How a group of Presbyterians is trying to reshape the SBC

Imagine, if you will, an enormous wooden horse encamped outside the Southern Baptist Convention headquarters. Downtown Nashville’s bachelorettes, bar hoppers and backup singers stop and stare at the giant horse with “Center for Baptist Leadership” emblazoned on its barrel.

William Wolfe, the center’s executive director, leans against the great horse’s right hock and assures bystanders he is indeed a bona fide Baptist. He has a photo of himself lifting weights with Southern Baptist Convention President Clint Pressley to prove it. Like a used car salesman, Wolfe promises the CBL will reform, restore and revitalize the SBC’s authentic Baptist spirit.

However, suspiciously large wooden horses are notoriously full of secrets, so it’s worth taking a closer look before Baptists haul this horse inside the walls of the SBC.

On CBL’s website, beneath all the lofty language about historic Baptist principles, in fine print are the words: “Center for Baptist Leadership is an independent center supported by American Reformer as part of their mission to partner with leaders and other key stakeholders within Christian institutions who are seeking to reform and revitalize their institutions for the challenges of today.”

“Center for Baptist Leadership is an independent center supported by American Reformer.”

According to the Office of the Secretary of State of Texas, there is no independent nonprofit called the Center for Baptist Leadership. CBL is only a d/b/a (doing business as) moniker of American Reformer, an extremist New Right nonprofit founded by evangelical Presbyterians.

Companies often use a d/b/a for marketing purposes or to expand their business in a new direction. Filing a d/b/a, as American Reformer did in January 2025, does not create an independent entity. Both organizations share the same Employee Identification Number in the IRS database and share the same Dallas address. While Wolfe’s title is executive director of CBL, he is in truth an employee of American Reformer. Donations to CBL are deposited in the coffers of radical New Right Presbyterians.

TheoBros in charge

So, what is American Reformer and who are the men directing the next conservative takeover of the SBC from inside the Trojan Horse of the CBL?

Mother Jones calls American Reformer the “unofficial magazine” of “TheoBros.” The emphasis here should be on “bros” rather than theology. The scant theological debate amongst this group centers around the superiority of white evangelical Protestant men and why they should be the political and cultural elite in America. Because saying this out loud is gauche, the TheoBros rely on the musings of folks like Aaron Renn to smooth over their extremist views with erudite-sounding language.

A former expert in urban policy, Renn gained notoriety on the right in 2017 for his critique of contemporary conservative Christianity, which he called the Three Worlds of Evangelicalism. He laments the decline of Christianity’s influence in America, especially among the elite echelons of society. Christians have fallen from a position of cultural and political dominance in the post-World War II “Positive World” to one of grudging acceptance in the “Neutral World” and are now currently social outcasts in the “Negative World.”

To regain the privileged status Renn feels they are owed, conservative Christians must stop publicly fretting about “refugees and racism” and work to combat multiculturalism, homosexuality and feminism. While Renn is quick to say he himself is not a Christian nationalist, he is not opposed to working with those who wish to establish a new evangelical Protestant elite.

Who’s who?

Renn’s chief financial supporter is Nate Fischer, a Harvard graduate who is using the fortune he made in real estate to fund his vision of a Christian autocracy. Fischer believes the Constitution has failed and America is on the verge of societal collapse from the weight of liberal excess. He is working to replace the country’s crumbling institutions with his own.

Impressed by Renn’s writing on the Negative World, in 2019 Fisher met with him in New York. Two years later, motivated by the “tyranny and violence” of 2020, they founded American Reformer to push their far-right Protestant perspectives online and to organize “real world action.”

“We are very explicitly looking to transform the country.”

“We are very explicitly looking to transform the country,” said Fischer.

While Renn and Fischer were launching American Reformer, they also were laying the groundwork for a new Christian nationalist civic organization, the Society for American Civic Renewal. SACR is loosely inspired by the Afrikaner Broederbond, a secret society of armed Calvinist men who rose to power in 1940s South Africa and constructed apartheid out of an alloy of fascism and white supremacy.

