Matthew Boedy, The Seven Mountains Mandate: Exposing the Dangerous Plan to Christianize America and Destroy Democracy
Westminster John Knox Press, 2025
by John D. Pierce
“The seven mountains movement is an all-encompassing strategy of a larger ideology known as Christian nationalism,” writes Matthew Boedy, author of the insightful new book, The Seven Mountains Mandate: Exposing the Dangerous Plan to Christianize America and Destroy Democracy.
Boedy wastes no words in revealing the strategy, progression and underbelly of this key component of surging Christian Nationalism. His highly relevant book meets its stated purpose of laying out “the movement’s sweeping plan to Christianize America that now has its champion controlling the levers of government.”
A helpful timeline at the book’s opening traces the half-century journey from the revisioning of American society in the 1970s by R.J. Rushdoony, Bill Bright, Loren Cunningham and Francis Schaeffer to the current, well-funded efforts of Charlie Kirk. It is Kirk’s Turning Point USA that gets Boedy’s primary attention, noting: “What makes it unique is … its pursuit of seven mountains at once.”
Turning Point’s aggressive and well-funded efforts came onto Boedy’s radar when he landed on theirs. In 2016, as a new English professor at the University of North Georgia, Boedy had written an opinion piece for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution opposing a law to allow concealed firearms on college campuses.
With new zeal on the heels of Donald Trump’s first election, Kirk’s organization created a “watchlist” of 200 professors they claimed were advancing “leftist propaganda in the classroom.” To his surprise, Boedy was on the list.
Reflective of his journalistic and creative writing training and teaching, Boedy weaves stories, research and analysis in a flow that makes the book thorough yet highly accessible to a variety of readers. While Christian Nationalists continue gaining government power, Boedy reminds readers that the other six mountains are being pursued as well. He addresses each of the seven areas in the book’s chapters: education, government, religion, family, business, media and entertainment.
In response to a destructive movement built largely on alarmism, Boedy provides a helpful resource for sounding a much-needed alarm.
Of Kirk’s organization in particular, he writes: “Turning Point has the nation standing on the precipice of the destruction of our democracy.” Those who see the Seven Mountains Mandate as a fringe movement aren’t paying close enough attention, according to Boedy.
He notes how the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, included a call for churches to pray for the “seven centers of influence” in its 2022 National Day of Prayer guide.
Boedy shows not just how this movement could happen, but how it is happening at rapid speed. The January 6, 2021, violent attack on the U.S. Capitol, he writes, “was not merely the effect of lies about the 2020 election, but the decades-long influence of the Seven Mountains Mandate.”
Boedy also explores the impact of those enabling this destructive movement that is being advanced through false history, bad theology and unfounded conspiracies. Among those he references are Christian Nationalist preacher Lance Wallnau, fake historian David Barton and former Texas legislator Rick Green, along with advocates of the prosperity gospel. But Kirk is the book’s central figure.
“The nation now faces not merely a new generation of this antidemocratic right with a well-funded heir with big dreams and immense power, but a president who understands how to take hold of American society through those seven divinely approved areas,” writes Boedy. Kirk and other supporters, he warns, “now stand ready to use and abuse the levers of democratic power to deliver on all the movement has been promising.”
Awareness must precede action. Boedy’s book is a superb resource for raising awareness more widely among those who care about religious freedom, liberty at large and human decency. His 148-page volume is ideal for introducing the seven mountains movement as well as providing all readers with greater insights into the ways Turning Point USA, in particular, is advancing this dangerous and destructive ideology.
Groups choosing to read this book will find no shortage of timely discussions.
John D. Pierce, former editor of Nurturing Faith Journal, now directs the Jesus Worldview Initiative for Belmont University’s Rev. Charlie Curb Center for Faith Leadership. (This article represents the personal views of the author and does not necessarily represent the views of Americans United.)
