. The Constitution, that inconvenient document with its guarantees of equality and its prohibitions on religious establishment, becomes advisory at best and an obstacle at worst.
That is not America. That is a theocracy. And it is being built right now, brick by brick, executive order by executive order, Pentågon prayer service by Pentågon prayer service, for all to see, with the full backing of the White House, the Department of Defense, the Heritåge Føundatiøn, the Southern Baptist Convention, and a 900-page blueprint that told you exactly what they were going to do.
They are not hiding it. They are not ashamed of it, and they are not slowing down.
They are stripping the Constitution to its bones. And when the bones are bare, they intend to cremate them, so that nothing remains to which future generations can appeal, no document, no precedent, no legal memory of what your rights once were or where they actually came from.
They just knew most people wouldn't read it. The next move is yours, as the ashes are forming.
Before the Ashes Cool
Knowing is not enough. A warning only means something if the people who hear it act on it.
Call your representatives today. Call your senators too. Tell them you know what is happening. Tell them you are watching every vote, every statement, every silence. Find your representatives at 5calls.org, and make the call. Or text "RESIST" to 50409 to use Resistbot, which finds your representatives and sends your message directly on your behalf. It takes three minutes, and it matters.
Demand the restoration of the wall between church and state. Contact your senators and representatives and demand they oppose any legislation, executive order, or judicial appointment that places biblical law above constitutional law. The First Amendment is not negotiable.
Share this article. The regime is counting on most Americans remaining unaware until it is too late to reverse what has been done. Every person who reads this is one more person who cannot claim they did not know.
Support the organizations fighting back:
The Constitution belongs to the American people. Not to one party, to one church, nor to one God. To all of us, of every faith and no faith, equally, without exception.
They are coming for it. The question is whether we let them finish the job.
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