In 2020, Fischer began hammering out the details of SACR with future American Reformer board member Scott Yenor, the Boise State University professor behind the extremist website Action Idaho, who wants to exclude women from STEM. On March 19, 2021, Yenor emailed himself an itinerary for a visit by Aaron Renn which included plans for the two to interview prospective SACR candidates.

Millionaire Charles Haywood, who said, “Renewal could never happen except through extreme violence,” incorporated SACR in 2020 as a 501(c)(10). Haywood also has donated tens of thousands to both SACR and to American Reformer.

Like Fischer, Haywood believes America needs a “Red Caesar,” a Republican strongman, to seize power, topple “corrupt” institutions, impose Christianity and radically remake the nation’s power structure. SACR members will be the “backbone” of that “renewed American regime.”

Individual SACR “lodges,” like the one in Dallas headed by Fischer, are responsible for identifying, indoctrinating and mobilizing “local elites” to create an economic and social network for an “allied future regime.” They must be Christian men with “community influence, capability or wealth” and “who understand the nature of authority and its legitimate forceful exercise in the temporal realm.” Fischer cofounded the State Leadership Initiative in February 2025 to plug these aligned individuals directly into state boards and commissions in Florida, Indiana (Renn and Haywood are residents), Texas, West Virginia, and Wyoming.

To establish an alternative economy, similar to the one the Broederbond used as a springboard to political control in South Africa, in 2021 Fischer cofounded the venture capital fund New Founding with Matthew Peterson, the former vice president of education at the Claremont Institute, an autocratic think tank and a member of the Project 2025 Advisory Board.

Fischer and Yenor are both former Claremont Fellows and the organization financially supported SACR, American Reformer and New Founding. The president of Claremont is on the SACR board. With a coalition comprised of MAGA members, Christians with an “assertive political vision” and disgruntled Tech Bros, New Founding aims to “develop the class of people who can ultimately challenge the incumbent regime and to acquire the resources, territory and institutions that will enable this effort.” Silicon Valley giant Marc Andreessen, who has spoken out against “wokeism,” is another New Founding investor.

Among New Founding’s start-ups are a pro-life health insurance company, a company that makes body armor for the Christian “fight against tyranny,” an ad platform for the firearms sector (Fischer is part owner of ammunitions manufacturer Stand 1 Armory), an aligned collaborative workspace in Dallas and a “nonprofit focused on promoting state-level digital and economic sovereignty.” New Founding also has invested in the tea company Kindred Harvest, owned by Charles Cornish-Dale, known online as Raw Egg Nationalist, or REN. Cornish-Dale is a far-right influencer and conspiracy theorist with a Nazi aesthetic that New Founding claims is just “tongue-in-cheek.” He is followed online by many in the Trump administration, including Vice President JD Vance.

Vance himself has visited the New Founding office and, prior to the vice presidency, formed his own “political venture capital firm,” the Rockbridge Network, with American Reformer’s director and far-right media maestro Chris Buskirk. (Fischer says Buskirk was only a board member at American Reformer. However, as of April 2025, Buskirk was still listed as a director in an official document.)

Conservative megadonors Peter Thiel and Rebekah Mercer also are Rockbridge investors. Dabbling in the political realm, New Founding has sponsored NatCon, sent a representative to AfriForum (The Afrikaner organization in South Africa lobbying Trump with claims of “white genocide”) and provided candidates from their aligned talent pool to staff Trump’s second administration.

Josh Abbotoy, another former Claremont fellow, SACR member and graduate of Harvard Law School, joined the staff of New Founding as managing partner in 2022. With backing from New Founding, his Highland Rim Project has created aligned communities in Kentucky and Tennessee, where residents with shared religious and political ideologies can live together and, in time, amass enough economic and political clout to influence local and state governments. Joining Abbotoy in Tennessee as unofficial “ambassadors” for HRP are Pastor Andrew Isker and C. Jay Engel. The two record their podcast “Contra Mundum” in a small office building in Gainesboro, Tenn., where Abbotoy’s property company, RidgeRunner, also is headquartered.