Alexander Gouzoules and Harold Gouzoules, The Hundred Years’ Trial: Law, Evolution, and the Long Shadow of Scopes v. Tennessee
John Hopkins University Press, 2025
by Bruce Gourley
In The Hundred Years’ Trial: Law, Evolution, and the Long Shadow of Scopes v. Tennessee, Harold and Alexander Gouzoules, father-and-son scholars — Harold, an evolutionary biologist and professor at Emory University; Alexander, a legal scholar and associate professor at the University of Missouri School of Law and a former AU Legal Fellow — warn that “the legal status of evolution in US schools is less certain today than it has been at almost any time since Scopes itself.” A century after the 1925 famed trial in Dayton, Tenn. — the first “attempt to challenge the evolutionary consensus from within a courtroom” — opposition to evolution’s legality has “never truly ended.”
Charles Darwin’s unique personality and framing of evolution in his popular Origin of Species, the authors argue, made his work an enduring lightning rod for controversy among scientists and Christians alike. Skewering Darwinian theory, fundamentalist lawyer and populist William Jennings Bryan brought “politics and morality” into the Bible Belt’s Dayton courtroom. A master orator in front of a friendly jury, Bryan tied evolutionary science to eugenics (not altogether truthfully), and “skillfully” (albeit deceptively) exploited “issues that the scientific community had yet to fully resolve” (but worked out in the ensuing decades).
Although fundamentalists counted Scopes as a moral victory, evolutionary science remained and advanced, in the 1960s becoming firmly entrenched in public school classrooms.
In dethroning humans as the special creation of God, however, scientific evidence of evolution’s reality hardened fundamentalists’ commitment to their unverifiable religious belief system and resistance to constitutional church-state separation. By the time “the final Scopes-era anti-evolution law” [Mississippi, 1970] was struck down as a violation of church-state separation, a more sophisticated generation of anti-evolutionists were experimenting with new legal strategies.
Still, creationists faced problems. The U.S. Supreme Court’s 1968 Epperson v. Arkansas decision, striking down that state’s prohibition of the teaching of evolution in public school classrooms, ruled the anti-evolution law to be a violation of church-state separation enshrined in the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. Three years afterward, the court’s Lemon v. Kurtzman decision provided clearer legal guidance for all courts in upholding the Establishment Clause.
Thereafter, anti-evolutionists’ evolving courtroom strategies — whether using creationist language or thinly veiled “intelligent design” wording — were “met with an unmitigated string of defeats.” Failed efforts included the teaching of creationism alongside evolution and assertions “that teaching evolution was itself a violation of the separation of church and state.” When the emerging new field of sociobiology — equating social behavior with evolutionary processes — roiled the scientific world, creationists attempted, and failed yet again, to “discredit the field [of evolutionary science] as a whole.”
Gouzoules and Gouzoules point back to Dayton, Tenn., to illustrate the escalating rhetoric of angry creationists by the early 2000s. There the Rhea County public school system, where John Scopes had once taught, had been maintaining a Bible Education Ministry. In 2002, a federal district court ruled — under Lemon and on behalf of parent plaintiffs who remained anonymous for fear of retribution — that the Bible program was clearly “an impermissible entanglement of government and religion.” Some locals angered at the decision threatened the anonymous parents. “Attack religion and crusades begin,” the local school principal warned.
“Culture wars around science and religion continued to escalate,” the authors write. Still, creationists failed to make significant progress — until the election of Donald Trump, whose appointment of three Supreme Court justices supported by Christian Nationalists “signaled the complete ascendancy of conservative judicial philosophies.” Soon the court tossed the Lemon test aside, weakening legal protection of church-state separation.
“Today,” Gouzoules and Gouzoules conclude, “the scientific community has become increasingly alienated from the judiciary in the wake of decisions that have ignored scientific evidence or evinced hostility toward scientific expertise.” Although creationism remains a minority view among Americans, the authors emphasize the importance of educators more effectively educating the public on the merits of science. Evolution, after all, explains how human beings “got to be here” and “continues to shape our world.”
Despite a Supreme Court hostile to church-state separation, the Establishment Clause yet restrains creationists’ attempts to breach public schools. Nevertheless, complacency is not an option. The Hundred Years’ Trial ends with a warning that “dedicated attorneys” and “courageous litigants” are “absolutely critical” if the teaching of evolution in public schools is to survive into the future.