If Renn is the sage of American Reformer, Isker and Engel are the movement’s shock jocks. They spout racist and antisemitic vitriol and, when called out, claim they were “just having fun.”

Isker believes civil rights should be turned back over to the states and Jewish people treated as second-class citizens. Engel lamented on their podcast that “all of our heroes were way more racist than we’re allowed to be today” and said Martin Luther King Jr. was an enemy to “Heritage Americans,” Engel’s name for Americans of white, European descent.

His goal, Engel says, is to “radicalize Main Street” by normalizing “dissident right talking points.” On election night 2024, Isker and Engel podcasted for nearly nine hours, welcoming several figures from the American Reformer universe, including Charles Haywood, Josh Abbotoy and CBL board member and SBC pastor Dusty Deevers. William Wolfe himself dropped by and, thrilled with a possible Trump victory, said, “If he does (win) then, you know, Red Caesar, mandate from heaven, rock and roll, let’s go!”

Before he joined New Founding, Abbotoy was executive director of American Reformer. He later was elevated to cofounder. In 2021, he headed the group’s first attempt to “reform and revitalize” a Christian institution when he coordinated efforts to “stop a CRT incursion” at Grove City College, a traditionally ultra-conservative private college in Pennsylvania. The “woke” threat included diversity awareness training for resident assistants and a chapel sermon by Jemar Tisby.

While American Reformer worked behind the scenes to advise a group of GCC parents, students and alumni, Abbotoy drummed up outrage online with his articles and podcast interviews with Jericho March emcee Eric Metaxas. American Reformer listed its involvement in the GCC fight as evidence of its “reform work” when filing taxes for the 2022 fiscal year.

American Reformer and the SBC

That same filing also states that American Reformer “assisted in PR and messaging strategy for key individuals and issues-based efforts in the Southern Baptist Convention.” It’s unclear just what individual or issue was the focus of their strategizing at that time, but during the lead up to the 2022 SBC annual meeting, Abbotoy wrote articles for American Reformer and other online magazines against recommendations made by the Sexual Abuse Task Force, just as he had when battling CRT for Grove City College.

This year, Abbotoy repeated the strategy and spoke from the convention floor at the 2025 SBC annual meeting in Dallas. Identifying himself as a “member of a small rural church” and someone who “runs a small nonprofit,” he pushed for greater financial transparency from the SBC.

Abbotoy is the lone Baptist among the cofounders of American Reformer, but in 2022 William Wolfe joined him as a member of American Reformer’s first Cotton Mather Fellowship cohort. Recipients of these fellowships study political theology, moral order, Christian civic engagement and American history under the tutelage of American Reformer scholars “with an eye to how fellows can carry these ideas into whatever institutions they find themselves in, or to whatever institutions they may found in the future.”  Wolfe now finds himself as the head of the Center for Baptist Leadership.

Wolfe grew up in a Christian home, but faith became personal to him after suffering the loss of his younger brother in college. Pastor Mark Dever of Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, D.C., ministered to and baptized Wolfe, who then moved to D.C. to intern at Dever’s church. He worked on Capitol Hill for three members of the House of Representatives before spending a year at Heritage Action for America, the political arm of the Heritage Foundation, where he met Russ Vought. Like Vought, Wolfe joined the Trump administration, serving first as a deputy assistant secretary of defense at the Pentagon and then as a director of legislative affairs at the Department of State.

After Trump failed to win reelection in 2020, Wolfe moved to Louisville, Ky., to pursue a master of divinity degree at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. While at Southern, he worked as seminary president Al Mohler’s chief intern, the most important student job on campus. Pastor Dwight McKissic called for Wolfe’s resignation when Wolfe endorsed “Anglo Protestantism” as “the rightfully predominant culture,” saying it should be protected by the government. During that time, he also preached a sermon at Syracuse Baptist Church in which he said the time for taking up arms to protect Christianity was near.

An unabashed Christian nationalist, in 2022-2023 Wolfe was a visiting fellow at Vought’s think tank, Center for Renewing America. Vought himself said in 2023 he was “proud” to work with Wolfe “on scoping out a sound Christian nationalism.”

While at CRA, Wolfe coedited  A Statement on Christian Nationalism and the Gospel with pastor and pro-Red Caesar misogynist Joel Webbon, SBC pastor Cory Anderson and Jeff Wright, who is Josh Abbotoy’s pastor at Midway Baptist Church. The manifesto was coauthored by Deevers, who thinks women who receive abortions should be charged with murder, and the even more anti-choice James Silberman. It calls for the end of public education, the corporal punishment of children by parents, punishment of citizens for public blasphemy and establishing the Ten Commandments as the “foundational law of the nation.”

Meanwhile, according to tax filings for the year 2023, American Reformer launched two initiatives in pursuit of its reform agenda for conservative Christian institutions. One was the Center for Academic Faithfulness and Flourishing, designed to continue the fight it had begun against “wokeness” on Christian college campuses. The other was the Center for Baptist Leadership.

“This is a whole area of focus that could use its own organization dedicated to it, and out came the Center for Baptist Leadership.”

William Wolfe, as a former Cotton Mather Fellow with ties to the Trump administration as well as connections across the Baptist far right, is the perfect frontman for the CBL. Abbotoy is now “a CBL contributing scholar.” Reminiscing on Renn’s podcast in 2025, Wolfe said, “Josh Abbatoy and I and others realized the Southern Baptist Convention … is the largest Protestant denomination. It is being moved in a leftward and liberal direction, aggressively so over the last 10 years. And this is a whole area of focus that could use its own organization dedicated to it, and out came the Center for Baptist Leadership.”

In his podcast, Renn is careful to call the CBL an “affiliate” with its own board. However, the CBL advisory board, and Wolfe himself for that matter, have no authority apart from whatever is allotted to them by American Reformer because CBL is only an assumed name under which American Reformer legally operates. It is the American Reformer and its advisory board, which includes Yenor (Lutheran) and Fischer (Presbyterian), that ultimately holds the power.

Matthew Milsap, a professor at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary who posted the assumed name document on X, said: “Baptists working with Presbyterians for shared, broadly Christian aims is fine. Baptists purporting to run an independent center whose express intent is to overhaul the SBC, but which was launched by Presbyterians and is itself governed by a board that is 80% Presbyterian, is problematic.”

“They would rather lose nobly, even to wicked & evil enemies … than do what it takes to win.”

Wolfe, however, doesn’t see it that way. He thinks conservatives in the past have not gone far enough, tweeting in 2022, “They would rather lose nobly, even to wicked & evil enemies … than do what it takes to win.”

During the 2024 campaign, Wolfe endorsed the use of deceit: “I actually think there’s wisdom in cloaking some of your power levels and maybe some of the things that you’re trying to do, and then once you secure power, and you have it, you govern in a more extreme position.” (White supremacist and extremist groups use the term “power levels” to denote one’s level of radicalization.) Wolfe continued: “Republicans out there who want to run for office and gain power and use it to do radical scary conservative things, should consider doing (it).”

This bait-and-switch approach is one Wolfe and American Reformer are using consistently with the CBL. In March, Wolfe joined other evangelical pastors at the White House and met with President Trump. Afterward he said: “I told the White House faith office I think Christians want to see mass deportations. I think Southern Baptists and Christians want to see this happen. … The work of CBL is giving me the opportunity to do things like that.”

In truth, more than 10,000 SBC churches signed a statement opposing mass deportations. While access to Trump is certainly valuable, Fischer and Abbotoy have longstanding connections to Vance, Vought and no doubt countless others at the White House. They didn’t need to create the CBL to influence policy. And there already are other conservative Baptist groups inside the SBC working to push the denomination even further to the right. So, why is American Reformer hiding behind the CBL?

American Reformer has published several articles on the necessity of “saving” the SBC, that “lone bulwark” on which “America’s rise or fall depends,” from the liberal rot. What havoc liberal forces funded by George Soros are wreaking on the SBC varies depending on the news cycle and includes: CRT, social justice, multiculturalism, Marxism, racial reconciliation, climate change,  immigration, “pronoun hospitality” and  egalitarianism. American Reformer authors such as  Renn, Abbotoy and Yenor point out that the SBC is the largest Protestant domination in the country and trains more pastors, sends more missionaries and attracts more media attention than any other. The SBC also has a host of politicians on its roles. All this makes the SBC an incredibly attractive prize for any faction that can gain control of it.

American Reformer’s editor-in-chief, Timon Cline (Presbyterian), writing with Clifford Humphrey (Anglican), believes the path of renewal in America and salvation of “our Protestant heritage” depends on the SBC resisting liberal capture. The SBC, he says, is the “only real opportunity for a ‘Reconquista.’”

“Reconquista” refers to a conservative movement to infiltrate, reclaim and return churches and denominations to orthodoxy. While taking over the SBC and its vast resources would be accomplishment enough, American Reformer doesn’t plan to stop there. Building on Renn’s strategies for Christian institutions in his book Life in the Negative World, they intend to use the CBL to help them flip America from a Negative World back to a Positive World, where their brand of extreme Calvinist Christianity is dominant.

For this to succeed, Cline and Humphrey say conservatives need strategic “fortresses” from which to launch their cultural insurgency. The SACR lodges are one set of fortresses, as are Christian colleges, aligned communities and aligned businesses. The American Reformer website itself is a fortress of sorts as it radicalizes readers and steers them toward opportunities to mobilize.

However, Rhett Burns, a South Carolina pastor who has publicly led the call for more transparency in the SBC, suggested another network of potential fortresses: Baptist churches. In an article for American Reformer, Burns makes the case that small and declining Baptist churches, especially those scattered throughout Appalachia and the South, are “winnable,” as are the “red-pilled normies” on their roles.

He argues that dying Baptist churches are prime targets because any “woke,” egalitarian members already have left for larger, more progressive churches. Those who remain are more likely to be conservatives sympathetic to the New Right. These “red-pilled normies,” who are bothered by changes in American culture, could be persuaded to action by new, bold, assertive pastors.

Because Baptist congregations call their own pastors, it will be easy to place aligned men in the pulpits of desperate churches, the theory goes. If the CBL controlled the SBC, they would have access to the resources of the North American Mission Board and the authority to direct the denomination to “wage a cultural insurgency that doesn’t make peace with Negative World but conquers it.”

The Center for Baptist Leadership is just one vehicle among the many the founders of American Reformer have created to impose their conservative, white, patriarchal Christian autocracy on the country. CBL’s plan to orchestrate another fundamentalist takeover of the SBC, especially at the behest of Presbyterian extremists who don’t believe in the basic Baptist tenets of religious freedom and separation of church and state, should alarm all Baptists, inside or outside the SBC.

Wolfe’s promises for a revival of Baptist principles are just as hollow as the original Trojan Horse. For the good of the country and the SBC, Baptists should “Beware TheoBros bearing gifts.”

 

Kristen Thomason is a freelance writer and journalist living outside Edinburgh in the United Kingdom. She has produced educational and promotional media for national and international religious organizations and public television. Kristen also worked with local churches in Metro D.C. and Toronto, Canada. With a master’s degree in communication and undergraduate degrees in media studies and classics, she is interested in the intersection of politics, religion, history and the arts. 

 

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